So, I’m pretty disappointed in my Laptop right now. I mean, I kind of knew that I wouldn’t be able to play many PC games on it, especially nothing new, but I didn’t expect to have problems running games that are 10 years old or so. Or, hell, even games that I could play on my crappy older desktop PC.

The problem here is that I’ve realized that I really enjoyed many games on the PC before and use to tinker around with them until 2004 or so. In 2004 I got my laptop so that I could run the magazine better and I got a few games that ran OK on it, but it just wasn’t worth the hassle of getting the games working. For example: I spent about 14 hours just getting Morrowind to run properly on my laptop. When it finally was running properly I was fairly happy with it, but I had already spent so much damn time with it on the Xbox I only played it for a couple dozen hours. I am constantly fiddling with my video drivers to make things work, and unfortunately the custom drivers that have made anything playable have stopped supporting my chipset: Omega Drivers.

So who would think that something like Quake 1 or Half-Life 1 would be an issue? These games were released in the 90’s before graphics cards even existed for the most part. I mean, sure there were some, but the games use software modeling even. So I should be able to run these games no problem, but I can’t. They constantly waver in frame rates between 30-60 FPS and then they occasionally drop down exceptionally low.

For Quake, my keyboard keys will occasionally get stuck forcing me to run off ledges. I’ve been told the reason for this, but it’s still silly. In Half-Life, my mouse will occasionally hit a fake “wall” of sorts where I have to move the mouse in frantic circles to make it break the invisible walls. Add to that the fact that when I tried to play online multiplayer games my frame rate is LUCKY to be in the 30fps region.

Argh, I need a new PC. At this point LCD monitors are pretty much the standard due to high resolutions, so that means I’ll have to also pick up a new monitor. I have no idea how I would be able to do this because I know it’s going to be about $1000 total with a monitor. I have to figure out where to get the money without selling a kidney.

While browsing through the manual of Quake (I only have 9 days of work left, give me a break) I noticed one of the questions in the Commonly Asked Questions section is still that’s very high on the minds of many right now:

Q. Don’t you worry that Quake teaches people that all problems can be solved by the misuse of deadly force?

A. No.

Sure this topic has been beaten like a dead horse time and time again by both scholars and watercooler junkies. I don’t think it’s a stance that’s going to be declared official any time soon. When speaking with Matthew Weise at GDC he said to me that, in order for games to be taken as a serious medium we basically just have to wait for everyone born before a time with videogames to die. This isn’t malicious, or at least not intentionally. He compared it to film, and when it really became a recognized art form was after people who had grown up without films had all died out. [tangent: I was just reading an article yesterday about how film is still struggling to be a recognized art form. You could have fooled me!] I then countered with Comic Books, which still aren’t generally considered an art, yet have been around for well over 50 years now.

Anyways, we’re getting away from the point here. People like Jack Thompson will always say things like the Commonly Asked questions, and so will the mass of inexperienced outsiders. The thing is that creative intention goes a long way. Outside of possibly America’s Army, I don’t think that any violent or aggressive game is out there to teach people about how violence or murder solves a situation best. Until the creative intent behind the development of a game goes out of its way to support that claim I think the issue is a bit ridiculous. In order for this all to get resolved I guess I’ll just have to wait until everyone dies out.

First, the TIGSource B-Game Competition is over. If you recall, I was involved with one of the games, donating 5 games to the The 100-in-1 Klik & Play Pirate Kart. We took 6th place (out of 29) so that’s pretty good! The winner was also one of the games I voted for because I have a soft spot for zombies. Unfortunately I don’t think that this actually resolves the issue that the competition set out to tackle: what is a B-Game. The winning game ended up being very polished, and sort-of straight forward. It was clichéd in many ways though, which is kind of always how I see B-Movies (clichéd and bombastic, which Cottage of Doom fits into). Also, of the two mentioned writeups on the games, my entries to the Pirate Cart were mention in each. Kick the Habit was mentioned in one, and Sad Old Man in the other (though just in image form).

~Over at High Dynamic Range Lying there was a new entry titled Telling stories and Realizing worlds. Since I’m replaying and still greatly enjoying Half-Life 2 again the image at the top made me read more carefully than usual to what Nayan was saying. He touched on some topics about HL2 which I think are both prominent and important not only to the game itself, but games in general. I recommend reading the article linked to above otherwise my comments may seem a bit disjointed (which, you know, they are):

HL2 is pretty much, the state of the medium as far as combining narrative and gameplay. The result is the emergent product. I honestly feel like this is what most reviews miss, or at least don’t realize is the point of the game. The product is not the disc sitting in the box. It’s not a list of bullet points and length. The product is the result of many months/years of hard work from the developers mixed with the player. Unlike most mediums, a game does not exist without a player. A game can not exist in a vacuum where graphics or writing alone actually mean something and can be graded. This is not to say that the graphics are irrelevant: flash-level graphics may get the job done as well as cell-processor level HDR bump-mapped graphics. The product is dependent on how well the creator gets their point across using an actor they’ve never met.

