Ragequit

iPod nano key lock fix!

2011-12-27T11:55:00.003+01:00

Time for a Christmas/New year blog post!
About a year ago the key lock on my iPod "broke". It kinda worked some times if you managed to balance it perfectly, but if you put it in you pocket it would become unbalanced again, and the key lock would be gone. This is mightily annoying of course, and this Christmas I have finally fixed it. I believe there's some bad contact inside the iPod to cause this behaviour, but I'm not a good with that kind of stuff, so opening it up and soldering was out of the question. On to plan B.

It's a very simple solution, basically putting something in front of the wheel to prevent one from accidentally touching it. I built it out of an old Lemon Mints box, a sponge and some duck tape.
The original plan was to house the entire iPod inside the box, but it was too small for that, so I cut a hole in the top for it to peek out of. I also cut a smaller hole in the bottom for the head phone cable. The sponge is there to keep the iPod in place and to duck tape is there to take the blunt the metallic edges that got pretty sharp after I cut it open. I also used a bit of glue to try to keep the duck tape from falling off as the small pieces doesn't really stick that well to the box.

Well, I'm satisfied at least!

Battlefield 3 - EmJays Mumble server

2011-12-11T22:12:00.002+01:00

Please click here to join the mumble server!

Please ensure you have Mumble installed first!

This blog sure was dusty!

2011-04-04T13:12:00.004+02:00

Hello!

As you will have undoubtedly noticed I have made some more changes to the blog. Just a quick facelift to give the impression of activity!

I do intend to start writing more here and I will try to get the other guys back into it as well.

HOWEVER. I appear to have broken the "read more >>" functionality. For all posts. Yay.

Abbe, if you can restore that it would be awesome.

For now I bid you adieu.

Riddles.

Project Nostalgia

2011-03-06T13:15:00.003+01:00

Back in 2008 (May/June?) a group of us had nothing to do for a weekend and decided to do something fun together and at the same time throw something together for the SGA. The result was Which Witch is Which.
Of course we didn't win anything as we spent a weekend on the game, and another week of not quite as hardcore coding just cleaning some stuff up.
It was primarily developed for the local arcade machine (a PC in a fancy casing), where coop is king and controls very limited.
A while back I got the source code from one of the other coders who actually take care of their stuff, and yesterday I compiled it for the first time. And it worked. I've made some minor changes to get it to be easier to develop for, but nothing major.
I don't have any specific goal with reviving the game, but I hope to have some fun playing around in the code base. The first thing I will have a look at is the horrible control, and after that there might be some feature creeping (some sort of single player challenge mode would be cool. Or power-ups!). I have no plan for any of the development, just doing what I feel like, and I'm also quite busy at work now so probably won't have that much time free. Basically we'll have to see what happens.
Currently I'm trying to set up a svn repository over at assembla. Never really done anything like this so we'll see how it goes, or if they are any good. If you want access to the repository, sign up and let me know, and I'll add you! Happy random feature creep day!

Yay 2011!

2011-01-13T12:11:00.001+01:00

Here goes another year!
Anyone still reads this? :)

Bad Company 2 Domino Effect!

2010-10-20T18:17:00.001+02:00

Crazy Russians! 1:46 of absolute madness.

Cee-lo Green - Fuck You (Official Video)

2010-09-17T11:19:00.002+02:00

Thought I'd post the official video to this song as it's just as good as the one below. :)

The old Citroen 2CV - Zero Technology

2010-09-17T10:36:00.003+02:00

Fuck You (ooo, ooo, oooo)

2010-08-21T23:15:00.001+02:00

Changes

2010-08-15T11:01:00.002+02:00

Hello!

So I've made a couple of changes to the blog, added my twitter feed and hopefully be bringing more recent updates and articles.

Matt Ridley: When ideas have sex

2010-07-19T17:21:00.004+02:00

Excellent talk by Matt Ridley about how and why human evolution of technology and knowledge increases so fast, and most importantly why it becomes faster the more we populate the earth.
Recommended watch!

I like it

2010-06-21T13:21:00.002+02:00

I like it.

Translated lyrics:
Closing my eyes to the sound of gunfire
Uttering a roar
In a flash I am switched into despair
Everything for the one who lives inside the nightmare
Missing from the bottom of my heart

Wishing the world that ran out of tears
The heart is already dead
The hope
Missing until it hurts.

Street Fighter The Movie - Correct subtitles

2010-05-30T13:34:00.000+02:00

Iron Baby

2010-05-28T22:21:00.000+02:00

Batman XXX

2010-05-04T18:07:00.002+02:00

:D
Found at Kotaku

Yup.

2010-04-21T15:59:00.002+02:00

"This difference is just because people's everyday life experiences don't include superheating a block of carbon above 5000 degrees Kelvin until it glows blue."

Upcoming stuff

2010-04-01T08:32:00.003+02:00

The activity has been down a little bit, but don't worry I've got tons of stuff coming up!

April Fool, I've got nothing. Nothing planned at least.

I wonder if RSS or something will ruin this. I wonder if we have RSS support and if anyone has subscribed to it. Anyway, it's not much to ruin as it didn't take any time and it isn't really that funny.

Piano!

2010-03-25T20:50:00.002+01:00

It gave me 2 minutes of joy at least. More because of the music rather than the animation though.

Dragon Age: Awakening

2010-03-20T00:59:00.003+01:00

The first expansion (of many?) have now been released and I have been playing it pretty much non-stop, but now I'm finished and thought of writing a small review of it.

Dragon Age: Awakening takes place after the end of the main campaign, you get the choice to import an old character or to start a new character on an appropriate level (20+) for the expansion. Your new-found role as the Warden-commander over the grey wardens and Vigil Keep presents you with a few new scenarios where you act as the defender of the keep and the outlying region.

Loved
Its Dragon Age! - Felt good to get back into Ferelden again, made me want to start playing my Rogue again, time will tell if I actually will. But if you liked Dragon Age: Origins, then you will like this.

Short - It took me pretty much exactly 16 hours and 40 minutes to complete it, which is longer than most games and enough for me to get into it but not to get too bored with it. After all, you will be doing mostly the same stuff you have been doing in the main campaign.

New Skills and Specializations - Each class have gotten 2 new specializations that your high level character can branch into, the classes have also gotten more base skills to their disposal, enhancing their base strengths.

New Dialogue system - This being an expansion and not a full-fledged game, you cannot have as much talking with your companions, instead you might stumble upon things in the world that will initiate conversations. No more will you spend hours in your camp talking to everyone to learn their whole life-story (although much of the talking happens there still).

Hated
Other Campaign, not an expansion - The new skills and specializations are unavailable if you play the normal campaign again, even if your character is over level 20. A real shame and I really felt that Bioware could have made it a real expansion instead of a separate campaign.

Disconnection - Mass effect 2 was proud of their connection to Mass Effect, boasting about some 700 triggers that could be transferred. Most of the time it feels as if you aren't playing the same character you played in Origins, but a newly started unknown character, only in the end-screen texts did I see a real connection to what you've done earlier.

Incompatible with older DLC - Seems as if Awakening is incompatible with the skills you can gain from the Warden's Keep DLC, my mana-heavy mage really missed the blood sacrifice skill. Warden's keep being an official DLC addon the incompatibility really surprised me.

Dragon Age: Awakening is a good addon, its plagued with the occasional voice-acting mistakes (in the beginning especially) and a general disconnection to what you did in Origins. It contains some bugged quests and I crashed several times in and out of battle, not sure if its the expansions fault or just my computer acting up. Most disappointing is that the expansion doesn't 'expand' your characters in Origins, but only once you import them to Awakening.

But if we look past these mishaps we have a product of the same quality as Origins, the writing is good, voice actors do a good job and the environments are still amazing. I enjoyed my time in it immensely. But don't expect any technical revolutions to have happened under the hood or affecting the main campaign, or you might be sorely disappointed.

Dr Horrible's Sing Along Blog

2010-03-14T15:48:00.002+01:00

Just an awesome mini musical that I had totally missed before. Highly recommended.

Bad Company 2 sigs!

2010-03-09T23:54:00.005+01:00

Edit:
Right, the owner of the sig-site did some changes and made a few versions with detailed information, so I updated the links to the more informative stuff. There was some problem with the sigs displaying wrong information but that was because the EA servers were down, thus completely out of my hands. :)

Original post:
If you gaze your eye to the right you might notice a few new images, in short its some basic stats of the people I know that play Battlefield Bad Company 2, unfortunately the images is cut a bit short but I cant be arsed to change the theme... But I shall provide you with the full images below as well.

This service is provided by Elxx

ARGH Release dates!

2010-03-04T23:44:00.004+01:00

I'm getting more and more annoyed by the fact that England seems to lag behind on release dates compared to the rest of Europe. It's not much, only a day (they get it on Thursday, England on Friday). In reality it's nit-picking, but it's especially annoying since Steam started. The reason for this is that I have the game downloaded but still locked (not released yet) while my friends are happily playing the game. Why can't I just unlock it? ARGH! The games where I noticed this the most so far has been Mass Effect 2 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and those are both EA, so perhaps there's some connection there.
Edit: Someone made a picture of it.

Everything thats wrong about Japan, according to Tim Rogers

2010-03-04T12:45:00.004+01:00

Tim Rogers have written an article almost as long as longcat about everything he finds wrong about Japan. As a person that is interested in Japan and its culture, it was an incredibly interesting read about life and work in Japan.
I've never had any thoughts about living or working in Japan and thanks to this I doubt I will try and pursue anything like it, still, I would like to spend a summer with my friends travelling there, which would be ahahahawesome!

Anyhow, its long but if you're interested about Japan, do give it a read.

Japan: It's not funny anymore [Tim Rogers, Kotaku]

Shiina Ringo

2010-03-04T00:56:00.001+01:00

I've liked Shiina Ringo for quite some time, just sharing the love. Theres attached subs to the movie, if you cant see them, turn on closed captions.
Yes, her voice is awesome.

Ninja Assassin

2010-03-01T23:37:00.003+01:00

The film is stupid, brainless and everything it promises.

Seriously, you wouldn't watch a film called Ninja Assassin and expect some deep story or philosophical questions. When I saw the trailer I actually guessed the name of the film. That's how awesome the trailer is.
The film does deliver on its promise and features almost no story and an awful lot of action. This is a good thing as the action is very well done, especially the beautifully stylised blood. If you want to put your brain in stand by and enjoy some awesome ninja action, its worth a watch. If you don't, you won't be missing anything either (except the limbs the ninja cuts off when you dishonour him).

Things to know about Breasts and Semen

2010-02-27T12:44:00.003+01:00

Sankaku Complex have found some fun information about Breasts and Semen, quite informational and also quite funny, so here they are for your perusal:

Star Wars Trilogy

2010-02-22T22:49:00.002+01:00

To me Star Wars is still a trilogy. I don't care about all the new crap that has been tacked on to the beginning of The Trilogy.
However, right before Christmas I was informed about something horrible. The Star Wars Holiday Special

I feel that enough time has passed since Christmas to not totally ruin it for everyone so I'm posting it here.

