New album and new track

I am officially making it official. I am producing a new album with a working title of "Glamtastic". The plan is to make a bunch of hot pink glam tracks infused with LazerBlade synth work. What is probably going to be the main track of the album was just released today.


This track is the first of mine in years to be produced with FL Studio. I really could have made this exactly as it is with LMMS, but with FL Studio is was much easier and quicker.

Introvert Self Abuse

While not all of my readers may view this space as a platform for psychology theories and discussion, I believe that in a way it is. I do primarily write about games and music here, but I feel that both of those media - games especially - are bound very closely to psychology. So I am officially opening the content on this blog up to some of my musings about the human mind and various behaviors I have either come across or studied. Today, the topic is a theory of mine about introverts who engage in self abuse through extroverted behavior.

Aside: I shouldn't have to have the disclaimer that this is just speculation for the interesting thought of it. There is probably merit to what is written here, but I have not done enough research and experimentation to back these ideas up as guaranteed reality.

Cognitive Observation #31

Happy first Cognitive Observation in awhile! I have ideas for at least a few other comics, so if I don't have article content for Tuesdays you can enjoy those.

Cognitive Observation #26

Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Story and Choice

There is a lot to say about this game. It's so full of good content, yet flawed in enough places to rag on it a bit. This might stretch out over 2-4 posts. What can I say? There hasn't been a good Cyberpunk game in awhile.

I'm going to jump into the story of this game first. One choice I loved, was when they had about half of the intro be in gameplay. Of course, I hated the first-person invisible train track bit, but it didn't last long. Anyway, you play Adam Jenson who works as security chief at Sarif Industries. Megan Reed (your wife? Girlfriend? I dunno.) works at Sarif as well, developing new human augmentation technology and planning on presenting about it at a soon to occur UN meeting.

The security system goes off, and Sarif(your boss) sends you down to the location of the breach to see what's going on. You see a bunch of heavily augmented mercenary dudes killing all the scientist and destroying all the research. You look for Megan, who is in that very section of the building, and probably in danger. Then some big mercenary dude shows up, punches a hole in your stomach, throws you through a wall, chokes you half to death, and then shoots you in the face.

The evil mercenary dudes leave you for dead. Of course, in game intros where the player gets shot in the face, it's never fatal. Sarif pushes what's left of your body to the limit, installing as many of the most advanced cyebrnetic augmentations as possible. After a six month recovery period, you come back to work. And so begins an extremely cyberpunk story where you start by setting off looking for answers about this random massacre where Megan and all her fellow scientists were burned beyond recognition along with their research.

As far as introductions go, this games is not the most creative. However, it does an excellent job of giving the context, setting the atmosphere, and actually immersing the player. The best touch was when you went through the labs looking for Megan before you got augmented. In FPS games, you're probably used to being a super-soldier who can jump 2 meters high and take several bullets before you have to recharge your health. In the beginning of this game however, you play a normal, un-augmented person who is weak compared to the augmented mercs you're up against. This is in contrast to you once you've been augmented. You experience the transformation Adam goes through first hand.

I have to talk about the choice and the endings. First off, your choices have no effect on the plot of the game until the very end. When I got to the end, I had 4 buttons to push, each of which represented a different choice. This ruined everything for me. I knew I was essentially just selecting from 4 different ending cutscenes, so I chose each one and watched each ending. This is NOT how player choice should work. This is worsened by the fact that the only selection that didn't paint you as a liar or someone who gives a slant on the truth painted you as mentally unstable.

On the gameplay choices side however, this game is almost stainless. Almost. We've probably all heard reviewers raging on this game for the mandatory boss fights, so I won't spend your time criticizing something which has already been criticized by everybody else. It was a stupid, bad decision. All the other choices work pretty solidly though. The game does an excellent job holding up a number of different ways to handle each situation, each one having different consequences and outcomes. The game will be worth playing through multiple times for most, just because of all the different ways things can be done.

Another good aspect of the game's story is non-vilification of the player. Many games will impose a set of morals on you, judging your choices as either good or evil. In this game however, the moral dilemma is spun to match your perspective.

That's another thing. When I started this game, I was of the opinion that there was no dilemma. This game convinced me otherwise, although leaving my perspective the same. I'm personally pro human augmentation and enhancements. IRL.

The story really isn't air tight, it's just a few levels above what we've come to expect. I think the story here is a step in the right direction. I would definitely like to see more games with stories like these.

Wow. I spent this entire post just talking a little bit about the story. This serves to exemplify how much there is to say about this game. Assuming the reason I go on isn't just that I'm obsessed with Cyberpunk.

    --LazerBlade

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.

Cognitive Observation #20

Yay! 20 Cognitive Observations! Don't ask what awful thing inspired this comic.

Cognitive Observation #9

This is borderline breaking my rule about not discussing politics/religion here on this blog, but I figure this is funny enough for those of you knowledgeable about this fiasco to make up for it.

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

Videogame characters

Most of you are probably used to me rambling on about the interesting facets of game programming and philosophy. However, being a one man show encompasses a good deal more, and this time I'm going to talk a bit about story and characters in games.

Often times, games suffer from something not too different from programmer art. This something is what I call programmer story. I will be honest, someone who can specialize well enough in programming to make an entire game on their own, probably won't be as good at story writing as a specialist in that area. However, we aren't trying to do perfect stories, we just want good stories in a fairly reasonable amount of time. Coming up with a good story is a complex task, and a rather daunting one at that. I'm just sticking to characters for now.

