Categories
Geek / Technical

Darn Internet…

You know what’s frustrating? You find a blog post that was interesting, then someone comments on said blog post, and you reply to that comment.

And then you forget what blog it was on. Because Google doesn’t let you search for comments in blogs, it’s pretty much impossible to remember where you were, especially if your browser history automatically clears when you shutdown the application.

So if you have seen GBGames post a recent comment on your blog, could you let me know? Thanks. I’m really curious to see if there was a response to my comment.

Categories
Games Geek / Technical

YASD, the First for 2008

I was a tourist, exploring the dungeon with my yet-unnamed feline companion, when I found a ring. I put it on, and it turned out to be a ring of invisibility! How awesome is that!

I managed to get fairly far at a low experience level because enemies just couldn’t find me until I already hit them with my +2 darts or kicked them. I was sitting in a room after making it to a new level of the dungeon, inspecting my inventory, when a friend came over to my computer.

“What’s this?”
“Oh, this is NetHack. My cat keeps getting in my way.”
“Uh, huh…wait, what?”
“Here, let me show you. Oh…wait. Let me take off my ring of invisibility first.”

I took a moment to look through the help to figure out how to take off a ring. I’ve never survived long enough to want to take one off before!

“Ok, so this at sign here? That’s me.”
“Uh…”
“And that f? That’s my cat. These are the walls, this is the floor, and this is the door out of the room.”
“Where are your enemies?”
“Probably on the other side of this door.”

I opened the door, walked down the dark corridor, and made it into a room with a fountain. Just as I was about to describe that I was near a fountain, an iguana appeared in the doorway. I showed my friend the text that appeared at the top as the battle waged between the iguana and my cat. My cat was victorious.

“Uh, huh. Well, I’m going to go back to my world where things are tangible. Like, with graphics.” I joked that the graphics came from my imagination, and I pushed my glasses up my nose.

I continued to play. I decided to drink from the fountain…and water moccasins streamed out! There were three giant “S” characters looming before me on the screen. They were between me and the doorway out of the room.

And I was still not wearing my ring of invisibility!

I put the ring on, but not before they took a few bites out of me. I tried to move out of the way, and they started swiping at the air. Phew!

But then I walked forward, and they apparently got lucky and hit me five times before I could move. I was poisoned, but it didn’t matter since I was killed by one last bite.

Ah, NetHack.

Categories
Game Development Games Geek / Technical

SimCity Source Is Now Under the GPL!

Found through TIGSource, which found it through Fear and Loathing:

This is the binary and source code for Micropolis (A.K.A. “S*mC*ty”: see the GPL License and additional terms, below), which is released under the GPL.

The One Laptop Per Child laptop is going to have an official and original SimCity game available for it. Don Hopkins has cleaned up the code and removed references to the SimCity trademark. Now the source to the original SimCity is available for everyone to study, play with, and change!

The key thing here is to peek inside the mind of the original Maxis programmers when they built it. Remember, this was back in the day when games had to fit inside of 640k so some “creative” programming techniques were employed. SimCity has been long a model used for urban planning and while it’s just a game, there are a lot of business rules, ecosystem modeling, social dependencies, and other cool stuff going on in this codebase. It may not be pretty code but it’s content sure is interesting to see.

Categories
Game Development General Personal Development

Oh, and Happy New Year!

It’s been a week since January 1st, and I just moved into a new apartment. Yes, I know I was supposed to move in August, and I did, but then there were problems with that place, so now I moved again. I’ve been in crunch at the day job as well. All of this conspired to slow down my blog posting and my game development.

I’m still unpacking, but hopefully I won’t have to move again any time soon. The Thousander Club got derailed for some time, as well as my Killer Kittens game, but I hope to get back on track towards 1000 game dev hours and 1000 game ideas soon.

Categories
Game Design Games

Gender Portrayal and the Meaning of Game Elements

In any discussion about gender portrayal in games, someone will talk about how female characters are unrealistically hyper-sexualized. Many people argue that it may have a lot to do with the fact that most game game developers are male and so don’t have anyone to act as a check against their juvenile urges.

