Blain's Gaming Life

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.

Review: Saints Row: The Third

2011-11-20T06:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 20 Rowvember, 2011

I don't really do reviews anymore, but I felt this was worth coming out of retirement for.

Saints Row: The Third

Developer: Volition
Platform: PC
US Release: Rowvember 2011
Genre: Third Person Action
Price Paid: $50 (pre-ordered July 15th, 2011)
My Score: 4 of 5

Saints Row 2 was a great game. While GTA was going serious, Saints Row was going crazy. It had missions where you drive around a septic truck and spray poop everywhere and make huge insurance claims by getting flung hundreds of feet by freeway traffic. But it somehow matched that craziness to a brutal story of murder and revenge that played things surprisingly straight. That game had a lot of issues, especially the PC port. But what it accomplished was amazing.

Saints Row: The Third does not fill those shoes, but it's a very fun game. For me the reason it does not measure up boils down to one word: mythology. The Saints are larger than life. But SR3 takes some of them out of the picture in unsatisfying ways and changes the personalities of others to make them unrecognizable.

That might have been okay if there had been colorful, dastardly villains to focus on, but there aren't. The best major villain in SR3 doesn't stack up to the weakest major villain in SR2. There are wonderful new homies in the game, but considering how quickly the old ones were discarded, it's hard to get attached.

So with all this complaining, why is it still a 4 out of 5? Because there's still a bunch of crazy, fun stuff to do. The shooting's better than GTA's will ever be. There are some ridiculously overpowered and entertaining weapons to use. The driving is fast and fun. Some of the scenarios are hilariously absurd. And you can experience it all with a buddy in co-op. And while there are still tech issues on PC, the game runs very well (until it crashes so badly I have to reboot :P).

Heavily armed strippers are by no means the craziest opponents you will fight in SR3.

I Want To Be In That Number

2011-11-14T01:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 13 Rowvember, 2011

In under 24 hours, Saints Row: The Third will be unlocked on Steam. Here's hoping it's a better PC release than a lot of what we've seen this year. If the PC version actually works on release it will be ahead of Dead Island, Magicka (multiplayer especially), and Rage (on ATI hardware thanks to ATI releasing the wrong drivers). Of course, just being on time with the console release will put it ahead of the PC versions of L.A. Noire, Costume Quest, Arkham City, Assassin's Creed, Renegade Ops, Call of Juarez, and From Dust. It's not a high bar, really.

But hey, Skyrim wasn't buggy enough to precipitate much complaining or any news stories, to my knowledge, so anything's possible. :)

Here's what I've been playing in the meantime.

Nitronic Rush

Nitronic Rush is a student game. The tech is very good. Stuff looks great, and I never saw the frame rate drop (although my wallpaper went away after quitting, so there may be some cleanup issues). It's got some fun ideas. You can make your car sprout wings and fly or just fire your stunt jets to flip around like crazy, which somehow cools your engine so you can boost or fly more. The art design is good, if a bit derivative. Overall I expect the people behind it have a bright future.

That said, I think they need to learn how to cheat. The physics model and camera system are essentially offered up "as is" to the player.

Stunts are easy to land because the game doesn't care if you land right side up. But the flopping around to right the vehicle kills the pace of the game. A few assists in the physics system to make jumps easier to land could keep the pace up.

When flying, the camera stays right behind the car. Often I couldn't see where I wanted to go. A bit of code, angling the camera towards the player's route, could have helped.

Other than that, the game just needs building out. More types of interactive elements like speed arrows, power ups, and breakable walls could add variety. And the tracks don't really develop a vocabulary, building players' skills and expectations only to turn them on their head later. But that's all stuff you do when you have more time. For a free student project, Nitronic Rush is fabulous.

I've also been playing some Saints Row 2, finished Dead Space 2 a third time, and played some Morrowind since I'm too cheap to buy Skyrim yet. But who cares? Saints Row: The Third in 21 hours!

Waiting For The Row

2011-11-07T05:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 7 Rowvember, 2011

Saints Row 3 will be releasing in a little over a week. That game has so much wacky stuff in it, I don't even know where to begin. Every other game I play is just killing time until SR3.

Costume Quest

Double Fine, the makers of Psychonauts, have taken to making smaller games to keep their studio independently viable. I'm glad it's working out for them. But while the idea of little kids turning into their costumes to fight candy stealing monsters is fun, I found the humor flat (which is surprising from Double Fine) and the gameplay painfully simple. I'm thinking it's more for 8 to 12 year olds.

Other Stuff

There was a Killing Floor event that some of the folks I hang out with on Steam were into, so I played a few rounds with them. As sort of a scary October holdover I played through Dead Space 2 again. It's still good. I also spent some time watching other people play games on OnLive. Until games are built to account for the lag in streaming systems, I don't think I'll want to play on OnLive, but it's fun to watch people.

Zombie Outbreak

2011-10-30T06:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 30 October, 2011

As one might expect, Steam has been having a horror themed holiday sale. Here's what I picked up.

Zombie Shooter (one and two)

What's simpler than running around shooting zombies?

Nation Red

Not running around shooting zombies.

Zombie Shooter and Zombie Shooter 2 are from Sigma Team, who brought us Alien Shooter and Alien Shooter 2. They've mostly made the same game four times, but I don't mind. There are tons of enemies (thanks to the magic of sprites), driving and turret segments, and a nice selection of weapons. That's enough.

Nation Red doesn't have a long story mode like Zombie Shooter. It just gives you a small open space and sends zombies at you. If I'd never played Crimsonland, I'd probably like it. But mine eyes have seen the glory, so Nation Red didn't make much of an impression.

Pound of Ground

Pound of Ground, despite this pretty bland screen shot, does at least leave an impression. The dialog of this Czech made game is so surreal that there should be a warning label advising against playing the game while sober. And the admirable commitment of the voice actors only makes it feel more bizarre. The gameplay was always teetering on the brink of being terrible (way too repetitive, the occasional super cramped combat area), but never quite fell over that brink, in my opinion. So while I can't recommend Pound of Ground, I did somehow enjoy it.

No Hurry

2011-10-24T04:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 23 October, 2011

I didn't write anything last week because I didn't have much to say. I still don't, but I call these things keepalives for a reason, right?

We're right in the middle of the holiday release season, but I'm just not feeling it. Deus Ex 3 was, by most accounts more of Deus Ex 1, but prettier. That's nice, but there's no hurry. Gears 3 and Uncharted 3 are probably very good, but they're console exclusives. Rage has nice tech, but it's mostly shooting in a post-apocalyptic setting, which I've done many times before. The new Batman isn't on PC yet, but it's also more of the same, so I'm not counting the days. Battlefield 3 won't run on WinXP, and from what I've seen and played isn't worth an upgrade. I haven't cared about Call of Duty since the second installment.

Nope. The only major release I'm waiting on is Saint's Row: The Third. Volition has been adding as much crazy stuff as they could think of to that game, and while I'm afraid they may have spoiled the biggest surprises with their marketing, I'm sure it'll still be a lot of fun.

Playing the Angles

2011-10-09T17:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 9 October, 2011

3D is hard. I'm not even talking about 3D graphics. I'm talking about 3D environments, prevalent in games since the mid-90s, regardless of how they're rendered. Humans are built for 3D, but the games I played this week reminded me of how challenging it still is for game developers.

Transformers (2004)

After playing the more recent War for Cybertron, I heard that the 2004 PS2 Transformers game was considered the best ever made, so I hunted down a cheap used copy. The game defaulted to Recruit difficulty, but that sounded boring, so I bumped it up to Veteran. To survive on Veteran, I've had to resort to pretty lame tactics.

The first boss had to be fought in terraced ruins. Since the boss couldn't fire while jumping between levels, I simply changed levels, took cover, then jumped out and pegged him while he couldn't retaliate.

The second boss was a jet. So I hid in a barn and shot him in the back with homing rockets as he went over.

The third boss was a helicopter, but his guns couldn't penetrate water, so I found a shallow lake, turned into a vehicle, and only had to dodge his missiles. And even still he was a pain.

And boss fights aren't the only problem. There's a stealth segment in the game that is a huge pain to actually be stealthy in. The game's sound algorithm increases the volume of things in front of you, so trying to guess enemy positions by sound doesn't work. And the ability you get to see enemies through walls doesn't work at a long enough range to make it very useful.

I respect that this game gives players a lot more options and freedom than the more guided experience of War for Cybertron. But it's got its own problems.

Portal 2 (2011)

Portal 2, was on sale for $15 last week, so I finally picked it up. It had it's moments, but I got the same feeling that I did with Dead Space 2. Here are some fine bits of entertainment with a mediocre game in between.

It's probably sacrilege to call Portal 2 a mediocre game, but I felt the same way about Portal 1. The novelty was great, but the puzzles were so focus tested and carefully built to guide the player to a single solution that much of the spontaneity and creativity had been removed from play. And the new gels added to Portal 2 weren't really enough to make it feel novel.

Additionally, solving some puzzles depended on noticing usable panels or objects in out of the way locations. Those puzzles felt like a 3D version of the pixel hunts in old adventure games, and I was more annoyed than pleased to find their solutions.

Plastic and Metal

2011-10-02T06:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 2 October, 2011

Computer graphics are good at certain textures. They do fairly convincing plastic and metal without too much effort, while textiles and skin are far more involved. I mention this because the games I played this week reminded me.

The Last Templar

The Last Templar is a lackluster game. The fighting is tolerable. The upgrade system hides so much that I had no idea what I was working towards. And there's a lot of dull travel. But I was mesmerized by this random background character.

I don't know where I've seen the texture of his clothes before, but I could almost feel the thick, pliant rubber in my hands as I looked at it.

I have no idea what kind of plastic his hair is made from. It looks like a Lego hairstyle that he slips over his head when he wants to differentiate himself from the other random people he portrays in the game.

Transformers: War for Cybertron

The game has a very stylized look. All the metal is supposed to look old and worn. As a result, much of the game looks drab.

Still, I enjoy being a giant robot and shooting giant robots, and the set pieces are impressive.

NecroVision

This being October, I try to look out for horror games, but I've played almost all the one's I've got. So I decided to revisit NecroVision. The game does rubber and metal textures in a way almost no other game does.

It's like I'm a toy soldier with a little gleaming sword, fighting rubber Nazi zombies with tin hats. It's supposed to be grim, but it's almost adorable. Even when their heads blow apart they seem to be made of Gummi candy.

Setting the Bar

2011-09-23T13:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Friday, 23 September, 2011

We judge things based on expectations. If we're set up to expect great things and only get good things, we're let down. If we expect utter garbage and get something only sub standard, we're pleasantly surprised.

I was pleasantly surprised by Duke Nukem Forever.

Here is Duke in his own casino. There are statues of naked women in high heels all over. Aliens are attacking. Yeah. That's about right.

And that was enough. I'd heard such awful things about the game that the fact that it was mostly just a mediocre shooter made it seem like a wonderful experience. Sure, Duke's an idiot. Sure the game wastes way more effort on objectifying women than the original. But I shot an alien and he ragdolled nicely, which was more than I was expecting.

Shellshock 2: Blood Ties

There's a lot of trash on GameTap. Shellshock 2 is part of it. But knowing that going in, I was pleasantly surprised to discover a fairly playable Vietnam zombie shooter. Sure you couldn't hear any of the voice over. Sure the tiny maps and lack of variety made it feel like a PS2 era shooter. But I shot some guys with guns and blew some pieces off of some zombies, so it was okay.

Also this one guy had a killer moustache.

Dead Island

Speaking of taking parts off of zombies, I also spent some time in Dead Island multiplayer. It's always nicer having someone to watch your back and to chat with. In some ways, this defeats the mood the game is going for, but that's why I played through by myself first. Also, it turns out that the character I used for my first playthrough is

pretty popular.

Workarounds

2011-09-18T22:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 17 September, 2011

Dead Island

I've played some more Dead Island this week. But, much like Dead Rising 2 last year, it's devolved into a filler activity. When there's not much else I want to play, I murder more zombies. Also, I finally got stung by one of the game's many bugs. You expect a certain amount of odd behavior in open world games. It's just par for the course. But throwing weapons from outside a house at a monster inside a house made my weapons disappear. In a game where finding good weapons is a major, time consuming activity, that's unacceptable. And I crafted an explosive throwing weapon that never showed up in my inventory.

