TOM FRANCIS
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Eurogamer Play Heat Signature

I let Eurogamer play Heat Signature and sat in the back seat to passive-aggressively criticise! It went great!

This is both a slightly better looking build than the last trailer, and a longer vid – shows the whole disrupt/isolate/capture cycle.

Eurogamer Gunpoint Preview

Chris Donlan has been playing Gunpoint, and gives it a lovely write up over at Eurogamer:

“The interface is uncluttered and intuitive – you just drag beams of light from the object you want to act as a trigger towards the object you want that trigger to activate – and the whole system’s bristling with opportunities, especially when you start to factor in enemy AI.”

Episode Two Death Maps

No-one seems to be reporting it, but Valve have now released stats for how players behaved in Half-Life 2: Episode Two. This time they’re more in-depth, and my favourite part is the Death Maps. They’re heat-map visualisations of where most player deaths occured in each level. This is the Death Map for the huge freeform Strider battle near the end of the game:

Loads of people died trying to defend the Sawmill, and the place to the East with the antiques, but very few near the Westernmost building. Whether that’s because it’s easy to defend or because no-one bothered to save it isn’t clear to me, but I remember it being one of the easier ones. I never managed to save the Sawmill – I’m always busy with the Hunters when the Strider takes his shot. But it’s always worth losing it just to hear the rebel shout “Oh God, not the Sawmill! Is nothing sacred?”

Soberingly the stats again reveal that less than half of all players completed the episode – 44%. That’s a slight improvement over the shorter Episode One, which confirms my feeling that Valve were much more wary of difficulty spikes here than in previous games – perhaps because of the Ep1 stats.

Because Valve are the only guys making their stats public, we may never know how this compares to the number of people who completed, say, BioShock. But you’ve got to figure games so short, so propulsively scripted and balanced for new and casual players have better completion ratios than almost anything else. So you can see why a lot of major games last less than ten hours these days.

This is my other favourite Death Map. It’s the place where you get the car – the car itself is on the upper right there. Looks like lots and lots and lots of people didn’t make the jump.

Update: just noticed there’s also an ‘Achievements’ tab. 1.1% of us got the Gnome one, making it officially the second hardest. Top is, of course, Get Some Grub – the 0.4% of players who actually earned that one probably see phosphorescent maggots when they close their eyes now.

Episode Two Conjecture

So. This is kind of exciting. We don’t get cliffhangers in games usually, certainly not the kind the world can discuss the way we do Lost. I have some theories:

Alyx isn’t dead, obviously – Confirmed!
It’s not that I don’t believe Valve would kill her – I think they will – but they wouldn’t give it away in a trailer. She’s hurt, and I’d guess out of action for pretty much the duration, so no more faux-co-op for a while.

There will be pheropods
I think you’ll have to go into the antlion tunnels seen in the trailer (there are grubs on the walls and ground) in order to defeat a queen antlion, and take her pheropod in order to send all antlions against the Combine, including Guards. So many people loved commanding antlions in Nova Prospekt, and the pheropod’s the only weapon that doesn’t feature in Episode One. Alyx’s presence throughout E1 was a response to the positive feedback about her, and I think they’ll use each episode to go to town on something people loved about Half-Life 2.

There’ll be a vehicle, probably a new one – Confirmed!
Your train is clearly crashing only a short way out of City 17, and the place is blowing up. You’ve got to get out of there fast, and we know from the trailer that you reach Eli and the others at their hideout, well out of the blast radius. No way are you walking. The obvious choice would be the jeep again, but it was a customised one-off vehicle, and there’s no reason it would be around (no-one knew you’d crash there). I’d love to think air, since they’ve done land and sea, but it’s more likely going to be a different wheeled vehicle. My gut says no to the Combine APC – too clunky and too familiar. I also can’t imagine it’ll be a civvie car – not interesting enough. But something…

Odessa Cubbage will return, and betray the rebellion – New entry!
Raising The Bar mentions that Cubbage originally played a bigger role in Half-Life 2, and turned out to be a nasty piece of work. He was also Alyx’s father, which is referenced in a little joke Alyx makes in Episode One. That’s one of three times Cubbage is mentioned in Episode One, which I think is to refresh our memories of that character’s existence in preparation for a reappearence. He’s also an outdoorsy type, and Episode Two is going to be mostly outdoors. That’s science.

And some questions:

Where are the Advisor Pods going?
Not up, seemingly.

