Infiltrator E46 - Video Playback

Those of you who checked out my Infiltrator pre-alpha demo video awhile back probably know that I had a spiffy animated background with circuit patterns on the main menu. Those of you who didn't: I had a spiffy animated background with-you get the point. I bet you guys didn't know that I don't have that anymore, did you? I'm hoping to get it back at some point, but the problems that led to its removal are deep and annoying.

Let's talk about them!

Mandatory Defeat

Today I want to discuss- mainly by analysis of examples -a videogame story concept, the closest TVTrope article of which I could find calls Hopeless Boss Fight. It actually applies to any battle in any genre that needs the player to be defeated for the purposes of the story, be it in gameplay or in a cutscene. This tool could obviously be used to the great benefit or great detriment of a story. We will therefore be looking at a good and bad example from the games Megaman X and awful ol' Mass Effect 3.

And yes, this article will obviously be laden with spoilers from all of those games. Also, I feel like I need to warn you that this page conatians TVTropes links, which have been shown to lead to the eating up of countless hours of time when clicked. Unless you aren't familiar with the tropes mentioned, click at your own risk.

RPG Classes and Encounters

When this originally came up I wasn't provoked enough to write about it. There was one particular encounter early in the first Mass Effect Game that I had a load of trouble with. At the time I figured that I just hadn't built up my character enough, had put my XP into the wrong skills, chose to bring the wrong squad with me, or was just plain new enough to the game to have difficulty with something easy. I eventually learned that almost every Mass Effect player who chose the character class that I did died more times than they bothered to count at this encounter, not for any fault of their own, but because this encounter was almost perfectly tailored to a different class.

Backtracking and Persistent Worlds

There are some things that are love or hate for gamers. Half of the gamers really love to go back through an old area of a game and pick up the things they missed, refill their health with a medkit  they left just in case, or hunt for secrets that they previously could not access. On the other hand, many simply cannot stand the way it can break flow or impede on the time they want to be shooting things. While this example uses action games, the idea of backtracking applies to many genres and is looked upon similarly in most of them.

Mass Effect 3 - Extended Cut

Awhile back when I did a from-the-hip-by-the-seat-of-my-pants review of Mass Effect 3, I spent an entire paragraph explaining how I wasn't going to talk about the ending. There is plenty of hate for it and some pretty awesome critiques of it that I can't touch. Then, along comes the extended cut. There is also a lot of good writing about the extended cut, but I have a few reasons to want to write about it myself. Before I get into those reasons(and before you hit the Read More button and blind yourself) I would like to warn you that the remainder of this post will obviously contain spoilers for the entire Mass Effect series and universe.

Artistic Workflow vs. Technical Fidelity

I've had thoughts about this topic for awhile and just kind of kept them to myself. Now it's starting to flare up in more and more places, so I would like to get behind the increasing number of people saying that pushing new game technology should now be in the direction of improving the artistic workflow rather than the game fidelity. I believe that this should be applied to every aspect of creating the complex piece of art that is a game, but for now I am going to stick to the visual and level creation side of things for simplicity. It also provides a perfect example and happens to be the direction that most tech R&D has been pushing for higher fidelity rather than better artistic flow.

Mass Effect 3 - Insert Vivid and Clever Simile About Cover Based Shooting here

After gabbing on about the story for an entire article, it's time to talk gameplay. The action gameplay specifically, as I'm saving the RPG like systems and other stuff for later articles.

The original Mass Effect had a cover system that was fiddly and awkward, but still held up well enough. The cover system in Mass Effect 2 was better, but still broken. So the third, final, and theoretically ultimate Mass Effect game should build on the knowledge gathered from the last two games and create an solid, effective cover system right? WRONG! Mass Effect 3 has the worst cover system of all three games.

Mass Effect 3 - The Dive In - Story

A little while ago I temporarily emerged from my sock drawer to play some mainstream AAA titles. The last part of this streak was all three games in the Mass Effect series. I actually timed things pretty well so that I ended up finishing ME2 just in time for the release of the third game which I also immediately played through. I thought about discussing it right away before all the hype and fan rage/defence settled down(not that it hasn't,) but that's not my style anyway. I'm not here to give consumer advice, and I'm not here to give everybody my two cents on the ending. I'm here to talk about interesting game design concepts and manifestations in games, and today I feel like Mass Effect 3.

Cognitive Observation #26

SOPA & PIPA

Blacking out(all posts reverted to drafts) today.

