Killingtime Through Games

It's Over

2007-01-17T13:17:00.000Z

Well I've come to the realisation that I don't produce enough traffic for one blog let alone three so after much consideration (well minutes anyway) I've decided to kill this blog and put it with my personal blog. The games I make and play are all part of me as a person anyway. The only real incentives to keep this separate is for people who are only interested in this stuff (especially those that use an RSS reader) and the fact I can better customise the look and feel of the page. I'll make sure that, from now on, I tag the posts that would have been in this blog with Games so you can just bookmark that if that's all you are interested in. Unfortunately Google doesn't support Tag Feeds so those that use ATOM can't just get the stuff they are interested in.

Thanks for reading and hope you continue to do so in the other place.

All Things Final Fantasy and PS2

2006-12-13T17:29:00.000Z

I've been playing quite a bit of Final Fantasy III, which I picked up from the states because it is going to be released at some unknown time over here. I've been enjoying it though it doesn't have the same involved story as later games in the series. I also think they've done a good job sticking to the original but wading through a dungeon only to get killed by the boss (and having no way of saving before then) is very annoying. Anyway unlocking the Dragoon job in Final Fantasy III made me fancy playing Final Fantasy IX again. I didn't enjoy the game the first time around but I figured I might have been missing something. I'm still not enjoying it that much (mainly because of the slightly messed up way it seems to deal with the ATB system) but probably more than I enjoyed it the first time around.

Also, awaiting Final Fantasy XII to final drop in Europe I bought a RGB SCART cable for my PS2. The difference is amazing, I can't believe how much sharper, and better, the PS2 looks with it. I also can't believe that they bundle the composite cable when the image is so much sharper with a RGB output. I played a few games just to check them out and then changed back to composite to make sure I wasn't imaging such a difference but, sure enough, it really is massive difference. I think I'll get an RGB SCART for my GameCube as well if the output can be made to improve like that.

As a quick note I notice they are looking to make a couple more Final Fantasy Tactics games. Mmmm.

Game Update

2006-11-13T18:12:00.000Z

Why not quickly update you all with the exciting game playing I've been doing.

I recently finished Company of Heroes. An utterly fantastic game and highly recommended. I'm looking forward to the editor to see what I can do and what other campaigns and maps will be generated. For now I'm trying the skirmish mode.

Also I got a Nintendo DS to pick up Final Fantasy III which I ordered from the states since, in the unwritten SquareEnix law, Europe gets the shaft. Again.

Anyway awaiting Final Fantasy XII made me decide to try and complete a few of the earlier ones (or play through them again in the more modern ones).

What Gives?

2006-11-08T10:41:00.000Z

Is there a good reason that Gears of War and Call of Duty 3 are coming out on the same day? It's bad enough of that Gears of War has been doing this whole hype machine Emergence Day thing and then proceed to make if a different day in Europe but both games are out on the same day both in the states and over here. Now you might argue that they both aren't in the same field (even though they both are FPS games). But when you are paying £50 for a title then suddenly the thought of buying two in the same week becomes daunting (as you release you are spending 2p less than £100). Anyway with that in mind I think I'll just wait until Christmas instead and not get either. I do look forward to playing both titles but I'll wait.

Dark Me...

2006-10-30T19:08:00.000Z

So a little later than North America we got Dark Messiah over here. I had a busy weekend and I was trying to cram in a few hours with this game. I've been looking forward to the game since I played the demo. Started it up it carried over all the settings I had in the demo. Great. Played through the Prologue again, quickly, to get on to the new stuff I hadn't seen. New cutscene revealing much more of the plot (interesting stuff). Followed by the next level loading with lots of static where talking should be and then the game crashing in the scene. A quick visit to the Steam forums... one of the files downloaded is corrupt validate the download. Did that and it fixed, great! Played a little more, it hung (in a way that means you have to turn off your machine, Windows can gracefully shut down if you wait an age to end the task). Tried again, it hung. Tried reducing the graphic quality and it hung less (though not entirely); which makes sense since my graphic card is puny but then the graphics settings was something it picked automatically. Tried to find a happy medium work ok on one level but on the next (where the demands are probably higher) it hung. Tried another fix from the site. That caused the game to crash to desktop. Upgraded my video drivers (hey, just in case). That caused it to crash more as well.

Yeay.

I went to play Company of Heroes to help me contain my increasing annoyance.

It's been a problem that has plagued me with Source games for a while (well Half Life 2 as well). I don't like games crashing on me but I understand that sometimes building something for all the permutations of system configurations isn't easy at all. Still it has been a long standing, common, issue so you'd think they'd put the resource onto tracking down that bug. What annoys me the most is that it doesn't just die it renders the machine unstable too resulting in a reboot.

Anyway except, maybe, a couple more goes I'll wait for the forthcoming patch to see if it resolves the lockups. If that fails I'll play it when I get a new PC.

Interesting Pricing Scheme

2006-10-26T17:04:00.000Z

Since I'm subscribed to the Steam RSS feed then I get all the information about the new games that have just been added. Civilization IV has just been added. I thought great, now if someone is online who doesn't have it we can suggest that, if they are interested, they can go pick it up and it will be downloaded in a couple of hours. But it is coming out at the full retail price of $50. That's before another few dollars tax is added on. A quick look at one UK site, Play showed that it was £17 there (which is about $30). I expect that they can't offer it below their retail price because they'll risk annoying the stores. Surely they can justify the cost of producing the manual and such could knock of a bit of the price? I see lots of benefit in the digital distribution model but it won't really make an impact until it is competitive. At that price I'd have a hard time convincing myself to suggest anything other than a friend order it online and wait a few days.

