January 2012
3 posts
The MPAA studios hate us
The MPAA studios hate us. They hate us with region locks and unskippable screens and encryption and criminalization of fair use. They see us as stupid eyeballs with wallets, and they are entitled to a constant stream of our money. They despise us, and they certainly don’t respect us.
Yet when we watch their movies, we support them.
— Marco Arment, The Next SOPA
Why SOPA, PIPA, DMCA, DEA, etc. exist:
“We’re dealing with archaic industries that were built around the impossibility of that which is now possible. Their time is up, and they know it. But they are so massive, so enormously powerful, that they are going to do everything imaginable to defend their fortunes. And that’s why we have SOPA and PIPA. They know it won’t beat piracy, because it’s immediately obvious to anyone with half a clue...
2 tags
Bulletstorm, in 80 words
When I had killed as many enemies by kicking with my boot as by shooting, I started to question the name of this game. Its points-for-combos approach to combat and emphasis on using environmental hazards is fresh and exciting, but the story it has to tell follows Epic’s trademark bro-gamer recipe, with a sprinkling of comedy—sadly not self-aware enough to be parody. However, I give it points...
December 2011
3 posts
2 tags
Something bothers me about dungeons
Many dungeon designs have the player entering the dungeon, travelling deeper and deeper into it while facing foes and/or traps of increasing difficulty, culminating in a climactic encounter, often a boss or mini boss.
That’s fine: these are chieftains, or guardians of great treasures, or whatnot, so naturally they’d surround themselves with minions for their own defence.
No, what bothers me is...
3 tags
Stalkers and Anomalies
In Call of Pripyat, there are areas of odd chemical, electrical, fire, or gravitational behaviour (and usually high radiation also); these are called anomalies. For the most part these are merely incidental obstacles in your way, but from time to time objects called “artifacts” appear in them.
These artifacts are highly valuable to sell, but if you carry them they also provide...
On “the bottom half of the Internet”
“The bottom half of the Internet” is an interesting phrase, especially when it is accompanied (as it so often is) by an admonishment to shun it. The phrase refers to user commentary on websites, and is an implicit declaration of superiority—we are the people you should listen to, not those filthy commenters down there. How could they possibly have anything worthwhile to say?
The self-applauding...
November 2011
2 posts
2 tags
Talker: San Francisco
I shift into a random vehicle, a red sports car of some kind. I’m interrupting a conversation: the girlfriend of the driver I’m possessing is declaring that nothing in the city scares her. I take that as a personal challenge.
I hit the accelerator and touch the handbrake, drifting the car sideways down the winding road. She yawns exaggeratedly. I swerve into oncoming traffic, barely...
Plus ça change, plus ç'est la même chose
Via @brainpickings:
I’m amazed that I can watch video from 1901 on YouTube. That’s one hundred and ten years old!
Oh look, it’s erotic in nature. Well, it’s meant to be titillating at least. Undergarments in 1901 were rather more substantial than many complete outfits these days.
You have to sit through a copyright notice at the start of the video. Worse: a copyright...
October 2011
6 posts
“Many games designers think its their job to tell stories, but games isn’t a story medium, they should go write books or make films. Many artists think that games are about attention to graphical details and in extension to proving how ambitious they are. They should go make art. No, games are about mechanics, they are about feedback, and that is something that programmers provide.”
—...
I want a sequel to Shadow of the Colossus
I want a sequel to Shadow of the Colossus. You are a pilgrim riding a grey horse, and you travel to the site where each colossus in turn. You gaze in awe at their majestic bones merging into the Earth, and you remember. That’s all.
3 tags
The True Origin of iPhone 4S’s Siri
The point is, if we can store music on a compact disc, why can’t we store a man’s intelligence and personality on one? So, I have the engineers figuring that one out now. Brain mapping, artificial intelligence, we should have been working on it 30 years ago. I will say this, and I’m gonna say it on tape so everyone hears it 100 times a day: if I die before you people can pour...
2 tags
The End of an Era
For many years, Psychonauts was the only one of my favourite games that I’d never finished. If you’ve played it, two words will be enough to tell you why: Meat Circus. It’s the final level of the game; it gets off to a great start with an annoying escort mission, follows that with an uninspired boss fight, then a long and horribly finicky platforming sequence, followed by two more boss fights that...
