Dissimilitude

The Call of Duty Effect

2011-06-09T13:25:00.002Z

I'm generally wary of the fanboy-ish objection of 'consolification'. It's a knee-jerk reaction to change that often doesn't take into account the sound underlying reasons for simplifying, refining or changing a particular mechanic when a game makes it's way onto a console. And I have sympathy for studios trying to churn out 3 SKUs to the same deadline, leading to perhaps a little more UI conformity between PC and console than is strictly sensible.

That said, I've definitely noticed a trend in big budget games over recent years, that I'll call the 'Call of Duty Effect'. It's not, strictly speaking, consolification; rather, it's the trend for ever more flagship franchises to ape the Call of Duty series in terms of blockbuster set pieces, to the detriment of core game play.

I recently finished the single player of Black Ops - prior to this I'd not played a CoD game since CoD 2 way back at the 360 release in 2005/6. The thing that really struck me about Black Ops was the sheer number and pervasiveness of scripted sequences. Almost nothing in this game is emergent; the game is characterised by the constant intervention of hands-off, scripted events, as well as tightly directed, highly linear game play sequences. Impressive, yes, and undoubtedly fun. And there's certainly a place for it in the industry. But the effect of the success of the CoD franchise is that other developers are looking to replicate it's success. And they seem to be doing this by trying to give their games a big budget, blockbuster feel through enormous 'set piece' events in the game.

Now, why is this a problem?

The reason it's a problem (for me) is that designers often struggle to turn the script / story into meaningful and consistent mechanics. So they inevitably resort to cutscenes, or specialised 'one-off' game mechanics (Star Destroyer battle in Force Unleashed, for instance) in order to achieve these set pieces. To give an example of game that suffers from this effect - Splinter Cell: Conviction. The game has numerous set pieces that break the stated selling point of the series - namely, stealth. There are fights with boss helicopters, foot chases, forced combat sequences. All in the name of big set piece showdowns. All good fun. For me, however, it breaks the implicit contract with the player who buys a Splinter Cell game on the basis of certain mechanics, and on the expectation that the game will achieve immersion by sticking to this core set of mechanics. Chaos Theory was the ultimate realisation of this style of play. Of course, designers have the right to take a franchise onto new ground, and to attempt to keep things fresh by adding new elements. But equally, consumers have their expectations of a franchise, and if they are not being met then the franchise can fail.

Halo is an example of a game that achieves a blockbuster feel without sacrificing emergent gameplay. It does by retaining player control through the majority of the game, having fewer cutscenes, and fewer novelty game play sections. The God of War series is another game that does things right. By introducing quick-time battles early and often, and by establishing them as a core mechanic, their repeated use for the incredible boss battles does not jar - there is no broken contract between designer and player. Expectations are met. Half Life 2 and Bioshock are another two fantastic examples of games that achieve blockbuster feel without sacrificing core mechanics.

What makes an RPG?

2011-01-13T14:50:00.002Z

My last post got me thinking. Just what do I consider to be the inherent features of an RPG?

I'll start by stating my opening position - I'm not an RPG canon fanatic. There are those for whom any deviation from their favourte RPG is heretical. Mine is a broad RPG church. though I'd draw internal distinctions between the the western and Japanese RPG lineages and action RPGs versus narrative driven or dialogue-heavy. What sorts of features are normally present in games considered to be RPGs, and which of these are truly integral to the genre? For the first part of that question, consider some features commonly found in RPGs:

Character creation and / or development.
Dialogue choices.
Moral choices.
Inventory management.
Levelling up or some kind of quantitative character improvement.
Non-linearity.
Fantastical or science-fiction setting (are there any real-world based RPGs? I can't think of any).
Party management.

What's striking about this list is that it's easy to think of games that have most of these missing, yet are still unmistakenly RPGs. Equally, there are games where these mechanics feature, sometimes quite prominantly, yet they are not considered RPGs. As a genre, it has become quite difficult to define. Of the features in this list, it is incredibly difficult to identify those that produce a canonical, undeniable RPG.