Crysis 2 review part 2 will be up tomorrow(with the rest of the posts) if things go smoothly.

Crysis

Odd as it may seem, I've only recently picked up Crysis. I won't bother making excuses, but I will give you a review. Note that I've spent probably only around ten hours on this thing so far. A plus here is that there are less spoilers I could reveal even if I wanted to. So let us begin...

Crysis is a sci-fi FPS adventure game developed by CryTek and released in 2007. The official "trial by fire" for gaming rigs, Crysis has made a significant name for itself. Unusual for a game 4 years old, it still pushes the limits of modern PC's at the highest detail. Naturally, it was still no match for my uber-rig, but it did put up a fight.

Touted elements include story, open-ended objectives, interesting mechanics, spiffy environments, and pretty pictures. Don't bork me for spending the rest of this review explaining how it kind of does these things, but halfheartedly.

Crysis at it's core is a cliche action FPS with the usual re-charging health and hiding behind things. I'm thankful that it's not the usual cover-based fare, but you had better hide behind things yourself if you expect to survive. It feels like they started out with a shooter where the player could use superpowers, and then decided to strap a bunch of other things on.

Story goes that some random island which archaeologists are excavating is taken over by Koreans. The transmissions from the island go silent, so you and a bunch of other dudes wearing funky "nanosuits"  drop onto the island in the middle of the night. These nanosuits bestow superpowers on whomever happens to be wearing them at the time. You get separated during the drop, and get pretty quickly picked off until there's only half of you left. The story is actually interesting and convincing, but doesn't really make up a big part of the game. In places you can feel that it's just an excuse for you to do more shooting.

The gameplay itself is pretty solid. There were some awesome moments. Allow me to transcribe my thoughts during one:

"The signal says the hostage is in this building. Better switch to strength mode and jump up on top of it. Hack! The dude on top of the building is firing a machine gun at me! Armor mode to absorb the bullets. Speed mode as soon as I hit the ground so that I can run behind a corner. I know, I can switch to cloak mode and sneak up behind him. Then I can smack him in the face with the chicken I've been carrying around."

Unfortunately, these are spread out around "Go kill 400 dudes, it's going to be impossible if you want to sneak by, because that wasn't the way the game designers meant it" moments. It does go between a shooter and a stealth game pretty smoothly, although I would have preferred more choice in when you use stealth and when you don't.

I'm glad that the cutscenes are in first person. It kind of reminds me of Half Life. A lot of things about the game remind me of Half Life I guess. It's still its own thing though, which I also like.

The island setting is interesting, and I haven't got bored of it yet because the day/night cycle keeps changing the aesthetic. I'm sure the setting eventually changes, and it had better. I think this island setting will get boring sooner or later.

While this game has creative elements in many places, the weapons are all cliche. You get usual mixes of sniper rifles, machine guns, shotguns, grenades, and rocket launchers. Not to mention that the game still does that thing I hate where you can only carry a few weapons with you. I know the argument here is that it's more realistic, but if I wanted a realistic experience I would just stay in real life.


I'd love to write more about this game at some point, but I hope this review can give you a good peak. The verdict for me is that it's a game with many good elements, but a lack of depth and lack of concentration on any of the good elements takes away from the experience. I guess that the main problem here is that there really isn't that much to the game apart from it's cliche first person shooting.


Final Score: 7.5
(why this score?)

       --LazerBlade

Cover based shooting

"Oh look, LazerBlade is coming out one last time to cover a pop buzzword before heaving his final breath and turning to the dark side of only doing music." If you have just said this, you may get in line at my vaporizer ray, near the volcano entrance. Otherwise, you can except the fact that I still do game design.

So, let's start flapping gums about cover based shooting. I'm not sure where this mechanic originated, but it was certainly popularized by games like Mass Effect and Time Crisis. In the case of Time Crisis, cover based shooting added more depth than the usual rail shooter perpetrated by the novelty value of a light-gun.

As time went on, PC and console games began playing with this mechanism as well. It's definitely an interesting idea, and it's a good thing that some games like Mass Effect 2 have taken the time to expound upon it. However, I think that one or two games are enough. Cover based shooting is really interesting, for about 30 minutes. After that, it becomes a boring ritual.

Step 1:  Wait for enemies to stop shooting.
Step 2:  Pop up and shoot at enemies until they start shooting.
Step 3:  Hide again.
Step 4:  Go back to step 1.

