The lows are low, but the highs are home
Month
On friday I had the wonderful pleasure of experiencing Video Games Live - basically, music from video games performed by an orchestra (with choir). First of all, holy crap, the music was good on its own. When you knew the piece, that was just a bonus. Second of all, it was a pretty sweet event all told, music aside - they had booths from Microsoft and Sony, demo hardware, a Guitar Hero tournament, a costume contest… It’s pretty much the closest thing to a gaming convention Ottawa will ever have. I highly recommend you see them if they’re playing in your area.
Let’s move on to the summary of all the fun I had (that you didn’t :( ), shall we? I don’t know about you, but that sounds great to me! From what I understand, here’s what Video Games Live does: play shows anywhere there’s an orchestra willing to play the music, with video accompaniment of cutscenes and gameplay from the games. They travel around and play with local orchestras, playing an assortment of the 80 or so songs the creator has arranged for the project. They try to play different songs everywhere they go, so it’s worth going more than once. They take suggestions on songs, too, so if I got to choose I’d love to see Assault of the Silver Dragons from FF IX, or Eternity ~ Memory of Lightwaves ~ from FF X-2, or even Destati from Kingdom Hearts. I would have been the happiest boy in the world if either of those were played.
Well, life is full of minor disappointments. They played lots of other great stuff, though! In no particular order, they played a medley of retro games (Joust, Centipede, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, etc.), the opening sequence for Assassin’s Creed 2 (literally, they played the video behind, and did the music as it played), a similar video-and-music arrangement for God of War 3 (not sure if the video is from the game or not, as I haven’t played it, but it showed stuff from all three games so the song may have been a mix as well), an arrangement of songs from the Halo series, a medley of vanilla Megaman songs (from Megaman to Megaman 10, but no Megaman X or any of that stuff), an arrangement of character themes for Street Figher 2 (if Guile’s Theme is in SF 2, they played it) a piano medley of Final Fantasy songs (this made me so happy, I knew every song XD), a piano medley of Mario songs (half of which was played while blindfolded, and received the night’s first standing ovation), and maybe a few others I’m forgetting… There’s more, but the others bear special mention, so I’ll get to that.
They picked two people out of the crowd to compete for a high score in Frogger, while the orchestra played the background music. The ultimate winner was a man lovingly nicknamed “Jesus” by the crowd. Jesus only hopped on the lady frog once. What a great monogamous example for us all.
After the intermission, the winner of the Guitar Hero tournament was brought on stage to play a song alongside the orchestra (on Guitar Hero, obviously) - if he could score 175,000 points on Hard, playing Jump by Van Halen, he’d win some stuff. His response: “I want to play it on expert!” He got 200,000 points in the end. Pretty cool.
They also played Baba Yetu (the song from Civilazation IV that won a Grammy, the first for any video game), accompanied by the original singer for the song, because apparently he’s from Toronto. Pretty sweet.
The vocalist for all the songs was Laura “FluteLink” Intravia, who (I think) was recruited by the group after they saw a skit she’d performed and uploaded to youtube. She did the skit live, with a plush Navi over her shoulder, which was cool.
Now I’ll give you three guesses what the finale was. Here’s a couple of hints: the title ends with the word “angel”, it had to be played by an orchestra and a choir, and it’s more than ten years old.
If you called it before the end of that sentence, congrats. If you didn’t, you need to brush up on your gaming history and dust off a copy of Final Fantasy VII - the finale was One Winged Angel, and it was great. Lots of people did their best to sing along, mostly poorly, because who remembers all the lyrics anyway? You know, except the Sephiroth part. While it was an obvious choice for the finale, that certainly doesn’t make it a bad choice, because it was a totally fitting finish.
Everyone stood and cheered, and a chant for one more song rose up around the room. It continued for a minute or two, and died down a little when it started to seem like we weren’t going to get it. Then it got a bit stronger, and finally they came back for an arrangement of music from Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross. Everyone pulled out their backlit screen of choice (DS, cell phone, PSP) and waved them around. Probably looked really, really awesome from down on the stage. One guy was waving a laptop. A couple of the guys we’d met up with while we were there waved the copies of Chrono Cross they’d bought just before coming to the show. Lucky bastards got them for twenty bucks…
All jealousy aside! After that song was done, everyone stood again and clapped and clapped until they said “if you guys keep standing, we’ll just have to keep playing!” Spoiler: we stood. For our second encore, we got a rendition of Still Alive, with lyrics up on the big screen for the two people who didn’t know them already. Everyone sang along, and it was great.
Everything about it was great.
vael:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/92000/
Yes, it looks bad. That’s what makes the game look so delicious, because you can tell they have an official marketing person who wrote the content for that page.
BREATHTAKING VISUALS
I had my breath taken once in portal, when I saw that you can put…
Here’s what Jim Sterling had to say about Hydrophobia: Prophecy:
Nothing is yet known about the game, other than it is a thing. Episodic games can have a habit of disappearing before reaching their conclusion, so this is terrific news for the three Hydrophobia fans on the planet, otherwise known as “two engineers from Dark Energy Digital and one of the engineers’ autistic kids.”
Jim gave the game a bad review, basically saying it sucked and was boring and lame, and someone from the company called him repeatedly to complain about his review and tell him he was playing the game wrong. Yes, their game is actually wonderful, but you won’t realize it unless you play it properly. Too bad the developers didn’t include instructions for their way to play the game.
A couple of weeks ago, I set off from my house with a backpack full of games I knew I’d never play again. My brother had agreed with all of my choices, and we’d had them sitting in a box, waiting to be disposed of in any way possible, for a long time. This was stuff like Ape Escape Pumped & Primed, Pokemon Battle Revolution, games we either picked up in a bargain bin or as a well-intentioned gift. Maybe a few that seemed like a good idea at the time (Star Wars Force Unleashed, Ridge Racer 7). We’d tried selling them to our friends, through a yard sale, and we just couldn’t find anybody willing to give us any decent price for them.
So I took them to the one place I knew would be forced to take even the worst game off of my hands: GameStop. I looked at the pile of games, and I said to my brother: “I almost feel bad for making them take these games. I’d refuse, if I were them.” I apologized when I went in, and the guy (the manager, I think) laughed. I unpacked all the games, he rang them in, and the total came up to around $90. If you buy a used game when you trade something in, they give you an extra 50% credit. New total: $134. The catch: I had to use all the credit right away.
So I bought Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood used, which was 100% worth it. Then I bought Final Fantasy Tactics A2, also used. With $70 left, I couldn’t think of anything to get, and ended up getting Dead Space and Dead Space 2 - both used. I didn’t really want Dead Space 2, given that I haven’t played the first, so I asked my brother and we agreed to return it in exchange for a Portal 2 pre-order.
This was definitely a great deal for me - I got rid of a box full of junk, and scored four games in exchange. But does that make it right? I got, literally, dollars and cents for most of the games. I got Arc the Lad: End of Darkness for $10 in a bargain bin, and they gave me $0.37 for it. That Ape Escape game got me $0.45. Pokemon Battle Revolution was worth about twenty bucks, and Yoshi’s Island 2 was worth $15. All of the games I sold them will be sold for a much higher price, the profits going solely to GameStop. The three games I bought used didn’t contribute anything to the developers beyond what they got from the first sale. Some people like to make the argument that “used game sales drive new game purchases” - yet GameStop gave me $45 just for buying one single used game from them. I could have just bought a $10 used game from a bargain bin, and gotten that bonus credit. There are no restrictions on it, except with pre-orders I think. You think they’d be doing that if it didn’t make them a profit?
So, in short, I may be a bad (or at least selfish) person. I made a profit for a large corporation, and I contributed nothing to the people who genuinely deserve the money for the games.
edit: I traded in exactly 30 games, if I counted the receipt properly - so an average of $3 each
You already know that I used to be depressed, right? If that’s a surprise to you, read that first. I haven’t read it since I first wrote it, so I don’t know how I feel about it. I’m sure it’s ok though.
The reason I say that is because I’ve been kind of doubtful for the past month or so since we got into the psychological disorders section of my psychology class. The “worst case scenario” they describe for depression is being absolutely incapable of functioning normally. Not getting out of bed for weeks, stuff like that. “Heaven forbid, you might even become suicidal” quipped my professor. Given that I always managed to scrape by, I guess that means my depression wasn’t really that bad.
That is, if you accept the “it could be worse, so it’s not that bad” form of logic. It’s probably better to place depression (I’m sure the analogy would work for other problems, too) on a sort of exponential scale similar to the Richter scale used for earthquakes. A 2.0 earthquake is 10 x 10, while a 4.0 earthquake is 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 - a lot more than twice as bad. Being unable to get out of bed is a totally different level of magnitude than having a life devoid of joy and happiness, but I don’t think that changes things. It’s way worse, but the latter is still bad.