Take a game like Darksiders. It has levelling up. It is non-linear. Yet it's not an RPG. Why not? For me, it's because there's no narrative choices for the player to make. There are tactical choices. Which upgrade, which weapon etc. But no choice that affects the story arc. And yet, if memory serves, many JRPGs do not feature such choices either. The Final Fantasy games do not allow players to dictate the direction of the narrative, only the pace at which it proceeds. Yet they are considered RPGs; they certainly contain many signature features - character levelling, party management, non-linearity.

Perhaps what makes an RPG is a critical mass of features from the grab bag of RPG mechanics - a compound key, rather than a primary one.

Fable 3: A Slight Tinge of Disappointment

2011-01-12T10:22:00.006Z

Just finished Fable 3, and thought I'd jot down a few thoughts.

After Fable 2, Molyneux was well quoted as saying he felt he needed to improve the accessibility of the series; various statistics were bandied around about the proportion of players that were missing huge chunks of game content. It's pretty clear that Lionhead were determined to deal with this in Fable 3, and set out to strip away some of the more spurious functionality.

I think this stems from the Fable franchise's position as an 'almost great' in terms of sales. Each of the Fable games thus far has hit around 3m in sales, which puts it just outside the top echelon of franchises like Halo, CoD et al. The overriding feeling I got from playing Fable 3 is that Molyneux is experimenting, he is tinkering with the Fable formula in an attempt to break the franchise out amongst the wider Xbox community.
He's correct in many ways. RPGs are inaccessible to people who don't often play them. They're full of unfamiliar tropes and traditions, conventions that don't make sense to the uninitiated. I, as a non-racing gamer, can easily pick up the latest Forza and pretty much right away figure out what I'm meant to do, even if the mechanics themselves contain much subtlety - the RPG novice doesn't usually have this option. Lionhead are, much like Bioware are doing with Mass Effect, progressively stripping away many of the genre traditions in an attempt to streamline the experience and pare it back to its core.

I think these efforts are largely doomed to failure. I think what's holding the Fable franchise back from sales of 5m+ is not the subtlelties of its various mechanics, but simply that RPGs, even slimmed down, action-focused RPGs, do not sell in the numbers that shooters do. Here's approximate sales figures for the major console RPG releases on the 360, taken from VGChartz.

RPGs
Fable 2 - 3.97m

Fable 3 - 2.71m

Oblivion - 3.46m

Fallout 3 - 3.48m

Fallout: New Vegas - 2.26m

Mass Effect - 2.36m

Mass Effect 2 - 2.39m

Dragon Age - 1.94m

Contrast these figures with the big shooters:

Halo 3 - 11.34m

Halo Rach - 7.56m

Halo ODST - 5.80m

Gears of War - 6.12m

Gears of War 2 - 6.07m

CoD: Modern Warfare - 8.56

CoD: MW2 - 12.11

CoD: Black Ops - 10.19

Now, Molyneux will know this, so if he feels that it is at all achievable for an RPG to sell 5m+ units, then it follows there's a structural problem or impediment that could be fixed that would then allow the hallowed 5m to be reached. I don't think this is true. What's striking to me is that even those RPGs where the action is tailored as closely as possible to be shooter-like (whilst staying within the bounds of the genre), for example Mass Effect 2 or Fallout, that the sales figures never breach that seemingly inherant RPG cap. It's not that RPGs are not popular, they clearly are, as all the genre flag carriers sell multi-million units on a single platform (which isn't easy). It's that shooters are WILDLY popular. The problem with attempting to ape shooter-like sales by paring down certain features of your RPG is that it's simply tinkering around the edges. The very features that make an RPG an RPG are too inherant, too ingrained in the marrow of the genre to strip out. Taking out inventory management in Mass Effect 2 was quite widely seen as a good move - it streamlined a non-core aspect of the game, but it didn't improve sales much.