This is actually kind of interesting. But I find more depth, challenge and enjoyment in the old school, unrealistic, free-roaming, run n' gun game.

This problem is worsened by many games, because your health recharges at a rate prone to boredom. Mixing this with cover based shooting is going to make your job as a game designer quite difficult. Oh wait, I'm assuming your job is to make a fun game. I guess this was what you had in mind:

Step 1:  Shoot enemies until you're almost dead.
Step 2:  Hide for a few seconds until your health recharges to max.
Step 3:  Go back to step 1.

Now don't misinterpret me. I actually liked Mass Effect 2 from a game design perspective. It was a game that managed to work cover based shooting in with recharging health with a minimal amount of boredom. I still think it could have been better though.

Take this into mind. If you want player to take advantage of cover, why not just add in some chest high walls and a crouching button? This may seem like a bad idea since everyone is shunning FPS games, but what's wrong with it really? The only advantage of slowing the player down to the speed of a snail with a broken leg, and then taking away his crouching and jumping abilities, is that you as a level designer and programmer don't have half as much to worry about the player doing, since the player can't do half as much.

        --LazerBlade

Comic #5

Clicky...

It's always annoyed the hack out of me that certain people I talk to always brag about how much they paid for something. It's like they think it means they got a really high quality product, when in reality they often just got swindled.


        --LazerBlade

Game Review: "Invaders: Corruption"

Today I review this game:

I was planning on talking about the awesome GridWars game, and then ranting on Microsoft-erm "Bizarre creations" for having it taken down. Unfortunately I remembered my intention to review a game I truly hate. Plus I couldn't get it running on Linux again. Which stank.

So instead, you all get to watch me ranting about something else. In this case, I switched out for a different arena shooter, Invaders Corruption. And while I don't really "hate" this game, you can safely assume this review isn't going to be positive.

Invaders Corruption is an overhead 2D arena shooter made by Manuel van Dyck. The thesis of the game is that enemies, arena's, the player, and even gameplay can be generated in a procedural manner based on a core-seed. This hands us a really interesting game, with pretty visuals, which ultimately ends up being somewhat annoying.

Maybe I've been spoiled by really good arena shooters like GridWars, but this game seems to prove that there are no inherently good genre's. You see, this genre usually has a huge edge. The reason is that the learning curve is about 15 minutes, you can enjoy a game in 10 minutes a day, and you can also go all out and spend hours and hours before reaching mastery. This game lacks this crucial element.

Now if so much is really generated, how can I claim this game to have so little depth? The reason is that while most of the graphics are procedural, VERY little of the gameplay will change. This is even true when plugging in all kinds of core-seeds.

Most arena shooters are 1-hit-1-kill games. You get bombs to help protect you, a few extra lives to help you last longer, and enemies are about the size of your ship. This game is 1-hit-1-kill, but you get only 1 life, and start with one bomb. Your ship is almost always far too big compared to the enemies, requiring you to try core-seed after core-seed to get close to decent proportions. This is worsened by the fact that your ship usually has too much inertia, as well as wall bounce.

Because of these things, I very seldom die because I couldn't handle it. I almost always die because I didn't see that tiny enemy, or my ship bounced off a wall too hard, or getting the ship to go where I want it doesn't always work. Then the over-punishment which comes from having only 1 life sets in.


So yes, this is a popular game. While this game isn't that fun to play, especially for very long, it is pretty interesting. I recommend you give it a try, regardless of your tastes. It's free, and runs in WINE so you have no excuse.

Final score: 6
(why this score?)


        --LazerBlade

Infiltrator - Season 2, final part

Believe it or not, I'm not posting this session because I got anything done on Infiltrator. Specifically, I'm posting because I didn't get anything done. You see, as my school continues to get more intense, it gets harder and harder to find time for things like programming or my webshow. What it comes down to is this, I don't see myself having time to work on Infiltrator right now, much less in the near future. Thus, I unfortunately have to put it on hold until I can empty some of my time bucket. Whenever that is, I will start back up with season 3.

I know my projects have been what covered most of the content output, so I might end up doing more reviews or something. If worst comes to worse, I might have to cut back the number of weekly posts as well. I'm hoping I won't have to, and I'm also hoping I can get some time freed up to get back to normal sooner rather than later, but one can never tell what the future will bring.

        -LazerBlade

School vs LazerBlade

School won this round.

