TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Crysis Week: The Endingening

The last few games I’ve been really excited about I’ve also had the good fortune to review, so it’s been a long time since I’ve been sat at home, house to myself, supplies stacked up, lights off, with a sparkly, exotic new game to dive into. Particularly one as momentous as Crysis.

70cl Sycamore Canyon Cabernet Sauvignon (2006 – a memorable vintage for Californian reds, I think we can all agree)
1 packet chilli & coriander Walkers Sensations
6x chocolate mousses (it’s okay! They’re Be Good To Yourself, and therefore a meaningless smidgen less lethal)
70cl dark Jamaican Rum (for the tropical ambience)
2x cinnamon danish swirls (not sure where these came from)
1 packet mixed sour cream and chive potato snacks
1 litre Tropicana orange juice (‘with juicy bits’ I’m assured)
1 Fox’s Favourites variety pack of biscuits (‘perfect for sharing?’ the packaging optimistically suggests)
1 large bowl of popcorn, with banoffee syrup
227 grams of Viennese fig-seasoned filter coffee grounds (purchased on the basis of the impossibly romantic photo of a presumably Viennese bistro-cafe on the packet)
1 Crysis-capable PC

To the South China sea! Further report when I take my first rum-and-danish break.

Things I’d forgotten:

• Far Cry tactics (drive a jeep at them) don’t work on Delta difficulty.
• I can happily take freaking hours over one group of enemies.
• Cloak mode makes the world sound muted and distant. I’m not sure I forgot this, I don’t think it happened in the demo.
• The soundscape is as remarkable as the graphics, and everything sounds better super loud.
• Boats are dicks.
• Alert enemies can hear you reload while cloaked if you’re standing right next to them.
• Psycho is a psycho, but Jester isn’t funny and Prophet isn’t very good at predicting things. Aztec may have been from Central America.
• In every cut-scene, the characters re-state their point three times before the other person replies to it. Three times.
  
   
• Rum goes well with cinnamon.

Wow, Crysis escalates quickly. I took a leisurely hour and a bit replaying the demo section, but even that is a startlingly short time to get into the groove of the basics before they start throwing tanks and helicopters at you. Far Cry spent a long time avoiding the subject of what more it could do, beyond shooting mercenaries on an island, and it didn’t have a very good answer when it got there. Crysis seems confident it’s got plenty more than preying on frightened North Korean troops in a jungle, and it’s keen to introduce it quickly. Risky! Observations, in order:

1. Holy shit, this next level is huge.
   
    
2. Holy shit, this level is around twice the size I thought it was when I called it ‘huge’.
3. Is there supposed to be a helicopter chasing me the whole time, which can insta-kill me with explosives even when I’m cloaked? Because it’s making my life kind of difficult.
   
    
4. Wow, this level is huge.
   
    
5. OH GOD TANKS. I’d been wondering how Crysis would ever get hard if I can always cloak for huge periods of time. Tanks, coupled with swarms of inquisitve NK troops, really work. The tank just KEEPS… ON… FIRING at where it last saw me, forever, and there are so many troops that it’s hard to slip around to a new vantage point without bumping into them. It’s doing a really good job of fucking up my plans and forcing me to improvise.
6. I’m calling the North Korean president you keep seeing on posters Kim Yong-Yerli. Here’s why:
   
   Eternal President of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Kim Yong-il

   
   Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli

   
   Kim Yong-Yerli

   
    
7. My character confidently informs command that the landing zone is ‘hot’, but I can’t see anyone, and I am him. After a few minutes of searching, I think of a better way to locate enemies: firing my shotgun in the air like a redneck.
8. OH GOD NANOSUITS. They’re everywhere. They’re invisible. They’re jumping over rocks. They have sniper rifles. They’re super-tough. This is fucking brilliant.

The whole game up until this point – even the tank and helicopter bits – were me using my unfair advantage to prey on people. Sometimes it took a while to work out how my suit functions gave me the upper hand, but they always did. Finally they don’t, and it’s a weird and wonderful feeling. There are four or so of these guys, and they can do everything I can. I’m suddenly being asked to outwit not just an equal, but a squadron of equals. The game expects me to completely rock – I appreciate that.

WAR WERE DECLARED. This is new – sort of. Far Cry had that Rebellion level that tried to be a nocturnal warzone, but the trigens didn’t make a very good side. And it was obvious that no-one fought until you turned up, so the best tactic was to creep into activation range, creep back out and wait for them to kill each other. This is a lot more dynamic, and a very different feel to anything we saw of Crysis before release.

