Resetting VMWare Fusion

Published on September 30, 2008 in Hacks. 0 Comments

Long story short, I wiped my XP partition on my MBP and installed Vista. Part of it was because I had created the partition too small to be able to play any games on the Windows side at my leisure, part of it was because I’ve got a friend at Microsoft who says Vista SP1 is much more of a complete product than what everyone seems to be complaining about.

Since I had jumped for a copy of Ultimate way back when, but became too apprehensive when all the reviews started rolling out, I finally installed the beast, and have had it running since.

Only problem was, VMWare Fusion wasn’t booting it because it still had remembered that my Boot Camp was originally Windows XP. Here’s a quick fix:

Turn off VMWare Fusion
Delete /Users/<your username>/Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion/Virtual Disks/Boot Camp/%2Fdev%2Fdisk0/Boot Camp partition.vmwarevm
Restart VMWare Fusion
Boot your Windows Partition

Enjoy!

Quality, or Lack Thereof

Published on September 27, 2008 in Games and Personal. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

One thing that has continually frustrated me time and time again has been the output of design studios, game manufacturers within the past decade. There has been a steady decline of quality from all outlets, as games are pushed further, deadlines are cut, and developers (both hardware and software) are pushed to the brink of their respective physical, mental, and emotional limits. With a myriad of issues surfacing more and more each day, those limits are either beginning to be realized by consumers, and ignored by the offending companies.

From a hardware standpoint, there has been a massive speculation about Microsoft’s latest console, the Xbox 360. With varying reports saying that their latest console showing anywhere from 16% upwards to almost a 60% failure rate. When the Wii launched, it’s update service was bricking a small number of consoles. There were a few recalls/fixes for some major game accessories as well – Nintendo sent out a batch of straps and wiimote sleeves for added protection, and Rock Band’s guitars were suffering from issues with the whammy bar. I’m sure I’m missing a few on this list, and I am only going back a few years in terms of hardware issues.

I guess I should give some slack to the issues that have spawned up in the manufacturing process, as there will always be a small failure rate for any mass produced product. Bad CDs will be made, and defective consoles will get out there, and it will normally be a small majority (with the exception of the widespread issues with the 360) who have the bad luck and inconvenience to deal with the problem, and get a replacement.

However, I’m not so quick to hold my tongue on software releases, as there is a bit more involvement of putting together the game from start to finish, then declaring a product gold, and sending it out for mass duplication. From conception to gold, it’s all input: the development process, the investors, the studio, and your distributors.

For instance, I searched Kotaku for “bugs”, and “issues”, and I came up with a few recent games with some slightly annoying to fairly serious issues:

GTA IV (PS3)- Crashing/Freezing and multiplayer issues

Castle Crashers – Online play issues causing players to lose their entire save files

Bully: Scholarship Edition (360 Port) – Freezing Issues

Guitar Hero III (Wii) – Mono sound in a music game

The list goes (The Orange Box (PS3), Saints Row, Rainbow Six Vegas, Battlefield 2), and I only went back a few pages for each search to get a broad idea of what’s come up recently. Some of these issues are near unforgivable, so glaring that it would seem that any competitent programmer/tester should have been able to see the issue from a mile away, and have made note of it before this was released to the masses. When you look back, how many consoles had recalls, or huge defects, or games went out so buggy that they were unplayable? While it wasn’t something that I noted when I was that young, it seems like the rate of failure and growing issues post-release seems to be coalescing at an alarming speed.

Before I piss off any game studio employee that may be scouting this blog to check me out for employment, I don’t outright question the quality of the employees that are creating and testing these products. In one hand, the problem lies on the gaming community. Gaming as a socially accepted hobby has become much more mainstream than it was twenty years ago. The competition between genres, studios, and product sequels is so fierce as new features, upgraded graphics, larger environments, and hours upon hours of gameplay are crammed into the products that it is forseeable that losing sight of anything is not possible — but probable. And why is there such a frenzy for all these additions? Consumers flock to the shiny, new features that are released. Media tends to highlight games with something new to offer, rather than focus on simple design and elegant gameplay. Because of this, studios can’t ignore what is inevitably required of them, and the laundry list of things to add piles up fast. The involvement of people in one major game release jumps into the hundreds, development cycles jump into multiples of years, IP and projects change hands as publishers, producers, marketing and corporate execs clash heads over features, content, the release timetable. And none of this aids in speeding up the release of the game by any means.

All of this is beyond me, and far removed from my biggest issue that has been plauging the industry lately. When it comes to games released in the past five years, I have grown increasingly sick of companies using the internet as a crutch for their development cycle. It seems that games now have a release schedule that extends far beyond going gold, and the definition of “gold” is almost unquestionably turning into “beta”: A studio finishes a game to get as complete as they can, to get as close as they can to the wishes of their higher-up’s for both the feature set and the timetable requested. The game is then packaged and sold to millions in its released locations. The developers then field the mass of bugs and issues that come up with the game, and release a patch over the ‘net shortly thereafter to fix what has come up. With PC games, this is okay – you can’t expect a developer to be able to test every driver, every setup that exists out there. But consoles? Come on.

As much as I am giddy for LBP’s release – they are only going to be releasing the online “create” functionality down the road. While their marketing spin on it almost makes sense (give the gamers time to actually learn the tools before you go working with others), it doesn’t remove them from hitting the principle problem.

Don’t rely on the internet to release an unfinished, unpolished product. It’s your job to keep your feature set managable in the time that you require to finish it in, including proper time to thoroughly test the product.

Review: PixelJunk Monsters

Published on September 21, 2008 in Games. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

PixelJunk Monsters

When I had originally picked up my PS3, I had a few plans for it – Blu-Ray Player, some games from the PSN, and a few games. Mainly, I sprung for the system in anticipation of the release of LittleBigPlanet, and knew there would be some other games that would come along and find their home on the console. Sadly, the few games that I would have been interested in, I already own on the 360 (Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty 4). I’m considering Ratchet and Clank, and The Darkness, but I hadn’t heard enough about the game itself for me to jump on the game from the start.

