It's Bad to be Good by being Bad

Another day of the long weekend and being a tad ill resulted in more game playing.  In this case I remembered I still have Infamous and picked it back up.  I've also played Prototype and while I think it might be slightly more enjoyable to me, Infamous is still good and likely better to others.  It however fails in it's morality system.

Despite the issues Bioshock had with following through on its morality system, it did make a good incremental step in actually applying morality to games and having the consequences matter; however black and white they may be.  Infamous though is just bad in its attempt, and perhaps only helpful in what not to do.

The game is basically you quarantined in a large city with superpowers and stuck between a bunch of cultist anarchists and the Police.  The basic morality system is you can either fight of the evil force of the game taking your fellow citizens into account or ignoring them wildly as you tear through the city.   You can't max out abilities unless you make a distinct choice in either direction and stick to it.   This is thankfully furthered by the game locking out one mission of the other direction each time you finish one.

The execution of this is horribly flawed though which is unfortunate because the story is more filled out story than in Prototype.   There are missions through the game and some are 'good' some are 'evil'.  These are the main way to advance the degree of whatever morality you choose.   Supplementally, there are neutral missions which simply let you get more experience to actually buy power ups.

The flawed part is this

Those neutral/story missions are usually in favor of the citizens, but they can make you more evil!   I disabled a couple boats and rescued a few citizens and I become less liked!

Another embodiment of this is that you can 'clean' sections of the city from the cultists by doing missions in them.   Some of the missions though specifically force you to choose which moral compass direction you're heading; however the end result is still that that section is cleaned.   I let a bomb blow up a police station, and somehow that made the anarchists afraid of that section of the city!  Normally you have to take out a local gang of them or remove some poison they're putting in the water.

In hopes of learning from Infamous

Black boxing this, it would look like the developers suffered from tacking on their morality system to a game mechanic which is unfortunately biased in one direction already.    In the first case it seems that your level in your moral choice is experience point based so doing a neutral mission can bump you up. The broken part is that the neutral missions are almost always in favor of the citizens, so the end moral shift ends up making no sense if you're evil, and unfortunately hurts an otherwise good story.

The map cleaning falls into this problem also.  The game wants to reward you for completing missions by making it easier to get around the city and, given the game's citizen bias, making it safer for the people, but they didn't disable this for those distinct instances where you can do a bad thing.


While I like the morality idea, I do really feel like they took it all a step back by it not only make no difference, but actually have backwards outcomes.   I played 'evil' because I only plan on playing once and it was suggested it's more fun.  I hope playing the good route only works out better.

(Full disclosure: I haven't finished inFamous, though I'd be really surprised if that somehow changed all these backwards consequences)

Demos in Review: Dante's Inferno, Bayonetta, Trine

Unlike last year I have no awesome game to play through the New Year long weekend. Last year I had Bioshock, but this year I just managed to finish Uncharted 2 on Wednesday which left me with only a slew of demos I'd yet to play through on my PS3. ( Uncharted 2 was pretty good. It's no Bioshock, but if you liked Uncharted then this is a good follow along true to the original. )

Two of the demos are kinda crazy awesome and somewhat similar: Dante's Inferno and Bayonetta. Both of which I really only have heard of from when I went to PAX this past year. Both are out soon and amazon's discounting them a few bucks. Dante's Inferno is out February 9th as well Amazon's giving a $10 coupon for a future purchase and Bayonetta is out January 5th.

Dante's Inferno makes me think of the Kingdom of Heaven movie in visual style and maturity. It's rated M though I dunno if it's for the gore or the nudity. Having not followed the game the story from the demo appears to be this: Bad ass crusader Dante did some bad stuff, gets stabbed in the back ( literally ) then refuses to die and kills Death/Hades making him some sort of in between demon christian. He return home to find his wife dead and some sort of mystery surrounding that as her soul is taken by a shade. Dante is not the type to give up and I can only assume descendes through the levels of hell to get her back. So there's your R rated movie plot to facilitate this over-the-top button mashing hack and slasher.

I'm fairly impressed in the movie quality of this game. The graphics are well done, it has a fairly adult plot that could actually have some story depth to it, as well it's the first game I've personally ever seen with frontal detailed nudity, in the demo no less.