The atmosphere is awesome here, volatile and thrilling in a way that Call of Duty 4 never was for me. I always knew what was going on in CoD – there’s no point trying to make it past that barbed wire coil before the marines pull it across the street, because I know there’ll be an invisible barrier there; there’s no point worrying about the enemies seeing me in this sniper section because they’re hardcoded not to; there’s no point trying to clear that building because the enemies are on an infinite respawn; etc. I don’t know Crysis very well yet, but it doesn’t seem to be constructed of such binary, artificial rules. There’s no-one I’m safe from, no-one who’s safe from me, and that feels more like war to me.

The transition from a night-time warzone mission based around a large bay area, to an assault on a heavily guarded city port by morning light, is amazing. This is the point of the Crysis engine – the sheer scale it can cope with lets it chain together disparate adventures into one enormous, calamitous and intensely personal narrative. Level transitions never felt like they were disrupting the experience in other games, but this just demonstrates how much more absorbing, exciting and unique your journey becomes when it’s unbroken.

PS. The missile launcher is so fucking great. In most games that mix vehicles and infantry, the armour’s a chore to take down because even when you’re hitting its weakspot for massive damage, it just takes a long time. The noobtube in Crysis lets you appear out of thin air and get nail anything with two rockets to kerplode it. This war zone level was pure cathartic revenge on dick-boats. The slight heat-seeking is a godsend, too. It’s like they actually looked at what wasn’t fun about anti-vehicle combat and… took it out? So few designers think like that.

– lol i has a tank
– lol it broke
– lol

I actually rather enjoyed this. The scale is just so staggering, it looks like some of those vast open valleys that made Lost so escapist. It’s a strange decision to make the first time you get a tank the absolute worst time to be in a tank, but once you leave it you start to see where one might be useful, and by the time I’d hijacked my second I was quite enjoying the speed and power.

Like Graham, when that mountain started to crumble I physically got out of my tank to gawp. God damn.

I think this might be my favourite so far. It’s not that different from the early jungle levels, but much more intense. There are so many goddamn troops, and stalking the nanos amongst them is thrilling. I replayed the section where you have to clear the landing zone for the VTOLs, just before the Quarry proper, three or four times. It always ended with my decloaking behind a nano to do this to him with the minigun:

The entrance to the quarry was the first bit that’s been pretty tricky on Delta – apart from when I alerted that helicopter a bit early and it followed me for half an hour before I found my first missile launcher. Tricky in a good way though – it’s a proper, volatile warzone with you in the enemy trenches and friendly fire raining down around you.

The boss-fight inside was hilarious. I wasn’t really paying attention, so when I got control of my body I just kind of ambled up some stairs, found a guy there who looked familiar and kept punching him until he fell into a pile of crates and died. He never fired a shot or said a word. I don’t know what that fight’s like if you let him get an attack in, but I wasn’t trying very hard to stop him.

 

Inside The Thing

Whoa! I didn’t expect this so soon. I thought the alien ship would be the climax of the game, so that they could lead you gradually from the familiar (jungle) to the unfamiliar (frozen jungle) and then the entirely alien. Nope. Alien right here.

I was really looking forward to some mind-bending stuff here, but there’s not a lot to it. It’s not truly directionless 3D like Descent, it sort of auto-rotates you to a predefined notion of down for each locality.

It’s very, very pretty and such a clean break from the environments until now, but there’s nothing to do here. The enemies aren’t at all scary or fun to fight, because they’re terrified of your bullets and strangely reluctant to use their own. The best tactic is to sit and take pot-shots, during which you’re completely safe.

When they do get to you their melee attack is powerful, but it’s not really clear what it is. Are they just slapping me with their wibbly hands? I’ll try to avoid that, since it clearly kills me, but it’s hard to work up any kind of primal fear over that kind of threat. Wibble hands, I mean.

Things I would have liked:

• A baffling ‘there is no down’ design.
• Ferocious enemies that act like they’re at home in this enviroment you’re struggling with.
• Bigger, stranger enemies – this has the potential to be as scary as swimming with sharks, but these things are just wibbly dudes.
• More functional features to the enviroment – there’s only one thing in this whole world: fragile generators. I wanted to be fascinated by this place, but I quickly grokked there was nothing functional in it.
• Less wibble.

The Scouts: ooh! They’re like angry metal space frogs! Last time I saw these dudes, at a preview event, they just floated around vaguely, firing. This exotic, fierce pattern of movement makes them much more threatening and entertaining to fight.

At first I thought their extreme mobility rendered most of Crysis’ most interesting tactics – i.e. stealth – unviable. But now that I’ve played around with them for a while, I realise that’s not true. It’s quite possible to cloak and kidnap these dudes, or nail them with a hurled trashcan mid-air, and even find refuge from them to recharge your cloak. It’s just a little trickier on all fronts than it is with the Koreans.