From the time of my purchase, the PS3 had 194 games in its library. With the exceptions of cross-platform titles that I already owned, I wasn’t drooling at any games other than a few gems in the PSN’s store. (Echochrome, flOw, Everyday Shooter, Crash Bandicoot 1, and PixelJunk Monsters)

Overview

From Wikipedia

Gameplay in PixelJunk Monsters borrows similarities from various tower defense titles. The objective is to build defense towers along the enemies’ path to keep them from reaching a hut, or base. Several small creatures dwell at the base. For each enemy that survives the defense towers and reaches the hut, one creature is killed. If all creatures are wiped out, the level is failed.

Towers have distinct attributes, such as rapid fire, long range, air-focused, etc. Destroyed enemies usually drop coins and occasionally give gems, which then can be used to build and upgrade towers.

There are a total of 21 different levels (36 with the expansion pack) at 3 stages of difficulty. There are also 3 special stages that unlock unique abilities for the player character.

Overall Reaction

From Desktop Tower Defense, Gem Tower Defense (a custom map for Warcraft III), and a few others, I’ve always had a small place in my heart for tower defense games. They’re simple, fun, and easily can waste a good amount of time without much effort. Beating tougher levels from these games generally take a good amount of strategy, preparation, and trial and error before you can beat the final levels of the game.

So when I was browsing the PSN, looking to purchase some games that I could actually begin to make use of my PS3, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to try another tower defense game. While this game wasn’t the best tower defense I’ve ever played before, I do enjoy the re-playability of these games, and look forward to be able to eventually play through with someone who’s familiar to the genre.

Weaknesses (What I’d Change)

Earning your keep
This was the first TD game that I’ve played where you needed to actually earn your gold (used to upgrade/build more towers), by scrambling to pick it up. Not only did it have a timed-life before it disappeared, but it also could be lost if your character hit any of the incoming creatures. While this adds a bit of difficulty to the game, I don’t think its the type of difficulty that the game needs. The focus of the difficulty should be designing a defense that stops the onslaught of enemies, not avoiding them with your character. Other games have allowed placing towers with the mouse, or at least not having collision with your character be an issue.

Variable Money
Monsters drop both gold and (sometimes) jewels. Gold is used to build towers, where jewels are used to upgrade towers and unlock new towers past your three generic starting towers. However, there is no way to convert one into the other. That means if you really needed to unlock that special anti-air tower, and you are one jewel short but have mass amounts of gold, your only hope of winning the round are building a mass of lower grade towers, and hope for the best. The separation of these two elements add quite a bit of frustration to the pool, and I’m sure they really add to the strategy scenario that well.

Unlock this tower again and again and again…
After playing one level, you may have been able to save up and unlock for a specific tower, but you are back at square one again the next level. Even after you pass to the next level of play (medium, hard levels), you still only have your lame first three towers that you get to start off with, grinding again to get the towers you enjoy using unlocked again. I think at a very basic level, certain towers should be allowed to be unlocked as the difficulty of play increases (again, create difficulty with the actual point of the game, not the side-pieces that were added in for flavor), rather than having to start at square one every level. (Note: I think they did something to fix this complaint in the expansion pack, which I have yet to buy)

Useful towers?
Aside of the three main towers, I used the laser tower for anti-air, and the napalm tower for anti-ground. That’s all I really needed. There was one certain type of monster that was resistant to fire-based attacks, but they seemed to fall incredibly fast to just the regular arrow towers. So out of a total of something like 11 towers, I usually found myself using five of them, and a sixth when hard bosses came around (the mortar tower). If you’re going to offer a variety of towers, make them versatile enough to offer use to the players so that they can be included in the strategy. For instance, the ice tower should have either had a faster rate of fire, or been able to hit multiple enemies at once. (Normally you use the ice tower in TDs to slow down large amount of monsters while your other strong towers pound on them). After one frustrated game of unlocking the ice tower to only find out how pathetically useless it was, I never unlocked it again.

Sparse abilities (spoiler)
You get a total of three unlockable abilities throughout the game, one is running fast, one is remote mines, and one is a lightning tower. I don’t think I have had the chance to unlock the tower yet, but I have unlocked the other two. Using a remote mine costs a whooping 5 gems, which are better used in unlocking and upgrading towers, so I never once used it. The running fast was necessary, as the character originally moves MUCH too slow to be enjoyable, and I found myself holding the run button for the entire game after I had unlocked the ability. While this was a somewhat fresh idea to be able to unlock abilities, it seems the execution of what was unlockable, and what came out from it was ill-concieved. The running should have been inlcuded from the beginning, and if this were the way to unlock towers, I would be much more content – provided those towers stay unlocked at the start of a new game.

Underused “Special” Modes
There were a few modes where you had a ton of money, or you had all the towers unlocked, or you only fought one type of monster the entire game. These were gems, and probably some of my favorite levels, but these should have not been individualized levels, but “modes” that you could either select from, or unlock, so you could enjoy every level with these options.

Anti-Climatic Ending
First, the game let me “beat” it before I had beaten all the levels. I would understand if it allowed this before I had gotten rainbows (perfect games) on every level, but beating the “final” level was enough for the game to consider itself conquered. And after that? Absolutely nothing. No unlocks, no special modes, nothing. Boo.

I think this game has more to offer, and will prove to be a bit more fun with someone else playing along, and I look forward to the remote play once I get a PSP, but until then, I’ll play away with my gripes and deal with it. (Maybe the expansion will make some of these things slightly less annoying)

Review: Castle Crashers

Published on September 2, 2008 in Games. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

I had been spending the past few weeks playing a bit of Call of Duty 4 online, trying to figure out what game I’d be hitting up next. While lazily browsing a few gaming blogs last Wednesday, I came across some news which restructured my entire weekend. It had turned out that on the 27th, a little game known as “Castle Crashers” was released by The Behemoth. I heard about this game a year or so back, and was very excited at the prospect of a fresh beat-em-up to come to the picture, especially with the same art style of their first game, Alien Hominid. With the release being so far away, I must have tried to forget about it a bit to quash my anticipation.