Some say you should NEVER ever EVER reveal the main character's personality. That way the player can then connect with them better by coming up with their own. Then you have just as many people saying that you absolutely MUST give some background and expound a little on the protagonist's character. If you want my perspective on it, both of these positions are equally viable. You can do it either way and make not only a successful game, but a good game.

As a rule, you should pick your race, gender, age, birthplace, and everything else that isn't part of the personality, very carefully. It's a bad idea to say "We better make this character African so that people won't rap on us for being racist." But at the same time, it's a bad idea to say "What? Another protagonist? Just grab another one of those dudes with blonde spiky hair and a five o'clock shadow." One thing I hate about creating characters for your story is that any game designer will feel like they're only trying to line up with the reviewers ideas of what's fair and what's boring. In my opinion, you should ONLY pick these things because it helps you better express the character's personality. Granted, reviewers will probably eat you alive for not having the perfect white-black-man-woman ratio of characters in your game, but who cares anyway?

That said, I think it's best to work out the characters personality and then choose things like race to explain or express that personality. So first get your personality all fleshed out. Give every character some flaws, some places where they aren't sure what they think, that kind of thing. Once you have that down, you can start picking things like gender. Then you can move on to choosing experiences that shaped these characters in the past. If they don't trust anyone, throw in some betrayal or have them grow up on the street or something.

Now that you have a character that has personality, past experiences, and natural character flaws, don't go screwing it up by having them do or act in a way they wouldn't. Don't have somebody with a trust-no-one attitude decide to trust the protagonist. And don't EVEN THINK about making up some excuse like "You have no choice," or "I know you well enough," or "You're the protagonist so you're just the kind of person that everybody trusts." You shouldn't have to explain your characters personalities, they should be manifested in their actions. So have your characters stick to their personalities.

This article is starting to run a little long, so I'll try to finish up by saying that not every character in your game needs a personality. The random person who rides by in a skateboard doesn't need all that work. You must decide for yourself how deep you need to make each character. Some characters just need to show up and do their thing, others need to communicate with the player.


       --LazerBlade

What makes a hacker's paradise?

I must admit that I really enjoyed the last couple weeks or so. I started out working on Infiltrator(more on that in a later post.) I added in some basic enemy structure, and went about trying to implement spawn/die system. Everything went perfectly, before the evil monsters of pointers in C++ arose from the pits. I couldn't get the application to stop crashing on me. I worked late into the night drinking more and more coffee.

I was pretty much out of ideas. I needed a break, a new look at the code and problem would probably help. I decided to do a little 3d modelling for the movie I'm working on:

That got boring after awhile, so I did some kung-fu, and then some music. Then I played around a bit with my new Linux Mint system, and decided to burn down the house of the person who decided we didn't need ~/.bashrc anymore.

And you're asking, what makes a hacker's paradise? I'm telling you. It's a world full of fun and interesting little(and big) problems to play around with. Oh, that and coffee and pizza. That's why we techno-geeks came to planet Earth, we didn't have coffee and pizza on our home planet. There has been no shortage of fun stuff to do for me, and that's what made things well... fun.


          --LazerBlade

Posting schedule

I've been holding this blog together with no real schedule or discipline. I recently decided to change that. From now on, I'll be posting probably three days a week, on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. I may have to dig a little sometimes to come up with content for you, but I'll settle into it.

One thing I'll probably be doing is having more reviews, programming and tutorials, and less philosophy and humor. I know some of you like philosophy, so don't worry as it's not going away completely by any stretch of the imagination.

As always, leave comments telling me what you want me to write about. Maybe a there's game you'd like me to review, or some nifty new programming language you want me to talk about, or maybe you just want me to quit jabbering and work on my 3D game projects. Whatever the case, you can let me know with comments.

        --LazerBlade

How do you take your coffee?

Foreward: If you get these jokes, good for you. If you don't get these jokes, good for you anyway because you're lucky. Note that you can only enjoy this article fully if you happen to be a trekkie.


Not Foreward:

Ask twenty people and you will probably get at least ten different answers. Well, twenty coffee drinkers anyway. Some only drink black coffee, others can only stand it with amounts of creamer that almost make me sick. Some take one lump of sugar, others two, some take only cream. Even after all that, you have espresso, cappuccino, latte, and all kinds of other variations which make coffee available to more people.

As a geek, I myself drink coffee at times. I'm highly irregular in every way however, and it's hard to put my finger on any habits. I've narrowed it down to mood and activities. Duh, staying up late working on a project equals drinking coffee. However, sometimes I drink it for the heck of it, sometimes I can't get enough of it, sometimes I just like the flavor at the moment, etc.

How I take my coffee is a can of worms in of itself. I've narrowed it down to mood. If I wish I had more time in my schedule, I often find myself diluting it with things like cream or milk, sometimes to extreme amounts. If I'm frustrated, I often find myself brewing a *very* strong pot and drinking it black. Then again I sometimes add extra sugar for the extra energy, or sometimes just mindlessly dump whatever is in front of me in the cup on the way back to my computer.

You may find it interesting that a person with my heredity would be influenced by things like frustration or wist-fullness. For those of you who don't know, I'm half Vulcan, about a quarter Klingon, and then another quarter Italian. It's hard to think such of a half-Vulcan, but remember what happens when you mix Vulcan and Klingon blood, let alone get Italian mixed in there.

Anyway, I tend to channel my feelings into things like how I take my coffee, so there's no need for worry about my 11 year mating cycle causing me to seek a warriors honorable revenge of my woman by putting the hit on you. Yea, mixing those together can create some interesting situations. ;)

I guess this is what happens when I try to write a whole article on coffee with too much of it in my system.

*SIP*

        --LazerBlade