As a matter of obsessive habit I check Steam every Friday when I get home. Sometimes it’s like getting a present that I can share with other people. Games have been known to go so cheap they’re impossible to pass up. There’ve been a few games that I bought once for a console then re-bought on Steam for basically nothing. Five minutes ago that game was Lost Planet.

Lost Planet was one of the early release titles of this generation of consoles that gave me faith in the “new direction” at the time. Many people condemned the game for the very reasons that it apealed to me. Boiling down the game to a skeletal shell of itself leaves a player with the impression of both very-very pretty graphics, and “archaic” 16-bit design ethos.

Rather than being upset over this contrast of the very-new and the just-old-enough, I thought of it as a breath of fresh air from the stale smell that most new games around that same time gave off. Many were overly complicated first person action games. To me it felt like Capcom sat down and figured out what they could do best (that “archaic” design ethos) and then combine it with what they thought the public was looking for (bloom-infused high resolution graphics).

This seems to have confused most people who were looking for “something more.” I’ve never figured out what that exactly means. To me Lost Planet is one of the gems from this generation of console games, and for $5 I feel it’s worth giving a look if you haven’t yet.

While I’m pretty sure this is a quiet story in the gaming press, it’s something that’s struck me as totally bizarre. In Age of Conan female characters attack approximately 33% slower than their male counterparts for most classes. This is something that made it through at least 18 months of beta testing, and something that was done intentionally at one point or another. Since this is all hidden behind a log-in password that you need to have a copy of the game to access I’m going to copy/paste the developer comments here:

My fellow Hyborian Adventurers …

Last week I promised that I would do my best to have a more detailed update on the issue about Male vs. Female attack speed/damage ready by today. It’s quite possible that not everyone will be thrilled by what this update contains but you as a community deserve to know both what’s causing it, why it’s taking us this long to fix it, and how we plan on fixing it.

Let me begin with saying “yes, we here at Funcom agree with you; this is an unacceptable bug”. We never intended for any character to be stronger/weaker than another based on its gender, and we have been working on making the necessary adjustments to correct this issue for quite some time already.

Now, in our game, we have two primary sources of damage; ‘normal’ damage, commonly referred to as “white damage”, and ‘combo’ damage. Making the white damage equal for both Male and Female characters is, in this context, a fairly simple task and something we’ve already done and which should already have been patched out to Live.

For future reference, when I say that it was a fairly simple task to fix it, we’re still talking about modifying, either through actually having an animator work on the animation resource itself or by having a BCC designer adjust the speed-scaling of said animation resource, of more than 150 unique animations. In addition, these animations are fairly “simple”; by which I mean that they are your ordinary attacks and don’t contain any flourishes, sequential blows or other “complicated” stuff.

However, if we move onto ‘combo’ damage, which is what is causing the notable part of this issue, there are suddenly several factors that come into play when determining the final damage. I won’t be wasting too much time in this update to go into detail about every factor, but to quickly list a few they would be stat/modifier/multiplier (which in turn depends on class, level and weapon equipped), length of animation and, although irrelevant to this exact issue any longer, amount of steps in a combo sequence.

The main reason for the discrepancy in damage output that you’re seeing is that the length of an animation isn’t equal for both Male and Female characters in many cases. This is what we’re currently fixing, but there’s roughly 800 to 1000 animations in total that are involved here, and that they are significantly more “complex” than the ‘white damage’ animations mentioned above this naturally takes a lot more time.

Of course, once the length of the animations have been fully corrected/tweaked either by an animator or BCC designer then every rank (of every combo for every class) has to be re-balanced by the System Designers because, as I mentioned above, one of the factors that come into play when determining the combo damage is animation length.

I guess I should begin wrapping this up by now. I’m afraid I won’t be able to give you an exact date for when this issue will be fixed, but we’re working internally towards a goal of having everything finished during the next two to three work-weeks, depending on how much we need to re-adjust after the initial tweaking. This is including the majority of QA testing, which can be performed during the process as we’re working on a class-by-class basis. That being said, and even with on-going testing during this process, everything still needs to be verified by QA once more after we merge our changes into the system data to ensure that we’re not breaking anything else.

