Firstly, there's a lot of spiders out there!

$ grep "06/Mar" spiders.txt | wc -l
69

When an article isn't trending, or I haven't posted lately, bbot.org does about 1200 hits and 300 uniques a day. Some spiders request robots.txt multiple times, but cloaked spiders don't request robots.txt at all, so it's a wash. This means that fully a fifth of my traffic is from machines.

This is odd, because in terms of actual traffic, Google is the only game in down.

The traditional social contract between search engines and site owners is that you let them download your site, and in return, they drive traffic to you. This contract is broken, and has been for years. Google provides 99.98% of search traffic.

Microsoft, Yahoo, Gigablast and Blekko maintain fabulously comprehensive databases, updated regularly, which nobody ever uses. (DuckDuckGo strips referrer headers from their outgoing traffic, so they might be super popular, I have no way to know) This doesn't even count the foreign-language search engines, like Baidu, Soso Naver, Daum, or Yandex, who I also never ever see traffic from, since my site's in English.

Now, I don't use robots.txt, but still. What a waste of time and money!

Spiders can be roughly grouped into three groups: Google, Everybody else, and spammers. Brandwatch, Sitexploration, Seoprofiler, Linkdex, and Metadatalabs are all "SEO tools", which want to charge you money to get reports on their vague guess at how many people link to you. Spotinfluence even wants you to sign in via Facebook to begin using their site, and if you're dumb enough to do that, you deserve whatever they do to your profile.

Some spiders don't take no for an answer.

208.115.113.85 - - [01/Mar/2012:14:09:51 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 404 169 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Ezooms/1.0; ezooms.bot@gmail.com)"
208.115.111.69 - - [01/Mar/2012:15:37:17 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 404 169 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Ezooms/1.0; ezooms.bot@gmail.com)"
208.115.113.85 - - [01/Mar/2012:18:24:34 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 404 169 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Ezooms/1.0; ezooms.bot@gmail.com)"
208.115.111.69 - - [01/Mar/2012:19:56:54 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 404 169 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Ezooms/1.0; ezooms.bot@gmail.com)"
208.115.113.85 - - [01/Mar/2012:22:02:14 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 404 169 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Ezooms/1.0; ezooms.bot@gmail.com)"

Some really don't.

107.21.161.122 - - [06/Mar/2012:09:46:53 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 169 "-" "linkdex.com/v2.0"
107.21.161.122 - - [06/Mar/2012:09:46:53 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 169 "-" "linkdex.com/v2.0"
184.73.70.151 - - [06/Mar/2012:14:31:17 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 169 "-" "linkdex.com/v2.0"
184.73.70.151 - - [06/Mar/2012:14:31:17 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 169 "-" "linkdex.com/v2.0"
107.20.100.1 - - [06/Mar/2012:22:27:30 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 169 "-" "linkdex.com/v2.0"
107.20.100.1 - - [06/Mar/2012:22:27:31 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 169 "-" "linkdex.com/v2.0"
107.20.100.1 - - [06/Mar/2012:22:54:24 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 169 "-" "linkdex.com/v2.0"
107.20.100.1 - - [06/Mar/2012:22:54:25 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 169 "-" "linkdex.com/v2.0"

I'm not sure what the rationale is for using such a short timeout is, or asking multiple times. Presumably if a robots.txt request returns a 404, and has been doing so for the last two years, one isn't going to appear five hours later. Google, on the other hand, only checks to see if I've changed my mind twice a day.

While I've got my logs open, I'd like to complain about this: (original domain replaced with .su)

91.229.175.130 - - [11/Mar/2012:19:52:39 -0400] "GET /clubwearguru.su/blog/clubwearguru.su/archives/clubwearguru.su/2009/clubwearguru.su/07/clubwearguru.su/index.htmlhxxp://bbot.org/clubwearguru.su/blog/clubwearguru.su/archives/clubwearguru.su/2009/clubwearguru.su/07/clubwearguru.su/index.html HTTP/1.0" 404 169 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; ICS)"

This appears to request a valid page on my server, but with a domain inserted after every /. Does this actually work? Do people really automatically post their server logs online? The mind boggles.

If you liked this, you should donate! bbot.org is out of money, and is not long for this world otherwise.

(Massive, unmarked plot spoilers ahead. Also, no screenshots, since I wasn't expecting to review either game.)

In the lonely, neckbearded association of freaks and other, bigger, freaks known as "PC gamers", Deus Ex is regarded with reverence shading into outright worship. Its very name is a shibboleth, separating real gamers from the casuals, distinguishing the Holy Elect from the debased fratboys who teabag each other in MW2, play video games based on real world sports, drink Coors light, and maintain an ever-changing collection of exciting venereal diseases.

Deus Ex is a big deal.

Personally, I didn't think it was that great.

The graphics aren't great. Well, of course of course they aren't, the game's more than a decade old, so no rational person could possibly knock it on that. I'll give it a similar age-related pass on the indifferent level design, though it's odd that Deus Ex is so bland when Unreal Tournament, using the exact same engine and coming out at the same time, had real architecture. I have to give the vague attempt at facial animation a pass as well.

Some things aren't quite so forgivable. The voice acting is just really horrifically bad, even by the standards of late 90s video games. The gunplay is terrible, so the game punts halfway through and gives you a lightsaber that will let you instantly kill any human in the game, which makes combat short and unexciting. The stealth gameplay is lousy, lacking any meaningful feedback, and the enemy AI is absolutely brain dead.

The standard response of every enemy in the game upon seeing you, heavily armed super-soldier JC Denton, is to stand in the open and start shooting. If you damage them enough, they'll eventually put away their weapon and try to run away... except the game never flags them as non-hostile, if you actually spare their life, they'll re-arm and try to kill you again. Whoops.

These are all quibbles. The real problem is: I read about the game before playing it. In fact, I've been reading about the game for eleven years before playing it, and in the course of doing so, acquired some preconceptions, something that didn't work out real well for me with Phoenix Wright either.

Every single person who has reviewed, played, or glanced at the box art of Deus Ex has raved about player choice. At great length they have spoken regarding the paramount importance Deus Ex places on player choice, in tedious monologues they have rhapsodized about the unlimited possibilities open to the player.

And so, the preconception that I acquired, was that player choice was critical to the plot of Deus Ex.

It's not. Deus Ex is as linear as Ronald Reagan sitting on a horse, holding a straightedge.

To it's mild credit, there are three different endings. You can choose to side with the Illuminati, destroy technological civilization, or merge with the Helios AI.

To additional credit, all three endings are quite morally ambiguous. The Illuminati, while not quite as outright evil as their offshoot, Majestic 12; are about as amoral as a starving rat, and display a contempt for individual liberty somewhere between Stalin and Reileen Kawahara.

You can destroy the worldwide communications infrastructure, killing billions and insuring "perfect liberty". This is known as the "blithering idiot" option.