Needless to say, I rushed to download the game, and convince some of my friends to do likewise. When I was younger and arcades were still common, beat-em-ups (Fists of Rage, Final Fight) were incredibly common. One franchised beat-em-up, The Simpson’s arcade game had received the majority of my spending money. With The Behemoth behind this project, and the promise of four player online co-op, I was nothing less than giddy.

Overview

From Wikipedia

The game is a side-scrolling beat-em-up in which up to 4 players can play, online or locally. Playing as one of the available knights or an unlockable character, players must defeat enemies to progress using attacks and magic. As enemies are defeated, the characters level up, giving access to new combos and abilities, and players can improve attributes such as attack, magic, defense and agility.

Overall Reaction

Great art, great music, a creative story progression, a pretty good combo system, and a ton of replayability make this game well worth its purchase. I have personally beaten the game probably about six times or more, either by myself or with friends. Despite the large amount of playtime, I have failed to truly get bored of the game. After you’ve beaten the game, you can revisit levels to find 60+ hidden or acquirable weapons. To aid you in your quests, you can currently collect up to 26 “pets” whom either alter your character’s stats, or they preform actions of their own (attack the enemies, find/point out hidden items, or bring you food). After your character’s leveled up and can fly through the regular game without a sweat, you could try your hand at Insane Mode, where your enemies are much harder to put down. And either before or after you’ve collected all the weapons and pets, you can unlock up to 23 characters by beating the game with different characters, or unlocking characters by beating the single player arenas.

What makes this game truly shine however, is the multiplayer co-op. When you add the ability to throw friends in the mix (both online or locally), one play through to the next is a different, yet enjoyable experience. Surprisingly, even playing online co-op is just as responsive as playing locally. If anything, I can count the momentary slowdowns I’ve experienced on one hand.

Lastly, some of the community members at the GameFaq and NeoGAF forums have impressed me with the determination to find every unlockable item within the game. From pets, to weapons, to characters, it’s been a 24-hour manhunt for almost a week now, trying to figure out what sequence it takes to unlock some characters and weapons that have surfaced in some testing/press images that were released. The Behemoth is obviously having a good time with the community of hunters, as they gave no outright explanations to begging fans at the past PAX 2008, only to leave the mobs of unlockable-hungry (myself included) players searching in the dark for the few holy grails left in the game. It would seem that the game has quite a bit of room for some DLC to come into play to potentially unlock these characters, I would hope that The Behemoth plays to the stingy and reveals free means to obtaining the unlockables.

What I’d Change

Abracadab…
Magic in this game seems to be very one-dimensional. While it does seem to have some sort of effect against the type of enemy you’re fighting, there doesn’t seem to be some sort of teaming-up aspect between the skills when playing co-op. Other than the attacks themselves, it feels like magic could be easily  expanded on as an improvement to the game. I remember in The Simpson’s beat-em-up, players could combine to form one unit, with one player attacking and the other controlling movement. You could combine something like fire and ice, the ice magic would freeze the opponents feet while the fire burned his head, or make fire more potent when someone was poisoned. Either way, I wish there was more depth to the differences and cooperation of magic that would make choosing a varied amount of characters important to gameplay, rather than just feeling like the majority of magic was merely a sprite switch.

No Sea Legs
Sadly, the entire “water” bit of the game, where you fight ninjas aboard a ship lasts only for only two waves of enemies. With a few long desert levels following, why was so much cut (or not added) to the ship level? That level had my  favorite music throughout the entire game, and it ended sooner than it started. You could have characters jumping from ship to ship, fighting off  waves of ninjas, avoiding cannon balls, and the like. It’s not like we’re worried about repetition here, the entire game is comprised of beating up several enemies, moving on, and beating up several more enemies. Lastly, I agree that ninjas are awesome, but why didn’t we get pirates too? I’d love to play through the game hobbling on a peg-leg and slashing my enemies with a hook or sword.

One road diverged in a yellow wood..
To get all the known characters at this point, one would have to play the game through twelve times. While I may find myself doing that eventually, the game could offer some sense of multiple passages that offer different means to reach the boss at the end of the level, either a way requires more magic, or stamina, or just provides a different experience to the player, it could ease up on the monotony of wanting the play through the game several times, without the ability of being able to do a play through with your  eyes closed.

QA Issues
While my issues with QA as of late will be saved for a post on its own, it seems that some of the bigger known bugs in the game may have been able to be caught with either better managed QA, or simply a larger team, or more time in testing before release. There are multiple instances of glitches and bugs in the game that others have found. One that my friend and I found while playing (that hasn’t been posted on YouTube yet), is when you are in the desert, and go inside to where you can see one pet (I think it’s ScratchPaw) hiding behind a screened window. If you walk up the stairs on the left side, and jump quite a bit, you end up glitching into the ceiling and are walking outside of the building. We were able to fall down into where ScratchPaw was (before we found a bomb would have gotten us back there), and then we found ourselves stuck in the level, not being able to progress to the next room. On top of these in game glitches, it seems the game has had a myriad of online play and saving issues when 3-4 players get together to play online. Coupled with matchmaking problems over Xbox Live, we can only hope that any next iteration is throughly stress tested before it’s next release. Thankfully, for the current players of CC, we should be seeing an update/fix to our online/saving woes soon.

End Scene
I’ve almost memorized the names of all the people involved and thanked in this game. Can we please skip the ending scene after we’ve seen it five times already?

Episodic Content/DLC
While this isn’t something I would necessarily change in the game, I would go and say that a few things could be added that would continue to keep me coming back for more. I think this game could easily continue bringing in money if more levels were added, and new content/abilities were tossed in the mix to keep things fresh. I wouldn’t mind paying for things to add to gameplay, but I don’t know how excited I would be if The Behemoth simply just threw new weapons and characters up for purchase. I’m not too fond of the Bad Company approach, and I hope it doesn’t become a habit.