School has really been eating up almost all my time. I didn't even have time to write this out until later in the day, and this day is almost over. I should theoretically still be able to have Advanced LMMS ready by Saturday, but I don't have time to write about something entertaining right now. Sorry about the lack of content today.  :(


        --LazerBlade

The first-person shooter

A genre that once ruled the industry is being attacked non-stop by reviewers and gamers alike, although still enjoyed my many gamers out there. People look around, and they see that they've been playing FPS games for more than fifteen years. Gamers want something more than the same old "buff dude goes around blowing supposedly scary things up in a gory way in first-person with the same guns" kind of game. This can often lead to the rushed conclusion that the FPS as a genre is either dying, or already dead.

For one thing, no matter what new directions games take, people are still going to like the concentrated doses of immersing fast paced action and competition that is hard to find elsewhere. So unless an alternative is provided, FPS games will probably never die. It is true though, that FPS games are starting to make up less and less of the average gamer's diet. I myself have a relatively small collection of games, mostly preferring only games that I think stand out somehow. I also usually only play through games one time, and those are only the best games. If I think a game is terrible, I don't usually finish it.  On track, what games do you spend most of your gaming time on? You probably play some game like WoW that eats up most of it, then you have filler for new SP games that come out, and then finish it off with some kind of deathmatch game like quake.

So while FPS games don't dominate your diet, you still have them. Provided, this is a huge, exaggerated, overgeneralized blanket statement stereotype, but as a designer this is probably what a lot of your audience will look like.

Does this mean that the first-person perspective is doomed to either slowly die out or become just those deathmatch games you play to kill time? Probably not. The advantage of the first-person perspective is that it immerses the player and helps to merge their personality with the protagonist's personality. This is very useful, and is not only limited to shooters. However, I think the best game probably has some action in it somewhere.

I think that game designers shouldn't be afraid to use the first-person perspective. Game reviewers usually don't really care all that much about that, it's just what most people do with it. Granted, the best game designer doesn't fear reviewers. Ideally, you should be able to create whatever game you think your audience will enjoy, and not fear what the reviewers will do to you for it. But you have to get your money somewhere, plus the reviewers often times have a pretty good idea of what your audience will like.


          --LazerBlade

Infiltrator - Season 2, Part 4:

This session has been one of the most annoying and yet most rewarding yet. Let's just hop in with some of my favorite features:

You may not be able to tell without checking twice, but that's actually an old school enemy pile-up. I finally initiated the base enemy framework as well as simple enemy objects for each type. I even have nifty little spawn and kill functions, and let the level spawn enemies wherever it wants. Granted, all it does is load the proper mesh, turn it into a rigid body, and fling it at the wall, but at least it's a start.

Development of this certainly did not go without incident. Walk up to a programmer and say the word "pointer," then say "void pointer," then say "deleted pointer to a pointer to another void pointer being referenced again in some obscure piece of code." If they aren't laying on the floor crying at this point, they haven't been doing enough programming.

Now if you are a programmer, you can probably understand some of the frustration introduced here. To make things short, I needed to be deleting a pointer but it was crashing every time I did. Debugging showed me that the program was actually crashing after the function I was deleting the pointer in had ended. I moved the deletion to a different function and the problem went away. To this day I don't know what the problem was, and I can't figure it out. Programmers can also relate to the amazing annoyance of a problem you solved and don't know why.

Anyway, once I finally got the enemy structure intact, I set about doing some level parsing. I parse levels by first using the config file variable loader to read the number and type of enemies that will appear in the level. I use this information to create enemy arrays big enough to hold all the enemies. Then I go on to read those enemies one at a time and spawn them at the indicated location and heading.

The file format isn't the most user friendly or readable by humans, but it shouldn't have to be anyway. I'll theoretically build a level editor once I get the level object setup properly, so I should only have to write a few of the files by hand. Only the really hardcore modder's will be looking at the format, and they'll be used to handling convoluted files of garbage, so they might be a little forgiving. ;)

Note, that I'm not finished setting up this level parsing thingy yet, as I'm still playing around with it.

I need to start on the real enemy coding. I need the enemies to be more than inanimate pieces of metal laying around. It will take some serious work to work out AI, enemy firing, and things of that nature. Even after that, I need to setup things like doors, keys, powerups, other weapons for the player, and more.

This session took longer than previous ones, punching in at 9 hours. That leaves me at 16 hours total. We'll see how long my optimism lasts. ;)

        --LazerBlade

Blender and video editing

I don't know where Blender 2.49b is when it comes to video editing, but I'm not here to talk about that. I'm here to talk about video editing in Blender 2.5. I was originally planning on posting a new LMMS tutorial, but that didn't work out. It did work out for me to spend more than two hours trying to do my video editing in Blender though.