You can also merge with Helios, the most attractive option for a soft-hearted old transhumanist like me. Except Helios is about as stable as a pencil balanced on its tip, its reasons for wanting to merge don't make a whole lot of sense, and it's not at all clear how much influence Denton would have over the resulting gestalt. I certainly wouldn't have jumped at the chance to plug my brain into it.

Crucially, you don't really see the outcome of any of the endings, besides the Illuminati path. This is because Ion Storm were planning a sequel, and didn't want to ruin its story. So there's zero closure, and worse yet, when they actually made the sequel, they made all the endings a little bit true, (Denton sided with the Illuminati and merged with Helios and killed the internet) and the resulting game was terrible.

The problem with this three way "choice" is that you make it at the very end. There's something like ten minutes of gameplay after various crucial choices, but there's no branching. You can't rule out one ending by siding with a faction early on. No matter who you kill, and you can kill a lot of the NPCs, you're presented with the same exact same choice. If you save your brother in Brooklyn, he'll show up later to advise you on the One Choice, but it doesn't affect the fucking plot. Player choice is meaningless if the choices have no effect!

As I alluded to earlier, Deus Ex lets you kill a lot of plot-critical NPCs. This is unusual in video games, since you have to a lot more work behind the scenes to wire up the plot so that it doesn't completely fall apart when big chunks are missing.

This is a noble aspiration, and actually quite interesting in-game, but of course there are hard limits at play. You can't let the player kill everyone he meets, because then there wouldn't be any plot at all. So Deus Ex does have invincible NPCs, but the way it treats them is bizarrely schizophrenic.[1]

For example, at one point, you are ordered by UNATCO agent Anna Navarre, your superior, to kill NSF terrorist Juan Lebedev. You can do that, or you can instead kill her. This is hard, because she's way better equipped than the player is at this point, but it actually is possible, which is cool.

If you kill her, her partner, Gunther Hermann, is very upset. You're ambushed by him and a small army of UNATCO troops and combat robots at a subway platform.

This is a very tough fight, but it actually is possible to kill all the soldiers. Except for Hermann, who is invincible, because this was a fight you're supposed to lose! Even if you're gibbed by a rocket in the fight, you'll "wake up" in a Majestic 12 secret jail. Later on you'll meet him in Paris, and you have to kill him to proceed.

This is Deus Ex's vaunted "player choice". Enemies you can kill, except when you can't, except when you're required to.

It goes further. Doors in Deus Ex are actually destructible, if a door is locked and you don't want to lockpick it, you can just blow it open with a rocket launcher. Yay! Except, of course, there are some doors they don't want you to open, which can't be lockpicked and infinitely durable. Come on, guys, seriously?

I had seen hardassed-designer types talk about Deus Ex's freedom of choice, and so I had made the foolish mistake of assuming that player choice would be implemented in a hardassed-designer way. Like how hardasses have dictated that Gordon Freeman will never talk and that there will never be third-person cutscenes in the Half Life series; or how Nethack is a game centered around, obsessed, utterly focused on the permanence of player death, with no take-backs or compromise; I assumed that Deus Ex would stick to its guns, that it would follow its own rules, be internally consistent.

It's not, of course. Like Fallout 3, Deus Ex follows a set of rules until they become inconvenient, then it breaks them. If I had come into it without preconceptions, I might have enjoyed the game. But I did, so I didn't.

And so we come to Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Human Revolution is not a game without flaws. The leaked build has performance issues, low resolution game assets, a very console-like 60 degree field of vision. Jensen has about three different idle animations, and you're going to get real familiar with them during conversation. The pre-rendered cinematics probably knock em dead on the Xbox 360, but are startlingly low resolution when viewed on a PC monitor.

But it's so much more polished than Deus Ex 1.

Consider the XP system of both games. DX1 had skills, and augmentations. There were a lot of skills in DX1, several of which were completely useless. (There was no reason, ever, to put points into Swimming. And every computer in the game could be hacked with a single level in Computers.) It also was badly unbalanced: depending on how you created your character, the game was either a breeze or an utter grind.[2] Augmentations required canisters to install, and upgrade canisters to upgrade. Install cans require a medi-bot to install, upgrade cans could be used at any time. Both of them were irreversible, one-time use items! And the augmentation system was also badly unbalanced. There's the EMP shield augmentation, which is useless, (There is one single enemy in the game that uses EMP attacks, and there's EMP grenades, which are used against you maybe... once.) and the health regeneration augmentation, which is absolutely essential and which the player will always want, no matter how else they've set up their character. You have to activate each augmentation manually, and they consume bioelectricity (BE) points, which you refill using BE cells, much like how you refill HP points with medikits.

Before fighting gresels I had to press a chord of activation keys. Power recirculator, regeneration, environmental resistance, ballistic protection, combat strength. Press five keys before fighting, hit enemy once, wait for HP to regenerate, then don't forget to press all five keys again, or else they'll drain all the power!

Absolute madness. A dozen keypresses, but no actual meaningful choices being asked of the player, no skill required.

In contrast, there's DX3. One single XP system, which unlocks new augmentations. Most augs are passive, requiring no busywork to use. If you're pressing a button, you're actually deciding something. Hit points regenerate, as well as the final cell of bioelectric energy.

Now, there's certainly an argument to be made that things have been dumbed down for the consoles.

It is known far and wide that I am no friend of the Halo kiddies, and if I thought that DX3 had been oversimplified, I would certainly be saying it.

But there is a difference between Farmville and Go. One is casual, the other is elegant.

I spent the last couple hours of DX1 walking up to enemies and slapping them in the face with a sword. With several upgrades sunk into the ballistic protection augmentation, you're a walking tank. With the ADS augment, rockets and plasma rifles can't even touch you. You consume bioelectric energy at a fearsome rate, but there's plenty of BE cells on the bodies of your enemies, and your sword never runs out of ammo.

This never happens in Human Revolution. At least, in the first three hours, and on normal difficulty. Ammo and energy are light on the ground, and Adam Jensen is rather squishy. Point blank, you're carbon fiber death on wheels, but charging straight at an alerted enemy is a fast death. You can do Gears of War style third person cover based shooting, but there just is not a lot of ammo, and the AI uses the big, nonlinear levels to flank the player, and flush them out with grenades quite well.

I haven't finished the game, and the endings of games offer me limitless opportunity for disappointment, but based on the first few hours, I like Human Revolution more than Deus Ex 1.

1: Personally, the way I'd like to see it work is that the game would let you kill any NPC, but if you broke the plot, it would invite you to reload an earlier save, but still let you keep playing, like in Morrowind.

2: Several in-game characters encourage you to use nonlethal weapons, like the tranquilizer darts for the mini-crossbow. Surprise! All the end-game enemies are immune to tranquilizer darts! In the beginning, your brother offers you the GEP gun, and if you accept it, he gets pissy. Surprise! The GEP gun is the single most useful weapon in the game. You can one-shot every boss with it, and the ammo is common! I digress.

Arena TF2 on unitinu.net!

Sunday, June 5th! 6 PM, 18:00 o'clock PDT! 10PM EDT! Be there or be square!