If you own an Xbox 360, you need to pickup this game.

I’ll be spending the next few posts going over some more XBLA/PSN downloadable games.

Review: Assassin’s Creed

Published on August 1, 2008 in Games. 0 Comments

There were plenty of people telling me how much they hated Assassin’s Creed – so I had originally waited on buying the game. When I did get it, I wanted to like the game, to find something different that could be admired to counter the claims that I had been hearing. Luckily, I wasn’t completely lost with my experience with Assassin’s Creed. Despite it’s pitfalls, the game was overall a positive and enjoyable experience.

Overview

From Wikipedia

Assassin’s Creed is a third-person stealth game in which the player assumes the role of Altaïr ibn La-Ahad (Arabic, “The Flying One, Son of None”), a member of the Hashshashin (The Assassin Brotherhood) which is not allied to either the Templars or Saracens during the third crusade. Altaïr’s objective in the game is to assassinate nine historical figures propagating the Crusades in the year 1191.

The primary goal of the game is to carry out the assassinations ordered by the head of the Brotherhood, Al Mualim. To achieve this goal, the player must use stealth and a variety of intelligence gathering tactics to collect information on their target. These tactics include eavesdropping, interrogation, and pick pocketing [...]

Overall Reaction (Possible Spoilers Below)

There are parts of this games that I dislike, but there are parts of this game that really, really impressed me. The game was really well done artistically. While the color scheme was bland from time to time, the textures, buildings, and clothing of the people were very sharp. Secondly, the movement system that this game had single-handedly takes the cake as to while I find myself returning to this game to do some tedious flag-searching. Climbing up buildings, awnings, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, grabbing ahold of a ledge as your falling – it’s all done very, very well. The movement is easy an intuitive, your character looks good while he does it, and even the animations when scaling building’s and whatnot accurately match up with the surroundings Altair is truly climbing. Past the movement system, I enjoyed the story line that was being told. I disliked the ending that purposely left for a sequel (I later found out this is the first installment in a trilogy), and had wished a few more ends were tied up, but I’m already sold for the next game as I want to know what happens next. There are many questions left unanswered – where do we go next? Does Desmond survive? Does Lucy survive? Desmond got some of Altair’s powers at the end of the game, do we get to fully use him as an Assassin in the sequel? While the gameplay did see repetition throughout the game, it was these parts that kept me anchored to my seat, enjoying the in-between gameplay, and looking forward to the “what-happens-next” aspect, both in the story of Desmond and his ancestor.

Weaknesses (What I’d Change)

Cutting the Cut-Scene
After having beaten the game, I’ve gone back to AC to revisit some of the past cities to get the flags, visit the remaining high points, to enjoy the movement of the game again, and to earn some achievements as well. What’s frustrating is that when I go back to play the game for a second time, I have to pick a memory block to play again, and when I do – I have to listen to Al Mualim go through the same self-righteous dialogue with Altair again, and there’s no way for me to skip it. This is a nuisance in every scene where I save a citizen, or assassinate someone, or start or finish a memory block, there’s some scene I have to watch over and over. It’s gotten to the point where I select the memory block, set down the controller, and do something else for a few minutes until “my game is ready to play”. It’s like when people used to make a cup of coffee while their computer dialed in to the server for their internet connection. I would understand if you wanted to force the user to watch the cut-scene through at least once to make sure they receive the entire story as it develops – fine. But it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary to go and allow them to skip it after that one time. Sometimes people just want to jump in your game to play it, so let them!

Writer’s Block
With respects to the unending cutscenes, there are a good three to four canned responses you get from people who you save. This wouldn’t be a problem if you were doing it maybe 10 times in the game, but there are something like 8 citizens you have to save in every district of the three cities, and hear this crap (and again – being forced to listen to it before you can continue) gets annoying, especially when you’re just trying to barrel through it.

Achievements
Sadly, I must have missed one or two conversations with Lucy right at the beginning of the game, and I did not get the “conversationalist” achievement within the game. It turns out however, that if I wanted this achievement (which, being a perfectionist at this mindless crap, I might want it later) I need to replay the ENTIRE GAME to receive this achievement again. That’s a good six hours for something like 20 gamerpoints. While I am completely fine with setting reasonably hard-but-attainable achievements, don’t go and make something like this to force a second play through of your game for a simple achievement like that. At that point, it’s not an achievement anymore – it’s a punishment.

Death by Button Mashing
The fighting system in this game wasn’t the best – I constantly found myself mashing the attack button when I was hacking away at my enemies, and simply mashing the counter combo when they were attacking me. Sure, I love the quick cut-in’s that show you obliterating your opponent in numerously grotesque ways, but there was generally little payoff, since there didn’t seem to be a combo tier that brought better animations with different moves. Washed down, it seemed like, attack, counter, and break grab were really the only pieces of the fighting system I was coming across.

All day, everyday
While the game does some neat lighting that one would expect from a cloud blotting out the sun, never once did any of these levels take place at night. In Twilight Princess, this even added to the style of the game, which would allow and disallow certain access depending on the time of day (if I remember correctly). This would have been an excellent addition to the game, as it could have added another level of stealth, or challenges, or feature sets to the game. And what else better to be a skilled, stealthy assassin, other than to be moving with the veil of darkness as well?

Do you just want to call it exercise?
Altair had to go on a three mile run every time he got his instructions from Al Mualim. Couldn’t there have been a back door? At least in a game like Shadow of the Colossus you ended/started right at the exit of the castle, and your horse was right there. In this one, you needed to take a good two minutes just to get to your horse before you could ride out. I will take a second though, to applaud the developers for allowing you to select where you wanted to go after you had ridden to it once. I’m not sure I would have had the patience to take the ride from Masyaf to Damascus every time I wanted to go there.