A Weekend Of Gaming

2006-10-24T19:00:00.000Z

For some reason this weekend pretty much became a weekend of gaming and not much else. It started on Friday when I completed the standard mode in Dead Rising and unlocked the overtime mode. I then went back to Enchanted Arms which I'm not really enjoying but it's become something for me to complete and put on the shelf. For me the game fails to have a particularly gripping storyline and this isn't helped by the way conversations are handled with the scene being displayed in the background and the characters being rendered in a flat way at the front of it, nor by the fairly dull combat system that means that one combat has little relation to the next in terms of resource management.

Saturday I carried on with a little Enchanted Arms anyway along with playing the Company of Heroes demo (more on that in a bit) and the Dark Crusade demo with a bit of Medieval: Total War II demo chucked in for good measure. Dark Crusade doesn't disappoint and seems to be a great expansion to the Dawn of War series as a whole. I noticed they have a campaign mode that looks a bit like the territories map you get in the Total War series which is a great draw to the game. Later on Saturday I was going to go out and chill with friends but instead three of us ended up on Teamspeak playing Civilization IV. It was a good game and got me thinking that it might make a great present for my dad and brother and we can have a male family bonding session over the Internet. It sounds like a plan (it's ok, neither of them read my blogs).

Anyway on Sunday I was in town and bought a copy of Company of Heroes after I enjoyed the demo. It's an interesting one, that game, since it was only brought to my attention by someone playing it. A friend of my thought it was a FPS but became more interested when discovering it was otherwise. How do these games slip beneath our radar? Anyway it's been fantastic and Relic have done a fantastic job of drawing you into the atmosphere and really making you battle for the territory.

I think that pretty much covers what I did this weekend.

Advertising in Games Part 2

2006-10-20T16:05:00.000Z

I wrote about this a while back when I first heard about the plans.

There currently seems to be a bit of an outcry about advertising in games. I found Penny Arcade's comic on it insightful. One thing that that comic does outline that I never thought of was that it might not be a global ad for the game but a personal ad (based on the usage of other ads). This would mean you couldn't use the ad as a reference point in the game (so the whole I'm approaching the McDonald's ad wouldn't work).

To go back to the statement that it adds realism I can't agree with that about Battlefield 2142. It's well over one hundred years in the future, how are the ads realistic? How do they help the atmosphere of the game? They don't. I understand using advertising on cars in racing games, banners on the pitch in football games but this doesn't seem to be authentic to me. I'm pretty sure it's detrimental to the atmosphere on the game and I fail to see how it would be a good thing.

Dilemma!

2006-10-12T09:37:00.000Z

A recent post from Steam stated that:

Naked Sky Entertainment, an independent game studio located in Los Angeles, and Valve announce RoboBlitz™, an Unreal® Engine™ 3 game, is coming to Steam®, the leading online platform for PC games, in the coming weeks.

This leads me to wonder if I get it for my PC or my XBox 360 (it's coming out on Arcade for the 360). It's multiplayer and therefore either I exclude potential XBox Live goodness or some friends on the PC.

Though it isn't a game made by Epic it is interesting that a game using the Unreal 3 Engine (I think that sounds better than Unreal Engine 3, don't you agree?) is coming to a platform primarily designed for the Source Engine games.

At The Movies

2006-10-10T10:41:00.000Z

I had a few friends around (only one of them has a blog and one of them was my brother). We met to have a games film night. Since we started late and people seem to have a life we only got through two films namely Doom and Silent Hill.

Now I know as well as most people that films based on games tend to be poor so I wasn't expecting much however even my low expectations were more than met with Doom. It was really bad and then some. First they stripped the main thing about the game, mainly that hell has come to Mars. Instead, for no real reason, they blame it on genetics testing. Second they invent this Ark thing to transport people from Earth to Mars maybe they felt landing crafts and such would be too close to Aliens. Of course they couldn't escape the fact that the lab scenes were reminiscent of that film. My high point of the stupidity of the film was when they went down into the sewers. Here they are, on Mars, with 87 people working there and they have a sewer system with tens of thousands of gallons of water jetting around. What? Did they have a spare sewer set that day or something?

Anyway Silent Hill was better. It was actually pretty good. The plot was kinda random (I was expecting that though) but visually it was nice.

Anyway that was an interesting experiment though sticking to the games seems a smarter thing to do.

Too Lazy To Game?

2006-10-04T12:59:00.000Z

Quite some time back Endie and I were talking about the fact that many people would take their XBox 360 gamer score very seriously and that the difficulty in unlocking achievements would be a factor in a game's purchase. It seems that someone is now offering a service to gain achievement points. I can't really understand why I'd want to. Surely part of the point about getting achievements is that you've achieved it? Also presumably this means you have to hand them your XBox Live details so they can log in as you (also do you get to chose the games you unlock or will you suddenly become a Fifa fiend).

Difficulty Levels In Computer Games

2006-09-26T18:57:00.000Z

I bought Dead Rising when it came out in the UK and I've been playing it a while but it has got me thinking about the difficulty curves in games. I messed up a few missions in Dead Rising and that made points later in the game more difficult. In turn that escalating difficulty made leveling up more difficult which made more points of the game difficult. For example I failed to kill a psychotic clown, had I killed him I would of unlocked a shortcut to another area. If I had done that then later, when I was trying to save four survivors then I would have succeeded. This would have given me more experience points making it easier for me to finish later points of the game. This is an inversely proportional difficulty, that is the more skilled the player is the easier the game becomes. I'm going to look at this in more detail later but I'll look at a few of the models I've seen in games.

