Bonesnack

A wider point of view, The Title Fight

2012-01-05T00:10:00.000+01:00

The two game most FPS gamers were keeping eyes on were Battlefield3 and Modern Warfare3. A lot of us were wondering if BF3 would make the same impact as its predecessor. Battlefield2 was the first game to use the modern combat setting but it was Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare that made it popular. Since then the market has been bombarded with a CoD every year. Pointing the way for rival shooters through sheer success. But as the novelty wears off, a lot of gamers are getting tired of the formula. Though the quality and production values of the series are what makes it such a hit every time. The reward-a-minute treadmill might have something to do with it too, and so might the stiff online competition. The gameplay is fast, often rage inducing and frustrating. But when things go your way, it's an ideal way to blow off some steam after a day's work. I should know. The game has to cope with diminishing returns however.

When games like Crysis2 and Homefront tried to copy the formula, some of us got a case of desperation because you couldn't buy a AAA shooter without getting a good dose of Call Of Duty with it. This fear persisted all the way through the development of Battlefield3. Even though most of us who played Battlefield2 knew that series had a lot more going for it. But more importantly, it had different things going for it. From the direction the Bad Company games were going, more console focused, we had little reason to be overly hopeful. But Battlefield3 turned out as an incredible step forward from Bad Company. And while it incorporates a few select innovations from CoD, the game turned out something else. A game with a very high skill cap, not only does a player need to know what role to play at what time, he needs to know it on foot, in tanks or in the skies. And he has to be a team player. This alone isn't the novelty though, but the way the game was made and the way it plays are. The pixel perfect user interface alone makes it stand out compared to the bulky font and laggy mouse found in the MW3 interface. The entire layer of post processing, and colour separation in BF3 also apply to the interface. When I first saw it in the beta I had the wide eyed look of a child who discovers that his new toy not only looks shiny, but also transforms into a robot. It looked so very expensive.

MW3 sticks to its guns. It isn't a spoiler to say that MW3 is "like MW2 but newer". A mark of the stagnation of Call Of Duty, which is just as well because the sub-series has now come to a close. Right on time for the end of the Xbox360. Does this mean that CoD is beaten by default? Not really. And I wager Activision doesn't see it that way either. Queue Black Ops 2 for November 2012 as the swan song of the CoD series as we know it. Another sign of decline could be measured in its players. I'm not saying we should crack open their skulls to examine the dopamine levels but instead look at their dedication. CoD4 was played for two years. And if you're a competitive player, you still do after 4 years. MW2 was actively played for 1 year and wasn't even that good. Black Ops was hot for about 3 months and now MW3 already seems on it's way out after only 1 month. It's hard to tell if it is because MW3 is considered to be slightly less good than BlOps was or if the formula has run its course, regardless of MW3's quality. Battlefield, with its new engine, bigger scope, more interesting shooting mechanic, seems the title to beat now. But still, it seems a very frail reign if we base this claim on sales.

Truth be told, CoD and Battlefield aren't that similar conceptually. They share the modern combat setting. Both have a team deathmatch and the M16, Americans and Russians. But they also share the mudslinging ad campaigns. To the untrained eye, both are advertising the same game! They aren't, but the perception is still there. Neither companies are informing otherwise because they actually are rivals. Both would want the public to buy their game, and not the other. If we go on customer loyalty, Call of Duty takes the lion share. As console popularity has given it the biggest audience. BF vets are almost always on PC, where the series by and large stayed, and are a minority.

As predicted earlier, Call Of Duty remains the more popular of the two. And as long as there's another dollar left, a company will keep making its product. Even to its own detriment. I'm not sure Activision has the audacity to carry the franchise into the future on the same tech though. Which in turn means that Activision will have to procure a new next gen engine to power their franchise for the next generation of consoles if they do. They will, Call Of Duty is a very important money maker for Activision.
This dependency is where Activision may have a problem.

Not a typical PC publisher, Activision has yet to show off a next generation engine or a game using one. Others did, EA has the Frostbite2 engine from DICE. Bathesda has the Rage Engine from ID. THQ has a few projects, Nexuis & Homefront2, using Cryengine3. And no doubt EPIC is working on a next generation iteration of Unreal Engine 3. Unfortunately I was only moderately impressed with the Good Samaritan Trailer they showed at GDC 2011. But we have yet to see a game using it.

Out of all these mentioned next generation engines, Frostbite2 has seen the most actual use thus far. Need For Speed: The Run used it, and rumour has it Dragon Age 3 will use it too. It's no stretch to say that the next generation of Mass Effect, Medal of Honor and Dead Space games will use it too. Just a few weeks ago, Bioware has already confirmed it is using Frostbite for the upcoming C&C Generals2. And then there's Respawn. The original CoD developers, now with EA, who are poised to fill the void that CoD will presumably leave in the next generation if it fails to reinvent itself.
Maybe the future for CoD as we know it today, lies with a free to play model, not unlike TF2 or Battlefield Heroes. A hardcore shooter running through a browser isn't new either. It could be an opportunity to bundle the entire Modern Warfare series onto one unified platform. With all maps, all weapons and a selection of balanced perks. Optimizations could even be made to create a Pro Mod to promote professional play.
Since the specifications to run CoD have become far below those of the standard PC, it can live quite a few years longer in this form, using the same engine, generating revenue through micro transactions or subscriptions. Away from the bleeding edge of technology, where expectations are more tempered.A key ingredient may be the social aspect of CoD. The basic framework is already in place: Call Of Duty Elite. The community site where player's multiplayer stats are shown on profile pages. People can watch video content, participate in community activities, start community groups, etc. Activision has delayed, or aborted according to some sources, the PC release of CoD Elite because they are worried PC gamers will mess with the statistics.
My inner cynic would rather think this story is hogwash because when was this company ever worried about PC gamers or what they did with the game? History has shown that Infinity Ward didn't care in the least about what the (PC) community did. Glitches, exploits and hackers in MW2 didn't push the developer into any sort of action. I'm also not inclined to think IW has had a change of heart, after the stellar job Treyarch did in supporting Black Ops, because the proof is in the pudding. MW3 has no Dedicated servers and no accessible in-game console. The buggy release version and no CoD Elite only add insult to injury. To further tarnish IW's image, this just happened. My guess is it will go unresolved. PS3 users have my condolences.
An argument that comes up time and time again is piracy - by now the oldest cliché in the book. In the case of Activision it's mind boggling considering what its other half, Blizzard, has been doing on PC for years. If a game runs through a (web)client with a bunch of server side operations, its useless to pirate. MMO's can't really be pirated.

DICE is halfway there with BF3 as the game launches from the web browser. Plus Battlelog is available for all platforms. And it's great. So great in fact that I'd wish other EA published games, such as Crysis2, Battlefield Heroes, Mass Effect3 MP, Medal of Honor and the upcoming C&C: generals 2 would use it. The statistics it tracks are useful, the internet browser server browser, yes you read that right, is the quickest thing and the social interaction is just logical considering the time we live in.
It almost goes without saying that BF3 is a pureblood PC shooter. It's very customisable: FoV, dedicated servers, a long list of tweak able variables. A PC gamer marvels at the mere sight of it all. Rendered in a brand new engine that pushes our hard earned computer hardware. Meaning, of course, that the graphics look absolutely stunning. Just look at this clip from FRANKIEonPCin1080p.

I'm tempted to write a good review on it, I really am. But those are so hard to do, and might even be superfluous considering the game speaks for itself. I recommend it as it is, in my opinion, superior to MW3 in every meaningful way, as a serious FPS.

And With that I'll leave you with some BF3 entertainment by BirgirPall. Enjoy, and have fun.

A wider point of view, The Aftermath

2011-12-31T00:37:00.000+01:00

As far as gaming goes though, 2011 has been an important year for first person shooters. There were some ambitious titles this year, many debuts. Most of them poised to capture the hearts and minds of the same public. Now at the end of the year, at last, we can look back as the dust settles.As I type this I am aware that I'm writing this from the one perspective, that of the PC gamer. I also realize there were more interesting shooters this year then mentioned here. But I wanted to keep the scope of this post limited to those games aiming squarely at Call Of Duty. For some these are competitive games and PC still remains the home of that. Console gamers should look to PC as well, because the tech that's present now will be what dictates the hardware of the next consoles. This is especially important now, because the next wave shouldn't be too long out.
Talking about hardware almost always means talking about graphics. But I shouldn't sell PC gaming short, it's not all about graphics. The social aspect of gaming shouldn't go unnoticed. More and more people are playing games. Pulled in by their friends, or simply because everyone else is doing it.
It won't be long before we find it hard to imagine the social aspect absent from gaming. For a good long while now Steam, Xbox Live and PSN have been familiar names to gamers, yet these platforms are still evolving. Becoming more social oriented instead of being just a digital marketplace. Facebook is the norm to follow.This year was also important because it marks the point at which console ports seem to look really dated. This is generally a bad thing, making developers push their tech if they want to keep selling on PC. It only takes one, because if the competition does...
So how did the other contenders to the throne fare? I'll give you the rundown of what I remembered.

Homefront turned out a little Battlefield-clone that could. Or at least wanted. At first glance, gameplay looked like a cross between the fast paced action of Call Of Duty and the scope of Battlefield Bad Company. Multiplayer was about that, if you could handle the way it played. Inertia and loose screws are two words I could use to describe the experience. None of them are overly negative, but it took some getting used to. Not nearly as fluent as CoD, but still fast. Not nearly as deep as Battlefield but not shallow either. The PC version of the game got some extra attention and it showed as this was by far the superior version. Just looking at the archaic options screen that looked as dense as an excel sheet made me smile. But that's where the praise stops for most people. Homefront got outclassed by the competition in every way. I also make a deliberate point not to mention the campaign mode. It set the scene for Homefront, let's leave it at that.
The Homefront franchise is not done though. THQ wants its militairy shooter. After all, they've been doing very well recently with their other titles such as Darksiders, Saints Row and all things Warhammer 40k. To everyone's surprise Crytek will be making Homefront 2. Originator Kaos studios was put out of business.

Crytek also had its own seminal shooter this year. Showing the prowess of the Cryengine3. At the time of the release of Crysis2 is was quite clear that real time computer graphics had taken the next step. This first engine that was ready to enter the next generation was still on current consoles. But it was until the engine started showing some muscle on DX11 tech that we saw we were dealing with an engine for tomorrow. My quad core PC with a single gtx460 had to bow out but the screenshots thrown around the web spoke volumes. Crytek had made another engine for tomorrow's systems.
The game itself was very good indeed, the gameplay mechanics deviated drastically from the standard run and gun found elsewhere. Instead you'd run, gun, cloak, super-jump, shield up and gun some more. Unfortunately the game was run like a console game, even the MP part was done by a console developer: Crytek UK, formerly Free Radical Design. Known from Timesplitters and more recently, bot to mention notoriously, Haze. As a result the MP was well done but FRD was clueless when hackers started taking over as soon as the game went live. Pirates could play MP unhindered. Bringing with them the ire of all honest Crysis fans that made the franchise what it was. Steps were taken, but by then the game was bleeding active players.
The single player campaign was quite good. I'd rate it higher than both Battlefield 3 and MW3's campaings. Sure it was a lot more linear than Crysis1, but it still had set pieces which one could tackle whichever way you wanted. The story was a lot better and held a few interesting twists.

Brink didn't need a new engine. Brink took another, more artsy direction. The look of the shooter game with the hooligans was well established. The caricatures in this game wield caricatures of real guns. Too bad then, the gameplay wasn't quite the caricature of what Team Fortress has to offer.The concept of the game was painfully limited. Multiplayer matches were essentially a series of objective-oriented team challenges. Where one side would have to stop the advance of the other. These story missions got very old very fast though and that's what killed the game for me. The missions were well made but once everybody figured out the maps, every match would play out more or less in the same way. Needless to say, things got boring. I still feel extra, more open, game modes such as team death match, domination and payload could have saved this game.

After my disappointment with Brink, I was hesitant to give Bathesda more money for Rage. So I am holding off until Rage gets a hefty discount, or steam has a sale on it. Rage was well received by the press. And people seemed to like it well enough. The PC version wasn't very good at first - the techniques used by Carmack were more fit for consoles. This brought out the usual pitchfork mob of disgruntled PC gamers. Carmack sold out. Carmack lost his mind. Carmack has left us. Carmack made amends. He then stated that the PC should propably have been the lead platform for the game, and will be for future ID projects. PC problems were fixed within a few patches though, so in the end it all came together. The big upside to Rage is that Bathesda now has a established next generation engine. The engine is very powerful as it is, making Rage run at 60fps on current consoles is no small feat. Though it remains to be seen if it will be used in the future. The next big FPS from Bathesda will be Prey2, and that looks fantastic even though it still run on the old Doom3 engine.

Once, in a Steam review of the game I wrote the following:

Simply put, TF2 has become the best shooter of all time. It has proven its staying power for years now: the timeless art style, the classic gameplay, the support from one of the best developers. The micro-transaction based free to play model is a sign of things to come, as TF2 is the herald of a new age in computer gaming.

And I feel I was pretty much right. Even though I wrote it in a hurry in exchange for an event achievement.TF2 went free to play this year. Boldly going where no big mainstream shooter dared go. Valve was rewarded in a huge way for their calculated gamble. The game even surpassed Counter Strike, which had been on top for years, as the most played Steam game.
Income from TF2 now comes solely from microtransactions from the in-game store. Once a player buys an item, he'll activate the random drop roulette that exists within the game. Which gives him even more, craftable and tradable items.
By making the game free, Valve has effectively invited everyone to the in-games store that has already made them, and the in-store item creators, a fortune. With this Valve has changed its initial stance on character customization. They had always put character silhouette first, to improve the recognizability of the various classes. Don't take out the pitchforks just yet, because this means we can expect more solid titles from Valve because of this.Dressing up your own characters is fun but this doesn't say anything about how fun the game is to play. The answer is very. But by all means try the game out for yourself. It's free. Despite being really old in gaming terms, TF2 is still getting a ton of attention from its creators, almost as if it was an MMO. There's something new almost every month.Valve isn't resting on their laurels either. Soon Counter Strike: Global Offensive will storm Steam, and the world as the next e-sport. Next to DOTA2. Another e-sports game. They don't seem to concerned about what happens in the world of FPS, keeping Counter Strike in a league of its own. Much like that other e-sports titan, Starcraft from Blizzard.
Duking it out for the mass market though, are EA and Activision. The title fight! In the next post.

A wider point of view, the inverted Y-axis.

2011-09-11T22:43:00.000+02:00

My first foray into PC gaming was called "Falcon" on an Amstrad 8086. It wasn't really a game as such but a combat flight simulator. At the time, and at the mere age of 7, I wanted to be a fighter pilot. Being so young a pilot, some of the flying had to be done for me. So taking off was done on auto-pilot. So was navigating, engaging and landing. All I mostly did in between was steer the plane with the joystick. Whenever things got a bit too hot for comfort, I would press the "a"-button and the game would take care of business.
A while later I got a new PC, a 386, and was given MS Flight Simulator by a relative. Soon hours would be spend in a Cessna zipping around the Detroit city skyline, making a game out of flying between the skyscrapers at breakneck speeds without crashing. This time though, all of the flying was done by me. The sim had an auto pilot but it was too complex for me to configure.
Another PC upgrade to a 486 brought with it another flight sim: Falcon 3. This is the game that would seal my fate: I was going to be a military pilot. Because the sim trained the player to be one. I got the game in the deluxe edition, which added an F-18 and a MIG 29 sim using the same engine. It had a very thick booklet on how F-16s work. It had a booklet about how the air force works. It had a booklet about how weapon systems work. I doubt anything like it could be printed today without looking like a wikileaks publication and being treated like one. The box containing all the books and CDs was a treasure trove to my eyes and felt like it too - I could barely lift it. Hope and destiny carried most of the weigth all the way to my father. The treasure cost accordingly. But my father was somewhat of a flight buff himself and he must have seen a great pilot through my trembling arms and the tears welling up in my eyes. So he bought it for me. In short, yes, the game sealed my fate. As a PC gamer.

Later, my flying carreer came up to speed when I also got Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, and when Pentium came around, expanded with EF2OOO and even later with F22 Air Dominance Fighter from the same company. Flight sims were my thing and I strove to know everything about air combat and fighter jets.
I knew all about navigating airspace using pitch, yaw and banking. And I would use them to great effect in barrelroll, Immelmann, Split-S, and cobra turn manoeuvres. I was in perfect control.

Control is what this post is really about. Control is crucial.
When one plays flight sims one controls aeroplanes like this: push forward on the stick to move the nose downwards, pull back on the stick to pull the nose upwards.
Translated to mouse controls means that pushing the mouse forward, which is perceived as an upward motion when you look at the mouse from the top down, results into the nose going down - not up. This reverse effect along the Y-axis is what lends inverted controls its name. The mechanics of a plane make the controls inverted by their very nature. Knowing about these makes inversion very logical.

You should watch the following clip if you want more info.

After the flight sims came the shooters. Doom revolutionised gaming and introduced the first person shooter genre in a big way. In those early days mice weren't as common as you might think, it was the joystick that accompanied every gaming PC. Gaming in those days was mainly done in arcades the PCs were trying to emulate. Not to mention mouse support in software was almost as rare as the hardware.

Doom was no exeption and was played mainly with just the keyboard, in the game there was no actual use for looking up or down. Aiming was done only on the rotation of the player and shooting would result in a hit regardless of the targets height, as long as the shot was neatly lined up.
When online gaming finally swooped me up I got into playing Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight. The game was often showcased as the game to play while using a force feedback joystick. Of course, I had to make do with the stick I already had. Through the power of imagination the flightstick became the handle of a lightsaber. But it wasn't very long before I realized there might be a better way. The gunplay was too slow to be competitive, because with a stick you need to steer your aim. So I switched to a mouse, which offered the needed speed and precision.
Ever since, I have been pulling back on the mouse to point the camera upwards in the virtual space of a shooter. Just like I always had with the stick and still was in the new flightsims.

