But, it is Halloween! My favorite time of year. With the holiday comes the glory of good and bad horror movies. Thanks to NetFlix and their “watch it now” on-demand movie viewing service I’ve gotten to experience a gamut of horror movies. I try to fill up for the year so I don’t get the urge to watch them during every season.

I’ve been attempting to watch at least one horror movie a night and to watch them completely no matter how bad they are. There have been some good, some bad, and some really bad. Luckily I actually found a diamond in the rough with The Signal.

Going into the film I had no expectations. I did know that it was written and directed by three different guys, and that the plot involved a broadcast signal turning people into killers. Good enough to start with! So, I watched it and found myself both creeped out about the situations, and really enjoying it. The next day I couldn’t stop piecing together the puzzle of the plot and realizing unique and interesting things about it.

It is still the only film I’ve purchased after watching it on-demand from NetFlix. That means it’s good. Seriously good, and for a horror movie that’s very difficult. Caveat: There’s a small part at the begining of the film that is really, really terrible. It serves it’s purpose, but I don’t think it is neceassy as it was so bad I almost stopped watching the film before it started.

So, when you’re wandering around the movie store this holiday season keep an eye peeled for The Signal.

What happen to Sonic Youth?

The honest answer is nothing. They’ve been releasing albums like clockwork for nearly as long as I’ve been alive. The last album of theirs I bought was Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, though this was after Washing Machine had been released. In the span from about ‘96 to ‘98 I managed to convince myself they’d vanished.

Throughout my adulthood I’ve  never once ran across another person who use to love Sonic Youth. Many people seem to know who they are yet so few actually can name a song or album of theirs. Even my friends who are musicians haven’t ever owned an album of theirs. With this being the case it blew my mind to see that after nearly a decade of only listening to the few albums I owned that they keep creating and releasing music.

There must be a hidden underground fan base somewhere. Perhaps in the mountains of Arizona, I don’t know. Wherever they are I want to both thank you and reach out to you.

See, if you recall when my iPod broke down you may remember that I lost a lot of music.  Some of that music was most of one of the two remaining albums I have of theirs: Experimental Jet Set. Since I was still moving into my new place I hadn’t unpacked everything when this happen so I decided to hold off re-ripping a few albums until I was unpacked, and that was one of them. Well, I finally got around to ripping a whole pile of CDs that took the entire day to complete (in flac).

At the bottom of the pile was Experimental Jet Set, I was saving it. When I opened up the case my heart sank. The disc was in there but it was damaged beyond readability. Rather than get upset I did what most people do now on the internet and found a torrent. I handpicked the first few albums that I could find in good quality, then went to a decent quality discography to fill in the gaps. The next morning they were all on my computer and I had already shared them with other people.

I’ve since been listening to these albums over and over, when I’m alone mostly. Not even my wife can get through a whole album without asking me to skip one or more tracks on it. But I love it, every track of it. OK, granted the earlier stuff isn’t as well focused or organized as it could be, everything from ‘85 on is pretty much gold.

A few of these albums I hadn’t heard in nearly a decade, and yet I found myself remembering everything. Even the lyrics to a few songs. This music brings back such strong and vivid memories once long lost. The strange thing is that many of those memories are fogged over with a colored haze. I’ve heard before that some people dream in specific colors (like red, or black and white) but that always seemed like a completely ludicrous thing that I’d written it off as urban legend. Then, while listening to Washing Machines I had memories return entirely in one color of green or purple (not at the same time though).

This moved me emotionally. I now feel like I never missed a day of listening to Sonic Youth. I know that I’ve worn this maroon t-shirt from a concert of theirs since High School and it’s barely hanging together. It was a shirt that my friend picked up for me when I couldn’t attend said concert. It gives me a strange comfort to know that I no longer have to hold onto the memories of enjoying the band, but that I can still enjoy them now.

Now I’ve picked up albums that I’d never heard before, or I thought never existed.  Why didn’t anyone tell me about these. Yes, I’m pushing this off onto others because it’s only within the last few years that I’ve gotten back into music. So many of the albums and artists I loved in the 90’s haven’t aged as well as I wanted. Then Sonic Youth comes along and proves an amazing band can survive coming out of that decade unscathed. It’s even possible that I enjoy and understand them more now than I ever could in High School.

Dylan Cuthbert has done it again. PixelJunk Eden was released last week for the PS3 via download on the PSN. This makes two of the best games on the system from the same damn guy. That’s a pretty impressive feat.

Now, PixelJunk Eden is in line with the whole PJ theme of “using a ton of meticulously hand-drawn 2D art instead of 3D modeled graphics, we have tried to re-create the feel of some of those older classics”. But I feel like this is a big step for Q-Games. Eden is meticulously unique in both design and aesthetics. Eden, is their best game since Digidrive, and in many ways it’s leagues better.