The other thing I kind of want to rail against is what my professor said about becoming suicidal being the end of the line for depression. That’s really not the case. Again with a math analogy, because they’re super easy, becoming suicidal is probably more like the area of a rectangle. Being depressed for a long time (length) is just as bad as being extremely depressed (width). A rectangle that’s 10 x 4 has as much area as one that’s 4 x 10. Claiming that only people who are as depressed as you can be will become suicidal is just false.
So, in sum, I’d still say that I was depressed and that it sucked a lot. It feels pretty distant to me, now, so it’s easy to say it wasn’t so bad - but only if I forget what it felt like at the time.
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Now here’s where this post becomes relevant: my brother is incredibly similar to me. All of the reasons I became depressed, all the despair I had in my little ten year old mind, are just as relevant for him as they were for me. I know this sounds stupid, but it’s hard being a smart kid, especially when being smart doesn’t mean you’ll succeed. He’s as smart as I ever was, probably smarter when it comes to math and science. But he isn’t getting the grades I did, which is just unfair. He wants to be an eccentric math professor, and I can totally see him being that eccentric math professor, but the universities aren’t going to see it that way when they look at his marks.
Making matters worse is the fact that my parents expect everything out of him that they expected of me, and he’d naturally have as much trouble dealing with that as I did. It’s hard being perfect all the time, you know? But I escaped that by taking those expectations into myself - my parents would probably accept 80’s at university, but I want the 90’s for myself. And I get them, with enough effort. Or with very little effort (usually) in junior high and most of high school.
Except he isn’t getting those grades all the time. My dad gives him a really, really hard time for that. My mom is better with it, but she still pushes him.
Plus we moved away from all his friends. He’s got a couple here, but I don’t think there’s anyone he’s really close to. Certainly nothing like what I had at his age, which was an immense help to me.
In short, my brother is depressed.
My mom brought it up with our doctor (or some doctor, at any rate) and they said “we’ll get you to a psychologist in a month or so.” Ok, great. Give him someone to talk to and work through his problems. Then they said “in the meantime, have him take these antidepressants.”
You can probably guess I have a problem with that. You don’t just give people treatment without any sort of diagnosis! If someone walks in and says “I have a heart condition,” you don’t give them pills and send them off for a month. Pills are meant to solve physiological (chemical, biological, etc.) problems, and they do that by making physiological changes. Changes in your physiology, especially in brain chemistry, screw with your body until it can adjust. That’s why medication has side effects. You know why antidepressants sometimes say “may cause suicidal thoughts”? Because they mess with your neurotransmitters (like hormones, but in the brain), and if the problem isn’t related to neurotransmitters, you’ll be creating symptoms that were never there.
Long story short, on average, people tend to become more suicidal in the first few weeks of taking antidepressants. He’s been on them now for about two weeks, with some pretty bad side effects (incredibly dizzy, slept all day on sunday) but I don’t think he was suicidal to the point of actually hurting himself. What if he had been? What if he never got to see that psychologist in a month, because he didn’t adjust well to the pills and couldn’t take any more?
Even aside from all of that, there’s the simple fact that psychological disorders are caused by more than just neurotransmitter problems. There are social issues (family life, friends, etc.), cognitive issues (bad thought habits > depression > bad thought habits), pre-existing conditions to consider (personality disorders, general physical problems) and plenty of other things that contribute. Antidepressants aren’t going to help someone with an inferiority complex, or an abusive partner, or a bad habit of blaming themselves and being pessimistic. That is why a psychologist studies for many years to make a diagnosis and (hopefully) take all the possibilities into account before beginning the appropriate treatment. And that’s without even getting into the possibility that there’s a vicious circle going on (negative thoughts > low serotonin levels?), leading to treatment of symptoms instead of the underlying cause.
Anyway, people are sometimes bad at their jobs and make irresponsible choices.
I love how they’re against spending money on things they don’t agree with wasting money, deficit spending, national debt… and taxes. So what, if the government would just quit spending their darn money, they wouldn’t need to tax anyone?
Let’s run the government as a not-for-profit organization! Donations only! Yaaaaay!
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On a related note, I think I should be the guy on the left in the BTP picture.
Before it stops being topical, I’m going to post a couple of Ars Technica articles rather than make one of the posts I have floating around in the back of my head. I’m not sure how much I want to say about this, because it’s all information I’ve cultivated from intelligent people writing blog posts I couldn’t hope to source now. At any rate, here’s the first link:
Or, in plain English, more properly called “Self-Entitled Whining, Lack of Industry Knowledge, and Free Bonus Stuff Isn’t Good Enough For Me.” I’m going to look at his points in order, because the fact is, these things don’t happen just to piss you off and keep you from playing the game you bought. Not only that, but none of these things even have anything to do with “new” games! Buying a game used doesn’t solve any of these issues, except perhaps that you don’t get the free DLC codes that the previous owner probably used.
Or worse, you DO get the codes, and they’ve already been used. Jerks.
I don’t want to install the game, or an update.
A) Installing a game is one thing developers use to make the game perform better. You know how load times are practically a thing of the past? That’s because we don’t have to load every new area off of the disk when you move across some arbitrary boundary point. A lot of games will make installs optional on PS3, which is nice, but it’s probably easier for them to force you to do it. Go make lunch or something.
B) The code sent to the manufacturer who makes the physical discs you buy (or to the publisher who controls the digital platform you’re downloading on) is likely months old, in order to give enough time for the discs to be made (or the content to be reviewed by Sony/Microsoft/Steam). Is the development team supposed to twiddle their thumbs until release, or start working on DLC expansions (or the sequel)? Not only that, but patches cost a lot of time and money to push through Sony/Microsoft on consoles. That’s why they don’t release patches to fix every little problem, because it’s just not worth it. For example, a problem people had with Costume Quest was fixed if you bought the DLC for it, because it just wasn’t worth the money to patch it.
So there’s two things at work here: it’s more economical, and that’s important when you’re spending millions of dollars on developing a game. And the second thing is that you get a better product after the patch, and the game can be released six months sooner, so why complain about it? Unless you have a dial-up connection, it’s going to take you two minutes to get the patch. Go to the bathroom while you wait.
I don’t want to input a stack of codes.
Gosh, getting free stuff is just awful. It’s hard to say for sure if the content you’re getting would have been on the disc if it weren’t DLC, because that really depends on the individual game. Aside from that, I guess this is the only one that’s relevant to buying new vs used. The goal is to reward people who buy new, and/or punish those who buy used, and packing in DLC is a perfectly fine way to do that. Assuming the content really isn’t on the disc, you are getting free stuff. Now, if these codes were abolished, one of two things would happen: the game a few months later to add some DLC, or you’d have to fork over five bucks for it the day of launch. DLC codes don’t seem so bad now, do they?
I don’t want to watch an unskippable trailer for your next game.
I don’t know about this. Does this actually happen? I’ve never experienced it. This is a good point, I guess. Why anyone would do it is beyond me, so I’m glad I haven’t played a game that does this.
I don’t want to make a new account for your online service.
There aren’t that many services to sign up for anymore. You’ve got an EA account for BioWare and (Dark)Spore and Dead Space, and you’ve got a Uplay account for Ubisoft, and maybe on PC you have an old GameSpy account… I’m sure I’m missing some, but for the most part these kinds of accounts are from publishers or something and not game-specific. Most of them come with free stuff, too, so why not use them? Having an EA account lets you get free Dragon Age stuff, having a Uplay account lets you get free Assassin’s Creed stuff and upload your save data to their servers. It’s really not that bad, and it’s great for them because they can track your stuff more accurately, pimp their brand a bit, and if they’re doing it right give you some sort of reward for using the service. Alternatively, if it’s to sign into their servers or whatever, that kind of sucks. But it’s not different from making an account for an MMO.
The one legitimate argument against this is when the Terms of Service basically say that you don’t own your game, as has happened with Dragon Age II (turns out that was an error, allegedly) and Dragon Age: Origins (server problem) recently.
Boy that was way too much. Well, onto the next link!
This is a long one, but it can be basically summed up by two graphs later in the article:
Mass Effect 2 is a kind of oddity among the group, considering it’s very story driven and a lot of players were probably coming in from the first game. Red Dead Redemption, Super Meat Boy, and Shank, all of which were very well reviewed, have abysmal completion rates. Essentially, most of the people who played those games probably didn’t see the last half of the games. If you’d released the game with half as much content, 30% of the people (a very vocal minority) would have complained, while everyone else would have finished it and been perfectly satisfied.