We will however not be patching this out to Live on a class-by-class basis, but rather in one big “collective” fix to all classes. I will make another promise right here and now though; I’ll be investigating whether or not we can introduce these changes to the public Test server (which Famine has promised everyone a bigger update on soon) at the earliest possible convenience.

I know that many of you will probably be disappointed to hear that it might take us as much as another three to four weeks to solve this issue, for which I can only apologize, but we want to make sure that we devote the amount of time that an issue of this magnitude and importance deserves rather than rush out a “quick fix” that might not work as well

And finally, I have to stress that even with our internal goal set and everything currently proceeding on schedule I cannot currently promise that this will be patched to Live at the projected date. There’s a lot of stuff that, while totally unrelated, might cause a certain patch to be delayed or even pushed out without containing this data. What I can promise though is to return with another update about a more specific patch date as soon as possible.

I hope that this information is what many of you have been asking for, and that I’ve been able to present you with answers to many of the questions you’ve had about this issue. On behalf of myself, everyone else directly involved on fixing this issue and Funcom as a company; thank you for reading!

-Svein Erik “Sharum” Jenset: BCC Design Funcom

Bold added for emphasis by myself.

I think it’s interesting that this is being handled as a “bug”. It is clear that at one point or another someone made the conscious decision to do this. Whether it was just carelessness by the animation department, or if it was intentional from a higher up level, I don’t know. But clearly if 800 - 1000 animations are “effected by this bug” it’s hardly a minor oversight.

Honestly, I’m not really sure what conclusion to draw from this. It’s obviously an oversight that the developers didn’t care about. Now I can understand how this wasn’t picked up in Beta testing or anything for a while (I wasn’t playing two characters of different sex of the same class, I can understand why many people wouldn’t), but I don’t understand how it made it past the developers in the first place.

What are your thoughts on this?

EDIT: Two more things have come to light about this issue while I was poking around. All following information was confirmed by the above quoted developer.

1st: The devs were told about this bug in beta testing. Around mid-March the first reports of noticing this were released by beta testers. This means that the game could have still shipped w/o the “bug”

2nd: The devs are saying that this “bug” is due to the speed of the Motion Capture for the animation for the classes. This opens up a whole new bag of worms.

Interesting.

In the 1920’s a depressed and talented pugilist took up his hand at writing for pulp publications of the time. Later this man would become a contemporary of era standing next to pillars like Howard Phillip Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. Stemming from his love of history, particularly that of Europe and Asia, he created the Hyborian Age (”Hy” being Irish for “country of” and “Borea” meaning “north wind”). In this setting he solidified his previous fictional works of the brave Pict warrior Bran Mak Morn and the exiled Atlantian King Kull as the Thurian Age of “the past” and set the scene for his most famous character: Conan.

What started with a short poem (poetry being R.E. Howard’s first passion), he created the land of Cimmeria spurred on by a memory held of hill-country in the heart of Texas after a winter rain. It was from this land which Conan left to seek his crown, and the land which Howard hardly wrote about besides that it was a war ravaged nation of nomadic tribes. When Howard wrote Conan he used the character as a vent for understanding his own internal conflicts about society and lonesomeness. Yet he still understood how to tell a good story: weave an interesting yarn.

“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

As I’ve only recently found Howard as a writer, I’ve long been an admirer of his work without even knowing it. My interest stems from many viewings of the campy and violent outing of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan. While quite different from the Howard stories in point, it gets much of the essence of the character just through the acting and setting in which the film takes place. As a young boy it captivated my imagination. Years later when I found HP Lovecraft I never realized that he and the writer of Conan weren’t only good friends, but that I’d read some of Howard’s Cthulhu mythos stories. He and Lovecraft were good friends and writing partners. They died within a year of each other, both tragically: Howard committed suicide after the death of his mother, and Lovecraft a victim of cancer.