Given that I already beat the game on the up and up, I decided to just start duplicating weapons. If you throw a weapon and drop it at the same time, you get two copies. So whatever my best weapon is, I just make copies and never have to stress about losing weapons again. So I'm using a bug to rescue my experience from other bugs. Weird.

The Conduit 2

I really liked using the Wiimote in Metroid Prime 3. Unfortunately, The Conduit 2 only used it for shooting, and not as well, if my memory of MP3 is accurate. MP3 had a more aggressive lock on mechanic, used motion controls for more than shooting, and kept the environments simple. Those may be workarounds, crutches that adulterate the FPS experience, but they worked.

Also The Conduit 2 locked my favorite weapon from the demo I played at PAX 2010 (the shield gun which catches and accumulates bullets so you can throw them back all at once) behind a bunch of searching for secrets. I was hoping the game would have more interesting weapons like that, but it didn't, at least not that I found.

Dead Island

2011-09-10T21:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, 10 September, 2011

Dead Island has pretty much taken over my gaming this week. It's first person melee against zombies. First person melee is never perfect, but Dead Island has taken the crown (from Zeno Clash or Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. I can't remember who had it last).

A major reason it works so much better here is because Dead Island is a horror game with zombies. This means the effects of your attacks are much more varied and surprising than in other melee games. There is blood spray. There are decapitations. You can break or sever limbs, which beyond crippling your opponent, nets you bonus experience so you level faster. I often found myself breaking a zombie's arm and knocking him over. They change how they get up based on which arm is broken, and waiting to see which arm a zombie puts its weight on so you can break both its arms for maximum XP is morbidly fascinating and makes these zombies feel so much more weighty and real than the paper mache hordes of Left 4 Dead.

But you often don't have the luxury of taking an enemy apart as it's easy to aggro additional zombies and suddenly need to switch from fight to flight, keeping the tension high. Tom Chick describes this dynamic better than I.

There is also a loot progression that will have you move from broom handles and kitchen knives to sledge hammers and katanas. There are guns in the game, but their primary virtue (aside from being helpful against the odd group of armed humans you have to fight) is that they can be sold for a good chuck of change to let you upgrade your melee weapons.

Dead Island definitely has flaws. The story and characters are as throwaway as most games and action movies. The PC version released on Steam was a funky developer build. It's taken multiple patches to get the networking functional. And there are occasional other glitches. One time stomping on a zombie's head bounced me so far into the air that I died when I hit the ground. Still, when this goes on sale, I will push everyone I want to play co-op with to pick up a copy so I can join them in co-op and murder all the zombies all over again.

(I thought about taking some screen shots, but it's zombies. If you play games, you've seen zombies.)

Post PAX Blahs

2011-09-06T10:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Tuesday, 06 September, 2011

After PAX normal human gaming loses a bit of its luster for a week or two.

Saints Row 2

Ah PC gaming. I spent the better part of an hour troubleshooting why I couldn't join Morkath for some co-op. I opened a bunch of ports and nothing. I tried starting a new character. Nothing. He tried some fiddling on his end. Nothing. Eventually it turned out that I could never connect if his game required a password. To clarify, GameSpy is so terrible that it makes it so you can't connect to a game with a password, ever.

One of my favorite bits of the Borderlands 2 panel was during the Q&A. Gearbox CEO and co-founder Randy Pitchford was asked whether it would use GameSpy. He responded "What's GameSpy?" After the applause he was asked to elaborate. "We're past that." Gearbox is even retroactively patching GameSpy out of Borderlands. That's what a pain it is.

But enough whining. Morkath was playing without the crazy appearance slider part of the Gentlement of the Row mod. This made Hellboy go from this...

to this

Yikes.

Path of Exile

I finally tried the Path of Exile beta.

For the most part, it's Titan Quest. They've got a nice health mechanic where your health flasks store four or five charges which automatically replenish as you kill enemies. Unless you're wearing gear that heals you, flasks are the only way to recover health, so you have to manage it a bit (unless you're a pack rat like me and keep all your flasks topped off all the time). But I'd rather have to remember to heal once in a while than manage stacks of potions.

This is PoE's skill system. Keep in mind this is still beta. What you're seeing is a tiny part of the overall tree. I'd say it's probably sixteen screens (four by four) of this kind of graph. And since it mostly reuses icons, the player has to read each and every one to find out which abilities are which. Since some of the icons just say "temp" at this point, this will be improved.

What won't likely be improved (to my way of thinking) is accuracy as a stat. You can miss in PoE. To paraphrase Randy Pitchford, I'm past that. There's more than enough math to do in comparing loot and deciding which skills to get. You get one skill point a level, so having to spend even one point on accuracy is galling.

Maybe that's just me. The Diablo 3 beta that was at PAX 2009 worked the same way. But in my world only comic relief heroes should whiff this much.

PAX 2011: The Games

2011-08-31T14:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Wednesday, 31 August, 2011

I took a notebook to PAX. I wrote quick impressions of sixteen games from the show floor. Because I don't hate you, I'll just discuss the interesting bits.

First off, the best experiences I had were not on the show floor.

Bushido Blade

I had spent all day in lines. And playing Red Faction: Armageddon in console freeplay had only confirmed what I'd heard about it being less interesting than Guerilla. Then I wandered over to classic freeplay and saw three guys playing Bushido Blade on PS1.

The only other time I've played Bushido Blade was at the first PAX back in 2004. It's a technical and challenging dueling game where one hit can kill. But if everybody playing sucks at it, it is a hilarious collection of lucky and unlucky accidents. At one point my legs had been crippled and I was flopping towards my opponent like a fish, trying to stab him in the shin. It turned my entire day around.

Left 4 Dead 2

During one of the gauntlet sections (where zombies spawn infinitely until you run a maze and flip a switch), I crouched in front of the group with a fire axe and began singing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" as I cut down the constant flow of zombies in front of us. One of my companions started singing as well and it was magical. It could only have been better if I'd been using an oar and we'd sung a proper round.

And now, for the less awesome show floor. Feel free to skim or stop reading if it gets dull.

Alice: Madness Returns in 3D

The game isn't new, and the tech isn't new, but this was the first time that I spent more than a minute actually sitting down and playing anything in 3D. Honestly, I didn't think the 3D added too much. I didn't find myself being more certain of my jumps or combat positioning. What I did find myself doing was moving the camera to angles that were worse for gameplay just to put more stuff in the foreground so that I (and the people watching) could see the 3D.

Since I started recording game video, it jumped out at me how much a player can enhance an experience by paying more attention to camera movement and positioning. Heck, in some games, you fight the camera more than the enemies. 3D made playing camera man a little more rewarding, but not so much that I'd pay extra for it.

Firefall

Firefall will be a free to play futuristic action MMO. The teams on the demo I played were so mismatched that I don't really want to play it now. Such are the dangers of running largely unattended demos at a convention. At least in the Brink demo last year the devs tried to give advice to the losing side. When one of the Firefall stations went down, the employee I told didn't even seem to care.

Battlefield 3

A lot of people are really hopeful about BF3. My feelings are less positive. They demoed no vehicle combat at PAX. They are not selling on Steam. They will only have servers available until EA wants players to buy something else. Mod support is highly unlikely. And the co-op is only two player. I can't imagine what it would take for me to care about BF3. That game is going to be dead and buried, and I'll still be playing BF2 (with the Nations at War mod).

Twisted Metal

I was never big on the Twisted Metal combat driving games, but (once I figured out where the accelerator was) the new version seemed both a little easier to get in to, and presented more variety. There was a semi with turrets on it's trailer. Friendly cars could drive into the truck and man a turret. I drove an ambulance that shot homing gurneys with crazy people covered in dynamite on them. If I had a PS3, I'd definitely keep an eye on it.

Everything Else

Dead Island

Beating up zombies is fun, but the five minute demo leads me to suspect that the devs are just as worried as I am about its longevity.

Black Knight Sword

It's a side scroller with a nice paper art style and lots going on in the background, but the jumping bits kill the momentum.

Bloodrayne Betrayal

It looks like a decent side scroller. I just wish Dust: An Elysian Tale had come out. With stuff like Black Knight Sword and Bloodrayne Betrayal out, it may get buried.

Dragon's Dogma

It's Lord of the Rings meets Monster Hunter. It felt a bit sluggish, but it has potential.

Asura's Wrath

Oh, Japan. The realistic art style and attempts at gravitas belie a very cartoony action sensibility. It felt like Dragonball for people who think they're too cool for Dragonball.

Charlie Murder

Another Final Fight game for Xbox Live Arcade. Meh.

Retro City Rampage

I don't know if it's just because I'm old enough to have played the 2D GTA games, but it does nothing for me.

Lord of the Rings: War in the North

I enjoyed the action game version of Return of the King. It had a lot of issues, but the connection with the films and passable combat were enough for me to have fun. The demo of War in the North might be as good, but this many years later, that's pretty disappointing. Maybe it's just the segment they chose to show, but the combat looked very bland. The only reaction to attacks I saw were damage numbers or death. That's fine for tower defense, but action games need more feedback and give and take, in my opinion.

Resistance 3

I played a little deathmatch. It was alright. But I've heard that the best part of Resistance is the crazy weapons (which makes sense coming from the developers of Ratchet and Clank), and I didn't have time to experiment with them much in the hurly-burly.

Counter-Strike: Global Operations

It's still Counter-Strike. I would have thought Valve would want to show off more of the new stuff to bring in new players, but they seem focused on people who still want to play de_dust for the billionth time. I suppose there are a lot of them, but they already have the game they want, don't they?

Path of Exile

PoE played like a slightly less refined Titan Quest. Still, I liked Titan Quest a lot. They also gave me some beta or demo disk, so I'll likely try it out.

Rage

It pretty much looks like expected. It's pretty, but the need to show off enemy behavior has turned them into bullet sponges that make the guns feel wimpy. We'll see.

Vessel

It's an indie platformer where you use fluid dynamics and creatures made of fluid to solve puzzles. I was pretty impressed with the puzzle design and the way the game valued the player's time by not forcing the player to run all the way to the edge of the screen before loading the next puzzle. It was fine until the lava area. I sprayed water on it until the surface looked safe, but then it would crack and I'd die instantly. After almost completely solidifying it and still dieing, I moved on.

Variety Pack

2011-08-21T19:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 21 August, 2011

It's been a busy week, gaming wise.

Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath

Stranger's Wrath is a western on an alien world. I played it on the original Xbox. I wasn't a fan. There are definitely some bugs with the PC port, but I was lucky and only had a few graphical glitches. I don't know how much was the improved controls and how much was the fact that I'd been through the game and knew what I had to do, but I had a lot more fun this time than previously.

Here I am hiding in the bushes, preparing to ambush three guys. I stunned one with a lightning bug and tied the other two up in spider webs. By the time I'd finished capturing the first two, the third stood up, just in time to get punched in the jaw and go right back down.

I also think Stranger's Wrath has my favorite regenerating health system since regenerating health was invented. You have a stamina bar you use to jump, melee, and heal. If you're injured, you take cover and press your heal button to shake it off. Managing my stamina and choosing when to heal felt like I was managing resources and making choices, as opposed to Halo's hide and wait method which felt like forced time outs.

Bastion

Bastion also feels like an alien western, albeit with a more steampunk, anime vibe.

Bastion's claim to fame is a narrator that talks about what you do as you do it. It's novel and well done, but doesn't make the game. I can see the clever bits in the story and storytelling, but with such a desolate setting and empty archetype characters, there's little reason to care.

The combat is also a little bland. There are a bunch of weapons that can be upgraded multiple ways, but the combat situations don't vary much, and any weapons are good enough, so I never felt like I'd made a clever choice and done the job right.

It's a good first effort, and the art and music are nice. But there's room for Supergiant Games to improve. (I initially wrote grow, but that was too punny.)

Star Wars: Battlefront 2

Dune Sea is a great map, maybe even the greatest map.

The sarlacc grabs characters and small vehicles and eats them.

I dubbed this vehicle the Party Skiff, and the name stuck so well that one of the players changed his Steam name to Party Skiff. As an assault vehicle, it's junk. It's flimsy. The passengers are fully exposed to small arms fire, and the sarlacc can eat it. But when you've got three gunners zooming across the landscape firing wildly like stereotypical drunken hillbillies, it's a quality assclown experience.

Plus Tie Tanks. I don't know if a modder made these up, or if these exist in some novel or comic book I never saw, but they're so ridiculous that I can't help but love them. They're actually pretty good at running over people, too.