Now for your regularly scheduled blog post:

(previously)

I keep thinking about this in the shower, so here's hoping that doing a post on it will turn my mind to something more productive.

First off, naming. Calling it "a Starcraft clone with less clicking" will get old, and since I'm a sucker for theme naming, let's call it Slower Than Light. (viz.) The humans will be the Border Administration, the squishy aliens will be the Red Plague, and the glowy aliens will be the No. (Opposite of Yes. Insert your own Starship Trooper joke here.)

I wrote about the BA in the previous post, so I'll skip over them here. No, wait! I just thought of something.

The only humans on the battlefield are the ones inside the command buildings, controlling the units, right? So they're essentially pro gamers. It would be amusing if you hired real life pro gamers to voice them, like Idra, Flash, et al.

The Red Plague, as suggested by the name, is a microscopic bacteria that subverts larger species, rather than being a macroscopic animal itself. This would be bad news for the opposing factions if the BA didn't fight with robots, or if the No didn't have a... unique biology.

The No are a race of four-dimensional aliens from the core of the Milky Way, where things are considerably hotter and more exciting, and they are as far above the human race as we are above a basket of newborn kittens. If it was a real war; if the No considered humanity to be any kind of threat at all, then the extermination would take hours. Indeed, the No have ended several unaesthetic wars by exploding the local star.

But you don't prune a bonsai with a flamethrower, and most of the time when the No feel intervention is needed to guide the war to a more elegant state, they deploy small combat teams. Even when they're pulling their punches, they're awesomely powerful. The Red Plague fields a swarm, the Border Administration deploys armies, and the No sends individuals. Each No unit is a tiny core of exotic matter that reacts explosively on contact with normal matter, surrounded by vast bulwarks of force fields, which recharge quickly when not in combat, and encourage hit and run tactics, rather than the steady plodding of the BA tanks, or the overwhelming rushes of the Plague swarm.

The No "bases" are closer to sculpture parks than the litter strewn factories of the BA (Terran bases accumulate trash, and smelter fumes kill off nearby vegetation) or the "whale dropped from a great height" aesthetic of Red Plague hives.

The No buildings are attractive, (literal works of art) expensive, (most of the player's income will go into constructing them) temporary, (they slowly decay and fall apart, which is part of the aesthetic) and useless; since all units come through the gateway back to the homeworld, rather than be constructed by specialized buildings. Much like how web designers refuse to work in cities without at least two Apple stores, high-tier No units won't step foot on a planet without a twenty metre tall gold statue of Desiderius Erasmus.]]> http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2011/05/22/the_failure_of_second_life/ http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2011/05/22/the_failure_of_second_life/ 2011-05-22T19:10:51-04:00 Samuel Bierwagen important, Game Design

In July of 2005, when I created my account, Second Life was the cool new thing. Moving between regions was kinda wonky, loading textures and objects was slow, and it was pretty ugly when compared to other games of the time; but it was generally assumed that these were teething issues, which would be quickly sorted out as new versions of the software were released.

At the time, I used an Athlon XP 2500+ processor, a not enormously distinctioned graphics card, 768 megabytes of ram, and phat 2 megabit/512 kilobit DSL.

Today I have an Intel Core i7 940, an eight-threaded processor that can access 6 gigabytes of ram, and Radeon HD4860 video card with a further 512 megabytes of ram, and I have symmetrical 25 megabit fiber internet. The processor's an easy six times faster, there's eight times as much memory, the internet pipe is 12 times wider, and the video card is, well, it's real quick.

Moving between regions is still kinda wonky, loading textures and objects is slow, and it's still pretty ugly... when compared to games made in 2005. Second Life has gained features, many of them, but it has improved not at all. Its problems are profound and architectural, and won't be solved by any minor patch, but rather, a complete redesign. Something that won't happen, as even in its broken, half-assed state, it still makes rather a lot of money from furries, (like Zarla) and it takes quite the brave company indeed to break a profitable product to instead create something that may make no money at all.

And so, let us speak of architecture.

(Above: downloading a file from my ISP's datacenter at 25mbit/s. Below: Flying through Second Life with the draw distance set to 512 metres, and consuming so much bandwidth that the game disconnected me. My mark I eyeball figures that graph peaks at 4mbit/s.)

Go and grab a software engineer. There's plenty of them around, so it should be easy to find one. Tell her that she'll have to design a social MMO for a brand new console. This should make her eyes light up, because, as a rule, engineers prefer new technology over stuff that actually works, since new technology is cool and sexy, and old technology makes money.

Tell her that the new console is pretty much a stacked modern PC, with a dozen processor cores and heaps of memory. This will be well received. Then tell her, due to budget constraints, there's only four megabits of bandwidth between the processor and the disk drive, where all the game assets are.

Brace yourself. There will be swearing, threats to go back to Google, various and sundry recriminations. Placate her with twenty million dollars and two years later, go pick up your social MMO.

That game, a game designed with a major, major bandwidth limitation in mind, will be very careful to control player location. Maps will be linear, and areas of high detail will be strictly gated. Player movement will be slow. All this is done so that the game has time to load level geometry and textures into memory before the player gets there.

Second life allows the player to move at arbitrary speed (And height! Players can fly!) in an open world environment. There are no loading screens except during teleports. Players design the levels, and they can use all the huge textures and as many polys as they want. The majority of player-owned land is continental, where the tragedy of the commons is in full effect. Geometry pop-up is endemic. Textures can take a full minute to load. FPS on my stacked gaming computer is in the teens with any draw distance above "myopic". Performance is completely, absolutely unacceptable for an eight year old game!

Second Life as a game concept, sounds good, but was made with no thought of the fact that all the game assets are on the wrong side of a narrow, high-latency bus.

Second Life attempted to emulate Real Life in design. This was laudable, but misguided. Perhaps that's not the right word. Incorrect? Wrong? Colossally wrong?

It's been eight years, now, since Second Life launched. It hasn't come close to living up to its promise. My wild ass guess is that their asset servers will have sustain two hundred megabits a second to the customer in order to make Second Life even vaguely playable.[1] That's for SL's current, not great, graphics, nor a terribly inspiring draw distance, maybe 300 metres.

Not only would this require better internet service than pretty much anybody, outside of South Korea, has; it would take an absolutely massive investment in data centers all around the world. It only takes 40 megabits to stream high quality 1080p video. Sustaining five times that bandwidth, and maintaining consistency across all the caches would be a real trick.

I doubt Second Life will ever do it.

1: The PS3's drive can read a DVD at 8x speed, or 86mbit/s. (Blu-ray discs are actually slower, for some zany reason.) A top of the line solid state hard drive will do 4000 mbit/s.]]> http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2011/04/05/hawken_and_starcraft_two_great_tastes_that_taste_great_together/ http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2011/04/05/hawken_and_starcraft_two_great_tastes_that_taste_great_together/ 2011-04-05T00:06:40-04:00 Samuel Bierwagen important, Game Design Recently I've been thinking about the game mechanics of two games. I won't be in a position to actually change either of them, so I'll just write about it.