My first videogame experience with Conan was before I’d ever even heard of the NES with the Apple ][ game Conan. I spent many hours attempting to learn this game, and it remains one of my fondest memories on the Apple ][, even though I’m positive I never even finished the fourth level. Twenty something years later Funcom has released Age of Conan: Hyborean Adventures. It’s one of those online games that everyone’s talking about. As I’m not completely adverse to such things I got swept up in the hoopla and decided that, yes, I did want to play this game because it offered a setting which I thought excellent for something on such a massive scale.

My time with the game so far has been brief and mixed, but outside of the bugs (somehow more acceptable with new online only games) I’ve loved nearly everything about it. Recently I found a way past a fake wall in the game and, as I’m wont to do, I explored behind the scenes quite a bit and got some fantastic screenshots. I’m withholding more infomation about the game itself because things are still early (as far as MMO’s go) and I’ve still yet to see nearly half of the game, so today I just give you my cartographic experiences behind the scenes in a pictoral manner. Fear not though, I’ll talk more on the game proper at a later date. Till then I recommend picking up the original RE Howard books.

This first image I present with the HUD is only to point out the upper right mini-map to show that I am indeed, off the map… as thought the abrupt end of the earth isn’t enough of a clue Also, I took over 30 screen shots behind the scenes, the following are only the choicest of the group.

As a side note so I don’t seem perverse with the above “up skirt” image, that was taken while swimming through mid-air and not from the ground looking up.

I was recently … uhm … alerted to a … game. I mean, I think it’s a game.

The only thing I can say is that this is the Faces of Death of videogames. It’s disturbing, mostly fake, and inhumane yet I keep looking at it and using it.

The game is simply titled The Torture Game 2 and that sums it up wholly.

Trackmania United Forever has one of the more unique attraction I find in games. In Doom I use to use the walk through walls code just to see what kind of messed up graphics I could make. After hearing about the negative world in Metroid I attempted to get there as well. Things like the highest point in Bubsy 3D interest me. I love to break games and go where I shouldn’t.

The most memorable moment I had in Oblivion was when I found a seam in the wall of a city and broke into the area before it properly loaded. In order to cut down on the resources for a PC/Console to display an entire world Oblivion’s towns were loaded only when you entered them through designated areas. In order to give the player a sense of scale the size of the city is represented in the overworld, just less detailed in case you peek over the walls. When I was inside the town it was deserted of everything. When I threw or dropped any items they would slide on the ground as if it was ice until arriving at a seam in the polygons, in which case it would disappear.

Sometimes there are small things that let you into these backstage worlds in games. Other times you just have to think a little outside of the box. In Shadowrun (2007) the player is given an option of having glider wings bolted to their back which allows a small degree of flight. The player also has the ability to learn the magic spell gust which can push enemies back with a gust of wind, or can allow the player to break their fall with a cushion of air. A smart player thinking outside the box can combine these tools to get places the developers didn’t intend you to go. Besides just breaking the game and gliding around outside the limits of the planned arena there were also some partially built levels revealed by skilled players who explored in the right areas.

Aiming for self set goals is one of my favorite things to do in games, and when the opportunity presents itself even in the least expected places I take it.

While playing a particularly challenging desert track on Trackmania United Forever I happen to launch right off the track and into the landscape. At first I thought it fun just to see how far out things went.

Notice the awesome custom sheriff’s car with the welded-on spikes at the front. So I continued to drive off through the sunset where the atmosphere ends.

From there I was curious to see where things went. I cautiously crept up to the edge of what looked like all land.

Looking back on it I probably should have tried to drive off the edge and seen what awaited me. Instead I chickened out and turned around back towards the track.

While not the most interesting adventure off the beaten path I’d ever had, it did at least let me know that it was possible to break the limits of the game and explore secret worlds.