3 tags
UI: Entering a new password
Little Big Details today showed the form used on Pinboard when entering a new password, where the field for the new password only appears once, and uses very light grey text:
Traditionally, a form will ask you to enter your new password twice, and both fields will be masked with • bullets. The form will ask for the new password a second time in case you unknowingly made a typo the first time....
“Perhaps DRM does have a place…”
“Perhaps DRM does have a place, but Ubisoft has tried harder than any other publisher to solve this problem, and business has suffered. It may well be that piracy is not what ails them, and the secret to selling PC games is to make quality PC versions of multi-platform titles. But you don’t hear that from Ubisoft. What you hear is that they have the right to protect the products that they worked...
September 2011
1 post
3 tags
“I don’t know how many more times I have to say this, but I guess at least once:...”
– Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw, of Deus Ex: Human Revolution
August 2011
1 post
4 tags
Deus Ex: Human Revolution: A Review
In a sudden turnaround of my long-held opinion, I realise now that you can’t reserve a score of 100% for a mythical perfect game, whether Thomas Aquinas spoke of it or not. To point out that an otherwise amazing game has flaws is superfluous. Even the tastiest ice-cream makes you fat.
Accordingly, my review of Deus Ex: Human Revolution reduces neatly to: ★★★★★
July 2011
2 posts
We sat, and drank, and talked.
You told of the great final battle when you were a hero;
when Shamus destroyed Gondorf
or something, I don’t know.
Foreign names from foreign places.
Each of you was there, those many separate times.
“It was awesome” you all said.
I smiled and nodded, and echoed “awesome.”
It’s all Italian to me.
Your princess is in another country. I was...
Colorblindness simulation in the Source engine
While making a Portal 2 map last month, Robert Yang asked:
Was choosing “red” a bad idea / horribly insensitive to colorblind people? Like, will they be able to distinguish the non-portalable metal plating from the stone walls? I don’t want a BioShock 2 debacle on my hands.
— Radiator Blog
This gave me an idea. I knew there was research into simulating the effects of...
June 2011
3 posts
John Gruber, commenting on an extrapolation of Apple’s growing role in the games industry:
“And the Apple TV doesn’t support apps yet.”
And I’m far from certain that it ever will. The biggest problem for games on the AppleTV alone? The controller sucks. Even for the little it has to do right now, the remote is clumsy, and slow to give feedback. You can’t press the buttons quickly. It...
Simulate cellular connections on Mac (for iOS...
Oliver Drobnik, at Cocoanetics writes:
Now our trick creates a new IP firewall rule restricting the bandwidth to 112 kBits. You have to do this modification as root, hence the sudo and the first sudo will ask for your root password.
sudo ipfw add 500 pipe 1 ip from any to any
sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 112kbit/s plr 0 delay 20ms
Now you can test your app in simulator and enjoy the much...
Music Bought: June ’11
Here’s some of the music I bought this month.
Circuital – My Morning Jacket
Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers – The National
Kollaps Tradixionales – Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra
Ventill/Poki – Stafrænn Hákon
Smetana Piano Trio, Liszt Elegies – Trio Wanderer
Submers – Loscil
Songs: Ohia – Songs: Ohia
Map of What Is Effortless – Telefon Tel Aviv
Hintergarten – Hannu
May 2011
6 posts
2 tags
Like a Dog
John Marston had been laid up a long while after getting himself shot, and his shooting skills had suffered. He’d barely managed to kill a couple of coyotes the night before, so he figured some more practice in broad daylight would help him get his hand back in.
There was an old mutt wandering around the ranch: a mangy old thing. Nobody knew where it had come from, and John was pretty sure...
Are you drunk?
Kris over at Screen Cuisine writes entertainingly about her attempt at playing L. A. Noire,
which is hampered by inexperience with the dual analog stick control scheme:
“For starters, it was hard to get my guy out of the building. He kept walking into walls, but not to worry…no one even noticed.”
“On the way, people would randomly say things like “That’s the cop who cracked the big...
“It also says here that you’re adopted. So that’s...
Hitting the games news today is the story of a father who, playing
Portal 2 with his adopted daughter, is upset when GLaDOS and Wheatley make
fun of the protagonist for being adopted. You can read the story in The
Escapist,
or see the report on his local TV
news.
I’m sympathetic with the father. He’s rightly concerned that his daughter
could be hurt by the insults. Although in the context of the...
Music Bought: May ’11
Usually I post on Twitter a list of the music I buy each month, but this month I bought more than usual, so the blog is a better place. And I can include links and cover art!