For the instance of a puzzle game, the actor is omniscient and molding the game around them. Without the developer to give them the items to mold there is no game, and graphics or story exist as spread sheets or movies. These items only exist as a result of the emergent narrative.

It’s interesting to think about, and the more that developers actually do think about it the better experiences we’re going to have. Valve goes through extensive play testing and QA stages (note that Bungie also did for Halo 3). In these play test sessions they make sure that the player is doing what they want them to do as an actor. As a result the player (generally) will follow a script they don’t even know exists for them, and experience something above and beyond what any other medium can offer. The best example of this is the very early chase sequence in Half-Life 2. As a result of so much play testing I ended up falling directly into the hands of the developer and was molded like putty into the actor I needed to be. It was brilliant, and probably one of my fondest game memories from the past 5 years.

Also, it’s pretty important to differentiate between Story and Narrative. Story is the easier side: it’s what’s told to the player, either in text or through video/cutscene. Narrative is a slightly different beast which is far more developed in earlier games than since the birth of the cutscene. For example: Strider. The narrative is the player killing wolves in the artic to break into a mechanical fort. As the player runs across the mine laden snow field the narrative of what’s happening unravels: you’re running down the side of a mountain and entering a base. When the sequence is over you, the player, know you have just done this but the game never states it, you don’t have your actions re-told or encompassed into a story. Many arcade games and early console games did this best, and as a result we have very fond memories of these games because we made their stories, they weren’t told to us. One of the most crushing days for me in gaming was finding out every little detail about Samus’ past via the anime storyboards in Zero Mission. Since the story of Metroid had previously been so much based on the narrative I created through playing, the illusion was shattered with “real” explanations. Narrative is very powerful, and often something that is lazily ignored in current game design.

Sorry, I’ve gotten way off topic and gone on long enough! I think the point I was getting to is that the games with the best stories are the ones incorporating it into the emergent narrative of the game rather than forcing it as an aside.

So basically I just wanted to capture that here and talk about Half-Life 2 a little more.

~ As a final note, I was linked to a really excellent blog recently titled The Criterion Contraption written by Matthew Dessem. As an aspiring script writer he’s currently going through ever Criterion film in order of release on DVD to get a better understanding of foreign film, and film in general. He does a lot of research into each film with a self established average of fifteen hours work put into each entry. After about three years of steady work on the blog even Criterion has officially recognized it and linked to it from their main site. He’s only up to #77 (Criterion is currently up to #401) but there are still some really amazing films up to that point. This also reminded me that I need to invest in some of those new Eclipse series box sets Criterion is releasing. Specifically the Ozu and Kurosawa box sets.

So, of course, I got the Orange Box last night. Well, yesterday afternoon really, but I was doing some work and didn’t get a chance to play until the evening. The box isn’t just a standard orange either, it’s a bright safety orange. After spending over 10 hours with the game last night I’m sure of one thing: were this just HL2, HL2 Episode 1 and HL2 Episode 2 this would be an amazing deal. But no, absolutely not, they couldn’t leave well-enough alone. Valve decided to make the best game package and deal _ever_, with some of the best representation from three distinct genres: Action (HL2), Puzzle (Portal), and Team Tactical (Team Fortress 2). Sure they all use the first person perspective, but Valve really is the state of the medium when it comes to presentation, narrative and execution.

While Half-Life 2 remains one of the greatest games ever designed for many reasons, and while I haven’t yet played them, I’m sure that Ep. 1 & 2 maintain exactly what made the original great. I’m not worried about that. The real test was with the new games: Portal and Team Fortress 2.

Not that I was worried, I’ve been talking with one of the developers of Portal for a story that’s going to be appearing in the next issue of The Gamer’s Quarter, and everything seemed good about it. It’s short, sweet, subtle, and sly. It has perhaps the best writing in a game that never really needed writing. When I heard that “Old Man Murray” was going to be writing the script I initally wondered how much script there would really be. Even after a short time playing I was still wondering how much there was. It ended up brilliant and hilarious. That aside, the puzzles were so clever at times that I felt like a genius when I figured them out easily. Portal weighs in at about a two to three hour game for the first run through. It’s a really excellent length for a afternoon type game, and when I finished it first I went straight into the developer’s commentary and played through the first half again. It was neat to hear what came of QA and play-testing and how they molded the levels around it, but much of it was a little dull. On that run I completed the first half of the game in about 20 minutes, which is less than half the time. I’m going to go for some of the time and step trials later because the game lends itself really well to being replay.