Some of you will like a mechanical explanation, so I'll give it a shot. Just to make the point even clearer. More proof, I hope, that inverting the Y-axis has a working, logical explanation. You're steering the virtual camera as if it was your virtual head. A real life comparison would be if you would replace the mouse with the top of your virtual soldier's head and you were pulling his head backwards to make him look up. I threw together an animation to show just what I'm mean:

In contrast the non inverted control works as if one is pointing the cursor in a 2D environment like windows. If one was to translate this to a 3D space you'd be pointing towards your target on a 2D pane or a windshield.The emphasis is on the pointing. As in a lightgun game or a shooter on the Wii or PS Move. Perhaps this control scheme comes more natural if you have a background with these.
Simply put, you're steering the virtual camera by pointing towards targets.

As it stands today games offer both control schemes, and if the people designing them are capable this will remain to be the case. But gamers shouldn't take the abuse of uneducated people calling them crazy for inverting the Y-axis. The fact that this is happening at all, where it used to be common practice to invert, is a sign of the times. And that many, mostly younger gamers, have no connection to how things used to be. Or in other words, are unincumbered by old ways. Either way, one shouldn't remain ignorant about why the option is there in the first place. But in the rare case of games that feature fighter jets with uninverted controls, we're dealing with a decision informed by either popular opinion or by ignorance that degrades both every game maker in the industry and the intelligence of the players. And that would be truly crazy. As crazy to me as having a car go left when steering right.

Money Games

2011-06-26T18:20:00.028+02:00

Belgium is a sporting nation with many national sports. Such as football: the international sport. And the ever popular Cycling: the other international sport.
It also used to be Judo. A Belgian once even won an Olympic medal. But since said person retired, Judo was never mentioned again. International appeal is where it's at with the big sports because you're nobody if not a world leader.
I should mention Tennis as another somewhat national sport because of our tireless duo racket-whipping the world's backside. But both are on their way out and this may spell the end for a few tennis clubs too many.
As it goes, the afflicted sport will have representatives lobbying for government support, punctuated by the threat that no new talent shall be found or trained, and our national image bruised, unless certain financial demands are met. The government, faced with the dire prospects of additional international embarrassment will then pull funds from education and reallocate them to sports.

Education is a field we Belgians still manage to lead in, so why would funds be needed? As long as creationism stays off the agenda, were good to go. Unfortunately, too many young students become religious adults, so there might be a spanner in the works. An expensive search campaign for said spanner was researched, planned, organised and subsequently scrapped due to budget cuts.

"Brawn over brains" has become the national motto. I wish I was kidding. The solution for the current financial crisis given by liberal democrat Dirk van Mechelen during election time was:
"We must work harder and harder, and I know because I used to be a butcher's son when I was young".
The line was delivered with the poised jaw conviction of Caesar crossing the Rubicon. To further clarify his point he said nothing, but let the grave rebuttal sink in during the long, long seconds of silence in which the camera paused the image on his fierce gaze.
I wonder if he managed to convince single mothers working two jobs to pay for food and bills. And I wondered at the time that if we were told the missing inner monologue about the butcher argument, it might have made at least some sense.

Money is always a problem. Even in sports. You can't get good at something without putting in the hours, and time is money.
In order for a sport to get subsidized we must first answer the question: what is a sport? We have appointed a minister to spend 8 hours a day to mull over this conundrum and come up with the list.

The current appointee is Philippe Muyters. And after careful thought and consideration he has dismissed, among others, Chess, Darts and Billiards. The reason being "because there is no physical effort (involved)". The words inside the brackets were not present due to more budget cuts, but I added them for clarity.
He went on to say that "A sports-person must stimulate his physical development, upkeep or improve his condition. None of these condition are present with mental sports."
I do wonder how Sir Raymond Ceulemans reacted to this news. He was the World Champion of Carom Billiards 35 times and was awarded "Belgian sportsman of the year" in 1978. He even had an international nickname "Mr. 100".

Some of his shots look like magic:

During his long reign, Carom Billiards probably was a National Sport too. But even during Sir Ceulemans lifetime, the sport would cease to be that. Because of the lack of required muscle mass and sweat output?
The physical argument puzzled me because shooting Clay Pigeons still is a sport.

The reason Shooting Clay pigeons is still considered a sport by the minister is tradition. In my mind, this alone exposes the ministers intentions with the designation because shooting Clay Pigeons has no traditions as a sport. Though perhaps it does as a rich mans hunting game. Perhaps the ministers fancies himself in a tweed suit? I also find it hard to think of a sport as traditional when its main tools are firearms. Compared to Chess, Shooting Clay Pigeons is a toddler wielding a plastic pistol loaded with a suction cup dart.
Maybe the minister's reason for respecting the art of The Shooting Of The Mock Bird is because it has the potential to put a meal on the table in a way playing Chess or Billiards does not. Those bring nothing to the table. They're not subsidised.
However it may be, the former and latter definitions wielded by the elected official are inconsistent.
In political speak, inconsistency is often named a dynamic response to demanding situations, or adapting to new situational circumstances, or tactical adjustment to stimulate a positive response. I'm sure Mr. Muyters has a fair arsenal of this kind of verbal buckshot. Which he wears like a bandoleer of blanks: Looking tough at first but looking more ineffectual with each subsequent shot.

For those wondering, my interest in this debate is from a gamers perspective and the thing called e-sports. I'm sure Mr. Muyters has his reservations about all things e because of their minimal physical component. Which is a gross and offensive simplification. Say you're a programmer, your job is "pressing buttons on a keyboard". But let's stay on topic.
I was wondering if games like Starcraft, Street Fighter, Call of Duty or Counter Strike could ever be recognised as a sport. I can attest to the fact those take a lot of effort to play competitively. One must have strategy, communication, lightning reflexes, nerves of steel and solid concentration. All those flow from good physical condition. And you have to use your brain.
If clay pigeons can be a sport, perhaps there's hope for Shooters like Call Of Duty or Counter Strike. Starcraft may be out of luck, because the strategy component makes it so akin to Chess, even if it's action packed and players need to perform about 250 to 300 actions per minute.
I do wonder how Mr. Minister would view computer games. Pressing buttons like madmen. Not seeing any structure in the actions. Probably the way he sees foreign languages, "Hey look, they're speaking Ooga-Booga, surely this is a sign of barbarism".

So we probably won't see anything like this around here anytime soon:

Or even this:

But as with chess, so with e-sports. In that they don't require brawn, but finesse and clear thinking. Which brings me to the one thing Mr. Muyters probably has forgotten. While talking up physical condition and training he seemingly fails to notice that the brain is a physical organ situated in the corpus humanum. And can be trained just as well as muscle. Or should I say, has to be trained.

Perhaps the minister still clings to the belief that the mind and the brain are two separate things. A theory, that of the soul, invented more than 2000 years ago to try and explain the gap between body and mind.
Because the mind is a projection of the brain. In my mind, or should I say brain, the following rule is true: the better the brain, the clearer the mind. And brains are more important than brawn. This is another rule: big brains are able to accomplish much more than big muscle, and in much more then just sports. And that's where our country should make the difference. We need to develop our big brains because that's what were good at.
And anyway, if I told you about Muscles from Brussels, one man already comes to mind. So why still try? We could still take a shot at e-sports though.

I do believe that we should keep our bodies fit and healthy though, a healthy mind comes from a healthy brain comes from a healthy body. An idea that should be taught from a young age.
And that's where Mr. Muyters has missed the point as well. At this point I would like point out that he's also the minister of Finances, Work and Planning. Plus he's got an economic background. A field he's probably better suited for.
So imagine what his economist eyes beheld when he was delivered, on the 10th of June this year, the report that in 13 years our top sporting schools had only delivered 2 top-tier handball players. What a gigantic waste of our resources! Logically, the sport has since been scrapped from the curriculum. Along with Judo, a former national sport, and long distance running, because our small country's lack of long distances.
With the budget cuts made to schools, the minister has crossed the border of the acceptable. If there's anything schools need it's more funding. The result of schools isn't just top tier sports-people but educated people. And that's what we can't have enough of. If we have enough of them maybe they'll even find their way to parliament.
And anyway, if you're a patron to the arts you can't be too concerned with return on investment. You just have to hope the artist you're funding that somewhere down the line, but don't count on it, because it's rare. It's the reason why patrons of the arts are rare. One just accepts that the money is gone, but the mind is at ease because the money has gone to a generally good cause, and not to say, an expensive mistress.
Speaking of arts, perhaps Mr. Muyters wants to take aim at the art schools because of the minimal amount of world renowned artists our country is producing? What a clever idea, if you can't sell it, why have culture at all?

I'm sure Mr. Muyters congratulates him on his big brains for being a minister. Perhaps hard to justify because it requires about the least physical activity in the nation's range of professions. I could call it hypocrisy, but I'm not sure about his after-hours activities. Maybe he has a second job as a longshoreman. Though more likely he goes to the firing range, where he shoots clay pigeons. Scoffing at his aide for his performance "Why did you load blanks instead of buckshot? Weren't you thinking?"

A wider point of view, part two.

2011-03-19T23:16:00.010+01:00

In part one I talked at length about current games and their console and PC features. One of which is an often ignored option that has been irking me to no end: A configurable Field Of View (FoV) variable. A limited FoV is usually a telling sign of consolitis, a term the online PC community uses to denote a game that is marred by its console origins. Yet I have not explained just why it's such a big deal. Why the fuss over adjustable features? And what makes the FoV so important?

An example might clarify what I'm talking about. If you want to fully notice the difference between the following clips, watch the peripheral vision, size of opponents, sense of speed and turning speed. The effect is clearly visible when you look at the onscreen size and position of the AK47. This first clip is Black Ops at its standard 65 FoV:

This second clip is Black Ops at its maximum allowed FoV of 80. Which still considered on the low side by most PC gamers who'd want the scale to go as far as 90:

The differences are subtle, yet make a world of difference while playing. CoD might not be the best example of this because the gap between min and max FoV isn't that big. The engine is quite performant and so the standard FoV is still quite wide compared to other games.
But does it make a difference? Of course it does. Compare the render area with this picture in picture image images courtesy of the GamingAU.net Forums). In the picture is a screenshot of Bad Company 2, the numbers on the shot is the used FoV. 55 Is what the console uses, 85 is typically around what a PC gamer would use on a 16:10 monitor.

The difference in number of assets that are displayed on-screen is clearly visible. More on screen logically means the computer will need more system resources to display them. Also note that the 55 FoV screen is zoomed in, enlarging objects in depth. The shot with 85 FoV is less zoomed in, but objects in the distance appear smaller on screen.
There's an additional concern with the zoomed-in view. If we were to apply 3D vision to it, the effect would be less pronounced. If you've ever looked through binoculars and moved from left to right, you'll know that depth perception is minimized. This means that any game with a very narrow FoV will gain little from 3D effects, and might even get in the way of gameplay because it is so unnatural, at least on PC.
If the viewing angle gets to big though, the image will become noticeably warped, like watching through a fisheye lens. What's more, if more image is squeezed into the view port of the monitor, objects in depth will get pushed even further away, making them smaller and, as a side effect, harder to aim at in a shooter. Debunking the claim that increasing the FoV would be some sort of visual cheat, just because you get to "see more". Players need to find a workable medium, one that looks and feels comfortable.

PC gamers demand adjustable FoV because, unlike their console playing brethren, they're sitting quite close to the screen. A low FoV makes you look around constantly in order to take in your environment. Combine this with the screen distance, a lack of peripheral vision and one can easily get motion sick.
What's more, a larger FoV is more immersive because our natural FoV is quite large as well. So it is best to match the natural FoV with the one in the game. The further you sit from the screen, the smaller it can get without appearing unnatural. But when watching a screen up close, as is the case with a PC, it needs to be quite wide. To drive the point home: if your eyes were the screen, logically, you'd want to have the full natural FoV which about 180 degrees. Fun fact, a large FoV also greatly increases the sense of speed.

So why don't console games provide a bigger FoV? The low FoV on consoles could be there for a number of reasons. As I mentioned before, one is that the player sits a distance away from the TV, his "window" into the virtual world. Making a smaller FoV appear more natural. We'll ignore the naturalistic appearance of a pair of arms more than a meter away for now. One argument against this then is: why don't they incorporate a FoV slider and give players a choice. I can imagine some console gamers are sitting quite close to the screen too.
Perhaps console devs simply can't. And that really narrows down the number of design choices.
Linked to system resources, a low FoV can also be due to the limited horsepower of the consoles. Rendering less makes a console render faster. Here is where we get to the crux of this topic. This highlights what infuriates PC gamers so much about badly ported shooters: inferior hardware dictating and limiting the way a game plays on potentially superior PC hardware.

In the past PC's have always been used for immersive applications that greatly benefit from wide viewing angles. A good example are flight simulators where, even in the early days, multiple screens would be used to simulate a real cockpit in which the pilot could watch not only in front but also to the sides. This was even more useful when piloting a fighter, where dogfights would take place in 3D space. By which I mean a fighter pilot has to keep track of his targets all around him, back, front, left, right, up and down. Watching rigidly ahead would narrow his spatial awareness to less than 1/6 of what it should ideally be. If the used foV is around 90 degrees.
We could quite easily change the context to shooters, where a soldier needs to keep track of his targets in a 3D environment. Perhaps not so much under and above him, but certainly in front, to the left and right and to the back.

With all this in mind. Let's watch the following youtube movie. The commentator, the esteemed El Presador, doesn't have an inkling about how a game engine works technically, but what he's saying from his gamer background is pertinent. And that's what really matters. The game is Killzone 3.

If you enjoyed that, there's more on topic El Presador on Killzone 3.

Killzone 3 is a prime example. A low FoV is its main persisting problem, as it has been present since the first Killzone. And its bad controls are always what people complained about however the "sluggish controls" are wrongly attributed to the controls. The game looks sluggish because the view is so zoomed in. It can make people nauseous. It makes the environment harder to navigate which in turn makes people run into walls. That's also what happened in the video.
I assume Guerilla squeezed the PS3 for performance, making the game look good, by squeezing the FoV. Render less to make it render faster. And despite the sacrifices the game doesn't run any faster than 30fps. Meaning that a TV running at 60hz will display every frame in the game twice, where it would display any given frame only once at 60fps. Twice the frame rate makes a game feel more responsive.

Because engines have gotten harder to run on consoles, the FoV has become more narrow. And in many cases can be blamed for the sluggish or unresponsiveness in console shooters. Which makes all of them fail to topple Call Of Duty. It has the lightest engine, the widest, most natural, FoV, the highest frame rate and the most responsive controls on the market. Does this mean it is untouchable? On the current consoles it probably does. But I for one feel that the age of Call Of Duty is coming to an end. The new engines dazzle players with their effects, physics, realism and immersion. The visual fidelity of Cryengine 3 and Frostbite 3 will raise the standard in a way that Call Of Duty players will expect the same quality from their favorite game. Unfortunately though, if Call Of Duty has to upgrade its engine, it will also have to leave behind its 60fps and 65 degrees FoV in favor of 30fps and 55 or less FoV. With the same sacrifices on gameplay in favor of visuals, it would get attributed the same dubious award of looking great, but playing like garbage. Current console hardware only goes so far.

For PC players though, this tipping point is a sweet release from the shackles of console hardware. We're seeing it with Battlefield 3 already, where PC is the leading platform. PC hardware does have the power to run a 64 player battlefield game at 60fps with a 80+ FoV. Which is bound to get the goad of at least some ardent console players who'll have to admit that the PC platform is leaping miles ahead in both gameplay, scope and graphics. The consoles will only be getting a limited version of the very same game. Again, Battlefield 3 will have to use DX9 technology on consoles leaving out all the realism gained with DX11.

Ultimately, it's hard to point fingers. I guess the lead artist or lead gameplay designer of these games are responsible for allowing it. Even though they might not even be aware of the issue. Not knowing about the legacy of shooters or technical limitations. Perhaps they simply have to comply with the lead programmer that the game just doesn't run fast enough with these kind of high-end visuals.
Maybe it's the fault of their customers, supporting bad practice with their money. Though they are even less aware of the issues. And are at a loss about what some other, often PC players, are raving on about. Why are they getting so upset? They only know that this game doesn't feel as good as Call Of Duty but can't quite put their finger on as to why. So they play it for a week and go back to their beloved franchise with the crisp controls and the responsive frame rate. Even though they wished the other game would take them somewhere else.
Then, the newest trailer of Battlefield 3 stuns them into a new dream. The lighting looks amazing! And look at the soft shadows! Will it run at 60fps? But of course it won't. Even Josh Olin, Treyach community manager, hinted at that smirking all the way from his gold plated throne. Disappointed once again console players will go back to Black Ops and Modern Warfare 3, while DICE wonders why only the PC crowd keeps cheering them on. And EA, learning too little, will break their heads over how they could possibly reclaim the FPS crown from Activision once more. Funny that, how this cycle repeats itself.

A wider point of view, part one.

2011-03-19T03:01:00.019+01:00

I may or may not have mentioned the end of civilization recently, which may or may not be coming our way soon. But just in case of a global meltdown, I'm preparing for extreme violence. Luckily as a Belgian I'm not far away from one of the world's most renowned weapons manufacturers. So when I go online and equip a FN F2000, such as were delivered to the Libyan special forces, to headshot teenagers in Battlefield, I'm actually celebrating our great Belgian Culture. How our Minister of War, Pieter De Crem, would swell with pride and joy upon reading this post. If only he knew how to read. Reading might be a shallow skill however, when compared to the way the man can pre flight check a Lockheed C130 by patting the side of the fuselage as if congratulating it after winning the Ostend Derby. Sadly, the last great Belgian military victory dates back to when horses were high tech in the year 1302, when we kicked the French all the way back to France. We haven't had a French related problem ever since, proving the value of armed conflict once more. But let's not dwell on political games.

Suffice to say, I've been playing a lot of games. Mostly shooters. My most recent stint started about half a year ago with the release of the Medal Of Honor reboot. But even before that the market has been flooded with big budget hardcore first person shooter (fps) games. One remarkable trend among these titles: most of them are multiplatform. Console popularity is on an all time high with developers because of the large user base. So the leading versions are often for console and then get ported over to the PC. A process that almost always leads to an inferior PC title compared to pure PC games. Developers porting from console to PC usually leave out a lot of functionality or options the hardcore PC community is used to. Such as mod tools and dedicated servers. But the lack of one often ignored option has been irking me to no end: A configurable Field Of View variable.
The field of view determines what the viewing angle (in degrees) of a game is according to the old 4:3 aspect ratio. So a 65 FoV gives the player a 65 degrees viewing angle. This same variable, 65, will result in a somewhat wider view in 16:10 and 16:9 widescreen aspect rations.. Maybe it's not quite as ignored as I think though, but I am getting the idea that many devs just don't care. Which leads people who actually are passionate about this topic to write about how devs just don't care.