Regardless of the reason, I wonder why hyper-sexualized elements, or any elements of a game, end up in the finished product if they aren’t specifically called for by the game designers.

In many good films, every scene is planned out in painstaking detail. If it’s on screen, it’s probably there for a reason. I remember an art teacher in high school talking about a film about people getting into brawls. He said that as far as you can tell, it’s just mindless fighting, but then if you listen to the director’s commentary, he’s talking about the symbolism of the design in the carpet during an overhead shot. If you are paying attention, you might appreciate the parallels with Greek mythology or some modern-day conflict.

In good books, every piece of dialogue, every name of a character or town, every situation is absolutely needed to push the plot along. Nothing is there without a purpose. If the protagonist encounters a dog on the side of the road, it isn’t because the author just happens to like dogs or decided on a whim to add this encounter. There is some reason why this encounter exists in the finished text.

And so with good games, shouldn’t we also expect that the game designer will add elements to a game on purpose? If you’re going to create hyper-sexualized female characters, how much thought have you given to why? Does it add anything meaningful to the game, or was it thrown in without much more thought than, “Well, I’d prefer to see this sexy figure if I’m going to be playing this game, so why not?”

I recently watched Kim Swift’s Indie Games Summit 2007 talk about her team’s journey from student developers to Valve employers. Narbacular Drop is the precursor to the very popular game Portal. While the entire 32 minute video is a good for indie developers to watch, I found her comparisons of Narbacular Drop to Portal fascinating. She mentioned that Narbacular Drop‘s art design and theme wasn’t well thought out at all. The dungeon didn’t have much meaning besides being a place to host the game. The laboratory setting for Portal, on the other hand, was carefully thought out from the beginning.

A long time ago, character design was limited to what blocky pixels allowed. Today’s Mario has overalls, a hat, and a mustache because it made it easier to see him in his first games. Today’s technology removed such limits from developers. They could be more purposeful with their art direction. Is your own personal variation on the hyper-sexualized female character really adding anything meaningful to your game? Is its presence meant to say anything other than “FEMALE PLAYERS UNWELCOME”?

Categories
Geek / Technical General

Merry Christmas!

On Christmas Eve each year, my parents host a dinner at their house. Being an Italian household, there is an abundance of seafood and pasta. After dinner, the men will usually play poker, the women will talk, and the children will either watch television or play video games.

I brought my Gamecube. I’m not as big a fan of poker. B-)

Also, each year there is an unspoken contest between me and my sister. We each have a stocking up, and each year I put a walnut in her stocking. Occasionally I’ll find it back in my stocking, and we try to avoid being the one with the walnut on Christmas Day. I just checked, and I’m still winning. Another aspect of the game is that since it is never announced, it’s always part of the fun to see if I can make it to Christmas without her even being aware that the game has started.

Christmas 2007 - The Walnut

Merry Christmas!

Categories
Games Geek / Technical Politics/Government

Steam: Further Impressions

I hate Half-life 2.

I hate it because one night I found that I was still playing the game at 3AM, and I was supposed to be waking up in only a few hours to get ready for work. When you have to worry about using the words “tonight” or “today” to describe “now”, you stop worrying about finding a good place to stop (there isn’t one. It’s like a well-written novel that way).

I can’t believe I’ve been missing out on playing this game for so long. I’ve played Quake 4‘s single-player campaign a bit, but it isn’t the same feeling. In Nova Prospekt and City 14, I feel like I’m dealing with a post-apocalyptic world. There’s hope hidden everywhere, and it feels like a idealistic fight. In Quake 4, I had one exciting fight against a giant mechanical insect, and later encountered a similar one while crawling under some tunnels. I remember being afraid as I crawled past it, thinking that at any moment the glass will break and it would be right on top of me. Still, the conversations and emotions didn’t feel real. I felt like I was playing a game. Half-life 2 is a really great game. Well, it’s not as if most of you didn’t already know.