Hawken, a really neat looking mech game based on Unreal Engine 3 has been making the rounds lately. As a person who loved Mechwarrior 2, and owns a Steel Battalion controller, I would dearly like to like this game, but there isn't nearly enough information available at this time to make even a preliminary judgement.

The burning question at hand is if this is a mech shooter, like certain debased Japanese arcade games, or a true mech simulator, like (most) of the Mechwarrior series. Hawken appears to only have two weapons, and a unified health bar, rather than component based damage, which is a bad sign; but there is heat management, which is a good one.

Since I am not actually on Hawken's development team, and actually know damn near nothing about the game, I'm reduced to shouting suggestions from the sidelines.

One of these is: I hope they do something more interesting with heat management than Mechwarrior 2 did.

In Mw2, (Not MW2, lord no) firing weapons caused heat to build up, and if your mech got too hot, it shut down to cool off, and if you overrode the shutdown and kept firing, you blew up. Pretty simple.

But single-constraint systems like this don't make for very interesting gameplay choices, as any World of Warcraft player can tell you. Since there's a hard limit, you're encouraged to stick as close to that limit as possible, and, in practice, tend to spend a lot of time staring at cooldown timers. There's plenty of people who like to "play" spreadsheets like this, as Kotick's billions of dollars suggests, and man, is it ever boring.

What if, the hotter your mech was, the farther away you could be detected by senors? Sure, you can spam your BFG, but then you attract artillery shells from across the map?

Or if your mech acted like a real world heat engine, where overheating means greatly reduced engine power? Or if your guns acted like real world ones, where firing until the barrels are red hot causes the rifling to wear out much faster?

What if you let the player control the pressure release valve on their mech's reactor coolant line? Crack the valve and let some of the superheated coolant boil off, dramatically lowering the temperature, but let too much of it boil, and there won't be any left to move heat to the radiators. And, of course, clouds of coolant vapor are a great sign to whoever you're fighting that perhaps you're having trouble with heat, and probably wouldn't appreciate being hit with a weapon that does very little physical damage, but heats up the target very fast.

Like a flamethrower. Every game can be improved by adding a flamethrower.

Speaking of Blizzard...

I was watching the GSL the other day, when it occurred to be that Blizzard really don't do all that they could with the Creep, and that requiring Battle.net for LAN play was pants on head retarded.

For those of you who have been living under a rock, in a cave, on Mars, with your fingers in your ears for the last decade, in Blizzard's legendary stereotype-'em-up Starcraft, the bad aliens, Zerg, tend to cover everything around them in a sticky organic substance called the Creep, entirely coincidentally like the xenomorphs from the Alien movies, which they do not at all resemble. In the lore, this does all sorts of zany stuff, but in-game, it just gives Zerg units a speed boost, and you have to build Zerg structures on it, you can't just plop them down on the dirt.

Now, Starcraft 2 is already a stunningly asymmetric game. There really is no other RTS with such radically different player factions, that still manages not to be an entirely imbalanced pile of shit. They're so different that Starcraft 2 pro gamers will almost always play just one faction. You play Zerg or Protoss or Terran. You can't play more than one.

But, at their heart, they're still pretty similar. The Marine is a lot like the Hydralisk, which is a lot like the Stalker. They're all infantry units that can attack ground and air.

But I have a fetish for over-complicating games, so I began thinking about Creep. In-universe, Zerg combat units are just regular animals whose genome the Overmind has been tinkering with. What if one of the standard combat enhancements is revving up their metabolism by a thousand times, so as soon as they step off the Creep, they immediately begin starving to death? This implies that they're constant grazing on the Creep, which is a foot-thick layer of cancerous flesh, which could provide some nicely gruesome idle animations.

Heck, if their metabolism is running so fast, why not give them mayfly like life spans? In Starcraft 2, 40 minutes would be a long game, so give Zerg units a seven minute expiration date, and, say, 50 seconds before they starve, when off the creep. That would result in some interesting tactical decision-making. Give units some debilitating status ailments near the end of each timer, (say, -25% movement speed and damage done, and -10% health once per second for ten seconds) and it would get even more deliciously complicated.

Something that even I'm not sure is a good idea: In Starcraft 2 there's a dedicated suicide unit called the Baneling, that explodes and deals great damage. What if you gave every Zerg unit the ability to kamikaze, and they also exploded when killed, like the Baneling? The near-death damage debuff would almost certainly have to apply to end of life explosions, or else I could see them being amazingly annoying.

All these disposable units demand a slightly different production philosophy. Your body doesn't generate new cells on a one by one basis, so why is the Cerebate groveling over individual larva? No, the Zerg should be constantly producing new units. You can tell it what you want more of, but what you can't do is tell it to stop. Hopefully this constant flood of new units will encourage the attack attack attack theme I'm trying to establish here.

Additionally, for gameplay reasons, the Zerg can place new hatcheries on uncreeped ground. What if the hatchery was a dedicated unit that lumbered over to resource points, then planted its fat ass permanently? Or, if you were afraid of making sweeping new gameplay changes for some bizarre reason, you could just require that an Overlord drop Creep on the target area before you could build a hatchery there.

Making Zerg units depend more on the Creep also demands that it too be overcomplicated.

It speeds up Zerg units, so what if it slows down hostile ones? Or constantly damages them while they're on it? Or explodes like a mini-Baneling on contact?

Starcraft 2 also has high and low ground, where crossing from low to high ground requires a terrain ramp. Both the high and the low ground can be covered with creep, but Zerg ground units still have to take the long way around, rather than just running straight up the creep covered cliff. There's also floating islands, and it would be tremendously amusing if Overlords could build Creep rope bridges between them.

Zerg bases tend to be very neat, rectilinear affairs, mostly due to gameplay concerns. Which is lame! These are supposed to be building-sized organs sitting on a square mile of liver tumor. Zerg bases should look like you just cracked open the rib cage on a still living body. I want to see viscera, giant throbbing veins, intestines the approximate width of city busses conveying the half-digested remains of my enemies to reprocessing organs. We've endured a decade of meat levels, yet I'm still not seeing any giant eyeballs! I shouldn't have to tell you this, Blizzard! Where's all the gross shit?

Writing this out, I realize that it makes no sense for somebody to suit up and actually go out to fight the Zerg one-on-one. It's nuts! I can almost believe that the Protoss would do it, since they're religious nutbags (The infantry unit is called the "Zealot") who already do insane shit like charging money to warp combat units to forward bases, rather than teleporting in 50 Carriers as soon as a fleet beacon is constructed, and winning every single fight they get into; but a regular Joe going up against either of these guys, in a tin can and armed with a peashooter? Nah.[1]

In addition, all these manned vehicles and infantry grunts don't jibe terribly well with the last decade of military development. No, it makes a lot more sense that the Terrans would be the race of the UAV and robot tank, drone combat and long range artillery. The only actual humans on the field would be in command centers, (Which opens up interesting new gameplay possibilities of disrupting communications to the combat drones by destroying generators, blowing up radio relays, or simple short range jamming) not actually out in the meat grinder that would be close combat with the Zerg. This is sounding a lot like the FTL game concept I wrote seven years ago, so go read that; and the second half to my Avatar post, which I never actually completed, whoops.