What information did the Combine send back to their home world?
We get no clues that I can see as to what that data packet contains, but I would guess it’s something Alyx and co don’t already know – i.e. more than just info on what the rebels are up to.

Where is Judith and what’s she doing there?
She mentions ‘what’s left of the project’ and something about information the Combine might have gathered about it. The fact that she’s in what looks to be a snowy climate implies, to me, that the Vortigaunt’s teleportation is the slow kind, like the one that skipped a week during HL2. This time you were ported a shorter distance and the time skipped was probably only six hours or so.

Will we ever meet the Hydra?
It was a City 17 thing, the only time we glimpsed it, and now City 17’s gawn.

Who’s in charge here?
Half-Life 2 made it look like a Combine Advisor was the big boss of the Combine, somewhere far off on an alien world. Episode One makes it look like there are dozens of them, all in the Citadel. It also shows us they have a weird psionic attack – it didn’t do any damage in the Citadel, but perhaps it has another effect. The Advisor pods don’t fly up to space when they eject from the Citadel at the end, they snake off above the ground. The commentary suggests that we’ll be fighting them.

Episode Three Conjecture

Suffering from blogger’s paralysis, wanting to talk about five different things but having no preference as to which, I’ll just stick with the theme. This is a bit silly, of course, Episode Two being six months off, but Dabs mentioned something I’d forgotten, and I looked it up, and he’s right. Raising The Bar, the superb coffee-table book about Half-Life 2’s development, mentions that at one point a large section of the game was set in an arctic base, called Weather Control. Examining a scan of a map sketch, it even mentions a ‘Judith at Weather Control’ scene.

I don’t think we’re going there in Episode Two – it’s a whole new country and Episode Two is already introducing a very large and very different environment, but we’ve been shown it now, and I really buy the idea that they’d finish the trilogy in a very different kind of place. Also of note are two aspects of Valve’s design philosophy: a) that the player should see where he’s going to end up long before he gets there (mentioned in Raising The Bar), and b) that you don’t show the player something cool then deny him it (mentioned in Gamespot’s The Final Hours Of Half-Life 2, I think). Wherever the climax of Half-Life 2: Episodes, we’ll glimpse it well in advance, and whenever it happens, we will go to Weather Control.

My final, third piece of evidence is one of the most universal tenets of videogame cliché: all expansion packs, however they’re delivered, must take you to a snowy environment.

I’m not sure how far they got with the section when it was going to be a part of Half-Life 2 – the name makes it sound like it served a Combine function like the Air Exchange, which had a lot built around it before it was cut – but there’s a short story by Marc Laidlaw in there written as inspirational material for the section. Sort of like textual concept art. It describes an intense climactic battle between Combine reinforcements who’ve tracked down the main rebel force, a last stand by the latter. Snowstorms and ice explosions. Enticing.

Ending, An Interesting Roguelite Puzzle Game With Extraordinary Sound Design

Found via Mike Bithell and Dan Cook, Ending is a puzzle game where you move around a tile-based dungeon, one square at a time, and enemies only move when you do. That’s normal for Rogue-like games, but here it’s also used as a puzzle: it’s all about trying to get enemies to walk into your attack range before you walk into theirs.

There are a bunch of cool things about it. Continued

Ending A Space War With A Punch In Heat Signature

The next thing I wanna let you do in Heat Signature is take the helm of an enemy ship and fly it yourself. But right now, things go very screwy if you’re on a ship as it accelerates. So I’m redoing all the relative velocity code to make sure the contents of a ship stay stable while it’s jerking around.

I was testing the new code just now, and headed for a small ship to dock with it. Continued

Elsewhere

None of my photos of fireworks came out, so here are some various strangers around the world took last night.

John, Leonardtown

Adam, Poland

Joel, New Mexico

Matt, Canada

Stephen, Melbourne

Serdar, Sydney

Easy A

I remember hearing something vaguely positive about Easy A, but to be honest I watched it because I have a weak spot for trashy coming of age movies set in high schools. I wasn’t planning on ever telling anyone. I didn’t realise it was going to be excellent. Continued

E3’s Violence Overload, Versus Gaming’s Usual Violence Overload

While frying a piece of fish, I wondered why the violence shown at the main conferences at E3 got to me, despite the fact that I play violent games all the time. Continued

Drawing With Gravity In Floating Point

So Floating Point’s a game about using a wire to swing through randomly generated spaces smoothly. When you do, avoiding obstacles and picking up speed, everything about the game tries to celebrate and reward that flow state: you glow, the music picks up, the collectible bars in the level get more valuable, and grow tall so they’re easier to hit.