And you know what else I like? That I don’t have to worry about finding my CD when I want to play the game. Unless I want to resort to using cracks, I still need a CD to play Starcraft or any number of games.

One of the things I remember worrying about with Steam was the problem of losing a network connection. When it was first launched, customers found that the network was overloaded and so they couldn’t play the game they already paid for. Well, that sucks for the people who ordered the game through Steam and couldn’t download or update it, but what about the smart people who bought the game at the store? No, they couldn’t play either because Valve decided that the store-bought version needed to be authenticated as well. I had sent an email asking about this, and after three replies in which I didn’t feel I received a satisfactory answer, I was told someone would get back to me and no one did.

So let’s do a test. I’ll disconnect my network connection and try to start Half-life 2. I get a dialog box that says Steam couldn’t connect, but I was able to start it in off-line mode. Nice. Half-life 2 loads up, but when I try to play, it crashes. Huh. Well, wait. Last time I played, I was in the middle of a firefight in “Anticitizen One”, and the game crashed to the desktop. If I use a save game from a few minutes earlier, the game loads fine, and my squad mates are yelling about the man in the mask who is shooting us from the street.

And now it’s 30 minutes later. Oh, yeah. I was running a test. I wasn’t supposed to keep playing.

Also, last night I received an automatic update for the Steam client. Oh. I, uh, didn’t know you were even downloading anything. What if I didn’t want the update? As mentioned years ago on Valve, Steam and DRM:

Steam pushes new versions whether you want them or not. Sure, you can decline to update, but you won’t be playing anytime soon. While this may look good on the surface solving incompatibility between revisions, the reality is much harsher.

The author mentioned Counter-strike 2 and the bots that were being developed for it. He loved them. Then an update came out that removed the bots completely.

Normally, you just don’t update and keep playing like you always did. Now, you don’t have a choice. Your entire gameplay experience is in the hands of some programmer. Whether you thought their previous effort was better is irrelevant. Whether you like an old feature or weapon is no longer your concern. Welcome to the DRM age.

As you can see, the DRM world isn’t as rosy as the pro-DRM lobby make it out to be. Technical glitches and decisions made by the copyright holders are turning the simple act of buying a game, installing it and running it into a minefield of checks, any of which can stop you from playing your rightfully purchased game or software should they fail.

Well, so far I haven’t had anything that I didn’t want changed, but the idea that the creator of the software I’m using still has control over what I can do with it after I’ve installed it makes me uncomfortable. Because of these concerns, I would still prefer to play games natively on my Gnu/Linux systems. For the most part, I can trust those computers better. It just makes me sad that I feel like I have to choose between really good games and really trustworthy games.

Also, I haven’t looked into this, but if I plan on purchasing The Orange Box, and I do so through a retail shop so I have a physical product in my hands, is there still a complicated activation process through Steam, or do the games play out of the box without requiring a network connection? I remember Half-life 2 needing some kind of decryption process for the game data that could take hours, although downloading the game in my experience didn’t seem to need extra time after I got it. Also, if I buy a physical product, will it require a CD in the drive to play, or does it associate the game with my Steam account and let me have the convenience that I’ve grown accustomed to?

Categories
General

I’m Moving…Again!

Starting tomorrow, assuming that there are no problems, I can start moving into my new apartment. I’m running a bit behind schedule in terms of this move. I haven’t hired movers, a van, or called to get electricity and gas setup at the new place. Cable will be interesting because I would like to get cable and Internet, and since I am without a TV, I’m sure there will be hassles.