The game play is pretty awesome too. Every button invokes some kind of attack and you can get pretty far just button mashing and watching the carnage if that's all you want. ( You should learn how to block though, it seems pretty important with the bosses ) However, there are also combos you can 'buy' and then use if you like. The system for this is what's become a standard light/dark set of abilities in a ladder organization. To further push the light/dark choices you can make there's actually one ability that lets you impale an enemy on the scythe you stole from Death and either punish or Absolve them.

I highly recommend this Demo if you don't mind some bloody hacking and slashing; and nudity. I'll likely GameFly this one and play through it.

The next demo I played was Bayonetta.

The best way I can think of describing this is a girlie version of Dante's Inferno, as if it and Final Fantasy X-2 got married. It's a button mashing hack and slash like Dante. A bit dark and kick ass, but with a distint girlie aspect.

Bayonetta looks like a model and shows some valley girl tendencies at times when she isn't channeling a sexy librarian vibe, glasses and all. I think your current target is marked with huge red lips, and some of the special attacks involve your very large high heal shoe coming through a portal and either stomping or kicking your enemies. Oh also, the heel of her high heel shoes are guns which she can shoot a la Chun-Li's whirlwind kick. So it's a bit lighter as well there's no actual nudity. When it would be there, bits are covered; such as when Bayonette channels her, magical?, clothing into an extension of her hair to beat down a boss.

There's some back story about a secret enclave of which she's an outcast or something, and there's a vague WET like cut scene mode which utilizes film strips so it does have some pretty good visuals. The game play is much like Dante too, combos you can use, but don't have to, though you'll likely invoke them on accident anyway.

I might end up playing this though given Dante's availability I'd likely choose it first. The girlie tint to it is perhaps a tad overdone for my liking, but I highly recommend the demo for how somewhat bizarre this game is.

For an added bonus I'll also share Trine. This is a cute side scroller pseudo-puzzler with neat visuals. The basic premise is a thief, wizard and knight all get trapped in the same body after touching a mysterious jewel and being transported to a new world. The story is light hearted and humorous and the game play is pretty light in a good way.

on Love, Semantics and the Law

Washington state voters recently voted to approve Referendum 71.   That is, the legislature decided to grant full and equal rights to Domestic Partners (a legal term), a group petitioned to block it pending a vote, and the rest of the state backed the legislature.

Despite the law passing being important, what the law actually did was even more important in the long run.

Let's step back for one second.

I believe there are two key points in this whole thing.

1. Denying same sex rights IS discrimination.   It may be discrimination you believe in, but it is discrimination.  (I'd even argue it's illegal for the simple reason you are discriminating based on sex which is illegal)

2. The word marriage means a lot to a lot of people.   There is almost certainly more people who really care about the word than those who don't.


What Washington State did differently is it did not touch the word Marriage.   It simply said that those who register as Domestic Partners have all the same legal requirements.  The actual affect of the law was to effectively take every instance of the word "Marriage" and add "and Domestic Partnership".   Given how many attempts to actually legalize gay Marriage have failed or been overturned, Washington has shown that this is a much more tenable approach.  In fact, a gay marriage provision has never passed a public vote before.  Read that again.  Never.   All the existing ones have come from legislatures which have not been challenged.

I have long said the only route for gay "marriage" is to focus on the law and not the word.   The word simple means too much to too many people that it will never work as a step toward the concept.  In fact Referendum 71 only barely passed with 52% acceptance.   With that little of a margin, in a state with a large liberal bias, I think it's clear that "Marriage" is simply a non starter in our nation.   Ideally, governments should only recognize 'civil unions' and churches and society can do what they like with the word Marriage, but I think Washington has done a good job with this step.

on Better Video Game Playability

An open letter to game developers:

This letter stems from a recent issue I had playing two games, Fear 2 and Mirror's Edge, though I have no doubt it applies to many others.   The issue was that my PlayStation 3 went belly up and would no longer boot.  The short of it was that the data was unrecoverable and while Sony replaced the system under warranty, they would not recover the data for me.   I had in effect lost all saved progress in all my games.   Of particular interest to me though, I was half way through Mirror's Edge and almost finished with Fear 2.   The issue with the PS3 was certainly not the game's faults, I hope..., however I believe they very poorly recovered from this increasing issue of hardware failure.