What is missing is the ability to plan your attack from afar, since these things are always sprung on you. And the actual missions throughout, here, are time-sensitive and ally-oriented, which really does render all but the shootiest of approaches pointless. Which brings me to:

Prophet: this guy gets a section of his own because OH MY GOD HE’S A TWAT. He stands there, dying, screeching at me to get him out of there when there IS no exit to this arena. My objective is to defend him, but no-one’s attacking him. I eventually find there’s a Scout stuck on a jeep in the corner of the clearing, and I have to kill him before the next wave will spawn, and kill those super-fast to trigger the next wave, which inexplicably causes an unrelated scripted sequence in which a wall of the arena is blown open.

So Prophet follows, whining endlessly about cover and his suit energy – neither of which seems like my problem. After refusing to follow me and standing in the middle of an empty canyon until he dropped dead of exposure, Prophet – in his next life when I reload – finally decides to tell me that he needs to linger near a fire. By which he means, he needs me to linger near a fire – because there’s no way he could see or move to one by himself, since blazing car wrecks are invisible.

There’s also no way he can stay near one – he wanders off a few metres and stands there, waiting to die, while shouting at me to find some cover, and by cover he means fire, which is right there, and by me he means him, a guy standing next to some fire.

This is dismal.

In which you’re fighting off the stuff with the guys outside the cold thing, but in a place which is still pretty cold.

I just love the look of this place – a tropical shack frozen inside and out, every surface sparkling with frost and smudged with glove or bootprints.

I quite like the game, too. It forgets about the nanosuit and the notion of freedom, but the aliens are almost interesting enough to fight in a straight action-game way that they make up for it. Almost.

The frosty version of the Gauss Rifle is one of the most beautiful weapon models I’ve ever seen, and the gun is supremely satisfying to nail aliens with.

This is the first time you fight a Big Thing. It’s called a Hunter, I think, and they really fudge its introduction. The thing is just absolutely no threat to you, your first impression of the most visually spectacular enemy in the game is that it’s mostly harmless.

It’s a total non-fight – you don’t shoot at it because you know you probably can’t hurt it yet, and it doesn’t shoot at you presumably because they thought that would be too punishing on the player. They’ve wasted the moment when I inevitably do get to fight it, because I’ll no longer be impressed by the thing.

When you think of all the hard work the artists and coders put into making that thing look and move this way, it makes you want to slap the game designer in his stupid face.

Major Strickland isn’t impressed either.

Sucks. It’s not very long and it’s not very difficult, and it might have made a nice break in between two actually good missions, but placed where it is it’s just another shallow, uninspired and badly-made novelty section in a long line of shallow, uninspired and badly-made novelty sections that are rapidly exhausting my interest in playing this at all.

There’s not much point in making faces this detailed if you still don’t have the technology to animate them convincingly. It’s also just not worth putting much effort into characters in a game like Crysis. Two things are brilliant in this section, though:

1. The scientist in the Armoury has just upgraded Prophet’s suit, whereupon Prophet goes crazy and declares that he’s going to hijack US military equipment to fly straight into the target area of a tactical nuke, wrestles Psycho out of his way and storms off to his radioactive death. And the scientist turns to you and says, “So, what can I do for you?”

I can’t type in this suit, and sometimes that makes me sad.

2. When the general angrily hammers his finger on the LCD map in the control room, little digital ripples bend around the pressure point just like they do on a real screen. Dear person at Crytek who thought of that: I love you.

Oh look, the Hunter’s back, and he sucks. We’ve seen him before, he’s not very dangerous, and the solution to this fight is to just shoot at him a lot when you’re told to.

If they work out how to attack more than three at a time, we’re screwed.

The second boss’s entrance is fantastic – potently cinematic and genuinely unsettling. But when he’s fully emerged, the craft itself is rubbish – it has no particular features, just a vague lump of alien stuff. The battle is worse still – shoot the turrets? Really? You’re going with that?

A good boss ought to challenge the skills you’ve learned playing the game – in Crysis, that’s using the nanosuit. The Korean general could have been a great one, done right – you have no weapons, you both have nanosuits, you’ve got to outwit him by using yours better to compensate for being outgunned. A big floating lump of metal that you just have to shoot a lot? Not so much.

I don’t mind a hint that there’s more to be done, but it’s a bit much when your character gears up for a very specific and exciting-sounding mission, and then the credits roll. But Crysis does start with an advert – even after the six compulsory sponsor promos – so it’s fitting that it essentially ends with one, too.

Most of the varied post-Quarry sections, as banal and ineptly made as they are, would have made appreciated breaks from the real meat of Crysis: time-consuming open-ended stealth combat in huge forested areas. That type of play could actually do with some dumb variety to punctuate it – it’s almost exhausting.

