Kyouryuu's Journal

Setting up a Combine APC is simple enough. You place the APC model as a vehicle prop, and then you place an npc_apcdriver. This fellow is an invisible driver in the game, but in the editor, it shows up as a one of those evil Rollermines.

Plop it in the game and what's the first thing it does?

CRASH right into a lightpole.

Moral of the story: Rollermines make really lousy drivers.

Because my current mod project is going to call for talking actors, I've began to study some of the sequences in Half-Life 2.

I noticed one really awesome detail on Dr. Breen during his Breencasts. Periodically, his eyes look to the left, as if he's reading a teleprompter over there, before refocusing on the player.

I don't know if you'd even notice it in the game itself, but I thought it was a nice touch. It's the little things like that which make these sequences hold up almost five years later. :)

Y'know, it used to be that you could walk into a store and buy computer or A/V cables for a fair price. There were a lot of no-name brands out there that got the job done. Back when I had an LPT printer, there was no need for "gold plated" LPT cables. Dumbest thing I ever heard. Who made such expensive cables? Belkin.

Well, fast forward a few years and Belkin has come to dominate every discount store I go to. A cable that you can find for $4 on Amazon sells for $20 at Target, all because it's the Belkin brand. Fred Meyer, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples... even CompUSA when it was still around. And there are no alternatives at the stores either, it's Belkin products as far as the eye can see. All with that moronic "gold plated" nonsense to drive up the cost. I mean, last I checked, our devices were digital. The 1's and 0's flow whether it's gold or not, so don't give me this malarkey about "luxury" cables. We're talking about $20 ethernet cables. This isn't even HDMI, it's Ethernet!

I have to admit, a scheme to get a veritable monopoly on the discount market is a pretty clever one. As a consumer, the lack of choice is frustrating. But I will stand behind my personal boycott of their products because I don't believe these artificial monopolies are fair to the consumer at all.

Sarah Palin is stepping down as the Governor of Alaska and, as one might expect, the talking heads are bursting with speculation about why she did it.

I think the reason is quite simple.

She was tired of all the Michael Jackson coverage. :)

For the life of me, I'll never understand the popularity of the Black Eyed Peas.

I think God is assembling some kind of concert in Heaven.

First, he takes Michael Jackson. He's obviously the main act. Then, he took Ed McMahon, because every concert needs an announcer. Farah Fawcett? She'd get the crowd amped up.

And then he took Billy Mays, because I suppose he needed a promoter.

No, really, Billy Mays is dead.

"And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."

There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of posts about the death of Michael Jackson. So massive was the public reaction that several functions of the Internet were actually brought to their knees!

- TMZ, which reportedly was the site that originally broke the story, collapsed under the traffic.
- The Los Angeles Times, which confirmed the story, also succumbed to the weight of the Internet on its shoulders.
- AOL Instant Messenger went off-line for 40 minutes.
- Google was slammed with queries for "Michael Jackson" so suddenly that they thought it was a hacking attack and began to block traffic.
- Wikipedia crashed as everyone went to Jackson's entry there.
- Twitter was brought down.
- Facebook struggled to cope, slowing down significantly.
- CNN's web site traffic saw a fivefold rise, with over 20 million page views in the single hour following the breaking news.
- Jackson's music has dominated the Top 10 charts on Amazon MP3 and iTunes as physical albums sold out in a matter of hours.

Yes, if there was ever any question how important Michael Jackson was to the music world despite all of his - shall we say, eccentricities - there should be no question now.

Tonight is probably my third week of playing the 1 vs. 100 beta. Currently free to Xbox Live Gold members, it is a massively multiplayer game show based on the TV show of the same name.

The premise of the game circles around the One versus the Mob. As in other game shows, like Who Wants to be a Millionaire, the One's goal is to climb the money ladder by correctly answering multiple choice questions with three choices each. The twist is that the goal isn't merely to get the question right - it's to eliminate all the members of the Mob. A Mob member is eliminated when they answer a question incorrectly. For every ten Mob members eliminated, the One graduates to the next bracket on the ladder and has the opportunity to take the money or continue playing. Should the One answer even a single question incorrectly, they will lose it all. To help the One, there are three lifelines. Trust the Mob uses the most popular answer given by the Mob. Trust the Crowd uses the most popular answer given by the Crowd (who are playing along with the game). Trust the Brain uses the answer given by the round's brightest player. A twist on the lifeline concept is that choosing a lifeline ties your answer with theirs - you can't take it under advisement and choose a different answer if you feel they have it wrong - their answer is your answer.