Neither game would in anyway allow me to restart  where I had left off or anywhere else in the middle of the stories despite my best efforts.   I tried finding save games online only to find that the games would simply reject them.  I tried finding cheat codes and came up with nothing.   I was left with two options, abandon the games, or restart them.   I choose to abandon both games.   Before I list the reasons this is bad for you and for me, let me provide an instance of a success in this area.   At the same time I was also playing Half Life 2: Episode 0 and also lost my save game for it too.   However, with very little work I soon found a cheat code that allowed me to start at any chapter.  I was thankfully able to finish my game where I left off and as well have gone on to play Episodes 1 and 2, as well anticipate 3.

So onto why this failure scenario of Fear 2 and Mirror's Edge is bad.   The obvious consequence is that for me to finish these games I must waste my time to recreate the achievements I had already gained.   I don't know about you, but I do not like repeating things.   I decided it was not worth my time to replay many hours of these two games, let alone effectively reread the start of a story and as such simply put them down.   Unfortunately, the best case recovery scenario for me was to simply eat the time and money spent on these games and move on.   While this was the worst case scenario for you, you unfortunately made it the best case scenario for me.    But it gets worse.  The hidden consequence is that not only did I waste my time and money on these games and not actually get to finish the stories, but you have now effectively prevented me from buying and enjoying any of your sequels or add on content.   This is certainly a loss for you, though given the annoyance incurred so far, I'm unsure where it ranks for me.

So that's where we are right now; maybe try and learn from this.




Having no actual discussion with you, I can only assume that since a number of games, such as Half Life2, do provide a way to start in the middle, that someone made a distinct decision to not allow it on these games.  (If that is wrong, well then problem solved I hope.)   While it doesn't make much sense to me, I can only speculate that the reason to specifically disallow this is somehow rooted in the 'hard core gamer' mentality of core gamers, or simply in hubris of developers.

For hard-core gamers, a way to skip through a game is a way to skip some challenges and reap the rewards of boss fights, cinematics or perhaps trophies on the PS3 without actually doing the work for them.   If two people have beaten the same game then they have gone through the same trials and tribulations as each other, there is something here to bond over.

For developers, this ability is a way to skip your well crafted story and interaction elements.   There was the pit with awesome fire that shot up to get past, the balrog that required precise button hits to defeat, and the tricky puzzle that required assembling items from around the island to solve.

Unfortunately all these things are pretty much already skippable in some various form.  As for the challenges, games already allow for different difficulty levels so there's little in common with the challenge of an easy run through and a hard one.   As well there is no end of pay and free walkthroughs everywhere.   There is no more challenge needed than reading if desired.   As for experiencing your content in full, people very frequently record full game plays and put them online, so you can not only get a visual cheat guide you can simple watch the pieces you might want if you desired as such.   I can understand the trophy/leader-board issue, but how about just disabling them completely in these situations?

Additionally, video games are pretty much the only entertainment medium that locks people into a linear progression.  Movies, books, music do not prevent me from jumping right into the middle of them or even just experiencing the ending if I really want.  A play even lets you come in in the middle if you really want, so why maintain such control over how someone who has paid you good money experiences your content?   You're creation is not that amazing.   While it's true that it would really suck to jump past that pretty awesome scene in BioShock and have no idea what's going on in the game, do you actually think people really want to skip random pieces of content if they haven't been forced to, and is it really going to hurt you if they do?




Let's talk about how you might be missing out by requiring people to play in traditional ways though, and why you might instead want to embrace it over simply allowing hidden cheats.

The wii has shown that casual games are a huge market, and further more Prince of Persia has shown that you can successfully create a game in which the player never dies or has to give up important progress they have made.    Embrace this.   Most modern games are simply elaborate Interactive Fictions.  They are linear stories which the player is immersively experiencing.   There is no reason that gamers of all skill levels should not be able to participate in your stories.

A game could implement a movie mode where it simply walks through for you. If the story is that good some people may actually want to just watch it if you make it interesting enough.  ( probably not too bad for those late night parties where you want to replay some gorefests and are perhaps not quite capable of doing it yourself at the time)   For players who still want some interaction, games can also offer walkthrough mode where you are hard or impossible to kill, enemies die really easy, and puzzles call out to you with assistance.   Just because some people are too young or old, or didn't develop excellent straffing technique when they were 14, doesn't mean they don't want the viceral enjoyment of walking in, and then out of a firefight.

Take the simplest case though ( aside from my tradgic hardware issue ).  Your game rocks, and on a bored sunday night years from now, I want to go back and relive that final boss fight.   Guess I should have kept all my save games around after all.