I don’t know what the solution to all of this is. I know I don’t finish the vast majority of the games I buy. Yet I do like to have more content in the good ones. I really don’t mind the multiple almost-endings in Persona 4, because any extra time spent with that game was just great. On the other hand, I feel kind of cheated that I spent so much time on Final Fantasy XIII, considering I didn’t enjoy it that much and just felt obligated to finish it.
What would be really interesting is if some data like this was available for older games. I’d love to see how many people made it through older, 40+ hour RPGs (western and eastern) and how many managed to finish shorter titles. We know players don’t see most of the content in a game, yet demand that it exists, but we don’t know how things used to be either. Could be that just as many games were going unfinished.
I don’t think we’ll ever see 100% completion rates, no matter how perfect the fit between length and quality becomes. But then a class average of 70% is considered phenomenal in a large first year university class (more people take the course than there are people who care about doing well), and considering the even larger sample of people who play a given game, you could probably expect something a bit lower on any game longer than two hours.
ok that’s enough I’m going to go have lunch now, too bad I don’t have a game to install
Taken from Abstergo Industries phone records
Dated April, 2011
I take a great risk in sharing this audio file with you. But you must know: everything around you has been engineered to keep you subservient - to a master with a million faces. Look as hard as you like - all you’ll find is one of its masks, a mere front, designed to throw you off their scent. The true mastermind controls everything…
except us.
All I can say is awkwardness.
He must not like asians because you’re definitely pretty.
If only every relationship in life could be based on physical attractiveness. The world would be so much better that way!
/awful, totally rude sarcasm
I think guys only insist on asking who a girl likes when they know it’s them. That’s the only reason I ever did it, at any rate. I dunno. High school.
ok look java I know we’ve had our differences in the past
but we’ve had some great times too
so please stop making all of the blue objects in my game go backwards
I don’t even know how you could screw that up
but the red ones work just fine
so yeah
edit1: fixed the blue ones, now the red ones are going backwards
it’s a problem with the sign, if you move something in a negative x/y, the sign gets lost amid all the pythagorean calculations and whatnot
brb fixing it for good
I went to Carleton’s varsity banquet last night, even though I’m not on the actual varsity fencing team. They put my name on the list without even asking any questions, and I actually just walked in and sat down at the table without even showing my ticket (luckily enough, because I didn’t have the ticket). Which is all to say that it wasn’t exactly an exclusive event.
Anyway! The banquet itself isn’t really important, and there’s nothing really interesting to say about it. What is interesting, though, is what happened afterwards. I was there for about two and a half hours, with maybe a couple hundred people there. We were unlucky enough to get the table closest to the speakers, so the music was so loud you had to lean towards the people beside you to talk to them. When all the awards had been given out, I basically just said goodbye to my friend (and none of the other people I kind of know) and took off as quickly as I could. I’m sure it was rude and etc. but I just wanted out! So I left, and I’m walking around wearing a suit, and I was just so glad to be alone. I missed the bus, met up with a guy I kinda know and hadn’t spoken to all night (he was at a different table), and he knew the way to the light rail train station so we could get back to Carleton and I could take the bus from there.
After we got off the train and he left, I just started getting incredibly tired, as well as an instant headache. I’ll blame that part on the music. The other thing is I started thinking about stuff I should have done at the banquet (actually socialized with people, for example) and being lightly miserable. Really just wanted to get home and crawl into bed. So I hopped on the bus and did that, and remembered that, oh yeah, I’m really introverted. And that’s what this post is really about!
I don’t dislike people in general, and I like the people I know. I’m not trying to avoid you! Really! What happens is this: I need to be alone when I work, because it’s really hard to keep up three conversations and write an essay at the same time. When I want to relax, I prefer to be by myself. And then suddenly I’m “too busy” to sign into Miranda and talk to the people I know and love. And I say I’ll be around more often, because being alone all the time is depressing and bad, and then it doesn’t really happen. And that sucks.
The absolute worst case scenario is when I either spend a lot of time with a few people (having friends over for the entire weekend like I used to in junior high and high school) or any amount of time with a lot of people (parties, banquets). Then I get mentally and emotionally drained, and it puts me off for a long time afterwards. When I went to the Halloween party in October, I was miserable literally all weekend. It isn’t as bad this time, though I don’t know why. I’m feeling mostly better, at any rate. Having a hard time getting settled in to work, though.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure this is an actual thing that happens to people other than just me. Odds are it’ll seem familiar if you’re introverted, because I’ve realized in retrospect that it has pretty much always happened and I just never realized it until I really thought about it. Maybe you’ll notice it from now on.
Ok this is getting long and I’m really just procrastinating. Tl;dr I half-ass an apology, rationalize my failure to socialize, half-heartedly justify my continued status as a hermit, and try to remember from now on to accept my introversion. Denial doesn’t really get me anywhere.
I’ve played Diablo II and never got into it… Eventually sold my copy for ten bucks to a guy who’d been banned on his previous CD key. I played Titan’s Quest for maybe an hour, and I don’t even know where that went. Never tried Torchlight or Deathspank or any of the other Diablo-esque games that have come out (actually I tried Hellgate: London a little bit), because they just never hooked me on the “collect rare lootz” premise.
Spore was… ok. I played it long enough to get to the space part, and promptly wanted to leave. Controlling the creatures themselves was really the best stage. So as a game it didn’t really get me. The animation and random creature generation, even the creature editor itself, that stuff was all great. But it wasn’t a whole lot of fun, when you include all the various stages.
Darkspore, first of all, is an inevitability considering they probably didn’t make any money off of Spore. They’ve got amazing procedural generation (clearly a hot topic recently) for both the creation of random creatures and animating them, so why not make use of it? I can pretty much guarantee that 99% of the game’s assets were made by a guy pressing the “generate horrific monstrosities” button and then picking the five coolest ones out of the thousand possibilities that came up. From a business point of view, they’ve hit the jackpot, because the Spore creature editor will probably always be cool.
As a game, though, it’s actually pretty sweet. You’re a Crogenitor (pffffft), and what that really means is you’re one of the demi-gods blessed with the ability to genetically modify powerful mutants. The game doesn’t say this, but you know that it’s true. In your role as “the last surviving god-thing from Spore,” you control a squad of Genetic Heroes (read: deadly mutant creatures) and you upgrade them using the various shiny pieces of equipment you find while running around murdering things.
The heroes have subtypes (Necro, Plasma, Bio, Quantum, stuff like that) which decide their powers (summon ghosts, stun guys, create minions, slow down time) and then classes (Ravager, Sentinel, etc.) which determine your main stats and attack type (strength and melee attacks, dexterity and melee attacks, mind and long range, etc.). Then they have some detailed backstory stuff I didn’t read, which may or may not have been randomly generated too. The equipment you find is equipped to them in the same way body parts were in Spore, and I think you can find new body parts as well eventually. And of course the equipment has all sorts of stat boosts and cool adjectives like “Laseth’s Thunder Claws of Sharpness” and there’s a few levels of rarity. You can gamble your equipment by beating progressively harder levels one after another - double or nothing, essentially. Beating multiple levels in a row also increases the odds of getting rare (rarer?) items.
Collecting some ugly little staff that claims to be a mystical bone wand, but really looks like every other staff, isn’t very engaging. Collecting energy claws, mystical hoods, cybernetic implants, crystal growths, etc. etc. and “equipping” them through the creature editor, however, is a whole lot more awesome. Maybe it’s that, maybe it’s that they took the good parts of Spore and the good parts of Diablo, but I actually liked playing Darkspore. That’s pretty good, since I didn’t like either of those games. I don’t know if I’ll buy it, but the beta’s free until friday, so go check it out. We can team up and stuff and maybe that would be cool?
(some dumb people in the game’s chat were like ‘wait is this game free to play’ and 'screw it if they want a monthly subscription’ because they don’t realize it’s a normal retail game lol)
The game has a campaign mode, with extra unlockable difficulty levels (and, I assume, better lootz) with co-op that increases the shiny stuff you and your team members get. It also has PvP (unlockable through a purchase at like level 9 or something) and I don’t know how that works. I have no idea if the full game is going to have more in it? I assume the campaign is going to the only single-player mode, which is ok I guess but it’s not like it has much of a story or anything. You’ll be hard-pressed to remember what the cutscenes tell you after five minutes of murder.
Anyway! As I said, free until friday, we can team up and stuff if our schedules work out. In fact, I’m free tonight… but it’ll take like two hours to download. I’m ok with this multiplayer because it’s co-op and everyone wins.
I’ve got a bunch of things I want to say, but not a whole lot to say about them. Not enough to make individual posts, but too much to say in a facebook status update. So I’m shamelessly stealing the term ‘quick hits’ from The Electric Hydra podcast (or internet radio show) and presenting a bunch of stuff to you, with shiny bullet points for your reading pleasure.