On my fifteenth million attempt at bay course C3 for the damn silver metal to move on, I happen upon a far more interesting situation than being in the desert. Shortly after a very sharp turn there is a speed boost right in front of a ramp which will launch the SUV (or in my case a Monster Truck) quite the distance in the air towards a small tunnel entrance. In my case the wheel wasn’t straightened out well enough before the speed boost which launched me diagonally into the ocean.

I noticed that my truck had somehow landed upright and was capable of driving underwater. Since the camera was forcing me to look at a small dot at the bottom of the ocean I aimed for land as best I could and hoped that I’d eventually come up for air.

I was greeted on the beach by a small group of apartments–or perhaps condos–in a state of seeming disrepair. At the bottom of the buildings it looked as though overgrowth had taken the first two floors. Upon examination the growth wasn’t vines that climb three stories of the building and cover all the windows, it was actually the trees that would look like they’re in front of the building from a long distance away in case you happen to look.

I found a misshapen and discolored road out front of the condos leading to the city which made up much of the backdrop throughout the race.

It looks like not just the outskirts have been taken over by the shrubbery.

On the way out of the city buildings are far more grim–the takeover becoming more hostile.

With the city far off in the distance fleeing the infested place, I feel a bit better and head for the hills.

The mountain bluffs surrounding the bay range in size. Some are much smaller than they appear because they are closer. When you finally drive for five minutes only to see that the taller peak is in a different direction. Why are you looking for the tallest peak? no particular reason honestly.

On the way up a mountain all the way at the back of the bay I found a wrinkle in space.

Following it I found the rift opening into a similar black space that was beneath the desert. I decided to give it a try and see what happens. When I drove over the edge I took many pictures which I will refrain from posting to save the weak at heart.

Strangely enough I happen to graze something with my back tire on the fall into blackness. It righted me in mid air and I safely landed on an absent ground.

The way that the geometry of the landscape worked under everything was wondrous. It was like ribbons of earth suspended in time over me.

Approaching the city buildings hover eerily in the air over me with their infected green bases all the more macabre in appearance.

Condos hover over me like cavity infected dentures.

Off in the distance is the racetrack where I started.

Unfortunately my subterranean expedition was ended early. I didn’t realize that I would be able to slide out from under these buildings into the water.

I’m honestly a bit sad that I got to explore so little of it all. I wanted to go check out the area that had even more growth infested buildings than the part I did get a shot of from underneath.

My instinctive curiosity prods me compelled me to keep going on, to look over the edge while still being a cautious enough to hold on to ground firmly. It’s a great feeling. Most games now have either unbreakable walls, or artificial ones which keep the player restricted from seeing the man behind the curtain. It keeps the games focused and the fourth wall erect, and for all intents and purposes it’s how you want the game to be. That’s why when I can I look behind the curtain I do.

For completely arbitrary and torporous reasons I have decided to randomly select 10 independent games from recently released “top of 2007” game lists from numerous indie game reporting blogs. I tired to limit it to games which I’ve either spent very little time with, or games that I’ve never touched. I will be ranking them in order of 1 to 10 based on initial impressions of 30 minutes or less with the games. This exercise should not be taken seriously by any stretch of the imagination, don’t let the title fool you.

Now for the game list in alphabetical order:
-Akuchizoku
-Cottage of Doom!
-Dive
-Dwarf Fortress Graphical Version
-Flipside
-Iwanaga
-La Mulana
-Poesysteme
-Sam & Max Episode 4: Abe Lincoln Must Die!
-Sauerbraten / Cube 2

So, play along on your PC too. The games shouldn’t be all that hard or taxing on most PCs: at worst you need to get Steam, and for one game you’ll need HL2 (which everyone has anyways, right?). One game is to feed my own indulgences and curiosities, see if you can pick which one. Results will be posted within the next few days.

Ok, perhaps I missed this game when it came out in 2004, but even if I had heard of it my PC probably wouldn’t have played it then. Someone probably mentioned it in passing but at the time hearing about Ragnarok-anything would have set my sensors to ignore. Nonetheless, I found out about Ragnarok Battle Offline and can’t help myself from playing it.