And last, but not least, there are proper flying vehicles in the map. The map makes is pretty cramped for flyers, but outside of Hoth it's the only place I've seen armor, air, and infantry all going at once, making it the battliest battle in Battlefront. Hooray for Dune Sea!

Blasts From The Past

2011-08-13T01:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Friday, 12 August, 2011

I have no idea why, but IdolNinja and Digital decided the Penny Arcade forum members hadn't been playing enough Star Wars: Battlefront 2. And you know what? They were right! I remembered we tried Battlefront 2 at a LAN party a long time ago and me not thinking much of it. The weapons feel puny. The movement is artificially smooth. The bots can swing between useless and uncannily accurate depending on what weapon or vehicle they're using. And the game has some features that take a while to figure out.

All that stuff is still true, but as long as you don't take it at all seriously, there's a lot of fun to be had. For one thing, the game is old enough that you can put in a ton of bots, making the battles feel like battles.

For another, there's a mod called the Conversion Pack which adds maps and additional vehicles, including content from Knights of the Old Republic. A lot of it's pretty janky because it's pasting textures of KotOR characters onto existing models, but sometimes that just makes it hilarious. The run animation on Mission is just her walk animation at double speed, which always makes me laugh. Plus the KotOR Wookies have huge heads for some reason.

Plus the combination of all the elements of the game frequently causes scenarios you can't find elsewhere. An enemy Jedi was bearing down on my lowly imperial officer. I'd been force pushed from my feet and I thought I was doomed. As I started to stand, I jammed on the mine button, hoping I could drop a mine that would take my attacker out with me. I drop the mine, but get knocked down again. Death seems imminent. Out of nowhere, a friendly Jedi force pushes my attacker. He flies into my mine which flings him across the room and into a bottomless pit! Force powers are to high explosives what peanut butter is to chocolate.

It makes me sad that companies are trying to eliminate mods and user run servers. I know they want us to buy new games and pay for new content. That's the business they're in. But no one will be having this kind of fun with today's games six years from now. The servers will be gone. Outside of a few map packs, no additional content will ever be developed for them.

As we put more and more effort into creating games, the results of that effort are being abandoned quicker and quicker.

PAX Is Coming

2011-08-07T15:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 7 August, 2011

In three weeks, PAX will be almost over. Who knows what wonders I'll have experienced by that time. If you don't care about PAX, you can safely skip this post.

Gatherings

I've put up the announcement for the NorCal pre-PAX lunch, and some of my favorite people have already responded, so I'm pleased. I've also signed up for the pre-PAX dinner and post-PAX party, so even though I'll be missing the Magical Mystery Tour this year, I'll still be hitting up many community events.

Oh, and here's a dark secret for you. My memory for names isn't so great, so I cheat and review previous PAX posts.

Games

I still plan to hit up the expo floor, but I have no specific games I'm looking for. While it was good, chartered accountant style fun to compile a list, it never ended up being useful. It's easier to simply get the map that comes in the program and work my way from front to back.

Panels

I haven't been too big on panels for the last few years. But going through the schedule I found myself wanting to hit up more of them than usual this year.

In a recent interview, Ken Levine talked about designing the companion AI in BioShock: Infinite. It sounded like he was moving forward with the work done by Valve in Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and LucasArts on Republic Commando. I'm very curious to know if John A. Hancock's work on Republic Commando informed their design process and whether they recorded dialog as a group. Since the two principle voice actors will be there, I probably won't even have to ask.

Randy Pitchford will be hosting the now traditional Sunday Gearbox Pizza Panel. But instead of just Duke Nukem Forever, he'll be talking about Duke Postmortem, Borderlands 2, Aliens: Colonial Marines, and the bizarrely lighthearted Brothers in Arms: Furious Four. That's a lot of games I'm interested in. Well, I'm not so interested in Duke, but he might have some interesting postmortem observations.

And while I'm usually not up for spending an hour of PAX in a single demo, I might make an exception for Skyrim. I'm honestly not that interested in the game, but Todd Howard is demoing it, and I've enjoyed listening to him on various podcasts. He's earnest, intelligent, and soft spoken which could serve as a welcome break from the bombast of the expo hall.

Buttons

Here are my button designs for this year.

This is a bit of a pun as the grenades can be the best tool for taking down the game's bosses.

The second one goes with a design from last year and is the center of a three year story arc. Here's the one from last year.

Next year will be "My Frog Got Better" and feature the final image from the game. Of course, that means I'll actually have to beat the game again. Just getting to the frog boss took longer than I expected, so I should probably beat the game now while my chops aren't entirely rusty.

Summer Doldrums

2011-07-31T23:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 31 July, 2011

Ah summer. Between the media blitz of E3 and the lead up to the holiday season (which usually starts in late August), there aren't too many large releases. This can be good for the indie games, since they get more attention.

The main game I'm seeing get attention is Bastion, a downloadable game for Xbox. Even if I had an Xbox, I'd rather not buy any downloadable games on it. If a game's good enough, the PC community will donate time and effort to keep it alive for many years. Console makers can't justify that kind of time and effort to shareholders.

So where does that leave an old PC Gamer?

Saints Row 2

Saints Row The Third has been putting out a lot of great promotional videos. I've tried to avoid most of them as I like to be surprised, but from the reactions I'm seeing on the PA forums, it's going to be a symphony of ridiculous chaos. And unlike Just Cause 2, it will have robust co-op support.

To make the wait more bearable, I decided to load up the latest Gentlemen of the Row mod and complete the game, again. But since I was using the bizarre appearance portion of the mod, I went with a slightly unusual protagonist.

It's not a very good Hellboy, but between the limited options of the character creator and the fact that I was doing it from memory, I am satisfied. And truth be told, the main character in Saints Row 2 is significantly more vicious than Hellboy and doesn't sound like Ron Perlman, so a perfect likeness might have been too weird.

As it was, I enjoyed running around as big red, pretending the revolver I favored shot "really big bullets".

Plus he just looks cool.

EYE: Divine Cybermancy

Hungering for something new, I spent too much money and bought EYE.

As you can see from this picture of a knight in a subway, it's kind of a mishmash. There's stuff about aliens and artifacts and conspiracies. You use guns and psychic powers and high tech abilities that let you take over enemies. It's interesting for how much weirdness is in it, but it's also uneven in quality. The interface and menus and upgrades are pretty confusing sometimes. But with not much else coming out, I can spare a little time to figure things out.

Free To Stay Away

2011-07-24T11:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 24 July, 2011

I've been trying the free to play games again, and it's not working for me. I even got tired of League of Legends early in the week. It's not a bad game, but there's just something about making these cute little avatars do violence to each other that feels too removed to be satisfying and too aggressive to fit with the art style. I think a direct control scheme (as opposed to click to move) might help the former.

Alliance of Valiant Arms

I actually tried War Inc. first, because Steam said it had co-op. But Steam lied, so I deleted it immediately. It's nice to have internet fast enough that you don't feel obligated to play something just because you invested a lot of time in the download. But back to the subject...

This is the co-op mode of AVA. If you look in the top left corner you can see that this is not part of a map, you are looking at virtually the entire map. Three sets of doors spawn waves of bad guys who run at you with knives. You die in two or three hits and subsequent waves are better armed. Co-op DooM is more refined.

I tried some of the versus multiplayer. The map wasn't much bigger. It was like the worst maps in Counter Strike being played over and over in order to earn enough game points to buy marginally better weapons and weapon enhancements that degrade over time. If Dante's Inferno is to be believed, there is at least one layer of hell itself which is more pleasant than this game.

Global Agenda

Global Agenda is basically a free to play MMO about fighting robots. As action MMOs go, it's not terrible. It's less crazy than Champions Online, which is probably good for some people. For me, the most entertaining thing about the game was the fact that it let me create a character resembling Futurama's geriatric robot magnate Mom, then watch her be an action hero who shoots robots.

But at about level fifteen the game seemed to run out of solo content. And while I did appreciate the variety of the randomly generated instances, the fighting didn't have enough oomph to keep me satisfied.

Zeboyd Games
A couple guys from the Penny Arcade forums made some games which finally got released on Steam. They aren't free to play, but at $3, they're close enough.

Yep. They're SNES era JRPGs. They've added many delightful improvements (a run button to cover terrain faster, silly enemies and stories, and a finite number of random fights before you're free to explore at your leisure), but when I'm winding my way through yet another maze, knowing that I have to explore the entire thing or miss out on loot I'll want to have for the boss fight, I can't help but feel it's still not streamlined enough. Plus you make permanent choices between abilities when you level up. I often found myself wishing I could change those choices retroactively to correct mistakes or just experiment more with the combat system. At $3, they were a treat. But after playing through both, I'd probably pass on spending even the time it would take to play another.

Iron Grip: Warlord

The following picture probably makes Iron Grip look about three times as fun as it actually is, and at $10, it's probably a bit overpriced. But I enjoyed the demo enough to play it for four hours, so they earned their money through an older form of free to play.

Iron Grip is a co-op FPS tower defense game. You can see why I was particularly intrigued. The main problem with the game is lousy difficulty balance. Easy starts way too easy. But Medium is nigh impossible without human backup or exploiting the map and enemy AI pretty thoroughly. Also, the turrets are so weak that the tower defense aspect isn't worth much. That said, I did enjoy parts of my Easy playthrough of the game.

At it's best, Iron Grip let me play a super soldier. In the picture above, I have been set on fire by a flame thrower and am still strong enough to hold back an enemy platoon by myself. Did I mention I was on fire? But with great power, comes great responsibility. Should I be thinning the herd, focusing on enemy armor, or seeking out the enemy leader to damage morale (the primary way to win)? Feeling like you are the one soldier capable of turning the tide of a war is very empowering. It's the Dynasty Warriors of FPS.

Killing Floor

While it's payment model isn't in keeping with the week's theme, at less than thirty dollars for a hundred and fifty hours of fun, Killing Floor is probably still the best value on this list. I still enjoy feeling out the strengths and weaknesses of a new group, tying to decide what role to fill, and telling the occasional bad joke. Why I enjoy this in Killing Floor and not in any other FPS or MMO may forever be a mystery.

Horror, Hollywood, and Faery Tales

2011-07-17T06:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, 16 July, 2011

Dead Space 2

While there were a couple slow sections in the middle, overall I'd say Dead Space 2 is a high four, if I were still putting scores on things, that is.

The combat is still not my favorite. It's good to back yourself into a corner so you don't get surrounded, but the third person camera goes squirrely when you do. And there are occasionally sections where you're probably boned until you've been through it once or twice to know when and where bad guys spawn. But once you know, the fights often becomes trivial.

My favorite thing about the combat was that EA's unlocking system doesn't work right and I got a bunch of nice guns from the very start of the game and for free, letting me experiment more than I otherwise would. I do plan to play through the game again at some point, but that's because it's a good ride with some variety, a decent story, and good production values, not because of some manufactured compulsion to own / max out all the guns.

Top Tier Blues

I feel bad for the top tier developers, in a way. Mark Twain supposedly said golf is a good walk spoiled by a little white ball. I suspect as the writing and production values of games approach Hollywood quality, we'll hear more people saying games are good movies spoiled by difficult, confusing, and tedious interaction. It's taken incredible leaps in technology, billions of dollars, and lifetimes of work to get games to a point where people can say "That looks cool except for the game part." That's probably frustrating.

Faery: Legends

It's a simple turn based RPG with some nice window dressing.

You can design your own male or female faery and as you upgrade them, you change their appearance even more. For me this made for some strange decisions. I chose my main attack element based on which wings looked best. But I stuck my faery with some pretty ugly antennae because I wanted a specific ability.

Anyone who's played Mass Effect will find this conversation interface strangely familiar. I don't think choosing "renegade" has a big effect on the game, but some allies will let you choose a special ability for them if they like you enough. There's even a potential to make a certain amount of romantic choice in the game, although it also doesn't amount to anything gameplay-wise.

The game itself is pretty much fetch and fight, but you can choose which you want to do sometimes. I felt it more realistic for an eight inch tall creature to lean toward diplomacy rather than violence. :)

While it's probably too simple for RPG fans and too complicated for most kids young enough to want to play with faeries, it's got nice music and visuals, decent writing, and a nice flight model / camera that makes the getting around feel pretty good (tight areas excepted).