Flat Model Difficulty

A lot of games fall under this category to one degree or another. A lot of Real Time Strategy games are like this (Dawn of War as one example). At the beginning of each level you are back to square one and given a fixed resource to work with. It doesn't matter if you just scraped through the previous level or managed to succeed with flying colours. Generally these games also follow a game trend where the levels become increasingly difficult; it's a game mechanic rather than following more of a real world example where you'd assume the dwindling resources of your enemy would mean that you were in a stronger position as you progress. Many first person shooters also are like this. In Half Life you start each level on a roughly equal footing to any other player. You might have more ammo or health but generally a good game designer will balance this out by providing a stock up area to put people on equal footing.

Often these games will increase the challenge by allowing the player to pick the difficulty (maybe dynamically, or when they start the game). An experienced player can increase the difficulty to match their skill to insure the game is still a challenge for them.

Proportional Difficulty Model

I can't think of many examples of the model. Sin: Episodes is one example. In that, if you die the game begins to reduce the difficulty of the enemies deployed automatically. If you are doing very well the game will increase the difficulty automatically providing a more difficult challenge to players that can handle it. It's important to provide players with the ability to control this themselves as well so a good player that isn't looking for it to become frustrating can still tailor their game. This model helps insure a challenge for all players without, hopefully, becoming frustrating.

It's a good model to implement as it makes the game fun for everyone while not consciously making them change the difficulty. However a developer may find it more difficult to scale events dynamically like this.

Neverwinter Nights also uses this for random encounters though the fixed encounter fights don't scale like this. So players may find it easy (where it is picking lower level encounters) until they get to a scripted fight where they'll find it impossible (because the boss doesn't scale to challenge them correctly).

Inversely Proportional Difficulty Model

Finally we have the model that made me think of this in the first place. This model is understandable as it rewards skilled players and penalizes poor players. The first thing you need for this model is some level of persistence in the game. Grand Theft Auto isn't an example as though you might fail to achieve missions or progress in the game each mission is an instance which has no knock on effect to the rest of the game. In dead rising achieving certain missions will reward you with experience points (giving you new abilities) and routes which will help you in later missions. Long term strategy games such as Rome: Total War and Civilization also create a situation where a bad start might effect the entire rest of your game. Roleplaying games tend to also create a situation in which a good player can hoard items and gain levels easier than a poor player.

Though rewarding people who are skilled is good (as it makes them feel they've achieved something) this is a bad situation. Good players might well find the game too easy and poor players will find the game impossible. The easiest way to rectify this is to offer difficulty levels so the player can find a difficulty level that they are happy with. Another way is to playtest all rewards to insure they don't give a huge long term advantage.

I like this model, it is just a difficult one to balance properly.

Insomnia

2006-09-02T01:48:00.000Z

Maybe insomnia setting in should be reserved for my personal blog but failing to sleep made me decide to talk about a game I was playing last night; Bang!. I found it a really fun game and I was a bit surprised at myself for not playing this before as I can be a bit of a Western fan. Anyway the Wiki entry is pretty good at describing it. I found the dynamic of the game interesting. The fact that some people want to defend the Sheriff even if the Sheriff doesn't know that.

Right maybe I'll try that sleep thing again.

Advertising in Games

2006-08-31T18:33:00.000Z

I was just reading in IGN about EA dynamically advertising in games I like the comment:

advertising is not only nice to have, but it's an essential component to create the fiction of being there

I agree that it might well add to the realism of the game in question but the real motivation isn't to make a more authentic gaming experience it's to create another revenue channel. I doubt this will result in the games in question being cheaper though. It will be interesting to see if they allow it to be turned off (in the event that someone doesn't want this added realism) or whether we'll see a bunch of people blocking sites in the same way as they do with banner ads.

Blogger Upgrade

2006-08-31T14:36:00.000Z

Not Related to gaming at all but with the blogger upgrade I've upgraded the template on this site. Let me know if you have any problems with it or such.

I bought Sin Episode 1 from Steam yesterday. One of the reasons for doing this is it was $15 which is a really good price; even for a short game. The second is that it's a Source based game and with all the problems I've been having with Half Life 2 at the moment I thought I'd see if I had with another game using the engine. I played it for about an hour and a half with no problems. Still something to do with Half Life 2 then. That's good as Dark Messiah looks good and I'm hoping it runs ok. Anyway Sin has been really good fun so far. It's not breaking any new ground on the FPS front but it keeps the pace well and has a good action feel to it.

Steam

2006-08-23T20:37:00.000Z

I love steam; the way it burns through your skin... ok I'm really talking about Steam; Valve's online content delivery service which I have more of a love/minor irritation relationship with. At first I had an issue with not actually having a physical copy of the game but it wasn't really that much of a hurdle to overcome to realize that I don't really care about owning the box just the product and the idea of not needing to hunt around for where I left that DVD case appealed so I quickly got over that.

I was playing Half Life 2: Episode 1 with commentary on and recently it just started crashing for no reason. At first I assumed it was something to do with hardware but now I think it might be a regression in one of the background updates. This presents a problem since I didn't know about that update until I read the RSS feed I had on it and suddenly the game stops working without me knowing about it. Of course that's more of an issue with testing a patch rather than with the content delivery system.

I just bought X³ from Steam after moaning about a game working on it. I haven't actually had a chance to play it for any length yet. This is another point about Steam. All games I've bought (as far as I recall) I've preloaded so they have been ready for launch. In the case of X³ it was quicker than buying it from an online store but longer than going to a shop and buying it, taking it home and installing it from DVD. Still I am prone to buying things at 1am so Steam really helps this :D and given I'm looking to buy Dark Messiah on Steam rather than in a store then it is quite obvious I prefer it as a platform over traditional purchasing methods.