The moral of the story is you should probably read AltDevBlogADay. I love the idea of “GDC all year round” because there are a ton of awesome people with great stuff to say who wouldn’t get a spot to speak at a conference because they aren’t famous. And they sure as hell wouldn’t be given an hour to talk about best comment coding practices or the glory of “scripting languages” that don’t need to be compiled for ten minutes in order to test minute changes.
Not going to lie, I was actually wishing for a collection like this when I first got my Kindle. I settled for a few books and just left the rest, but now I have this! And so does everyone else who wants it. Does that include you?
It’s a good thing I’m never going to be making charts in Java, because I would probably be screwed if someone thought Excel wasn’t good enough and asked me to write a new chart program. We’ve had two tutorials now on working with these chart program, and in both of these tutorials I’ve spent an hour and a half trying to get past the first instruction. It certainly doesn’t help that every step in the tutorial is meant to somehow summarize half an hour of work - there are only four or five steps in each. Why couldn’t I just spend ten minutes accomplishing the same work with a little more instructions?
It’s not like the notes are any help, either. Here’s the entirety of our notes in the “Graphics” chapter. Think you could make a graphing application out of that? So we have bad notes that probably teach less than the Java documentation does (educate yourselves hurr hurr and we’ll just take your money), and we have unclear instructions that are written with the understanding that you’ll waste your time doing it wrong for a while until you figure out the problem through trial and error. What makes it worse is that every tutorial begins with you downloading at least five pre-built classes and then trying to fill in missing functionality. Last week’s tutorial had… 14 classes to download. Most of these have variables like X_AXIS_OFFSET and YEAR_SEPARATION_WIDTH and they’re used in a few places without giving you any real explanation of how it’s meant to work.
Last week’s tutorial was to draw the chart, and I couldn’t get that working. This week was to do some mouse stuff. Anyway, the chart drawing code was supplied this week, and here’s the formula for the (x,y) of the points on a graph that I spent an hour and a half trying to figure out:
X: ORIGIN_OFFSET_X + i*YEAR_SEPARATION_WIDTH
Y: Y_AXIS_OFFSET + DATA_HEIGHT - DATA_HEIGHT * histogram[i] / maxValue
The code I had, which was drawing everything slightly off for no reason I ever figured out:
X: (i*YEAR_SEPARATION_WIDTH)+ORIGIN_OFFSET_X
Y: Y_AXIS_OFFSET+DATA_HEIGHT-(aDVDCollection.yearHistogram()[i])
Why does that multiplication happen? What’s wrong with my code? I could have asked the TA to write it for me, but that really doesn’t help anything. At best I finish the tutorial without learning anything. Or, wait, what was I supposed to learn? How to use the drawLine() method? Or was I supposed to learn how to make a mediocre program after inheriting someone else’s code? It’s the destiny of your average software engineer, after all. Really, though, it’s not really a useful learning experience.
So what I’m getting at with this boring little rant is this: last semester, I learned stuff in our tutorials and by reading the notes. They were written by the same guy. Clearly he just gave up trying to teach the second course, and figured we’d learn what we need to know through hours spent working on assignments. My instructor (a different guy) isn’t really teaching us a whole lot during class time, either. I mean, there’s some stuff he tells us that’s great, but he’s a professional programmer, not a teacher. If you’ve ever done any programming, you’ll know what I mean by this. You can probably figure out that watching someone do that for three hours every week would be boring as hell.
So as for the title of the post, last semester was definitely a win, and this semester was pretty much a loss. Doing the assignments and looking at example code from class assignments and the notes has taught me plenty, but did I really need to pay six hundred bucks for it? Technically yes, because I need the course to graduate, but realistically, no. Sometimes you just don’t get what you paid for with post-secondary education. That’s the unfortunate truth.
All in all, this just reinforces my decision not to specialize in computer science as part of my cognitive science degree. I may as well just teach myself everything I need to know with a tutorial and the official documentation. Maybe I should steal a few of the assignments for the other courses before they’re taken off the Carleton sites to give myself something to work towards…
So I’m in a philosophy class this semester called “Mind, World, and Knowledge” and we’re getting into the “mind” part of the course. At the moment, we’re looking at the debate between Dualism (the mind and body are separate things) and Materialism (the mind is a material thing) and while there are a ton of different positions within these broad categories, that’s the basic gist of it. Thus far in the course, everything we’ve considered has seemed pretty good on its own, at least until we get into criticisms coming from other philosophers. So I’ve been open-minded and accepted that they may have a point with what they’re trying to say.
Getting into Dualism, it’s been really hard to do that. And that bothers me a lot, oddly enough. What am I learning if I cheer for every little argument against what we’re considering and can’t think of anything but problems with the position? That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, just that I’m looking for it to be wrong, or want it to be wrong, because of my own personal bias. Dualism isn’t literally about some kind of soul or mystical property or another of our minds, but it’s hard to escape the influence when you’re trying to separate the mind as a thing from our brain and our bodies. I’m sure that contributes to my bias against it - in a kind of abstract way, I would certainly say we have a soul or something along those lines, but I’d see that as something that arises out of what we are. As in, you have a soul because you think and hold ideas about things and all of that comprises the “soul” of who you are. I guess I’m saying it’s equivalent to your identity.
At any rate, that’s a Materialist position (or maybe Idealist…? that’s something about ideas making us who we are, or something) and pretty clearly shows my bias against what we’re learning. It just seems wrong and ignorant to look at this as somehow better than Dualism just because it’s the thing I happen to think is right. It’s a totally natural way to be, and just about everyone is that way. But does that make it right? If everyone is wrong, that doesn’t necessarily make it any better.
I’m not bothered by the idea that I could be wrong, really - if some form of Dualism turned out to be right, well, that’s just great. Today’s topic, specifically, was a philosopher trying to show that sensations are proof of Dualism. A few of the examples he used were afterimages and pain. Now, I can tell you that there are specific types of nerve fibres for experiencing pain, and if you get distracted you can actually not perceive the sensation of pain your nerves are actually bringing to your brain. I can also tell you that, because of a certain way your eyes work and the neurons for sight work, afterimages are caused when they fire in reverse after a stimulus is taken away. So you stare at the sun and close your eyes, and you’ll keep seeing some colours. This is a purely physical, or material, thing - you’ve got neurons firing and they’re creating this sensation you’re having.
Dualism is the idea that the mind is somehow separate from the body - so this philosopher was saying that the perception of things such as sounds and etc (sensations) is something that belongs to the immaterial mind, and aren’t equivalent to the causes of the perception - i.e. the sensations. I’m using psychology terminology, but he described it a little bit differently and this is more precise. Anyway, the whole defence against such a “this is what makes you perceive something” argument is this: the cause of your perception (the sensations, neurons firing, etc.) aren’t equivalent to the perception itself. So, the fact that you stubbed your toe and nerve fibres are bringing that message to your brain, doesn’t equal the fact that you, as an immaterial mind thing, realize “ow my toe”.
That’s all well and good, but that’s why the term perception exists separately from the term sensation. They’re different things. You could have perfect vision, and see everything, and yet think you’re blind, because you aren’t getting the perception part. You might even look at someone while speaking to them, and your neurons are reacting, but you’d still say you don’t see them. But I don’t see that as proof that the mind is somehow different from the brain and the neurons in it and the difference cortices and etc.
The fact that you can’t see the mind doesn’t mean it’s not there - if I can track every single little thing leading to you feeling pain, why is it somehow separate and special? That’s what gets to me about this particular argument, anyway, but I let it slide when the professor gave it to me as an answer because I don’t want to get the class off track. Things to do and discuss and whatnot. But, really, it’s not that I think the argument is wrong that bothers me. It’s the fact that I can’t bring myself to consider it seriously because I think I’m so smart and have all the real answers already. Well, not consciously. But on some level that’s obviously going on.
You don’t get a good wrap-up of this post because I have to go to class. Everything I wanted to say is here, so there! Good for you if you wanted to read it. If not, I probably went on for way too long. Ah well.
First of all, I think I’ve already mentioned here that I adore Insomniac. They’re just cool dudes. But second of all, this is actually a good, concise critique of the majority of facebook games (and whatever mobile games there are that take after them). I don’t really have much to say that isn’t already mentioned there, so go check it out.
On the subject of how problems and goals work in game design, here’s an Extra Credits episode more relevant to “core games” on choice and conflict. It’s not a new episode, but I thought of it right away as I was reading the Insomniac post, and I don’t think anyone has actually started watching Extra Credits on my recommendation yet. So I’ll keep linking to good episodes and that’ll be enough.
Because I worried (or hoped) that someone might worry about me and not get the joke, no, I don’t actually think I have a ton of mental illnesses. Sorry guys.