No, the game isn’t anything like the online game unless you consider the settings and enemies and jobs (i.e. the mechanics are completely different). And no, the game isn’t boring or remotely RPG-ish (at least in the negative sense of the connotation). RBO started it’s life as a bit of a joke when a java game popped up under a similar name developed by doujin game creator French-Bread. Apparently they were flooded with requests and after a bumpy start when dealing with Ragnarok Online creator Gravity, French-Bread finally released RBO for the PC (with the “off” not-so cleverly pasted over the “on”). Since then they’ve released three expansion packs and have no intention of continuing with the game. That’s ok though, I promise you’ll find more than enough with what’s currently available if you’re really interested.

See, RBO is probably one of the best 2D brawlers ever released. It has a very in-depth combo system and also includes cancels, juggles, launchers, and damage scaling. It has 6 classes that all have completely different play styles, each with unique male and female characters (while still retaining the same moves the combos and attacks vary based on your choice of sex). Total there are 15 “normal” stages including the expansions, and over 50 arena stages (though those don’t appear until the expansions). Oh, yeah, did I mention that there’s up to three person multi-player simultaneously? (No, there’s no versus mode even though some videos have pallet swapped monsters for characters for effect.) If it has one downfall it’s the lack of interesting level layout: everything’s pretty much just on a level surface.

Don’t belive me? Ok well, here’s a combo video displaying all the character types. Here’s a more impressive combo video with some two player combos. And here’s a pretty sick combo video that has some monster pallet swaps. Hopefully that’s convinced you.

I must include one caveat though: you really need a controller to play this game and enjoy it. I mean, it’s fairly balanced and entertaining–even though it’s not quite as deep as a vs fighter–and with a leveling system it slowly unlocks moves, but they’re not easy to perform with a keyboard. So, just be warned.

I know you’re sitting there frothing for more, so head on over to http://www.ragnarokbattle.com/ and poke around for more info on where to get the game. It’s good stuff that I really can’t keep to myself.

You’re not allowed to laugh at me, it’s against the rules. Ok, so perhaps I’m not really great at computer games or something, but I just got devastated by the Global Criminal Database. It turns out that I got caught a couple times in the Social Security database and, well, because of that I had a minor criminal record. Well, those bastards Uplink wouldn’t hire me into any new jobs so I decide it best to just wipe my record clean. While trying to decrypt some sick Elliptical Cryptography I was nearly traced back through my nodes and decided to just pull the plug on the whole operation and just disconnect.

Not a good idea.

It turns out that the Global Criminal Database doesn’t like it when people try to break their encryption, so they came and seized my Uplink Gateway and ended my career as a hacker.

It could have been worse I guess. In that game I’d only spent about an hour and a half of my time. I’ve picked up something new and I’ll carry it with me. The interesting part is that I was having a lot of fun and feeling a lot of pressure/excitement from doing exceptionally mundane tasks. I mean honestly mundane: most of the time you spend watching bars progress and navigating terminal menus. The game does make things fairly exciting by creating an environment where every action counts and nothing can be undone. Your career and game is on the line with everything you do.

After spending a bit of time with Defcon earlier this year I decided it was the perfect Matthew Broderick in WarGames simulation. Uplink on the other hand, turns out to be the perfect Jonny Lee Miller in Hackers simulator. It’s brilliant in execution, and for being a seemingly unoriginal idea has a fresh and nonpareil feel to it.

Uplink is about seven years old at this point. You may have heard of its developer, a small independent game studio called Introversion, perhaps not (probably so!). Anyways, Steam has an excellent package deal going on right now and since I wanted a copy of Darwinia, and I’ve been interested in Uplink since I purchased Defcon, I picked up the Introversion Anthology for the cheap ass price of $20 and it includes all three of their games. I was a bit disapointed that when I bought it that I kind of ate the cost of Defcon (I was hoping it would turn into a gift much like HL2 did when I bought the Orange Box), but it was still cheaper than buying Darwinia and Uplink separately. Even when the price goes back up to $30 this is still a stupidly good deal.

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.