Tower Defense Failures

While I did write down a list of the annoyances I found in many tower defense games, it all boiled down to giving the player enough info to make good choices and making the feedback clear enough that mistakes are obvious. If either is lacking, success and failure feel random and meaningless.

Back And Busy

2011-07-11T14:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 11 July, 2011

I'm back and the Steam Summer Sale is done.

During my no-internet time, I found out you can only earn perk advancement in Killing Floor while online. :P And I dug some more holes in Terreria, but nothing interesting came of it.

I also spent some time with Devil May Cry so I won't be totally rusty when I start the next video talkthrough. That game was so difficult in 2001 that many people quit at the first boss. I don't blame them. The boss is tough, and the terrain and camera angle don't always help, which can make the fight unfair.

Since I've been online I've been fairly busy, even to the extent of being a day late writing this post.

Sanctum

It's a tower defense game, but you run around between and on top of the towers shooting bad guys. It also has co-op so you and a buddy can shoot bad guys simultaneously. When you're facing down a wave of baddies, flipping between weapons to pour on the damage and keep them slowed, it's great. But the second you falter, which is pretty easy on one or two maps with tricky terrain, all the damage you were doing stops and it's game over.

This isn't so bad in single player where you just restore to a previous wave, but that option isn't available in co-op, where you're likely to have people of different skill levels and need more room for misunderstandings and mistakes. Ah well.

Random Tower Defense Games

Part of the reason I picked Sanctum up (besides it only costing $4 during the sale) was that I've taken more of an interest in tower defense games in general. This is largely because my father enjoys them. There's practically a cottage industry just churning these things out at this point. In fact, I'm starting to see where people have reused the same engine and just changed the appearance of the enemies. That isn't necessarily a bad thing if enough is changed to make the experience different, but some sites crank out a new game every day, which puts them past the point of bothering about design. I'm thinking I'll write up a list of the most common design issues I'm seeing next week.

Dead Space 2

I wasn't a huge fan of the first game. I felt like I'd seen most of what it had to offer by the end of the intro, and I felt the same way when it was over. But the sequel puts a lot more effort into keeping the story alive and ditches the tedious puzzles. It's still got puzzles, but they're usually much easier and quicker. I may have more thoughts when I'm done with it, but my current feeling is that Dead Space 2 is an okay game elevated by many millions of dollars of window dressing into a good, scary experience.

The Games of Christine Love

Christine Love got some attention from the more academic folk a while back, and I had downloaded her games, but never installed them.

The first one I played was "don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story". It's a game about being a high school teacher dealing with student drama in the year 2027. The hook is that the school lets you tap into the kids' social networking, giving you "behind the scenes" info for the choices you have to make. It's an interesting game which definitely expresses some outside the norm views on social issues, so I can see why the academics were into it. Personally, I just enjoyed the jokes and the general vibe of helping people being the most important thing.

The second game I played was Digital: A Love Story. It's set back in the BBS era and is about falling in love and solving puzzles. As someone old enough to have spent time on BBSes and FidoNet, I was surprised to find myself pretty bored with the game.

The posters weren't fun to read like the kids in "babe", so eventually I was just mining for the next clue to solve the next puzzle. There was eventually a bigger story, but I'd already learned not to bother with the fiction, so I noted the puzzle elements and just moved on. The writing of the romance parts wasn't bad, but as in Half-Life 2, I have no acting choices as the main character, no way to express myself. So the love story is just a story, not an experience.

AB 1179 Going Offline

2011-06-30T13:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Thursday, 30 June, 2011

News

Normally I list the games I'm playing first, but the Supreme Court decision on Assembly Bill 1179 is probably more important. :P They decided that games have the same first amendment protection as other media. Yay.

They also decided that the "evidence" for a causal link between violent games and violent behavior in children was insufficient. Considering that California had eight years to find proof, I hope we can put that particular argument to bed. There's no doubt that what we consume influences us. But the idea that any form of make believe somehow forces people to commit violent acts is irresponsible scapegoating.

Games

I suspect I'll be without internet while I transition ISPs over the next week (which is why this post is so early). It's always an interesting test of dependency. The fact that I may miss good deals on the Steam Summer Sale is already making me itchy.

I won't be messing the the offline modes of TF2 or Killing Floor, I expect. They're just not as fun that way. I may have to unpack the PS2 and get my Devil May Cry skills back in anticipation of my next video series.

Nothing from GameTap will work, which is a bit of a loss as Divinity II just released on the service. I wasn't very enchanted with the demo, but trying to complete goals as quickly as possible before my internet goes plooie has added a nice sense of urgency.

I wonder if there are any Socially Integrated Goblins you can meet?

Terraria is still serving as digital knitting. What follows will spoil some of the game mechanics, so don't read it if you're sensitive to that sort of thing.

Here is my kill room in The Underworld. It's the deepest layer in the game. There are flying demons, fire bats, lava slimes, and giant bone worms, like you see me fighting here. None of them are pleasant. But the lava slimes are actually the worst. They do very little damage, but they leave lava behind when they die, which you are then standing in, which kills you very quickly.

So, in the deepest depths, in the midst of the lava sea, I built a place of murder. Enemies can be led in through passage on the top left. Of course the worms just burrow their way in. When slimes die, their lava runs down into reservoirs which can be cleansed by filling them with dirt, then digging them out again.

The room is a safe way to kill worms to eventually get the best weapon in the game (by my standards). But I wasn't even thinking of that at the time. I just enjoyed the challenge of taming the game's harshest environment.

Keepalive: Some Wii, Some Oldies

2011-06-26T17:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 26 June, 2011

Epic Mickey is a chore. None of the actions you do are gratifying. The camera is terrible. I try and appreciate all the history that goes into it, but when nothing I do is fun, the history is not enough.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii is not a bad game. But there is more momentum than I like. All I could think of was how many times I'd played that same game with better controls. Kirby's Epic Yarn is for babies, but at least it's novel.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed was the best of the Wii games I tried. It's nice to fling stuff around and blow stuff up. But I didn't see anything in the first two hours that I hadn't in the first ten minutes. And the boss fights didn't seem to have much of a pattern to them. Then again, the lighting conditions weren't ideal, so maybe they had tells I couldn't make out. I may give it another shot.

Terraria continues to be patched, which is good and bad. On the plus side, there are many new potions and ingredients to find and play with. On the minus side the fancy multilevel mushroom garden I had just started is slowly collapsing because mud now acts like sand and falls down when not supported.

C'est la vie.

Team Fortress 2 went free to play, and an old acquaintance wanted to play, so I jumped into a couple matches. The thing that gets me about that game is that there are tutorials against bots that work fine. But playing co-op against bots isn't supported, so it will never be played at one of Matthew's LANs. That aside, the game itself is still fun. I was worried that all the new weapons and other changes would be confusing, but mostly it played like I remembered, fast and loony.

Killing Floor is still fun. I feel like an old hand, always useful to the team. I should probably play on Hard more, but Normal is a relaxing explosive zombie apocalypse. I can generally get to the last wave with only one or two competent people on the team.

Hopefully this time next week I'll have a bunch of Steam Summer Sale games to talk about.

Keepalive: Dull Games, PC Versions

2011-06-19T18:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 19 June, 2011

Because of real life stuff and a spotty internet connection, gaming was on the back burner this week.

Terraria

Terraria is a 2D crafting, fighting, and exploration game. You gather resources to build tools and weapons in order to gather better resources from more dangerous places to make better tools and weapons and so on. The combat isn't much fun. And until you get somewhat geared up, the exploration can be pretty slow going. But it's got enough environments and stuff to find and make that it's a decent time killer.

Here's my tower house, complete with a crafting station and chests to store materials and loot. When you meet certain conditions, friendly NPCs will move in and sell you stuff.

My current project is building a mushroom garden beneath my tower. I've planted some seeds in mud and put down a thin layer of water, but nothing's happened yet. I'll probably hit up the wiki.

Here is some exploration. I've dug an underwater tunnel (with occasional air holes) and am now fighting some evil plants and flying insects. There are treasure chests throughout the world, their contents varying by location. I'm trying to put together a set of jungle armor, at present. My current armor is better, but there's only so much to do in this game, so I've been reduced to collecting.

When's that darn Steam summer sale coming, anyway?

Settlement: Colossus

I tried a few more casual games on GameTap. Mostly they were terrible. But in some cases, they did the job. Settlement: Colossus is a hidden object game. That means the main play mechanic is looking at a picture and finding stuff in it. Colossus just dresses it up in the tiniest bit of city building / management. I could go gather mud down by the river to make pots. But at the rate I'm using food, I'd have to go farming just to get the potter to work next turn. It was just enough to think about with just enough bonus puzzles thrown in to get me to finish it.

Gaming News

Everybody's had their forums hacked. Most outlets are saying Duke Nukem Forever is lame. PC Gamer likes it, but that's probably because it's easier to play with a mouse and because the load times aren't so awful on an overpowered PC.

An interesting point was made on a recent podcast (Rebel FM, I think) that we're finally seeing a few big budget games that are best on PC, but that it probably has nothing to do with the strength of the platform. With the Wii U announced and multiple rumors about publishers having Xbox 3 dev kits, it's more likely that the industry is trying to ease the transition to the next generation. It's in everyone's best interest to have strong launch games. And spreading out the investment of upgrading your development tools keeps it off shareholders' radar. If PC users get a nicer version (which publishers can use for amazing looking "actual screenshots" in advertising), so much the better.

E3 2011: Only Potential

2011-06-12T17:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 12 June, 2011

Even with one concrete hardware announcement, I didn't feel much got said at E3 this year.

Wii U

Nintendo announced their new console. Basically it's a Wii HD, and it has a controller with a big touchscreen in it. All we've seen so far are basic tech demos. And while there are theoretically a lot of cool things that could be done with the tech, there were a lot of cool things that could have been done with Wii tech.

The industry is focused on cross platform blockbusters which tack on support for special controllers, if they support them at all. And indies seem to move on after putting a few proof of concept videos online. There's a lack of commitment. Microsoft says they're trying to do better with Kinect, making sure it's being used in all games they publish. So maybe we'll eventually see some face tracking or other useful features come out of that commitment. But I'll believe it when I play it.

Games

There are so many games that it all seems like a blur. A lot of the sequels (Batman, BioShock, Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, Mass Effect; Uncharted) sounded solid. A few sequels (Brothers in Arms: Furious 4, Prey 2) sounded vastly different from their predecessors, but that might be a good thing. The revivals / reboots (Deus Ex, Devil May Cry, XCOM) sounded like they could go either way.

It's really hard to tell. E3 is mostly trailers and rehearsed playthroughs, so what we see may be very removed from the final experience. It's probably too much to hope for, but I'd like to see more games ready for hands-on demos by the time PAX rolls around. Again, I'll believe it when I play it.

Keepalive: GameTap Casual

2011-05-29T18:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 29 May, 2011

Not a lot's been going on lately. A lot of people jumped to Brink, which I wasn't getting much out of. And we're in the news lull just before E3, which starts June 7th. In the meantime, I've been scouring GameTap to see if my subscription fee is still justified. They have a lot of casual games there now, stuff I wouldn't try if I had to buy it piecemeal.

Time Management Games

Take orders. Prepare them in several stages. Deliver them to customers. When it's done decently, it's lively and challenging. I enjoyed Potion Bar, Terrafarmers, and Mystic Emporium. They weren't perfect, but they were enjoyable. Surprisingly some of the long running series, CakeMania and Farm Frenzy, weren't nearly as fun.

In the case of CakeMania: Main Street, there are four separate games, but flower arranging plays almost identically to cake making. And making sushi is almost identical to making fast food. It got old. And Farm Frenzy was way too much waiting around to live up to its name.

Royal Envoy

Royal Envoy is still a time management game, but there's a bit more math to it. Should you build more housing, or a market to sell that lumber instead? Would you make more with another house for raw income, or a bank which adds 50% to the income from your existing houses? Late in the game the developer became overly fond of obscuring the map, forcing the player to restart to have any chance at a good finishing time, but overall the game worked.

Tradewinds Legends

This game is a puzzle. I mean, the game itself is fairly straightforward. Run errands, buy low; sell high; fight pirates. The puzzle is that it's appearance and interface are right out of the early 90s. It makes some pop culture references from the late 90s or early 2000s. And it's set in mythic Arabia which, outside of Prince of Persia, doesn't come up much, especially in post Gulf War games. The credits feature Lakshya Digital, a small Indian developer judging by the names, and a lot of work by Sandlot Games. There's definitely a story or two buried in there somewhere, but since I'm not getting paid to write, I should probably leave it alone.