But Crysis’ contents have settled during transit, and all the big chunks of freeform goodness are clustered in a dauntingly weighty lump at the start, while the sugary tack of the brainless sections has congealed in a sickly mess toward the end.

It’s guilty of the very thing people unfairly kicked Far Cry for: going permanently off the rails halfway through. Or more accurately, going permanently on them.

One of the infamously linear, Trigen-riddled later levels of Far Cry.

• That Helena Rosenthal is played by Aeryn Sun from Farscape? It’s true!

• That the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer – or perhaps just someone with the same name – is in Crysis? ‘Female scientist’, apparently – I remember no such person.
• That having heard the Crysis credits were absurdly long, I inexplicably decided to sit through them all? NOW YOU DO!
• That the game artificially limits the number of enemies allowed to fire at you at once? On Hard, it’s 5. On Delta, it’s 20.
• That, more importantly, one of the localisation team is called ‘Jazz Wang’?

Crysis Suit Modes Revisited

Just got round to revisiting Crysis on my new machine – the torture-test for high-end hardware. And it’s good news: everything on maximum at 1600×1200 purs along at 30fps. I say maximum, I haven’t tried the hack to enable all the DX10 stuff under DX9 yet – I will do.

After I first played it, I wrote a post about how I’d change all the Nanosuit’s augmentation modes if it were up to me, but it was lost in the great hard drive failure of recently. Replaying now, I find that I agree with myself entirely, and repeat my thoughts here for your amusement:

Cloak: the problem with Cloak as it stands is that it provides an extremely effective but rather tedious way to play. Cloak, run forwards ten metres, lie down in the nearest bush, decloak and wait for it to recharge. That’s fine in the middle of tense combat against multiple enemies, but most of your time is spent exploring a new, densely forested area where you don’t know if there are enemies are not. You instinctively want to approach cautiously, as you should, but the cautious option just takes a really long time and often turns out to have been pointless because there was no-one around anyway.

I’d like a Cloak mode that drains suit power at a rate proportional to how visible you are. I.e. how much work it has to do to keep you hidden. If no-one’s actually nearby and looking in your direction, it drains no power because it doesn’t have to do anything. But if you’re right in front of someone and they’re looking right at you, it drains rapidly because it’s having to render you entirely invisible. Your suit already knows how clearly you’re being seen by enemies – there’s a meter for it in the bottom left of your HUD.

It’d let you explore safely when you don’t know if there are enemies around, and when your suit power starts to drain, you find cover and look out for enemies. But if you’re in the middle of a firefight and want to slip by your enemies, you only have a small window to do so. Right now, I can just walk away from any firefight at any time, which makes them all a little easy.

Speed: at the moment this makes you go a little faster, makes your sprint speed preposterously fast, and then has a third, in-between speed for when you’ve run out of energy but are still sprinting. Your super-fast sprint exhausts all your suit energy in a second or two, which makes you feel a bit like you’re running on five year-old Duracell batteries. It’s one of those design decisions where they wanted to give you an extreme ability, but couldn’t find a way to balance it without an extreme nerf, and the result is rather awkward.

I’d want that third fast-but-not-crazy-fast speed to be the normal movement speed in Speed mode. Speed. The super-jumping of Strength mode should be part of Speed mode instead, and I really liked Jedi Knight’s system of being able to charge a jump by holding the key before releasing – so that you can still do small hops. None of this should drain your suit energy, but it also shouldn’t regenerate unless you’re standing still.

Holding the Sprint key wouldn’t make you go any faster, it’d slow down the world around you instead. The only games that don’t need slow-mo are the ones that already have it.

\

Armour: here the problem is that if I know I’m about to be taking fire, the absolute last mode I want to be in is Armour. Because it’s the only mode in which shots drain your suit energy, which deprives you of the only two effective ways to escape a sticky situation: cloaking or super-sprinting.

Clearly, it shouldn’t. Instead of absorbing damage like an extra health bar, it should work the way armour normally does: full energy means you only take half-damage, no energy means you take full. Energy neither regenerates nor drains when in armour mode.

Except when you press Sprint. This would render you completely invulnerable until you run out of energy, but you move like the walking tank that you are: slowly. It’d let you pull stunts like cloaking to the middle of the road when you see an enemy Humvee coming, then switching to Armour and going invuln to make them crash into you. Or similarly, surviving a head-on vehicular collision that results in an explosion fatal to everyone else involved. Or throwing yourself off a huge drop and surviving. Or wading towards an angry tank, planting a detpack on it, and blowing it up right in your own face.