Listen, Steal, and Punch
This problem was the biggest “kick to the nuts” that this game had to deal with, and is the majority of the complaints that I’ve heard about Assassin’s Creed. In a nutshell, Ubisoft Montreal created a beautiful game, an awesome movement system, with varied landscapes and (fairly) different environments, and then they have you go from place to place to listen to people, steal from others, and beat information out of the rest of the people you need to interrogate. That’s it. It singlehandedly flattens out the game experience for the majority, and if I didn’t like the movement system so much, I would have put the game down at a much sooner date. That’s not to say that was the only choice they had in order of variability with their game. As I mentioned before, adding nighttime events could have easily added to the tasks Altair needed to conquer.  With the phrase, “there’s more than one way to skin a cat”, there are plenty of ways to kill people, yet the game only focused on you stabbing your opponents. What happened to poison, or crushing an enemy, or drowning him, or setting him on fire? Without going further to cause any sort of alarm on my own mental stability, there are plenty of more ways an assassin could have gone about doing his job, and many more dimensions that could have been added to the interrogation procedures, as well as the actual assassinations themselves. All the while this could be achieved without so much as adding one puzzle to the game.

Alternate Movement?
When I had exited Animus, it seemed like I had suddenly become handicapped in my movement. The feeling of movement presented to me outside of Animus seemed slow, dingy, restrictive, and not fun. While I understand the “chamber” in which Desmond Miles inhabits is more of a means to an end of getting him into Animus, and thus the game – but there is a stark contrast between the two feelings of interaction between being inside of Animus and out, too much of one at that.

Continuity
I’m nitpicking from this point, but there were a few issues that I had with the game itself that didn’t add up, and brought me out of the experience to remind me that I was indeed playing a game. First – when you go to sleep on the left side of the bed, you wake up on the right. I don’t know how hard it would have been for the animators at this point, but why not have Desmond wake up in three or four different positions, and switch it up? We all toss in our sleep, and we generally sleep in a few different positions, so imitate that. It’s a small change, but it’d add a nice touch to the effect. Also – when I fall asleep on the left side of the bed, have me wake up on that side.

Story Holes
This somewhat plays into the last issue I had, but there were a few things that just didn’t add up. When Desmond was in his bedroom, the point of view would be coming from security cameras, insinuating that Desmond was being watched at all times. Yet there was never any mention of someone noticing him finding the key code, or leaving his room, or accessing the computers. And there was never any story to back it up that Lucy was altering the videos, or changing the logs to cover his tracks. Another thing – as soon as you went in your room, the Doc and Lucy would go Houdini and disappear from the room. At least show a glass window in Desmond’s room, showing them leave after he enters his room. Doing this, and forcing Desmond to only leave his room after the coast was clear would have added to the feeling of sneakiness that you got from leaving your room after you entered it. Granted this would contradict my complaints about adding gameplay, but this could be done quick enough that wouldn’t effect overall gameplay time to a point where I’d complain about it.

If you had to choose, I would say at least play the game, it takes about 6-9 hours on a first run-through, depending how many tasks you achieve whilst playing it. However, the game did see a recent price drop to around $30, and stores are selling it used slightly cheaper than that.

Mind Candy

Published on July 24, 2008 in Books. 0 Comments

I’ve done a bit of reading this summer, and I’m hoping to do some more after my short foray into some of Apple’s SDK Docs.

Here’s what I’ve tackled (in some cases, for a second or third time) this summer.

1984

The Iraq Study Group Report

The Catcher in the Rye

Suggestions?

Reflections on E3

Published on July 22, 2008 in Games and Personal. 0 Comments

E3 has come and gone, and it wasn’t without its announcements that had my ears perk up. Here’s a roundup of things that caught my attention, split up from the different “camps” they came from. As a whole it’s been said that this year’s event was missing something. Whether that something was pure excitement, or companies not living up to hype (or removing it in the case of Bungie/Microsoft), along with the lack of attendees (being a media-only event), the overall reaction from the event seems depressed and deflated.

Sony
With the announcements of an 80GB PS3 to be released in September, rumors coming in about a new PSP refresh, and LittleBigPlanet having a “release date” set for 10.21.08, I’m gearing up for my PS3 purchase to come in the next few months, and looking forward to it. The God of War 3 cinematic that they released looks pretty cool, but I’ll keep my reservations about the game until I see, or experience some actual gameplay to see how they made the transition to the PS3, along with a third creative director switch in the series. I’m mostly interested in the release of LBP, and look forward to some fun nights of playing it with some friends, but it looks like the PS3 is starting to *slightly* look up in terms of what game library is available, and some people taking the platform a bit more seriously (notably, id Software). With Bioshock getting some potentially exclusive content the PS3, I may have made up my mind for what platform I’ll be purchasing the game for, but I’m not entirely sure how different that will be from the DLC that’s available for the 360. More research on that later. In terms of PSN titles, I’ll be looking to get my hands on echochrome, which has been already released, and Fat Princess, which looks like a funny take on a team-based game of “capture the flag” (or chubby princess).

Microsoft
These guys made my week/summer with their announcements, and the ones that mattered the most didn’t really have much to do in the way of gaming. They’re putting together a slick new dashboard update for gamers, which shows a much slicker, simpler design that lends to a great polished look for the console. They kicked out a price cut for some of the current models, which makes the 360 more affordable for some, and they’re going to be adding “avatars”, very similar to what the Mii’s offer to the Live service. On top of this, the two biggest announcements that hit home for me was the fact that I’ll be able to turn my Xbox into a streaming device for Netflix’s Instant Queue service. While I’m not a current Netflix subscriber, this is the last thing I needed to push me off the fence to take the dive when this service goes live. I’ve been hoping to turn my 360 into a more media-oriented device, rather than just playing games, and this helps put it in the right direction, along with my rewiring of my stereo to get surround sound coming from the 360’s digital audio out. Lastly, Microsoft is going to offer the option in the future to be able to install your game directly to the hard drive, giving the disc drive a bit of slack, and potentially a longer lifespan, as well as improving the load time on some games. This seems to be very well received, even though Sony had beaten Microsoft to the punch on this feature, because Microsoft is making the feature optional, rather than mandatory. Soon enough, we’ll also be seeing The Behemoth’s next game: Castle Crashers. While I liked Alien Hominid, I’m hoping they release a game that myself and a few friends can get past the second level. (I mean really guys, tone it down just a smidge)
Wii
I don’t have much to say about Nintendo, other than the fact that this was incredibly disappointing for me. Watching the video of their keynote made me never want to play Wii Sports again, and while I’m interested to see what their MotionPlus accessory can do for improving game input, I’m reserved to see myself dropping more money on add-ons until I see a game worth buying it for. The few things that I’m looking forward to on the Wii sit on third party developers – MadWorld looks like it’s going to be awesome.