What I will say is that Melissa Cuthill and Dana Hanna did a great job with the localization of the game. The mechanics would never have held my interest. But the text describing the events and supporting characters was so silly that I had to see what came next. It's amazing how much humor and personality can be put into fetch quests, trading, and super simple combat.

Publishers

Most of the games I played came from three publishers. Playrix has high production values and some good games, but they're pricy. Sandlot publishes some good games and some not so good ones and is a lot cheaper. And finding a game I liked published by Alawar meant sifting a lot of garbage.

Keepalive: Backlog Variety Pack

2011-05-19T16:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Thursday, 19 May, 2011

I'm going through some transitions, so the blog is lower priority right now.

Brink

Brink is not a great game. It's mostly Enemy Territory: Wolfenstein since without the vehicles or artillery, it's got less variety than ET: Quake. The parkour and objective systems are functional, but don't really add much. The perk system rewards prolonged play and specialization in a class, while the game itself requires flexibility. The difficulty of taking objectives seems to vary a lot, meaning some missions are pushovers and some are brick walls, depending on which team you're on.

Games with more than four player co-op aren't easy to find, so there may be some appeal there. But outside of that, I don't see much reason for Brink to exist. And that's not a big market.

Killing Floor

Oh look. A six player co-op game. :) Killing Floor has been my go to lately. That's partly because the Penny Arcade forum folks have backed off of Bad Company 2 to deconstruct Brink. They'll spend weeks testing every map, gun, and perk to find optimal combinations.

But it's also because Killing Floor is simple co-op fun. If I'm on a good team, we hold down a defensible location, a bulwark against the monsters. If I'm on a bad team, sometimes it's even better as I get to step up and be a big fat hero. Some teams are too terrible to save, or just jerks, which will make even a good team no fun. But it's way better than Bad Company 2 for finding fun games, if only because it's cooperative and the voice chat actually works.

The Witcher 2

I'm torn with The Witcher 2. The combat has serious problems including a steep learning curve and controls that simply refuse to work at times. I have been in fights where I didn't care about winning. I just wanted the block button to work. Even at low settings, the game is fairly choppy on my old system, so I suspect the input system is simply getting ignored when there's too much other stuff going on.

I may turn the combat down to easy to see if I can't salvage something from it. But at the moment, I'm thinking I'd rather just sit back and wait for a major overhaul like the first game got.

Singularity

For me personally, Raven Software makes good games standing in the shadows of great ones. Heretic and Hexen were fantasy versions of Doom. They did Quake 4 and the latest Wolfenstein remake. Those games are good, but never great. Singularity mostly fits that bill. The tape recorders you listen to, frequent use of water effects, and upgrade system feel like a lightweight BioShock. The time device you carry feel like a souped up gravity gun from Half-Life 2.

But while many aspects are derivative, it still worked. The the Soviet trappings, time travel elements, and additional powers of the time device were enough that it didn't feel like a retread.

It's worth mentioning that the game is totally streamlined. You always know where the path is, and if you're deviating it's always a quick diversion to figure out how to get some extra loot. I liked it. It was on rails, but the ride was fun.

Keepalive: Mostly Multiplayer

2011-04-24T06:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 24 April, 2011

Battlefield: Bad Company 2

While most of the people on my Steam friends list were playing Portal 2, I kept playing Bad Company 2. I'm sure Portal 2 is an amazing experience, but I was just too cheap to spend that kind of money on a puzzle game which I will probably only play through once.

Bad Company 2 I bought for $6.78 and am still enjoying pretty well. There are still lag deaths. And my Comcast internet seems to hitch up for a few seconds every so often, booting me from the game. But I'm still learning the tools and doing better, so it's still got my interest.

My latest favorite toy is the humble motion mine. I never used it at first because it said it was a mine, but didn't explode, which is stupid. But what it does do is send out small pulses that show the positions and facings of enemies near the mine. If you're playing hide and go seek with shotguns, this is life saving information. And when any enemy is killed near your motion sensor, you get free points.

There are a fair amount of cheaters playing Bad Company 2. I suppose that's part of any popular, competitive game. In a single night I've seen over half a dozen people automatically kicked for using various hacks. And I've been on at least one server, where people were hacking and the computer was unable to tell. It's sad how proud they are of it, too. Dude, everyone knows you're cheating. The only ones dumb enough to think you're a winner are some inert silicon and you.

The cheap price of the game may work against BC2 here, as getting banned for life just means dropping $10 to buy another copy. Who knows, maybe someone will use / has used that as a business plan. Sell the hacks through a different company, then ban players for using them, but not until they've had enough fun dominating matches that they'll happily buy the game again.

Killing Floor

I only bothered to reinstall Killing Floor after my recent reformat because my brother has it, and I try to have a nice selection of co-op games ready to go. But when the Portal 2 pre-game silliness started, a bunch of PA people started playing, so now I'm back leveling my pretend skills. I still say that Killing Floor skills take way too long to level. But sometimes I'm tired of fighting against people, so stale co-op wins. Bad Company 2 actually does have co-op, but DICE didn't port it to the PC. >:P

Since I hadn't played it in so long, I found I had a lot to learn about Killing Floor, as well. Monsters behave differently than they used to. They take different amounts of damage from different types of weapons, I hear. And there are a couple new guns. It's fresh enough that I'll probably stick with it for a bit.

System Shock

I forgot what a pain the maintenance level on System Shock was. There are invisible, fireball throwing mutants that spawn in infinitely. Very few shooters put in areas you're just supposed to blow by. Most games are either about shooting or avoiding. Actually having to use my brain to choose for myself is disorienting. It's like I'm choosing what genre the game is as I'm playing it.

Other Stuff

I'm working on some game programming stuff. It's really basic, but if anything results from it, I'll post.

I would still like to post Big Baby's War Journal at some point. I've already reformatted all the images. I just haven't had any inspiration to do the writing. I may have to forgo the inspiration and just post it as a scrap book to have it done.

I would still like to post a video of Chris and me discussing our old Doom levels. To me they represent an important part of our lives, and I want to preserve that.

Gaming Culture

2011-04-20T06:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Wednesday, 20 April, 2011

Gaming culture is a funny term. It recently popped up in a review of Portal 2 when Adam Biessner of Game Informer said the original game "defined a year-plus of gaming culture". The veracity of GLaDOS' promises of cake, the weighted companion cube, and of course the ending music kept popping up all over.

I don't think of those things as culture. They feel like memes, amusing refernces. It's probably just in my head, but I thought that culture was the stuff that was meaningful to people.

Or maybe I'm just out of touch. When I go to PAX now (and I just registered for PAX 2011), most of what I see feels pointless. All your base? Rick Astley? Dragonball Z? I like silly things, but putting them up on a thirty foot screen in front of hundreds (thousands?) of people who have already seen them feels extra tired. Heck, there were silly videos I'd never bothered to watch that felt instantly out of date in that format. But maybe that's just because being in a giant entrance line in a largely featureless concrete room that feels like the holding pen for a slaughterhouse does nothing for comedy. But I digress.

Culture used to be exclusively about geography. The printing press and faster forms of travel let ideas move around a bit more. And the internet lets them go all over. But does playing the same games and talking about them make gamers a culture? I'm not an anthropologist, but I suspect it doesn't.

I think it's called a culture, though, because people tie it to their identities. People dress up as game characters. People get game tattoos. People give game character names to pets or even children. I guess the idea is that culture is what shapes and defines identity, so if gaming does that, it's culture. But all this stuff happens with movies and music, too. Is there music culture? Is there movie culture? If there are, I don't hear them called by those names.

I have heard of hip-hop culture, so maybe it's about feeling apart. Liking music in general doesn't give you any identity. But if you're really into a particular type, then you start to be interested in the trappings and behavior associated with it. Maybe. If that's true, than the term gaming culture will probably go away as gaming becomes more pervasive. Or maybe it's already going away as we break into smaller groups like core / traditional gamers versus casual / social gamers.

Anyway, that's my muddled thinking on the subject as it stands. I predict that as long as there are hobbies closely associated with gaming that are considered outside the norm (writing chiptunes, cosplay, etc.), the term gaming culture will still exist. But as gaming becomes ubiquitous, those communities will become cultures of their own, and playing games will be like watching movies or listening to music.

I feel compelled to add a final note. These are all cultures based on escapist entertainment and consumerism, not the healthiest of sources. But that's a bigger subject for more educated people.

Keepalive: Mediocrity Continues

2011-04-10T04:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 10 April, 2011

Battlefield: Bad Company 2

Bad Company 2 is still not the greatest game. Perhaps it's simply the reality of internet gaming, but I feel like I get robbed half a dozen times a round. A guy comes around the corner; I'm right there on the trigger. But I die. Or an enemy opens up, I zip behind cover and feel safe. Then I keel over dead because he killed me already, and the game just hadn't told me.

I've never had much tolerance for lag. I didn't care for Quake, and after trying again with Quake 2 and some mods, I swore off modem gaming completely. That was probably to my detriment as I missed Tribes entirely, which I understand was amazing. I came back to it once I had broadband and had some fun, which is confusing me.

I don't get why BC2 feels worse than I remember Joint Operations feeling. Maybe it's my faulty memory. Or maybe it's that Joint Ops was so janky all around that you expected weird behavior.

Regardless, I don't have anything I particularly want to play more, so BC2 is still the game for now. I'm learning to accept the glitches. Still, I played DooM on a LAN a month ago. And no game, especially one played on consumer grade internet, can stack up to that experience.

Part of me thinks I need to get back to making co-op maps so I can DooM more often. But I've got enough projects right now.

Two Worlds II
I think my time with the game is winding down. I've beaten every level of the adventure mode, and unless I missed something, the adventures don't scale. So there's really nowhere to go but competitive multiplayer. I can tell by how the single player works that that wouldn't be at all satisfying.

I built up my village far enough to know that it's a dead end. Even with an upgraded forge and mining operation to give it the best materials, the weapons in my shops aren't any better than what I see in the NPC shops. Plus despite the fact that the entire village lives and works in buildings I sponsored, they don't give me better prices than the NPC shops. That's gratitude for ya.

Maybe I'll go back and finish the campaign. But I think I'd be smarter to uninstall.

Keepalive: Something Old, Something New

2011-04-05T15:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Tuesday, 5 April, 2011

Two Worlds II

I tried messing with village mode. It's not so much Farmville, and is actually the worse for it. The game itself is a very simple village sim. You build structures which add population. You build a farm and ranch to feed them, and a shop to sell them the food. It's a company town, I guess.

You then wander about killing wildlife which doesn't respawn and occasionally getting requests for aid from your second in command, which just mean that you go fight a few other types of monsters in a few specific locations. And you wait for your city to amass some funds. Provided you haven't messed up and put in a building that has more upkeep than its goods produce profit, money comes in every six minutes, which is six hours in game time.

If the designers had been clever, they would have made it so that when I log in and it tells me I haven't visited my village for 22 hours, my town's coffers would have increased, and there would probably be some trouble for me to go fix. Since there's a fairly low cap on the money, this wouldn't wreck the game and would give me a reason to go visit the village. (EDIT: Apparently they did. But it's so little money I didn't even notice.)

As it is, the village is tedium. After you've cleared the surrounding countryside of wildlife, there's nothing to do but wait for the next emergency. I considered removing my guard houses to manufacture more emergencies, but there are only a half dozen types of emergencies, so that would be just as dull. Plus the villagers would be unhappy because they would feel unsafe and nobody would buy the weapons my forge cranks out.

I'm still kind of curious to see if there's any fun locked away in village mode, so I'm taking my character adventuring to earn money that I can then pour into my village. It not much faster as a way to earn money, but it is much more fun, and I level up, which happens painfully slowly in village mode.

The thought has occurred to me that village mode is supposed to be multiplayer, so I may just be doing it wrong. But how would having four people standing around waiting for an emergency be any better than having one person standing around waiting for an emergency?

EDIT: On further reading, it looks like the village is more of a time sink. You upgrade the buildings so that they produce good gear for you to buy, not to get wealthy. But I was never at a loss for decent gear in the first place. What a waste.