1: There's also some gameplay/story disconnect here. Zerg grow new units, and Protoss teleport them in, but a Terran barracks can spew an unlimited number of marines, like the world's most heavily armed clown car. Where are all these people coming from? Nowhere, of course, and nobody but nitpicking nerds like me care; but there's no such problem with a robot factory.

It didn't.

Not to say that the plot is bad. It's just not good. Bland. Unambitious. About as edgy as a bowl of oatmeal. If anything, it solves the question of why they allowed Morgan and Watts to work on it: they didn't actually allow them to do anything. As far as tone goes, they could have fucked off to a beach for six months and let some anonymous schlubs write everything, there is no functional difference. Crysis 2 is yet another Modern Warfare 2 clone, no more, and no less.

You play as a bog standard heroic mime, who, without fail, listens to the voice with an internet connection, and waltzes into increasingly obvious traps.

Like any other big-budget video game in the last five years, the game is split between several production units who apparently had a big fight, and now refuse to speak to each other. Sometimes you're fighting an incredibly well-equipped PMC while investigating the virus which has more or less destroyed New York. Sometimes you're fighting aliens with the help of some marines who apparently don't care at all about the virus the other half of the game hypes up, by their lack of protective equipment. The transitions between the two are not very well concealed by having the protagonist get knocked out with alarming regularity.

I might check out Watts' novelization. But I sure as hell won't buy it.

There's also a bucketful of awful, showstopping bugs and assorted fucked up scripted sequences. (An example: Prerendered videos are at 800x600, and occasionally the game gets confused and forgets how to upscale them to whatever resolution using, at a speed faster a frame per minute. The workaround for this is to force quit the game, and restart it in 800x600 windowed mode.) But I can't complain about this, since they'll probably be fixed when the game is actually released, in a month. I can complain about design decisions, though.

Crysis 2 has brain-dead pre-mission briefing cinematics, just like Modern Warfare, but what they forget (just as Epic did) is that these cinematics have two purposes. The obvious, to brief the player, and to cover up loading screens. In MW2, you jump right from the briefing screen to the action. In Crysis 2, you get another loading screen. Stupid.

You can add silencers, which make weapons more or less perfectly silent, but don't reduce range or damage at all. Once you unlock the silencer, there is no reason at all not to put it on every weapon. Which makes me sad. Also, all the pistols are useless.

There appear to be three kinds of alien enemies, total, and two kinds of human enemies. Total. Which is a bit miserly, for a triple A game.

As for the gameplay systems; they have one very noticeable failure, and one original idea they actually did fairly well.

First up, the failure: Armor mode is implemented with comical ineptitude.

Like in the original game, damage taken while in armor mode drains energy instead of health. Unlike in the original game, you have to enable armor mode manually, which adds a subtle screen effect, makes your steps clunkier, and slowly drains suit energy. A very, very subtle screen effect.

Therein lies the problem. When they stole the regenerating health mechanic from Halo, Cretek forgot to copy how it made it really super obvious when you were unshielded, with loud alarms and large blinking lights. So it's fairly easy, in Crysis 2, to wade into a firefight in armor mode and then die suddenly when you run out of energy. Which is great fun.

The tactical assessment mode is well done, however. When you use the binoculars, you can mark the location of enemies, ammo caches, and even possible routes to use. I used it for half the game before I figured out that it was a very well disguised easy button. It tells you where to go, and where all the enemies are, and puts that information on the minimap. It's made for clueless newbies, and it tricked me into using it! Very clever.

So maybe Crytek will fix all the bugs, then go on to completely rewrite the plot and a bunch of game mechanics, in the next month. If they pulled off that miracle, then I could recommend this game. But I doubt it.

Minecraft is a neat game. Nobody denies that. But it could be neater, and I know how it could be done.

Waaay back in 2006, Valve released an early teaser trailer for for Episode 2. This was somewhat ill-advised, since EP2 changed quite a bit in the next 13 months; but there was one scene in the trailer that had my jaw on the floor. It showed a bridge collapsing, with its girders buckling under the load.

That looked, to my naive eyes, like real-time finite element analysis, something I have a little experience with. FEA is, at its root, a cheat, to make simulating the deformation of an object under load. Rather than simulating every atom, which would be hopelessly complex with current computers, FEA pretends that it's made of a bunch of very large atoms, essentially, then does a bunch of fudge factors to make the math come out right. But while FEA makes the problem tractable, it still doesn't make it terribly easy. My water simulation used 3,375,000 "atoms", and it took a couple hours to produce 25 seconds of data. That is not even vaguely close to real time, and doing the same for an entire bridge would be orders of magnitude more computationally intensive. In order for Valve to pull off real-time FEA, they would've had to make some major breakthrough, or several major breakthroughs, in quite a lot of fields.

Of course, they didn't. It was faked. The simulation was precalculated, and the data merely plugged into the mesh animation. The collapse of the bridge plays out the same every time. This is unfortunate, but unsurprising. Accurately simulating the collapse of a bridge, with a high enough resolution to be convincing with modern graphics, takes a lot of computational resources. But there are problems that are not quite as hard, and their hardness diminishes even farther if you don't have to use a fine-grained model.

And what game is composed entirely of blocks a meter on a side?

Not every problem is as hard as water simulation. Minecraft uses a simplified water model, due to processing constraints, that mostly works for natural rivers, and breaks hilariously in certain edge cases. (Go to lake. Fill bucket of water. Go to top of mountain. Pour out bucket. Bucket covers mountain in a flood of water.) No, for maybe the next five years, water simulation, even at the cubic meter scale, will probably be intractable. (Intel "Rockwell" 16nm CPUs are due to come out in 2014, and there will probably be a 12-core variant)

But there are plenty of neat things you could do in Minecraft, thanks to its 1 meter Planck length, that would be impossible in any other modern game.

Things like weather simulation.

Weather prediction is notoriously hard, but that's because to do it perfectly, you have to model the entire world at a molecular level, which requires, along other things, measuring the initial state of the system perfectly, and vast, vast oceans of computational power.

But in minecraft, the total simulation size is much smaller, (a dozen square kilometers at a time, centered on wherever the player happens to be) and absolute physical accuracy is unnecessary, and indeed, in this context, doesn't mean a lot. Accurate to what, precisely? The Minecraft world isn't much like the real world, except in broad, garishly colored strokes.

A lot of interesting things come naturally from real weather simulation. Realistic biomes, for one, something Markus implemented in the last patch, which are pretty neat in-game, but has garnered criticism from the usual suspects for being "inaccurate". If it's inaccurate, then why not simulate the underlying conditions that produce biomes?

A real water cycle would also produce rivers that make sense. Right now the world generator puts cubic meter "water springs" where they (I suspect, from looking at where they appear) produce interesting features, such as waterfalls, etc. Of course, these waterfalls are produced by the same water springs that can be placed by buckets, and can produce the same bizarre results. Simulated rivers would be more physically accurate, could produce large-scale water features that can't happen under the current model, (rivers tend to peter out pretty quickly when they hit flat stretches of terrain) and all without presenting the intractable complexity that implementing true real-time water simulation would.