(I'll be mailing a copy of this to the creators of Fear 2 and Mirror's Edge)

PAX 2009

I managed to attend PAX 2009 this year for the first time.   I say managed because it actually sold out completely, the first time it has ever happened too.   Luckily someone at work was selling a three day pass and I got lucky enough to get it.  score.

I really had no idea what to expect.  I knew it was somehow based around Penny Arcade, and had "video game stuff", some presenters, and other "stuff".   It seemed likely to at least be an interesting experience so I wasn't much worried, and it was only $50.

I won't boringly enumerate everything here, but I will say the main stay is the expo.  I'm kind of quite surprised it actually fit in the convention center, it is simply massive.   I didn't actually play many games due to lines and well nothing really grabbed me, but it was quite amazing to see all the different set ups as well simply the number of people.

So instead of being boring I'll just point out some specific things I learned about attending PAX:

Pax is mostly about video games

I know Penny Arcade is a lot about games too, but I really was expecting it all to me somehow mostly about the comic, but it is not.   The main focus is video games, console and computer alike, including even hardware vendors showing up.   There was actually a stand in the expo just pushing 3D setups, which apparently will work with any 120Hz display.   It makes HUDs a little more life like.

It wasn't just video games though.  There were table top vendors and CCG vendors in the expo area too, as well a whole floor was just for pick up board gaming.

Pax is for and by gamers

Pax is pretty much made by gamers for gamers and not by the gaming industry for better or wose.  I don't think there'll be a ton of surprise announcements like E3.

Pax is pretty cool

During the 3 days the Omegathon occures.  This is a 5-6 stage elimination gaming competition.   The games however are quite random, and the final game is secret and done during the final closing show of PAX.  This year it was Skee ball :o)

Also, they even Pax 10 awesome small games and both feature them in the printed program, but also let them demo.   One of GAMBIT's games, CarnieVale, was there and I got to meet some of the Singapore co-workers of Marleigh's.   As well there was a new game called Machinarium from the makers of Samorost.  If you haven't played Samorost you should go now.

Wil Wheaton gets to do whatever he wants

Wil Wheaton isn't known for gaming, but he is a gamer and therefor I think he gets to do whatever he wants.   He was on the Pitch Your Game panel, he got his own Talk, and was just in general wandering around on stages and with other guests doing stuff.

There are smarts at Pax

Pax isn't just about playing games, there are also several rooms in which talks, movies, etc are going on.   There were a few on interesting subjects like: Female gamers; sex, drugs, murder in games; designing for failure, etc.   You can still see the schedule online with descriptions.

Seattle is a good place to be for such geeky things

I learned there are a lot of geeky things in the area I didn't know about.  First, Penny Arcade is homed up in Capitol Hill ( Mike and Jerry live here ).   I hear Scott Kurtz of PvP is thinking of moving here, I can only imagine Wil is next.   Bungie is in Kirkland, Valve is in Bellevue, and apparantly 5th Cell, the makers of Scribblenauts, are in Bellevue too, who knew.

The Seattle Convention Center is huge

PAX had complete use of the convention center from what I saw, well floors 2-6.  The convention center looks big from the outside, I mean it's a convention center, but it doesn't feel like the insides should fit.   The expo and main hall areas were simply massive and I think they were on the same floors.

Games

Since there are games at PAX so here's some I ran across that caught me.

Uncharted 2:  Looks neat, nothing special but that should be quite fine.

BioShock 2:  Only a teaser walk through but pretty awesome, can't wait.

Scribblenauts: This personally isn't doing a lot for me, but I like the idea and I'm glad everyone else is jazzed.

Dante's Inferno:  Looked pretty cool and the game play with fighting big monsters was somewhat Prince of Persia like which is good.  I'm told it looks pretty much like God of War, so I'll have to check that out too.

WET: At first it looked a bit typical but I think some of the game play will be pretty neat.  The parts where you were riding a moving vehicle down a highway and attacking others looked well done.

Diablo 2/Star Craft 2:  More of the same with somewhat newer graphics.

Batman Arkham Asylum: I saw this in the free play room since it's already out, but it made me want to give it a try.  After playing the demo today it's on my gamefly queue.

---

I'm glad I went to PAX, and more so I could go for the three days.   I'll likely go next year and make sure I go to the Saturday night stuff which I skipped this year ( no Jonathan Coulton for me ).