Bulletstorm Demo

I tried the demo for Bulletstorm. It ran well, especially once I turned the settings down to medium. The game felt passable. There's a lot of auto aiming of your special abilities that frequently had me killing guys in ways I didn't mean to, which lessened my sense of control.

The control bindings were also a bit off and needed to be remapped. Some of that was me being particular, but some of it wasn't. Space is the sprint key, and the shift key is entirely unused. That makes sense when you learn that the sprint key is also used to jump over low barriers, but assigning shift as the backup key would have helped players familiar with the many FPS games that put the sprint button there.

The main improvement I think the demo could have is reinstating the trick list. The game's main mechanic is supposed to be killing your opponents in these elaborate ways, but I got bored of the simple combos and kicking guys off ledges / into spikes before the ten minute demo was half over. I've played Dark Messiah of Might and Magic already. As it was I played through twice, to make sure I wasn't missing anything, then deleted the demo. If I want a shooter with combos in it, I've got Necrovision. Bulletstorm still needs to show me something.

Keepalive: Videos and Such

2011-04-01T18:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Friday, 01 April, 2011

System Shock

I'm spending too much time recording System Shock videos, partly because I record them multiple times. If an installment is boring or I trip over my words a lot, I'll scrap it and start over. This then makes it tricky to record the second time because I know things about the upcoming section I shouldn't. I have to remember my mistakes and repeat them, which is silly.

But I'm also spending too much time recording them because I'm enjoying the game. Cyberspace in System Shock is different and cool. Picking up the audio logs and trying to piece together what happened to who and when is just as interesting a puzzle as it was when I first played the game.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2

Originally, I played BC2 for five hours, beating the single player campaign, and put it away. But I saw that the Penny Arcade forum folks were having a Bad Company 2 night and decided I should give the game a chance. I probably should have stuck to the PA night because on it's own, the game isn't impressive.

Like many modern shooters it adds so many special effects and fancy lighting that it's often hard to see. I was told that there are a few maps where sniping mostly doesn't work because of graphics problems that make your screen go white when you bring up the scope. Also, the controls are only read once per frame, so if you're on a slow computer, you're doubly boned. And last but not least, you have to unlock fundamental class abilities. Initially medics can't heal or revive and engineers can't repair. I still haven't earned enough medic points to be accorded the privilege of reviving people.

I very much enjoyed hanging out with Carbon Fire from the PA forums for a while. But I can't imagine playing this game for anything but the company.

Then again, I may just be old and out of touch. I thought the Crysis 2 multiplayer demo also had disorienting effects and a discouraging unlock system too.

Two Worlds 2

I met the creative director for TW2 who was demoing the game at PAX. I got a lot of enjoyment out of the somewhat similar Gothic 3. I watched videos people made of themselves having a lot of fun with the co-op and spell system.

This game is dull. It's so desperately dull. The combat is very basic and exploitable. It's generally more about patience than skill. The spell system has fun bits, but loses it's charm pretty quickly. And I've long since stopped listening to the quest dialog.

I should probably just uninstall it, but when it's too late at night to play something fun, I'll do a couple quests in TW2 to help me get to sleep. I may need to just switch to playing the multiplayer mode by myself, since it gives me a town to manage and build up. Since I don't care about the story anyway, it might be more fun to use the game as the world's fanciest Farmville clone.

System Shock Video Talkthrough Launches

2011-03-28T23:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 28 March, 2011

YouTube play list for online viewing

MediaFire directory for downloading

That is all.

Assault Down Memory Lane

2011-03-27T13:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 27 March, 2011

Chris and I recently played DooM for the first time in half a decade or so. Even with some frame rate hitches and only playing two player on maps that are better with three or four, I had a great time.

I remember a psych teacher at Sierra College talking about a study where subjects who had experience with marijuana were given joints to smoke and asked to rate the experience. Subjects reported getting just as high with joints that had the THC removed as with normal ones, raising the question of how much of the experience is or can be learned behavior as opposed to chemical reaction.

There's definitely some learned behavior involved with my reaction to DooM. I enjoy being goofy. I enjoy blasting enemies. But DooM reverts me to a younger state of mind and kicks all of that stuff into a higher gear. I don't just enjoy pulling off that hard earned kill, I hunger for it.

At any rate, it was a special experience, so I decided to upload it.

Part 1 (download)

Part 2 (download)

Part 3 (download)

Part 4 (download)

System Shock Prep and Thoughts on Let's Plays

2011-03-16T06:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Wednesday, 16 March, 2011

Hey hey, kids! Not too much has gone on in blog. It'll continue to be slow for a week or so. I'm spending a lot of time reading about System Shock. I would like my video talkthrough of the game to be better researched than previous ones.

If you don't care about the walkthroughs, or Let's Plays in general, stop reading now.

Boring History of My Research Process

For Heart of Evil, I think I read the text file that came with it and a little bit of the author's web site (which was taken down during the walkthrough).

For Blood, I don't remember doing any research at all.

For Republic Commando, I got lucky and caught an interview with the game's director and lead designer Tim Longo that came out around that time. I think I poked around on Wikipedia a bit, as well.

For Gunman Chronicles, I also don't remember doing any research.

I think I did some research for Shattered Steel, but a lot of that was finding technical articles on how to get it running. :P

For The Witcher, I watched all of the Making Of videos that came with the game. I didn't even take notes.

In one sense, that was good. I'd rather the game did most of the talking. But there's often still plenty of room for trivia or anecdotes later. Almost every game bogs down / tries to fill time at some point. This raises the issue of...

Entertainment vs Documentary
The goals of entertainment programs and documentaries aren't mutually exclusive. Documentaries need to give the audience a reason to care about the subject matter, and good storytelling is key to that. But there seems to have been sort of an arms race in the Let's Play community to add pizazz to the videos. Some people have fancy animated intros with pictures of themselves in them. Some tell lots of jokes and use their best radio voices. Some videos even have four people sitting around commentating on recorded gameplay to give a sort of live forum discussion on the game as it's being played.

None of these things are "bad". The nice thing about the internet is that it lets everyone make and consume the content they most want to make and consume. Even if you want to see a playthrough of a PC only game like The Witcher, you've probably got half a dozen choices.

For me personally, adding pizazz is what game shows and bad video game networks do. If a section of a game is dull, I want the viewer to experience the dull. If it's a recurring theme, I'll fast forward or edit out the future dull bits, but I want to make Let's Plays that are about the games, warts and all.

That said, I saw an X-Com LP on the forum where forum members volunteered to lend their names to the game's notoriously short lived characters. Then they waited nervously to hear what happened as their namesakes were sent out on night missions to investigate downed UFOs. Whoever thought of that had a good idea, and if I liked strategy games, I'd steal it. :)

Demo Impressions: Guns of Icarus

2011-03-10T20:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Thursday, 10 March, 2011

Guns of Icarus is a 3D browser game about defending a zeppelin from air pirates.

You run around on a ship with plane engines on the back, held aloft by a zeppelin. Then planes attack and you have to run around to different gun emplacements to shoot them down while also repairing your airship's components. If you fail to keep your zeppelin or rigging intact, you die. If you fail to keep your engines intact, you stop moving, which means you can't escape your pirate attackers. If you fail to keep your cargo hold repaired, you won't be able to get upgrades for completing the segment.

The game looks nice. There aren't enough steampunk games, in my opinion, so I appreciate the setting. Even though there wasn't anyone using it for me to test, the game has a multiplayer mode, which I suspect would be chaotic fun.

There are definitely areas to improve upon, though. And as an exercise in game design I thought I'd list them along with proposed solutions. (If that doesn't interest you, just look at the pretty picture and move on.)

Gunnery
The preceding picture demonstrates a source of confusion for me, the gunnery feedback mechanism. I don't appear to be hitting the plane, but the little red X keeps popping up with every shot which makes me thing that maybe I am. But sometimes planes die very quickly, and sometimes they die very slowly, which leads me to believe the red X doesn't mean much.

Suggestions: If the red X means the attack caused damage, perhaps it could also indicate amount. I think the easiest way would be through transparency. If the X just barely shows on a weak hit, and only becomes fully opaque on a strong one, that would help. Also, an "out of range" icon when looking at distant targets with the Gatling gun would have helped me better understand its limitations.

Introducing Game Mechanics
The game introduces new mechanics as they happen. The first time you use a gun, the game pauses and you see its stats. When a component is damaged, you get information on what it does and why it's important to keep it in good repair. In a complicated game this is a great way of keeping players from being overwhelmed. They only get the information when they need it. But in Icarus it consistently felt like I got the information after I needed it.

Plus, it would often pop up while I was in the middle of a heated combat, so I'd often click through to get back to what I was doing, which meant I never learned the finer points of the game. Should I prioritize repairing the engines because I'll be attacked forever until I get to my destination, or is that the worst possible thing to do because new waves of enemies will be spawned by my forward progress? I HAVE NO IDEA, AND PLANES ARE ATTACKING ME, AND EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE!

Suggestions: I'd try introducing any new parts that can be damaged before play starts. That let's the player know to anticipate trouble with them, give due consideration to protecting them, and take a few seconds before the attackers appear to get an idea where they are. Otherwise they have to deal with being under attack, learning the function of a new component of the ship, being told that component is on fire, and having to go find that component all at the same time.

It would also be nice to be able to get information on upgrades from the upgrade screen. How do I know if I want a super Gatling, super cannon, or Tesla gun if I don't know what they do?

Other Feedback Mechanisms
First off, I very much liked that the HUD for the game features old fashioned analog displays. They definitely add character. But they weren't always easy to read.

Suggestions: The distance to destination display seemed like a thing I should be checking a lot, but it was always a blur when I glanced down at it.

I'm probably just old, but a large print version might be nice. They seemed pretty small at 1920x1080. Also, the first three digits are really the important ones, so if could you set them apart somehow, maybe by making them black on white, that could help a lot.

Again, I like the design of old fashioned indicators, but I got confused trying to remember which was which in the heat of battle (especially when repair icons were on top of them, like in the picture). Adding a small empty space on either side of the cargo bay gauge, so that the gauges were grouped by ship location, might be enough. It might also help to swap the zeppelin and rigging gauges with the engine gauges (at least for people who are used to reading left to right, top to bottom).

And finally, it could add a lot to the feel of the game if there were damage related sound cues. I remember listening to enemy shots hitting my airship and thinking it would be helpful if I knew which part they were hitting. I imagined little *pop whoosh*es when they hit the zeppelin, rope snapping sounds when they hit the rigging, metal pings for the engines and wooden *thuck thuck* sounds as the cargo bay takes hits. That might be too much effort, and it might be a confusing cacophony when under heavy attack, but it seemed like a good idea in my head.

Bye Bye Video

2011-03-07T03:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 7 March, 2011

I posted my videos here in the blog because I was excited to be doing them and so you folks would know what I was up to, gaming-wise. For The Witcher, I put together over thirty two hours of decent quality video in eleven months using tools I hadn't even heard of. I'll always be proud of that. But the truth is it's not the content most of you come here for. So I'll leave a link to my YouTube channel in the sidebar and occasionally post keepalives here to let you know when I start a new one or when there's a story behind the story I feel like telling. I may still post a video once in a while. But for the most part, the blog will be about my thoughts on games.

Thumbs up? Thumbs down? Deafening indifference?

State of the Industry?

2011-02-21T06:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, 19 February, 2011

I used to think I had a passing idea of how the industry was doing, but a lot of stuff just doesn't make sense.

Music games are out
Activision laid off virtually everyone working on Guitar Hero (and most of the rest of the company that wasn't Blizzard or working on Call of Duty). Similarly, Viacom sold Harmonix (the makers of Rock Band (and Guitar Hero initially)) back to the original owners.

But dancing games are in
Four of the top ten selling games at retail for January were Wii dancing games.

Conventional wisdom is that the 3DS will do great
I don't remember hearing any serious doubts on the Giant Bombcast, Gamers With Jobs podcast, or Weekend Confirmed. And I haven't seen doubts around the forums, either. But that might be because I haven't been looking for them.

But cell phone games cost a buck and DS games cost forty
We've got article titles like "As Mobile Games Rise, Studios Fear for Blockbusters’ Future" and "Peter Moore Likens Game Industry to 'Burning Oil Platform'" which talk about mobile games threatening the big games. But shouldn't the portables be feeling the squeeze much worse than the blockbusters?

Maybe the commentators I've listened to are just thinking about the hardware, which should be novel enough to move a lot of units initially. I don't know.