The following blog posts require a bit of gaming history to really be understood. This first post sets the scene for what is to follow.
I will talk about first person shooters on both PC and consoles. The differences, the design choices and the consequences. To some this might be sliced bread, but I'll highlight the necessary info just in case. And this chronological summary will provide some perspective on the genre today. This is by no means a complete list though, but it highlights the big hitters.

The game that popularized the "modern war" setting was Call Of Duty 4. Current generation CoD games were made with a very heavily modified Quake3 engine by Infinity Ward. The game has a fully moddable FoV in the .cfg file, which could be modified with a simple text editor. The game was smash hit and instant classic on consoles first and PC second. Which led to the sequel Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 2.

A big console shift happened with this game. All variables were locked away, including the FoV. While still having a somewhat usable FoV even for PC, other neglected options, the biggest of which were dedicated servers and the access to an ingame console, made this game into the most hated Call Of Duty for the hardcore PC community. The outstanding production values made things worse as Infinity Ward dropped out of favor. Not supporting the game beyond a few simple bug fixes and exploits added insult to injury.

Not long after Battlefield Bad Company 2 was released. The name "Bad Company" denotes the console offshoot of the Battlefield series. Made by European developer DICE, the original had no PC version but the sequel did. Surprisingly it was quite configurable via an editable config file which allowed PC gamers to change the FoV, among other things. One year after release, the game still has quite an active PC community. While not a steamworks game it still makes the steam top 10 most played games list almost every day. Yet it can't get close to the popularity of CoD.

The 2010 release of Medal Of Honor marked the reboot of the series with a modern combat setting. Not surprisingly it was heavily influenced by the succes of MW2. It had a troubled development though and the game was ultimately split into two separate pieces with two different engines. Resulting in two quite distinct games. The Single Player campaign used Epic's Unreal Engine 3. Which has encrypted configuration files, making it impossible to adjust the FoV. Producer EA pushed the game primarily for the console market to compete with CoD but got absolutely destroyed in sales.
The multiplayer side of the game was done by DICE. They used their proprietary Frostbite engine giving players the same options as Bad Company 2. Making it quite configurable.

The current king of the market is Call Of Duty Black Ops. Made by Treyarch, it has been well supported across all platforms. Needed indeed because the release version of the game was very buggy for PC and PS3. The lead PC programmer (@pcdev) made a promise to make this a genuine PC title. A statement that was bound to come back to haunt him. Yet as a result this CoD game is much more configurable and enjoyable than MW2, its biggest rival. The games options menu has a built-in FoV slider. It and many more variables can be edited with a text editor just as before too. A remarkable and commendable return to form. As were dedicated servers. Mod tools are promised with a future patch.

Not a cross platform game but still important is Guerrilla's Killzone 3, as it is intended to be the flagship FPS game on Playstation 3. It's backed by Sony and presumably the answer to Microsoft's Halo before CoD took over the market. Rightly lauded for it's superb visual design but despite all effort has failed to catch on and hasn't even come close to competing with CoD.

Bulletstorm was made in response to the "serious" military shooters of the last year. This over-the-top arcade shooter was ported to PC and uses the Unreal3 engine. Many PC options were left out in the release version and the config files encrypted, which sent forums alight with rage. To soften the blow a bit for PC gamers, a decrypter was posted on the Bulletstorm forums so they could edit the config file.

Homefront is made by Kaos Studios. A spiritual successor to the developer's earlier game Frontlines. They develop games using Unreal3, not a very promising sign if we look at its history. However, Kaos has been wooing PC gamers with exclusive features, dedicated servers and the promise of editable config files. The game was recently released with moderate success. Undoubtedly it will get stiff competition from existing and upcoming games. But the success of Counter Strike has shown that a PC shooter doesn't necessarily needs to be a looker to be a darling. If it keeps getting support.

Speaking of lookers, Crysis 2 is developed by Crytek. Responsible for the exquisite Far Cry & Crysis 1. Crytek will now foray into the console market with this sequel. Now suddenly skeptical PC gamers are promised the same great Crysis style support and features. Crytek have a lot to live up to as the first Crysis had and still has the most impressive game engine to date. Just about every variable was editable. The game had dedicated servers and modding tools. It was pretty much exactly what the PC community wanted from a FPS game. Gameplay footage from Crysis 2 has been very promising so far. The demo, released on 4/03/2011, was not. Gamers all over the internet were predicting doom and gloom because the demo lacked just about every configurable setting while carrying over a few key console features, such as the now infamous "press start to play" opening screen and aim assist for gamepad users. A demo isn't representative however, so here's hoping Crytek remembers its promises.

Brink is being developed by ID software protegé Splash Damage. Like bulletstorm a reaction to current "realistic" shooters and like Team Fortress 2 is very stylized. The game uses the ID4 engine, known from Doom3, which was also used in Splash Damage's Enemy Territory Quake Wars. They seem to be very aggressive in their stance on the genre, and very confident of the game's success. They also have the material to back up their claim as the game seems to be in great shape. The PC legacy of the ID4 engine is telling, the game is promised to be fully configurable with an ingame console, FoV modification and dedicated servers on PC. If the game is a success it could spell the end for Call Of Duty clones.

Speaking of ID software. It is also cooking up a new game, with a new engine. It's called Rage and will appear on consoles and PC. Curiously, it seems to be the only one breaking new ground with its engine. As the FoV seems very wide compared to other console shooters. Which is good news for everyone. Perhaps the venerable giant, I'm talking about ID, can come back to compete in style.

Battlefield 3 is the upcoming DICE blockbuster. Using an upgraded frostbite engine, it was originally a PC exclusive and will be using the latest DX11 technology. Meaning the PC version is the one to be downgraded to the DX9 generation consoles. Couple this with DICE's excellent PC support and it should be in great shape.

And then there's Valve. They release few new games, but instead opt to support their games long after release. Counter Strike, Left For Dead and Team Fortress 2 are prime examples. Updated almost every other day, fully modable, dedicated servers and more have made these games fan favorites.
Valve had their own FoV incident when Half-Life 2 was first released on PC in 2004. Many of people were complaining about getting motion sick while playing the game. The standard FoV was set at 75. Shortly after, a patch addressed the problem by adding a feature to modify the FoV to 90. Keep in mind that the Call of Duty standard anno 2011 is 65. You can read more about this historic event here and here and even here.
Most likely the game was configured as such because at the time Valve didn't want their brand new engine to run slowly. So they probably narrowed the FoV to boost performance. Which is key to my next post.

There's another layer of politics going on though. I've mentioned developers so far but it's the publishers who're really competing for the market. The big players are Activision with everything Call Of Duty, EA with Battlefield, Medal Of Honor and Crysis, THQ with Homefront and Bethesda with Brink and Rage.
At present, everyone on the market is trying to knock Activision of its throne, with little success. In my next post I'll explain just why this is and why it's probably not going to change anytime soon while this battle is fought on the consoles. Which in a way has consequences for our PC gaming freedom.

Don't forget to also read part two of A wider point of view.

Rebel without a clue, part two

2011-03-06T01:05:00.015+01:00

I'm feeling a bit depressed after the first part of Rebel, so let me lighten the mood by playing some music. Music softens the senses and mine are sharp. As sharp as the peeling knife that cut the top of my right thumb while doing the dishes yesterday. I didn't realise this at first but the blood stains on the door, wall and coffee mug gave me a clue. Tired as I was, it took almost a whole minute while I feared for my sanity, before I finally felt a dull pain emanating from my thumb and saw a shallow cut about 15 millimetres long. It had reopened and small drops of blood were slowly trickling out. Next I see the walls bleeding however I'm afraid a simple band-aid might not help, because I've been on edge for a while now. Helping me to stave off clinical insanity is Mozart, and his K262 concerto performed by La Grande Écurie et la Chambre Du Roy under direction of Jean-Claude Malgoire. "An immortal masterpiece" it says on the box. There's some irony there but with the mood now set to a suitably light tone, let me continue my irrational but not insane rant about the coming end of the world.

Because the end is coming our way. Fast as an incoming comet, chilling as a new ice age, scorching as global warming, sweeping as a tsunami and inescapable as global slavery. At least, if some sources on the Internet are to be believed. A truth that has quite a bit of apostles in the world.
One of which is Albert, a friend of a nephew. Albert is something else and proud of it. He's the waving finger whenever you try to have a discussion about the upcoming elections, our national pass time. He's the warning voice saying that no amount of votes or politics can stave off the inevitable end of the world. He'll sometimes add that some of the authorities are in on the plan to enslave everybody. With motives ranging from greed to plain evil. Everything goes to achieve their goals. Even global warming is set up to kill of part of the populace. The question that never gets asked though is why a robber would burn money in order to get it? Albert would interject and say that he doesn't, he raises taxes to battle this so-called global warming and pockets the money. What the money will be used for is never stated. It might never be used at all because, also according to Albert, all forms of currency are about to disappear with the rise of the new world order.

His claim to this truth is incontestable because he has read it on a web page blog post opinion piece, much like this one. He is convinced that everything written down has to have at least some modicum of truth about it. Trough this lens Albert also looks at his preferred religion: having no preferred religion. He's the one looking for the red wire running through all the world's most popular beliefs. Believing that the thing they have in common must be the core of truth. Life after death is a good example because just about every religion assures everyone that they'll never stop being. The success of which is simple to explain. Few people exist who have the imagination to imagine not existing. Death reverts us back to the state we were in before birth: not there. Try asking people if they were aware of their personality before they were born and count the frowns. When asked about this Albert says he's had past lives, but he has trouble remembering exactly what or who he was. Luckily there are many people willing to help him remember. From would-be gurus to truth tellers. Albert has a lot to look forward to; caught in an infinite loop of reincarnation on a planet that is getting worse as time goes along.

Of course every religion has its "end days" scenario and Albert has adopted a few. I could also be so arrogant as to say the world will end in my lifetime. Special as I am to be one of the very, very few people in the history of existence that get to rightly predict and witness The End. But if it doesn't happen, I'd look very, very stupid. Most of the time I look stupid enough as it is so I'm not going to take voluntary steps to make it worse.
It's mostly old people who tend to speak in terms of doom and gloom, because of the thing that looms largely on the horizon: their own demise. As if nothing has a right to exist if they don't get to. Most youth with health and prospects have optimism about the future. So what makes young Albert so gloomy then?
Albert insists he's always right about everything. When his girlfriend broke up with him, he was trying to get me to brake up with mine. He said that all women are deranged freeloaders, and we'd be better off without. Or with different ones. Albert get's kicked out of school. That's OK, so should you, because the school system is used for indoctrination. Albert can't find a job. That's fine, you shouldn't work either. Cannabis can be bought just as easily on welfare. Albert is poor. Not a problem, you should be too and concentrate on what's really important. Like expanding your mind, man.
Albert doesn't care about his health, and why should he? Why should you? The world will end in 2012 anyway. As "predicted" by the Mayans. Be merry, have fun, relax and make love, not war. But what then if what he thought was wrong? Now you're uneducated, homeless, angry and crawling with STDs. I'm rather thinking he doesn't want to be alone. It all comes down to this one sentence: "if you are like me then that gives me and my actions legitimacy". Even though he values his uniqueness and independence above all else.

If there is one thing Albert and me can agree on is the existence of aliens. I think there's an immensely high probability of extraterrestrial intelligent life. Albert also believes that in addition to the trans dimensional aliens that are looking over your shoulder as you read this, Draconians, Pleiadians, reptilians and archangels.
There's a theory that says aliens have influenced ancient civilizations. Part of me hopes they did. I hope the smoke, fire and hocus pocus in the bible is only a description of the spaceships stopping by to toss out a bearded madman or some such. That way, when they come back somewhere around 2012, as Albert believes, every Catholic will have to admit their belief in god was actually alien worship. Of course the aliens, as superior beings, will see this flaw in parts of the earth's populace and promptly send believes to the alien sweatshop, where they can continue their worshiping habits. In contrast, anyone who did not subscribe to religious doctrine but instead thought for themselves will be welcomed among the Alien ranks. And by the way, let's say humanity were to enter a galactic society, don't you think it would have to discard something as divisive as religion? I doubt that will happen though. So for now we are on our own. And we have to solve our crises ourselves.
As a professional problem solver, I'll have a crack at it. It's high time we come to the conclusion that we need to deal with the problem at the source. What's really taxing the planet? The root of all this evil is humanity itself. Or at least part of it. The part that makes us spread like a wild-fire, consuming even the air we breathe. How to deal with the situation? We can't simply remove people, that would be immoral. The solution might be then to stop reproducing the way we are. Though it might not happen because every scrap of humanity thinks it is entitled to reproduce itself and add yet another mouth to the teat of nature. Even Albert thinks children are the holy fruit of love and our only hope for the future. With fewer natural resources every excess child brings us one step closer to the fight of all against all. The inability of government to sustain its populace, protecting it from such a scenario in the first place, will dissolve government. The mask of civilization cast aside to show the hungry fangs of the inner ape. No, releasing your knowledge and fresh ideas upon the world is much more useful than releasing your genes. As it stands, I would much rather conserve the talent and knowledge that is in the world already in favour of an expanding population. This means we should prolong human life and keep up the quality of it as much as possible. Who, apart from the suicidic, would rather have a decrepit body at an old age over a youthful body at a high age? I know some of you will rightfully think that I'm hoping such treatment will be available for myself in my lifetime, special as I am. Some people might cry out that I'm just afraid of death, and they are not. Willfully ignorant perhaps, unable to change the fact of the unavoidable, best to cope with it as best you can.
But I would like to point out that they are wrong. They too do obsess about death. Looking both ways before crossing a road, wearing seat-belts, signing up for insurance. And they obsess even more about the health of their children. There's no such thing as DNA insurance. If your offspring doesn't survive, neither do your genes. And that's it for your personal branch of evolution. Luckily for those occasions the human race has sidetracked natural selection, so it doesn't really matter. Everybody gets to live. No matter how muddled the gene pool. Don't get me wrong, I'm thankful for it too, but I'd like to take matters to the next step.
The books and sites Albert reads have a different view though, every one of their readers are the pinnacle of human evolution, ready to ascend. So get down to earth and back to nature! Cast aside those inoculations and medications! Don't you know that no disease can kill you!? Their children to be gods among men. Prepare for the tidal wave of indigo children! For they will defy the global government, aided by aliens from parallel dimensions, aided by telekinesis and telepathy, aided by your dreams and illusions!
If you can't quite comprehend the words of that last sentence, don't worry. Just get any issue of X-men and you'll be up to speed within reading five pages. Just don't go believing what you read, or some person might write some arsenic blog post about you.

Just in case though I'm already stocking up and saving up for a self sustaining underground bunker. I've got the plans right here, and a few shovels. I only need to convince a few of Albert's satanic friends that satan really is down there, near the core of the earth. After all, nobody has been there to prove otherwise so he really has to be. When they dig deep enough they will get to him eventually. Of course, a day or two in they will probably find it to be too much work and get back to playing Xbox. Leaving me with my personal underground lair.
This way I'll be safe for when humanity starts loosing it's mind. And by the time generations of post-civilization cannibals have chewed their way though the concrete walls in search of the holy grail, all they'll find will be my desiccated mummy and Mozart playing through the speakers for all eternity, until the Aliens finally arrive. Expecting a golden race of Illuminati and Elvis Presley. But finding nothing more on our brown planet earth than the corpse of a civilization that found it more important to consume than to construct.

Rebel without a clue, part one

2010-09-23T22:59:00.010+02:00

Some observers might observe that I am not a very good observer. Because most of the things that are happening to me, are happening to just me and only me. Perhaps because most of it is even happening inside my own head! So I might want to observe very carefully so I can pick apart what's in here and what's out there.

There's always the one observer who proclaims that everything you know is wrong. You're taught by the wrong people. Craving the wrong needs. Watching the wrong television. Eating the wrong food. Worshiping the wrong god. Handed the flashlight of inquiry but kept in the dark, as to not overstep any boundaries in order to keep your attention on what you need to attend.

One such is Albert, a friend of my nephew. Albert is something else and proud of it. He tries to cast a shadow of doubt on every aspect of life. Except for the ones he really likes. Speaking mostly in hyperbole he commits one of the worst sins: exaggeration. Contrast is turned to 150%. So when trying to discuss a black and white world with the man, you're either friend or foe. Apt words for someone ready to take up arms about what he perceives is true. He's strengthened in his convictions because he has quite a lot of allies who share his point of view. A body of men who've all agreed to be nonconformists.

He's a higher education drop-out. When asked about it, he'll state that the school system didn't really suit him anyway. To his credit though, he has tried a few directions, from psychology to art. The first because of Albert's immense people-skills and the last because his boundless creative energies. Knowing Albert a bit, I'm sorry to say he might be lacking in both departments. He can help people and create art in the same capacity that everybody knows how to sing, or how everyone knows how to be a politician, or a soccer trainer. From the looks of it these are skills that don't require much if only you're born with the talent. But that can't be imagined. Plus there's training involved. His ambitions were well founded too, change the world for the better. Too bad then that his ambitions were quenched when he saw the volume of paper being handed to him on the very first academic day. The fact that changing the world takes a lot of work cooled him on that and he gave up on ambition all together. There had to be an easier way. Like flipping the switch that would make it all right. So he went in search for the switch. The one thing that will instantly reverse the wrongs into rights. A search for a holy grail that will end in the realization that there probably isn't one. I don't know what is the cause of this binary thinking. Perhaps it hails all the way back to the cave where problems were addressed as "food or no food", "crap or no crap", "sleep or no sleep", "woman or no woman" where the solution was to just take it, or in some cases drag it back to the cave by the hair. It sure took a lot of time before "to be or not to be" entered someone's mind and even depressingly longer before "god or no god". A sure sign that the binary brain needs a lot of education.