Strength: so the problem with Strength mode right now is that it outright fucking sucks. It should be the coolest mode, but everything you do in it drains nearly all your energy, and is woefully less effective than simply shooting people. Also, shooting people drains your energy. Jesus.

As I say, jumping has no place in this mode, it shouldn’t be about mobility, it should be about hitting stuff. A Strength-mode punch or melee attack should always kill, obviously, and furthermore should flip a Humvee like it ain’t no thing. Hell, you should be able to flip a tank if you can get right up to it and hold ‘Pick up’ long enough. I have no objection to Strength mode steadying your grip with weapons, as it currently does, but causing that to rapidly drain your vital suit-juice is just the most despicable and moronic form of the Limit Everything design philosophy.

Sprint mode would be a kind of murderous charge, barreling forth shoulder-first and canoning anything you hit flying out of your way – including vehicles and walls.

Conversations With Strangers

Update! Some great conversations from the comments added to the bottom of this post (now with moar!)

Last night Waxy.org linked a service called Omegle, which instantly puts you in a one-on-one chat with an anonymous stranger. I tried it.

I said it “Supposedly” did this when I linked it on Twitter, because I thought it might be a bot coded to randomly insult people, as a joke on the stereotype that people on the internet are twats.

After three conversations, that was still my prevailing theory.

For my fourth, I decided to try and break the pattern by acting like an utter dick first.

You’re now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!
You: I HATE YOU!
Stranger: my head hurts :'(
Stranger: don’t be rude i’m sensitive
You: I thought I’d try being the crazy one.
Stranger: thanks, asshole
You: Any… any time?
You: Maybe all the crazy people I talked to were trying the same thing.
Stranger: you’re an inconsiderate jerk
Stranger: what’s your favorite animal
You: This one: http://mfrost.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2009/03/29/otter2.jpg
Stranger: why did you already have that link open and ready, you’re a fucking freeak.
Stranger: WTF
Stranger: THAT’S CUTE
Stranger: LOL

A pause.

You: Did that make your head any better?
Stranger: temporarily, yes
Stranger: thank you for your kind gestures………

I had to admit that it probably wasn’t a bot after all. Which suddenly made starting new conversations strangely compulsive.

Stranger: Jesus loves you
You: I’m just not that into him.
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

Stranger: z
You: zz
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

Stranger: o herd u liek
Stranger: consensual sex in the missionary position?
You: Yep.
Stranger: hm
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

You: Rah!
Stranger: hello stranger
You: Hello.
Stranger: male/female?
You: I like to start conversations the way I imagine godzilla would.
You: Male.
Stranger: excellent
You: The godzilla thing or the male thing?
Stranger: bothhhhhhhhhh
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

You: Hi. I reckon your favourite colour is blue.
Stranger: I reckon it aint.
You: Oh. What is it?
Stranger: My favorite colour is red
Stranger: yours?
You: Probably green.
Stranger: well that tells me alot about your personality.
You: Oh yeah? Red suggests to me that you’re an angry man.
Stranger: quite the contrary
Stranger: a passionate woman
You: I say.

Both Steve and Meteoracle shared shots of their conversations with wildly unhinged racists, and Steve inexplicably turned down an offer of sex with a robot. But one of my favourites was actually recounted to me by someone I was talking to on Omegle at the time:

You’re now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!
Stranger: please don’t disconnect
Stranger: i love you

J-Man:

Amusingly I was talking to a 14 year old girl, and she asked if I was single. I said yes, and she told me it was because I talk to 14 year old girls on the internet.

You: Your appointment to FEMA should be finalized within the week. I’ve already discussed the matter with the Senator.
Stranger: hi!
Stranger: whut?
You: He didn’t really have a choice.
Stranger: who did’nt…
You: When I mentioned we could put him on the priority list for the Ambrosia vaccine, he was so willing it was almost pathetic
Stranger: you did’nt kill him did you?
You: Why contain it? Let it spill over the schools and churches, let the bodies pile up in the streets. In the end they’ll beg us to save them.
Stranger: Lets see… I’m actually kind in to that
You: They can smell their deaths, and the sound they’ll make rattling their cages will serve as a warning to the rest.
Stranger: i love it
You: The world left them behind long ago. We are the future.
Stranger: lets kill m all
You: Our biochem corpus is far in advance of theirs, as is our electronic sentience, and their… ‘ethical inflexibility’ has allowed us to make progress in areas they refuse to consider.
Stranger: true… true
You: But, I must admit, I’ve been somewhat disappointed with the performance of the primary unit.
Stranger: Well, mine is work. dont know about yours?
You: We’ve had to endure much, you and I, but soon there will be order again. A new age. Aquinas spoke of the mythical city on the hill, soon that city will be a reality and we will be crowned its kings. Or, better than kings… gods.
Stranger: I’m not sure if we should become what we want to be. The goverment is lying about the fact that they will support us. Who will tell?
You: All right. I get the picture. You want a piece of the pie, or you’re going to toss the whole pie out the window. Fair enough. You can have anything you want. How about Europe? Your own continent. Just let me complete my preparations.
Stranger: Go ahead. let my see
You: What an expensive mistake you turned out to be. I’ve ordered the troops to kill you, because quite frankly I don’t have the patience to wait for one of those damn killswitches to work.
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