Other
In news outside of any specific “camp”, I’m looking forward to see what Bungie has to offer to the gaming community, and for us to find out who this Superintendent really is. I’m curious about Sonic Unleashed, but not very excited about this whole beast-at-night aspect of the gameplay. E3 is supposed to be the pinnacle of the gaming season, but it’s timing is seeing to be a rough time for studios to fit in new announcements, as they usually rely on more than five months to hype a new product before the Holiday season.

Review: Ico

Published on July 18, 2008 in Games. 1 Comment

IcoI have been told that Ico is somewhat seen as a gem in the game industry by designers, and that it’s a “secret card” one could pull out during an interview as the game is unique and provides a great experience from its minimalist design approach.

Since Shadow of the Colossus is seen as a “spiritual prequel” to Ico, I was very interested in where the story would continue from where SOTC had left off. With rumors of a sequel to the series coming to the PS3, I had planned to get this game and play it before the next iteration came out. Luck would have it that I picked it up used (in mint condition!) at a GameStop while browsing to kill some time.

Overview

From Wikipedia:

The player takes on the role of Ico, a young boy born with a pair of horns, who must escort a princess named Yorda safely out of a castle without her being captured by the shadowy figures that prowl nearby or being killed by the castle’s numerous environmental hazards.

Overall Reaction (Possible Spoilers Below)

Story
The story itself was an interesting story. From the ending of Shadow of the Colossus, we have a baby boy who has small horns growing out of his head. (Presumably a transformation of Wander.) As the story goes, there were boys who were born with horns every few generations, and that those boys were seen as harbingers of trouble and misgiving to the community. After the boy’s horns had grown large enough, the community thought it was time to sacrifice him. They bring him to a castle, and lock him up. He soon breaks free of this castle, and finds his way until he gets to a spiral staircase in which he had a previous dream about. He rescues a girl, Yorda, whom does not speak the same language that he does. He knows that he needs to get out of this castle, and takes it upon himself to bring Yorda with him along his quest for escape.

The story itself is easy to follow, and there is a bit more dialogue that Shadow of the Colossus, but with only three characters, more dialogue is not really needed.

What I really enjoyed about this game was the minimalism (no GUI), and incredible amount of puzzle diversity when the developers did not introduce much in the way of various tools, or variables to the equation. The game stayed very fresh throughout, without much interaction with similar puzzles from the past.

Lastly, Having played the “prequel” to this game before, I was able to re-enjoy some of the aspects of SOTC, reliving some of the story, understanding some of the puzzles that took me awhile to get not having played Ico (specifically the stick and fire / pitbull colossi), and I got to see the two games to come together complimenting each other really well.

Weaknesses (What I’d Change)

Options
My first issue with the game happened before I even got to start it. I wasn’t able to get my hi-def cables working with the PS2, and I wasn’t able to see the game clearly until I had gone back to the composite cables. This frustrated me slightly, and there were no options within the game to control widescreen, progressive scan, or even controls. I got used to it soon enough, but I generally use an inverted look when playing a game, and it was a pain in the ass to have to remember this each time I needed to look around. (Which happened often enough to remind me of the frustration of the whole ordeal).

Camera
The camera at times provided to be a huge annoyance, as it seemed that the camera anchored itself a good ten feet away from Ico, yet wouldn’t let you look past Ico’s field of vision, which was a perspective you weren’t looking through. In enclosed spaces, close hallways, or when Ico for whatever reason was near a wall when I was trying to glance around, I would find myself moving him just to get a better look.

Colors
I love the coloring in Ico, and the mood it creates, but I absolutely hate the fact that it has created some sort of bland-movement in next-gen games, pushing these games that could break beautiful boundaries of color and vivid presentation.

Controls
This goes hand in hand with some other complaints, but with two unbound buttons (not that all of them need to be filled up), but the lack of customization abilities and camera controls in this game were ultimately lacking

Hints
There was one puzzle in the game, probably about two hours in, that I was stuck on for a good 45 minutes before I gave up and looked up a little help on an online walkthrough. It turns out, I needed to swing on the chain I was dangling from. Having needed no use of swinging previously, and no inclination of how to do that, one would have only found out that such a solution to the puzzle existed by frustratingly looking online for a walkthrough like myself, or having looked through the instruction manual, which had the move listed within the book. (Who reads these manuals anyway?) Thankfully, this information was not in vein, as it was necessary to solve a few more puzzles later on. If there could be some way of detecting when a puzzle was started, and if it was being attempted for longer than x amount of minutes (say, 25-30) that some onscreen hints come away to provide you some help along the way.

Move to Europe
Generally Europe gets the shaft when it comes to console releases, etc, but not this time. The European version of Ico had a multitude of features for more replay value, including:

The second playthrough bonuses present in the EU and Japanese releases are removed, as is the expanded dialogue (the subtitles that were indecipherable runes the first time through are now translated), the option to have a second player control the princess, a secret weapon which resembles a lightsaber from Star Wars, and the option to play the entire game in the “film effect” seen in certain cut scenes. There were also a few changes made to the game itself, such as the shadow generation points and the AI. Most notably, the Waterfall and Windmill puzzles are more complex in the Japanese and European versions than the US version. The original box artwork, designed by Fumito Ueda, is a homage to the surrealist painter de Chirico (compared to The Nostalgia of the Infinite) and helped to add to the minimalist feel of the game.