What this says to me is that, whilst increasing accessibility should always have a positive impact on sales, that there are inherant aspects of a genre that simply don't appeal to people who dislike the genre in general. Thinking of it from a more personal standpoint, there isn't a mechanic that racing games could add or remove that would make me like them - it just won't happen. I don't even follow racing game news or reviews, I am entirely resistant to any efforts to engage me in that genre. So it must be with people who dislike RPGs.

I am very interested to see if Fable 3 catches up and overtakes 2 as the king of RPG sales on the 360. It's averaging lower on metacritic (80 verus 88 I think), and I don't think it will catch up in sales either - I think Molyneux and Lionhead have lost something in their attempts to win wider appeal. A few of my criticisms:

The close connection between the morale choices the player makes and the visual look of the character has been lessened, and this was always one of the pillars of Fable for me.
For a game that so clearly prizes accessiblity, each of the methods of upgrading the various legendary weapons are incredibly MMO-like and grindy. I never bothered.
Some of the morphing features are too subtle, and lost on the player. I only found out later that the hero's weapons are granted random morphs that reflect the things he's fought - a bone handle if you've killed a lot of Hollow Men, for example. Totally lost on me, never pointed out clearlyin-game.
The story was less amenable to uncontrived morale choices, in my opinion. Fable 2 allowed for the player to plausibly head in good or evil directions without contorting yourself as to why. In Fable 3, there's little narrative justification as to why your character would ever be evil.
Forced importance of multiplayer. I can't be the only player that resents the locking off of certain content to cooperative play only. RPGs as a genre is full of single-player adherents!
As others have mentioned, the dog is an assumed companion in Fable 3 - it was a long time since I'd played 2, and as such I had no real affinity towards it. It's also an incredibly annoying method of finding treasure, and while I'm at it, the dig animation is too long, and too irritating to trigger.
Some minor annoyances include the hassle of managing a large property empire, and the removal of player choice in the expression and dialogue systems.

I would dearly love to see an RPG hit the heady heights of CoD-level sales, but sadly I just don't see it happening even with the removal of many non-core genre features.

Stored Procedures Are Bullshit

2010-09-29T13:12:00.000Z

Obviously not totally bullshit. They have their uses. But I am working on an application that has so overused them, that I feel like stabbing out my eyes with a rusty spoon every time I look at another of the 1000 line obfuscated monstrosities.

Who the fuck thinks writing a multi-thousand line stored proc is a good idea? At no point does common sense intrude and say ‘Hold on. I might have taken a wrong turn here’? I suppose not, since this app has literally hundreds of enormous procs, containing the vast bulk of the applications critical logic.

Even though the insanity of this approach should be self-evident if you’re anything other than a total charlatan, for the sake of my own sanity, I’ll iterate here why this is so much bullshit:

Multi-thousand line functions of any form are folly. Multi-thousand line functions in an IDE as feature-free as your typical DB client are on a higher plane of batshit insanity. For fuck sake.
Why, oh why, would you choose to write business critical logic in the exact place where your unit tests can’t get at it? Oh wait, it’s because you don’t have any.
By writing all your critical code as SPs, it’s not only now next-to-impossible to test properly, it’s also tethered to the scaling capabilities of your DB. Nice work.
Most of the stated benefits of SPs no longer apply. It’s 2010.
If the amount of SP code is large or especially complex, you’d better like your DB vendor because you’re not fucking changing.
Your application developers have to context switch every time they want to implement a full slice of functionality. From modern IDE / language / tools to the SQL stone age of whatever shithole DB client you’re using (they’re all shit, no exceptions), this is the path to productivity destruction.
Debugging stored procedures is a fucking black art, known only to DBAs and weirdoes. Fact.

Very few coding topics actually arouse strong feelings in me – something I have learned over years of working with many different people at different companies is that, as software engineers go, I’m reasonably easygoing. I can accommodate a vast array of programming styles and technologies without much of the usual subjective, vitriolic, bullshit that often reigns in an industry full of Aspergers sufferers.

But on this I’m clear. Fuck stored procedures.

Roguelike - Mining!

2010-09-14T21:03:00.002Z

Players can now enter mining mode and designate blocks to be mined. Miners will path to the nearest block to be mined, and start digging.