EGTF

You’re now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!
Stranger: oh its you! hows it been goin?
You: Oh my it’s you too!
You: Very well
You: How’ve things been since we last spoke?
Stranger: fag
Stranger: go die in a fire
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

Ush:

Connecting to server…
You’re now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!
You: *guitar riff* hello
Stranger: *drum roll* FUCK YOU
You: *thousands of people shouting at once* Well thats not polite
Stranger: *people who care* What
You: *a dozen horses screaming in unison* i mean you could have said “hi”
Stranger: * A 1000 orphans crying * I’m Sorry let me start again HI
You: *wind-up monkeys clanging together* Thats better, see? not so hard to be civil
Stranger: *Loud noises* are you from a forum
You: *the laughter of children remixed* Oh no, nasty dirty places they are.
You: *cello solo in an empty hall* where are you from?
Stranger: * 200 african americans* they are nice places to meet new friends
Stranger: *400 cups of tea clanking* im from britain
You: *trumpets blaring* i am from a country quite close to britain
Stranger: *I have ran out of noises* france?
You: *coins hitting a marble floor from a height* nope!
You: *sheet metal being torn* To be honest Im not going to say.
Stranger: * strange gruntiing noises* sweeden
Stranger: * fecal matter hitting porcelain* why
You: *discordant flutes* nope! because I am a naturally paranoid person. whats it like out where you are?
Stranger: * children crying* awful but the weather is getting better
You: *The worlds largest fishbowl being tapped with a hollow iron bar* ’twas a lovely day here! I say, do you like tea?
Stranger: *N/A* No
You: *echoing footsteps* Thats a shame. There is a lot to be enjoyed with a good cup of tea.
You: *A heifer in heat* Take Earl Gray, for example.
Stranger: to be honest i have never had a full cup of tea
You: *Steam whistle* You really should try one you know. Take Earl Gray, for instance.
You: *The dark hum of space* Strong and refreshing like regular tea, but with a hint of lemon that affects your pallette in a completely different way…
Stranger: I see
Stranger: anyway i best be off chap
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

sQUEAKYfOAMpEANUT:

You: >Ye see before ye a SWAMP
You: >What wouldst thou do?
You: >
Stranger: FUCK YOUR MOTHER.
You: >You approach the fearsome FUCK YOUR MOTHER, brandishing your sword.
You: >The FUCK YOUR MOTHER attacks!
Stranger: SUCK MY DICK, FUCK YOUR MOTHER
You: >FIGHT >ITEMS >FLEE
Stranger: >FLEE
You: >You cannot escape! The FUCK YOUR MOTHER is far too large!
Stranger: >ITEMS
Stranger: >ITEMS
Stranger: >ITEMS
Stranger: >ITEMS
Stranger: >ITEMS
You: >You open up your SATCHEL to ruffle through your ITEMS. You have with you a BANANA, a MICK’S TAPE, and a SMALL ROCK. What woudst thou do?
Stranger: >use BANANA to FUCK YOUR MOTHER
You: >You throw your mighty BANANA at the fearsome FUCK YOUR MOTHER, who falls writhing to the ground in agony.
You: >You have defeated the FUCK YOUR MOTHER!
Stranger: FUCK YEAH!
You: >You gain three experience points, and the TOE OF THE FUCK YOUR MOTHER.
You: >Ye see before ye a SWAMP
Stranger: >QUIT
You: >NO ESCAPE
Stranger: oh shi-
You: >YOU SHALL PLAY FOREVER

Kadir:

You: go
Stranger: get
You: a
Stranger: great
You: big
Stranger: fucking
You: bunch
Stranger: of
You: pickles
Stranger: that
You: smell
Stranger: like
You: they
Stranger: were
You: about
Stranger: to
You: go
Stranger: have
You: a
Stranger: flight
You: of
Stranger: greatness
You: to
Stranger: alpha
You: centari
Stranger: to
You: find
Stranger: ender
You: and
Stranger: his
You: huge
Stranger: influential
You: admired
Stranger: sister
You: who
Stranger: wrote
You: about
Stranger: the
You: war
Stranger: let’s stop right now and agree we need to be friends, okay??