I can't get my mind around the fact that this was actually done. Not only was it done but they got all the (major) original actors to participate! Who in their right mind thought this was a good idea?
How bad is it? The first video has 126.000 views while the last one has 10 000. That's roughly 8% that finished watching the move. I know that's a hasty conclusion but I wouldn't be too surprised if it was close to the truth. It took me several days to finish the thing. When you're done it feels good. Like you have completed a filthy task like cleaning your room. With your tongue. You are glad that you're done with it and you know that one day you will look back at the experience and laugh.

http://5z8.info/orgy.avi_h3d9q_illegal-guns-for-sale

2010-02-20T17:53:00.002+01:00

I approve.

Splinter Cell: Conviction

2010-02-19T00:09:00.002+01:00

*Seizure*

Ahahahhaha

2010-02-09T00:34:00.001+01:00

The link!
:D
Oh, the site is NSFW but the content of the article is not.

Alien vs Predator, demo impressions and rage

2010-02-05T22:05:00.004+01:00

The Aliens vs. Predator demo released yesterday and joyfully I downloaded and began to play it and...

...I'm definitely not going to buy this game based upon this demo, the ways they have fucked up everything except the overall balance of the game is, frankly, incredible.

What also baffles me is that people defend them and say that the final product will be loads better, I doubt it. The reason being that this is a Demo, a demonstration of the final product. The game will be released in roughly 2 weeks.

People also spout shit like its 10 month old code, no developer with their head straight would (or should!) release code that old or working this poorly and expect to get away with it. If and that's a big if, they had slapped on a big BETA sign like the Battlefield Bad Company 2 beta, hell, I might just have believed them, but they labelled it as a demo and as a demo it shall be judged.

Hell, I can take connection problems, I can take some balance issues, but I cant take a straight port from consoles in terms of controls and gameplay, or the fact that they default everyone's mic to automatically transmit. The lobby and connection system of the quick match seems to be designed for perfect conditions. Which might just be the worst thing you can do with computer software.

The worst thing is that the game might be fun if you really get to play it with good ping. But I'm not going to experience it with this demo, there's just too much other complications for me to actually try and enjoy it.

Global Agenda: Conquest Overview

2010-02-03T10:55:00.002+01:00

Very interesting video about the nature of the Conquest mode in the recently released MMOFPS, Global Agenda.

For your die hard WoWers there won't be much value here, but if you enjoyed games like Tribes, The Witcher (to an extent) and Mass Effect, but also like to shoot stuff and don't mind managing a few hundred players at once... this one may be for you.

I gotta learn to play guitar

2009-12-29T23:10:00.003+01:00

So I can be as awesome as this kid (also I know that he plays ukulele, not guitar).

Also related, fucking kids...

Merry Christmas

2009-12-24T17:24:00.000+01:00

That's all.

My allegiance in the war

2009-12-13T00:06:00.003+01:00

By the war I obviously refer to the Team Fortress 2 Soldier vs Demoman war that is currently going on.

By studying my stats screen you could easily figure it out.

I have almost twice as much playtime with the soldier than any other class and it's more than a third of my total play time (rounding it to 78 hours of TF2 where 33 is soldier -> ~42% soldier).
Obviously the soldier is winning even though it's not thanks to me. Haven't been playing TF2 that much lately, but I think that might change when the patch goes live.
As I'm writing this it dawns on me that I will probably be on vacation when the path goes live, so perhaps TF2 has to wait till 2010.

When you're happy and you know it show your hands.

2009-12-05T00:45:00.016+01:00

Basically I'm drunk and can't leave you with something awesome,so I leave you with something cute instead. Awesome is coming later (wait a few days/weeks/years).

I ragequit piracy, part deux

2009-12-04T19:03:00.002+01:00

Part 2, because I saw this in a signature:

The Rationalization of Pirating PC games...
1. I'm too poor, so I steal it.
2. I wouldn't have bought it anyway, it was a crappy game all the way to the end. I'm glad I demoed it before I bought it.
3. I hate the copy protection they use so I had to steal it.
4. The developer made me steal it because it runs crappy on my hardware. It's their FAULT!
5. I'd let someone steal my million dollar game, so its ok if I do it.

My part one looked like this, if you don't remember:

I wont download a game if a demo is available or I'm interested in buying it.
If I do download it, I wont finish it unless I'm interested in paying for it.
If it turns out to be a bad game, then I will remove it and not even think of completing it. If I do complete it, I need to buy the game.

Addendum to point 3: If its a newly released game and you really like it, bite the sour grass and pay whatever you find it to cost, don't wait 2-3 years to buy it as that is just as good as stealing it.

Rogue fucking Warrior, fuck, best motherfucking game fucking ever

2009-12-03T11:34:00.003+01:00

Just watch it and if the topic didn't give it away, there's some explicit language in it.

John Riccitiello seems like a pretty cool guy

2009-11-10T17:16:00.004+01:00

I've felt that since John Riccitiello became the CEO of EA, EA have shaped up as a company and at least somewhat left the waters of a moneyhungry shark, this interview with him just reaffirm my thoughts even more.

If the embedded video shouldnt work, heres the link to the original video page. You might need to turn off your adblocker for it to be seen.

Prince of Persia Trailer

2009-11-04T15:06:00.002+01:00

Time to be Cautiously Optimistic again:

Cant wait. :D

A bunch of amazing pictures (and a load of trash)

2009-10-26T17:47:00.004+01:00

Now I'm generally not one to recommend forum posts but I'll make an exception out of this one.

It's a topic over at 2+2 (a poker forum) with the title "Pictures that say 1000 words (some pretty disturbing)" and some of the images are really quite disturbing. If you don't feel like having a few more images of war and suffering in your head, you might want to look elsewhere. Some of the pictures are actually of nice things but those are exceptions.

Even though the pictures don't make me happy per se, they make me think. And thinking about things seriously makes me happy.

One example after the jump.

Sad puppy is sad.

I'm not sure if I should cry or laugh

2009-10-24T12:48:00.003+02:00

Ghost in the Shell will become a Live-action movie.
While the story in Gits can be covered quite well, I wonder if they will honour the original story at all. The world and the technical site is another big issue...

I'm gonna cry myself to sleep tonight it seems.

Ghost in the Shell Live Action Going Strong [Sankaku Complex]

Your future

2009-10-22T23:03:00.001+02:00

Don't have anything to do? Don't know what to do in the future? If you got some time to spare, ESA wants to hear from you.

China is a pretty cool place

2009-10-22T11:54:00.002+02:00

The Dark Side of China’s Industrial Boom [Sankaku Complex]
The images seems to have been slightly photoshopped with darker edges for a more dramatic tone, but all in all it is pretty horrible.

New Global Agenda info

2009-10-20T22:45:00.000+02:00

Woop, new stuff from global agenda!

The latest information is about pricing and their optional subscription cost, for a short list of it, read on:

Global Agenda (one time purchase - $49.99 MSRP) includes:

Creation of up to eight different agent characters
Character visual customization
Access to all combat weapons and devices
Cooperative Player vs. Environment missions against the Commonwealth NPC faction, AI-controlled enemies, and Boss Fights
Matchmade Player vs. Player missions with five different game types and over 20 unique maps
Character progression through 30 levels
Achievement and unlocks system for individual characters
Player Inventory for suits, flair, dyes, upgrades, and loot
Virtual Reality practice fighting area
Vendors and accumulation of in-game currency
Text chat with multiple channels
Built in voice chat during missions
Ability to join an established player-created agency
All play is on our single-shard, hosted server environment to ensure convenient and consistent gaming experience.
Ability to sign up for one free month of subscription at registration (credit card required, can be cancelled at any time)

Global Agenda: Conquest ($12.99 per month, $11.49/mo for 3 month, $9.99/mo for 6 month) includes:

Access to Alliance vs. Alliance (AvA) World Domination gameplay

A massive scale campaign between player created agencies and alliances over scarce territory and resources on a persistent world map.
Attack and Defend Territories in zones that match your agency's schedule
Agency and Alliance Management – Create and maintain persistent player groups and officer ranks
Creation and Upgrading of Facilities - Control production and output
Base Raids – involving up to 60 players per side; coordinated between 6 different strike teams within linked territory instances
Agency Achievement System, Leveling, and Recognition

Auction House with bidding and buyouts
Mail System
Upgrade Text and Voice chat to support multiple channels and strike teams
Player Crafting with blueprints
Additional character customization options including elite character suits, dye colors, and seasonal flair
Ongoing Co-Op content at max character level
Ongoing AvA content, multiplayer PvP content, and new social areas

Kotaku also have a nicer writeup which basically contain the same info: Global Agenda: Two Ways To Pay; Two Ways To Play

Getting Psyched again! :>

Whoops steam did it again

2009-10-19T17:54:00.004+02:00

Sure it can't be easy setting world-wide prices on steam. But this is really getting out of hand.

I was browsing for Torchlight (I'm buying it mostly to play with the editor), which is 20$ off their website. I was expecting it to be 19.99€ but was happily surprised to see it be only 14.39€, a mere 19% more than buying it from the developers themselves. Congratulations, have a cookie.

On the other hand, Dragon age is what's really making me rage. The pre-purchase in the UK is £29.99, in the rest of Europe, it's 49.99€ or an increase of 49%. I really wonder where this increase is coming from since the GBP is only worth ~9% more than a euro. Here you go, have a ragefest.

Good thing Phyzen is living in the UK and can gift it to me.

Mind = Blown

2009-10-19T15:00:00.001+02:00

Be sure to watch it, because he times the 4 pretty perfectly and makes "ascii" characters appear a few times. The song isnt as good but damn its cool.
If you want more you can always check out Phyzens original post way back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Modern warfare 2 have no dedicated servers

2009-10-18T02:12:00.001+02:00

Before reading warning, Ive pretty much just puked out this text so expect some crazy language and shit.

Wow, this hit me quite hard, PC-communities and serveradmins will NOT be able to run dedicated servers. While having a quickmatch and live matchmaking service like Xbox live is not a bad thing, not allowing server admins to run a dedicated server is just horrible.
Read up on it here: BASHandSlash.com

Hell, I probably wouldnt have played TF2 for such a long time if I couldnt connect to the awesome community servers out there, such as the Swedish Lokalen, or the UK groups such as Trigger Happy Gamers and Nervous Energy. The experience that I get when I connect to those servers in comparison to one of the MANY other ones found in the server browser is of a higher standard. The players are better, they are friendlier and I know that I wont have to hear custom sounds (NE server being excepted) or music when I join the server. But most important I know that the servers will give me the same performance and lagfree experience at all times.