Both the other PixelJunk games were either too silimar to another style of game, or nearly a complete mechanical rip-off of others. Digidrive was something unique with a visual style and appeal that neither of the first two PJ games had, then comes Eden, seemingly out of left field. The sound and aesthetic design are very similar to Digidrive, yet also unique to itself. It is quite the accomplishment for such a small company to be so bold and so successful at the same time.

If you have a PS3 I feel like this is perhaps the first must buy title on the system. Yes, over Everyday Shooter (which is now on Steam too), and yes over any blu-ray Disc released title. Get it now if you haven’t. At least give the demo a try, it’s free!

Calamity Annie is perhaps the first dyke western videogame. I can’t think of any others.

I probably should have written about this game sooner, but I was under strict orders to say nothing about it except in vague terms.  I’m not really good at that so I just kept my mouth shut. It was really hard not to say anything to anyone because it is such a fantastic little indie game.

The game is quite simple, it borrows heavily from very early style saloon and parlor games. The key is quick draw. Reducing the game down to its very essence leaves you with one impression: concentration. Sure there’s many things to distract you, mini-games, story, and even tumbleweeds. Yet, as the sun beats down on you at Fister’s Alley you’ll be concentrating on nothing but the enemy at the other end of a pistol.

I highly recommend trying the game out, it’s free and can be grabbed at auntie pixelante’s site.  If you like it, please donate so that we can send out auntie to the IGF next year!

Well, I guess I should celebrate as one of my all time favorite games–Umihara Kawase–is getting brought to the US, finally. Unfortunately it’s the PSP version and not something great like an import on the PSN store for my PS3, but I’ll take what I can get.

Umihara Kawase is a strange and wonderful game about mastery and giant walking fish. I did a write up about the game a couple years ago for GameSetWatch (found here). That says just about all there is to say about the original.: UK:Shun (which the PSP version is based on) is not all that different, but mechaniclly it is a bit looser and the design is a bit more complex, but overall a very similar experience.

While there’s no release date yet (not even a fake one at Game Stop), you can play the PSP demo (JP, but works on all consoles) from here. Natsume is the US publisher which will be releasing the game in the states under the new title Yumi’s Odd Odyssey. I don’t know what sort of planetary alignment happen to make this possible, but I’m just glad it did. It seems like there’s less and less games left abandoned on the shores of the land of the rising sun these days than ever.

It seems like today was my lucky day. While doing a bit of shopping and wandering around Game Stop I picked up three great Taito packages.

First the old stuff. I grabbed PC version of Taito Legends 1&2 for around $12 total. I know what most people are thinking right now: “but you can get them all in MAME and for FREE!” that’s not the point. See, if I have the option I prefer to own legit copies of games. Sure the interface is a little annoying, but I don’t feel like I’m on the gray side of the law here. So far I’ve spent most of my time playing Elevator Action Returns, Ray Force, and a game I’d never really paid attention to yet turned out to be really excellent: Bonze Advernture.

I also found a typo on the back of the Legends 2 box!

So the other Taito game I purchased blew my mind twice: Space Invaders Extreme. My mind was initially blown when the Square-Enix logo was the first logo to pop up. I mean, I’ve know they bought out Taito, but it was still really strange and a bit heart breaking to see. I was yet again blown … by the gameplay. Now, while the game at it’s heart is still very, very much Space Invaders there’s been so much mixed into the formula that it feels really fresh, replayable, and stylish. I mean, everyone know’s that Space Invaders is now retro-sheik, but this oozes with nostalgic reference and modern aesthetic appeal.

The influence that effected SIE are easily identified: Rez and Ikaruga. I can’t simply say that SIE ripped off either game–they have been molded to fit inside of the vision we’re presented with. Auditorily Rez was about making beats and sounds that flowed with the music through player interaction. While it’s a more prominent feature in Rez than SIE, it’s still an easy connection to make. The other connection is a bit looser, but still just as easily recognized. The key “gimick” of Ikaruga is the way that you chain colored enemies to get a better score. This has been taken in by SIE and been expanded upon to be the catalyst that gives the player other weapon options, and also drives the score. Hell, if I didn’t know better I’d say that Jeff Minter had a hand in the game’s influence too.

Don’t take these comments at face value, honestly if I gave this game to my wife or many gamers who just don’t scratch too far beneath the surface they wouldn’t see these influence. The influences are ubiquitous. SIE has taken them and evolved them to fit what it needed for itself. It’s really a fantastic collaberation of the great things that the medium can do, all the while maintaing a violently faithful connection to it’s own roots. More so even than my (now) second favorite Space Invaders game: SI ‘95: Attack of the Lunar Loonies (aka Akkanvader).