While real-time water simulation is, as implied, done in real time, (pour out a bucket of water and watch it flow downhill) weather simulation does not need to be terribly fast to produce good results. And there's an obvious, in-game method of reducing the amount of computing power needed: changing the length of the day/night cycle. Short days and nights, with fast moving weather, longer days for users playing on laptops or old hardware, or disabling the day/night cycle entirely, for the most limited platforms, or for those malcontents who point out that a day/night cycle, while physically accurate, is actually quite annoying and produces a consistently mediocre play experience, rather than one precisely optimized by the designer picking the one sun angle, that, you know, looks good.

Tracking heat could also have water evaporating when coming into contact with lava and becoming steam, later falling as rain. It could also heat up the air in a cave system that has lava in the bottom, requiring you to divert a river into it before you could enter.

There's quite a lot of headroom for CPU intensive features, at least, on modern machines, since Minecraft is single threaded.

There's a reason most games don't scale features based on CPU power, rather than GPU power; and that is because it is both hard to do well, and not terribly obvious even when it is done.

Scaling graphics quality is both easy, and very, very obvious. You use larger texture maps, greater levels of antialiasing, or higher polycount models. Each of these scale linearly up or down, in an easy processing-power-for-prettiness tradeoff, and crucially, do not affect gameplay at all.

But the CPU, in video games, tend to be used for fiddly things like AI or game logic, which tend to be of the form of things that either work, or they don't. There's no way to scale up event scripting. Either it runs fast enough that things trigger on time, or it doesn't.

Even when you can scale up CPU-bound features in meaningful ways, like adding more physics objects, or making the AI smarter, it's hard to do so without materially affecting gameplay. Add more physics objects, and the player can score more object kills, and make the game easier. And making the AI smarter is one of the oldest ways of managing game difficulty!

So not only are CPU-bound features hard to do, hard to scale, and hard to balance, they're also not terribly impressive in a trade-show demo, unlike a slam dunk feature like improving graphical quality by putting your code guru on the lighting engine team and quadrupling the number of dynamic lights in the scene. Instead of what he was doing before, which was spending a lot of time unproductively staring into space and then writing blog posts on what you could do with a lot of CPU power.

At this point I think I should point out that Minecraft is leaving alpha on the 20th. This means that the price is increasing five euros, and that buying the beta no longer guarantees that you'll get the full version of the game. If you have been on the fence about buying Minecraft, then, as your attorney in this matter, I strongly advise that you do so before Time, as it were, Runs Out.

22 months ago, when I wrote my Fallout 3 review, I subtitled it Part 1, strongly implying a Part 2.

This was initially due to laziness. After I finished Three, I pounded out an enormous pile of angry words. As the days ticked away, I was faced with the increasingly ugly prospect of "reviewing" a game that had been out for multiple months. So I took the angry words that had the best prospect to be hammered into a vaguely coherent narrative, and left the rest to be expanded and posted as a Part 2.

(Even so, I posted it 43 days after launch. I am many things, but "a fast writer" is not one of them.)

But soon after launch it became clear that Bethesda was planning a major expansion pack, that, hilariously, retconned the horrendous ending that I spent pretty much my entire review excoriating. Obviously, I couldn't release Part 2 without first playing it.

But I wasn't exactly eager to give Bethesda more of my money. And when it did come out the reviews weren't exactly stellar. (It focused on combat, in a game that doesn't do combat terribly well.) So Part 2 languished in the inprg folder, while Bethesda released expansion pack after expansion pack.

So I waited until New Vegas. I'm 50 hours into it, and I can confidently say this: New Vegas is better than Three, in almost every way.

The feature list reads like something lifted directly from my head. Ironsights! Ammo that has weight, weapon modification, hunger, thirst, and sleep management! Multiple currencies, many, many more guns, more craftable weapons, and ammo reloading!

But it's buggy. Goddamn is it buggy, crashing on average, every other hour, and typically more often than that. Ugly crashes, too, of the like I haven't seen since the days of Windows 98, requiring finagling to even get the task manager to display, so I could end the process, and on several memorable occasions, spontaneous reboots resulting in the loss of saved games!

This resulted in the worse case of savegame paranoia I've had in years. Save before talking to a NPC. Save after talking to a NPC. Save when leaving towns, save when entering dungeons, save, save, save. New Vegas helpfully includes a savegame counter, (as well as a limit on the number of times you can save your game. It is the year 2010 and this game limits how many times you can save. What the fuck?) which at the time of writing stood at 135. That's one every 22 minutes, for those keeping track at home.

The bugs are everywhere. The Thorn, an underground settlement just west of New Vegas, is based around a giant fighting arena. Behold its rusty, dingy, glory:

There are no shopkeeper NPCs, and only one named NPC, who you can get exactly one quest from. Pretty much the point of the Thorn is the arena. You can bet on fights in the arena.

These fights never take place. The animal NPCs walk out, but the scripting never flags them hostile. So they just stand there, until the end of time. (And there's only animal enemies. You can't fight human enemies, or watch humans fight.)

This puts the one named NPC into an error state. She won't talk to you until the fight's over, and the fight will never begin. Hope you didn't start the only quest, because you'll never be able to turn in the quest items.

Incidentally, according to the wiki, the quest reward is the world's tamest "sex" scene. The NPC changes into sexy sleepwear, says something along the lines of "let's have sex now," and fade to black. Fade back in, you're both fully dressed. Was it good for you too?

The cause of this, as well as the lack of bloodsports in the arena, and the mysterious absence of prostitutes in a city where the NPCs constantly chatter about whores, is not hard to see.

Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart is the biggest physical retailer of video games in the United States, and Wal-Mart does not carry games rated Adult Only. This, more or less, means that any sex, at all, or any nudity not artistic in nature, will lock your game out of a huge market.

Yet you can dismember enemies with chainsaws, and sell women into slavery, which Wal-Mart is apparently totally cool with. They also sell Glenn Beck's latest, but that's more of a literary crime against humanity.

New Vegas' second biggest problem, right after the bugs, is the Xbox 360.

Fallout: New Vegas, like Fallout 3 before, and Oblivion before that, and Morrowind before that, is a multiplatform title, here being released on the PC, Xbox 360, and the Playstation 3. This has been a greater or lesser problem in the past, but here in 2010, the consoles are based on five year old hardware, and it is a problem.

The biggest problem is memory. Consoles don't have a lot of it. The 360 has 512 megabytes total, shared between the CPU and GPU, while the PS3 only has 256 megabytes of system ram. Less ram means fewer NPCs that can be onscreen at any one time. Fewer NPCs mean that New Vegas, which takes a while to get to, and which the game relentlessly talks up, is deserted.

Utterly empty.

Behold, New Vegas, glittering jewel of the wastes! Well, behold the signs, mostly. They're very pretty, very cheap to render.