Local servers run by players and matchmaking is horrible and have always been horrible because of the need to both render and run the game, as well as receiving and sending network packages as a server. I will also have to withstand the horrible crowd of Random People shouting on mics or spamming soundfiles.

The only little glimpse in this is that IW will host dedicated servers on their own, however I doubt there will be forming smaller communities and this will most likely CRIPPLE serious clangames if the local server lags.

So on one hand we get something like a global community around the IW.net where they will offer quickmatches and matchmaking based on your skill and things like that. But on the other hand we will loose dedicated clanservers with custom servers and the clangamers that are serious about ping and fair and even play.

This is both a good thing but also a horrible fucking idea, making it easier for less hardcore players is always good, but those that consider themselves hardcore will be forcefed with this in the most horrible way.

Left 4 Dead have a similar system with quickplay and such, but they do offer the ability for server to host dedicated servers, which is the way it should be. I doubt that IW will be able to host enough dedicated servers to give a good experience to all players, they need the support from the community to hold some of the cost of the servers.

I can already see the thousands of players that try to host games and fail because of firewalls and routers that block ports, Jesus Craig. We dont even get a bloody demo to try it out. Shit.

I just hope it doesn't spread to any other PC games.

Run faster plx

2009-10-17T21:35:00.002+02:00

So I've been watching a couple of speed runs lately. Not just because I get to relive the experience of old games in an hour (or less) instead of going through the trouble of finding the discs. There is just something amazing about knowing how much work it is to become that good at a game and I'll never reach that level of dedication.

But there is one thing bothering me. Staring endlessly at boring walls because the fastest way to get there is to roll sideways (Max Payne), roll backwards (Ocarina of time I think) or jump backwards on your ass (Mario 64).

So I'm asking any and all designers out there, make running forward the fastest way of getting to places. It allows for much more interesting scenery.

Dragon age: how to not create a demo

2009-10-15T10:18:00.002+02:00

Someone at Bioware seems to have thought that it would be a good idea to create a demo. This was a good idea. Then someone else said that instead of a demo they could only release the character generator so that people could play around with it. And that was where it started off on the wrong track.

1. Anyone who decides to show an unskippable video before you get to set the volume should be taken out and shot. No ifs, no buts, that should be a crime against everyone wearing headphones. Creating unskippables themselves is close to criminal.

2. Maybe make the demo be a bit interesting? Being allowed to select three things (race,class,background) and then nothing else doesn't make for a very interesting game. And downloading 300 megabytes to click three things then quit doesn't quite create any hype.

The only reason why I can say releasing this "demo" was of any use at all is because of the endowment effect. I'm sure they will sell a few additional copies for basically no work at all. People who have created their character will probably want to take them out for a spin, because once it's created it's "their" character. Me? I didn't save a single one.

Unfortunately, there just aren't enough non-J RPGs that allow a fan like myself to skip buying it because they made a retarded demo. And that saddens me.

A riddle

2009-10-15T00:03:00.000+02:00

What goes "RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrrmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmnnnnnn...." and then doesn't start again?

Answer after jump.

My computer apparently. Following in Jonas' footsteps, my computer suddenly died while I was playing and wouldn't start again. Will try to have a look this weekend. It's not as bad as it could be, I still have my laptop with a SNES emulator and I just bought Scribblenauts!

Flying pantsu

2009-10-14T19:07:00.000+02:00

I don't know.

How to not create savepoints

2009-10-11T16:12:00.003+02:00

So since my computer spontaneously died this wednesday, I've gone back to my trusty old console, the PS2. I've played through the first God of War a couple of times but I never really thought it was as good as Devil May Cry 3. I didn't even play through God of War II since it came out so late in the PS2 cycle and I had other games (and school stuff) to keep me entertained.

But now that I don't really have anything better to do and I'm unable to continue mapping, I've gone back and started over. I've played it for maybe 7-8 hours now and I'm not sure if I'm going to finish it this time either, it just feels so clunky.

GoW 2 seems to have gone even further towards DMC 3 than the first one in that you now have the capability to have a secondary weapon and switch between them while fighting. The problem is that it takes a while and they're all so different that it's just hard to properly chain attacks. DMC did this in an excellent way where most of the attacks worked similarly for all the different weapons. But the biggest problem is not that the weapons are so different, it's that the controls are so badly designed.

Take the L1 button for example. In most games, you might be doing one separate thing with it. In GoW 2, you use it for blocking, reflecting certain attacks and using special attacks along with circle, square or triangle. I can hear you thinking "isn't it a bad idea to start attacking while holding down the block button to try and survive?" why yes, it is.

Since I'm also a weird emo fellow who likes to hurt myself, I chose to play the game on the "God" setting (Hard). And I'm not going to switch to the easy setting no matter how many times the game asks me, thank you very much.

Playing it on hard is in my experience how it should be played. The bosses are properly difficult and you actally need to learn how to stay away from some attacks or you will be at that boss for hours. Having to learn attacks and how to protect yourself is a good thing. If it weren't for how bad the feedback is. Your average enemy might have three different attacks. The feedback is usually the same for all of them. And bosses are even worse. The first boss in the game, the colossus has a couple of different attacks that I tried to evade every time but no matter if I jumped, rolled or parried, nothing seemed to work. And when you die from 4-5 attacks and have to fight the same monster for maybe 4 minutes, you have a lot of dodging to do.

And playing it on hard brings out another issue: the savepoints. When you die you have the option of restarting at the last savepoint. The problem is that the savepoints are totally retarded. For instance, at one point where I died 6-7 times, every time I started over I had to:

1. Kick a head so that it fell over
2. Watch the cutscene where the head crashed through a wall
3. Jump down and open 2 separate chests
4. Run through the window and start the actual fight.

While this might not sound like much, putting the save in the window itself might have made me have to put 5 minutes less on running across the room doing things all over again. Considering how much I die, it wouldn't surprise me if I lost about 5-10 minutes per hour played just doing things to get to fights the second and third time.

So the controls are clunky and the combat flows like crap through a blocked sewer. But why am I still coming back? Because of the visual design for one. The part where you run across to four giant horses and make them move an island for you is one of the prettiest scenes I've seen in a game. Even though the majority of the environments are sandstone brown, it's never really dull.

The boss fights themselves are also pretty good. They look and play really differently and since I'm mostly still crap at the game, they're all quite challenging. The biggest challenge for me is to try and figure out what parts of the fights are the hardest and try to blow my cooldowns (Rage of titans and magic spells) to get through it. The Perseus fight where he starts out invisible and you need to track him by his footprints in the water is also amazing.

There are some things that DMC can learn from GoW (like the magic spells which are cool), but GoW should have learned more from DMC. If you had put Dante from DMC into the GoW2 world and taken the feedback designer from DMCs boss fights, God of war 2 would have been pure gold. Now it's coated lead at best and shiny paper at worst, but shiny paper can still be fun at times.

God of War 2 gets 2 ragequits for the controls and feedback but three tentative smileys for the graphics, encounter design and setting.

Reflections on killing in MMO's

2009-10-11T01:15:00.000+02:00

This is really just a wall of random rambling about killing stuff, read at your own risk.

So I recently began playing Aion and with my somewhat mixed background of MMO's (World of Warcraft, Guild Wars and a bunch of random free ones) I always end up comparing the one I'm playing with my experiences in WoW or GW, my two favourite ones. The reason is that they have the best pacing and flow when you do the general killing and missions/quests.

While GW undoubtedly win the "most compelling story and quests" category WoW on the other hand take the top spot in the "fun in killing" category.

The reason I end up thinking about WoW is that many MMO’s have bad pacing in the killing area. You usually take a role of a “Superhuman” or “Hero”, but in many MMO’s I feel like regular Joe on the street. The explosive, aggressive and feeling of control in combat rarely takes place and you end up standing and hitting at each other until the other is dead. The almost sole exception thus far have been WoW where they have that explosive feeling from very low levels and just increase the higher up you get. The big exception being in healer classes such as Paladin, where you lolafk all the way to ~60.

As a Shaman at level 50 my general style of play were to go all out on about 3-4 enemies in a short amount of time and then spend a time of recuperating my mana and hp. Thus I went through each enemy in about 10 seconds each and then spent 20-25 seconds recovering mana. Comparing that to the earlier levels the killing had sped up and the recovery time had also increased. The dangers of long battles also increased a lot, so fast fights were always recommended.

Dont you just go 'aawwwww'?

The difference in Aion is that the fights at level 1 starts slow and has just increased in time as I have levelled. At my current level of 11 the fights take around 30 seconds and I don’t see the trend turning to the better until I get a whole batch of skills to use. The time spent killing monsters isn’t something that I enjoy particularly and thus its slowly killing my will of exploring and playing the game (and I have just begun!). On the other hand, you do get quite a bit of XP per kill so overall you might not need to spend as much time killing, but if that time is boring, it’s even worse than having to do it a lot.

One of the reasons the time spent killing has been the overall lack of skills to use once I chose to become an Archer. Right now I have only 2 skills, one at 8 seconds cooldown and the other at 16 seconds cooldown. I do have a bunch of knife/sword related skills to use as well. So now you’re probably thinking: "why not shoot arrows and then pull out the sword and start chopping at em?". Well, I would do just that if the main attackskill of the bow is somehow linked to the main attackskill of the knife/sword, yeah, I have no clue why.

The most enjoyment I have had thus far is the time I have spent playing with my sister (‘aaaaawwwwwwww’) where she helped me in killing mobs for my quest, so instead of 30 seconds per enemy we knocked the time down to around 10 seconds. I know what I prefer.

So on one side we have WoW where you have to kill 2 million mobs per level but you do it really quick and explosive and on the other hand we have Aion and many other MMO’s where it takes forever to kill something and you get more XP per kill (only 1½ million mobs!). I personally would take the faster killing anytime, if only to keep me from getting bored.

And with that, when life gives you lemons-BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!

Schoolgirls are scary

2009-10-08T13:20:00.003+02:00

After one of my friends linked Night of Fire on his facebook yesterday, I've been listening to a bunch of Jpop the last two days. While some of it is a bit hyperactive, working when listening to songs works pretty well when you have no chance of ever understanding a word.

The bigggest problem I have with it is that I get the feeling that I'm actually watching twelve year olds trying to be sexy and get me aroused. It's quite a scary feeling, especially since it wouldn't surprise me if it was true.

If I do get a hardon, am I then a pedophile? Like I said, schoolgirls are scary but I wouldn't mind it if the you-tube videos just said "18+, safe to sex".

Oh btw, if you've got 4 chicks willing to do the Night of fire-dance at a disco somewhere, I'll totally learn the dance and be your weird wrestler-guy. So awesome.