Construction Ahead

Please excuse the state of this place while I tinker with it a little. I have a visual retartening planned out, and the current design will start to look glitchy as I rip it up and force the new one in. I’ll let you know when it’s supposed to look right, and you can tell me that it really doesn’t.

Concerned

Concerned satirises Half-Life 2 with affection, though. The title refers to the protagonist’s pen-name – he’s the author of one of the letters Breen reads out on his compulsory telecast at the start of the game. That strip is probably my favourite of the many tie-ins with the experiences of Gordon Freeman, who presumably arrives a week or so later.

Probably not intentionally, the positive outlook of the main character also plays to my own subconscious desires to live in City 17. It says something about a game’s artists when they create a dystopia so beautifully it undermines the dystopian bit.

Comparing Notes In Spelunky’s Unique Daily Adventures

Spelunky is out on PC again! The fancy version this time, and with a new feature that is obsessing me more than ever before. Every day, there’s one set of randomly generated levels that’s the same for every Spelunky player. Everyone gets one try at it, and when they die, that’s it, they can never play it again.

The scores for each person’s attempt are ranked, of course, but I don’t really care about that. The reason it’s so fascinating to me is that it takes a generative game – one that’s different every time – and gives it one of the most appealing things about pre-scripted games: being able to compare notes with your friends. Continued

Come In

So this is the new layout I’ve been tinkering with. There’s still some tinkering to do, but it’s very time-consuming tinkering about fancy niceties for which I have long since lost my enthusiasm. The only major thing missing is a box with links to friends’ blogs, but the way I wanted it to work relied on some highly unstable technology that I’m not going to be able to code robustly anytime soon. It involves tachyons.

I was going to talk you through why I’ve done some of the new bits, why I scrapped some of the old bits, and why it’s slimmer. But it’s kind of late, and I’m kind of burnt-out on thinking about it now. I’ll edit that stuff in later – for now, let me know what you think, and have a listen to this while you look around:

Collision

I’m only making a very basic game, and with a program that provides the base engine for you. But even so, that means hand-coding some pretty fundamental stuff, and it’s taught me that you can’t use the word ‘basic’ to describe anything you haven’t tried to code yet. I like to do stuff like The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever in my spare time with a Google Docs spreadsheet (and xkcd’s The Hardest Logic Puzzle In The World in a text doc), but implimenting the most basic laws of game worlds is on a whole other level of complexity.

This bit of game logic, for instance:

Is impossible. I don’t mean hard, it’s just not the way algorithms work. You have to pretend it is, though, and the intricacies of that are what’s taken up most of my time.

The issue is that time progresses in discrete chunks in games, so just the word ‘when’ is problematic. Real life doesn’t really care if it’s not at exactly 1 second or 2 seconds that a man walks into a door, he just stops when he hits it. Code isn’t smooth, it has to re-examine and re-create the whole world sixty times a second, and there’s nothing in between these frames. Unless you want everything to move very slowly, some things are going to have to move more than one pixel at a time. That permits a nasty possibility: after 1 frame you haven’t hit anything, and after 2 you’ve already gone through it.

So collision logic fudges it one of two ways: the game either waits until you’ve already gone through something and pops you back out, or it looks ahead to see if you’re going to hit something and pretends you already have. The effect can be seemingly perfect, since these precautions are computed before the result is drawn on-screen, but it makes the underlying logic fiddlier than it ought to be.

Generally, though, it’s all fine so long as your character is a solid unchanging block.

Old-school platformer protagonists versus actual human proportions. Chick proportions not pictured.

That’s why a lot of 2D games have very compact, boxy characters: the game can treat them as a simple rectangle regardless of what animation they’re playing. Real people change shape much more dramatically when they run, jump and hit things. If you want a human-like character to dive headfirst into a wall – and I do! – you have to solve this insoluable problem for a thing that keeps instantaneously and dramatically changing size and shape.

I won’t get into why this is even more complicated, difficult and annoying than it sounds, but suffice it to say that the next time I fall through the ground in the latest FPS and plummet into the infinite grey limbo below, I won’t be thinking “Why can’t these idiots fix shit like this?”

I will be thinking “Why don’t these idiots account for shit like this?” though, because it only took me a few days of tinkering to realise a fundamental law of coding.

So early on, when I had so many collision bugs to fix that it seemed daunting, I spent some time on an “Oh fuck, I’m stuck” subroutine. It’s a little spiralling algorithm that searches with increasing desperation for a nearby space to teleport you to, should you somehow get stuck in solid matter. I know I’ll never solve all the minor or rare collision glitches that could happen, so I feel I should at least try to make sure they don’t break the game when they do.