I was surprised to hear things went like this because any sane person knows it takes a lot of work to do anything in this world. And I'm not just talking about mending world hunger, even feeding yourself can be a daunting task sometimes. You might know what I'm talking about.
For example, whenever I want to make myself a sandwich I'm first faced with the fact that all plates, cutlery and cups have been standing in the sink for a couple of days, marinating in the remains of tea and coffee. The knives have a hardened crust of jam or chocolate paste and the plates have doubled in size with the crusted remains of past meals. I have to turn the hot water tap and wait for it to get warm. A time and energy investment that's hard to justify in the first place so since I have to wash up a few pieces I might as well wash all of them. After this form of ritual cleansing comes time to get a few loaves of bread. The bread is nowhere to be found. Except for the one inside the freezer, which is frozen solid to the inner left side. It's there just in case we ran out of bread and all bakers decided to go on strike because inflation had inflated the costs of production. The running out of bread happened the night before and the bread was bought only hours before that. But no matter, it has to go into the microwave to be defrosted. Upon opening said apparatus I realize it still contains some leftovers on yet another dirty plate. The food has long gone stale so it goes into the bin, which is located in the hall of the building. During the commute to the hall, the bread is melting to a puddle of dough and frost water because instead of inputting one minute of "melt some of the ice" I have put in "melt all solid matter". A common mistake because the defrosting function is only one notch removed from the "nuclear fusion" function. At this stage hunger is starting to take over from logic so I take the roughly loaf shaped item out of the radiation and reach for the butter - a cup of scrape-marks lined with crumbs and butter, achieving the worlds worst cocktail impression. Some fresh butter is obtained on the way back from the bin in the hallway where the crumb-cocktail finds it's final resting place next to the leftovers. When the phone doesn't start to ring when the sandwich is two centimeters away from your mouth, it's a piece of cake. But in the end, all I wished for was a sandwich. Wishful thinking simplifies things. Life never is.

Albert once read a book about wishful thinking. It was written by an American woman who has a degree from the prestigious university of www.degreesoftruth.com. But what's more, she once talked to the Dalai Lama and was infinitely blessed by a Buddhist physique and a revelation which lead to the book. Albert must have wished for a lot of money because he has been declining a lot of jobs of the last few months.
His professional activities consist entirely of refusing work from the temping office. Mainly because the jobs are too mean. He was told by his parents and teachers as a child that he was special, unique, a gift of god. Through childhood and puberty he read stories about heroes and kings. Affirming this belief and so the need for a special destiny remains. No, he wants something important and meaningful. Apparently, he knows too much to be filling up cardboard boxes.
My critics are happy to point out that I never found myself predisposed to fill boxes as a profession. It's true. But I never pretended to know too much to do so in the first place. I only knew I wanted to do something else. So I set out to know too much. How do you know what to learn? By specializing in what you already know. How do you know what you already know? Recount your talents, and think about how they've expanded over time.

Albert knows too much because he's got the Internet. But that's a chapter I'll get to.

The Humanism of Mass Effect 2

2010-03-19T00:50:00.015+01:00

If there's one thing we can thank the bible for it's the way it has made literary achetypes and memes. At first glance Mass Effect seems to borrow quite a bit of them. Project Lazarus, a club called Afterlife, ascension... to name but a few. But could there be something more going on? In my previous posts I've spotted a very engaged humanist vision in the stories and characters of their games. So I kept my eyes peeled while playing Mass Effect 2. In this post I want to explore how far the bible analogy goes and where it breaks down. Are there any differences? Can it tell us something about our human condition today - which is for some, if not a lot of, people a big part of what defines art.

Mass Effect 2 doesn't seem to be as epic as its predecessor. It's more intimate. The game is much more focussed on its characters, interaction and dialogue. The events less grande in scope. Shepard needs to build a team to take out the Collectors. Emphasis is laid on the team building. The taking out is done in, what is presumed, a suicide mission behind enemy lines. And because of this, you end up fighting primarily to save your team, saving the galaxy seems like a secondary objective.

I should say that this post will potentially be one big crackpot theory. As the rather pretentious title of this post might suggest. It's a continuation of my own series started with my Dragon Age post. In which I said that Bioware has a very strong humanist viewpoint. Christians might call it anti-christian. But besides the fact that any religion will feel picked on no matter what, there might something to be said for those feelings, given the biblical names and themes in the game. Also keep in mind that this is what I'm reading from the game and isn't said to be the outspoken opinion of the company.

Religion in Mass Effect is rather curious. Because no alien race in the Mass Effect Universe is religious. That is to say, truly religious in so far as the player would have to believe that there is a "true religion" within the fiction.
When Ashley admits she and her family are very religious, Shephard would rather believe her dead father to be a zombie than believe he's watching from heaven. "Wherever that is" she adds, a logical comment to make when you're born in a spacefaring civilisation. Heaven was supposed to be a sky kingdom in the clouds, as evident in classical paintings, and space doesn't have quite the same kind of clouds nor anything we could naïvely call "the sky".
As Shepard you can confess to Ashley that he is religious, just as she is. It is considered a Paragon choice. However, Bioware has made the Renegade Shepard canon. So they have made Shepard, de facto, an anti-religious Atheïst (ruling out even Agonsticism).

The most outspoken religious race in ME are the Hannar. They are a Jellyfish-like race, soft spoken but a bit naïve. And because of it, often the butt of jokes. And mostly referred to as "the Jellys".They revere "the inkindlers". A superior race who bestowed knowledge upon them. The inkindlers turn out the be the Protheans.And they turn out to be an extinct alien race.
And then there's the Asari. A spiritual race. They often speak of "the Goddess". Not an odd choice for a race of females. A further comment on our human beliefs where no deity could be female in a socienty dominated by men.
The game is very positive about the Asari point of view. Yet the faith is dispelled as soon as the Novaria mission in the first Mass Effect. Where Benezia bemoans the lack of a "promised white light, they said there would be..." with her dying breath. It isn't said that the Goddess is an actual deity or a spiritual unconscienceness, but by Benezia's comment there is at least some desception going on.
A portion of the Geth, a sapient machine race, worship the Reapers. Because they are supreme mechanical synthetic lifeforms. That they do not fit the picture of an ideal God needs no explanation. Or does it? They are powerful, eternal, or so they say, have worshippers, and promise ascension. Ascension is the term Harbinger, the main antagonist, uses in Mass Effect 2 during the collectors' harvest of human colonies. This because their actual physical biomass will be used to construct a "human reaper". A god in the image of man. Man made god. Or plainly put, a god made out of Human bodies. Bioware is painting quite a cynical picture of what a god is.

The central figure in the series is Shephard. Gathering disciples of all walks of life of many worlds. He's a born leader. His name is Shepard. It's pretty clear that the closest resemblance is Jesus. More so in Mass Effect 2, where he dies and is ressurected with project Lazarus. "Aha, Lazarus is not Jesus!" sings a choirus of prepubescent boys. Indeed it isn't but imagine what game this would have been if the project had been called "Project Jesus". It would hit the player over the head with symbolism that isn't really nessessary. It would change the tone of the game dramatically and would propably offend a portion of the lucrative American audience.

The meaning of the Illusive man becomes a bit more complicated. He's got godlike qualities, like the Reapers. He's seemingly all-knowing. Apparently lives for ever. Doesn't give a sod about his health. Does whatever he deems nessessary. Raises Shepard from the dead. And like the god of the Christian and Muslim faith cares about humans first and foremost. A position that's bound to be problematic in a universe with a variety of sentient species.

Like all Bioware games, there's a lot to do about morals. As with religion. Both have a prominent place in everyday live. They seem linked even to the extent that it's generally believed that religion is where morals originated. I noticed that ethics in this story come from the characters themselves, not ever from some dogma or handbook. I could say these characters are a mouthpiece for the writers of the story, schooling the player in modern philosophy.

A prime example is Mordin, a Salarian scientist. It may be a stretch to call it an archetype. But perhaps accurate in this case. He's a genius who's considered a devil by some but does good work regardless. He's got his own set of morals that seem to work well enough. You can't call him an evil character because he's forced to act and tries to make the most of it. He's content to know that no one but himself could have done a better job.
Mordin comments on the responsabilities of aiding foreign species and the dangers of bypassing any true need of technology and knowledge. In the context of our history, this is a comment on how irrisponsable Humans have been in founding, or rather annexing, colonies. How native Americans were used against each other. How missionairies brought civilisation to the "primitive" indiginous people of South America. Or how industrial Europe carved Afrika into pieces for its own needs. And with that brought modern weapons into the African tribe wars. Wars originating in no small way from the colonisation. The Krogan are analogous to the African Tribes in that regard.

But there are more analogies, biblical ones. Miranda has been made out of the rib of her "father". Tali is a virgin Mary, untouched. Though Shepard gets a chance to change that. Garrus is John the Baptist, not quite a failed messiah but a precursor to Shepard.
Jacob is perhaps a symbol of humanity standing alone. He's been separated from his father and has done just fine in constructing his life. In the story he discovers the faux-paradise his father has landed himself into, confronts the man and finds a repulsive immoral self appointed hedonist King. He's almost a caricature of an evil, self-centered god. Jacob is disgusted and turns his back on him.

I consider myself to be somewhat of a humanist. I also consider the Mass Effect games to be one of the best games I've played these last few years. The cross-pollonation between these make it extra interesting for me. Mass Effect is furthering the case that we have to see some games not only as consumer products but as carriers of information and points of view. Congratulations to the talent at Bioware for raising the bar once again. I can't wait to see where Mass Effect 3 will take us.

Game of 2009: Dragon Age: Origins

2010-01-05T22:40:00.011+01:00

For a game that is so heavily story based I think I can still place my fondness of it on its gameplay. It had been a while since my last party based RPG. Yet, it felt familiar. As if I had switched on the light in a room I hadn't been in for years, and everything was still the way I left it.

Dragon Age (DA from now on) feels like the distilled gentlemen's version of what a party based RPG should be. It's for people who grew up playing Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale or Neverwinter Nights. Or for the hardcore MMO players of today. It's for people who enjoy a methodical approach to combat, who enjoy tactics with an abundance of skills and spells. There's somewhat of a contradiction in there though. The thing that is most striking about this game is the evolution it shows. An evolution that has been made in the MMO genre. And it's quite a simple one at that. It's what a lot of MMO developers call the "holy trinity". It's the steady base upon which party tactics are built. The tank, the DPS and the healer. These classes are mirrored in the base classes of the game. The Warrior (tank), the rogue (DPS) and mage (healer). Of course there's plenty of cross-over so Warriors or Mages can have a DPS build, and there's class specializations that push characters into a certain direction, change party tactics or just make a class excel even more in what they are supposed to do.

But it's no wonder that Dragon Age has been called a single player MMO. And that's a good thing. A single player game can sidestep most of what is (almost) impossible to do in an MMO, and that is to have a lasting effect in the game world. Cause and effect is also one of DA most remarkable features. From beginning to end there are choices that have to be made and most, if not all, have some sort of effect, either small or big, later in the game. No other company but Bioware has been quite so adept at crafting a narrative structure like this in such a cohesive and new universe.

Congratulations Bioware, again! Dragon Age: Origins is my personal Game Of The Year 2009. Other possible contenders were Team Fortress 2, Street Fighter 4, Dawn Of War 2, Modern Warfare 2 and Torchlight.

There's a few more thoughts I'd like to share about DA.
There seems to be an overarching storyline, regardless of the player's chosen origin and it's that of mages versus the Chantry. In modern terms one would call it Science versus Religion. A theme that really speaks to me. The mages being represented by the Circle of Magi and several independent more experimental mages. The Chantry is a matriarchal church lording over the Circle with an army of Templars. Who are basically Paladins - church warriors - who've been conditioned through indoctrination and Lyrium, the game's fuel for magic, to hunt down Rogue or dangerous mages. Their partial immunity for magic stems from training and lyrium addiction but destroys their mind in the end. The setup for this hierarchy of powers is because Mages have the potential to bring Demons into the physical world if they are not able to resists their seductions in the fade. The fade is the game's version of the dream world into which mages can enter with full awareness. For those who've read any of Terry Pratchett's discworld novels the fade will sound familiar, it really is quite like the dungeon dimensions.
Not only that but mages are blamed for the existance of the Dark Spawn, the games main evil force. It has been told by the Chantry that the quest for knowledge, power and a mission to usurp the Maker (The Chantry Deity) from his throne in the fade has transformed these mages into the first of the Darkspawn as part of a godly punishment. However, if so, where do new darkspawn come from? The games only shows mages transforming into abominations, either physically or mentally. Whether the crime and punishment is symbolic or not, the events are still pinned on mages without actual proof. Later in the game the player character discovers that darkspawn are actually born through a brood mother, like a spider giving birth to live offspring. Further claims of Chantry lies are found in ancient records. Potraying it's most important figurehead, the Prophetes Andraste (the game's equivalent to Jesus, Mohammed or maybe more accurate: Jeanne d'Arc), was not a chosen by the Maker but in fact a very powerful Mage with a political agenda. To further justify the credibility of the claim, it was found in the Shaperate. The Dwarven records of History who have no truck with the Chantry. Their spiritual system being based on ancestors rather than Gods. If all this turns out to be true, and it propably will, in this game universe, that means the Chantry is indeed lying to its followers and duping everyone fortunate enough to have magical talents.
This leads me to believe that in further Dragon Age stories the Chantry will turn out to be the hidden evil pulling strings in order to maintain its power and control. The motivation to keep mages down is the fact that they could ascertain the truth about the makers place, or lack thereof, in the fade. A truth that would shatter the Chantry's credibility. There's even more. The player is almost always able to choose an Atheïst answer whenever religious questions or favors are asked. Answers that range from scepticism to mockery.

This might be a crackpot theory but... The Chantry's setup seems synonymous to the Roman Catholic church and its imperialism of the western world. It may well be that Humanists everywhere might have an ally in the Bioware docters, Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, and their colleagues as voices in this ever more powerful medium. If you want some more proof, please remind yourself of Mass Effect. Where dogmatic belief in the Protheans was dispelled by the relevation of the Reapers. Where near-holy artifacts fall into the profane because facts deemed them to be. Baldur's Gate and Knights of the Old Republic had equally shocking revelations. Discovery and disillusion has been a trope in Bioware games for some time.

Intermezzo

2009-12-28T01:20:00.009+01:00

By the lack of new posts it seems as if have been avoiding this blog. I almost have, because it would mean having to look at the date of my last post. A new post was always being conceptualized and then postponed. Not being one to feel guilty, I would rather look the other way and focus on the realities that are more rewarding in the short term. And so, I've been gaming in my spare hours. Like a rat in a skinner box, I've pressed buttons in arcane sequences to get my sweet reward. And these lasts few months I've been a glutton. The need for relaxation has been in direct relation to the amount of work I've been doing. Where one would grow, so would the other. In short, it's been a very productive period. Both in the professional world as in the skinner box. To the outside world it seems as if all I do is press buttons, wearing out keyboards, mice and wacom pens.

The same world that sees me effortlessly produce artwork and get satisfaction out of pressing buttons in order to make a game play itself, is starting to think that it actually takes no effort at all.
On both accounts, it is wrong.
My tasks are Crucial as to deserve capitalisation and the games I play are as brilliant as any great Belgian novel. Or so I keep telling myself. In the eyes of some one in the know, I must seem like an intellectual of the modern age. Yet to some one in the real world, it must seem like a lazy office jockey who earns a living by letting the computer do all the hard work for him and is addicted to pressing buttons at night. I must have been the nightmare of the previous age. An overqualified hippy with nonsensical morals based on a fantasy world of dreams and drugs. Someone who doesn't know how to take life serious and doesn't know what it is to do actual work. My parents used to threaten me with this actual work by saying: "If you don't do good at school, you'll spend the rest of your life carrying a lunchbox to the factory".

And so, after completing not one but two higher diplomas, one of which is on par with a university degree, I got a creative job that pays reasonably well. However, irony has it that now my parents wag their finger at me for not knowing what actual work is, and that I should propably do more of it, instead of letting the computer work late and playing those silly little games on it when it's done.

So on to my blog where I talk about games and only hint at the work I pretend to do!
The next part is about a few games I played, and it's there because I told the blog posting algorithm to mention the names I input before leaning back and sipping my tea. I also mentioned it to write in a manner to attract lustful females and to garner world fame. I'm not expecting it to be flawless, two out of three objectives met is still an acceptable result.

I've played and enjoyed Need For Speed:Shift. The demo convinced me of its quality, and I bought it shortly after. I've always appreciated racing games. Mostly for their obsessive compulsion gameplay of driving a car efficiently. My last serious racing effort was Xpand Rally some years ago and more recently Mario Kart Wii, so I'm hardly an authority on the subject. NFSS has a sense of speed of a rollercoaster, and that's what makes it rather special. Racing a car on one of its tracks feels like controlling a rocket powered skateboard on the downwards slope of an active vulcano. The game has a leg up on other racing games in its style and it's truly phenomenal cockpit view. I've also been known to call it "Top Gear: the game". There isn't much to talk about with this game - there's no higher understanding of life because of it. On my parents scale of approval it would propably score to be "very silly indeed". What they don't know is that I'm using these racing games as a simulator in order to easely acquire a real driver's license. This is, of course, using my parent's mindset that, if games like call of duty are ruthless murder training devices, racing games must be ideal in order to be a driver.

To make matters even worse, I've been dabbling in satanism and demonology! It's no wonder that my feeble atheist mind would one day succumb to the seduction of the beast itself. Because what could be worse then playing Dungeons and Dragons? Why a computer game that is the tier3 evolution of D&D! And why is this evil ruleset so evil? Because it's a ruleset that's been streamlined in such a way that the computer does all the calculating! Truly this is a magnetude of wickedness not seen in any game all year! (HINT)
Because of it's inherent didactic nature the game teaches amongst other things: magic, lesbianism, homosexuality, alcohol, unholy and generally shady dealing, pickpocketing, cursing, cursing, smuggling, drug trafficking, genocide and worst of all, blasphemy. The name of this unthinkable yet unbelievably seductive abomination is Dragon Age:Origins. On the caring parent's scale this game has fallen of the "silly" and into the "dead serious". It'd propably only be remedied, and I saved, by sacrificing one's eldest son, namely: me.
Or perhaps it's only a phase.
Either way. The game has left me a powerless thrall unable to appreciate any other game.

Self-prescribed medication has been ordered in the form of Modern Warfare 2:the murder simulator and Torchlight:Even more devils and demons.