Indian food

2009-10-03T00:50:00.003+02:00

Just got some Indian food. Got the different bits in their different containers, and those containers in a paper bag and that paper bag in a plastic bag. Why a plastic bag on top of the paper bag? I don't know. Too drunk to handle a paper bag perhaps?
Anyway, if you are drunk and looking for food, don't buy Indian food. If you spend the money on a pizza or KFC you have enough for when you're drunk, but then some for when you wake up.
But if you're not that drunk and looking for good food, go for Indian, it's really good!

Non-intrusive music

2009-09-28T23:05:00.000+02:00

Jonas told me to blog, so here I am with a short post.

Todays post will be about music that you can have in the background while you're doing other things.

Personally I want game soundtracks, RPG's or MMORPGs tend to work the best because of their somewhat ambiguous and non-intrusive style. I can specifically recommend the Witcher soundtrack or the Guild Wars soundtracks made by Jeremy Soule, listening to soundtracks like them make the time fly away in a pink cloud of effectiveness and concentration, or it might be the drugs.

Have some Jeremy Soule:

What's your favourite music when you just want some non-intrusive stuff to listen to?

Christian charity scares me

2009-09-27T21:46:00.003+02:00

While driving home from work just five minutes ago I heard a radio show. They were discussing different charities working with AIDS in Africa. One of the charities that got money from a big radio show last year was apparently trying to convince people that AIDS and HIV can be cured by faith and laying on hands.

Not only did a small group of people working with charity find this reasonable, the institution that worked with making sure the charities didn't spend the money on silly stuff also believed this.

My own translation of the quote on the radio: "We sincerely believe that laying on hands can cure serious disease. Christianity has believed this for several thousand years, that's not something we're going to change now."

This scares me. So the fact that you should stone your woman to death for pre-marital sex and the fact that the world is flat should also not be revised because it's been part of the faith for longer? Maybe someone ought to tell them about bacteria and viruses that have been discovered since Jesus (assuming you belive in him).

[Link to mp3] - Swedish only

Server hoo!

2009-09-26T12:50:00.006+02:00

So I've finally managed to learn how to start my own TF2 server on the laptop, hopefully allowing for game testing. It's actually up and running my current map-in-development, koth_factory.

It's fully playable but quite under-developed in that I think you can still build sentries in the opposing teams' spawn, there are no supply cabinets and you can run up to the skybox, things like that. I'm probably going to fix that in before first alpha test.

If you haven't had enough of dev textures, the center of the map is currently looking like this:

Batman goes DRM

2009-09-24T10:43:00.002+02:00

So there has been a lot of talk lately about the copy-protection in Batman: Arkham asylum. Apparently once you get to a certain stage of the game (several hours in), you can't continue if you pirated it. The bat-cape simply won't open.

Now I'm all for these types of creative ways of stopping piracy, even if it did get cracked within a day. But why settle for one thing?

I came across an excellent post here, describing several ways to ruin the game for the pirates.

If you had a nagging thought that you were missing out on the game experience while playing a pirated version, would you consider getting the full version? Let's say the difficulty of everything is nerfed into the ground. You breeze through the game in only a few hours. And then you talk to people complaining over how hard it is.

That's not how the game is supposed to play, games are supposed to provide interesting challenges. Sneaky DRM might be one of the things that will also create difficulty for the pirates. I'm not sure how easy this is to put into actual code, but it's worth looking into.

It has finally happened

2009-09-20T19:53:00.002+02:00

I'm now officially paying for an online music service. In my case, it's Last.fm. While last.fm doesn't have the freedom of spotify, it's absolutely brilliant for radio to have in the background.

My jazz channel on last.fm has been built up from a couple thousand songs while working on my bachelor's degree and is just amazing. I don't know any of the songs and it's all mellow and perfect for working. Oh and 3$ a month isn't all that much.

But I'm still thinking Pandora was better. Believe it or not last.fm but just because two artists come from the same country, they do not play the same type of music.

Extreme pole dancing?

2009-09-20T18:40:00.002+02:00

I'm not sure how to describe this really. Well I am, I would call it parkour but I'm not sure that's correct. Well have a look yourself and then tell me it isn't awesome.

OUT OF TIME from Андрей Скурьят DREE on Vimeo.

Prototyping tool

2009-09-19T20:55:00.003+02:00

My reason for disagreeing with the world this time, is of course Hammer. I've been thinking a bit about taking a small part of my (still unfinished) Rocky mountain map and turn it into a "King of the hill" map.

Yes, my problems may be due to the fact that I'm not starting from the center and working out but instead trying to adapt a building that already exist and puzzle two of them together. It looks pretty nice already but it will take a ton of work. Using the only part of my old map that I was already happy with is a good thing.

A prototyping tool would still be amazing. This is how it should work:

1. Building creation
Draw a shape on the ground (control adds a rectangle, alt removes), drag it up how far you want it. The walls are a default thickness, no doors no nothing. Walls work as faces, you can click one and move that single one to make a wall thicker if you want to.

2. Cut holes
Draw a shape on the wall on the outside of your house, use a right-click action (like in Maya) to remove a hole. The hole itself works as an entity, you can click the hole and scale it, clone or delete it. Like a negative brush.

3. Add walls
By drawing on the walls inside the house you add brushes instead, using them for ledges (drawing on walls) or dividing walls (draw on floor/ceiling).

4. Terrain
Under the entire map is a piece of terrain, which you can paint on using your Wacom tablet (well I can since I have one). Using something like the Photoshop brush menu but with only two colors.

Most importantly, you can choose if you want the map to do mirroring or mirror+rotate and it updates in real-time. Using this prototyping tool you can easily move a door/window if you need to change it or move the entire house and you can see the angles all the time.

Another amazing feature would be to step between detailing and doing the basic construction all the time. Take a look at zspheres in Zbrush, that way you could be doing some texturing and detailing to make the map look differently on both sides. Even after that, you could step down a subdivision (or layer) and move a door, bringing the doorframe model and textures along with it.

Of course, this is not very well thought-out, I basically invented it in fifteen minutes. But if I can do it that fast, why is it not included in any engine that I know of, mirrored maps have been around since before the internet.

Minimalism

2009-09-14T21:54:00.000+02:00

I've been thinking a lot about art and games lately. I haven't quite made my mind up on wether games are art or not but I've arrived at the view that it does not matter at all.

While thinking about the subject of art, I came back to different styles of painting and how they seem to be missing from the games industry. Trying to find your own style usually comes by replicating the original, like the movies breaking off from theater. At first it was just theater on film, in time it became something much bigger.

Games seem to be only learning from each other and Hollywood. Though there are a few exceptions, most games seem to choose between realistic (meaning brown) and "cartoony" cel-shading.

Instead of going for higher, more detailed environments, how about going for minimalism? The current-generation of graphics and level generation are for the most part extremely work intensive. Minimalism is not.

I like to think that simple models and excellent animations can be better than vice versa. How many lines does it take to draw a horse and how many colors do you need? Keep it simple, stupid.

Torchlight, getting your addictions on before Diablo 3

2009-09-10T09:56:00.003+02:00

So apparently, former Blizzard employees at Runic games have gone out and created a Diablo-esque game (action RPG?) to get everyone hooked for Diablo 3. It's also quite interesting in that it's going to be released as a single player game while the MMO is in development and then released as a MMO proper.

I really like the artistic style, it's somewhere between the cel-shaded smoothness of TF2 and the lowpoly exaggerated style of WoW but still manages to look quite unique.

While it looks great, I'm still questioning some of the design decisions. I can't quite figure out why you would want to see how much damage you're doing or if you got a critical hit taking the focus off the nice graphics. I'm also still a bit worried about the attack patterns that seem to be quite linear and simplistic. At least the Diablo 3 videos have shown that monsters will have unique abilities but I can't quite pick out any in the (short) trailer for Torchlight.

As well as releasing a trailer, they've also been posting videos of their editor (Preditor) on their developer blog. It looks quite nifty and I really like the combination of random and static parts of the levels even though it looks like they could use a model browser. Being able to play the game in the editor seeing your entities is something a TF2 mapper can only dream of.

The trailer can be found here and the PrEditor videos are on the same youtube account.

How much is a serving?

2009-09-09T14:25:00.003+02:00

So apparently people should know what's in the food they eat, which is a good thing. Some authority or other has decided that for every serving of one item, there should be a comparison of how much of the RDA that serving contains. Except that they have let the companies that make the products decide how much a serving is, which is a bad thing.

Example one: if you buy a 50cl bottle of your beverage of choice (coke in this example), that is two servings. How often do you see people buying those bottles and sharing them compared to buying one each?

Example two: if you buy a 300g bag of chips and watch a movie, how much would you say a serving of chips is? Apparently 25g or 1/12th of one bag. How often do you share a bag of chips with your eleven closest friends?

Now I'm no proper scientist but I can come up with a simple way to test this thesis. Take 12 people, put them in a room and give them a movie to watch. Give that group 4 bags of chips (or 10 or whatever). See if anyone eats less than 25g. Assuming they all eat chips, I'll bet that nobody will eat less than that. If everyone wants more, it's not a proper serving is it?

When confronted, the people who decided on serving size say (my translation) "we like to show how much a serving contains, the 100g standard might be confusing".
I don't get how people don't rage more against these things. At least they can admit they did something silly and go "ok you got me". Or we can do like in HHGTTG and the people who deal with marketing will be the first to get launched into space (assuming I remember correctly).

Original source (in Swedish)

Halo 3 ODST commercial

2009-09-07T20:27:00.003+02:00

Say what you want about Halo 3, but it has really good commercials.

Halo 2 = Not so good

Halo 3 = Awesome

Halo 3 ODST = Really good

I love this song

2009-09-07T10:05:00.000+02:00

Supercell - Kimi no Shira nai Monogatari
Check the full post for embedded video.

According to last.fm I have listened to it 68 times, but that's not counting on how many times I've listened to it on my mp3 player. :D
The song is the ending song of the anime Bakemonogatari images in the video is from the first 4-5 episodes of the series.

Not sure if its on by default, but I chose to embed this video because it had lyrics embedded in it (check in the lower right corner for it if it isn't on by default). I think I like it so much because its quite intense throughout the whole song, its a jumbled chaos and I just get lost in time when i listen to it, and then suddenly its over and I want to listen to it again.

Also, scratch 68 times above, listened to it again when I wrote the post.

More movies: Moon

2009-09-06T22:53:00.003+02:00

I also saw Moon this weekend, which is another excellent film that you should try to see if you can. This one is also not what I expected from the trailer, but that's good this time. Even though the trailer is good, the film is better.
It's quite slow, and there is no action or anything, but somehow it manages to remain interesting throughout the entire time.
There's no real reason to watch it in a cinema as there are no/not so many grand views or cool sound effects (explosions, larger-than-life soundtrack etc.), but wherever you watch it, you will enjoy it.