Level Design

2006-08-21T14:23:00.000Z

I decided to get back to some level designing and attempting to create a map for Half Life 2 using the Hammer Editor. I've spent a couple of hours with it (just, not long at all) and it doesn't seem quite as friendly as the Unreal Editor which I previously used to create a map for Raven Shield.

Though developers are willing to put in extra time to develop maps the ability to quickly develop maps and change them is very important to professional developers and fans alike. Recently the Unreal 3 engine has been adopted by EA along with use in a few other studios. Maybe it's time I revisit that and see what I can do. However not before I play around some more with the Source engine.

Console VS PC

2006-08-16T11:07:00.000Z

I've go through phases in my game playing of prefering to play games on a console and playing games on my PC. Recently the playing fields have been somewhat merged as I'm using my HDTV as a monitor so the visuals and sounds of both my consoles and my PC are the same. Consoles have a certain instant feel about them. You buy a game for a console and you know that it will run ok and that you won't have any problems installing the game to play it. On the other hand Keyboard/Mouse (and I know that is just an accessory) is still my choice of tool for FPS and consoles are still yet to really use that. On the other hand I tire of upgrade cylces and that realisation that games just won't run on well on your machine any more can be frustrating. Not to mention the plathora of config settings can mean that games just don't work on your system or that some background task is messing it up.

I've been more drawn back to my PC recently. That is in part because I've been trying my hand at some level design and that's something that isn't really available on consoles. Also I can pick up some games for my PC for £15 compared to £40 on an XBox 360 and that sort of price difference can't be ignored. Still saying that I'm very much looking forward to Dead Rising and a host of other games for my 360.

PSP PSOne Emulator

2006-04-07T09:36:00.000Z

First post in a while but I'll try and post more regularly. Rumours of a PSOne emulator on the PSP? I think it is a bullshot; look at the game list: Final Fantasy VII. Even assuming they then put in redevelopment time to compress it to a single install (instead of three disks). I can't see it kicking in at less than half a gig (remember CDs are still quite large compared to Flash Disks) and you'd need a big chunky memory stick to store more than one game. Then again; maybe Sony hopes that you'll go out and buy a nice range of memory sticks to hold your games on.

What I've Been Playing

2005-08-22T15:39:00.000Z

Quite quiet in the way of gaming again.

World of Warcraft: I had a go at World of Warcraft. It was enjoyable questing fun but didn't really draw me to a monthly subscription model way of thinking. I didn't really get into much of it though. I didn't try the instance dungeons or really group quest with anyone so maybe I was missing out on much of the fun. It's my first experience of massively multiplayer games in a long time and... it hasn't changed all that much really.
Dungeon Seige II (Demo): Thought I'd give the demo of this game a go. We played the first one in Multiplayer mode for quite a while so I was looking forward to this one. I have to say they seem to have changed the weapon switching and spell system for the worse which isn't good at all given I felt the first game had done poorly there. I found so much of the gameplay similar to Diablo II it almost felt like I should have just been playing Diablo II instead. They have Skill Trees and Item Sets for example. Anyway one of the big wins that I'm hoping for is the ability to persist the server state for a multiplayer session which the first one lacked.
The Sims 2: My love/hate relationship with The Sims continue. I set up a couple of new families and tried to make them do their thing. I expect hearing tales about what someone's sims are up to must be more dull than hearing about what someone's pet has been up to so I'll refrain.
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker: Still love this game and it's style but I got board looking for peices of the Master Sword so I put this game down again not long after I picked it up.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: So after getting bored of sailing around in The Wind Waker I loaded up Ocarina of Time to remember the good old days of Zelda. The control system is a little poor in this one; perhaps it was because I had just finished playing some of the newer one. Anyway I got a bit of the way through it but it failed to really hook me so I expect it will sit on the shelf a bit longer.

So The Situation Escalates

2005-08-12T16:40:00.000Z

So it continues; after the court decided that the game (GTA; what else) was not a factor in the shooting of two police officers there is still a civil case going on to take any company (pretty much involved in any stage of the game) involved in the game getting into the shooter's hands. I find it interesting that:

The makers, distributors, and retailers of that murder simulator equipped Moore to kill as surely as if they had handed him the gun to do it.
Lawyer vows to prove link between video games and murder, The Register

If that is the case then why not take anyone involved in the production and distribution of the firearm used to court. Furthermore I'd argue that if you handed someone a gun and they then went on a killing spree then they have made an active choice to do that rather than to, as most people would, put the gun down. The game was not a tool; the person was mentally unstable to begin with. If you want to find a tool why not question the accessibly of a firearms to the population?

I also find it strange that they aren't just going after Take Two Interactive but also the entire distribution chain. I was disappointed to see that the trucking company that distributed the game from the warehouse to the shops wasn't included on the list. I'm also confused as to how you can sue Walmart and Gamestop for the game's distribution unless it was a Gamestop located within Walmart; I guess.

I'm not sure what is going to come out of this; I'm very interested to see.

Grand Theft Auto San Andreas: Part 2

2005-07-27T12:12:00.000Z

Well it looks like the GTA has been blown out of all proportion. I see that the kids that are being protected from this polygon sex are the seventeen year olds as (quoting Penny Arcade):

The ESRB is suggesting that they may change the rating of the game to Adults Only, a category that by their own definition should see a great deal more use in a retail environment. This is great. Look at the descriptions for these.
MATURE Titles rated M (Mature) have content that may be suitable for persons ages 17 and older. Titles in this category may contain intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content, and/or strong language.
Or, as the rest of our culture calls it, "Rated R." Check out AO.
ADULTS ONLY Titles rated AO (Adults Only) have content that should only be played by persons 18 years and older. Titles in this category may include prolonged scenes of intense violence and/or graphic sexual content and nudity.
Penny Arcade

Interesting so I year separates the suitability of the game being vastly inappropriate to just fine to play. Of course it isn't just about that; the game is withdrawn as policy in many shops on account of this. It is very much a political thing.