World War 2: The movie: Inglourious Basterds

2009-09-23T23:29:00.011+02:00

A little word up front to my readership that might not be interested in the usual game rambling that is the norm around here. This post deals mostly with popular culture AND LOTS OF SPOILERS.
It's impossible to ignore the impact the second world war had on the world we know today. It was also quite a long time ago. And indeed our first hand source of information is slowly drying up. Even so, Hitler and his Nazis are still very popular. Popular boogimen that is. Given the time that has past since that gruesome event, the world has had time to acclimate to the hard, cold facts, and has learned to live with it. What humans are capable of. This newfound freedom has allowed us to get a little more creative with the whole notion of a world at war. Break up the protagonists of the war into cartoonlike achetypes. And Nazis have become a literairy archetype. Comparable to the undead or vampires. In which case Adolf Hitler becomes a modern day Count Dracula. And now, these archetypes are coming from their dark subcultural recesses, games and comics, into the main stream, movies.

I recently saw the new Tarantino Movie Inglourious Basterds.
This movie is a stylisch expression. If you'd compare this movie to the likes of Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers. The difference is immediately clear. This is a creative interpretation. And presents an interesting point of view.

Adolf Hitler, who looks nothing like his real life counterpart for good reason, in this movie has been portrayed as a German Bonaparte, simple minded, psychotic and bent on the destruction of every Jew on the globe.
He bursts in saliva spitting laughter when watching the movie "National pride". The film (in a film) is basically about the typical rambo-esque spraying of bullets (from a bolt action rifle no less) and people hitting the floor. It's the heroic tale of a sniper sitting in a belltower killing a cohort of allied soldiers in Italy.
The allied stupidity shown through a brief conversation between an allied soldier and his commanding officer: "Commander, we must destroy that tower!" upon which the commander replies in stoic fashion "Not a chance.". Followed by the camera cutting to more allies getting shot or falling from windows. With his combat knife, our hero sniper carves a swastika with impressive shading into the floorboard of his belltower as a reprise from the killing. This is, of course, hailed with loud cheering and applause from the Nazi Brass in the theatre.
It's a boneheaded piece of propaganda. A power trip. It's what we could call "gunporn". Hitler exclaims to Goebbels; "This is your best movie yet!". Goebbels is moved to tears by the complement.
A condemnation perhaps on the director's behalf. Tarantino is comparing people who enjoy the gunporn movies to this caricature of Hitler.
And I guess this would also count towards people who play first person shooter games as well. If they are played for the simple reason of shooting people and marvel at the carnage in sadistic enjoyment.
It might also be a wake-up call to every person in the audience who was laughing at the fact that Nazis were getting brutally murdered or mutulated on screen. These said Nazis were in many cases presented as normal people with morals, principles and dreams. Like the sergeant that meets his demise at the hands of the "Jew Bear". The latter points at the Sergeant's Iron Cross and asks him "Did you get that for killing Jews?" at which he gets an honest reply "For courage". Implying that he did not fight this war to kill Jews, but rather to protect his homeland. And of course, it's rather absurd to believe that all German soldiers were psychopaths. The reply falls on deaf ears, it is not the version of reality a determined person on a quest for revenge wants to hear.

But for as many incompetent German officers the movie has, there are competent Nazis, you could call them "evil villains" if not for the fact the movie portrais them simply as "officers on duty". These characters radiate an air of tension, their friendly face the impenetrable facade for the calculating detective inside.
Such is the Gestapo Officer in the cellar meeting. And such is Hans Landa, played by Christoph Waltz, who is arguably the most enjoyable character in this story. And arguably the most impressive villain since Heath Ledger's Joker.
The very opening part of the movie is as tense as the it gets. And is one among a series of unbearable, deafening, tense and discomforting moments. All of these come to a loud, abrupt and somewhat violent end. At first glance a likable character, bearing a big bright smile, speaking kind words in a multitude of languages. He is shrewd however, seems to know just about everything and acts with deadly precision. The war seems to be a game to him, played by rules and a mutual respect between prey and predator. This almost childlike trust in these rules are eventually his folly. His professional mercenary logic is quite sound however. Unfortunantly for him though, some characters carry a grudge that is rather unprofessional.

You might have noticed I'm glossing over the story and possible meaning of the Inglourious Basterds squad. But then, what's to say? These characters are rather simple and honest in many possible ways. They're out for revenge, and get it. Aldo Raine, the squad sergeant played by Brad Pitt is an uncomplicated ruffian. And it's amazing how many times the Basterds serve as comic relief. Most noticably when they present themselves to be Italians. Perhaps the most interesting fact about the Basterds is that they are Jews killing Nazis, in it self this isn't anything special, but in the context of the film, and add to that the characters of Shosanna and Marcel, it leads to a remarkable reversal, namely that, from a Nazi's point of view, the übermensch is undone by the hands of the undermensch.

I did not feel good as I walked out of the movietheatre. This piece of cinema is rough, like the screetching of a fork on a blackboard. And contradictionary as it might sound, I enjoyed it thoroughly. That's because I had a lot to think about. And because I could, this blogpost exists.

The Lesser Evil, Overlord the Second

2009-09-20T17:50:00.017+02:00

In my ranting about all the technological and gameplay features of the Overlord games, I almost completely forgot to mention one of the most important pillars in gaming. The Overlord games have what one might call a story. And even Story Arc.

I gave a synopsis of these stories in my previous post. But I'll dig somewhat deeper into them here. Spoilers are ahead so go out and buy the game, finish it and get back to this post. Because you don't want to miss all that is about to be written down. You could also skip ahead to the last paragraph for a final thought. And just to make sure: BEWARE SPOILERS AHEAD.

Overlord the first has, in my opinion, the most interesting story.
However, initially there's hardly any story to speak of! You're thrown into the role of Overlord by Gnarl, the old and... gnarly spokesman of the minions. He's your advisor for the duration of the game. Teaching you how to act in your newfound role. Trying to rebuild the dark tower and reunite the brown, red, green and blue minions. You do this by raiding the surrounding villages, towns and castles. But the scavage hunt quickly becomes an unholy crusade against the "heroes" who inhabite the surrounding lands. Each of these heroes represent an earthly sin. Seven in total. Each is crushed beneath your Steel boots. Though the reasons beyond "because they are bad men" are somewhat unclear.
Melvin Underbelly is a bloated and obese halfling. Gluttony.
Oberon is an elven prince, asleep and on guard against a dwarven invasion. His nightmares become reality and haunt the Elven forests. Sloth.
Sir William the Black, a former paladin and presumable victim of abstenence, has an unhealthy craving for a mistriss succubus. Lust.
Goldo Golderson is a dwarven King, and as his name might suggest, concerned only by the amount of gold he possesses. Greed.
Jewel is a thief bent on stealing everything of value someone else might have. Envy.
Khan is a giant warrior and lover of Jewel, he's insanely protective and comes down with fiery anger to whomever threatens her. Unfortunatly, as the Overlord, you have. Wrath.
All these characters speak of a mysterious wizard. Delivering all they desired, and become corrupt in the procedings. The wizard is the main, if somewhat hidden mastermind behind the plot of the game. During your encounter with him he keeps mentioning his accomplishments and his genious. Possibly born a Leo, his sin is most definitly pride.
The wizard is introduced as he sits in your throne, your minions gasping in awe at the return of "the real overlord". As it turns out, this Wizard is possessed by a vanguished Evil. An evil slain by your hand, aided by the heroes you just ground into a fine paste.
The unawareness of the player is the memory loss of the Overlord. It becomes clear that the story from OVerlord is an aftermath of the typical "band of heroes" fantasy story you find in other fiction. One could say that Lord Of The Rings was an influence. In which case the question could have been who was Sauron before he became the evil Overlord he is today? Was he once a virtuous man? Is he only one in a long line of Overlords? What would Tolkien have written if there ever was to be a sequel to The Lord of the Rings? Overlord is the somewhat cheeky answer.
In the end, you're able to convince your minions to fight for you through means of bashing them over the head a few times. And use them to overcome the Wizard. Making you the rightfull Overlord.

Overlord II has a less interesting story, despite it's potential. "Sociological commentary" almost came on the box as a feature. But this basically boils down to "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely". The embodiment of this is the Emperor. Ruling an empire so successful and prosperous that the citizens have become fat, lazy and somewhat stupid.

To elaborate. There is scene where a group of fat, middle-aged women accuse Juno (the Aphrodite archetype) of witchcraft because her beauty has enthralled their men. For this she is democratically voted off to the arena. Quite a humorous scene, because it's kind of true, but never quite surpassed later in the game.
Even though the game is able to mislead the player from guessing the twist of the story. Unfortunatly, it is quite a let down and you get the feeling you'd be able to come up with something better. Here's why. At first I thought the overly speechy and brainy right hand man of the "evil Emperor" would be the real mastermind, the Emperor being the figurehead of the regime. Certain signs could have been telling. The Emperor never speaks, never shows his face from under his mask, never does anything apart from waving at crowds and is dependant on "consuming" magical beings to sustain him. Leading me to believe he might have been an animated character or a golem. Not so.
The real twist to the story is when you find out who's behind the mask. The transformation from one guise to the next is far more then just an unmasking, it's an almost hulkian transformation. Since the Emperor's physique is more impressive then that of his true identity.
The only real personal motivation for this character is "becoming a magical being", lust for power. And that's about it. He's not the only character to undergo a transformation, the seemingly intellectual henchman becomes a sniveling zealot in the end, able only to paise his master.
It seems this game that was inspired by the domination of the Roman Empire and Roman mythology, but in the end fails to do anything useful with it. Beyond the comparison that you are Hades claiming Artemis, Aphrodite and Persephone. And forgive me for using their Greek names. It seems that even here the age rating of the game is keeping the player from having some actual fun with your mistresses.

Evil in these games should be read as "mischievous", the minions are naughty. The Overlord is a big bully. When will we get an truly Evil version of an Overlord game?
In the first game there is an option to turn a spare room into a torture dungeon. I had a flashback to the old Dungeon Keeper games but unfortunately it's just there to look at. In the same game a village will offer you 10 "maidens". And again, these are just there to stand around your throne, spewing the same line of dialog over and over. Why weren't they put at random places in the tower to perform menial tasks. Like scrubbing the floor or something. I'd make the whole thing so much more believable.
The games offer an option to be "an unlikable person" or "a very bad person". The gradient goes from broken white to halfway grey. As a comparison we could say Fable goes from pure white to somewhat dark grey. But games have yet to go to pitchblack. You could say Manhunt or something is rather dark, but that's not the kind of Evil I'd like to see in the Overlord series. Manhunt is just plain violent. Brilliant Evil would be more of a thriller, working the imagination. Suggesting bad things instead of showing stuff intended for gore hounds.
Again I must plead for a dark and gritty Overlord PC game, intended for mature gamers instead of the giggling tomfoolery intended for the console tween audience. And perhaps go over a few ethical problems the human race has to deal with.

The Greater Evil, Overlord

2009-08-31T22:50:00.021+02:00

In a long standing tradition of me playing Third Person Strategy Action RPGs, it's time to turn a very Evil Eye towards the Overlord Series. With the buzz the sequel was getting. I picked up the first game out of a "why the hell did I never get to play this?" reason. Afterwards, I bought Overlord 2 without thinking twice about it. On first look, the game has sterling pedegree, being written by Rihanna Pratchett. And even though she's only the daughter of genius Terry Pratchett, expectations were quite high.

The synopsis to Overlord 1 could be. You're a young and ambitious Sauron in Albion, commanding an army of mischievous demonic imps. Fixing the worlds chaotic evils with your own evil law. The game has a good and evil route. The former picturing you as an iron fisted monarch. The latter portraying you as a ruthless tyrant with a appreciation for black lace and pale flesh.

Overlord 2 can be seen as followed. You're Hades, God of the underworld. Here to exact revenge on "the Empire" which has usurped your father (Sauron) from his rightfull dark throne. You set out to reunite the minion army and claim your rightfull place in the evil hierarchy. And while you're at it, you also claim Artemis, Aphrodite and Persephone as your mistresses.

The Overlord games are structured a bit like a Zelda game. You explore maps and dungeons sprinkeled with enemies and puzzles. In almost all cases your minions with their unique abilities are key in overcoming these obstacles. The level design is quite well done, especially in the first game, where every area literally comes full circle. Design reminiscent of games like Pikmin, Metroid and Zelda, but more directed and not at all dependant on backtracking.
Overlord did come as somewhat of a suprise. Coming close to being quite like a "nintendo" game, you'd half expect it to become an instant classic. But maybe, like many other games, only a classic in few minds.

There's one flaw that's not very hard to overcome, but it's still there. It's harrowing to think what this game might have been, had it been made as a pc game first and foremost. Unfortunantly that's not where the market is. Overlord is a console game and it shows. A blessing because it has filled the coffers of Triumph studios (and codemasters), allowing for more Overlord games. A curse because control becomes the game's biggest flaw.
The standard pc control scheme in both Overlord 1 and 2 drove me to use my pc gamepad (a Saitek p880) in favor of the mouse and keyboard. Because it simply worked a whole lot better. In fact, the controls work fine. They're functional most of the time. However, it is still baffling to see the game twist and squirm to fit onto a console controller. Evidence of this is that there are functions in which you have to press and hold a button, and then press another button. And that's just to select one type of minion. Which generally leads to the "select all, attack all" reflex, abandoning all strategy. Mostly out of necessity because the chaotic nature of combat generally calls for quick action. In order to fit those controls onto a mouse and keyboard, the scheme twists and squirms some more. It is now twice removed from the ideal mouse and keyboard controls.

Allow me to elaborate even further. From a design document standpoint. Overlord must have had the looks of a hardcore pc title reminiscent of Sacrifice. That is to say, if your reflex for troop management is "point the mouse and click". Which in short works like this: select your unit group, like your brown minions. Use a mouse pointer on a target, like an enemy. The mouse cursor changes to an attack pointer. Click the mouse to engage, or hold the mouse button to assign more minions to the target in Overlords case. Clicking the scenery would move the minions about. Do note that the Wii title Overlord: Dark Legend, does exactly that. And is claimed to have the superior control scheme.

Quote from Scott Sharkey, 1up:
The Wii Remote is just plain perfect for directing your horde of minions around the screen. The mouse or analog stick did the job well enough in other versions, but after experiencing the ease of simply pointing where you want the evil little buggers to go break things, it's actually going to be hard to go back to less precise methods. Hell, my never-played-a-videogame-in-her-life girlfriend had no trouble picking the thing up and just going with it, which is something that just couldn't have happened with any other installment of the series. It really is remarkably intuitive, given how complicated keeping track of both your Overlord and a swarm of gremlins can become.

We'll have to forgive Overlord 1 for being a pure console game. Because that's where it had to make Triumph the money to allow for more Overlord games.
And indeed the game is very easely forgiven since puzzles and pace of the general gameplay feel simpler and more manageable. I can't remember being frustrated with it.

But Overlord 2 was developed simultaneously with Overlord Dark Legend. So the point and click (P&C) controls were no secret. Yet, a similar control scheme was left out of the PC version of Overlord 2. I'm pretty sure it came up during the staff meetings, it must have. The main reason P&C controls were a no-go, next to higher development costs, was that it would break the difficulty of a few control based puzzels. Puzzles that are so frustrating because of the controls that I rightout quit the game a couple of times. Loudly cursing in incomprehension why Triumph would abandon the simple (consoles, remember?) elegance of the first game.
I'm pretty sure the "green minion spider elevator maze" will go down in history as one of the biggest faux-pas game designs. The concept of the puzzle is that the player must navigate a maze on the wall using the sweep command on the green minions. Controlling the group as one entity with the right analog stick. This whole time, the camera is behind the overlord and pointing towards the group of minions. Within this field of view the group is controlled. If one minion, or several, is stuck behind an obstacle, it will stop moving. And with it the camera, as it can't move ahead with the group. This would be alright if it weren't for the fact that this is a timed puzzle. Get stuck for a second and you loose a great portion of your experience rich green minions. They simply fall of the wall and die, or get squashed between the elevator and die. Start over. What makes the puzzle so enerving is not the fact that it's pretty obnoxious to begin with, it's in the controls by wich you have to solve it. The sweep command is pretty wooly as it is. In theory it's a "charge there" command. It's like moving by suggestion. It's pretty inprecise.
Now imagine just pointing and clicking your way through the maze. It'd be like setting waypoints in a RTS game. And it'd be pixel perfect. It would have made this "after boss" mechanic-tutorial (the hard part was supposed to be done with!) a breeze in stead of a wrist cutting. Another dubious decision was the ship chase. Cool in concept, but rather poorly executed. Another still was a rather lengthy stealth level using possessed Green Minions. Some trail and error sections could have been a little less frustrating.
This falling back to "twitch gameplay" in stead of sticking to "logic puzzles" may be a sign of Triumph running out of inspiration and then willingly overstepping the line between challenging and frustrating in these few instances. Overlord 2 is a more complex game then it's predessesor, with more gameplay elements, a more "advanced" camera and more elaborate control over the Overlord. Unfortunately, and though slightly, to it's detriment.

However, that's about all the bad there is to say about the Overlord games so far. So it's mostly all good. Managing your armour, weapons, spells, minions and dark tower are fun rpg additions I would like to see in a Zelda game someday. It's also great to hear all the different lines of banter and dialog in the game as well. Audio in Overlord is well done all-round. The score from the first game was quite good but becomes fantastic in the sequel. Paired with an improved game engine and more detailled art assets, the second game is an impressive showpiece. So far it one of the best games, or should i say franchise, the Netherlands has ever produced. Not that there's a lot of games coming from there anyway, but it's another glimmer of hope that these regions can produce games that actually matter. Now I'd love to see a hardcore Overlord PC game. Preferably with a strong multiplayer component, and an open endgame scenario. With P&C controls. It'd fill the void Sacrifice left behind and Brütal legend will propably fail to fill, as that's not coming to pc. One can only hope.