District 9

2009-09-06T13:27:00.003+02:00

For some bizarre reason District 9 had premier in Sweden (and probably other countries) before here in UK. I can understand having an early premier in USA, but Sweden before UK? They "need" subtitles and UK doesn't, surely it should be out earlier in UK?
Anyway, the film is really really good (although not quite as awesome as the trailer) and I can really recommend seeing it. There was more action than I anticipated (based on the trailer), and the actions was good. I still think the film would have been better as a drama (the trailer!), but as a sci-fi action movie, it's one of the best ones this year (and probably a couple of other years as well).
I'm keeping this short and vague as I don't want to spoil anything for anyone who hasn't seen it yet.

Interesting Guild Wars 2 interview

2009-09-02T22:20:00.002+02:00

Kill Ten Rats have an excellent and interesting GW2 interview, interesting how? Because it stay away from all of the usual questions and goes into the deeper ones based on lore and setting.
Guild Wars 2 interview

Awesome 1 button game

2009-09-02T14:08:00.003+02:00

Long time no blog, why? Because I haven't felt like it. Dur.

Anyhoot, Kotaku linked this awesome game and its so awesome I have to relink it here.
Its called CANABALT and is a one button game where you're trying to escape from something (huge frickin robots, judging from the things moving in the background), it also has awesome music to get you more into the game.

CANABALT

Forward bases and expanded fronts

2009-08-30T15:16:00.001+02:00

Since I'll (probably) be working less than 50 hours a week after the next couple of weeks, I thought I'd get back into mapping again. After letting my latest unfinished project rest for a while, I have changed a lot of what I think about it. Some areas are still actually quite impressive in my own humble opinion. Other areas are mostly trash. Amazingly enough, Valve themselves has seen to gracing us with some of their own progress videos. Unfortunately, it's mostly about detailing and has no commentary about the design itself.

But just because I haven't been actively mapping for a while doesn't mean I've stagnated in these last couple months. I'll be back with a vengeance with new insights into the classes and how to design on them. Last time, I understood the classes on a more basic level, understanding intuitively how they react to different situations and what areas they are likely to fight a lot in. What I will be working on today is expanding those thoughts and putting them into words. Ideas can easily be clumsy and hard to communicate, but once you put them into words then you usually notice when you're talking crap.

In this first post I will mostly be discussing area denial and area control in Team Fortress 2 and how the classes fall into different categories. I will also be posting for each different class but I'm not sure whether I want to put it all into one post, making people tired before they reach the end.

The area denial theory
As you might have noticed, I've been focusing on area denial and control lately. While I might be stretching the analogy too far, I'll try to make my best argument for why I'd say it applys in Team Fortress 2 as well as Diablo-esque games. It might extend to every single competitive game but I'm not going to go quite that far. Since I'm also not good enough to play TF2 at a competitive level, what I'll be discussing is based upon public play. It may or may not apply to high-tier gaming where nobody will even play engineer or sniper.

Since Valve has already separated the classes into subgroups, me arranging them into different groups with the same names might confuse you. My argument is that while the groups themselves are aptly named, the classes don't quite belong in them. Instead I'm going to arrange the classes by their area control and what they want from a battle field. All the classes can all be used while attacking or defending but you'll usually not see Sniper/Scout/Pyro attacks even though they can technically be offensive.

Defensive
In TF2 there are three basic defensive classes: Demoman, Engineer and Sniper. The primary one is of course the Engineer and most especially his sentry gun. A lot of the fighting in Attack/Defend type maps is based upon trying to destroy one or more sentries. The demoman's basic means of being defensive is his stickies. Unlike the sentry gun's wide area, stickies can only control a tight choke point and only against enemies coming one at a time. The sniper usually has a narrow field of fire like the demoman but instead switches it out for unlimited range.

Offensive
To counter these abilities, there are the offensive classes. The Heavy is offensive through both his massive survivability and high damage in close range. While heavies can't be relied on to take on a sentry at medium range, he's the only one with enough health to reliably kill it by himself. The soldier is decent at every range but the only one to surpass him at long range is the sniper. While sentries with an engineer on them won't be taken out, unguarded they die easily. The last offensive class is the Spy. While it's unlikely that you'll do great in every game as a spy, there's also no class that can unlock a difficult situation so easily. Running in and killing an engineer, sap his sentry and stab a few people on the way out comes out to more damage than any other class over the same time frame.

Support
Lastly, the support classes: Pyro, Scout and Medic. While it might just be because I'm terrible, Pyros don't seem to have a specific role except that they're amazing against spys and the only class that can counter übers. Pyros, like Scouts tend to have to play more hit and run-tactics letting the fire damage work for them. Scouts are also hard to put in a group. While they can run fast, it's not of much use if you just run into sentry guns quicker.

The Medics are basically in a group by themselves in that they don't really have a role, they're just a force amplifier for the rest of the classes. Most of the time they just heal and overheal, making everyone on their team tougher. Every once in a while they get übers. Using an übercharge, you can take out sentries with nearly any class and with kritzkrieg you can kill people fast but not take out any sentries.

Defensive points and forward bases
Not only do the classes fight eachother, they're also put into teams. And the teams themselves fight for defensible positions and once they have those positions, they fortify. The fighting itself is usually centered on or around the capture point and once the attacking team has captured one point, the defenders move back and the attackers fortify their new area. This concept is very visible on Badwater Basin, where there is only one forward spawn for the attacking team and instead they need engineers and teleporters. The progress goes something like this (rectangles are bases):

So not only do you need to think about making maps that play well for the separate classes, you also need defensible forward positions if you're making several capture points or payload maps. Here are a couple of examples of forward bases done well:

Go through your maps and look at them. Do you have decent defensible positions for both teams? Do you have areas that can be defended by the different classes? It's not something that is essential everywhere but it might be one thing to consider.

Expanding the front
Since demomen spamming grenades and keeping stickies up in a tight area can keep it locked down and too big areas favour snipers, you need to design different attack routes for every point. And since a demo can camp outside a spawnroom door by himself, you also need more than one exit from a spawn room. If you don't use more than one exit point, don't use the doors, just put a teamblocker in the doorway.

Assuming you do get out of the spawn you usually have two or three different paths to take. Here is where it gets interesting, one of the paths usually lead deeper into enemy territory or to one side where you're able to flank. This means the defenders have to spread out to cover several areas and no single sentry will be too powerful.

One great example of this is the last stage on Goldrush, here:

Not only does the path on the right side of the image lead deeper into enemy territory, it also forces defenders close to the attackers' spawn to look in both directions. This cover also means a Spy can get all the way to the defenders' base in a single cloak with no ammo pickup.

And here is one example where it doesn't work quite as well, the last stage on Dustbowl:

While there are several points where the attackers can get out of spawn (while still not keeping demomen from spawn camping), they all lead to the same choke point. Since the choke is also tight enough that sentries reach all the way across with no cover, there is usually one or two sentries on the right side and a lot of demospam.

This is a fast sketch of how it might look with another path. It would play very differently and I'm not sure it would be more fun. But it would cater to more classes and keep defenders on their toes.

While it's really easy to add another direction to attack from, this also means the defenders' job must be made easier as well. Just a straight corridor is no fun so the attack route must contain visually interesting areas as well. Thinking about adding or removing something is part of the creative process, you must be able to make errors to create good maps as well. As long as you're not too proud to leave several hours of work to go back, try out new things. If you're too proud to admit you made a mistake, you have other things to work on than your mapping skills.

If you have the time to add a way of getting deeper into enemy territory, think about it. Don't try just one and make up your mind that it's right. Try several different ones. It's very unlikely that you manage to get the perfect one on the first attempt.

Hopefully I've opened your eyes to new things to think about while trying to make a great map. It doesn't really matter if you read it and go "meh, my map doesn't need that". As long as you're actively considering it, no harm can come out of it. They're just suggestions, not requirements.

Sequels, sequels, sequels.

2009-08-25T18:32:00.003+02:00

I visited FZ.se to check out some Gamescom coverage. Out of their top ten most watched trailers, nine are sequels. And sequels make me a sad panda. While you might argue that sequels are more likely to be better games, since they are several steps further in the iterative process, it also keeps good studios from experimenting.

Sequels like Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 are probably going to make a crapton of money for Activision-Blizzard, but games plus expansions are also going to keep them busy for years. My hope is in the new IP that Blizzard has been talking about. Hopefully it's not a MMO.

And what about the tenth game that's not a sequel? It's Aion. I haven't quite given up on MMO's yet but Aion is not going to be the game that brings me back. I played the beta for about a week and while the setting and graphics seem to be excellent, gameplay and design is lacking. There is no justification for some of the annoying things in that game (quest system, attack/normal weapon stances). It could have been WoW if it had been out five years ago. But it didn't and it won't.

Does it really matter what they look like?

2009-08-22T09:34:00.002+02:00

In this day and age, there are a lot of different game engines that allow you to customize avatar looks. In some, you can only alter very few things, in others you can pretty much place every body part where you want it to be. While the results vary, most of the options make every avatar look about as good as any other.

I would really like to see experiments done with random generation. Not just of how the player looks, but everyone in a game. Does the master villain really become scarier because it's visually obvious he's a bad guy? When selling all the random pieces of loot to a shop keeper, do you mind if it's a woman instead of the man you sold to the last game you played?

As long as everything is the same for a round of play (10-100 hours or however long it takes start-finish), I think you could get away with a lot of this. And time not put into deciding on every little thing for NPCs in an area where the player might even never go, you can put it into something more important, like game testing.

While playing something like World of Warcraft, you're not going to have anything in the real world to compare an orc with and thus not really mind if they don't look as they should. The only time you run into problems is when you're trying to replicate realism and wind up in the uncanny valley.

Sure, you're not going to be able to use randomly generated characters in FMV cutscenes, but as you might have noticed already, I don't care much for them anyway. They just aren't as important as all the work they require.

Diablo 3 has a new class

2009-08-22T08:54:00.001+02:00

So apparently, the new class has been released, a Monk. While the trailer has a pretty decent amount of awesome, the gameplay video itself scares me a bit.

They seem to have put so much energy into making the single-player game be full of cool effects that the multi-player parts of the videos just consists of different kinds of explosions all across the screen at once. As I've said before, if you can't make out anything except the fact that there are monsters somewhere on the screen and a lot of effects, you can't make the game require teamwork.

My suggestion: scale down every effect in multiplayer and make your teammates more visible than the enemies. While designing them to look cool is good, designing them to be easily separated from enemies is better.

To watch the gameplay video, click here.

New Berserk anime!?

2009-08-19T21:20:00.000+02:00

Theres a rumor and accompanying pictures of a new Berserk anime at Sankaku Complex. Judging from the pictures its not sure if its a total remake or a pickup of the old series, while the first series was decent, it wasnt very true to the source material.

The new series on the other hand features Puck (the fairy, he was completely cut out of the first series) which is a clear indication that its closer to the source material, and probably a remake from the start.

Another good thing about this is that its rumored to be created by Studio 4°C, which have an awesome repertoire of anime's such as: Mind Game, Trava: Fist Planet and Kigeki.