Team Fortress 2 was really something else. While it only has 6 maps, that’s a bit misleading. Many of those maps have different maps inside of them that you can’t see until much latter in. For example when you’re playing on Hydro, there’s really 6 different layouts all within the same map. For Dustbowl there are three maps that you can only see as you slowly capture one after the other. Outside of 2Forts and another map I can’t remember, when you pick a “map” at the beginning of the game all you’re really doing is selecting a game type and set of maps. I’m going into detail on this because It’s one thing that I’ve seen a lot of complaints about in theory, but it’s not been explained in detail. The game does a lot of things right, things that I was looking for with team based Halo 3 yet didn’t find. It also doesn’t do somethings as well as Shadowrun does. One example is time: TF2 matches seem to take forever, where SR just took a while (longer than Halo, so many people complained). Due to SR not having respawns there was a lot more tension, and eventually TF2 does this with a sudden death mode, and when that happens it’s really fun. Also there was a lot more team work in SR because if you went out on your own you were probably dead with no hope of getting resurrected. TF2 does have team work, but it’s more like an engine than a sled team: everyone is doing their part independently and as long as one person doesn’t break down everything keeps running smoothly. With a sled team everyone needs to match up in sync and run together. A subtle difference, but an important one. They’re both good for their own unique reasons.

Team Fortress 2’s gameplay is really welcome though. Most characters have two ammunition weapons, and one melee weapon. All the characters are exceptionally unique (with the possible exception of the Soldier) and all serve very unique purposes on the team. My current favorites are Pyro and Engineer, with the occasional Demoman when needed. Both Pyro and Engineer are fairly lonely character types. The Pyro waits around at the front lines for people to try to sneak in and then flame them, or he waits near a defense point and flames anyone who comes in as a sort of decontamination process: if you light on fire you’re a spy and we’ll kill you. The Engineer is unique because you’re either alone defending while keeping your turrets alive, or you’re sneaking in behind enemy lines and offensively setting up turrets and teleporters. I’ve placed some brilliant teleporters that have won us the rounds a few times, and it’s a good feeling. The Demoman, well, he’s a black Scottish cyclopes. You can effectively play him as offense or defence, but he’s still a bit of a loose cannon. You can hope to god that you get your timing right and land a one hit kill with a granade, or you can lob a dozen at the enemy and hope a couple do enough damage to kill something. I kind of feel like I have a patatoe gun when I play as the Demoman, and it fits the game perfectly. Anyways, I hope some new maps come out for it eventually, but I’m not keeping my fingers crossed. If they do they should be free because of MS’ policy on “if it’s free on anything else, it’ll be free for XBL.”

I guess what I’m saying is that if you don’t get the Orange Box no one is going to die: you’re just doing yourself a huge injustice.

The Interactive Fiction Little Falls claims to be an experience rather than just a story. Released earlier this year by Mondi Confinanti in English (originally published in Italian), Little Falls has the widest range of multimedia I’ve ever seen used in an IF. Images and sound add to the story in a way that makes them inseparable from the experience (even though you can play the IF without them).

It appears that my pre-ordered copy of The Orange Box won’t be arriving until Wed. at the earliest. This is exceptionally unfortunate for me because of how much I’ve been looking forward to it. I was thinking earlier today how there’s never midnight releases for games that I’m honestly excited to get and would love to spend a couple extra hours with. But no, it hardy ever works out that way for me.

In case you’re reading this and cocking your head slightly wondering why I can’t just pre-load the game and at midnight launch it (or even play the beta for that matter). Well, that’s simple: there’s no way in hell I could run the game on my computer. So I have to settle for the next best (and most comfortable) thing, my Xbox 360. Hoping that I’m not alone in my lament I’ve collected a list of articles relating to Team Fortress 2 which are all good reads and will keep you busy when your hands aren’t doodling analogue sticks:

The Complete Go Team Fortress
Part 1: The Heavy.
Part 2: The Medic.
Part 3: The Demoman.
Part 4: The Pyro.
Part 5: The Sniper.
Part 6: The Engineer.
Part 7: The Soldier.
Part 8: The Scout.
Part 9: The Spy.

The Rock, Paper, Shotgun Team Fortress 2 Interview
The Rock, Paper, Shotgun Team Fortress 2 Interview - Part 2

In case you didn’t notice, all this writing came from the exceptional (newish) website: Rock, Paper, Shotgun. I highly recommend the rest of the site as well, but this should keep you reading when you’d rather be killing tomorrow night.

So, incase no one knew, I’ve had this webspace for a really long time honestly. If you want you can check out my old front page with awful articles included Nothing will be deleted!

Anyways, I’m going to work on backing up my LiveJournal and then seeing if I can make easy use of crossposting on my LJ and here at the same time so that I can keep my friends there.