Sorry Akkanvader.

E3 is over, and nothing really new has been said. How uneventful. One excellent thing did come out of it all though: the demo for Siren: Blood Curse is now up on the PSN for your shiny PS3 that sits around being used as a media center and PS2 machine without any lovely games of it’s own to keep your interest (outside of MGS4). Well, that could just be my PS3 anyways.

The original Siren for the PS2 is an excruciatingly difficult game for reasons that are hard to explain without playing through it. It took me and Sara probably a good year of starts and stops and over a hundred hours, but we did eventually finish the first game. I even liked it enough to purchase the sequel which was only released in Asia, but never got around to playing it in hopes of an eventual US release which never came about.

Even though the demo for Blood Curse is new to the US, it’s been available in Asia for a little while now, and this game was announced quite a while ago. So, honestly, E3 brings most of us nothing new. If you go about looking for information on Siren at IGN or any of the major news sites, you’ll probably come away with less information than you previously knew about the game, or less than you get from spending the 10 min with the demo that it takes to complete. Ultimately I’m severely disappointed with the only thing announced that was previously unconfirmed: the US is only getting a episodic (though, you get three episodes per… episode) release of the game in four parts for $15 each or $40 for all.

[Sidebar: I don’t like Sony’s trend to release full games as downloadable items. It’s not that I’m against digital distribution for full products (you should see my Steam list of games), It’s that they have the audacity to think that the PS3 is the same as a PC. You’re offering me proprietary software on a proprietary system that I am pretty sure Sony’s going to drop support for in the next 5 - 7 years. Something like this doesn’t really make me feel comfortable or safe plunking down that much money for, and I’d rather have something tangible that I can use to SELL and get retribution for if it’s shite. Now, calm down, I know what some of you are saying: “but Matt, the first game was a disaster sales wise, why would they want to release a physical version just to lose money on again?” First, it’s not like they lose money on it, they have all their other games supporting the occasional failure. This is how all other publishers work. By making it digitally distributed it actually lowers the amount of people who will know about the game, and hence worsens sales yet again. To top that off, it’s not like there’s a wealth of other great games for the system that’s going to get your average customer to overlook this one (which was much more the case with the PS2 release). So, in conclusion, I’m going to wait and see if the Asian version (which isn’t region coded, nor is any other PS3 game) has English menus and pick that up. This way I support the game, but stick my nose up at Sony’s inflated ego.]

Whatever, back to the game at hand. As I said there’s a new demo for Siren: Blood Curse on PSN, go download and play it now. I want to explain exactly what’s exciting about this demo, because honestly it gives initial impressions of being very mundane. The game starts off both feeling way too dark, and–ARGHmyhand–brings back awful tank controls. There’s also an new focus on combat, which is a bit misleading because your fists really aren’t going to do you any good. And, top this all off with the little niggling bit of needing to press the up button on the d-pad twice to make your flashlight turn on or off.

Moving along, the demo decides to give your your first weapon: a rusty pipe. How suiting. Now, you find that using this pipe with the control scheme is a bit unwieldy, and if there’s other survivors around you even hit them with no apparent way to avoid hurting your partners. Then the demo give you a gun. See this is where the real control scheme shines through: as soon as you pick up the gun hit R3 and never look back.  This puts the player into first person view. With no obscuring HUD or pesky aiming reticule, suddenly I’m completely absorbed into the tension and horror of the situation. The control scheme becomes natural, and the camera movements only enhance what was being shown from an outsider perspective previously.

The cherry here is that the auto-aim system is seamlessly integrated into aiming effectively feeling more like they game’s reading your mind than that it’s auto-aimed. While experimenting with the fps view on subsequent replays of the very short demo I went back to a previous area where I left a zombie (shibito) alive. I had unequipped my gun for a shovel (I don’t know why the demo makes you wait to get a gun to go into the fps mode) and try to find him. While running down some stairs, suddenly from the darkness he emerges. I swing the shovel in hopes of knocking him out, but he deftly avoids my swing and heads straight for my partner. Now, I don’t realize what’s happen at first, because after I swung the shovel the zombie disappeared below my field of vision, but the auto-aiming tracked them in a way that slowly turned me around (as though the character was looking for the zombie, rather than quick snapping zombie-locked-to-center-of-the-screen) to face them. Brilliant little moment.

After initial impressions I wasn’t so excited about Siren:BC, but now after playing around with first person perspective I’m stoked once again.

As a special bonus for all you horror fans, I’m mirroring the greatest B-Game wallpaper ever created here for your PS3’s pleasure. It reminds me of Bio-Zombie for some reason.

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.

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.