Things of our Children's Fathers

We remember people in various ways, but when they've left us it is their things we have left. These things give us a physical hold on them through time, and through this we can maintain a grasp on our emotional ties too. This is perhaps even more so with our parents. We spend the most pivotal years of our lives with our parents and they ingrain themselves in us ways even lovers can not. Most of these things will be new from parent to child, we don't plan on our children making these connections to something specific, it just happens. The things that do persist from generation to generation become heirlooms, some even forced down through history; the jade statue perched on the corner of the mantel waiting to be set free.

The things children cling on to will be of their own choosing, for reasons we likely will never realize, especially at the time. However we will certainly try to influence them. Give them things we think they'll like, hopefully cherish, and even better if it's something we have an interest in. Heirlooms persist themselves, some as sand worms, through history but what about when we want to pass things down, and what about when those things may not exist when they're old enough to care?

This all comes to me from one of my interests. I'd almost call it a hobby though that seems wrong, a hobby feels like you should necessarily be creating something. I play board games on a somewhat weekly bases. These aren't typical American board games, but  derived from Europe and somewhat dominated by Germany. They feature interesting game play, unique physical pieces, and usually nice artistic images. Carcassonne is a decent though perhaps simplistic example. One problem I have though is that most games I'm interested in are already owned by other members of the group I play with, and I don't tend to play with other people, so there is really little reason in me owning any games myself.

This is where we come back to the first bit. I realize however that some of these games I'll still want to play years from now, and some I will distinctly want my children to play; they're kind of like the Montessori of children's games, but furthermore they're so unique to what we usually experience. However, if and when I do ever have kids, some of these may not exist anymore. Games like these have fairly small markets and are to a large degree necessarily physical. While they do exist digitally and mostly online, they loose a lot in it, and there's nothing to say the electronic version will persist even then. The internet is fickle. So what do we do with things like this?

I certainly can't buy everything, but I've decided to actually buy games I think I'll still want to play in 15 years, even if I never punch the pieces from their cardboard holders until then. I'll have to lug them around until then, but I think it's worth it. The first one I'm buying is Thebes, a fun Archeology type game. It's got some interesting game play around how it handles digging over two simulated years, and I think it's probably pretty educational. My kids probably won't remember it, and I hear they tend not to like what you think they will or should, but all you can really do is try right?


I do wonder where else this kind of issue might lie; the niche market that doesn't lend itself well to digitization.

Pay Me Less, More Often

With my not so recent job change came a change in how I was paid. At my last job we got paid at the end of the month, all at once. It was nice and made my accounting easy. Same amount of money every month on the last day of the month. When I tell people in "the industry" about this they actually chuckle a little. I'm told monthly pay checks are a sign of an unsecure company as they could potentially get a month of work out of you, close up shop, and not have to pay out; also I imagine it's a little more trouble for a small company to do irregular pay periods. I like to turn this around and say that companies that pay bi-weekly are basically saying they only have enough certainty that they'll be open for two weeks, but I digress.

I got used to the odd pay periods pretty quickly, I still get the same amount each month by the end of the month, it just comes in in smaller amount and more often, but the same amount. However I then started to notice some benefits from this.

I usually do all my money changing at the end of the month, pay bills, transfer to savings, done. But now that I get a pay check in the first half of the month I realized I could transfer money to savings earlier and earn a bit more savings on it. If I know I can put a minimum of $500 in savings at the end of the month then, on average, I can put that money in savings 3 weeks earlier. It's not a huge extra amount of interest, but it's an extra 5.7% of your interest rate. At the end of the month I just then put in whatever extra money is left over into savings as I would normally do.

The other thing is that if you look at paydays on the calendar you'll notice there's two months with three of them! That's right, twice a year you "make" 150% your normal pay! These occur during May and October. What this means is that you make "less" most months than you would if you just divided your salary by 12. This is effectively making you save 8% a month. This has two very nice side effects.

1. This 8% less you make means you must tighten your belt in general and therefor spend a little more wiser than you might. Most people may realize they should do this anyway, but this is actually making it a reality.

2. You have effectively been forced to save a months worth of money. This mimics setting aside money each month for a particular purpose, say a vacation, or a new HD TV without the headache of actually doing it and having to account for it in your monthly budget, which is a big barrier to entry.

So go out and find a job that pays bi-weekly and enjoy the benefits.