So, like, welcome aboard. I guess I should set up what my goal is with this blog: I don’t have one. I’ll spend some time catching up on my work items and it may take me a while to get _everything_ from that on here, but I’d like to get it in one place for easy access when I need it.

Also, give me some input on the image/color/text scheme here. I mean, I’m not too artistically inclined and honestly the red may be a bit too much, but I couldn’t think of anything much better. I may go with a smaller image.

But yeah, input people, input!

EDIT: I have sucessfully dumped all of my LiveJournal entries into this blog. Warning: some are embarrassingly poor in quality and for nearly a year I was obsessed with Bemani games.  I have no idea how to go about pulling my Gaming Journal entries, but you can go to the first post from my LJ to get the link to that if you demand to read them. Unfortunately the comments were not pulled in with my LJ entries, which were sometimes better than the entries themselves. My LJ was pulled for historical posterity only.

I want to like Halo 3. I really do. I mean, technically there’s not a damn thing “wrong” with it. In principal I should enjoy it. It’s just so generic and safe. Sort of like going to a fancy Italian restaurant and ordering spaghetti. Sure, it’s probably good spaghetti with really nice seasonings and a spectacular presentation, but let’s admit that it’s still about the same as something you could cook at home.

Now, I loved the original Halo. I spent a lot of time with the game beating it on normal, heroic and legendary (including one co-op completion on heroic) and also played many hours of local multi-player. When Halo 2 was ramping up for release it seemed unnecessary to me: I already had done just about everything with Halo I ever wanted to do. The whole ilovebees.com ARG campaign got me mildly interested in it, but it was still a bit too… nonsensical for me I guess. It was probably because I didn’t know enough about the game’s back story.

The point of all that is that I never played Halo 2. Not really anyways, I have been forced to play multi-player at a friends house a couple times. The thing is that every time I try to play I’m at the bottom of the list, and frequently annihilated by the opposition. It’s frustrating and irritating to play with people who have been playing this for three years like it’s a part-time job. Playing against people that much better than you is like running into a brick wall over and over again hoping to make a crack in it before your skull splits open.

So, I’ve enjoyed Halo before (single and multi), and I know that other people can enjoy this game for years, so something had to be missing on my side right? I know that part of the fun is in having the game right when it comes out, right when the hype and excitement of the community is at a fevered pitch. Right when you’ve convinced yourself that “yeah, this could be fun again.” Perhaps enough time has passed now since I gorged myself on Halo last. Possibly I can get in on an even playing field with everyone else so that I’m not instantly outclassed. Maybe I can eek some enjoyment out of it before the game is broken over some unemployed college kid’s knee and cheats flow out from his 360 like water. For some reason I thought that the combination of all these things could add up to me having a great time with Halo again.

I was half right. It’s enjoyable at best and tolerable at worst, but still no where near as enjoyable a game mechanically as Shadowrun is. Sure, there’s a lot of people who can’t enjoy Shadowrun for one reason or another, but much like food each person has their own unique tastes. Going back to the Italian Restaurant example Shadowrun is the Veal Marsala which is something that requires quite a bit of preparation and finess to cook properly. Not only does it have veal (a meat many people don’t like) it also has mushrooms (another item many people don’t like): I love it though and it fits my taste perfectly, and it’s not something you can get just anywhere. From my side of the table I can see why people don’t like the game, but the people who do enjoy it will get much more out of it than eating playing something safe like spaghetti Halo 3.

And yes, Halo 3 can come with meat sauce single/co-op, Italian sausage single player online, or meat balls team based online, but at it’s core it’s still spaghetti the same game with different trimmings. Going into each game you know what it is, you know mostly how it will play out, and it will mostly be quite similar the next time around.I honestly prefer games that are more custom tailored for team play. I know I’m not the best person at aiming, but that’s not all a game should be about to me. I have excellent tactic for winning and when I’m on top of my performance and the people who outclass me in skill go with my plans we will dominate. (or at least squeak through with a victoly) On top of that I’m willing to play support roles even though I can put up a fight if needed. Support roles don’t really exist in Halo 3. Tactics mostly involve skill. Balanced teams mean that all the players are of the same skill level. Sure I’ve been lectured to about high level teams win based on tactics and plans and choke points, but honestly it all boils down to being able to point and shoot at the guy’s head quickest, frequently while jumping.

So I’m looking forward to Team Fortress 2 in the Orange Box next Tuesday like it’s nobody’s business. Well, actually, I hope it’s everybody’s business because I would love to get some really great teams going. TF2 seems like it will be able to fit into different player’s strengths and weaknesses while also providing a tactical element not found in many multiplayer FPS perspective games. Like I said, even though there are team based modes in H3, it’s still not focused enough on balance and compensation.

Halo 3 is only a week old and I’m already looking to drop it for my next new bad habit. I just hope that TF2 performs well on the 360. If not, I’m seriously going back to Shadowrun.