If you still think self-diagnosing is a good idea, check out my notes for today ‘cause my psychology professor spent a good ten minutes telling people not to do it. I didn’t write much down because that would be useless, but there you go - diagnosis is complex and you don’t know anything about doing it, so don’t even try. She didn’t mention it, but I wouldn’t go into a meeting with a psychiatrist/therapist/whatever and say “so I think I have x, y, and/or z” because they’ll look for symptoms of that and probably jump to conclusions just like you did. “You’ll see what you expect to see,” after all. Unless you want to be diagnosed and get meds because you’re sure they’ll help/don’t care if they don’t help, in which case, feel free to continue.
As for the actual reason I’m posting today, I wanted to mention again how much I like WriteMonkey. I like it as much as I liked Q10 when I was working on essays last semester, except a bit more, because it fixes problems Q10 had and adds a number of useful features. For example, something I’ve gotten used to using as a project-specific todo list is comments in my programming assignments - and WriteMonkey allows you to keep track of comments and dims them out a bit to set them off from the rest of the text. It lets you set progress goals (I think for the entire project) and then track partial progress, as in how much you’ve done in one session and stuff. It can do lookups for stuff on google and dictionary.com and stuff. And I haven’t used it yet, but you can create tags it calls “jumps” and automatically find them in the text - so you could have like @[INSERT IDEA] or #[INSERT TODO] or whatever. It also tracks your most frequently used words! So that’s pretty cool, and you can see “hmm, I used the word "something” twelve times, that’s not good".
Also, Ninite has made it possible for people to embed installers in their sites and show only certain programs, which is pretty neat because you can say “here are the programs I recommend using” and people can take whatever they want and just install them without any crap.
So we’ve been covering some cool stuffs in my psychology class recently. You’ll find my notes on motivation (why I became a hermit to do well in school), personality development (raise your kids not to be dumb), and stress (spoiler: it’ll kill you). Next couple of weeks will be mental illnesses - your depressions, schizophrenias, etc. Everyone’s favourite topic, really. On that note, I’ve self-diagnosed myself with every anxiety disorder except Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (though I’m only lightly OCD) and just about every personality disorder. Hopefully they can medicate those away for me.
My other class this semester is phonetics, which will be boring to everyone who isn’t a linguist, aka just about everyone. And if you are a linguist you already know phonetics so you probably don’t care. So that sucks I guess.
But my other other class this semester is philosophy! And that is pretty cool and you’ll probably find interesting stuff in the notes for that. The topic is “Mind, World, and Knowledge” and so far we’ve done Knowledge and we’re about to move into Mind. I can’t really organize those in any meaningful way for you, unfortunately, but check ‘em out anyway. Some of it is boring, some of it isn’t.
The best thing from PHIL 1301B, however, is definitely Pyrrhonian scepticism. There are three basic parts to Pyrrhonian scepticism: making no assertions, the method of opposition, and the four modes of acquiescence.
Check out the last three (or four if you read this on monday) days of notes for more on this. The only really valid criticism we’ve covered would have to be that knowledge of skills - something the Pyrrhonist accepts as “know-how” because it doesn’t involving making assertions - at some point has to involve a bit of “know-that”, or regular knowledge which eventually becomes equivalent to assertions. So being a doctor doesn’t just mean knowing how to treat your patients (know-how) but there’s also knowing facts and things to help you treat your patients (know-that).
I’m writing a paper about scepticism and how, as far as I can tell, Pyrrhonian scepticism is a perfectly tenable (fancy word for “it works”) position. So COME TEAR IT APART so that I can include that criticism in my paper! However please do check out the notes in case I’ve screwed up somewhere.
edit: also I’ve replaced Q10 with WriteMonkey for writing in peace
edit 2: if you google certain things, my notes show up as results - awesome, except when I’m looking for answers and find my own notes
Crunch time, as defined by Urban Dictionary:
The interval of time immediately before a project is due, when it becomes apparent that the schedule has slipped and everyone is going to have to work like dogs to try to complete the project in time. Crunch time usually occurs during the period between the next-to-last scheduled milestone (prior to which everyone was able to delude themselves tht the schedule had NOT slipped) and the final deadline for delivery. During crunch time, workers are in crunch mode. Prevalent in the software industry, but used elsewhere as well.
If you’re not familiar, crunch time is (allegedly, anyway) part and parcel of working in the video game industry. There are any number of reasons it might happen, and according to the bitter folk, you’re lucky if it only lasts a few weeks. Even indie developers do it, apparently (see the link). But they basically work for themselves - nobody is FORCING them to work extra hours with no compensation. If you have a deal with Microsoft to put the game on XBLA by a certain date, you might be stuck, and I’m sure it’s the indies who have teamed up with publishers who get into crunch time. At any rate, these are guys who love what they do, but I’m willing to bet nobody loves their work so much that they enjoy working twelve or more hours per day.
What I realized as I was reading the post and thinking about vael, was that I work for myself too. And I crunch all day, every day, except when I get too stressed out and resort to procrastinating - which only continues the crunch. Why am I always crunching? Because I have nothing else in my life except for school work. I don’t really have anyone to hang out with here in Ottawa, and I’m always so “busy” that I don’t sign in to IM the friends I do have. Fencing is really the only thing I do to relax, and I haven’t been going to that as often as I used to - it’s getting easier to say “I’m too busy to go tonight”. I’m going to go on saturday, for sure, and next tuesday as well. It’s hard to know if I should go on wednesdays and thursdays because sometimes I have nobody to fence with.
I’m doing really well right now, and everything is totally on schedule, and it’s awesome. But I feel stressed out when I’m not working and I could be. Even if I say “this weekend I’ll work for six hours and play games for two hours, then spend the rest of the night relaxing” I’m probably going to feel awful about that “lost time.” It sucks, and I know I’m not the only one who gets that way, and I’m willing to bet indie devs have some form of that too.
But it’s not healthy. And I’m going to work myself to death, probably literally, if I don’t do anything about it. We covered the chapter on stress in my psychology class this week, and Brittany came to visit, and she sat me down to chat about how I always seemed pissed off and a variety of other things. Eventually, I told her that I was going to keep working at better managing my time, and through that I’d easily be able to stop being so “busy” and stop isolating myself. I said the same to vael, and I’ll ask you, faithful reader, to do what I asked them both to do: send me a message every once in a while and ask me where the hell I’ve been. Don’t let me get away with being a stressed out hermit and spend all my time “working” without accomplishing a whole lot.
When I sit down and actually work, stuff gets done, and I honestly shouldn’t have problems getting everything finished. But sometimes I get too wrapped up in working, and when things are going well, I get pretty excited to finish “this one last thing” and then never really stop to relax. So help me out! I’m going to try, but when I slip, I need people to remind me to get back up. Something like that. I’ve always been awful with metaphors.
I’ve been reading a fair bit since Christmas, so I thought I’d make a post about what I’ve read. Let me know if you like the format! I’m trying to give recommendations without getting too spoiler-y, but sometimes you have to give out a few spoilers to tell people why a book is actually interesting.
All You Need is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka: A time-travel sci-fi action novel from Japan. I realize action isn’t a genre for books, but it was a lot like an action movie in book form - but maybe it would be more appropriate to think of it as an action game instead. Basically, aliens are invading Earth and they’re just brutalizing the human race. The main character is killed in his first battle, but then he wakes up the next morning - thinking it was just a dream. He goes off to the battle again, and does something differently from the dream - hoping it will turn out better. But he dies. And wakes up again the next morning. The day of the battle. He’s trapped in a loop, doesn’t know why, and tries a variety of things to get out of it - eventually he just decides to learn from his mistakes and become an alien killing machine. Nothing particularly deep and thought-provoking here, but it was pretty badass and I liked it well enough.
Metagame by Sam Landstrom: I got this one as an ebook for free online, and it was pretty good. It’s a sci-fi adventure novel in a kind of super-internet future, and in a way it reads kind of like MMO fanfiction. The kind where they keep their completely non-fantasy usernames for the character names. The characters have underscores and numbers in their names, they say “noob” and other internet slang that’s getting to be a little outdated… The book is a few years old, I think? So whatever. Anyway, there were a few interesting things in here, the best one I can remember is that in their future timeline, marriage is abolished in favour of civil unions and then all kinds of relationships become ok. Because marriage has such religious connotations, and the religious folk get all upset about the “sanctity of marriage”, their solution is just to make marriage a special option for people who want it and let everyone else be happy and love whoever they want.
Pretty neat, I think. Also at one point in the book the main character hacks the source code of life. That may be spoilers but it’s so badass that you need to know.
Azumanga Daioh by Kiyohiko Azuma: OH MY GOD SO FUNNY
SO AMAZINGLY FUNNY
I laughed OUT LOUD, physically hahahahahaha, on a regular basis while reading this manga and that should be all the recommendation you need. It’s about girls in high school and that’s really about all I can tell you, it’s hard to get more specific than that. But it’s so funny. Oh man.