Hopefully it will come, hopefully it will be good.

New Berserk Anime Images Leaked [Sankaku Complex]

How about a cup of awesome with that?

2009-08-15T21:35:00.003+02:00

So I've been watching this clip a few times the last week and it struck me: it has a ton of awesome-factor.

Not only does it show off what gameplay could be like (but never will be), it's also great fun. I'd rather have scripted events like these than fully animated cutscenes eight days of the week.

Graphics doesn't last, every new generation will have better graphics. Graphical styles last longer, great gameplay ages well but there is no beating the awesome-factor. That's why I still go back and watch really cool parts of pretty crappy movies.

MEEP MEEP

2009-08-15T10:01:00.001+02:00

MEEP MEEP

Artists that became big on the internet?

2009-08-15T08:44:00.002+02:00

I thought of this yesterday: are there really any artists that are big because of the internet? Most of todays' pop artists like Beyonce, Britney Spears etc. are still mostly big because they mastered the music video medium. The only ones I can think of are big because of the internet are pretty much "Ok go" and Jon Lajoie.

I just feel there are a lot of things that can be done. There's a ton of ways to make a video blog interesting, chat with your favourite artists, being on the road etc. It wouldn't really surprise me if the first artist to really hit it big on the internet would be a communications expert of some sort first and artist second.

Oh and my attack pattern post now has pictures if you're interested.

Too hot food

2009-08-15T05:39:00.003+02:00

Bought some kebab this night and asked for chilli on it. It became waaaay to hot. Mental note: don't ask for chilli on the kebab. Way to hot!

Attack patterns and the 2x2 game [Abbe: bump for pictures]

2009-08-15T00:00:00.000+02:00

After having played Diablo 2 extensively the last few weeks, it's hard not to notice how much it's focused on projectile attacks. Projectiles that travel in a straight line (for the most part). While watching the trailer for Bloodline Champions(hai Linus), I noticed the same trend and I'm not sure if I like it.

Now I've been playing player vs player games for quite a while and I believe that strategy and counter-strategy is more fun than the World of warcraft style where crowd control and healing is key. Not just because it doesn't take control away from the players but also that it allows everyone to adapt more easily. The games I'm going to talk about today all have one thing in common, movement is the only defense. By changing the attack patterns, the players will have to move in different ways, changing the strategies.

The linear attack game
Let's say we have two players, A and B. Player A has only one type of attack moving in a straight line, X. There is only one way to counter this, moving to the side. Player A will not really have any strategy in this game, he will only use X as often as he can.

Player B will only have one type of counterstrategy to this, moving to the side all the time. This causes movement but is also quite a shallow game.

The 2x2 linear game
In this example, Player A has two different attacks, X and Y. Y does more damage but also has a recharge rate of 5 seconds. To maximize damage, there will be four X's for every Y attack. Assuming both attacks have the same attack pattern, this is the only adjustment to A's strategy.

Player B still can't do anything to counter this except try and move to the sides and try to inflict more damage than he takes, basically by being more accurate than A while dodging.

The 2x2 mixed attack game
Instead of the linear attack, let's say Player A has X and Y again but this time attack X moves in a straight line but Y arcs around the sides of player B. When the only defense is to move, the attacks that are made to deny areas make you have to change the strategy. For simplicity's sake let's say player B will always get hit by X if he's dodging Y and vice versa.

Now what is Player A's optimal strategy? If he will use four X's to every Y again, maximizing damage, the perfect counter will be extremely simple. Move to the side for four seconds, then stand still. This counter only works against the player who is trying to maximize damage. This is first level thinking.

And if the counter is extremely simple, then the previously optimal damage rotation will never hit, making perfect strategy completely different. If player A stops using Y every five seconds and is instead preemptively countering the easiest counter strategy, that will be second level thinking.

By giving A two moves and B two moves, we have a 2x2 symmetric game where both players can affect their payoff. Assuming both A and B have the same attacks X and Y, there will be two different 2x2 games running constantly. If we remove the simple attacks where X and Y will always hit and instead make it so moving will protect you against the powerful attacks but also make it harder to land your own, things will be getting interesting.

Diablo 2
The enemies in Diablo 2 are rather dull, they are usually either melee (single target attacks only), ranged (single target line attacks) or casters. The casters have a couple of different spells but they are mostly line projectile (fireball) or line damage over time (inferno).

There are also a couple of area of effect type spells that are divided into three basic categories, novas which are expanding circles, randomized projectiles (lightning enhancement) or damage over time area effect spells (meteor/firewall).

Assuming that you play a character that is not dependant on the random AoE projectile spells like Charged Bolt and Tornado, you will probably hit with every single attack. Since the majority of the enemies only use melee or line attacks, you will basically only ever need to do two things: move back from the melee and move to the side against the ranged.

While this is generally fine since Diablo 2 tries hard to put enough monsters on screen to make you have to move your mouse around a lot, it's still just a twitch game. To add strategy you need to add different options.

Diablo 3
While I'm trying my best to keep my high hopes for Diablo 3 up, rewatching the gameplay trailer with this specific subject fresh in my mind, I can't help thinking it's all the same. Most of the attacks seem to be based upon three basic types, line, arc (melee) and AoE.

The only skills that seem different are probably Zombie wall (area denial and damage) and Carrion swarm which is a chain type attack, hitting enemies nearby but not quite AoE.

While the attacks themselves seem to be quite simplistic, the fights themselves are organised a bit differently. Since enemies are supposed to be tougher and there are several scripted events in the gameplay demo, you will not have such an easy time of clearing an area then moving on. Instead you will get thrown into fights with enemies on several sides, having to pick one way to go. This is one way to get away from Diablo 2's gameplay but I feel it's a bit too easy. Sure you will have to evaluate which side you will run to but the attacks are mostly the same. And if the attacks are simple, you can never really chain them to show your awesome teamplay.

Different types of attack patterns
As I've been discussing before, there are a few different types of attack patterns that are commonly used and a few I would recommend at least thinking about. In games where movement is the only defense, area denial is a really powerful tool and should not be left to environment alone.

Most of the different types of attacks will have the possibility of travel or activation time. This is usually balanced along with damage and ease of use. You don't want a spell that's easy to hit with to also do massive damage. Another modifier is also if it is direct damage or damage over time. The direct spells will usually not provide any area denial, instead you will have to make it a projectile with a high travel time.

Line
The line is the most basic of all attacks. Since it's so easy to hit with, it usually has a travel time. While the damage is usually point-based direct damage (Firebolt), having some AoE is not unheard of (Lightning bolt)

Arc
The arc is usually used in melee only. As a ranged weapon, an arc doing direct damage will be too easy to hit with. That said, as an area denial move it can be really powerful. Let's say you have an attack that shoots an arc at an enemy. As soon as it hits something, it stops and turns into an damage over time effect. While not completely limiting player movement, depending on the curve it might block three or more of the eight directions.

Circle
Like the arc, the full circle is easy to hit with (Frost nova), requiring either a limited range or travel time. Since a ranged circle effect might completely block movement in all directions, it should be very hard to use as an area denial attack. If it stops movement and damage, it's essentially a crowd control ability.

Cone
Like arcs, the cone is usually a close-combat weapon. There is no reason to not add an extension to it though. Let's say you get the ability "Scatter bomb". With your first mouse click, you fire a projectile and with the second click you detonate it, making the cone damage originate where the projectile exploded. You can even make it more advanced, firing a projectile and then pointing in the direction you want it to explode, making sure it will always do some damage. If you add a minimum detonation range this could be a really interesting ability.

Random particle
While the random particles (Charged bolt) are useful at close range, at long range they are just too unreliable. Assuming you use it many times, it essentially turns into a weak cone based damage. For simplicitys sake and game balance, you can probably just scrap this type altogether. Too random damage is not fun.

Area effect
Most of the area effect spells are usually either circle damage over time (Meteor) or random particle damage over time (Blizzard?). Since most of them have a huge AoE they usually don't do a ton of damage. This is one of the most boring ways to add damage to your game, either keep it small and hard to hit with or make it have some kind of utility. Big area effects need to be so powerful to work as area denial attacks that they will be quite overpowered.

Some less used attacks that might be worth looking into:

The sine wave
Use one or two mirrored, it doesn't really matter. Assuming you have the curves far enough from eachother, players might be able to stand in the holes between curves. That way, moving forward or back will make you take damage from both beams, moving to the side only one, but if you stand at the right distance, you won't take damage at all.

X marks the spot
As an area denial effect this is really interesting. Let's say there is half a second delay between a big X showing up and it actually starts doing damage. Then you have that half a second to decide which quarter you want to be in. After picking one, if you decide it's not the right one, you will suffer for it.

Increasing damage
While more of a modifier, let's say you add increasing damage based upon travel time. That way, you can have attacks that do more (or less) damage close or far away from you. If added to area denial effects, you basically give the opponent a short time where the penalty for crossing it is not so bad and then increases as time passes.

The fan
While not quite a cone, it works in much the same way. The closer your target is, the more damage he will take. If it has a bit of travel time, you can also choose if you want to aim directly at your opponent, hoping he stands still or slightly to the side, hoping he will keep moving.

Controlled effects
Making attacks take more effort from the user, you can also make them more powerful. This works a lot better when you need the mouse to both move and attack because then the player might have to stand in fire to make that last killing blow. Examples could be the extended cone, an area of effect spell getting bigger the longer you target it etc.

Boomerang
For everyone who has played DotA, Rexxar's wild axes. One (or two) projectiles, moving in separate arcs, meeting at the point where you targeted the spell and then returning to the caster.

Spread patterns
Again, mostly a modifier or combination of other patterns. Two lines can be parallel, crossing or forming an L, area effects can form basically any type of pattern, depending on which of the directions you feel you want to block.

PvE vs PvP
The 2x2 game and other game theory strategies only apply to games between players that can adapt to different situations. Since trying to pay attention to player habits and working out strategies in real-time is quite a task, the number of enemies and their different attacks must be limited. Let's say 3-5 for number of attacks and 2-5 for different enemies. This way you will still have complexity far beyond any human real-time computation.

The enemies in a PvE game will usually be limited to one or two different attacks though on the other hand there will be more of them on the screen at any given time. Since the player's own attacks will require less focus as the AI monsters don't have enough common sense to evade, there can be more complex area denial, forcing the player to work out more patterns.

In a PvP setting, most of the fights will also usually take place in a mirrored arena, letting the level designer decide how some battles will play out. Combining static maps with blocked areas and real-time area denial attacks will make the combinations endless. Since I have limited myself to mirrored games and mirrored maps, everyone will have the same possibilities of using the map.

In PvE though, the players will have to adjust to the areas as they go along. There will be choke points that are easily defensible and there will be open areas where some attacks will be less useful. As long as there are always a couple of different attacks that are useful, players will hopefully adapt.