So Japanese! featuring Final Fantasy V

2009-07-21T20:57:00.002+02:00

The Dragon Quest V remake had removed a stigma for me. It had made me see the appeal of Japanese RPGs. And so my eyes turned to that other Japanese Juggernaut: Final Fantasy. I never played the old classics from the NES and SNES era, but the Playstation Games (FF VII and up) turned me off to the series. Whenever I hear an otaku bemoan the loss of Aeris I look the other way and pretend it doesn't exist. And that's not all. Metrosexual protagonists? Melodrama and teen angst? Huge swords, gunblades, keyblades, beyblades, all wielded by children on a quest to save the world? I'll stick with Dungeons And Dragons, thank you very much. Let me make my own characters and choices. But then I heard the original Final Fantasy was actually based on Dungeons And Dragons. Well damn. Japan often adopts a concept and evolves it in it's own unique way. And that, to my mind, is a positive thing. So I picked up the Final Fantasy V remake, the original dates back to 1992, for Gameboy Advance and had a go at it.

The game is none to shy about it's gameplay system. And in fact that's about all there is to it. It's atypical to JRPGs in that sense. There's almost no story to speak of. Of course there is one, but it's mainly there to nudge you along the areas, open up new classes and progress you towards the ending (though I'm not actually sure there is one). Even the Dialogs have been kept to a minimum even though the script knows a few funny lines. It's almost as if the game isn't taking itself very serious. This game is all about it's class based combat system. And that is kind of a big deal. In short: There's a huge variaty of classes. You gain job levels through combat. Job levels earn you job skills. You can change classes at any time and You can equip one (two in one case) learned job skill at any time. You get four Characters to play with. Mix and match as you please. Reminisant to D&D and Guild Wars' ability to dual class, this system introduces a level of strategy and depth that is lacking in games like Dragon Quest V. It also gives the player a lot more incentive to grind away as New job skills are never far off. The game will throw a boss at you from time to time, and I always have a lot of fun figuring out what combinations of skills and classes will work against it. The downside to all this is the grind I mentioned before. With different motivations it's different from Dragon Quest's grind though; progressing your characters and gaining a strategic advantage in stead of progressing a story. But overall I think that in the current day and age these type of games would do well to speed up the levelling up process.

In all though, FFV replaced DQV as my handheld game of the moment. A moment that's been lasting for a couple of months now. And in between, I regulary bemoan the loss of Galuf on various message boards. In fact. I'm typing up a touching poem right now.

So Japanese! featuring Dragon Quest V

2009-07-10T23:02:00.009+02:00

While the world gets shuffled like a worn pack of cards I am trying to keep track of the card I picked. A fixation that has kept me busy for quite a while.

But in between chaos and pandemonium I have been playing quite a bit of games.
So let's start with the beginning. Otherwise we risk upsetting the delicate balance between time and space. I had been playing a fair amount of western RPGs lately, and I have been for a great part of my life. All the while pretty much ignoring the existence of Eastern RPGs. Which is odd, since that must make it the only eastern thing I have not had the joy to experience.
No more.

I knew Dragon Quest has been kind of a big deal. So that's what I got. "Dragon Quest V: Hand Of The Heavenly Bride" for DS to be precise. Few words could describe what happiness was in store for me. So there's finally a chance this could be a short blogpost.

It's a charming game. Objectives are laid out as if they were lighthouses on a clear summernight. There's humour that strikes me as being "So Japanese!". DQ5, however, does have its emotional moments. Soppy as it sounds, the game is actually quite humble (but do keep in mind the DS is humble technology as well) about this. It misses all the pretentious melodrama that is so typically associated with Japanese RPGs, wich makes it all the more absorbing.

My biggest gripe though is perhapse not with DQ, but with Eastern RPGs in general. And that is that the game is padded with grinding. And without a combat system that isn't engaging or a class system that supports it, the experience can get old rather fast. I understand that later DQ games have mended this ailment. And to be fair, there are games with more grinding. Furthermore, DQ mixes up the grind with the ability to go out and try to pursuade monsters to join your side. After which they become party members. Yet, while bringing more complexity, it Unfortinatly creates more grinding and more tedious inventory management.
And there really isn't that much incentive to grind exept to get your character level up. Which brings about another questionable gameplay mechanic. As you level up, so do the enemies. Meaning the game's relative difficulty remains about the same from start to finish. Each area having you playing catch-up on character levels. Thus encouraging the grind rather then make you think about how to get trough an area by combining skills, spells or party members. But that's just the way these games are made.

For a game that was originally released in 1992, DQ5 remade for DS holds up. I don't know if I'd spend the time to play it in my spare time, maybe in small chunks, but it's been a great companion on the daily commute.

Consider Battlefield Heroes

2009-05-19T13:47:00.013+02:00

I recently got my beta code for Battlefield Heroes, Dice's free to play cartoon shooter. Being intruiged by this game from the start, I was finally able to take it for a spin. And on first looks, Dice succeeds in creating a whimsical "casual" third person shooting game. But looks, as we all know, can be deceiving.

First of all, this is a beta I'm talking about so the game is still a work in progress. However. There's already a store in place for you to go spend real money on battlefield bucks, called Battlefunds. These are used to buy ingame items, such as fancy uniforms. I knew character customization would be on a to-buy basis, but it was sobering to see that just about everything in the virtual wardrobe is on sale. Of course there's some freebees in there which you can buy with valor points. These are the points you get from just playing the game. Logic would tell you that enough accumulated valor points (which boil down to "time played") would beget you some better customization options, or at least some form of visible markings of veterancy. But no Dice. Because of this I think the game is lacking a basic form of feedback, namely that of character growth. The one constant is your hero and his heropoints, In MMO-speak, this would be your character's level and skillbar. But there's no way of reading either.

To add insult to injury, the items you get in the game dissapear after a week or a month, depending on how much you are willing to spend. The problem here is that Dice can slack off in making new items, since you'll never accumulate a lot of them anyway. Adding a time limit also adds pressure of "having to play the game, or I have payed for nothing". I can understand why you would apply this to weapons and powerups because they give you an advantage in the game. Even if those weapons are considered balanced. If you play better with them, there's still an advantage. But I don't quite get why you would have clothing an accessories dissapear. This goes against some MMO conventions, where you "win" gear, and once you do it's yours forever, or until you sell or replace it. People might find it disheartening if they have to rebuy their outfits time and time again. But the special gear is more of a hook rather than a gameplay defining element.

I'm unsure as to how well it will score with the casual gamers. Maybe the concept of a shooter isn't that well suited to casual play. Even if it is from a third person perspective. We can make the case that casual players play games for killing time and having some easy fun. And it's hard to match this with a shooter, which operates in a competitive, highly hostile environment. The game is easy enough to dive into, but from there you need to really work your way up the roster. The game is said to find matches according to your skill level, so maybe this won't be as much of an issue as I might think. Still, the people I played against were often on ventrillo, really oganized and put up a very good fight.

This game feels like a reskinned, hardcore battlefield game. Where all the character models are replaced by cartoons and some of the sound effects were swapped with the ones you hear on a Sunday morning. To some ears this might sound like a bad idea. But for me, this game looks and feels better then the older battlefield games. Of course, "realistic" shooters are a dime a dozen nowadays, which makes Heroes stand out as being quite unique. The closest comparison I could make are to Batallion Wars and Team Fortress 2. With Heroes sitting somewhere in between those extreme ends of the spectrum. It's not an imitation of either, mind. To add some contrast, Batallion Wars is a third person shooter RTS and Team Fortress 2 is Quake to Battlefield heroes' Battlefield.

So will it all work?
I think so. But not with the casual audience, because I don't think this is a casual game. If this is marketed right, and the (content)updates keep coming, Dice is sitting on a goldmine. But they will get at least some competition from other shooters. Because they are aiming for the same audience. It's easy to see how someone might become invested in this game however. Spending real money on digital (to some: fake) items. I bet some people on ventrillo will agree with me, given the fact they have already spent some of their earnings on peg legs and sailor uniforms.

commutement

2009-03-06T23:06:00.005+01:00

One of the unique properties of being a working man is the daily commute to work. I go by bike, train and foot. And nothing is more enjoyable then playing railway roulette.
The one bullet in the gun is the pretty girl that sits in front front of you and smiles back. Or that casts the one, not so innocent glimpse when she is about to turn her head.

On my ride home today I sat down in a two by two compartment. While unshouldering my rainstained black leather bag, I turn and look up into the pink face of prudence. She must have been about 72 years old, scrubbed and wrinkled. Very dignified. I could imagine she has her milk and coffee in see-through porcelain cups with her pinky doing the Heil Hitler salute.
The word that surfaced out of the murky depths of my brain was "chicken", brooding right in front of me. And for someone reading a recreational magazine, she didn't seem much entertained.
Her mouth so downturned there isn't enough skin below the chin for a smile. It looked very much like she had a ventriloquist dummy mouth installed.
How did this come to be, I asked myself as I have time and time again. It must be all the prudence, I replied.
The gun clicked.

On the next stop, I had another shot. The mass of bodies moved off and on the train. Fresh air gushed into the cabine. And with it unanswered questions.
Like "Why is there a monkey next to me, shoving bananas into it's mouth?" I could see it out of the corners of my left eye. I saw a shape swinging a big hand in the air, the trajectory ending at an open maw, which closed on something sloppy and oker. The hand returned to it's lap, while the maw was winking it's delicious content at me.
After I unfroze, I risked a quick glance at this percieved reality. It wasn't quite as imaginative as I had imagined, but still rather shocking.
A button-nosed girl was fisting one waffle after another into her chubby face. Unapologetically and openly mauling the dough in her mouth as if she was mixing concrete in it. The guy opposite to her could propably smell the taste of the sweet salive-waffle paste.
The gun clicked.

We can't win them all. But it just goes to show that life's little frustrations can add much to one's creativity.

Comparing real time strategy games of the same genre.

2009-02-23T00:34:00.006+01:00

I could start off by saying you how unabashedly Blizzard ripped of the Warhammer 40k franchise by making starcraft.
Indeed going on looks alone, both of these have Humans (Space Marines and Terrans), "the old advanced race" (Eldar and Protoss) and the insectoid aliens (Tyrannids and Zerg). The similarities are striking and not coincidental, yet they are only skin deep. But makes it tempting to compare them none the less. RTS players know it has happend before, and will happen again with the sequels.
I could also say that Starcraft has been the dominant (video game) fanchise.
The offering of warhammer titles had been quite meager up until Relic made Dawn of War. But with that, a more superior title was released in the RTS genre. With added mechanics and concepts, which led to radically different gameplay from what had been the standard in titles such as Command and Conquer, Age Of Empires and Starcraft.

All the latter have a arcade-like "spend and win" mechanic. Which boils down to massing an army together. Be it of one unit type or a mix of units. Eventually a battle is fought between huge armies and usually the biggest, or most expensive, comes out on top.
Massing comes natural when you have to tech up one way or the other. Spending time and resources on buildings to build a specific unit type is risky. So a consequence of saving on the one building is the funding the one building you did build, and produce the specific unit type it produces.

I had to point this out because Starcraft has this gameplay down, almost to perfection. And with Starcraft 2, we'll see a further evolution of this kind of play.
Expendable units, used to (hard) counter the others. With Buildings as technology investments. Starcraft 2 will even go as far as one unit per building.
It's quite clear that reality has taken a back seat in this scenario. Which has led me to say that Starcraft is an Arcade RTS.
On a side note. It has become to such a degree that supply depots, which I take it were used to "store stuff in" (i.e. to expand your population cap), have taken the role of walls. This of course was because Starcraft players would wall off their base with supply depots. In Starcraft 2, Blizzard has added a "gate" functionality to the supply depot by making it possible to sink them into the ground.
Or, how meta-gameplay feeds into the perceived reality of the Starcraft universe.
Disclamer: I am aware that the cream of the crop Korean Starcraft players don't actually mass all that much. They win matches with a handfull of units and godly micromanagement skills (which still strikes me as arcade play). And seldom make it into the endgame scenario. It is not how the majority (including you) plays the game however.

The opposite could be said for the Dawn of War series.
Base builing and resource management has been minimised and put in the battlefield to focus more on the actual tactics. DoW1 still had a case of teching with buidings. But the evolution in DoW2 has been an even bigger move into the battlefield. Bases consist out of one portal-like building that produces all units. Not all units are available at start but are unlocked by, essentially, buying the next tier.
Resources are found on the battlefield as unexhaustable strategic points. These also form the goals of most battles.
I should also mention that the influence of that other Relic juggernaut Company of Heroes was instrumental to the DoW evolution. In terms of gameplay CoH was based on DoW1. And in turn DoW2 was based on both of these.
CoH cut back on basebuilding and unit count, expanded on strategic points and added the retreat function. Coh is more complex in nature than DoW. This can both be a good or bad thing depending on what you want in an RTS. CoH has more complex strategy and longer games. DoW is more straight forward, has smaller maps and has shorter matches.
But I digress.
The biggest contrast between Starcraft and DoW is that in DoW units are a big investement, and letting one unit die can seal your fate. All these units are rather expensive and can be customised in various ways. Mainly modified weaponry lets you deal with different threats. Hero units can equip armor and weapons mid game to make them stronger. Much like you would in, say, Diablo. To help your units survice there's a "retreat" command which orders your units to leg it back to base where they can be reïnforced for a fraction of the unit cost. This also saves any special weapons they might be carrying and preserves their level, as these units gain experience.

The observation is this. Starcraft is heading along the way of fast paced arcade gameplay using expendable units. Dawn of War is going the way of an RPG with limited yet highly customisable "party members" and added realism with unit AI, physics and a cover mechanic.
And as such, they also become much harder to compare. Both being at their own end of the RTS spectrum.

Fallout 3: Good Karma

2009-02-15T16:57:00.007+01:00

I forced myself to write a glowing post about Fallout 3 only a few weeks ago. Just to level out my cosmic balance. But since the game got praised into high heaven by just about every other body on the planet, I'll try and keep it short.

When you look past all the flaws in Fallout, there is still a good many reasons to play this game.
And in fact, I have loved my time in the wasteland.
Maybe we can chalk this up to escapism and a hunger for exploration.

Maybe most interesting of all is the greater story found in Fallout 3. And i'm not talking about the main storyline, because that, in fact, is rather bland in comparison.
Once you set out to explore this blasted world you're free to explore deserted and destroyed ruins of buildings, each of which could be considered a chapter in the big book of fallout 3. Each of which is a bitesized short story. Told in the form of audiotapes or through the evironment. In some cases you'll even meet the short story protagonists in the flesh. Or, what's left of it anyway.
Not only are these stories stand-alone, they each and all have their own level design. A beginning and an end. Some of the better ones are actually quite linear. Some have a very nice reward at the end. Like the bobbleheads you can collect.
On a side note: the bobblehead that came with the collectors edition is awesome. And I must have been one of the happy few that actually got the Outcast statue with it aswell.
Of course, some stories are told through sidequests. But with these my imagination wasn't as activly involved, and it generaly has more impressivly written dialog.
Yes, the dialogs in Fallout 3 are quite bad. Have I mentioned this before? I don't know, even I don't read my blog. But rest assured it's not all bad.
some of the dialog is quite good. And well acted. If you know anything about the voice talent in Fallout 3 you're propably thinking of Liam Neeson right away. He's a good actor and his voice sounds comfortably familiar but the actual performance is a bit monotone.
No, the best actor in the game is Malcolm McDowell as President Eden. He's the most likable, life-like and sympathetic person around. Wink wink, nudge nudge. If you've played the game you'll understand the irony.
The runner up is the guy who voiced Harold, one of the most memorable characters. To bad he's not even listed on imdb.com, which implies he's not even a registered actor. Wink wink, nudge nudge. sigh.
Maybe we should list the likes of Bob Crosby, Roy Brown and Cole Porter. Since they add so much atmosphere and character to the world of Fallout.
On a special note: this game has one of my personal favorites, Paul Eiding in it. Unfortunantly Bathesda had him only do his old man voice. Which is such a waste.

What else is a major appeal in playing an RPG? For me, Building a character is a big part of the fun.
The type of character you play influences gameplay quite a bit. And as with all RPGs, you take out of it what you put in.
Prebuilding a character in your mind does kind of kill the spontaneity, but it helps to define how you will play the game, and what the experience will be like.
On my first play-through I was a good character, a saint with a gun dealing judgement on the lawless. The character was build to be the infiltrator I played in Mass Effect, and so relied heavely on stealth and long range combat. Using sniper rifles and energy weapons.
My second character was made into a medium to close range combat powerhouse using heavy armour, explosives, heavy weapons and melee combat. He's also an evil slave trading computer hacking bastard with a short temper and. I enjoyed playing him the most. But I think a lot has to do with the fact I understood the RPG mechanics behind the game better, and so was more effective at making this character work. Short of abusing the game.
The second time through I played almost entirely without VATS, playing it as a shooter (I do like aiming manually). Which I recon was more fun. If not for fallout's clunky combat mechanics. Luckely, burning ghouls to a crisp at close range doesn't require a lot of aiming and is great fun regardless.
If you want to explore the entire game without getting bored of it all, you'll have to set your own goals a bit though. So what I did was set out to reach specific goals for each play session. Like, explore the Nuka Cola Factory, go get the Luck Bobblehead. Go get this piece of armor. Collect this unique weapon. In many cases couldn't have done it without the Wiki (looking up locations of some of the gear) though. So again, the spontaneity is kind of lost. But I recon it's ok since I don't have 200 hours to spend on one character. And there's other games I would like to play. Like Dawn Of War 2. Which is another game where you shoot up green hulking monstrosities under the rule of a fascist leader.

As a close I would say that once a character is built, all loot has been hoarded, all quests are completed and the map has been fully explored, the game is done.
And as it stands, I'm done with Fallout 3. Unless future downloadable content provids a big enough draw, I might be done for a while.
If not, there seems to be a healthy mod community out there, and so far I've been seeing some interesting mods. Maybe all my wishes will be granted in the end (or I should make my own). But thus far I haven't bothered. Maybe for a future play-through in a world where days run 48 hours long, transportation is eleminated due to new portal technology, and every week there's spaghetti-friday.
I already know what I'd want to play. A neutral unarmed combat stealth ladykiller ninja cyborg.
Yeah, that sounds great...

Fallout 3: Bad Karma

2009-02-07T01:45:00.008+01:00

Disclaimer: I do apologise for the length of my posts. The fact of the matter is that these will become standalone chapters in Bonesnack: the book.

I wanted to talk to you about Fallout3. A game that had me up to a point where I almost forgot I had a blog.
After playing Mass Effect I jumped right into the Fallout universe. A shooter RPG after a shooter RPG. Yet, the difference was still quite dramatic.
I'll start off with the bad.
Fallout3 has the looks of a shooter. Yet it is a Role Playing Game through and through.
Maybe it is to much of an RPG for it's own good. Making it hard to give it a pass as the first person shooter it pretends to be.