In the Xbox Live incarnation, 1 player is selected to be The One, 100 for The Mob, and everyone else is in The Crowd. In order to give The Crowd something to do, points are awarded based on how quickly and accurately you answer questions, randomly matching you with three other players if you are playing by yourself for a friendly competition. In the future, prizes will actually be awarded - with Microsoft Points filling in for actual money.

It's a reasonably fun way to spent a couple hours on a lazy weekend afternoon, but perhaps the game's biggest problem is that there is only one instance. When you consider that there are sometimes upward of 100,000 people playing, and only 101 people get to be outside the Crowd, you can see the flaw to this system. Outside of the Trust the Crowd lifeline, there is no point to Crowd participation other than playing against the others in your group. They really need to have multiple instances going. I would gladly sacrifice the live announcer for the option of having multiple sessions. I know I'm not the only one. Participation seems to have peaked around 110,000 a couple weeks ago to just 50,000 now. It's getting stale constantly being in the Crowd.

You may ask, how do you get to be the One or the Mob? The answer is to play as many of the "qualifying" matches as possible, which occur on the weekdays. Answer questions quickly and accurately and maybe, just maybe, you might be one of the lucky few. But who has time for that? Given my work hours, I'm not even home by the time those sessions wrap up everyday!

Of course, one of the interesting facets of the game is that since you're playing in a massive group, you get to see how it reacts to various questions. For example, "According to the infomercial, where is the Sham-Wow made?" only struck 3 people from the Mob. But a question like "What age-restricted product carries a Surgeon General's Warning" eliminates 20. Even moreso, "Who said 'Watson, come here! I need you!' after inventing the telephone?" knocked out a whopping 50 members of the Mob.

If nothing else, it demonstrates the effectiveness of advertising. Questions about "Which candies' motto is 'Taste the Rainbow'" or those silly Geico commercials have answers everyone seems to know.

Oh, and "What is Gordon Freeman's weapon of choice?" is always a plus.

The farthest I've seen the match get down to is 1 vs. 4. Tonight, it ended on 1 vs. 5 with a pretty challenging question:

"Which character's secret identity is Lamont Cranston?"
A: The Saint
B: The Shadow
C: The Spirit

Politico carried a story this morning about a Congressional staffer named Elizabeth Becton who went flying off the handle all because a representative from JP Morgan Chase made the horrendous mistake of calling her Liz in an e-mail.

Craaazy!

I didn't play MadWorld for very long at all, and yet I think Yahtzee's commentary is pretty much spot-on. By the fourth or fifth time I plopped a tire around a guy, drove a signpost through his eyes, and impaled him against a spiked wall, I was rather bored.

While I like the Running Man / Smash TV concept, it's used inappropriately. It's pretty clear from a level design standpoint that they did it to minimize the content they had to build. Rather than a typical brawler where you constantly progress forward into new areas, MadWorld traps you in lazy little deathmatch arenas and forces you to kill so many enemies for points. The caveat is that the points are doled out based on how gruesomely you kill things. For whatever reason, your basic fist and chainsaw attacks are "routine" to the audience. But involve a tire and, OMG, it's SO amazing! The whole game is geared around making you do those same three activities - wheels, poles and spikes - over and over again to satiate the crowd. I have a chainsaw on my arm and yet I'm not supposed to use it in favor of Three Stooges sight gags. Yeah, smart move. It's even better when I have to haul an enemy halfway across the level just to get to one of those pre-scripted death traps.

To me, it's yet another example of Driver syndrome. To explain, Driver had a lengthy tutorial inside a parking garage that explained the game's many pre-scripted combos to the player. This was, of course, back in the day when developers were as obsessed about fighting game combos as today's developers are about moronic quick time events. You couldn't leave the parking garage until you did every one of these things without bumping into the wall and it was very tedious. Compare this to a game like Grand Theft Auto. GTA says, here's the throttle, the brake, and the handbrake - have at it. The player is free to make up their own "combos."

Similarly, there's no reason why MadWorld has to show such disdain for its core mechanics. There ought to be enough fuel in a character with a chainsaw arm and a steel fist to make a compelling brawler. It would be like playing Final Fight and saying "Oh no, don't punch your enemies - throw barrels at them instead!"

That, and almost a decade after Sonic Adventure, Sega still hasn't figured out A: how to make a proper third-person camera that doesn't suck, and B: that platforming with said camera is infuriating. Unsurprisingly, the Wii Remote compounds these issues a hundred-fold.