It was interesting to see the reaction to all this. Even blogs of people who rarely ever move out of their own disciple have taken to talking about it.

The action has not stopped with Rockstar though. I was reading on Extra Life about articles mentioning Sims 2 content worse than Hot Coffee (the actual article). I'm not sure how you can define the extent of which someone has to mod a game before you should no longer consider that in any way part of the original game. In my mind it has to be one of the craziest rants that has ever had a press release but the media being what it is this might also take a life of it is own. VGCats had a interesting comic on the subject.

Retro Fortnight (Recently Played Games)

2005-07-12T07:43:00.000Z

I thought I'd make my what I've been playing list a regular thing.

Lionheart: It's an old game from the disbanded Black Isle Studio who did do a range of really good games. I didn't feel this was one of them though. Lionheart failed to capture me much. The story seemed ok, a descendent of Lionheart in the world but where evil spirits had been released, but the actual character interaction and quests lead much to be desired pretty much just turning it into a click 'n slash game. I quick-saved where I was meant to quick-load and then just gave up.
Neverwinter Nights: A few friends and I tried playing Hordes of the Underdark (a single player expansion pack) online anyway. We had a few glitches but things seem to be going ok. There were a lot of complaints at Bioware that they released a single player only expansion pack. In all honesty I have single player roleplaying games that I can play; Neverwinter Nights is more enjoyable as a group and I felt it was a shame that the second expansion didn't accommodate that.
Burnout 3: Takedown: I've played the Party Crash mode of this a few times recently. It's a fun game. It's not quite as freeform as the second installment though and that's a pitty.
Dance Dance Revolution: Euromix: In an attempt to get a better rhythm sense and get a little healthier I've been playing this. With dance mats; of course.
Legend of Zelda: Four Swords: I've had this game for a while but I was waiting for four of us to get together with some GBAs for some Four Sword action. It was really good fun to play and I liked the simple graphics. They took me back to wanting to play some of the other Zelda series so you might see those on recently played later. There were a couple of issues though. We did the first stage then messed up saving. We figured we'd redo it and the second time my GBA's battery was running low so I paused and turned it of. The game sensed a player had disconnected and so ended the game! We couldn't be bothered starting it again so we played the Shadow Battle mode (PVP action) and then called it a night.

Grand Theft Auto San Andreas

2005-07-11T18:33:00.000Z

The whole Sex Scenes in GTA: San Andreas has been predominant enough to make it into mainstream media. Effectively people are criticizing the ESRB system as a mod for the game allows a player to unlock some sex subgame. The current rating is (in the USA), I believe, an R and basically they want it set to some Adult Only rating which, as far as I can see is for the same age range as an R but lots of shops don't stock it or something.

The argument revolves around the fact that Rockstar North already had the code in there. Of course they may have had it in as they planed, but later dropped, the subgame. It's not officially part of the game, someone has to alter the code (even if only slightly) to access the mini-game so I fail to see how the ESRB can be criticized for failing to rate the game correctly as they can only rate the actually content they get to see.

I suppose the main point that I find worrying about is when I read things like this:

Once again, ESRB has failed our parents. This particular game has been known to include extremely heinous acts of violence, and now it has been uncovered that the game also includes explicit sexual scenes that are inappropriate for our children.
Leland Yee (Reported in the Scotsman)

That's the point isn't it? Why are you letting your young children play the game in the first place? I also find it sad that we deem extreme violence as better than showing some form of sexual act. That controlling some rendered models having sex is somehow worse than controlling those same models to beat a random street full of other models into a pulp.

I actually firmly believe that the GTA series should not be played by children I'm quite happy with games like it and Doom III actually falling under the BBFC jurisdiction.

What I've Been Playing

2005-06-21T18:17:00.000Z

I think a little update to the current games that have been taking up my time is in order.

Forza Motorsports: A fine driving simulation game. The lack of GT4 license and a fairly good difficulty curve keeps this game enjoyable and I haven't even had the pleasure of playing it on Live! yet. Graphically it isn't quite as strong as GT4 but that is presumably, in part, caused by the fact that you can customize the look of your car a lot more. The addition of a damage model is a big plus over GT4. I'm still terrible at driving games but this has been one that I've managed to get into.
Onimusha 2: I've had this for a long time but haven't really had time to play it. I'm not so sure about the merchants and the whole giving gifts to characters at all. I feel it detracts from what should really be a horror game. Plus the whole gift giving, I mean, is it really necessary? Anyway random demon hacking action.
SSX 3: Racing down a slope, or trying to do a few tricks, on a snowboard. It's straight up good fun; tricks are much easier to pull than in the first one and though that takes away a bit of the skill it does make the learning curve a bit easier and all that really results is for the criteria for winning to be generally tougher.

That's really it for the last week and a bit. I'm not really sure I can even call myself a gamer anymore. With the exception of a bit of Halo 2 I probably haven't even been online that much either.

Square Enix and The Curse of the Title

2005-06-14T18:38:00.000Z

Some people say that Squaresoft (now known as Square Enix ever since that merger) really should have had a better title than Final Fantasy when making a game that ended up having lots of sequels*. However I just read a press release stating, SQUARE ENIX SHIPS FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST™ 2: CURSE OF THE CRIMSON ELIXIR. Fullmetal Alchemist 2: Curse of the Crimson Elixir; seriously... April the 1^st was a long time ago you know. Maybe they should just stick with Final Fantasy XXIX.

* Final Fantasy was released just as Squaresoft were running out of money; they assumed it was going to be their last title.