One effect I fancied but considered low priority was some kind of trail: maybe particles or sparks or something. So I had a quick look to see how hard this would be in Unity, and discovered something called a Trail Renderer. I tried it, and it looked like this: Continued

Dragon Age Unclear On The Use Of Swords

My Rogue Elf (below) uses swords and crossbows, but the game’s starting to get them mixed up. It’ll probably right itself if I ever get a new crossbow, which seems like a good reason not to.

You’re stuck with the surname ‘Tabris’, so I eventually went with ‘Altris’ for my first.

If you’re playing it this weekend too, which Origin did you pick? Was it any good? The Female City Elf story is quite compelling, which is actually sort of a problem: the main story is nothing like as involving. I keep feeling like this is a slightly dreary sidequest I have to do before I can get back to the cause that interests me, so I’m feigning concern for the fate of the world.

Despite the weird lack of good shots before release, it’s actually super photogenic thanks to a remove-interface key.

I’m enjoying it mechanically, but the five or so hours I’ve played are a textbook example of BioWare trying so hard to be epic that they’ve failed to make it personal. I hope and half expect that something I give a shit about will happen soon.

Update: Just discovered you can not only see my character online, but read a bullet point summary of all the plot developments and major decisions I’ve made (spoilers for up to level 9) – they’re even time stamped. Scary.

I don’t want to talk about this quest.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

After proudly announcing a return to normal programming, I studiously wrote the first line of eight different posts and then watched Futurama until I passed out. I’ve been working for fifteen consecutive days at this point and I don’t sleep for long, so you might have to bear with me a bit.

This needs blogging about urgently, though, because it’s an online televisual event that will happen at an actual time! Tomorrow! Written by Joss Whedon and some other people, starring Nathan Fillion, Neil Patrick Harris and my close personal friend Felicia Day, it has two things in common with Firefly, and it’s about a supervillain, and it’s got Felicia Day, who is interviewed in the issue of PC Gamer on-sale in two weeks. Run, don’t walk, to your newsvendor. But run slow enough that you get there around the end of July.

It’s also a musical, and admittedly I haven’t liked one of those since Dancer In The Dark, but still. The three acts go up Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and stay up till Sunday, but I’m particularly keen on watching it as it comes out, because I am as mentioned in love with the idea of international premieres.

The premiere is something the internet’s sort of destroying and recreating at the same time: movies are splattered across the release schedule as people pirate them early, wait for the DVD, or wait to pirate the DVD. TV is Tivo’d and DVD sets are Netflixed bit by bit, but increasingly significant things are getting put out as webisodes. And in that, we’ve got the communal excitement of every fanatic devouring new content at the same time, world-wide instead of country-wide.

…

S’cool.

Update! Spit! This thing is the exact opposite of what I just said! It’s being broadcast via the evil Hulu, which is US-only. Way to defeat the whole spirit of the thing, jerk-wads!

Nevertheless, it is live now, and if you just grab Hotspot Shield or another sneaky proxy service of your choice, you can disguise yourself as an American and watch. Think of it as a baseball cap and a few extra pounds for your browser.

Update! It’s good! But doesn’t get very far in its 14 minutes. I now advise waiting till it’s all out on Saturday and watching then, since someone blew the whole worldwide premiere idea. Felicia suggests non-US people wait ‘a bit’, and adds a smiley face. Make of that what you will.

Update! As Iain and Graham note, the US-only restriction seems to have been removed.

Update! Act 2 is out and even better! Also, the whole thing is getting crazy popular, which is awesome. Provided they can refrain from fucking up the region thing, more of this sort of thing!

Update! It’s over! What did you think? Spoilerific comments below. I thought it went from good to great and back to good. The end seemed to be leveraging an emotional investment that I didn’t really have. I was there for the lols.

Don’t Make Me Play Football Manager

“Portrait? I don’t have a photo ready for this, but I’ll see what I’ve got in My Documents. Ah yes, an animated GIF Tim sent me of David Hasselhoff wearing David Hasselhoff briefs, which zooms into his crotch recursively, forever. Perfect.”

Over at the PC Gamer blog today, the full story of my doomed attempt to play the one game I know for sure I’ll hate: Football Manager. It doesn’t go well.

Don’t Blog While Stupid

I was just about to write an attack on browser programmers for not making the space bar scroll down one page when tapped, then discovered that it already does exactly that.