Buy the official English translation, because it’s localized really well (as far as I know) and you can get the omnibus (the whole series) for like $30. Or you can watch the anime if you prefer that. I’ve been told by everyone ever that it’s hilarious too, so you can’t go wrong.
All That Lives Must Die by Eric Nylund: The second book in the Mortal Coils keeps the same great style from the first book with DBZ our-powers-are-getting-stronger kind of cool. I can’t really give you any specifics about their super duper Immortal/Infernal (gods and devils respectively) powers but it’s pretty sweet. Like the first, it also does the thing I love most about young adult fantasy - mixes and matches myths and cultures from all over the world to get the very best selection of supernatural beings possible. I feel like a lot of “traditional” fantasy either wants to make its own epic mythology (with mixed success) or use elements from one specific place (Celtic, Norse, whatever) and be as “true” to the source material as possible. Which is what makes young adult books that have Norse gods hanging out with Greek gods so appealing.
One other thought about young adult vs regular fantasy: Young adult books don’t play with point of view, and for that reason they tend to be a lot simpler than more mature fantasy books. At least, my favourite fantasy books (Stephen Erikson, George R. R. Martin, R. Scott Bakker) all use point of view to craft incredibly intricate plots and constantly surprise the reader. All that Lives Must Die has a couple of chapters from points of view other than the two main characters, but even aside from that I was actually genuinely surprised by a few things in the book. So hats off to the author for that.
Harmony by Project Itoh: Another Japanese novel, this time a sci-fi thriller set in a hyper-socialist future where human beings are considered public property. Basically, World War 3 happens and nukes are tossed around like spitballs, and nearly everyone dies. Governments are decimated, and eventually dismantled completely as “admedistrations” - health care providers - gain power by offering health and security. Everyone agrees more war would be bad, so standing armies are disbanded along with traditional governments - admedistrative conglomerates become the unofficial government. Because so many people died, humans are the most valuable resource, and so everyone takes care of each other and people start to “suffocate from all the kindness.” Lots of philosophical musing, comparisons to Nazi society and their advances in health care, and ultimately a number of questions about the idea of consciousness itself. Oh, and mass suicides and other thrilling, globe-trotting adventures. It was one of those “can’t put it down” kind of books, so I do recommend it if you want to grab a copy off of Amazon for ten bucks!
I’ve been working with it for a few weeks now - almost a month, I think - so I’ve come to a definite conclusion: Leechblock, a firefox extension for FF 3-4, is awesome. If you prefer chrome, there’s a similar extension called Chrome Nanny or something like that. Here’s what they do:
You set up a list of sites that keep you from doing your work. Be honest: add all the sites you use to procrastinate, all the sites that distract you. You can use * for a wildcard: *.tumblr.com will block your dashboard and any individual person’s tumblr. Then, set out a list of times where you want to buckle down and work. I set mine up to block whenever I’m in class, and almost all day on friday, saturday and sunday (the days I have no classes). During that period of time, the sites listed will be blocked, and by default replaced by a screen saying “You can come back when the site is no longer blocked.” You can set it up to redirect to, say, google or something. Or a file on your computer that says “GET BACK TO WORK”.
As far as other features go, it has plenty: you can set up multiple “groups” for blocking, so you can set up different sites to block or different times to block on different days. You can manually enter a “lockdown” mode, which keeps you out of the sites in the group for whatever period of time you specify. You can also set up a timer and have Leechblock kick you off after that time is up: right now, I have Leechblock set up to give me 45 minutes every three hours to screw around on facebook and reading RSS feeds and stuff.
You can set up different options for “how to block” a specific group of sites: it can actively block pages from your sites (when the site is going to be blocked, it will refresh the page and block it), you can prevent access to options for that group when it’s being blocked (sites can be added to groups under the right-click context menu), and in firefox 4 you can prevent access to your addons page so that you can’t get into the leechblock options. You can also set up a timer in the status bar to tell you how long before a site is blocked, and display a popup message x seconds before a site is going to be blocked.
Honestly, after one weekend of having my favourite sites blocked all day, I stopped wanting to play Echo Bazaar. After a couple of weeks, I’ve forgotten what my daily routine used to be - I have to go into the bookmarks menu to remind myself to play BvS and check on tumblr. It’s actually really nice to get up in the morning and spend two hours working, instead of getting up and spending two hours reading RSS feeds. Ideally, I’ll uninstall Leechblock and have that same resolve to get to work. Then, since I’m actually doing work when I have the time, I’ll have more time to relax and talk to people and maybe live a little.
Note: This isn’t anywhere near as good as I imagined it would be. Send me your ideas for making it better! You may think it’s ok, but I can guarantee it wouldn’t make the front page on Destructoid, and THAT is what I had in mind. Probably asking too much there.
There’s a pretty unfortunate trend in big-budget games these days: creative new IPs don’t sell, and sequels do. So every game that comes out is a “franchise opportunity” if it sells well, and it’s abandoned if it doesn’t. Rather than publish something like Brutal Legend, publishers like Activision will put their money where they see potential profit: Call of Duty and Prototype. They’re allowed to do that, of course, because video games are a business and businesses want to make money. But they’re leaving gamers like me behind.
When Dead Space 2, Mass Effect 2 (and soon Mass Effect 3), Uncharted 2 (and soon Uncharted 3) come out, you can’t spend two minutes on the internet without hearing about how great they are. I’d love to play them, but there’s one problem: I haven’t played the previous games. I just don’t want to play sequels without playing the previous games and understanding the context and the characters. That’s even more true for games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age where you literally transfer your character from the previous games to the new one.
I barely have time to play one game, and I certainly don’t have the time to play one game and its prequel (or two). So instead I buy games like Stacking, Costume Quest, Inside a Star Filled Sky, Super Meat Boy - games I can play in short sessions and know I’m still making progress. Or I play freeware games like Desktop Dungeons or Cave Story. Five minutes here, five minutes there, half an hour during a boring computer science class… That’s how I game these days.
So when I look at the list of releases for 2011, discounting any sequels to games I haven’t played, here’s what I see that I might like to play: Okamiden, Portal 2, The Witcher 2, inFamous 2, Resistance 3… Then there’s five times as many sequels I’ll never play. I’m sure they’re great games, but they’re great games for someone else. Maybe Dragon Age II will be unanimously declared the Game of the Year, but I’d have to play Dragon Age: Origins first in order to enjoy it.
Of course, I’m part of the problem too. There are still new games coming out in 2011, but none of them really catch my eye… because they’re new IPs and I don’t know if I’ll like them. If I have to buy only one game, like most gamers these days, I end up going for the sequel I know I’ll like over Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom, or Singularity, or any of the other good new IPs that came out last year. That’s how I got into this situation in the first place. Dead Space, BioShock, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Uncharted, God of War, all those AAA games that are still getting sequels years later - I looked at them, wasn’t sure I’d like them, and played my part in the vicious cycle.
I’m not here to make dire predictions about the future of the industry. I can’t honestly say “we need more new IPs to keep the industry alive,” because people like me will keep those games from selling. I can’t honestly say “sequels are killing the industry,” because if it weren’t for those games, there wouldn’t be any money to fund new IPs. But I’m buying fewer and fewer games, and the games I do buy aren’t the AAA titles. What’s to stop Call of Duty or Uncharted from being the next Guitar Hero? How many sequels can they make before people stop buying them?
Coils (0.618…) by Transcending Bizarre?, an avant-garde/black metal band.
I haven’t posted music in ages. But I was listening to this and loved it enough to rush to tumblr and post it, so there you go. Enjoy it if you’re into that kind of stuff.
I have homework to do :/ So I’m not going to start writing massive and wonderful posts just yet. I have plans, and I’m writing them down and organizing my thoughts, so it’ll be even better when I finally write. Later, that is.
A little while ago, Crysis 2 was leaked in its entirety onto the internet a while in advance of its release. Then Killzone 3 was leaked - a PS3 game. Not that PS3 games haven’t been on the internet for years, but now that people can (theoretically) actually PLAY them, it’s serious business.
So…
Just a thought that this brought up, all the free to play games with micro-transactions that’ve been popping up.
also leaked games tend to sell more if they’re actually good.
Geez, I forget where it came from now, but I’d heard someone, somewhere say that buying a game is a huge commitment. You spend $60 on something, not because it’s going to be good or worth it, but because you’re hoping it’ll be good. From the publisher point of view, that’s great, because you can’t take your money back after the scammed you into a shitty game.