I also didn't find the audio and visual components all that compelling. The reviewers who scored this game highly waxed poetic on the Sin City-style visuals and the fact that it's an M-rated game on the Wii - and all of them should turn in their Gamer Cards because those are never legitimate reasons to dish out a 90% for something. But back to the visuals, yes, it looks like a gritty comic book. It's also clearly compensating for what would otherwise be laughable models and sets. And even with the style, the characters have all sorts of odd clipping and z-fighting issues when seen close-up. The fact that they limit themselves to black and white means that enemies don't stand out from the noise and actually have goofy beacons above their heads to highlight them. Then the sound, the sound is just a mess. You've got some rap in the background - with vocals obviously. You've got two commentators who repeat themselves incessantly. And you've got all of the gameplay sound effects too. All of these components are evenly weighted such that no one component stands out - and it's headache-inducing to have people talking over people. Any polished game would have ducked the music when commentary started. Even the sound effect words that show up (think 1960s Batman) - you couldn't do better than Arial font? Boom, indeed.

The whole thing smacks of an unpolished product relying on violence and an avant-garde visual style to mask its shortcomings. It's not the 1990s anymore, guys, we can do better than this. The sad part is, economists will probably look at the sales of MadWorld and say that it doesn't bode well for mature games on the Wii. But, in my opinion, it has more to do with how MadWorld is a thoroughly pedestrian game with a high price tag and a laughably short play time... the astonishing GTA: Chinatown Wars notwithstanding.

I can only imagine the look on the teacher's face who got this one.

In yet another example of "Gosh I feel old" syndrome, I realized that FreeSpace 2 turns 10 years old in a few months.

Fortunately, though, unlike many games from a decade ago, this one has actually aged quite well since Volition had long since released the source code. As a result, you have the SCP project doing things that the original engine never could. Super high-res textures, normal maps, HDR lighting - all adding onto an already perfect space sim.

It's come a long way.

You knew it would happen. Snakes on a Plane would eventually show up on cable. But how would the film's signature line, motherfucking snakes on a motherfucking plane, play out on the censored airwaves of cable?

"I've had enough of these monkey fighting snakes on this Monday-to-Friday plane!"

The heck? XD

25 years ago today, Alexey Pajitnov unleashed Tetris upon an unsuspecting world.

Of the many trailers shown at E3 so far this year, there are certainly a number of impressive ones. But, for whatever reason, the one that's really caught my eye is the intro seqeunce for The Beatles Rock Band. It's just slick, walking through the band's 10 years of existence and many different periods.

It came to my attention that sometime around the middle of May, Descent 3 turned 10 years old.

I still remember where I was when I got it. Back at the time, there was a fellow by the name of Robert Berzins who had worked at Interplay as the Grand Webmaster. A real nice fellow. He'd sent along some games every now and then. I remember I wound up winning a copy of the Infinite Abyss version of Descent 2 for some reason, and somehow Descent 3 came the same way. I remember running into the basement with that pretty box to show my parents. Heck, I still remember coming home from... Babbages. Or maybe it was Software Etc., holding the Descent Anniversary Edition in my paws. I still have that strategy guide sitting by my bed. $19.95, but the thing is quite a book I must say. On my walls are still the posters of Descent and FreeSpace I won in some other contest. I assume they are somewhat rare; I haven't ever seen them on the Internet.

Berzins had unfortunately past away in a motorcycle accident, and perhaps coincidentally, Interplay began its descent into obscurity. It still exists in some form, mostly getting buy on re-releasing its old portfolio of games in hopes of accumulating enough cash to make something original. But it's too bad, you know? Lawyers came to take control of the Internet and the sort of "casual community webmaster" person rarely exists anymore. A kind of vestige of the early days of the Internet when the culture was more like CB radio operators than corporate marketers.

Descent has aged somewhat well perhaps because there wasn't much else like it. Its closest imitator was probably Acclaim's Forsaken, which saw a widespread cross-platform release. There was the easily forgotten Terracide by Eidos. There still isn't much like it, owing perhaps to its complicated controls and nausea-inducing movement (before we cared about such things as motion sickness). In a way, it's environments matured in a graceful yet esoteric way. The same way I can look at the shareware levels of Doom and see them for what they are - sprawling labs and military bases - rather than those of Doom 2 which feverishly tried to mimic "cities" and such and failed horribly.

There are times when I wax poetic about maybe revisiting Descent, in a "one for the road" sort of way. I certainly owe it for essentially starting my career. Maybe one day I'll do it. It would certainly be kind of refreshing after messing around in Source Engine and Unreal for so long.

For the last few days, I've been working on-and-off on a map for Mirror's Edge. A lot of what I remember about UnrealEd for Unreal Engine 3 applies here, and it's kind of fun using that knowledge again. It's also interesting seeing how other people using UE3 approached similar problems with the engine. So far, I have a brief interior area which leads to some outdoor rooftops.