XBox 360 and Playstation 3 Articles

2005-06-13T18:48:00.000Z

The Internet is full of articles about the XBox 360 and the PS3. Some that stood out, as a detailed look at the hardware, was the articles on Ars Technica namely:

They can get a little technical, and are quite lengthy, but are certainly worth the read.

Realizations

2005-05-20T18:05:00.000Z

Ever come to the conclusion about something while not really thinking about it? I did just yesterday. I realized that my current PC might well be the last PC I ever buy. Sure I might still upgrade it a couple of times but what do I need more power for in my PC? Games. Now given the next generation of consoles all do some fine resolutions with some astounding graphics and, hopefully with wireless, support some keyboards and mice why do I want to continue playing games on my PC. Currently strategy, RPGs and FPS are all that I really play on my PC. Now FPS are already ported to consoles and the line-up for the next generation consoles suggests this practice will continue. I'm quite certain that with a resolution capable of showing text clearly and the falling price of persistence storage to write save games it will be well within the interests of people who develop strategy games to produce for the console market, even including those hard-core games that wouldn't normally appeal to the console audience.

Of course game development is a moving target and though the next generation consoles seem impressive now, they probably won't compare to a PC when we are looking at the next console cycle. However I'm becoming less and less impressed with incremental graphics updates and I'm not sure that the possibility of doubling the resolution on my PC monitor would appeal to me when I could put that money into a HDTV instead.

So if I remove games from my PC, and I'm not saying with the ever improving market that this will hold true, that pretty much leaves game development as the only thing that keeps me on an upgrade cycle. If there is one thing that requires more power than games it is generally the tools that are required to build for that game. Whether or not I'll find my current PC good for this purpose or not remains to be seen. I suppose maybe I'll get into video editing one day and realize that I'll have to bump up my machine for that. For checking email, listening to music or writing a document though there is going to have to be a hard sell as to why it is worth my time to upgrade.

E3

2005-05-18T18:41:00.000Z

Like most gamers I follow many of the announcements of E³. Also, like most gamers, I'm not actually there. This leads me to rely on those shaky-cam videos that you see splattered over FileRush. I noticed that Nintendo actually released their videos rather than them being taped. This is a good thing. The way I see it the fans want to see what the future might hold and will download these videos. If the videos are of poor quality then I find that I'm left with a not overall great impression.

I think, as we approch a much higher resolution image in games, that the thumbnail videos that you used to get aren't really worth squat in our broadband world. I'm sure most of the game companies are reaching this conclusion as well but I felt it was worth mentioning. Vision Gran Turismo looked great, more importantly it didn't just look like a revision of the graphics; if you look at how many cars are on track: that's a good use of technology.

What else? I watched the second Final Fantasy: Advent Children trailer and it made my mouth drop. Sure it is non-interactive, but it looks like everything Spirits Within should have been.

I'm sure, like all the other people who have game related blogs, will talk about the big 3 consoles at some stage.

Time to bring out the PHP scripters

2005-05-16T18:37:00.000Z

I noticed that the XBox 360 games preview screens on 1up.com all looked odd, until I clicked for a larger version. Namely because the are all 16:9 and the site has obviously been designed with the assumption of 4:3 pictures. I expect this is the case with many game sites who are currently getting their designers back in to rework the code. Well it humored me a little.

Since I'm on the topic of next generation consoles (well one of them anyway) I was reading in GamesIndustry.biz about the expected increase in costs to develop games for the next generation platforms (I've lost the link now though) is probably going to jump from about $2-3 million to about $10 million. This, of course, will have a great deal of impact in investor willingness to commit to a somewhat risky project. I find it worrying to think the future of gaming will (even more so than now) be just sequels to successful games and the latest year's sporting update. I think the increased cost of development along with a more mainstream market may lead to the more creative peripheries being forgotten about. Still saying all this the upcoming XBox 360 releases do look very interesting so maybe I'm very mainstream or that isn't going to happen.

Sky Captain and the High Definition World of Tomorrow

2005-05-13T18:37:00.000Z

I read The Hookup on High Definition TVs altering the scales in consoles of the future. It argues with the consoles of the future offering high definition, widescreen, games then those people with the technology will get an advantage. The principle being that the higher resolution will mean those with the technology will be able to see objects with greater clarity and widescreen will provide a better field of vision.

Now I'm ok with that. I would prefer to think that people who have invested in their TV get the most out of it (my TV is neither widescreen or a HDTV), if that gives them an advantage in a game then so be it. I don't think games companies should worry about trying to put balances and checks in to try and even the playing field.

I'm a big fan of the way that consoles don't force you to upgrade constantly to even stand a chance of playing a game well. I have to say after upgrading my graphics card on my PC I found the Waterways in Half Life 2 much, much easier to complete with a more responsive framerate (not to mention that it looked better to boot). Even still I know that a few months down the line I'll be looking at a game and wondering if it will run in an acceptable manor on my PC; or whether the game will look anything like the screenshots that I've seen.

On the other hand people who develop for consoles know the system they are developing for. I know there is, unfortunately, a tendency in modern console games to actually have framerate drops and such seen as acceptable. I'm hoping that this practice, along with the increasing acceptability of bugs, is dropped. I fully understand the pressures facing the company and there are bound to be technical compromises made when you are developing a game cross-platform. My current fear is this will all change in the PS3. I'm not sure how much developers will use the scaliblity of the cell processor but I worry that we'll see, Recommended Specs: PS3, 4 free cell processors, 512Mb of off-PS3 RAM. Though I'm pretty sure that Sony will insure that a game runs on just the PS3 they will almost certainly try and promote developers to use scaling; especially if that scaling means that they can say, Runs in 780p or 1080i if you have a Sony Vega HDTV with inbuilt Cell. I want to not see the upgrading I need to do on my PC also apply to consoles.