I’m not convinced about “episodic” games, but I’d like to see more mainstream retail games adopt the method Fable II (?) did. You get a demo for the first chapter or something, then you can buy the next chapter in game, and progress through the whole game like that. What makes that different from an “episodic” game is that the entire game was actually available from the start. “Episodic” game usually means “we don’t have enough money to finish this game, if enough people buy it then we will keep going” and that’s sad for them and sad for the people who love the game and never get to finish it.
Also, I think that “free to play” games that give competitive benefit for paying money (just about every F2P MMO and many, many facebook games) rely on their competitive nature for their success. D&D Online tripled its profit after going F2P, as did LoTR Online, but that’s because everyone wants to level up faster and go raiding and whatever high-level MMO content is there for them. If someone said “here’s Mass Effect 2, you can play the entire game for free, BUT equipment costs real money or takes hours to earn” I’m not sure it would go over as well. Although maybe experience boost items would be nice to have…
edit: I had an argument about leaked games but I deleted it because it was bad, but yeah good leaked games will sell more because gamers like good games, but publishers don’t like potentially lost sales and they especially don’t like it when people refuse to buy their shit games
A little while ago, Crysis 2 was leaked in its entirety onto the internet a while in advance of its release. Then Killzone 3 was leaked - a PS3 game. Not that PS3 games haven’t been on the internet for years, but now that people can (theoretically) actually PLAY them, it’s serious business.
So all kinds of noise and hoopla was made over piracy and arguments were had. You know the drill. Over on Destructoid, Jim Sterling made the point that game developers only have one source of revenue - retail sales of their games. Other industries, like movies and music, can make money through multiple avenues - theaters and DVD for movies, live shows and merchandise for bands, etc. But that’s not really true, now that we have easy ways to sell additional content to players. I forget whether Jim actually mentioned that, though he probably did, but I’m in “work mode” at the moment so I’m not going to risk getting distracted while I look it up.
Everyone feels kind of cheated when “downloadable content” comes out for a new game that’s really just a code to unlock content that’s already on the disc. Generally that just happens with console games, since PC gamers would probably just dig the content up on their own, but anyway. Fact is that DLC for an existing game is incredibly cheap to make and market, compared to making a brand new game, and it has way higher profit margins. Even if you only sell $5 map packs to 1% of your player base, it takes a fraction of the time to create those maps. As long as it’s actually adding content to the game, DLC is great for giving players more of what they want, assuming they like the game enough to spend more money on it. DLC can also be sold to people who bought used.
No matter how you look at it, DLC is really, really profitable. Most studios need to turn a profit in order to keep making games. Conclusion: Most studios now churn out DLC for their games.
The PC game market is different in a number of ways from console games - there’s no retail used game market, but by contrast, they have piracy to deal with. Usually pirates will get their hands on DLC and make patched versions of games that can play the DLC, but if you pirated the game and want to buy DLC, you can’t. Why not? Yes, they don’t “own” the game as far as Steam and whatever other online authentication system is concerned, but getting $5 from a customer is better than getting no dollars.
Somehow I don’t think this is going to fly with anyone staunchly against piracy, because they want you to buy the game in the first place. It really depends on the distribution and authentication systems, though, because clearly you can’t register DLC with your Steam account without having the game registered.
Alternatively, game developers should have tip boxes (like developers on Kongregate have) so people can send them five bucks any time they steal DLC. That works too.
vael:
Hey folks I didn’t tell you I’ve scheduled an appointment for ADD because I want to keep the tumblr entertaining and not full of personal stuff. But yeah I just did that.
Anyway :D check this out!
http://www.ldpride.net/addsub-types.htm
I’ve obviously read about ADD, but when they jog my…
Jeez, ADD sounds a lot more like me than ADHD, whereas my brother is pretty much all of the things for ADHD. He may not get into a good university because he has bad grades in his non-math classes.
It seems to me that ADD is spoken about far more often in the US than ADHD, while the opposite is true in Canada. Am I just imagining that? I only know about both because of American culture.
I’m not going to lie, I’m a console gamer through and through. I grew up with a controller in my hands, and I just don’t connect to PC games as much. I know that plenty of people like to game with a mouse and keyboard, so I’ll let you know right now that the second half of this post is not for you.
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Part one: XBMC
XBMC is a media center program that started out on the original Xbox, and has since grown to become a great media center program that would look absolutely gorgeous on your expensive new TV. It works on Windows, Linux, Mac, and if you really want to get your hands dirty I expect you could still install it on your old Xbox, Wii, or PS3. At least, if it doesn’t work on PS3 yet, it probably will in a few months.
Plenty of people are building cheap PCs to handle all of their entertainment, putting XBMC on it, then hiding it somewhere in their home theatre. So if that sounds good to you, go check it out - it works perfectly well independent of what this post is really about.
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Part two: XBMC as a console
Since it primarily runs on a PC, you may not feel like you’re gaining much by using XBMC as a “game console”. Isn’t that what USB gamepads are for? The answer to that is yes, and if you’ve ever used an emulator or played a PC game with a gamepad, the only thing you’d gain by doing this is a larger screen - since in theory you’d be using XBMC on a TV bigger than your monitor. If you’ve got a laptop you could just plug it into your TV, and win forever!
But I still thought this was really neat because it would take all the trouble I’ve had with PC gaming - either using keyboard+mouse (meh) or setting up a gamepad every time I want to play (meh) - and give me that console experience I love. Basically, XBMC just acts as a sexy launcher for your PC games and for any other game you can play with an emulator. OF COURSE these would be perfectly legal backups of games you own, or games that are hard to purchase these days, etc. etc. You can have everything from arcade games to PS2 games on your PC if you’ve got the hardware for it, so by extension you can have all of those integrated in your XBMC box.
Honestly, I’ll probably set this up at my dad’s one of these days. We just moved the home theatre into the basement, so we can sit around the fireplace and watch movies and play games and etc., and my brother’s PC is pretty close to the TV. Or I could just use my laptop. Either way, it’ll be cool. And we’ll go from watching some awful movie he got in the mail (Netflix will send out DVDs and it saves bandwidth) to playing a NES game and it’ll be great.
This isn’t an official thing I’d actually send around, so I’ve put in fake contact info, but check it out and let me know what you think. I’m going to submit it to a bunch of jobs soon and maybe make minor modifications based on the job, but this is the core stuff I guess.
It looks pretty nice with all the formatting and stuff I have on it, but it’s still good as plain text, which is important apparently. You can see that at the link. Feedback would be great! Also it fits on a single page in the nice version.
Anyway, since I’m mentioning my tumblr in my resume (maybe it’s a little cheesy to say I do creative writing and essays here, but it sounds nice) - I need to make the actual page look good. Mine is atrocious and I don’t really have anywhere to put links such as RSS, an ask button, contact info, etc. Vael, I like your theme’s layout, but I would change the colours. I will take any and all help I can get with this, so send me your thoughts or get a hold of me when I’m around.
I have a list of things to post about, so rest assured - I haven’t forgotten about my tumblr. I just have more important things to write, such as a resume and job applications.
This is a relatively short thought, but I wanted to have a public post and get reactions. There’s a part in Capitalism: A Love Story (that sadly I don’t have a link for - if you look for and find a clip, please do share) where they discuss how life was “back in the day” in regards to taxes and the economy - according to Wikipedia “ the past "golden days” of American capitalism following World War II". I guess it’s close to the start of the movie. Anyway, excuse the huge oversimplification, but from what I remember the basic gist was that the taxes were far higher but everything was just fine because you didn’t need as much money anyway. Then presidents got elected by promising tax cuts and etc. and now people have grown up with low taxes and feel taxes are evil and think the government is stealing their money.
I know there’s a lot of economics and history missing from this (feel free to enlighten me, though) but just focus on the taxes aspect. Whether or not you agree with government spending policies or like the people in charge or whatever, just the part about your money and the government using whatever portion of it.
If your government were to RAISE taxes, and put that money towards increasing your quality of life and generally taking better care of its citizens, how would you react? You and everyone else with a job might stand to lose as much as 20% more of your income, but the money would go towards cheaper/better quality education, lowered costs of living, governmental childcare, lowered sales tax and things like that. It could very well be that you come out of the equation with more disposable income.
Don’t just respond and say “yeah sure” or ravage me for being a socialist and a tax-lover - what’s the logic behind your position? Why do you think (or, more likely, feel) that way?
For my part, yeah, I’m sure I already sound pretty sympathetic in regards to this. But then I’m unemployed and almost all of the money taken off of my previous paychecks came straight back as a tax return. Plus my parents (both previously/presently employed for the Canada Revenue Agency) have handled my taxes for me in the past. I would be ok with this, though, because I don’t NEED a whole lot of money above and beyond my expenses - money is only a means to an end. Money pays for my food, money will in the future pay for my lodgings, and at the moment it pays for my education. Maybe if I were nearly bankrupt I would worry about how much money I have, but as long as I can afford to live, I’m doing alright. If I have extra, that’s great - but having $100 in the bank and $10,000 is emotionally equivalent for me.