Game companies want to expand into other media
Facebook and the iPhone are big? Let's put versions of our game on them! Let's make comics! Let's make movies! Everything grows the brand and makes money simultaneously!

But game companies can't really create or share
People play a game to do stuff. But in every other medium they look for genres, settings, characters, stories, and sometimes particular actors, writers, or directors. Games work in well established genres. Sometimes they have interesting settings. But everything else they tend to do poorly, including giving recognition to performers and designers because they don't want to pay them more. Also the TV and film industries seem to view games as the enemy and vice versa, even when they're part of the same parent company.

The industry sees big money in social gaming
Farmville maker Zynga is making crazy bank. They made $200 million last year, and are supposed to be on track to more than double that this year. Considering the company's size, and that their revenues are more predictable than the hit driven big games, they're doing great.

But that's not how social interaction works
People have been trying to take some of World of Warcraft's success for years, and even though there are many games that had elements gamers preferred, everybody they knew was playing WoW already. I suspect that's the main challenge anyone trying to break into the social space will run up against. That doesn't mean you can't still make money there. But the kind of money a large publisher looks for may just be a pipe dream.

As many developers have said, these are frightening, exciting, and uncertain times for the industry. We'll see how it goes.

A Bit More On Biometrics

2011-02-20T20:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 20 February, 2011

There were a couple more things about biometrics I wanted to mention. Valve had a debug setup where they could play Left 4 Dead competitively and see the excitement level of everyone playing. They noticed that people often attacked the most excited player on the other team and defended the most excited player on their own team. And this is definitely valuable data to have as a player. I often get frustrated with teammates who don't know what to do, but if I could see that they were freaking out, I would be more likely to cut them some slack.

Gabe actually thinks this might make the internet significantly more civil, but I doubt it. A lot of the people who behave badly in games do it precisely because they get a rise out of people. Being able to see your jerkiness have a quantitative effect will probably just make it more fun for them.

Also, the second people catch on that The Director attacks them less when they're exited, or that everyone helps the person with the highest excitement, they'll just lick their hand so the sensor thinks they're totally sweaty and freaking out.

We're gamers. Give us a system; we game it.

Biometrics

2011-02-19T14:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Wednesday, 16 February, 2011

I saw a mention on Blues News about an interview with Valve Software head honcho Gabe Newell (Part 1, Part 2).

I had heard about Valve working with psychologists in some of the coverage surrounding Half-Life 2. I thought they'd worked on the facial animation system and gone back to their old jobs. It turns out there's a lot I didn't know.

Here's the first question of the interview.

In the past you spoke about using biometrics to measure players physical and emotional response to a game. Would this technology only apply to play-testing in order to add better design the games or would it be something that all players would be able to use? If it became an option for all players, how do you see this technology being integrated in a non-intrusive piece of hardware.

Huh? Seriously? That's your first question?

Gabe spent over eight minutes responding. I had no idea Valve was so far down this road. Heck, I didn't even know this was a road.

Galvanic Skin Response - by measuring how much a person is sweating, you can tell how excited he or she is. You can't tell if it's fear or anger or lust. But you know they're worked up about something. Valve's put this tech into mice (the mouse and keyboard kind, not the medical experiment kind), so they can measure player responses.

If you've played Left 4 Dead, you probably already know where this is going. Left 4 Dead is a cooperative game where AI opponents are set loose on the players by an algorithm called The Director. When the players are healthy and well armed, The Director sends more monsters. When they're beaten and running on empty, The Director may space the enemies out more, or spawn more helpful items for players to find. It's a good system. But now, it knows when they're afraid. That allows them to adjust The Director in very effective ways.

Gabe said he "would be surprised" if next gen controllers didn't have this tech integrated.

Eye tracking - While current console cameras and most webcams don't have the resolution, we may eventually get to the point where tracking eye movement and pupil dilation (which can indicate interest in what the viewer is looking at) becomes feasible. Advertisers have long used eye tracking to test that their ads draw viewers to their logo or product. But it's also very important to games where designers want to be sure players see cool scripted events, find clues to solve puzzles, and can see an enemy telegraphing an attack to react accordingly. As a side benefit, this might allow users to navigate menus and target by simply glancing around the screen.

No estimate of when this might be practical for mainstream use was given.

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation - Outside of having EEG equipment implanted in your head, this was the freakiest thing discussed in the interview. Apparently researches have made significant progress in remotely stimulating specific parts of the brain with magnets. If you want the player to feel something, you directly stimulate the relevant portions of his or her brain. The long term effects on humans aren't known. But people are already willing to risk severe illness and death for the way alcohol and nicotine (not to mention illegal drugs) make them feel, so who knows?

Gabe thinks we may see this tech make it into some kind of game controller ten years from now. Although he might have been talking about a crazy expensive PC peripheral, and not any kind of mainstream application.

Before the Wii came out, most of this would have sounded like crazy talk. But from the Wii's success, the responses from the other console makers, and the push for 3D, it's obvious that the industry has a keen interest in any new differentiator.

Game Journal: The Witcher

2011-02-18T08:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Friday, 18 February, 2011

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 068a - Endings

0:00 - looting the Grand Master
0:50 - Dandelion and final decision
2:10 - final consequences
3:30 - bizarro conclusion
5:20 - neutral conclusion
6:30 - closing cinematic

Witcher 069a - Final Spoiler and Credits

0:00 - final spoiler
1:40 - credits

Thanks to

- CD Projekt Red and everyone involved in making The Witcher.
- WotanAnubis, Gooberslot, mrfreeman117, and everyone who participated in and viewed the walkthrough.
- the makers of AviSynth, AvsP, VirtualDub, Audacity, MediaCoder, and the encoders used (x264, cudaH264Enc, and faac).
- the Something Awful let's play forum for pointing me towards the aforementioned tools.
- Henroid and the Penny Arcade forums for providing a nice place to gather.

Final Saves

For anyone who might want to import them into The Witcher 2, here are the final saves.

Game Journal: The Witcher

2011-02-16T07:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Wednesday, 16 February, 2011

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 067b - Bizarro Epilogue

0:00 - ascent
5:30 - climax
6:20 - aftermath

Game Journal: The Witcher

2011-02-14T15:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 14 February, 2011

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 067a - Bizarro Epilogue

0:00 - king's conference
2:20 - troubled streets
3:30 - safe house
4:20 - Yaevinn
5:10 - zeugl
6:30 - road to cloister

Game Journal: The Witcher

2011-02-10T10:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Thursday, 10 February, 2011

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 066c - Bizarro Chapter Five

0:00 - murdering to the manor
2:30 - murdering in the manor
3:30 - Azar
6:00 - the big reveal

Game Journal: The Witcher

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

written by Blain Newport on Tuesday, 8 February, 2011

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 066b - Bizarro Chapter Five

0:00 - hospital
2:40 - clearing Old Vizima
4:10 - swamp
5:40 - crypt stuff

Game Journal: The Witcher

2011-02-04T08:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Friday, 4 February, 2011

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 066a - Bizarro Chapter Five

0:00 - arrival
1:30 - court
5:30 - old Vizima

Game Journal: The Witcher

2011-02-01T03:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Tuesday, 1 February, 2011

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 065a - The Finger

0:00 - King of the Wild Hunt
1:30 - Grand Master
2:20 - Dandelion

Next Gen

2011-01-31T11:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 31 January, 2011

Salt Racer brought up the subject of the next generation of consoles and how nobody talks about it. I suspect that's because they're still a ways off. Well, maybe not Nintendo, but trying to predict their next move seems foolhardy.

Sony and Microsoft are making money right now. They like that. Both companies lost huge sums on launching the last hardware, and that wasn't during a prolonged recession, so they probably want to hold off as long as possible without getting caught napping.

Microsoft spent 500 million promoting Kinect and will want to spend at least two holiday seasons (2010 and 2011) cashing in on that investment. Sony also invested in their motion controls, and the thought of another launch like the PS3 probably still makes some of the Sony folks break out in a cold sweat.

That said, Sony is introducing a hand-held that can play Metal Gear Solid 4 (at reduced frame rate, but still). If that much power can fit into a hand-held, full HD 3D consoles could probably be ready today, if it wasn't for the economic roadblocks.

My guess is we'll see announcements at E3 2012. But that's just a guess.

Game Journal: The Witcher

2011-01-31T01:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 31 January, 2011

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 064a - Law of Surprise

0:00 - Grand Master
1:50 - King of the Wild Hunt

Game Journal: Mass Effect 2

2011-01-30T11:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 30 January, 2011

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

You may remember Sweet Shephard from my Mass Effect 1 game journal. While customizing her armor for Mass Effect 2, I realized that the origin I'd chosen for her (Earth born, war hero, engineer) meant she was basically Miles O'Brien from Star Trek. So I decided to deck her out in engineering colors.

And then I realized that she looked like a black Samus Aran (the protagonist from the Metroid games). I liked it. She had a lot of good sci-fi history behind her.

She did not, however, have good lighting. I wonder if any of the testers played black characters?

My renegade character based on Firefly's Jayne Cobb also made his way through Mass Effect 2. The actor who plays Jayne (Adam Baldwin) voices a minor character in Mass Effect 2. I had Jayne Shephard risk the minor character's life as two Jayne's in the universe was definitely too many. But he survived, and the universe hasn't imploded, yet.

The character in the background is supposed to be this disturbingly cavalier mercenary. He and Jayne got along great.

And finally I made a third run through with a goth Asian woman (who I named after a nice Asian girl I went to elementary school with. Don't ask me why). After being pushed down the Paragon and Renegade path by game systems that gate important choices behind you having enough "good / bad points", I wanted to have one playthrough with a character who didn't care about being effective. She chose whatever she felt like. She ignored loyalty quests. And she hated everyone. When her final mission was over...

two thirds of her team were dead. It was liberating. I'll be curious if her horrible choices will actually make her life harder in Mass Effect 3.

Thoughts on 3D

2011-01-30T09:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 30 January, 2011

So... 3D. Maybe I missed it, but I haven't heard anyone say anything about 3D that stuck with me. Some people wrote it off immediately because it costs too much, most implementations require you to wear glasses, it narrows the viewing angle, and it dims the picture. Essentially the tech is too fidgety and expensive to be ready for prime time.

Regardless, I think 3D is a good idea. Consider for a moment that every baseball game ever made has forced players to judge pitches with no sense of depth. It's absurd isn't it? And how much easier will it be to judge distances in platformers and driving games? Why would you ever play a flight sim in 2D again?

I don't expect 3D will revolutionize games. I don't see new types of play coming from it. But when the tech finally gets sorted, it will make a lot of common tasks in games more manageable.

The real question is how long it will take the research and development people to come up with a solution that's cost effective and not a hassle. The last few years have seen a lot of money dumped into 3D. But it's been tried and abandoned many times before, so who knows if this is the push that will make it ubiquitous or not.

I doubt it. But I'm a late adopter. So I always doubt it. :P

Game Journal: The Witcher

2011-01-29T06:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, 29 January, 2011

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 063f - To The Death

0:00 - Adda
3:20 - Shani
4:00 - Grand Master

Magicka: OCD of Ultimate Power

2011-01-28T10:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Thursday, 27 January, 2011

THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS MECHANICAL SPOILERS FOR MAGICKA.

Magicka was just barely on my radar until this piece on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Now it's taken over my brain.

The premise is simple. You are a wizard. After a five minute tutorial, you have control over all the elements. You learn other spells, but they're almost irrelevant because once you learn to control and combine the elements, you can wreak amazing devastation. Plus there's no mana to worry about. So you can throw the most powerful spells around at a whim.

It takes a lot of time and experimentation to figure out the best spells. Every element can be cast in multiple ways. You can cast it on yourself (mostly for healing or casting shields). You can cast it in a direction. You can cast it all around you, which can be handy when surrounded by enemies. You can also combine elements to change their form. Fire is usually a jet, but with earth, it's an explosive fire ball. With arcane energy it's a beam. With lightning, you can arc it along a line of enemies. There are a couple hidden elements and a hidden delivery mechanism as well. Plus certain elements cancel each other out, so there's a lot to experiment with.

Then there's the control mechanism. At first I put my hands on the keyboard like I would for most games, with my pinky resting on the shift key. But I eventually realized that my index finger wasn't fast enough to be responsible for four keys and moved up to the normal typing position. I also spent a lot of time figuring out how the game takes input so I could cast as fast as possible.