The level isn't going to be much. I made up the gameplay as I went along and the whole thing should be completable in under five minutes. It's going to be more of a portfolio piece than anything else and demonstrate most of the major features in ME. After all, the game has the unique distinction of being a game most people have heard of, but are mostly unaware that custom content can be made. It should be eye-catching from a portfolio standpoint, I think. Especially when you bash through that red door to the rooftop - I want people to be taken aback for a moment at what they see. A cityscape, a helicopter flying by, pidgeons flying off, exhaust rising from the AC units. Sexy!

Being an unsupported editor, it's a bit quirky. Depending on how long I run it for, there's a high probability of it BSOD'ing my PC when I close it. It also takes an increasingly long time to close Kismet, Matinee, and the Particle Editor the longer it runs. The level also has trouble running outside of Play-In-Editor because of the hardcoded UI the game uses. Another thing that I've been spoiled by when it comes to Hammer Editor is both the ability to have multiple maps open at the same time as well as the general responsiveness of the editor. I forgot how terribly clunky UnrealEd was when it came to BSP editing, which ME uses for most of its interiors. On the flip side, the shrewd way they set up their props makes it reasonably simple to create a nice cityscape.

That with the advent of widescreen HDTVs, the weather forecaster doesn't quite know where to stand on screen. :)

A few weeks ago, I went on a long diatribe about how much I was soured on Mirror's Edge. Today, I think it's one of the best games I've played in a long time.

What happened? Well, two things.

One, I bought it on the PC. I had originally Gamefly'ed the Xbox 360 version and faced neverending frustration with it. Yet, after I returned it, the game was still alluring. Whether it was the desire to bask in its aura, or just run around some more, I had the desire to revisit it. Not long after, the price of the PC version fell to $20 on Steam, and I thought - well, I loved the soundtrack enough to almost justify the purchase alone. There was also talk of the editor being discovered, ah, what the heck, just get it. And you know what? It's infinitely easier to control on the PC. Combat and gunplay, two things that I just thought were horribly busted on the 360, were passable here. No, it's not the greatest combat ever, but at least when I throw a punch, I know it will land in someone's face. Naturally, mouselook controls make it far easier to pick up and aim guns. Actually, the simple fact that you have to look downward to pick up a gun and then look up to use it - that's obnoxious on the 360's analog sticks. Trivial with a mouse, and the combat is all the better for it.

The second point is that I totally misunderstood the wall run mechanic. See, I had it in my head that I had to hold the jump button in order to wall run. As such, I'd barely make it across - if at all - and it was very frustrating. In actuality, you only need to press jump to start the wall run. Faith will run on her own from there and if you press jump again, you'll jump and get almost twice the distance out of your wall run.

Needless to say, every wall run became instantly easy after that! Armed with knowledge of the wall run, I wound up beating the game. I only got stuck in one part, during the Boat, where I just didn't see the later-obvious wall run opportunity. With those big issues out of the way, I found myself enjoying the game. Right through to the end, the environments are gorgeous to look at. Standout areas included the New Eden Mall's interior, a multiple-storied shopping complex with skylights and open walkways. The Atrium in the next-to-last chapter, which is an exceptionally tall chamber of pillars and scaffolding (don't look down). And the subway part is quite intense. A mix of subway train surfing with a dash of that part in Half-Life 2 where the train comes right at you on the bridge (I swear, train whistles have made me tense after that).

That said, the combat becomes so egregious in the later chapters that I simply can't see someone playing this on the 360 or any console for that matter. Complaints of frustration would be well justified!

Onto another topic: the editor. As I said earlier, if you have Unreal Tournament 3, you go into its Binaries folder and copy the EditorRes, wxRC and wxRes folders into Mirror's Edge's Binaries folder. Then, you run "MirrorsEdge.exe editor" and UnrealEd will open. I spent about an hour flying around the tutorial map - what better way to see how the game's core systems work - and, I mean, it's a complete editor. All the Kismet is there, all the nodes are there, static meshes, interactors - everything. It seems like it wouldn't have been hard for DICE to distribute the editor, but fortunately they haven't posed any objections either. It has the potential to be a pretty exciting editor. We have very few examples of single player games running on Unreal Engine 3 that have editors. To my knowledge, UT3 (vaguely single player), Gears of War and Roboblitz are the only ones.

We'll see how this goes.

Tomorrow, President Obama will give a graduation commencement address at the University of Notre Dame. It is controversial. A group of seniors, not to mention the more vehement religious zealots out there, are protesting by not attending their own graduation.

To them, I say, what the heck did they learn in college?

People will disagree with abortion. But you don't throw away an entire person's breadth of character based on one fundamental difference. The world is not black and white and you won't get very far if your solution to everything you disagree with is to run away.