Roguelike - Pathfinding

2010-09-14T21:00:00.003Z

Pathfinding entities up and running. Not that they've got to try hard in this particular test dungeon.

Roguelike Development

2010-09-09T18:59:00.008Z

I've decided to blog a little about the ongoing development of a Roguelike. I'll be developing in C#, using libtcod.net for console support and some helpful library functionality like FOV calculation pathfinding, and BSP generation, amongst other things.

I'm primarily inspired by Dwarf Fortress, a game I'd love to be able to get into but just can't seem to crack. It's a testatment to its complexity that it actually seems simpler to develop my own Roguelike than to brave its (frankly horrendous) UI.

We'll see how far I get with this. Here's the first screenshot below! From small beginnings...

Set up the main console window, dividing it into sections. Tab toggles various enlarged views of the main window. Got a viewport system up and working so the main map can be scrolled.

Coding Standards

2010-03-26T08:59:00.002Z

Coding standards are such a double edged sword. Almost nothing else (except for possibly contentious code reviewing) has quite the same potential for sowing discord in a software engineering team than a debate about coding standards. The pitfalls are many:

There's a tendency for people to conflate personal preference with empirically-proven benefit.
There's a tendency for the 'tidy-desk-tidy-mind' fetishists to brandish coding standards as a way of achieving the requisite level of code conformity - "THERE MUST BE NO INCONSISTENCY IN THE CODEBASE!". I find this type of software engineer ever so slightly tedious, to be honest. People vary in coding style like they vary in writing style, and whilst every effort should be made to conform to a common style where it matters, it is simply not necessary to constrain every little detail.
On the other hand, coding standards can bring a desirable level of uniformity that allows people to move over the code base without jarring inconsistencies.
They can also be used to explicitly rule out certain undesirable traits or bad habits.

Where things get trickiest, I find, is when you've agreed all the obvious points, and are debating what you might think are the more marginal details. Everyone generally agrees what the horrendous no-no's are (for instance, in our team we ban the use of complex prefixes on variables, other than a m_ on member variables - there's simply no need for it in a type safe language), they're easy to spot, everyone acknowledges they shouldn't be done, and there's usually no argument about explicitly dealing with them in the standards doc.

When you get to something slightly less obvious, say, arguing the finer points of parameter naming convention, or whether or not you should ban the use of #regions, people start grabbing their pitchforks and preparing for war.

It's at this point that the worst aspects of programmers as personality types usually emerge - detail obsessed, a certain level of anal retentiveness, an inability to communicate differences without needlessly inflaming others. These characteristics are stereotypes for a reason - software engineering surely has a higher-than-normal proportion of borderline Aspergers sufferers.

Assassin's Creed 2 Thoughts

2010-01-11T08:32:00.007Z

I recently purchased Assassin's Creed 2, and have found myself slightly frustrated at the rough edges I'd hoped would be refined in the sequel. Partly it's a question of misaligned expectations - I think the previews and trailers of the original game set me up for an experience that's ever so slightly different from what the game actually sets out to deliver.

The Assassin's Creed franchise is an action adventure game par excellence. It's slick, looks beautiful, handles brilliantly and is polished to a high sheen. What I was originally expecting, on the other hand (spurred on by some over-the-top previews and early footage) was something slightly different, something closer to a 'medieval assassin simulation'. Previews boasted of living medieval cities populated by people going about their business, of 'hiding in plain sight', blending in, observing your target. Stalking, predating, killing your mark with some flair and creativity. What, in the end I think we got, was a game which actually emphasized story, free running, acrobatics and combat over and above any deep and meaningful assassination mechanics. Each of the main kills in the original game I accomplished merely by running up to my target, stabbing them, and running off. Indeed, the game seems to go out of it's way to encourage you to kill by this method, given that it's the path of least resistance by an enormous margin.