You may, of course, dismiss this as naive and nod sagely from your vantage point in “the real world.” I doubt I will ever value money, however. If that’s the case, I doubt I’ll change radically when it comes to taxes. But please do tell me if you believe I’m wrong, or right, or if you believe much of anything on the subject.
Well, if you consider your monitor a bunch of tiny shining lights (pixels) rapidly flashing in front of your eyes. Honestly even if you don’t know my last name, I’m the only Matt on the page, so scroll down a little and look for it.
This is what I was talking about a few weeks ago! The Language and Brain Laboratory is doing a lot of cool stuff and it seems like I’ll be the one putting together the programs for the experiments. Or helping to, at any rate, when I learn to use the tools. I’m hoping it’s pretty easy, it honestly can’t be that complicated to have a black screen show words with a specific timing and capture a couple keyboard input events. There’s a program for it, and I’m willing to bet it’s designed so you don’t need to be a hardcore programmer to put experiments together, so it ought to be pretty simple.
Famous last words, I know.
At any rate, here’s what I need to do in the next little while. Unfortunately, most of these have no due dates, so it’s hard feeling really motivated about it.
Except for the part with Dr. Hirotani, this is all stuff I’ve known I have to do for at least a week. I, uh, haven’t really done much work in the past week. If I HAD been working all of the time, I would probably be able to rent a game and play that in my spare time. It’s all going to get done, of course, I just used my free time tweaking my computer and reading things on the internet. Ah well. Some day I’ll run out of things to check out.
Some random tidbits about my day/recent happenings:
Anyway, I’m off to help set up the strips for the fencing tournament being held here this weekend. I hurt my leg last week (pushed myself too hard when I was trying to be tough) so I won’t be competing, but I’m probably going to go watch with my parents so they can see what it’s like and I can learn what to expect if I ever get to compete.
I went to fencing last night, and ended up going to bed around 10:30 - getting up at 6 am was hard for me this morning. I’m considering moving my alarm up to 6:30, because I don’t really need the extra time, but this is as good a time as any to make this post about how early I actually go to bed.
My schedule this semester is this: I have class at 8:30 AM from Monday until Thursday. It can take a good 40 minutes to get to school, more if I get really unlucky, so it’s best to leave early - the other thing is that early in the morning, the buses are less busy because there are fewer people making their way to work. Busier buses means it takes a lot longer to get to school. So, that’s why I get up so early - I’d rather spend half an hour extra at school than half an hour extra in transit and get to class right on time.
I happen to like getting up early, and don’t mind going to bed early to do that, which makes me the polar opposite of just about everyone I’ve ever met. A couple people barely every sleep, the rest are all night owls, and so I have this problem where every couple of night at 9 PM I get messages from people who aren’t going to bed any time soon. Maybe they have something important we need to talk about, maybe not, but of course I want to talk. Then I end up staying up for two hours and start getting ready for bed at 11 PM instead of 9, and then I end up crazy tired and it’s not really anyone’s fault. The thing is, I was likely online for hours, and they probably were as well, so why this almost always happens at 9 PM is a mystery to me.
So here’s my request: By 9 PM, I’m already winding down for the night - I’ve been up for 15 hours already, and I need to sleep. Talk to me earlier. Talk to me at 5 PM. Just keep in mind that I have a totally different sleep schedule from you.
Actually, there is another option - if and when I mention that it’s late/I’m getting ready for bed/I should sleep/any other not-so-subtle hints, tell me to go to bed and refuse to talk to me. It’s so incredibly nice for you to consider my best interests like that and I’m actually grateful towards the one person who ever does that for me. So that’s something else you can do that takes into account the fact that I may not be ready for bed yet.
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Listening to an episode of the Hey Ash Whatcha Playin’ Podcast titled Come Here Uli, and here’s a brilliant quote about game design:
“In a movie, you’re being asked implicitly to empathize with a character. In a game, you’re trying to do two things at once: you are trying to empathize with a character and to be a character at the same time. In something like inFamous, if you’re just trying to empathize with the character, when his girlfriend comes up like ‘raah I’m angry about stuff and later on you’re going to have to decide whether to save me or not’ then you can look at that passively, as in ok, we’re going to learn something about who this character is by how he decides to deal with his girlfriend. When you’re controlling him, and your girlfriend is like 'raah I’m mean at you for blowing up the city completely by accident and not your fault and later you’re going to have to decide whether to save me or not’ then it’s no longer a matter of 'what would Cole do, I’m interested to see how he grows’. It’s like ok, I guess what am I doing in this situation? I guess I’m supposed to manufacture a two year history, mentally, with this girlfriend I’ve just met, and in the entire time I’ve known her she’s just been a bitch to me, but I’m supposed to extrapolate that at one point this character, and therefore kind of me, but kind of not, once cared about her.”
I bought a Kindle copy of Dust of Dreams by Steven Erikson and, thanks to that, managed to finish the book after… a year and a half. Below is a conversation between two characters near the end of the book that I really enjoyed, and reminded me of Socrates style philosophical dialogue. I’m posting it because I liked the book enough to buy it twice. So, yeah, I liked it a lot.
‘In the world, there are attackers and there are defenders. Most of us possess within ourselves elements of both, but in a general sense a person falls to one camp or the other, as befits their nature.
This is not to say that aggression belongs only to those who are attackers. Far from it, in fact. In my talent with the sword, for example, I am for the most part a defender. I rely upon timing and counter-attack – I take advantage of the attacker’s forward predilections, the singularity of their intent. Counter-attack is, of course, aggression in its own way. Do you see the distinction?’
‘I think so.’
‘Aggression takes many forms. Active, passive, direct, indirect. Sudden as a blow, or sustained as a siege of will. Often, it refuses to stand still, but launches upon you from all possible sides. If one tactic fails, another is tried, and so on.’
‘Yes. What you describe every child learns, at the hands of the bully and the rival.’
‘Excellent. Of course you are right. But bear in mind, none of this belongs solely within the realm of childhood. It persists and thrives in adult society. What must be understood is this: attackers attack as a form of defence. It is their instinctive response to threat, real or perceived. It may be desperate or it may be habit, or both, when desperation becomes a way of life. Behind the assault hides a fragile person.
Cultures tend to invite the dominance of one over the other, as a means by which an individual succeeds and advances or, conversely, fails and falls. A culture dominated by attackers – and one in which the qualities of attacking are admired, often overtly encouraged – tends to breed people with a thick skin, which nonetheless still serves to protect a most brittle self. Thus the wounds bleed but stay well hidden beneath the surface. Cultures favouring the defender promote thin skin and quickness to take offence – its own kind of aggression, I am sure you see. The culture of attackers seeks submission and demands evidence of that submission as proof of superiority over the subdued. The culture of defenders seeks compliance through conformity, punishing dissenters and so gaining the smug superiority of enforcing silence, and from silence, complicity.’
‘Is there no third way of being?’
‘In my long life, I have seen many variations – configurations – of behaviour and attitude, and I have seen a person change from one to the other – when experience has proved damaging enough, or when the inherent weaknesses of one are recognized, leading to a wholesale rejection of it. Though, in turn, weaknesses of different sorts exist in the other, and often these prove fatal pitfalls. We are complex creatures, to be sure. The key, I think, is to hold true to your own aesthetics, that which you value, and yield to no one the power to become the arbiter of your tastes. You must also learn to devise strategies for fending off both attackers and defenders. Exploit aggression, but only in self-defence, the kind of self-defence that announces to all the implacability of your armour, your self-assurance, and affirms the sanctity of your self-esteem. Attack when you must, but not in arrogance. Defend when your values are challenged, but never with the wild fire of anger. Against attackers, your surest defence is cold iron. Against defenders, often the best tactic is to sheathe your weapon and refuse the game. Reserve contempt for those who have truly earned it, but see the contempt you permit yourself to feel not as a weapon, but as armour against their assaults. Finally, be ready to disarm with a smile, even as you cut deep with words.’
‘Passive.’
‘Of a sort, yes. It is more a matter of warning off potential adversaries. In effect, you are saying: Be careful how close you tread. You cannot hurt me, but if I am pushed hard enough, I will wound you. In some things you must never yield, but these things are not eternally changeless or explicitly inflexible; rather, they are yours to decide upon, yours to reshape if you deem it prudent. They are immune to the pressures of others, but not indifferent to their arguments. Weigh and gauge at all times, and decide for yourself value and worth. But when you sense that a line has been crossed by the other person, when you sense that what is under attack is, in fact, your self-esteem, then gird yourself and stand firm.’