And try to ignore that loading gate next to it, which splits the Strip into three sections. Each section has two casinos in it, and still isn't very impressive, even that heavily optimized.

My nineteen month old computer has six gigabytes of ram. And that's just main system ram! My video card alone has as much memory as the entire Playstation 3! And all of it goes unused, of course, since there was presumably a clause in the contract Obsidian signed with ZeniMax that specified all three versions of the game must be identical. No sneaking in code that detects how much ram you have and removes pointless loading gates and triples the number of NPCs that can be on-screen.

Sigh. What a waste.

The Mojave Wasteland is not the same place as the DC Wasteland. For one, not being a national capital, and having a improvised ballistic missile defense system in place, means that the Mojave got hit a lot less heavily than DC. The only radioactive hellholes are Black Mountain and a couple of the Vaults that had leaky reactors. And unlike Three, these place are usually the targets of quests, rather than no-go zones, so you have to spend a lot of time poking through them and soaking up rads, which make the radioactivity drugs actually useful, while avoiding the omnipresent radioactivity of Three.

The end result is that the Mojave is a much greener place than DC. It's still mostly a desert, of course, but there are plants, and you can even carve some of them up and eat them, or cook them in combination with meat from animal enemies on campfires.

This solves the mysterious food economy of DC, where everyone apparently lived on two hundred year old snack food and sewer rat meat. In the Mojave, there are actual farms, though they fall prey to the same general lack of scale of New Vegas, and are tiny in proportion to the population they ostensibly feed.

But this is a minor quibble over numbers, as opposed to the howling nonsense of Three.

New Vegas also solves the question of where all the guns come from. In Three, every gun was an antique, since every gun was manufactured pre-war. Yet guns were everywhere, which was even more mysterious when you considered the only way you could repair guns was by breaking up another gun for parts.

In New Vegas, the NCR import weapons from back West, but there is an authentic weapons manufacturing facility in the Mojave, run by the Gun Runners. (Who you might remember.) They build guns from scratch, and sell them at eyewateringly high prices. The models still use the same textures as the antiques, but what more do you want?

Unfortunately, the Gun Runners fall prey to the classic game design mistake of giving your NPCs cool abilities that the player can't get.

One quest with the Crimson Caravan has you breaking into the Gun Runners' factory, which is a standard dilapidated pre-war building, even though the Gun Runners are one of the richest factions in the wasteland, to steal their blueprints. When you sneak into their building, you discover that the "factory" is just three workbenches and three reloading stations. You can steal the blueprints, but they're a quest item, and you can't actually build new weapons. When you return to the questgiver, she gives you some caps, and says you'll get a discount on the weapons they will build with them.

God damn it, I don't want a discount, I want guns!

At least make an effort at justifying it by saying that they have equipment you don't. There's even in-game models for milling machines and lathes. Use them!

I also would have liked a more involved repair system. It's patently absurd that you could somehow enhance the condition of a near flawless gun by scavenging parts from an almost useless one.

A system where you swap out actual components, with each component having individual condition scores, would be more realistic. It'd also fit into New Vegas' larger themes more coherently. The NCR is overextended in its war against the Legion, beset by numerous supply problems. The Wasteland is littered with broken technology, made useless without an industrial base that can manufacture replacement parts. There are numerous quests based around finding parts for pre-war machines. Hell, Fallout 1 was about finding the water chip for Vault 13!

Against this backdrop, you find expensive, finicky, pre-war machines in the hands of damn near everyone in the Wasteland. They're always in lousy shape when you pick them up, but they never seem to malfunction when the AI uses them.

If guns were assemblies of parts, then guns in poor condition (unless they happened to contain a pristine part or two.) would be authentically useless. It might also bring some sanity to the Unique weapon system. Uniques are named variants of regular weapons, (Ratslayer is the unique version of the varmint rifle) which will have different skins, and will usually do more damage. Except, of course, that you can repair unique weapons with their non-unique versions. Repair a unique weapon enough, and it would be very plausible that it wouldn't contain any original parts at all, which rather begs the question of why it still does more damage.

Having a unique weapon use a single, irreplaceable part would reintroduce a gameplay mechanic from Three I quite liked. The Alien Blaster was the most powerful weapon in the game, but there was a limited amount of ammo for it, which could only be found by searching certain areas for the tiny glowing alien energy cells after dark; making the ammo not only rare, but tedious and time consuming to find.

A unique part on a unique weapon would put a hard limit on how many rounds it could fire. Once that part breaks, and you replace it with the normal version, it becomes a vanilla weapon, with a fancy paintjob.

This repair system wouldn't be terribly hard to implement. Some UI work for the repair interface, a bit of tedious scripting to add parts to all the weapons. It wouldn't even need any modelling work: all weapon parts could use a generic container model, like the Gun Runners briefcase for the weapon mods. They would show up in ammo containers holding ammo of the same kind. Laser rifle parts in containers holding microfusion cells, varmint rifle parts in containers holding 5.56mm ammo.

To keep New Vegas from becoming a survival horror-esque (or Metro 2033) ammo conservation sim, you could give the player some sort of advanced rapid prototyper which could produce weapon parts when supplied with scrap metal or more obscure junk.

Enemy AI is still pathetic, being of the very simplest "path right at the player" variety. This was mostly acceptable in Three, with its shorter draw distances and generally much shorter range weapons; but in New Vegas you spend quite a lot of time taking potshots at human enemies from very far away. Thus it is somewhat mysterious why they don't attempt to take cover when under fire, or do anything other than walking slowly in straight lines.

Incidentally, the most difficult enemies in the game are Cadazors, giant wasps, who in their normal state skitter around and are quite impossible to snipe, when alerted, stand still for a couple seconds, giving you exactly one chance to hit them outside of melee range, then fly straight at you and kill you dead.

Deathclaws are also more badass than they were in Three, but their much smaller numbers, and convenient habit of standing still, make them much easier to kill, once you get your hands on a scoped rifle.

The karma system of Three is still here, but fixed. This is done mostly by eliminating it. You get good karma from killing obvious bad guys, and ghouls; and bad karma from stealing, but most of the human NPCs are karma neutral.

In Three, killing every human was a moral choice. Every person was either Good or Bad, and killing them had the expected effect on your karma. While this could be generously interpreted as an extended satire of 50s geopolitics, what it really was a tiresome abandonment of subtlety, and a refusal to consider any moral ambiguity at all. Every single person in the game was either all good or entirely evil, with nothing in between.

But in New Vegas, while there are some saints, and a few devils, most people just get by. The karma system is further nerfed by having it affect gameplay not at all. Everything is determined by faction standing.

This delightful ambiguity is extended to the main plot. While my Three review was an extended, hate filled rant concerning its ending, New Vegas actually has an ending that's worth not being spoiled, so

SPOILERS:

None of the three factions you can side with are entirely good, or all out evil. House is an out-and-out dictator, but the best hope for New Vegas' future, being the only faction that's even thinking about the future; the NCR is a corrupt, ineffective bureaucracy, but the biggest political power around, and stable as rocks; while Caesar's Legion is an expansionist empire with reactionary political views and a tiresome enthusiasm for invading other territories and enslaving its residents, but they actually enforce their laws, which is a step from from the anarchy of the Mojave.