Alone in the Dark – Various Artists
Í Ástandi Rjúpunnar – Stafrænn Hákon
The Soundings – Blue States
You & Me – The Walkmen
Oceans Will Rise – The Stills
Ravedeath, 1972 – Tim Hecker
The Little Garden – Erin...
3 tags
Python SMTP debugging server
Note to self: this is how you start a python SMTP debugging server:
python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:25
— Parand Tony Darugar
This debugging server will not deliver any messages sent via it, but will instead output them stdout, bracketed by the following lines:
---------- MESSAGE FOLLOWS ----------
------------ END MESSAGE ------------
2 tags
The position of narrator is already filled.
“When the player is given choice, or at least the illusion of it, it’s very hard to have a narrator who is able to deceive the player: at best, you’re telling the player that those choices he or she made didn’t actually matter.” — Critical Missive
I think Eric Schwarz just misses a key point in his essay, which is why unreliable narration—and in fact any narration—isn’t a good fit for games....
April 2011
3 posts
“If you’re thinking about [which platform to target your game at] just in terms...”
– Ron Carmel, at The Reticule
Tweetbot Gestures
John Gruber on Tweetbot:
Two favorite aspects. First, when you tap a tweet in your timeline, it gets selected and a bar of buttons to act on the tweet appears beneath it. Most Twitter clients, when you tap a tweet, present that tweet in a standalone view, sliding over to the right. With Tweetbot’s inline action bar, you can do something like replying or marking as a favorite and then...
Maybe that’s what’s wrong with minigames in general: they’re an interruption. You have to mentally shelve what you’re doing in the game to focus on the minigame, and all too often it’ll require deliberate analytical thought, which is a great way to completely lose track of what you were doing before it. You want to open that chest to get the lovely, lovely loot inside, and you have to do it...
March 2011
5 posts
Escherisch
For Mapcore’s cube challenge,
I built a Half-Life 2 Episode Two map. It had to be constrained to 1024x1024x1024
units.
Typically when confronted with an arbitrary constraint, I try to find a way to
work around it. For example, a TF2maps mini-contest challenged us to build a
control point in 2048x2048 units (no height limit), but without a 3D skybox. So
I built the point, and a huge window...
Another day, another SDK, another iPhone simulator...
The default frame for the iPhone simulator looks awful. So I decided to fix that (again). Here’s what my iPhone Simulator looks like now:
If you’d like your simulator to look sleek like this, grab this zip file. Locate iPhone Simulator.app in Finder, open up its Resources directory, and extract the two PNGs from this zip into there.
Tumbled Logic — Copywrong:
The rise of peer-to-peer file sharing is not to my mind a simplistic reaction to a failure of a free market to capitalise upon new technologies, but also a broader reaction to a set of scales which are intended to be balanced being tipped firmly in one direction. In essence, the fact that a great many people have embraced illicit redistribution of copyright works is...
Control Freak
Whether you play a game with a mouse, keyboard, Xbox or Playstation controller, or Wiimote, the controller—this small object of plastic and electronics is a magical artifact, one that transports you into another world, the game world. You see and hear the game world through the TV or computer screen and speakers, but the controller is special. The controller alone allows you to enter the game...
“Authors won’t stop writing (to feed their creative impulse), and they won’t stop...”
– Chris Meadows
February 2011
3 posts
Throwing oranges at a duck
We need to stand up to this, to say it’s not okay, to loudly point out that it uniquely punishes their customers while not affecting those who do not pay.
Large publishers have to prove to their shareholders that they’re attempting to “fight piracy” (a phrase as daft as professing that you’re about to “fight the sea”). So delighted businesses spring up, offering “solutions”, selling their...
1 tag
Beyond Good & Evil is a beautiful game
Beyond Good & Evil is a fabulous, wonderful game. It dates back to 2003, when it was released for the PS2, Xbox, GameCube, and PC. It is being re-released in HD for the Xbox 360 and PS3 this year (March 2nd on XBLA, later on PS3), and is still available for PC from Good Old Games and Steam. The PC version runs happily in at high resolutions, although if you don’t fancy using the mouse...
The silent protagonist is wrong
The silent protagonist in narrative games—Gordon Freeman being a prominent example—exists ostensibly so that I the player can better project myself through him into the game’s world. The silence enables the avatar to stretch to encompass my actions and personality, rather than being a rigid vessel that forces me into an authored shape. It’s strange, then, that Gordon has a name, and a history,...