I was quite shocked when I first got to feel the controls of this game, expecting it to control somewhat like COD4 or Crysis or even Bioshock.
In Short, it doesn't at all.
All of this might be a minor thing but it does take some getting used to.
For instance, I was quite horrified to see the game "complete" my steps.
Which feels like when you scale a flight of steps, stepping up only with your right foot, one flight at a time.
It's hard to describe because it's so unusual. It's like the game has a "right foot forward policy". When you crouch down and move about, the game will "add a step" in order put your right foot forward when you have manually put your left foot forward. I'm pretty sure there's a reason for this. And if so, I'm pretty sure it's an RPG thing. And if so, I'm pretty sure it's rooted in outmoded design. To clarify, this is a bad thing. It's obnoxious and clunky and it has no place in entertainment. Are we to count our steps to prevent the sky falling down? Do not condition us to have an obsessive-compulsive disorder!

At first I thought this quirk might be there to make the third person view work.
But then as I entered said viewpoint, I was met with disbelief yet again. My stomach turned. Apparently I was air-skating across the environment. My body was making a running animation completely out of sync with the environment, and in 4 directions only.
This game has horrible, horrible animation! Bethesda needs contact a motion capture studio and hire some animators. It needs to film some people talking to each other. Study the motions and take note.
However, I need to nuance my statements a bit, I might come off as thinking too straight. For the most part, animations are fine. That is to say, when your running around in first person, having a firefight, using VATS (hey, ragdolls don't need any animation). It works, even though it's mediocre at best.
The third person view is there just to look at your character. It's unplayable otherwise. Further pushing the game into the FPS corner where bigger, better shooters lurk.

When you engage in a conversation, or you're being talked to, the game will zoom in on the speaker. Like in real life. You have quite a powerful zoom built into your eyes. That way you get a good view of all the bad.
These characters are animatronics. There faces are as bland as cereal that's been left soaking in the bowl for too long. There are facial expressions but they are so subtle and stiff that you propably won't even notice. There are no gestures, no body language. And when there is, they wave their hand about a bit, and even that animation is looped. In cases they will stand there like complete idiots and in perfect silence with a hand that makes the same "I'm weighing a bulls nutsack"-motion every 10 seconds.
It wasn't that easy coming to terms with all this. But since the game is not about talking to people it's possible to look the other way, or at the dialog text and continue with the game.

But my biggest gripe with the game is the blending of RPG and FPS elements.
Animation is superficial. Gunplay and combat gameplay are essential.
I can hear the crowd gathering on my front door, protesting in one voice "Fallout3 is not a shooter!". And they are wrong. Fallout3 is made to play like a shooter, and so should it be judged.
At first glance, the game plays rather clumsy. Your gun isn't particulary accurate nor powerful and your movement isn't very fluid. You're hoping it's a level 1 thing only, that things will get better over time. Well, they do. To a degree that you'll you gain auto-aim when you're really proficient with a type of weapons.
It's another RPG rule I guess.
Your weapons magically become more accurate when they are put in more capable hands. It feels so goddamn feeble to be shooting an assault rifle with bullets spraying in a 30 degree cone of fire. And for no good reason. This rifle has near mint condition and it shoots as if it has no barrel.
The way to fix this "effectiveness with this weapon"-conundrum is, in my opinion, to have the hands sway a bit. Like when you're using a sniper rifle. It will sway in your untrained hands. Of course, when you squeeze the trigger at the right moment the bullet should still hit the mark, or at lease have a more believable trajectory. With this it becomes that much harder to compensate for the sway while aiming.
But with the current game mechanic Fallout3 has, even this isn't possible.
Being an RPG, dice are governing hits and misses. Which means, when the dice roll indicates a miss, you miss. Even when you were seemingly dead on target. The opposite happens aswell. When your aim is off but the dice are right, you'll hit. The effect is basically auto-aim and it's insulting to any selfrespecting shooter fan. For wanting to be an RPG so badly it sacrifices consistancy.
Personally I'd ditch the entire system. It's boneheaded to try and shove dice rolls into a shooter. So don't. Make a shooter with RPG elements and be done with it.
But sure. Bathesda set out to make Oblivion with guns, mission accomplished.
By the way, why is the weight limit still around? It doesn't make the game more fun or challenging. It makes you shuttle from one container to another. Because of realism? In what reality does a coffee mug weigh half a kilogram? So many elements of this game shout, at the top of its lungs, "This is not a realistic game.", that a lot of these "set in stone" RPG conventions become superfluous.

The idea behind combat in an RPG is that it's strategic on a party based level. Or on a turn based level. Fallout3 has no party management, no (visible) turns and no strategy.
The strategy in combat is that of a shooter. It deals with positioning your character, prioritizing targets, lining up shots, leading a target. Managing reloads. getting into cover at the right moments, picking the right weapons for every encounter. Such is the ways of shooters.
If you want to borrow stuff, go look at the best of their class. Go look at COD4 and Gears Of War. Don't go looking at MOH:Pacific Assault.
Elements that are missing are a scaling crosshair to indicate the bullet spread or accuracy (although giving the system Fallout uses, the crosshair would take up half the screen), weapon sets, lean mechanics, iron sights.
I could even add weapon mods to that, but I guess no one ever had a second thought about the innovation Crysis brought to the table, which is a damn shame.

Combat in Fallout3 isn't very engaging. The AI simply isn't up to par with other shooters out there. What happens most of the time is that characters will charge up to close range and stab you with whatever weapon or limb they have.
Or they will get out of cover and charge up to close range and empty their clip on you. They're also amazingly accurate compared to your own gunspray.
Sometimes though, they will flee when it's clear they're outmatched.
The only time I had a challenging fight was when a group of Tesla Soldiers pressed me with long range plasma fire while one of them charged at me.

So what else is there to harp on.
There are no weapon sets. So you need to bring up the pipboy every time you want to switch weapons. Which hampers the action quite a bit. A few weapon slots would have been great. But alas, Fallout3 was made with consoles (drag and drop what?) in mind and the PC platform suffers for it. But we're getting used to this.
I think I'll postpone my comments on the voice acting in the game until I write a dedicated post on that subject.

Now, I know I might sound really down on the game. But truth be told, it has taken hours a day of my time for more than a month. And it's been occuping my gaming thoughts for just as long.
So next time, I'll write a glowing post about it.

I just wish Bathesda had made something that could stand next to the greatest of shooters, as well as the greatest of RPG's. But maybe 1 out of 2 still isn't so bad.

To be continued...

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++SPOILER WARNING++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
As bonus content and just as an example of how the RPG system of this game is holding it back. The end sequence with liberty prime could have been a lot more intense and interesting if the system could "calculate" more enemies at any given time. There's always little opposition, 5 troopers tops, and more spawn in when you dispatch the former. Imagine if the game didn't have to calculate dice rolls for any of those. A lot more calculations could be put to use on AI for more troopers.
And let's take it to the extreme, there could have been an Enclave Megatron to oppose Liberty Prime. Megatron kills off Prime, since enclave tech is always better, but does so at the cost of some of his health. You are left to mop up Megatron in a bossfight not unlike that of Crysis (Warhead).
That would have been an epic close to this epic game. Unlike the luke-warm ending it has now.
Hear that Bathesda? Stop being afraid.

Mass Effect is brilliant.

2008-12-29T00:03:00.008+01:00

It's time to talk about Mass Effect.
This is going to be one huge post so you might as well get yourself a drink. I did.
I feel compelled to write about it because none of you blighters seem to have done. And that's something I don't quite understand. The critics have. The haters have (really, what kind of men complain about lesbian sex?).
It's quite an accomplishment for the gaming medium. It's a game I will hand over to my kids when I teach them about right and wrong.
If some of you didn't pick this game up it probably must have been because of the Box art, which made it look like something of a generic space opera. Mark Vanderloo looks generic, just another model in spacemarine armour.
They should have put an icon on the box. Like one of the alien races.

It's been a long time since I dumped the multiplayer RPGs for what they were back when, and started playing single player RPGs. That's not because I don't have any time left to get lost in an MMO but because I am a huge selfish prick who only thinks about himself and the world relating to me, rather then myself relating to the world.
By the way this isn't irony, it's a Vanilla flavored milkshake.

This is me thinking like a renegade. And you know when you've played to much ME when you start thinking about real life responses in terms of paragon and renegade.
So, time for the ceremonial blogpost intervention to mark my third play-through. In all, I think this game has taken about 120 hours of my time already. Don't read this as something bitter, I just couldn't find a shorter Bioware RPG. And I needed a break away from anything Star Wars related. So why not find something better?

The more perceptive readers might be discerning something of a pattern here.
Bioware has been the dealer to my addiction and what you are reading is a love letter. Or maybe it's like an open solicitation. But I doubt they have an opening. Or read blog posts. Or care.
But rest assured, I carry a key-chain with Canadian Flag on it.

The big deal about ME is that it makes you choose not between Good or Evil, but between Polite (selfless, paragon) and Rude (selfish, renegade). Needless to say, 2 of my characters are rude space bastards and one is a big softy.
The point is, that as far as moralistic games go this one is quite refreshing. I played an evil megalomaniac lunatic in Kotor2 and Fable and the deeds were cartoonishly villainous.
Mass Effect doesn't go to such extremes and rightly so. It would be quite unbelievable for Shepard (the protagonist) to join up with the bad guys or aspire to some other cliche. The games where you can solve an argument with an uppercut are far and few between. I for one applaud the game for allowing me to develop an otherwise neglected character trait.

ME is a linear game, that's because it's story driven. However the tracks are relatively broad and your actions directly influence how certain elements of the story play out. So it's not as if your actions are ultimately reset and the only difference is the way you got there.
Because of it's linearity you might think you'll be done with it after one play though. But that's not the case. The biggest reason for this is that after you finish the game, you can pick that same character and start another play-though with it. Not only will the game be upscaled to fit your level, the level cap will increase after you finish the game.
It's also good to play the hardcore or insane difficulty level, since combat will become that much harder, interesting and rewarding. Part of ME is a tactical third person shooter. There's a cover mechanic that slows the pace of the combat down and gives it the breathing room for the actual tactics.
In addition to this there's a pause function! Which allows you give orders to your team mates about. A game mechanic that goes way back when RPG's were at the isometric stage of their evolution, and has lost none of it's brilliance.
The opposition is hard so don't expect to barge in, shoot every bad guy in the face and walk away unscathed. If you don't take cover you'll probably get one hit killed by an enemy sniper or rocket.
Only as the game reaches the crescendo at the end will you feel like a right bad-ass about to lay down the law, stamping peons left and right.

The main quest is clearly outlined, and you can get on with things rather quickly, there's no real need to do any of the side-quests. So you could blast through the story as if it were a regular shooter. I'll admit that's not quite how it was intended to be played but the option's there.
You're free to take your ship and zip around the galaxy as you see fit. Side-quests will show you the broader scoop of the universe, and tell stories that don't directly relate to the main storyline. There are quests about your companions, investigating companies, crimes, abductions, extortion, crime syndicates, you name it.
There's even the downloadable content "bring down the sky", which takes place on an asteroid on it's way to crash into a planet. It's a shame Bioware hasn't released more DLC for the game. Since this one was of premium quality if rather short. It has a lot of fun combat scenes. Some moral choices and in the end, there's even a special item loot reward.

"But what about the flaws of this masterpiece?" I can hear many of you ask. Well, there are a few, but none of these are game breakers, but some rather archaic ways of dealing with things. Like the inventory system. It's taken right out of KOTOR. That is to say, all your inventory items are shown in one, big, long list. If your list is crammed with items, you'll loose oversight. This is all rather mind boggling since KOTOR2 had fixed the Kotor inventory simply by adding tabbed sorting options. Like Weapons, armour, upgrades, miscellaneous, etc.
Anyway, a lot of your weapons and items will be replaced by newer, more powerful versions. So you'll want to sell all the old crap after every sortie anyway. A inventory purge might take some setting up every mission, but in the long run, you'll be glad you did. It won't only save you time and fill up your coffers but it'll also guarantee you've got all the latest equipment. Comparing items has been made easy since there is an on the fly statistics comparison. With colours. Red means bad, Yellow means good. This also goes for weapon and armour upgrades too. Of which every armourset and weapon has a few slots for.
But the most frustration I had was with the driving sections. Not that driving is bad in itself, but a few of the planets you're driving on are ridiculous. Apparently some planets in our galaxy have landscapes with mountains that look like they were drawn by a 5 year old. Imagine a military troop transport climbing a 75 degree mountainside. At times I would really hate mountaingoating with the thing. Of course, there were some designated areas where the designers clearly intended for you to ride. But in my logic the shortest route from point A to point B still is a straight line. Even if it means scaling mount Zork.

ME is an innovative game for a number of reasons. And while these are not the sole reasons for playing the game, it would be good if people took note.
The production values are unlike any you'll see for some time. The game is polished, the story and universe work, there are no annoying inconsistencies. This makes the ME universe so believable.
The animation is clearly motion captured, and to great effect. Characters tilt their head, blink when their eyes move, shift their stance, make gestures while talking. Sometimes they will almost move out of frame. All of this makes them look very much alive. There's next to no sign of the Uncanny Vally effect. Of course, having aliens talk further bypasses the effect. That's not to say that these characters are photo realistic, there's a subtle styling, like the shading in the GTA4 concept drawings. Which ensures the game will keep looking good.
The soundtrack is impressive too. Synthesizer sounds done in a good way. Winking to Vangelis and the blade runner soundtrack. Let's not mention the voice acting in this game, it's so good that it warrants it's own blog post. Suffice to say, there's some A-grade voice talent in ME. Jeniffer Hale, Seth Green, Lance Henriksen, Marina Sirtis, Raphael Sbarge are some of the better known names.
Bioware has made a good innovation with the dialog wheel. It gives oversight and quick selection, which keeps the dialogs at a steady pace. I hope this feature makes it into future RPG's. It's so much faster and dynamic then the usual "list of answers". It also adds to the cinematic feel of the dialogs, in which the camera cuts to different viewing angles. Keeping it interesting to look at.
Options are there to drag conversations out, but these are hardly mandatory.

ME is a third person action RPG. So it ditches some pure RPG burdens.
For instance. Every character in your team has 4 weapons at it's disposal. The Pistol, Assault Rifle, Shotgun and Sniper Rifle. These are, like in an FPS, freely selectable. So you won't be digging into your inventory and swapping weapons out on your paper doll. You'll be selecting weapons suited to the tactical situation. This might seem like a trivial thing, but some modern "shooter-RPGs" haven't leaned this. I'm looking at you Fallout 3. Even Kotor2 had two different weapons sets...
The controls and combat system are fluent, and characters feel like as if they have some weight to them.
Another example is the statistic screen.
In ME you won't be adding points to strength, dexterity, intelligence etc. Every class has a distinct talent tree and you'll be adding points to those.
Your ability to, for instance, hit an opponent will be determined to how good you can aim and shoot. However, your ability to aim and shoot is influenced to how steady you can hold your weapon. Thus, Adding points to your sniper rifle talent tree will lessen the sway with the rifle, increasing your accuracy. Of course it will also increase the damage.
Weapon mods can further influence these statistics, or grant side effects like a poison or burn status.

I think it's safe to say that Mass Effect has become one of my favorite games ever. It's up there next to Sacrifice. It's become a comfort game and nostalgia will have me coming back in years to come. It's like a book you read once a year. It will make me play my characters through the insane difficulty. I only hope my skills will keep up when the time comes.
I can't wait for more Mass Effect titles. Be it games, books or movies. I hope Bioware and it's writers continue to pursue and expand the Mass Effect universe. Because, frankly it stands above the likes of Star Wars and The Matrix.

Game of the year 2008.
Surpassing among others: Bioshock, CoD4, Orange Box, Kotor2, Crysis Warhead, Company of Heroes.

Now, on to another game where I can be a moral reject. Fallout 3, here I come.

Bioware's The Old Republic and storytelling in an MMO.

2008-12-17T22:39:00.007+01:00

In an MMO, everybody shares the same gameworld, there can be no definitive change. Not only does the environment have to stay the same, the storyline and quests have to remain the same aswell. It's pretty much a one way street, from the gameworld to the player.
So in the past, MMO's haven't bothered much with story. Which leads to fetch quests and "kill x-amount of this or that"-quests. I think we can all agree that it's time to pull the MMO genre out of the hunter gatherer stage of it's evolution.

Bioware is next up to have a go at pulling the blade from the stone Blizzard put there.
They will inject the element story to the MMO genre to enthrall the player. I hope they do this at the expense of the tedious grind quests mentioned above. It goes without saying that yours truly won't be having with those. Grinding reminds me of the sound of time slipping through the hourglass, reminding that my life is getting shorter by the millisecond.
A meaninfull story on the other hand, might have some merit.

Some proof of the importance of story can be found, for instance, on 1up where Anthony Gallegos did an interview with Bioware founders Dr. Ray Muzyka, Dr. Greg Zeschuk, principal lead writer Daniel Erickson and studio creative director James Ohlen.

Some people have been scratching their heads about how they will let players progress along their own "unique" storyline.
Fear not my loyal readers, all two of you, for I have stared deeply into this cup of coffee and have come up with a satisfying and likely solution to this mystery.

Every player will choose their own path of quests through a series of actions and choices.
These choices will string together the many quests that will shape the story of each player. Some quests will be shared, and so will some story elements. But as a whole, the experience will be quite unique.
Proof in favor of this statement is Greg Zeschuk saying there will be real concequences for players in SW:TOR.
Players will encounter less and less players "sharing" their quests because with every fork in the road, the available players will be cut in half.
Given the fact that this is Star Wars there is a basic division between Light and Dark side. Unique quests could be available to each seperate character class. Choices in the quests themselves could further influence future quests.
Companions have long been a staple of bioware RPG's, so I think we can count on some companion related quests as seen in Baldurs Gate, Mass Effect...

The character creation will set up the basic game, the big picture.
Proof of earlier signs of this development, we can find in, again, Mass Effect, where players select a personal history and a psychiological profile for their character. These choices eventually introduce their own sidequests into the main story.