Getting collision logic stable and robust was the hardest thing I’ve had to do so far, and the most intricate stuff I have planned for the game now seems trivial by comparison. I’m looking forward to the point when I’ve done enough of the coding that the question becomes “Is this fun?” rather than “Why doesn’t this fucking, fucking, fucking work?”

Cloak And Tagger

I’ve had this vision for how music should be played in the future for ages now: tagged and sorted by mood, style, and speed. You’d click a few words – ‘fast’, ‘instrumental’, ‘electronic’ – and a playlist would be auto-generated from a randomised selection of tracks fitting all three criteria, weighted towards highest-rated and newest. Then you’d chuck it on your MP3 player and cycle downhill to work. Or I would.

I decided that since we’re already pretty much in the future, there must be something out there that already did this. The trouble is that searching for anything to do with tags and anything to do with media players gets you a billion results about ID3 tags, even if you add a “-id3”. Results are still talking about ID3 tags, they’re just not calling them that.

But I remembered Tony saying Winamp’s media library was really good. I’d already tried it, shortly after he said that, and hated it, since I didn’t really have a use for a media library beyond the simple big playlist I already have. And it doesn’t support custom tagging in the way I describe. But since I do already use Winamp for everything – and I just found a new skin that makes it look like the future – it couldn’t hurt to fiddle around and see how close I could get.

Very close indeed, turns out to be the answer. I can do all of what I mention above except the selection ‘weighting’. I can make the list only things with a rating of three or higher, or only things two weeks old or newer, but not a random mix weighted towards those things. Essentially I need a biased shuffle, and I don’t know of anything that can do that.

But custom tagging can be done, in a stupid sort of way. Winamp is nice enough to let you create your own custom ‘views’ – essentially filters for your music library. The default ones are things like “Never played”, and you can then drag everything that comes up in that View to the Playlist section and it’ll make a playlist of them. What you can do with the custom views is to specify that you only want tracks whose Comment field (a part of the ID3 tag) mentions ‘fast’ and ‘electronic’ and ‘instrumental’. Then instead of having an external tagging system that your media player would have to keep track of itself, you write your tags however you like in the Comment field, and they’ll stay with the file if you ever do change media players.

The stupid bit is that you have to create a new ‘view’ for each combination of tags you want to filter by, so it’s a few steps rather than just clicking a word. If anyone knows of anything that can do this better, do share.

I’m not trying to deconstruct my entire music collection into Pandora-like musical properties, I’m trying for a more teleological approach. That is, they’re tagged after what I might want to use them for. So there’s no “mild tonal syncopation” tag, because I’m rarely specifically in the mood for mild tonal syncopation, but there is a “wistful” one. There’s a “chilled” one for working to, and a “cool” one for playing games I’m good at to. Combinations thereof create a smaller playlist that more specifically nails the mood you want from the music, and you can even sort by ‘Times Played’ and select the fifty you’ve heard least often.

Yes, the theme for this week is Scientifically Quantifying Art. Because you can. The rest of the week I’ll be away quantifying a big chunk of art in a great deal of detail, and I look forward to not being able to tell you about it when I get back.

Clear Screen

Impressed, astounded, I stare at the black screen for eleven minutes, then admiringly reach for the power button to reboot.

Too good for the links bar everyone ignores on the right (it has Google Ninjas if you click the title!), Chris Livingston’s Clear Sky review goes deep.

The illustration is my own work.

Clack: A Very Short Story Inspired By An Amazon Review

Cinnamon And Nutmeg Iced Coffee

I have to code but it’s hot. So… Continued

Christmas Chocolate Workshop 2014

I made chocolates for my family again at Christmas. Here’s what I did! Continued

Christmas 2010

Some pictures from mine. It’s snowy here in England, and the Dorset hills are a nice place to stomp around in it.

I got a Kindle! If you mail me stuffs – anything like a .txt .doc or .pdf – it’ll pop up on my cyberhyperbook! This is the address: pentadact@free.kindle.com

Chris Livingston’s Merchants Of Brooklyn Movie Script

I appreciate that many of you must already read his blog, but a) this is too good to go unlinked, and b) I never formally nodded to Chris’s excellent relaunch as First-Person Shouter, aborting one idea – itself the blog to accompany another aborted idea – to revive yet another aborted idea: a general games blog. Soft contrast designs with harmonious palettes, liberal use of colourful images and strictly logical layouts make my eyes happy.

Merchants of Brooklyn is an ultra-violent CryEngine 2 game about not so much Merchants as cavemen. Chris has not played or seen it, which makes his screenplay adaptation – Cloned Cavemen of Future Brooklyn: The Movie – all the sweeter. Let’s play a clip: