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: ★★★★★
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 never there.
I want to speak out, admit, I—no.
I stamp the desire underfoot like a mushroom,
ashamed of my ignorance.
No more.
I do not know your Marios,
your Zeldas or Arans. These are false gods.
I will be true, and a heretic.
This is no shame.
I worship other heroes,
Threepwoods, Dentons, Garretts.
I told their stories, and in telling became them.
I journeyed through Angband, Daventry, and the planets of Vorticon.
I stole the Amulet of Chaos from the temple.
I saved the wumpus from Jasper Slake.
I destroyed the three Shadowlords.
These are my victories, my memories, and I will not disown them.
They made me what I am.
A PC gamer.
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.
This gave me an idea. I knew there was research into simulating the effects of colourblindness, and had come across applications that implemented the method from that paper: Color Oracle for one. I also knew that the Source engine supported colour mapping. So why not combine the two, to simulate colourblindness in game?
Colour mapping in the Source engine is done with the color_correction entity. You can start the game—Team Fortress 2 for example—in “tools” mode to create and save a colour map file. You then create a color_correction entity in your map within Hammer, and configure it to use your colour map file. But the tools for creating colour maps are fairly basic, and I needed more.
So I wrote a short Python script to convert a colour map to a .tga image file, and vice-versa. I also set it up so it could generate an identity colour map file or image; that is, one in which every colour remains the same.
There are three common forms of colourblindness:
The simulation that is done here is of the “anopia” forms, where one of the types of cones in the eye is missing or completely non-functional. The “anomaly” forms are less severe, but as I understand it, if your visual design is accessible to people with deuteranopia, it will be at least as good for people with deuteranomaly.
To create the colour maps for these, instead of doing the maths described in the paper, I converted the identity colour map to an image and opened it in Photoshop. I then used Color Oracle to view the image with each simulation, took a screenshot of each, and saved them back to .tga files. Finally, I converted each of the .tga files back into colour maps to use in the game.
The last step was to put the necessary entities into my map to turn on colour correction with each colour map in turn, and test it out in the game. Here is each colour map image, with a screenshot of how it appears in-game:
I have posted the colour maps and the python script on GitHub. I have also included a prefab of the colour correction entities, so you can easily drop them into any map you’re working on.
Because the script will convert any suitably-sized .tga to a colour map or vice versa, you are no longer limited to the tools Valve provides to create colour maps, but can use all the tools that Photoshop or any other image editor provides to adjust the colours in the image, then convert the result back to a color map for use in the game.
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 takes too long to start scrolling, and you always overshoot. It’s really not enjoyable to interact with the AppleTV via the remote.
With iOS 5 and AirPlay we already have the ability to play a game on the iPad or iPhone, with the display on the TV. But it’s reliant on the phone rendering and encoding the video data, and streaming that to the AppleTV—and it lags, quite noticeably, if that video is anything to go by. And it eats your iPad battery much faster.
What the AppleTV could do really well is run half a game—graphics rendering, physics, networking. Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch runs the other half—input, game logic, drawing only the secondary display on the device. With the huge bandwidth and processing demands of the video streaming gone, the control responsiveness would increase, and the battery drain is gone.
Right now in the iCloud beta, I can buy an app on my iPhone, and it automatically downloads and installs on my iPad, too. The same infrastructure could allow the “server” half of a game to automatically download to my AppleTV, so it was ready to play as I continue my game in the living room.
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 20msNow you can test your app in simulator and enjoy the much faster turnaround when debugging the handling of slow connections.
To remove the firewall rule you use the following command:
sudo ipfw delete 500
I keep intending to make a note of these commands for future reference, every time I see them—this time I’ve done it.
Here’s some of the music I bought this month.
Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers – The National
Kollaps Tradixionales
– Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra
Smetana Piano Trio, Liszt Elegies
– Trio Wanderer
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 nobody would miss it. And anyways, it was just a dog. He unslung his rifle, took aim, and fired.
Well, it wasn’t the first time John Marsten had misjudged a situation. The dog was dead all right, but folk seemed none too happy about it. They started running and screaming, and them as had horses got up and galloped around all over the place. It was quite a ruckus.