Discussion
Notice how fast things get to the point where it's getting hard to calculate? Even if we make a chart where every player gets a certain payoff for making an action, the 2x2 game can get quite complex. But players can't just move in one direction. Let's use the standard D-Pad or arrow/wasd keys. That's 8 different directions. It's not all that hard to come up with attack patterns that correspond to those directions. You can even add attacks that are easier to land but making them do less damage and seeing if versatility truly is power.

Even though every finite game has a stable Nash equilibrium, that doesn't mean it can be solved in real-time. Even if you do, it will not be a perfect counter against a non-perfect opponent. And what if you add more players?

Line, cone and circle attack patterns are fine, but what about boomerangs, tornados and firewalls? You don't need to get fancy, just make a ton of squares, take a pressure-sensitive pen tablet and make dots and lines. Most will be junk, but some can correspond to actually useful patterns.

Snippets of gaming

2009-08-14T18:00:00.001+02:00

/EDIT: OHOHLOL I SUCK, I DIDNT FINISH THE POST BUT FUCK IT ANYWAY, YOU GET IT AMIRIGHT? TIME TO PLAY TF2
A+++++ FOR POWERBLOGGIN.

Walking on the Presidium close to the financial district can be a wondrous, frightening and also a profitable experience, however John Shepard didn't know that he would experience all of them in a single moment.

Johns dear mother had always warned him of mimes and people on stilts. With shivering footsteps he approached the elderly woman.

Her first words sent his mind on a wild goosechase, what would this business be? Killing people? Reading childrens books to elderly people? Or worst of all, hug small fluffy animals?

Still scared of the possibility that he would have to hug fluffy Things, he forcefully declined her proposition, after all, he did have a galaxy to save from homicidal robots.

New TF2 Patch!

2009-08-12T05:27:00.002+02:00

Well, soon at least, the details have begun to come up now: TF2 Classless Update!
(Do remember to click on to the update page as well.)

Also, this patch isnt about any class, oddness. :)

Shadow Complex

2009-08-09T23:23:00.003+02:00

Just found this quite nice video of a game called Shadow Complex. I haven't heard a lot about the game, but this play trough made it look really good. They could probably have named the game Metroid 2009 by the look of things, but I can't say if that's good or bad as I haven't really played the old (nes/snes) Metroid games. My only experience with Samus is on the Gamecube (yeah, I'm not counting Smash Brothers), which I didn't really like that much actually. The older games sound like something I could like though, but for some reason I have never really played them, so perhaps if I like Shadow Complex, I might go back and finish/try some more classic games.
The biggest problem for me is that it seems to only be for the Xbox 360, but I'll figure something out.

The effect of one on many

2009-08-09T21:16:00.010+02:00

I've been spamming my friends with a link to this music video on youtube for a while now. They don't only have a really cool jazzy hiphop style, the lead singer also has the most amazing walk ever.

The thing is, apparently they were on the "Colbert Report" show in the US and played. After less than a week, the sales of their first (and only) album "Äppelknyckarjazz" skyrocketed. Basically, they got big by playing in a country where nobody understands what they're saying. And the lyrics are actually good as well.

Hopefully, this will lead to more people here in Sweden buying their album as well and making them play somewhere close to me. They might even record a few albums and then I have even more good music to listen to.

Now this is not a post to just brag about how I listened to them when they were "underground" (or whatever). I'm just amazed at how much work it can be to have good music get played at all while lame pop is enough to be on the radio fifteen times a day. A new song with Zacke and Movits is actually called "Play me on the radio". It's amazing how they make fun of twenty different artists in three minutes and then I probably missed some references.

They might have caught the big break now, otherwise I'll just keep spreading the word.

Videos after the jump

Idle hands do the devil's work

2009-08-09T16:40:00.002+02:00

I've heard this before but I've never quite believed in it. I've been working 45 to 50 hours a week and I have more energy than I ever had. It appears that after the first few weeks of it sucking, you actually learn to cope with it and do things in your free time that doesn't just involve sitting around like a zombie.

Getting up at 7:30 the day of the week when you're not working and really wanting to do lots of shit is quite entertaining. Except for the fact that my wireless isn't working properly and I still haven't taken the time to actually install any useful software since I got my new PC stuff.

I want to make more epic blogposts. I just don't seem to find the time for it. Let's all wait and see, maybe there will be hamsters and rejoicing.

Snippets of gaming

2009-08-08T00:20:00.004+02:00

So, thought about stuff to do on the blog that require minimal work and ties in with the sort of theme we got going, so here I go: Screenshot with accompanying text of what happened around that moment, simply called: Snippets of gaming.

Sam Fisher felt really cool hiding in the pitch black shadows under the wonderfully painted Ming plate, however, when the guard on Sam's left blew his brains out two seconds later, he felt a better hiding place would have been in order.

Based on a true story.

I'm a sucker for collectors editions

2009-08-04T23:46:00.003+02:00

I currently have 3 collectors editions pre-ordered:
Dragon Age, Aion and the one I ordered today: Assassins Creed 2

Games I will get in collectors edition but cant pre-order yet: Mass Effect 2, Splinter Cell Conviction.

I'm doomed. Well, my wallet is.

Strategy cycles and break-even points

2009-08-02T09:01:00.003+02:00

Thinking more about perfect strategy, more specifically strategy in real-time strategy games, I've come across another concept. Strategy choices are cyclic, at least they should be otherwise you end up on a really slippery slope.

With Starcraft as my constant example, let's say one player expands early and the other doesn't. The one expanding will take a small hit to his development graph to have it rise faster in the future. If both players have perfect information, the one who didn't expand will know that he has a window of opportunity where he has the economical advantage. The reason why Starcraft is such a great game is that this window is just big enough to first spot it, getting information, build up a few troops and run across the map hoping to capitalize on the advantage. But it's not big enough to do anything about if you don't notice it.

Since the development graph of the expanding player will eventually catch up, that's where you get a break even point and the player who chose attacking as his first strategical option has failed to capitalize on his opportunity. Now it's up to the expanding player to try and win during his window instead.

Assuming equal skill, it's a rare thing that the first strategical choice decides the outcome of the game. Sometimes you get an all-in rush against an unaware player that will take him out in the first few minutes but most of the time the game will progress into the strategy cycle. The only reason why the first choice has such a big impact on the game is that the percentage of your income that you spend on one strategy is much higher than at later points in the game.

This is one of very few solutions to the strategy issue though, constructing a game where you always paid a percentage of your resources for every unit, nobody would ever have a reason to expand. Warcraft 3 tried another way of doing this, where your amount of units decided how much resources you got per second, basically breaking it down into a game where heroes and small battles are more important than the massive scale of battles in Starcraft.

Even if you create a game with scaling of unit costs, the rock-paper-scissors of strategy would still be in there. Since the later stages of strategy would still be as important as the first ones, trying to achieve perfect information would also be more important as the game progresses. I haven't really given this much thought but I will try to come up with a solution that balances economic strategy and information gathering.

Warcraft 3 tried but the adaptation is too slow, Starcraft didn't try at all, making strategic choices less important as the game goes on and everyone usually gets the same type of unit composition. Let's see what Starcraft 2 has to bring to the table.

Aliens Vs Predator revealed! Wait, this isn't September 1993... Or May 1999... Or...

2009-07-30T14:04:00.005+02:00

Not many people (it seems) knew much about the original Aliens Versus Predator games. It seems it was a market restricted to 14-year old boys whose fathers had allowed them to stay up late and watch the films and soon Alien and Predator figurines adorned every spare surface in the childs room, while the boy sat up playing the game, nearly foaming at the mouth with the sheer excitement of being chased by a hives worth of slavering, spiny armour-plated Aliens, his ammo running short.

At least, that's how I remember the 1999 Radical title Aliens Vs Predator, the FPS game that kept me up at nights for a good long while. 10 years on, I was rather shocked to see this...

Happy days! More on this as it's revealed, for now not much is known about the new title, except that it's being developed by Rebellion again, which is exciting for quite a few reasons. They're British, for a start. They also released such gaming gems as the PS1 version of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, Rogue Warrior and Call of Duty: World At War. Looking at their gaming track record shows a lot of ports to handheld systems, plenty of GBA games and some console work. It's almost as if they made Alien Versus Predator and went on holiday to develop in console land only to briefly return to the PC with Judge Dredd: Dredd vs Death before vanishing into semi-obscurity.

One of the more overlooked features of Aliens Versus Predator was the multiplayer, at the time the multiplayer scene was pretty devoid of anything resembling a server browser, the closest thing available was crap and the connection issues were so bad for most people that playing online was hardly worth the effort. It's a shame they didn't put in the toil though, as the multiplayer in AvsP was actually a LOT of fun. They realised their characters well and while they took the old book/film into game route and sub-class everything, i.e. a predator that only had the disc and not invisibility etc. With the human and predator classes, the Aliens were just... Aliens. Killing machines. They were so much harder to play as they were fairly fragile and didn't have any form of ranged weaponry at all, but were lightning fast, could crawl on the walls and could kill in a few seconds if they were allowed close enough.

This is all idle speculation and geeky teen nostalgia of course but if Rebellion can pull the excitement of the 1999 version of Aliens Versus Predator into the 00's, there'll be some very, very happy fanboys and gamers alike out there. Watch this space...

Old leopard, new spots, same teeth (AKA: Get off mah lawn!)

2009-07-30T10:50:00.008+02:00

First off, not a MacOS post despite the title.

Recently, after reading Abbe's glowing recommendation of The Tales Of Monkey Island Chapter 1: "Launch of the Screaming Narwhal", I downloaded the demo.

After playing all 15 minutes or so of the demo, I bought the series. I played through the first game and any review or opinion on the game from my perspective would be a carbon copy of Abbe's expectations and review of the game.

Just after I completed the first chapter however, as if Steam were reading my mind, the Steam news window appeared and within its hallowed frame, lay this little beauty. Fresh from my nostalgic journey to Flotsam Island(TM) and at only £7.99 GBP or $9.99 USD, I couldn't justify not getting a remake of one of the all time classic point and click LucasArts adventure games. See below for first impressions.

Reading about the special edition of The Secret of Monkey Island(TM) and getting the rush of nostalgia to revisit Melee Island(TM) and get out my rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle, it was but a moments work to buy the revisitation of a classic adventure game. The first thing that struck me was the size of the download, nearly 2Gb! The team had obviously gone overboard on the special effects and true to claim, the artwork in this new version is pretty stunning, with some lovely water effects and all-new hand-drawn sprites, the spirit of Monkey Island was very much apparent.

On top of the new visuals, there is now a much-needed voiceover. The voice talents of apparently most of the team that made it went into the game and I have to compliment them on their work, they do realise the characters they play wonderfully.

I haven't had much of a chance to play past the first few screens but clicking around it seems very true to form of the original. However, if you're a purist at heart this new version (aside from adding compatibility with newer OS's or having to use SCUMMVM to run it in all it's pixelated glory) adds something a little bit special.