I have the rest of this month to move, but I would like to be out of my current place as soon as I can. I want to feel comfortable cooking in my kitchen again, and my current place turned out to be the home of roaches. They don’t pay rent, they mooch off of your beer, and they hit on your girlfriend, so that makes them less than ideal roommates. Oh, and they ruin your food with disease and make it more likely that you’ll develop asthma. I still need to pack, and I want to make sure I don’t bring anything that is holding roach egg cases, which are called ootheca in case you want to know, or the roaches themselves. My friend’s advice is that I just need to really inspect everything. It might be tedious, but luckily for me, I don’t have a lot of stuff to go through. A few bookshelves, a table, a desk, some file cabinets, and my computer and video game equipment. I doubt they are, but I will be very upset if I find out that they are hanging out IN my NES. Depending on who you talk to, I’ll be fine at the new place, or there’s a very low probability that I can move without bringing my new friends with me.

There might be a period of inactivity again as I disconnect from the network at my current place and wait for the network to be setup at my new place. Then again, I’m not updating that often anyway, so you may not miss me too much. B-)

Categories
Games

Steam: My First Impression

So far, adding a friend seems to be a pain. I guessed a friend’s screenname and typed it in manually. It turns out that it was a complete stranger. However, when I do a search for my friend’s screenname using the Steam Community feature, I found my friend. Same screenname, yet somehow a different ID? When I typed Anthony Salter’s ID to manually add him as a friend, it said it couldn’t find him, but when I did a search in the community feature, there he was.

WTF? As far as I’m concerned, I was doing the same thing. I was adding a friend’s screenname to my friend’s list. So why would manually typing a name give me one result while searching for a SteamID gives me the same name but a different person? Why set it up so that the same friends list allows two different people to have the same screenname? I must be missing something obvious here.

I like that I can add all of my games to my games list and have a central place to launch them. Of course, if this exists, why would Vista have a games-specific folder? Are Vista users supposed to feel good about the redundancy? Just a thought.

Categories
Games

I Won Name That Game 33!

Anthony Salter hosts a regular contest on his blog called Name That Game! He posts a screenshot from a game, and people are supposed to post the name of the game and the name of the developer. Well, Name That Game! #33 was a doozy. He posted three screenshots for three different obscure games, and in order to win, you not only needed to give the names of the three games and their developers, but you also had to explain the theme tying the three games together.

Well, no one submitted an email to him at first, so he gave some clues. The first two games were on the Apple 2, and the third game was on the ZX Spectrum. I haven’t seen any of the games, and so a new updated post was created with clue screenshots. The first game looked like a Pong clone and reminded me of Atari Olympics. The hint screenshot was easy for me to identify. I played Bill Budge’s Pinball Construction Set on my Apple 2 c+ for many hours as a child. It was one of the three games I had that made use of the joystick.

Well, I recognized the clue, but how was it supposed to help me identify the game in the 1st screenshot? I don’t know, but now I was in the contest. I did some searching and found that Bill Budge’s first game was a Pong clone called Penny Arcade. While I couldn’t find it in the Moby Games database, I did find an emulator site that offered the game for download. As soon as I got it running, I recognized it. Game #1 was successfully identified.

The other two games were a bit harder. I didn’t recognize either the original screenshots or the clue screenshots. Moby Games helped, but it involved a lot of searching. I eventually found a screenshot of Rings of Zilfin that looked very similar to the one in the contest. Reading about the author of the game, I found that the clue screenshot belonged to the author’s later game, The Magic Candle. In any case, Game #2 was successfully identified.

I found that the clue screenshot for Game #3 belonged to Jet Set Willy. So was the first screenshot Manic Miner? No, it didn’t look the same. For a bit, I couldn’t find any information other than that the author worked on Manic Miner, and so I tried looking up information on other people involved with him. There were a lot of dead ends, but then I found a new bio on the author that mentioned Styx. Sure enough, when I looked up that game, there was the screenshot! Game #3 was successfully identified.

And from all these clues, I found that the theme tying the three games together was that they were all games developed early in the careers of their authors.

I sent in the email, and I received a response that I had won! So what did I win? According to the contest details, I get a copy of Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2 Episode 1…which means I need to install Steam.

So I did. Long ago I said I wouldn’t install Steam because I didn’t like the idea of the so-called digital rights management being used. I’ve decided that I’m going to try Steam out and see how I like it.

Thanks for the challenging contest, Anthony!