None of them are good, but none of them are bad, and they're all an improvement on the status quo. You can even take over yourself, using House's robot army, where it's implied that you manage to secure New Vegas, while everything around it just goes to hell.

The ending's not good, not bad. It's complicated.

Perfect!

END SPOILERS

I said in my Fallout 3 review that it was worth the $50, and I meant it. But if you haven't bought Three yet, don't. Buy New Vegas, instead. It's the game that Three should have been, and really wanted to be, but fell short of achieving.

But wait for them to patch some of the bugs, first.

6:35 AM - bbot: http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2010/11/07/review_fallout_3_part_2_new_vegas/
6:41 AM - kyonko: hahhaha fallout new vegas
6:41 AM - kyonko: ill pass
6:41 AM - bbot: you'll pass just like obsidian QA passed it
6:41 AM - bbot: without playing

Ba dum tish.

That is a statement that will make a certain kind of gamer happy, but hold on. Mayflight isn't neo-retro, a type of art direction characterized by great big cuddly pixels and chirpy synthesized music. You know, like VVVVVV, Spelunky or Minecraft.

No, Mayflight is authentically retro, so it has great big cuddly pixels, chirpy synthesized music, hideously ugly color palettes, soul-crushingly terrible controls, droolingly moronic UI, and pants on head retarded level design. It's very retro, in that almost all old games were very bad.

Mayflight is made by one John Harris, who does a monthly column for GameSetWatch, and who doesn't appear to have a personal website at all. Accordingly, he dedicated a column to his game.

The relevance of the game to the theme of his column, roguelike games, is that Mayflight features a lot of procedurally generated content, and therein lies the problem.

Mayflight suffers, and suffers badly, from the classic bugaboo of procedural games: generating interesting random content. He also wrote a column on how he generated the background images, which reveals that the algorithm has access to the entire color gamut. This has serious knock-on consequences, in that you can never trust important visual elements, like enemies, pickups, or how much time you have until you die; to stand out against the screen.

Rather than solving this programatically, like having enemies be the inverse of whatever they're standing over, or floating UI text over a box, John decided to just have them cycle through all the colors. This results in the powerups, the powerups you depend on to extend the clock, and thus to not die, are very briefly quite visible against the background, spend rather more time being hard to see, and are occasionally completely fucking invisible.

John then went on to render all the text, everywhere, in the entire game; in cycling rainbow colors. You get the feeling he wanted to cultivate a Space Giraffesque like-whoa-the-colors-man psychedelic experience, except the backgrounds are static, and are so frequently hideous, that any such effect simply doesn't exist.

I realize that I haven't spoken of the gameplay. It is thus: When you start the game, you have ten seconds to live. Kill enemies and grab pickups to extend the timer. Concordantly, at the beginning of the game, you move the slowest, and jump about as well as a white man.

Why do game devs keep fucking doing this? Granting the player usable platforming controls only after playing for fifteen minutes is like spitting in the face of someone just starting the game.

Not that the controls are terribly useful even when completely unlocked. You "fly" by mashing the jump button, which rapidly exhausts the flight bar, which means you spend a lot of time standing around waiting for it to recharge, while watching the timer tick down. Movement in general is about as crisp and responsive as dragging a rake through treacle, which is definitely something you want in a platforming game with a time limit.

But at least it doesn't cost money. Worse games have been worked on by many more people, then baldfacedly sold in stores, like things of actual value.

The game is an indie FPS about robots with swords who kill each other and then blow up.

I hate falling back on the old cliche of starting off with a confusing description, but, well. Plain Sight is different. By no means derivative, which is not something you can say of the AAA titles, as I have complained of, at length, previously.

Plain Sight is cel-shaded pretty, in the zero-budget indie way; sparse, elegant visuals as a result of not having enough money to clutter up the screen.

Its instructive to compare, as in, "one of these things is not like the other", the orbital "mechanics" of Plain Sight to the venerable Orbiter, which came out ten years ago, and has been succeeded by... nothing at all. If you're one of the two or three people who want a dead accurate spaceflight simulator, then you download Orbiter, and you'll damn well be happy with it. It reminds me of nothing more than the people who were looking for a semi-realistic tactical FPS, started playing Counter-Strike in 2003, and then... never stopped.

To this day, CS 1.6 is the third most played multiplayer game on Steam. The third. A seven year old game.

The second most played game is Counter-Strike:Source.

Plain Sight is not a genre installment, like the endless list of AAA first person shooters who periodically wash over /v/, it is a genre definer.

You want a train simulator? You play RailWorks. You want a war simulator? You play Arma II. You want to play a tank simulator? You play Kharkov 1942. (Or something a bit more old school.) You want Starcraft, but less ugly? You play Starcraft 2, which I'm not going to link, because it's friggin' Starcraft 2.

And if you want to play something like Plain Sight, you're... pretty much stuck with Plain Sight. There is, again, nothing like it.

It is beautiful, extraordinary, but it's not perfect. For one, the game mechanics are oddly tilted.

When one of the aforementioned robots kills another robot with an aforementioned sword, it gains a unit of energy, which is the unit of scoring. Energy is points. But those are not points in the bank, no, in order to convert them into score you have to self-destruct.

The aforementioned blowing up.

Of course, if that was it, then you would immediately kill yourself after scoring a unit of energy. Except that if you manage to kill someone in your explosion, then you get twice as many points. Kill two people? Three times as many points.

And if you're killed before exploding, then whoever kills you gets all your energy.

This is the diabolical twist. You want to get as many points as possible before exploding, and catch as many people as possible in the explosion, except there's an excruciating delay between pressing the kamikaze button and actually detonating, a delay during which you are completely helpless. And the more unbanked energy you have, the bigger you become, and the brighter and more obvious your vapor trail becomes.

So far, so good. No, well, deviously twisted, but whatever. But here's where Beatnik stumbles.

Once banked, energy permanently counts towards your final score. But you can then spend that money on perks, like faster movement speed, double jumping, and longer lock-on radius.

This is absolutely poisonous. An upgraded player is significantly more dangerous, and the people with lots of banked energy are precisely those who you don't want to have gameplay advantages, since they're the ones who are the most skilled.

This is bad. It gets worse.

There is absolutely no visual difference between an unupgraded player and a player who can jump in the air twice, float, kill you from twice the normal charge distance, and erect an unbreakable energy shield at command.

Good games developers, like, uh, Valve, go to enormous lengths to make it easy to identify different types of threats at long range, mostly because it is very not fun to gamble on how dangerous an enemy is.

Despite these enormous difficulties, Plain Sight is still fun. And here's some good news: Until midnight, August 27th, it's only two dollars.

You can pay more than that for a candy bar. Hell, you can pay more than that for a see through horse that doesn't actually exist.

So buy Plain Sight, and do it now.