A bullet whistled past, and John suddenly got the idea he might ought to be running himself. He got the uncanny feeling that he now had a $5 bounty on hid head, despite that the old dog couldn’t have been worth more than a dime. But with folks shooting at him, it wasn’t the time to stand around. He ran.
Turns out John Marston was pretty good at running, despite his wound. It took about five minutes and half a mile, but he finally lost his pursuers round about Pike’s Basin. He stopped a moment to catch his breath, then figured he’d walk back to the ranch and tell everybody it was all just a misunderstanding.
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 case!” or “Are you drunk?” I admit, I was bobbing and weaving. I knocked more than a few people over, but they didn’t seem to mind much. They’d just get back up and move along.
“It took me way longer than I’d like to admit to figure out how to get down to the crime scene. Even though there was a map, I kept running in circles and trying to run off cliffs.”
I had a discussion on Twitter some weeks back, where someone—I forget who now—asked, when can game designers stop including basic movement tutorials in games, and just presume the player already has the knowledge and skill? My answer was never, if the games are being made for a mainstream audience.
Anecdotes like Kris’s remind us that even movement with the conventional third-person controls is a complex activity, requiring precise thumb movements and coordination between both hands. It is not obvious but must be learned, and requires hours of practice to develop what most gamers would consider a normal level of skill.
I have observed several of my non-gamer friends—usually when I encourage them to try a game—having difficulty with the unfamiliar controls, whether the console controller’s sticks or the WASD+mouse of PCs. Being unable to make your avatar do what you want can be very frustrating, and without encouragement many have given up, saying “I’m not good at games.” This is unfortunate because they’re usually doing fine with the other aspects of gameplay—strategies, resource management, or puzzle solving—but the lack of controller skill is a barrier for them.
Games made for a wide audience should continue to include basic control tutorials. Even more importantly, they should ensure their opening areas are welcoming, not punishing for new players, giving them a safe environment to learn the game and the controls.
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 game these are meant as jokes, some of GLaDOS’s remarks are very mean:
“Don’t let that “horrible person” thing discourage you. It’s just a data point. If it makes you feel any better, science has now validated your birth mother’s decision to abandon you on a doorstep.”
And, speaking about the protagonist’s parents:
“If it makes you feel any better, they abandoned you at birth. So I very seriously doubt they’d even want to see you.”
And finally:
“Tell you what, let’s give your parents a call right now.“ [Phone dialling sound] “The birth parents you are trying to reach do not love you. Please hang up.”
The humour in these comes not from them remarks themselves, but their context. GLaDOS is a superintelligent AI who—in the first game—tried to kill the protagonist, but failed, and was dismantled and defeated by them. Now, after being switched back on, she’s taking petty revenge. It’s funny. It’s funny because this superintelligent AI that tried to kill you can now only resort to such pathetic insults, like a cowardly school bully.
It’s also funny when Wheatley tries to use the same tactics, because his insult, “Adopted… fatty! Fatty fatty no parents!” is laughably weak. It’s like he doesn’t even understand how insults work.
No doubt it’s easier to find these funny when the insult doesn’t apply to you. Getting called mean names and learning to cope with it is a part of growing up for most kids, but I don’t think any parent would want their child to have to go through it. So I’m sympathetic to the father’s position, but I believe taking the story to his local TV news is the worst thing he could have done. He’s now basically guaranteed that the poor girl will get called “fatty fatty no-parents” by other kids at school.
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
He Has Left Us Alone But Shafts of Light
Sometimes Grace the Corners of Our Rooms
– Silver Mt Zion
The Tomorrow We Were Promised Yesterday
– Because of Ghosts
Nothing Changes Under the Sun – Blue States
Circuital – My Morning Jacket
Ventill/Poki – Stafrænn Hákon
Submers – Loscil
Songs: Ohia – Songs: Ohia
Map of What Is Effortless – Telefon Tel Aviv
Hintergarten – Hannu
The Soundings – Blue States
You & Me – The Walkmen
Oceans Will Rise – The Stills
Ravedeath, 1972 – Tim Hecker
The Little Garden – Erin Bode
Ascension – Jesu
Paris Blues – Duke Ellington & His Orchestra
Exile Vilify – The National
Think You Can Wait – The National