The box art is much cooler in my opinion, having someone control Yorda could have made some of the puzzles a bit easier/faster/different, and the Windmill puzzle was memorable, but not necessarily difficult.

Animations and the slippery Yorda
Animations in the game were lacking, and this is evident throughout, but especially in the fact that EVERY TIME Yorda jumps after you, she slips, falls, Ico catches her, and pulls her up. In an earlier demo version of the game – Ico has the ability to let go of Yorda when they had made contact with her hands. I know for sure that sometimes I wouldn’t have minded letting go.

Quick Ending
While I’m not asking for the game to be any longer (I think the time was just enough to keep me interested), the arc of the story seemed to taper off pretty fast after you fell from the drawbridge. A few easy puzzles and you were back in the castle, kill the queen, game over. You just spent 6-8 hours getting to this point, and even with the descriptions in the booklet, there are 5-6 “sections” of the game, 3-4 of which you accomplish in the last hour. Since this game didn’t give any sort of percentage complete, or concept of how close you were to finishing the game, I wasn’t expecting for everything to jump into place like it did so quickly.

The game has inspired so much throughout today’s games, and plays a pivotal role in how it presented a minimalist game, great puzzles, and a good story, with the smallest amount of bells and whistles to create an entertaining piece of work. I would list this game as a must play to must own, just so you can get a feel from where some games today are truly coming from..

Growing Pains: Firefox 3

Published on July 12, 2008 in Hacks. 0 Comments Tags: .

I immediately appreciated the new look of the redesigned FF3 GUI when I installed it on “Download Day“, and after a week or so of having it on my laptop, I decided to take the plunge and fully switch over to FF3 from my previous browser of choice, Camino. (It functioned incredibly fast on my old Powerbook in comparison, and simply became habit.)

Either way, I’ve enjoyed the transition for the most part. Since they’re based off of the same rendering engines, there’s not much to complain about, and when I find an extension or ten that I find useful, I’ll be able to take advantage of the switch more thoroughly.

I have come across two issues which seem to be plaguing a few users, and will describe and document my travels here incase someone else has the issue and stumbles across this article :)

Issue 1: Random crashing at well-known sites (such as GoDaddy.com). I would crash everytime I had tried to get into the account panel. Turns out that Silverlight was the culprit, and installing the upgrade from v2 Beta 1 to v2 Beta 2 did the trick.

Issue 2: Since I move around to anywhere from 3-5 wireless spots on a weekly basis, some of which I administrate, I’ve been getting some frustrating issues with the self-signed certificates, or reused certificates that the routers re-use when sending them out to its users. The error typically at the top of this page is “Secure Connection Failed.” The best bet is to make a temporary or permanent (depending on your situation) exception to the check, and be on your merry way. My problems didn’t end there though, and it was saving a certificate it wasn’t showing in the list of certificates within the preferences page that I was supposed to be deleting, and restarting FF3 wasn’t doing anything for me.

Simply head on over to ~/Library/Firefox/Profiles and delete the cert8.db file, and restart FF3. Annoying, but its a large enough issue (plenty of people are whining about this) where I’m sure the Mozilla team is working on something, and we should see something in the next update or two (hopefully!)

Review: Gears of War

Published on July 11, 2008 in Games. 0 Comments

Gears of WarGears of War is the product of Epic, also the creators of Unreal Tournament 3. It’s yet another space-marine shooter where you take on the role of the very one dimensional Marcus Fenix. The game itself has won quite a few awards, and was one of the first games released on the Unreal 3 Engine. I was personally interested in the game as it was the first third person shooter that I had played, there was a decent amount of hype, and there was co-op campaign. Sadly, the game didn’t live up to the hype for me, and aside of going on a trip and moving into a new apartment, I needed some time to get the bad taste the game gave me out of my mouth.

Overview

From Wikipedia:

The game centers on the soldiers of Delta Squad as they fight to save the human inhabitants of the fictional planet Sera from a relentless subterranean enemy known as the Locust Horde. The player assumes the role of Marcus Fenix, a former prisoner and war-hardened soldier. The game is based on the use of cover and strategic fire for the player to advance through the scenarios; a second player can play co-operatively through the main campaign to assist. The game also features several online game modes for up to eight players.

Overall Reaction (Possible Spoilers Below)
There are plenty of things that Gears does right, and makes the high reviews the game has garnered somewhat understandable. However the things in the game that suck, annoy me so much that I forget the good things time to time, and focus all my energy trying to get around the nuisances. It’s the equivalent of creating a brand new luxury car with some amazing features to boast, then sticking in an incredibly uncomfortable seat and privacy glass for a windshield.

Campaign
For some, The Good Shepherd is seen as one of Matt Damon’s better performances. Maybe it’s because the story is interesting, the cinematography is done well, or maybe its because he’s got about five lines of dialogue. Didn’t these people’s Moms tell them that if they don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all? I think the same goes for decent dialogue. I won’t bother to pop in the game to get to the cutscene, because it’s not worth my time, but there is a scene in the beginning of the game that goes similar to this:

Marine with nasally voice: [Shooting out Helicopter] Hey, aren’t you *the* Marcus Fenix from (some battle)? [More shooting]
Fenix: Yeah.
Marine with nasally voice: Cool! [More shooting]
Fenix: Not really.

What the hell is that? Since when did designing a badass-looking character, and pretending to allude to a darker past through dialogue, creating something resembling a story, or even be an acceptable form of story-telling? Don’t worry, I wont spoil any revelations about Marcus’ personality, character, or history, because the game DOESN’T PROVIDE ANY. Just to humor myself, here’s another quote I remember (paraphrasing again):

Head-Admiral Guy: Fenix, I expect 110% from you!
Fenix: I’m not doing this for you.

Oooh, tough guy. Give me a break.