As a touch typist who used to play piano, I'm here to tell you that the power this game puts at my fingertips is madness. The damage I can dish out, the crowd control I can exercise, and the multi-level defense I can erect is absurd. I have to hold myself back to keep the game interesting.

The vast majority of games don't allow for this kind of play. Designers want players to have the same tools so they can balance the difficulty more precisely. The fact that Magicka even supports game pads makes me question if Arrowhead (the developer) understands how much more powerful the keyboard is. But if this is all an accident, why doesn't it feel like one? Why doesn't the game seem too easy?

I suspect the learning curve is the key. If the magic system had been even a tiny bit simpler, this power would have felt unearned. But because it took me over twenty hours to master, and there are still new spells to experiment with and many optimizations to learn, I feel like I'm earning this power.

I am a wizard.

Game Journal: The Witcher

2011-01-27T10:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Thursday, 27 January, 2011

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 063e - To The Death

0:00 - Toruviel
2:30 - Grand Master
5:30 - Siegfried
8:00 - Grand Master
9:50 - Adda

Game Journal: The Witcher

2011-01-26T22:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Wednesday, 26 January, 2011

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 063d - To The Death

0:00 - Grand Master
2:00 - King of the Wild Hunt
3:00 - Toruviel

Game Journal: The Witcher

2011-01-24T23:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 24 January, 2011

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 063c - To The Death

0:00 - Grand Master
3:20 - Shani
7:30 - Abigail

Game Journal: The Witcher

2011-01-23T19:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 23 January, 2011

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 063b - To The Death

0:00 - survivors
4:00 - road clearing
7:30 - into the cloister
9:00 - Grand Master

Game Journal: The Witcher

2011-01-22T10:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, 22 January, 2011

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 063a - To The Death

0:00 - talents
6:00 - potion up
9:20 - zeugl

Game Journal: The Witcher

2011-01-19T20:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Wednesday, 19 January, 2011

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 062c - Epilogue Begins

0:00 - a little looting and prophecy
2:20 - next house
3:20 - street fight
5:10 - wounded knight

Game Journal: The Witcher

2011-01-18T21:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Tuesday, 18 January, 2011

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 062a - Epilogue Begins

0:00 - chapter intro
2:20 - kings
6:10 - consequence pictures
7:20 - Dandelion

Witcher 062b - Epilogue Begins

0:00 - navigation
0:30 - Siegfried
3:10 - safe house

Game Journal: The Witcher

2011-01-14T15:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Friday, 14 January, 2011

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 061c - Bizarro Chapter Four

0:00 - Berengar
0:30 - Rayla
1:00 - adjutant
2:30 - village mess
5:20 - leaving

Game Journal: The Witcher

2011-01-13T17:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Thursday, 13 January, 2011

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 061b - Bizarro Chapter Four

0:00 - last of the lovers
1:50 - Dagon storyline
5:00 - letter

Game Journal: The Witcher

2011-01-10T14:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 10 January, 2011

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 061a - Bizarro Chapter Four

0:00 - healer
0:30 - Alvin
3:40 - The Adam Cover-up

How Many Shooters?

2011-01-08T22:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, 8 January, 2011

This article does not have a point. It's just a sanity check.

I took a look at GamePro's list of "big games" for 2011 and was surprised to see how many shooters were on it. I'd heard people complain about how many FPS games come out, but I always thought they were exaggerating because there are a few shooters that get a lot of coverage. But seeing how many shooters were coming out just in the first quarter of 2011 gave me pause for thought.

Q1 2011 (7)
Bulletstorm
Conduit 2
Crysis 2
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Fear 3
Homefront
Killzone 3

Q2-4 2011 (5)
Duke Nukem Forever
Ghost Recon: Future Soldier
Rage
Resistance 3
Socom 4

That's some serious front loading. We've got more shooters in the first three months than the rest of the year.

But is it really more shooters overall than previous years?

2010 (9)
Aliens vs Predator
Bad Company 2
BioShock 2
CoD BlOps
Fallout: New Vegas
Halo: Reach
MAG
Medal of Honor
Singularity

It's a little more. But looking at the bigger picture, there were five hundred games on the list I looked at. I will not take any complaints about there being too many shooters seriously for the time being.

Game Journal: The Witcher

2011-01-06T21:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Thursday, 6 January, 2011

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 060d - The End Of Azar

0:00 - Azar
3:50 - the boss
4:30 - leaving with Yaevinn

Game Journal: The Witcher

2011-01-05T15:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Wednesday, 5 January, 2011

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 060c - The End Of Azar

0:00 - exploring
2:30 - Azar

Game Journal: The Witcher

2011-01-04T12:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Tuesday, 4 January, 2011

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 060b - The End Of Azar

0:00 - cave wandering
4:20 - Azar
4:50 - koschey fight

Game Journal: The Witcher

2011-01-03T08:30:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 3 January, 2011

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 060a - The End Of Azar

0:00 - talents
3:10 - Yaevinn
6:40 - catacombs

Game Journal: The Witcher

2010-12-26T19:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 26 December, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 059e - Dissecting The Salamander

0:00 - De Wett
4:10 - to the manor

Witcher 059f - Dissecting The Salamander

0:00 - Rayla
1:50 - ascent

Witcher 059g - Dissecting The Salamander

0:00 - pulling sentries
3:20 - mutants

Game Journal: The Witcher

2010-12-18T23:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, 18 December, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 059c - Dissecting The Salamander

0:00 - Kalkstein
2:00 - wandering
4:30 - failed hospital quest

Witcher 059d - Dissecting The Salamander

0:00 - executioner's tower
2:30 - new armor
4:50 - back to swamp
7:10 - turn in and trek to old manor

Motion Control Prediction Revisited

2010-12-18T17:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, 18 December, 2010

Over a year ago I wrote a post on motion control going nowhere. I left myself a reminder to review those predictions.

Kinect (previously Natal)
"I'm guessing the best uses of Natal will be gimmicks, small things that make playing standard games just a little more physical."

I was wrong. There are no best uses of Natal for standard games. It's not in any standard games. Natal is a purely casual business.

That seems to be working out okay for Microsoft. After Black Friday they'd sold 2.5 million units. They spent half a billion in marketing, but if the sales keep up I suspect they'll break even. It just has nothing to do with me. But the same could be said of Facebook games, iPhone games and many other areas as gaming expands.

Move (a.k.a. the wand)
"The wand is good for aiming and manipulating objects in arm's reach. It'll be used for some shooter games and some puzzles in adventure games. It'll also be used in some strategy games, possibly to good effect, but I won't care because I don't like strategy games."

There are a couple shooters using the wand for shooting. But to my knowledge that's it. I liked the shooting in Metroid Prime 3, so I may someday enjoy PS3 Move shooting. But I think the overarching theme is that motion control is not being aimed (har har) at my demographic, by and large.

The End
Originally traditional gamers were the means to get Sony and Microsoft's proprietary internet content boxes into living rooms. But since Nintendo showed them another way, they're happy to try it.

In Microsoft's case, they launched it as what feels like a separate business which doesn't affect me one way or the other.

Sony, on the other hand, didn't have any exclusives worth a darn this holiday season. They may have actually hurt their core business by shifting resources to motion control.

Regardless, I think this post marks the end of my hopes that motion control would contribute significantly to experiences I care about.

Game Journal: The Witcher

2010-12-10T19:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Friday, 10 December, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 059b - Dissecting The Salamander

0:00 - racists
1:40 - back to town
3:30 - Jean-Pierre
7:00 - forge

Game Journal: The Witcher

2010-12-04T15:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, 4 December, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 059a - Dissecting The Salamander

0:00 - striga nonsense

Game Journal: The Witcher

2010-12-01T13:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Wednesday, 1 December, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 058a - Her Highness

0:00 - new sword
1:00 - towards the striga's crypt
3:50 - story time
8:00 - Velerad
9:00 - striga's crypt

Game Journal: The Witcher

2010-11-29T19:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 29 November, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 057h - Get Outta Town

0:00 - kill some wraiths
2:00 - kill some bruxa and Lilly
3:40 - turn in and reward choice

the font used is Bayern from typenow.net

Game Journal: The Witcher

2010-11-22T15:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 22 November, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 057g - Get Outta Town

Update: The old download version lost sound after twenty seconds or so. It should be fine now.

0:00 - ancient crypt
2:30 - to the cemetery proper
6:00 - Vesper
7:40 - huntsman
8:20 - back to the cemetery

Game Journal: The Witcher

2010-11-15T21:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 15 November, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 057f - Get Outta Town

0:00 - finding the refugee cave
1:50 - fight and money delivery
5:00 - finding the old mine
6:20 - exploring old mine

Game Journal: The Witcher

2010-11-09T21:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Tuesday, 9 November, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 057d - Get Outta Town

0:00 - swamp
1:10 - refugee cave
2:30 - swamp
4:00 - Raven's crypt

Witcher 057e - Get Outta Town

0:00 - Raven's crypt

Game Journal: The Witcher

2010-11-08T18:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 8 November, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 057c - Get Outta Town

0:00 - Jaques
6:00 - druid cave

Game Journal: The Witcher

2010-11-07T20:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 7 November, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 057b - Get Outta Town

0:00 - leave Kalkstein's
0:30 - fight through the barricade
6:10 - White Rayla
7:20 - into the swamp

Game Journal: The Witcher

2010-11-05T21:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Friday, 5 November, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 057a - Get Outta Town

0:00 - talents
3:20 - Scoia'tael choice recap
5:00 - to the barricade
9:10 - visit Kalkstein

Game Journal: The Witcher

2010-10-29T23:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Friday, 29 October, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 056f - Chapter Five Begins

0:00 - Order fight
1:30 - Shani
3:30 - Zoltan
4:50 - Order fight 2
9:00 - ~Toruviel~

Game Journal: The Witcher

2010-10-27T15:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Wednesday, 27 October, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 056e - Chapter Five Begins

0:00 - Kalkstein
3:10 - checking with the blacksmith
6:10 - a bit of wandering
8:10 - Shani

Game Journal: The Witcher

2010-10-22T19:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Friday, 22 October, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 056d - Chapter Five Begins

0:00 - rescue refugees
7:40 - Shani
8:10 - chasing the striga

Game Journal: The Witcher

2010-10-18T21:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 18 October, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 056c - Chapter Five Begins

0:00 - Foltest
5:40 - Antoinette
7:50 - Triss
8:30 - Old Vizima
10:10 - Zoltan

Game Journal: The Witcher

2010-10-17T14:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 17 October, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 056b - Chapter Five Begins

0:00 - Foltest
3:10 - de Wett
5:30 - Merigold
7:50 - Velerad

Game Journal: The Witcher

2010-10-15T19:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Friday, 15 October, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 056a - Chapter Five Begins

0:00 - Dandelion
2:10 - Vincent
3:40 - Carmen
4:40 - Radovid
6:00 - Zoltan
8:10 - intro to Old Vizima

Game Journal: The Witcher

2010-10-14T18:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Thursday, 14 October, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 055e - Bizarro Chapter Three

0:00 - curing Vincent
4:10 - attacking Salamandra

Witcher 055f - Bizarro Chapter Three

0:00 - attacking Salamandra
1:10 - Azar
2:50 - consequence animation
4:20 - Professor (mostly)
6:00 - wrap up

Game Journal: The Witcher

2010-10-12T07:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Tuesday, 12 October, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 055d - Bizarro Chapter Three

0:00 - swamp fight
2:20 - forbidden Vizima
3:00 - curing the werewolf

Game Journal: The Witcher

2010-10-11T06:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 11 October, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 055c - Bizarro Chapter Three

0:00 - Siegfried
0:30 - infiltrating Salamandra drug lab
6:30 - freeing villagers / setting up swamp fight

Game Journal: The Witcher

2010-10-07T10:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Thursday, 07 October, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 055b - Bizarro Chapter Three

0:00 - Scoia'tael update
0:40 - parenting
1:50 - bank robbery
8:40 - Thaler stand off

Game Journal: The Witcher

2010-10-05T02:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Tuesday, 5 October, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 055a - Bizarro Chapter Three

0:00 - Siegfried
2:20 - Alvin sent to Triss
5:10 - night out with the boys

Game Journal: The Witcher

2010-09-30T20:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Thursday, 30 September, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 054a - Vacation's Over

0:00 - Toruviel
1:00 - Dandelion
6:00 - Rayla
7:20 - Dandelion