You see, with a tap of the F10 key, the new voiced over sprite animated special effects'd version fades and regresses back to the very original game it's based on! Voices dissapear, smooth animations fade and once again you're bombarded in the face with the pixellated fires and 2 frame animations we all knew and loved first time round. It really is good to see how the game has changed and also be able to compare the two in real time.

This merging of the versions is not absolutely perfect however. The new graphics feel, well, kind of like an overlay on the original, Guybrush slides across the floor in a way that, while very similar to older adventure games animation styles, just feels really strange in the new-fangled backdrops of the re-imagining. I can however let this go as everything stays the same when you switch into the original, so I suppose they had to adopt this method of movement to better incorporate the switching feature. The interface too has changed, for the all new version, gone is the reliable old verb menu at the bottom of the screen and instant access inventory, always displayed to help inquisitive minds figure out how to get rid of that sodding seagull to get the red herring from the end of the pier. Instead we now have CTRL for a pop up verb menu and ALT for a pop up inventory and a context sensitive cursor. While this in itself is not bad, it is kind of strange to get used to, and almost easier to hit F10 and use the original verb menu once that appears.

All in all, I am impressed with the Special Edition of The Secret of Monkey Island(TM). It's a faithful re-imagining of a classic adventure game. It retains all the humour and wit present in the original script, perhaps even enhanced slightly by the voiceovers. The art definately adds a lot and I can't wait to see how they've redone some of the set-pieces such as being fired from the cannon.

Survey says: Buy it now! If you're new to Monkey Island or just don't remember it, this is a great starting point if you were intriegued by the new episodic Tales Of... series, but had no idea what to expect.

Value of education

2009-07-29T20:03:00.003+02:00

Went to Burger King (yeah, not my favourite place) for lunch today and one of the employees had a shirt that said "Too cool for school" on the back and some BK thing on the front. The back made me laugh, but then I realised that it's a perfect way to get more potential employees by making children (and parents?) think like that. Don't give the children any hope, let's aim for BK straight away, and they won't be as disappointed when they grow up.

Time scaling as difficulty modifier

2009-07-29T10:16:00.004+02:00

After having watched bullet-time in about a billion different scenarios over the last decade I got to thinking. What about having more than two modes (normal time/bullet time) and instead implementing a system for slowing down and speeding up time by percentages?

Let's say we create an action platformer with this system. The player always moves at 100% speed to have the controls be intuitive but you can change the speed of the world around you. When you get to a difficult boss fight, you can make him go slower and be able to beat the encounter.

This way, you can basically decide on your own difficulty since most of the difficulty usually comes from being swamped by enemies until you just can't keep track of them. Just a 10% increase in speed might be the deciding factor in some cases.

I'm not sure though if keeping this as some kind of power-up system would be better where it's limited or if you allowed the player to use it whenever he wanted and then just give a score at the end of each stage where you multiply your score by the average speed %. I don't really want to give points since I want good gameplay to be a reward in itself but I'm well aware that people seem to like trophies.

If you do create a game where you can speed up and slow down everyting, imagine running on top of trains, jumping on cars or seeing bullets or firewalls coming at you in slow-motion. The replays would probably look awesome with the player running around in a blur or actually being slower than the enemies themselves.

A bright future

2009-07-27T19:04:00.002+02:00

According to an article on Times Online, women are getting prettier with every generation as beautiful women have more children and more daughters than plain women. This is of course good news for man-kind. If you would believe Idiocracy (which you probably shouldn't), they are getting less intelligent too! This would mean that in a few hundred years, there will be plenty of attractive and stupid women. And people say everything was better before.

If you don't believe this, you can easily verify it by yourself. All you need is a public space with women (preferably a bar) and a bottle of vodka (the size of the bottle is important as it will determine how far into the future you simulate. A good estimate is that 1 cl is ~1.5 year, which means that a reasonable bottle should contain between 70 and 100 cl). As time progresses (drinking vodka), the women becomes prettier and your intelligence goes down, proving my previous statement.

Girls are (also?) sexist

2009-07-26T08:10:00.003+02:00

As you might have picked up by now, I'm working as a store clerk. Since I'm also fairly good at abstraction. To me it doesn't really matter if it's candy, baked beans or tampons, it's all cartons that should go on the shelf.

But apparently this is not the case. I have probably had remarks from girls five or six times now when unpacking make-up or women's hygiene products on the note of "are you sure you know what you're doing?". And this has been said with the same type of voice men use when girls start playing with cars, somewhere in the fifties.

If everyone in a store could only unpack things they used themselves, I can assure you the store would be quite empty. I think the only reason why the women seem to think men in the make-up section is a disgrace is because they have such a close personal relationship with it. If you're only thinking about what you're doing with it yourself, it might be hard to think of it as only boxes.

I haven't really run into those kinds of comments before so maybe make-up and hygiene are the last bastions where women can be women? Can't say for sure, but I don't think I have any subject where I would be surprised to find a girl at least as good as myself.

Luxury

2009-07-25T15:09:00.004+02:00

Let's say you had a crapload of money. Like football player style income (football, not handegg). What would you do to make your life better?

The only thing I can think of that I would really want right now (apart from a job) is someone that could take care of my bedroom. Having nice clean sheets, a nice temperature of 19-20 degrees and definitely no mosquitos every single night when you go to bed is a thing to pray for. Since sleeping is essential to my well-being, I would also like it sound-proof and no windows to let in sunlight in the mornings.

It's not quite a ball-washer, but it would do for me.

Tales of Monkey Island episode 1 - Surprisingly good!

2009-07-24T00:55:00.000+02:00

I bought Tales of Monkey Island when it came up as a pre-order, being somewhat sceptic (the demos of the other Telltale games have been... mediocre...) of the quality and the level of funny in it. To my surprise I thoroughly enjoyed the first part.

Loved
It took me around 3 hours to finish and I really only got stuck on one puzzle where I had to use a FAQ to get me by. The rest of the puzzles were quite intuitive and you solve a bunch of them by just naturally using the items for what they were made for, while some are quite clever and funny. Thankfully there wasn't many -if any- puzzles that had illogical solutions, which have been the bane (for me) of adventure games since pretty much forever.

The voiceovers are good and definitely bring life to the game. But if you are on the fast-reading side, you have the much appreciated option of skipping ahead in the conversation if you want to speed up the dialogs. Something I sorely missed in the remake of Monkey Island 1.

Hated
The game requires quite a bit of clicking around, you need to click on everything to find different things, for example you find a vital piece of a puzzle in a pair of socks, which I didn't even knew I could click on until I did it by chance. To its defence it usually have a slightly funny response or action that happens when you click on the item, so you will do it willingly most of the time.

I'm not really a person that play a lot of adventure games, but the telltale version of Monkey Island were quite enjoyable and I am actually looking forward to the next episode. If you really dislike adventure games you probably wont like this either, but I can recommend at least trying out the demo (I think there is one).

Why do people buy bad games?

2009-07-21T22:24:00.005+02:00

I started playing Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines again, and I must say the game is awesome! The more I play it, the more I love it. Slowly rising to the top of my best-game-of-all-times list. Sure the game has its flaws, and requires unofficial patches to work, but what great game doesn't?

I took a look at Steam, and this is what I found.

GENRE: ACTION!?
Is someone retarded? Sure the combat is action, but if you define that game as an action-game, you have missed the point (you could wrongfully argue that it's an action-rpg). It's like calling Star Wars a romantic comedy because there happens to be a kiss and some "wacky" teddy bears in it.

And traces of this can be seen in other places also. Look at this trailer for a Fallout 3 DLC.

Video Games | Fallout 3 | Broken Steel Debut Trailer HD

Is this what the sequel to Fallout 2 has been reduced to? A bland action game? Where were the dialogs in the trailer? The characters? Nooooo, the only thing kids want these days seems to be explosions. Fallout 2 is also one of the candidates for the top of my best-game-of-all-times list, and sure there was some combat, but that was not what made it fun (Fallout Tactics proved that point pretty successfully). It's everything BUT the combat that's important in these games, but still that's what they advertise (in Vampire) or implement (in Fallout 3). I sense a dark future, where everyone plays on consoles and everything is a sequel to some stupid game.

I really want to play Diablo 3

2009-07-19T12:08:00.004+02:00

I can't even remember the last time I was feeling this hyped up for a game. The only contender would be if I could erase my memory and go back and play Baldur's Gate 2 all over again. But the reason for wanting to play Diablo is quite different, it's just pure unadultered gameplay. None of that "what's my motivation" or "I wonder what will happen now", just killing small angry things over and over again.

And the thing is, none of that motivational stuff really matters. Nor do the character design, the universe or anything else. Sure, great feedback is one of the things that improves the core gameplay but if the game isn't fun to begin with, no amount of pretty monsters is going to make it fun.

I think I would have played Diablo 2 even if all the monsters were just represented by circles of different color, like in my amazing screenshot below:

Now sure, it's not very pretty. But assuming you get some kind of feedback on what your character and the monsters are doing, it could actually play pretty well. And this is not a screenshot per se, it's a representation of core gameplay.

Making sure the core gameplay is fun is probably one of the things game developers get wrong. A lot of the time, some Hollywood movie company approach a game developer and ask them to make a game out of their movie. Then the designers have to sit down and figure out what parts of the movie would make a decent game.

But that's not really how you make games is it? You're supposed to start with core mechanics that are interesting, then add art direction, setting and all the other shinies.

Adding another example, here's another example of core mechanics, in this case from Gears of War:

Now Gears of War is not quite a bad game. Even though I don't really like it, I can see that it's well-made. But the core mechanics are just totally uninteresting for me. You find a cover, pop out and shoot some ducks and then switch to another cover. It's prettier than duck hunt and usually half the screen is obscured by whatever you happen to be hiding behind, but it's still mostly the same gameplay.

I've never really been attracted to the cover-based shooters. Because once you force the player to be mostly stationary, you can't really create dynamic and interesting encounters. For myself, adapting to situations is what makes playing games fun.

World of Warcraft shows another problem though. The core mechanics are there to make the game interesting. Doing a 5-man instance where you don't have a pure tank or healing class is one of the most entertaining things (for me). Everyone has to be on their toes all the time and be able to handle more mobs, adapt to situations or simply just die a lot.

In 25-man instances this is no longer the case, at least not for my guild. Sure we're not on the edge of raiding, but therein lies the problem. Everyone expects the rest of the people to show up and kill new bosses but already knowing all the strategies and exactly what to do. So the difficulty only lies in learning and executing a strategy but there is basically no adapting. One person out of 25 is just not enough to make a difference and if everyone is constantly running around adapting, you can't really rely on anyone doing their job.

Make sure the core game mechanics are fun to begin with but don't scale the game to where strategy becomes more important than skill.