January 2011
8 posts
2 tags
Teaching the player how to play
When you introduce a new element to a game, you should instruct the player how to use it. You should design this instruction so that the player learns organically, without being aware of the teaching.
Here’s an example of how not to do this. In Dead Space, you kill enemies most effectively by slicing off their arms and legs with your ‘plasma cutter’, a gun-like cutting tool. The designers...
2 tags
Malaria
Malaria is a terrible disease. Mosquitoes spread it, carrying infection from person to person as they feed, infecting hundreds of millions of people around the world each year. Each year it kills a million people, mostly children. And once you’re infected, it can lie dormant in your liver for years, almost impossible to eradicate.
In Far Cry 2, the player character has malaria. Every now and...
Does Google’s removal of H.264 support presage the removal of H.264 <video> streams through YouTube in favour of only two options: WebM <video> or whatever-codec through Flash? YouTube has tremendous pulling power, and might just have the weight needed to convince hardware manufacturers to adopt WebM.
What happens when Google’s and Apple’s current arrangement regarding YouTube...
1 tag
User Interface Design in Twitter for Mac, part II
This is the second part of my detailed look at the user interface of Twitter for Mac. Part one is here.
The timeline
The sidebar is a constant presence while navigating the app; except for composing tweets, all other everyday interactions are done through the pane on the right-hand side. Most of the time this will show the user’s timeline.
...
1 tag
User Interface Design in Twitter for Mac, part I
With the launch of the Mac App Store last week, the long-awaited Tweetie 2, a.k.a. Twitter for the Mac was relased. As with his previous apps, Loren Brichter has employed many custom user interface elements. In the past, his willingness to experiment with UI has led to several usable and intuitive innovations. While the Twitter app shows evidence...
Twitter for Mac hidden preferences
Allow Escape to close the “New Tweet” window:
defaults write com.twitter.twitter-mac ESCClosesComposeWindow -bool YES
Hide Twitter for Mac when in background:
defaults write com.twitter.twitter-mac HideInBackground -bool YES
Compose windows don’t float over all windoes:
defaults write com.twitter.twitter-mac NormalComposeWindowLevel -bool NO
Scrolling brings Twitter for Mac to...
Posit: Publishers produce games.
Consequence: Retailers sell those games.
Result: Customers buy the games. Publishers and retailers profit.
Some people pirate those games for free.
Customers, dissatisfied or finished with the games, trade them back in to retailers.
Retailers resell the trade-ins for a slight markdown and generous profit.
Customers use the savings from trade-ins to buy...
The Player, the Villain
(This post contains spoilers for Far Cry 2 and Bioshock)
Bioshock famously built the cornerstone of its plot on the deconstruction of the designer/player relationship. It recognised that in a linear narrative, the player unwittingly (but willingly) acts as the agent of the designer in order to progress. Every significant action that the player takes is one that the designer planned out for them,...
December 2010
3 posts
An iPad game made in 24 hours
The challenge: build a game in 24 hours. About a week ago, two internet-friends of mine, Tom Pritchard and Frazer Grant decided they would challenge themselves to build a game in 24 hours:
Tom built a simple platformer, and Frazer built the core of a side-scrolling shmup, which he wrote about on his blog. They both tweeted their progress as they were going, using the #24hourgame hashtag, and...
2 tags
80 word review: One Chance
What would you do if you knew the world was about to end? Would you shirk all your other responsibilities to remain at home with your wife and daughter? Or would you drive yourself deeper into your work, trying desperately to find a cure for the plague that will end all life? What if the plague is, in fact, all your fault? And what if you actually could prevent the end? You can; but you have...
Tableau II
There in the corner, the fence had been forced open, the pole bent down and the chicken wire twisted where someone had attempted to get through. It did make it easier to climb over. The fuel storage tank rang brightly as he rapped his knuckles on it. Empty. Well, he’d have to look for petrol farther down the road.
The wall behind the tank caught his eye. There on the cinderblocks, the same...
November 2010
4 posts
Zombophobe
I am a zombophobe.
When I step into the shoes of Garrett, the City’s most renowned thief, I am fearless. I enter the heavily guarded mansions of the City’s upper crust with impunity, and leave with my pockets full of their wealth. No patrolling swordsman or watchful archer daunts me; even the deadly mechanical beasts of the Mechanists fail to give me pause, for I am the master of...