PSP...

2005-04-26T14:31:00.000Z

Well in follow-up to the video about the PSP attempting to take over the world. The Register report that Sony have confirmed a European release date for the PSP of the 1^st of September. It's so long away, I don't know if I can wait that long.

Import?

Final Fantasy: PSP

2005-04-20T22:41:00.000Z

I saw this funny (in a super-game-geek way) evil PSP Final Fantasy VI flash movie. It was on Penny Arcade which I imagine must be drawing a lot more traffic to it than I could ever dream of. Anyway if you are a game geek then I think you'll derive some enjoyment out of it. I certainly did.

Progress in NWN

2005-04-14T19:43:00.000Z

I've decided to have another go at modding in NWN. I'm trying to build a Cthulhu: Dark Ages mod. My first step is to remove the Races except Human and have a go at restricting the classes and maybe making some new ones. From there the sanity system. Hopefully by then I'll have a couple of people who are interested in having a go at creating more Lovecraft like models for the game.

Anyway I've started by trying to get up to speed with the development tools. If anyone is intersted in such a development drop a comment.

So Many Games, So Little Time

2005-04-11T16:25:00.000Z

I'm amazed at the quality of games currently coming out and the line up of games coming out in the near future. There's Jade Empire which I'm very much looking forward to; though I was a bit annoyed that we have to pay about £5 more for the Limited Edition which is free with pre-orders in America. I've also just recently heard about the Half-Life 2 expansion pack.

One day soon I'll actually talk about the developments that I'm involved with rather than just what I'm playing and what is coming out.

Resident Evil 4

2005-03-29T13:46:00.000Z

I finished Resident Evil 4 yesterday. It's a very good game and hats off to Capcom for taking a new direction for the series. Capcom seem to have a strong product line with the likes of Resident Evil and Devil May Cry. I found that RE4 had a good difficulty level, being just tough enough to make you struggle to keep your character alive while not becoming so frustrating to make you just give up. Devil May Cry 3 is apparently nails, though I haven't had the pleasure of playing it yet.

Given how much of a zombie fan I am I find it a pleasant surprise that I liked the move away from zombies to cultists in RE4. The ammo supplies and such kept it action packed (rather than evasion packed) while still rewarding evading big groups of enemies.

All in all I found it a great move for the series and have really enjoyed playing it.

Marketting and the Blurring of Nations

2005-03-28T12:12:00.000Z

This isn't a technical discussion nor that about a specific game; rather it is about something that has been brought up at least a few times about games before. I don't read previews; I entirely ignore most of the stuff about the development of a particular game; even a game I am fanatically interested in. As a person who has a desire to become a developer maybe I should take more of an active interest in all these previews but I feel the constant attention to the product dilutes my interest. When I read about great game I think fab, I want to play that when I realise it isn't hitting the market for another year I pretty much forget about it. Perhaps by the time that release finally hit's the shelf I won't have the slightest interest in it.

To this degree I subscribe to Steve Jobs', if you advertise the product on the Tuesday, sell it on the Wednesday, I don't care about first reviews; I care about the reviews I can read about a game on the day of release or a few days before. Of course, I am a little bias here, since I read reviews and news about games on international sites and, living in Europe, tend to have the last release of any game. Therefore you hear about a game, decide you want it, and then realise you have to wait another few months before they localize it for a European market.

So do you think there is a place for the countless previews and developer chats that occur months, possibly years, before a game release or do you feel that the marketing cycle for a game should be much shorter?

It's the Small Things

2005-03-04T18:47:00.000Z

I've always found install screens to be of little importance in a game. I was very impressed with The Sims II install, which included a trivia game. However upon installing the Obscure demo I was presented with a screen that I have been with a few other games as well. It asks you your name and company. I don't mind putting my name in, like you would if you install Word but the fact that you cannot proceed with the install if you don't enter a company just pisses me off. It is unlikely that I represent a company playing the game; I know it is just a standard install screen but surely it doesn't take that much coding to remove company as a required field.

Are you l33t?

2005-02-20T15:32:00.000Z

One of my friends just pointed out the Microsoft guide to computer slang. I know I'm not a parent, and therefore it wasn't aimed at me, but I found the document very amusing.

Teamspeak

2005-01-22T22:41:00.000Z

After using TeamSpeak for a while I highly recommend it for anyone looking for voice comms in their games. It's really easy to set up and I was running a server for others earlier today while getting on with other things and everything worked just fine.

Dawn of War

2005-01-09T13:26:00.000Z

I completed Dawn of War last night. Maybe Warcraft III gave me too high an expectation but I suppose I was hoping to have a go with all the races in the campaign mode rather than just the Space Marines. I mean there is still skirmish and multiplayer and I really look forward to them, but they tend to have very different play style from campaign missions. Campaign missions will generally progressively unlock the tech tree and have small isolated groups of enemies who rarely upgrade their base whereas skirmish will generally have quickly developing enemies with all the tree available straight away, hence the learning curve is a lot steeper.

It was, after saying that, very enjoyable. I love the animation sequences and attention to unit detail in the game. I'm still not sure about the mid combat reinforcement of units, but it is a new way of doing units and I understand why the choice was made.

Prince of Persia: Warrior Within

2005-01-01T14:13:00.000Z

I find myself pretty much trying to play through the games that I got for Christmas. One of the fine games I received was Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. Now Penny Arcade expressed that they had removed much that was fun out of Sands of Time so I was a little concerned, thankfully the combat doesn't really seem like that much of the game, though I often had to replay the combat scenes against bosses since they often kicked my ass.