I was trying to add some overlays during certain parts of the video. That really should be no big deal, I mean there are tons video editors I've done this sort of thing with, and probably plenty editors that I haven't tried. You'd think I'd be able to add a couple overlays in no time at all.

That's what I thought, but I very quickly became aware of several little quirks and flaws in the system. Firstly, seeking is totally broken. I can play the movie and make note of what was going on during frame X, and then stop the movie. But then if I jump to frame X, it will sometimes be somewhere completely different. A certain frame very seldom remains the same when you jump to a different part or play the movie again. On top of that, it seems to randomly cut off the beginning and ending as well.

I learned that going back to frame 1 and pushing the "Refresh Sequencer" button will occasionally snap things back to normal, but it breaks again the moment you change from frame one regardless of how you do it. This is especially a problem when it comes to exporting the movie file, as this problem also happens when outputting frames to the file.

I spent quite awhile trying to get it to work properly, as my overlays stayed in their place. It was just that they started at frame X, and what was going on during frame X in the movie file I'd imported was never the same. I eventually gave up. I may never try Blender for video editing again. Then I guess I might come back later and give it another chance. But for the moment, I'm still using good, old, and a bit to minimal Pitivi which comes with Ubuntu.


        --LazerBlade

The art of the vacuum

"What is this obviously Gimped(like the image editor) picture doing on my screen?" "That's the memory mnemonic that helps you remember and helps me prove my point." "I don't like it." "Yes, but you will remember that you didn't like it, and that will help you remember the rest of the post." "Or it will help me remember me tying your arms in a square knot."


-- The Mcdursy brothers



You might be wondering, what place does a vacuum cleaner have in the lair of a techno-geek? We don't spill food, and when we do we always have our minions lick it up off the titanium floor one crumb at a time. Yet why do we still find them in almost every lair? Why should the modern techno-geek of today consider having one?

The answer is simple, computers NEED vacuumed. Seriously, if you want to keep your machine around, you should vacuum it regularly. It will vary for different machines and different climates, but I find once a month is usually pretty safe. Vacuuming is something that can only be trusted to the highest minions, and sometimes can only be done by the geek itself.

You may not believe me, or you may think you haven't the time. I was once of a similar mindset, and have recently come to greatly appreciate my decision to vacuum regularly. Why this recent burst of pride and appreciation?

You guessed it, another tech support trap. Well, this time it wasn't really a trap, more of a likes to have friends and money(or money anyway,) so it was only a small step away.

A very small step.

So anyway, I get a call from one of my non-geek connections saying they have malware. Yea that figures, non-geek kinda goes with that. I accept the job, and have them drop off the computer. I didn't have time to look at it right away, so I just stuck it in my task stack near the top.

It ended up sitting in my lair for almost a week before I got to it. Yea, the thing was filled with malware, running slower than a snail carrying an anvil, and seemed to be lower on RAM than it should have been. So I do a little bit of malware hunting, which is really hard since the thing is apparently part of some kind of botnet based on how it prevents you from using it while still using up so many resources.

I decide to open it up and vacuum it out, knowing non-geeks don't do that very often. I also had to put the drive in a different machine and run anti-malware scans from an external system. So I pop the thing open. What I saw made me sorry I hadn't bought that digital camera I had my eye one. The thing was basically a huge roach nest. This was annoying on a number of levels. For example, that machine had just sat in my lair(which now has roaches) for almost a week.

Anyway, it took me two hours to get the mess cleaned up. They'll probably be finding stuff left over from that incident jammed into tiny little crevices I couldn't vacuum or didn't think to. Even after that, I found that there was a thick layer of dirt encrusted on top of the CPU's heatsink which was behind a permanently attached fan. If you turn the machine off and open it up, you can feel the heat by holding your hand a few inches away, and you will burn yourself if you touch. That didn't come off easy either.

Yet all of this could have been avoided if they had simply taken it upon themselves to vacuum their machine out every once in awhile. Even non-geeks, it's very simple. Just open the case and clean out any dust(or bugs) you see.

So if you haven't opened your case in awhile, you might consider checking for bug infestations and cleaning the dust out.

Oh, and for those of you who haven't witnessed me ranting previously, you just did.


        --LazerBlade