Then the game sticks you on a 4 hour escapade to find and install some device, that just craps out after you use it. Awesome, give me that time in my life back. There wasn’t even a decent reasoning, or a half-assed gratification of installing the device. All the user got was something similar “Nope, that didn’t work, we need to try something else.”

Like I said, there were a few things I liked about the game. I enjoyed having the freedom to choose which character took a different route to meet up later at, and thought it added some diversity to the experience. This could have potentially expanded a bit more into different jobs (one provides sniper fire, another infiltrates the enemy). I realize this occurred once in the game, but I like sniping, and my brother took that route that time. :)

I also enjoyed the small additional things you needed to do to keep yourself safe from these maddened darkness bat creatures. Blowing up the propane tanks, and the small area where one player needed to cover the teammate with the flood light was a different, but nice touch. It’s nice to take players out of shoot-em-up mode and force a little teamwork along the way to remind them that they are playing co-operatively.

Back to whining, the ending of this game was boring, anti-climatic, and lame! There is absolutely no trick to beating this boss, other than “shoot him a whole lot” when he’s in the light. At least with one of those spider looking bosses you had a weak point you had to shoot after getting it’s legs away from its mouth. You’d think that there’d be a little bit more thought involved then that in the culmination of the game. Along with the cutscene and the dialogue to set the game up for a sequel – I finished the campaign and said, “that’s it?”

Online Multiplayer Experience
I spent about forty-five minutes trying out the online “experience” of Gears of War, and I will only try it again if I’m doing it with a friend. After that painful, frustrating time had passed, I had been able to join about 4-6 games. Some games I had chosen myself, others I had let the game decide for me through the “quick play” feature. Not only did I often join mid-round, and had to wait a good 2-5 minutes for the round to be over, but I would generally be kicked right away, or after one round.

Granted, I played with comparable finesse to that of Helen Keller, but there was no room for error here. These were the few low-latency servers that I could find to play on, and I was reliving some old nightmares of being the fat kid in gym class. Except this time, you don’t get picked last, you just don’t get to play. The one time I did get to play, I was on a team with players of equal skill level to myself, and the other team was a bunch of friends, who were eating us for breakfast. I think we had a total of 3-4 kills on a 4v4 after five rounds. Painful? Yes. Humiliating? Extremely. Fun? No.

After a few choice words, I put the game back in its case, and either went and played Halo or just got up from my 360 altogether. Not the best sign for a game.

Weaknesses (What I’d Change)

Darwinism Revised
This has been something that’s been around since UT2003, and now that I was buying the game for more than just the online experience, it bothers me. The model designers at Epic seem to think that humans did not evolve from monkeys, but that of our hunchback-turtle brethren. What is up with this model shape, and why does it keep re-appearing in every iteration of the games they stick out. I’m not sure if they’re trying to start a fashion trend here – but its been five years now and no one’s picking it up, consider switching this look around.

Magnetic Concrete
Cover is an incredibly important piece of tactics that you need to work into the game while you’re playing Gears, or you wont be able to get very far. However, I found myself having a hard time either getting Marcus to “attach” himself to a nearby area for cover, or in close quarters, turning the damn ‘magnetics’ off so that I could get through a set of close blocks, or a doorway. I’m sure you can just chalk this one up for inexperience with the game, but it was too frustrating at times to be useful.

Dialogue
While I gave this gripe plenty of justice in the campaign section, I’ll say it again. I would have rather had less dialogue and more for me to fill in the blanks, then the crap that was used for dialogue in the game. Supposedly, the next Gears is “much more emotional” according to the voice of Marcus Fenix – but that’s like saying your house made of Lincoln Logs is technologically more advanced than your alphabet-block house. I hope I eat my words on this one.

Radar System
When you had a downed teammate and you needed to find him, he blended into the surroundings really well. Not only that, but the arrows pointing to them in the circle “radar” were often confusing and didn’t help much. Something closer to a blip-radar ala Halo 3, COD4, CS may have made this work a little bit easier. I mean, you’re in the future aren’t you? The technology for your turtle shells exist, so I’m sure a cooler radar does too.

Visual Reinforcement
This game has headshots, but there’s no real way to know when you get one, other than carefully watching the death animations of the enemy. I wish there was a little more response from the game when you were aiming at key points of the enemy.

Color Choice
There’s a few articles that really explains my gripes with the majority of the next-gen games that are coming out with supposedly “beautiful” graphics and visual pinnacles of gaming graphics. The article says something along the lines of “real is brown”. In these games, there’s this filter of haze over the screen all the time, where you get a reduced color palette and everything is an awful shade of emo. I realize that you’re trying to put the user in a state of mind with the scenery, but color doesn’t need to be the main vessel: you can use the story, NPC and player interaction, and many other tools to provide a sense of unease, loneliness, and impending doom.

Online Match Control
Gears probably has one of the best filtering systems that I’ve seen in a game thus far. I love that you can pick the maps you want to look for, among many other ways to trickle down to finding a game that suits your preferences at the time. However, players should not have the control to kick users from the game if they are not doing anything detrimental to the team – and sucking does not fit into this. If I’m killing my team, or ruining an objective, fine, kick me. But don’t punish me for trying something new out, and trying to adapt to a new style of game online.

Achievements?!
I’ve read the gripes by a few people about the incredibly unattainable achievements that Gears throws out to its players to try to reach. I know that I for one will never go out of my way to get the 1000 GPs that the game offers. At most, I may go back to play it again on Insane with a friend online, but that’s about it. My sympathy goes out to those who spent the hours upon hours of getting the 10,000 kills or something insane thats required, along with the individual gun kills that are required as well. Call of Duty 4’s 1000 GPs were pretty straightforward to get, and Halo 3’s are just hard enough for me to not whine about, and actually look forward to getting the final three online achievements when I do. Gears goes overboard with this, and requires you to dedicate way too much time to it in order to achieve them, that regardless if I think I have a life, receiving the majority of those achievements will remind me that no, no I do not.