I was enjoying the good old jumping around levels doing the acrobatic stuff. One stage I was happily jumping around, but really couldn't figure out where to go. I did notice the Prince looking strange, and thought there might have been some reason for it that was yet to be explained to me. Well after half an hour of exploring I thought Damn, the developers have outsmarted me with their fiendish puzzles I went to GameFAQs admitting defeat, I looked up multiple FAQs all of which referred to a cut scene and jumping through a hole an uberboss made. I don't remember the cut scene, and I certainly couldn't find the hole. Turns out I'm not the only one and it looks like there is a bug in the game. So looks like I'm rolling back to an old save and hoping for the best.

It worries me that bugs like this appear in console games, yes I have an XBox version and Live so I might be able to download a patch, if they make one, but those with other consoles or without Live won't be able to patch the game. The lack of testing on games now worries me, I think it bodes ill for the console gaming scene (traditionally who could mock the PC gaming scene as they could just play a game rather than install it, fight with hardware configuration, and then have it crash every 20 seconds). I know that this will probably mean that I put Prince aside for a while, and it might well be shelved before I've really had a chance to play it. This seems a shame, because despite my initial reservations it seemed to be shaping up quite well.

Half Life 2 Damage Model

2004-12-18T13:58:00.000Z

I was playing with the Half Life 2 SDK again (as well as the Hammer editor) though I haven't really got anywhere with it as I'm still trying to work out how to actually change the weapon damage variables. I did play around with the velocity and mass of bullets though was disapointed to find that this doesn't actually increase the damage of a round rather the damage done by a weapon in the engine is not related to these factors (though it's makes a lot of sense to scale accordingly). I now have a pistol that can knock objects miles. Hopefully I'll figure out the whole damage model thing soon, I thought I was on to a winner with CVar as it is a assigned for all weapons but it really is just registering a console variable.

Troika's Art of Patching

2004-12-18T13:40:00.000Z

Looks like Troika is taking it's sweet time patching Vampire: Bloodlines. I got to a point where the game consistently crashed. After looking around I found some console commands that would set the flags and get you out of a level (as the inbuilt one failed to do). This has been an issue that has affected quite a few people and you would expect a quick patch. A month down the line and still nothing though a fan created an unofficial patch that fixes a few bugs. This isn't the first time this has happened Temple of Elemental Evil also had the same situation. I understand that building fairly open roleplaying games can lead to all sorts of scripting issues but I think they need a better post game release bug management, or better testing before a game is brought out.

Steam

2004-12-08T13:03:00.000Z

I've been keen on Valve's Steam for a while. At first it took me some convincing to come around to the idea, I like media, I didn't like the concept of a game being purely digital. I did like the fact that if you lose your hard drive due to a failure it will automatically pull all the stuff you had back again. I thought to myself "what happens if Valve go bust, guess I won't be able to play my game anymore, still I can probably pick up the DVD cheap then". But I can't, see DVD copies need to be registered with Steam presenting the same issues, furthermore there have been countless other issues related to trying to log on to Steam after buying the DVD. I've seen a lot of people hacked of by this and quite frankly I'm not surprised. The DVD edition gets the worst of both worlds, Steam allows you to play a game on any machine as long as you have an Internet connection unless you have the DVD edition where you need to have the DVD in the drive to play as well. It takes away one of major reasons I like Steam and replaces it with the user's frustration.

I can't imagine how many sales Valve have lost from people returning a product that they can't get to work. Or how many fans have been outraged at the hoops they have to jump through to play the game. I imagine that this can't be doing anything good for their image, or that of their publisher. It really is a big shame as well, Half Life 2 is the best game that I've played this year, it's probably even worth the frustration that others have gone through to get it to work. I think as one person on the Valve forums summarised the issues with the technology well when they said I just bought Halo 2, I stuck it in my XBox drive, and look, it works.

And the winner of the next gen console war is...

2004-12-07T13:31:00.000Z

IBM by the look of things. They've security chip production for the next gen XBox and Playstation and it looks a little like they might be producing the GameCube sequel. I imagine they must be overjoyed at this, and asking a CEO of IBM which console they think are the best will probably get the response We don't care, we think they are all good, maybe you should buy one of each and pick your favorite.

Hosting on Deltagreen

2004-12-05T16:38:00.000Z

Well I've used the Atom feed to host on my own site's game page Deltagreen as well as here. You are free to use either, though I'm bound to link to files on Deltagreen from here. Over the next while I might play with the CSS to try and change the look. I know that this post isn't related to computer games, but it won't be setting a trend, honest.

Oh the Deltagreen site only updates once an hour so it might be a little out of sync.

Kick About in the Source SDK

2004-12-04T17:33:00.000Z

Well I've had my first kickabout in the Source SDK today, it's been reasonably enjoyable but I think the documentation is still not quite there. I think the most amusing thing I found was the BULLET_IMPULSE_EXAGGERATION in hl2_gamerules.cpp which basically gives the cinematic item knock back feel based on things being shot. I changed it from the reasonable 3.5 to 35 which was just really to check that the change was made, thing were flying about in no time.

I haven't really started playing about with actually modding yet. I'm hoping to at some stage soon though.

I'm interested it trying out the flare grenade that used to be part of the assult rifle but was removed later (they now have that bouncy ball weapon on it). The code appears to be there, and the model was probably nearly finished. You can see it in action in hl2-tunnels.exe available from 3D Gamers.

Which to use

2004-12-04T17:17:00.000Z

I've just set up an account at MSN as well. I'm not sure which of these I'll end up using. Think I'll give them both a go though. Blogger allows you to post straight to your own site which I find both scary and interesting.