So there you have it, the cat's out of the bag.
Fortunatly for Bioware it's not easely copied, since you need good writing in the first place to make this work well. This isn't a problem since Bioware is leading the pack when it comes to storytelling.
It also staggers the mind how much quests and dialogs will have to be written. The pitfall here is that quests could become really isolated or rather, really stand-alone. Opportunity exists however, to reward players with unique skills tied to said quests.
Bioware has licenced the HeroEngine, which is said to allow for easy updating and modification. Which could suggest that TOR might be rather short when it's first released, but constantly updated with new content and new quests. Like reading a book while it's still being written.
This might also be in line with the business model they plan to use. No monthly fees, but micro-payment for unique items. Players might let the "lack of content" slide just because there are no monthly fees - and thus no pressure or obligation ( "why else did I pay for this?" ) to play.

We might also come to expect personalised instancing of parts of the ingame world. Just like Blizzard has done with WOW. They call it "phazing". A simple and elegant solution. An evolution that is likely here to stay. Frankly, it's a mystery why no MMO developer has thought of it before.

Next post will not be related to Star Wars. And less speculative.
Unless I'm lying.

Coup de force.

2008-12-08T22:27:00.010+01:00

I used to think that when the first force-feedback joystick was put on shelves, it would be the perfect controller for a lightsaber. And it would be just perfect for Dark Forces2: Jedi Knight. Which, admittidly, I played with a Joystick. At the time I felt there was similarity between holding a lightsaber and holding a joystick.
Only later did I adopt the mouse. You must understand, I was a huge Flightsim buff before that. Either way, that game was awesome. Even with my rather unusual control style.
But I was wrong. About 10 years later the Wii came into being, and along it the Wiimote. It has been said over and over. The Wiimote would make for a perfect lightsaber. At last all the pieces were poised to fall into place. But I was wrong again. At least for now. Let's make amends.

Let us use our most remarkable human gift of reason to try and solve this problem.
Here goes.

We all remember Lucasarts much maligned Star Wars: The force unleashed and The Clone Wars: Lightsaber duels, yes? They are lacking, to say the least.
Krome Studios made both said games in respective order.
Logic would have you think that the second go would be a better one then the first, right? Wrong.

What I think happend is, Lucasarts dropped the ball. Into a toilet. Then accidentally flushed it. On the long way down it got shittier and shittier. Eventually an aligator ate it. The aligator commended himself on being able to digest anything, very slowly.
Since then, Lucasarts and it's variable minions have prodded the austere aligator for a long time in hopes it would regurgitate the ball. Often the reptile would crap into the wet sand behind it and the minions would scoop up the seeping waste, mistaking it for the much coveted ball. Then they release it in gamestores everywhere.

So Listen up Lucasarts and Krome.

A bit of free time and a sugared up coffee has produced this little brainstorm session.

The lightsaber combat game works like Metroid Prime 3, "lock-on" viewpoints with 1 on 1 movement (Wii motion plus included if it helps).
Locking on sets the player in "guard/fight mode" allowing for combat moves. The lock keeps the opponent dead center in view, this eleminates the need to manually adjust your character's direction, or the camera's, on the opponent. I honestly can't imagine a viewpoint in a duel where you'd want to have your opponent somewhere in the corners of your eyes while fighting.
Locking off makes the player more mobile. This so he can better move around and reposition, jumping on platforms, running away, etc. If Third person, this also makes the camera zoom out a bit.

Further controls.
A pointer or Crosshair controls the camera and look direction - pitch and heading when not locked on. Not locking on puts the saber and the sword arm in an idle state. That way you don't have arms waving every which way when controlling the camera.
Strafing and forward and backward movement are controlled with the analog stick. Lock on button is mapped to the Nunchuck's Z button. You don't want to press and hold a button on the controller you're waving about.

The game might not be able to know just where your hand is, nor where your arm is.
The wiimote and the wii are not equipped to gauge the absolute position of the wiimote in space. The player will have to adjust his movements to the "hand position" shown on screen. This opens the door for additional gameplay, we might be able to set the hand of the character on screen via combat styles. A bit like the combat stances in Jedi Knight 2. For instance a more defensive position has the saber placed in front of the viewpoint, allowing for easier blocking. The trade-off here is that the player is unable to make huge swings, making for weaker attacks. Reverse the previous situation and we have an agressive combat style.

First person view might work for this concept but third might be better.
Perhaps a view not too far out as not to be disconnected from the battle. Something of a closer view Jedi Knight 2 had. Over the shoulder might work too, but only if overview remains.
The reason third person works well is that it's {the "narrative of the combat"} focussing on the characters, their "bodies". As opposed to the first person view that makes the body something of an afterthought.
Third person gives a player more awareness of their environment right away. Mirrors Edge made a solution but it didn't incorporate combat all that much. For instance Metroid Prime had people jumping out of good faith, rather then exact knowledge. And it became something of an instinct. But again, MP has no melee combat.
In a lightsaber fight though, it might be necessary because of acrobatics, force jumps, etc.
Maybe this is one of the reasons Jedi Knight played so well in third person view, limited though it might have been. In it Gunplay didn't work well because it lacked a more zoomed in view, like the "over the shoulder" viewpoint we see so much and works so well.

In multiplayer though, I can see why a conservative studio might want to place the fighting on a 2D plane. But in order to coordinate exact movement, it's best to have the camera squarely behind the character.
So might I suggest a split screen? Preferably a vertical split.
Online play is a must. No more excuses.

Setting.
Personally I'd rather see the game in a timeframe where there's more then just a handfull of hero characters. Which brings about my next point.

High customization.
Players choose their race, gender, clothing combinations (robes or armor - mobility, defensive trade-offs?).
player gets to create a lightsaber, customise it's properties, choose the colour of the blade. To keep it fair, offer the "canon" colours in different shades.
Add chrystals and mods. More power - less defense. More speed, less damage. The usual.
Unlocks might be considered, though not along the lines of "unlock a more powerful version of this modification" rather "unlock a different kind of modification".

Force powers are there, but limited. Force push sounds like a given. If you must include more then that, stick to force choke, lighting and healing. Also, blinding as a light side power could be cool. Force power could be stored and accumulated like the power meter in the Street Fighter series. On a side note: super moves on a full powerbar could be cool, if they are not overpowered. This would be a good risk-reward move. Or when the fight starts to favor one player it might even the odds a bit.
Jumping and running could be a possibility, but have a stamina limitation, this to prevent people from endlessly running and jumping around. Keep the game about the duel!

Hurdles to overcome.
-Multiplayer lag.
-Possibilties for Local multiplay. (split screen?)
-Noobs slashing their way to victory (link stamina meter?).
-Huge expectations could jeapordise the gameplay, the game doesn't have to make you Darth Maul to make it fun.
-Graphics on Wii are a problem for some. As always choose style over technique. Cartoony graphics with a very limited polygon budget will work best. Have background that are functional first, and look pretty second - like making them in grey or earthy tones. A lot can be done with very rudimentairy geometry and simple textures. That way the combatants and their coloured lightsabers stand out more. Silhouettes are important, stance of the feet, positions of the arms tells the player their combat style, etc.
Photorealism is so far out of the Wii's reach, don't even think about getting there. Think World Of Warcraft rather than Doom 3.
-If there are no canned animations to count on, putting the movement of the player into animation might give a huge disconnect between the movement of the saber and th that of the character. Which in turn might favor a first person viewpoint.

Under- or overambitious? You might have similar ideas. Feel free to sound off.

Additional References:
Wii Controller for Virtual Reality

Learn, god damnit.

2008-11-27T19:55:00.008+01:00

Every day, I try to put my personal frustration into words. But it's like opening the door of a closet that's packed with dirty laundry. Or chaos being puked into a toilet bowl.
I'm glad Nick has made this beautiful message, this bundled voice, in which people who have no voice at all can join.

Thou shalt not kill: KOTOR 2

2008-11-11T14:28:00.004+01:00

No, this is not the Star Wars Blog your looking for. but let me assure you, more professional blogposts are on the way.
Kotor 2 is short for "Knights Of The Old Republic 2", a sequel to Bioware's KOTOR, made by Obsidian (risen from the ashes of Black Isle Studios, who you might remember from classics such as Baldur's gate 1&2, Fallout 1&2, Planescape Torment and Icewind Dale...).
I'm going to throw in a few (minor) Kotor2 and Bioshock spoilers, so if you don't like that sort of thing, skip this read. But they are neccesairy to link the two.

Kotor2 is a RPG based in the Star Wars universe. That doesn't mean it's badly written though. It shares the same special vibe with the Jedi Knight games. It's odd how these kind of "extended universe" titles are able to catch the original Star Wars vibe a lot better then, for example, the prequel trilogy could.
The game features a pretty elaborate story and retelling of Kotor 1. Along with the moralistic lesson that every being should be left to their own individuality and that they will become stronger if they themselves overcome their problems rather then count on others to solve it for them. As a player, you get to comment on that idea through the gameplay.
Speaking of which, the gameplay is of the highest standard, the one you might expect from a studio like Obsidian.

But the thing I wanted to share, aside from the recommendation, is something a bit more special. Those of you who experienced Bioshock, you will recognise this kind of phenomenon.
Just before the final chapter of Kotor 2, you have to face the jedi council, apparently for advice and answers, story wise. But what also happens is that the council judges and condems you, rather unexpectidy, for playing the game. They aknowledge you have become powerful indeed, but since you've become so through killing critters and people, you are Sith. Even if you played it "light side". I thought this was an interesting point.
In most RPGs you gain a fair bit of experience through killing stuff and this game is no exeption. And in these kind of games, it's a mechanic that defines the genre. But Kotor 2 judges you, or more precisely the gameplay and thus it's own genre, for it labelling you Sith either way. And it comes as somewhat as a shock, since you had no idea this was coming. It's like a stealth story element that crawls up on you. Just like "would you kindly" did in Bioshock, even though that particular example was more obvious. You are being played.

As a little by the way, this shows what true talent can do with a universe that might be dismissed by some as childish and shallow.
Impressive, most Impressive.

Comfort games.

2008-10-26T21:26:00.005+01:00

After a long busy day at the office, it's nice to get home, make yourself a cup of coffee and fire up one of your favorite games. Comfort games are the games you usually fall back on when there's nothing else to do. This might not be the best game in your collection, but it's the one that never ceases to enterain you. You might have a few, or you might even just have one.
I guess this is true for a lot of people who play World Of Warcraft, with more then 10 million subscibers, it has the population that even some countries have not. Since WoW is such a time sink, it's not unlikely that some of these people don't play much else. And rightly so, WoW has a lot to like.
So you might think about this, what is your comfort game, do you have more then one? These are the games that you should score an A+ or a 10 on your personal scale. I should say, that a developer that has you playing and enthralled for years, have done a very good job indeed.
You could even make the comparison with other media. What TV program or soap has eaten up hours upon hours of your life, what movie has you viewing it at least a couple of times a year? What books? It doesn't matter if it are public favorites or not, I'm not talking about commercial successes per se.
Your favorites could be critically acclaimed, or they could be despised by the critics.
For instance The Force Unleashed (yes, it is odd that I bring up Star Wars again - could it be a comfort franchise? I guess in time I will have to explain why it's interesting to keep bringing it up) is doing pretty good in sales, despite scoring average marks. It's almost a given that a lot of children and teen out there will have favorable memories of it later on, and if you ask them about the game in a few years, chances are they will label it "awsome" anyway. It's the experience that counts for the most part. On a side note, I played SW:TFU on Wii and wasn't very impressed by it (although admitidly, the story made into a movie could have the potential to be the best in the series). Chances are low of it becoming a comfort game for me, but it might be for some kid out there that gets home from school and pines to throw about a couple of Stormtroopers, perfectly understandable.

Some of my comfort games? I'll indulge you.
I had my fair share of comfort games over the past, must have been about, 12 years. So I will contradict myself and say that comfort games have come and gone. Change of hardware, evolution of game design. I will still vouch these games for being great, great games in the past. That doesn't necessairely mean they are as great today. Mind, i've been playing games since NES days, but in those days, a game was a game. It didn't have critical acclaim hanging in the balance, it was all good fun. Though our child minds still had the equipment to detect a stinker. So with that said, some past highlights.

First off was Jedi knight: Dark forces 2 (oh snap, Star Wars again). I played through the story numerous times, building my character differently discovering all the secrets. It was my very first online addiction, and to clarify, I played it competitivly.
I should praise this game on another blogpost, or this one will become rather lenghty. Anyway, if you have the ability to play it, you propably should. And I've got an extra incentive right here.

Along came Sacrifice, in my opinion Shiny Entertainment's masterpiece. It was a hybrid between an RTS, RPG and Third person action. That might seem like a strange combination, but it made for great gameplay. Top notch voice talent and some pretty good story telling. An art style that holds up today (and will do so in the future). In all, it made for a solid universe. For all those who wish to experience this unsung classic, go buy it over at Good Old Games.

Another chapter in my personal gaming history, Guild Wars.
One of the most succesfull MMOs out there. I was deeply involved in the game. Played in a highly ranked guild that got to and held third place on the world ladder. Which can be an indicator as to how engaged I was into the game. Unfortunatly for the game (do not read as "the ingame world"), once I joined the workforce, I quit playing. I log in from time to time to see what's happening in there. It's sort of like visiting the place you grew up in, albeit not quite as profound.
Some highlights in the game which would be a must see for anyone with a taste in gaming art, Kaineng city and the Jade Sea (factions) and the Realm of Torment (nightfall). The art direction in Guild Wars is an exquisite blend of real world locations and the artistic interpretations of said locations.

Finally, some current games I fall back on. It's hard to invest into a game these days, since there's not that much time for gaming as there used to be.
I spend a lot of time shuttleing between work and home, so there's a big portion of mobile gaming at this point. So I either carry a GBA micro or a DS to work.

Advance Wars has been a comfort game for me for years now. I own and have played through every game (barring the games before GBA that never came to the west) in the series multiple times. The gameplay, the happy-go-lucky art style, the music, the over the top vibe to it all. I think all this is material for another blogpost.

Recenty I've been looking into casual games, both from a personal and professional interest. And one of these games has me hooked. Puzzle Quest.
It's a match three game, which on it's own is quite simple. But PQ adds a few more layers of RPG gameplay that directly involve and influence the match three gameplay. Upgrading your character with skills, spells and equipment make it all the more addicting. It's an ideal game for quick and short game sessions. It's not quite a comfort game just yet, but it could become one. Only time can tell.

FACTS 2008

2008-10-11T22:46:00.012+02:00

In a time where escapism can be self-evident, it's interesting to walk through Facts in Ghent. This is the biggest Belgain fair about pop-culture, fantasy, comics, manga, Star Wars, Lord Of The Rings, Star Trek, games, cosplay, table top gaming, etc.
Barring the highly commercial aspect, I got the vibe that this is an event by and for happy people. Ok, watching furries frolic in the open might not be the best thing for one's sanity, but these are not unhappy people.
It's refreshing to catch a glimplse of these alternate realities, given the bleak perspective ours has - with the economy in shambles and all.
It got me wondering, so what if it's time for a new world order? Why couldn't we make it in the shape of the Star Wars universe? Skantly clothed women on chains, robes as everyday clothing, hovercars, helmets with fins on them, stormtroopers on the battlefields, bad guys dressed in black, good guys dressed in white, a moral system based on the greater good in stead of a god, sounds good by me! At least this would be a society with a neatly designed look to it, finally an image we can display to the greater universe!

From left to right, people cosplaying as The Joker, me, naruto, a blonde porn actor.

I met comic artist John Mcrea and had a nice chat with the man. He was very enthousiastic to talk about his craft, and I was genuinly impressed by his drawings. It's also the first time I've had to get my hands on some original frames of comic pages. His style, from what I saw at Facts is somewhat cartoony and very clean, but a closer look at his work shows he also knows how to do more realistic styles. It's curious to see that one artist is this flexible. Do check out his work if you're interested in comics. Amongst others, he has done work for public favorites such as Star Wars (dark horse), he draws one sinister looking Darth Vader, Spider-Man (marvel) and Batman (DC).

Alpha

2008-09-27T03:28:00.003+02:00

A blog, it's something that's been rolling around in my head for a long time now. It seems to be a very accessable way of getting word out. Or a fun way to practice writing.
I often shuddered at the word "blog" because it seems like something you would say whilest regurgitating. Implying that you would recycle or reproduce opinions you picked up somewhere, rather then sharing your own perspective. So dislikeing the sound of it, I usually reffered to a blog as a "b-log", I don't know why exactly, but the word "log" has something official to it.
I also wondered whether I'd have something to say at all, and if peope would like to read it. I'm rather positive on the first count, the second is out of my hands.
But I think it's best to dismiss those questions, or at least ignore them for the time being, since there is always merit in more information.

This blog will (propably) focus on my professional life, so I will shortly clarify what it is I do.
I am an Interactive Designer at Endrone (also often reffered to as Endrone Games).
Interactive Designer is a rather expensive term I feel. It's not as if all I do is make interactive and responsive things, programs or what have you.
My tasks are rather broad, going from graphics design and webdesign, game and game graphics design, animation, 3d modelling, logo design and even banner design.
I'm not the ideal jack-of-all-trades though, since I'm not an expert on all these things, but that luckely and hopefully grants me to be a master in at least a few of them.

So, a blog, it's also a way of dealing with our mute voice we seem to have in this society. And though not a lot of people on average seem to scream out loud for other average people to hear it, and bloggers are screaming en masse, so maybe even there, we are mute in the white noise of opinions, thoughts and conversations among other bloggers.
Opinions are everywhere, they are fired like artillery barrages all over the internet, on sites like youtube, forums, gaming sites, social networks and news sites we frequent every day.
But scream we must, and inform, and teach and share.
Though I must admit, the teaching part seems a lot like a job and not so much like the therapy I think I need.

Such expensive words, therapy, teaching, conversations... Chances are this will ultimatly become a blog about me monologging about games, obsessivly and single mindedly.
But it is my firm belief that everything, including games which are one of my interests (and job even), are products of the time and culture they were made in. Some offer in some way, a subtle snapshot of the mindset, fears, expectations and morality of the times. It's the same way with books, television shows, movies, contemporary art, etc.
So, the challenge will be to link games, but not just that, to stuff like art, science, politics, learning, filosophy and people. And give my own "professional perspective" on them, in a way I hope will be helpful and interesting.

Easy, right?

I thought so...