Contrast this with the Hitman series. In these games, such a direct approach will get you killed fast. Each level must be treated as a puzzle. Observation and exploration is key, before you engage in any hostile act. Once you have fully explored the level a number of approaches will present themselves. You'll have opportunities for all kinds of creative kills - poisonings, sabotaging the environment, sniper kills, misdirection of guards, hiding yourself in a quiet spot along your targets path. Assassin's Creed and it's sequel offer none of this. That's not to say they don't offer a lot, they most certainly do. However, they fail to meet the burden of my expectations, which is as probably more my fault than the game's.

There are several other issues I have that exacerbate the problems:

The game offers a variety of semi-scripted sequences clearly designed to offer a cinematic, exciting set piece - a guard chase through a catacomb to prevent other guards being warned, for instance. The problem with these is the same as the problem of attempting stealthy kills on the main targets - it's too easy to fail, and to survive if you fail by spamming combat counters. You get the immersion-breaking double whammy of not managing to maintain your low profile (i.e. you're as stealthy as a humpback whale) and yet there's little incentive to try again because you can simply fight your way out of most corners via the combat system. In some ways, games in which stealth is your only recourse achieve better immersion, because you die repeatedly until you learn to play. Here, stealth is the poor cousin to agility and combat.
Little creativity is required for the main boss kills. In some missions, it's even possible to sneak up on the boss completely undetected, only for him to magically turn around and spot you instantly when you hit his detection radius, or worse, the game activates a cut scene to begin a set piece as you're moving in for the kill. This, frankly, is bullshit. If I'm able to sneak up behind a boss, let me stealth kill him please.

That said, Assassin's Creed 2 does improve on its predecessor in a number of ways:

We no longer have the 'monk conveyor belt' as the only way of blending with a group. It's now a lot more organic, you can blend with any group of people, moving or standing, and they don't have to be wearing the same costume as you.
The game breaks you out of the main world far, far less. This was intensely irritating about the original game, which most people purchased on the basis that you were a medieval assassin, and so generally wanted to spend their time doing that, rather than spend their time as lesser man Desmond in the present.
Far more variety in general. There are foot races, feather and loot collections, glyph and treasure hunts. You can observe other thieves commit crimes, chase them and steal their loot. There's a notoriety system that controls how infamous and recognizable you are to the guard population. You have numerous ways of distracting and killing guards. There's multiple armour and weapon sets to collect and own. You can change costume. You have a stronghold of your own, which can be upgraded and improved, generating an income for you.

All in all, I think the game is very impressive, and I have huge admiration for the skilled team that made it. But if you could just add more depth to the main assassinations, I think this game would be a lot closer to perfection.

Old Skool Coders and Their Misconceptions

2009-08-09T15:21:00.004Z

I've been a software developer for a little over five years. Not very long. I've worked in the games industry for just about half of that. Now, I'm not sure if it's just the games industry or whether this attitude is prevalent elsewhere, but there's a certain mindset amongst long-time games coders that drives me nuts.

There's this common perception that new guys code wastefully. We don't optimise for every last ounce of performance, that we waste CPU cycles and memory with abandon. That we're 'spoiled' by new-fangled high level languages, that we don't know assembler, that we don't even have to manage our own memory with some of the newest languages. It's just so much bullshit. Never mind that the first thing a half-decent games engine implements is a memory management system, so as to avoid the majority of your coders having to work with raw pointers.

The real kicker for me is that these old schoolers bemoan our lack of optimisation obsession, without EVER stopping to think WHY this is such a prevalent trend amongst younger developers. They usually get as far as saying 'they just don't have to bother, with today's powerful CPUs and abundance of cheap memory'. This just misses the point. It's a sad, tired variant of every generations obsession with proving they 'had it tougher' than the next.

The real enemy in game development now is not hardware limitation, or poor performance. The REAL enemy in projects of significant size is COMPLEXITY. Their battle was with crappy hardware and limited resource. Ours is with 100-man teams and projects that span millions of lines of code. The fact that some people can't seem to recognise that there are different imperatives in software development now than there were coding single player games for the commodore 64 just gets me angry.

Sins of a Solar Empire...

2008-06-16T18:11:00.003Z

...is great. A real gem.

It's not a massively original game, it's very like a number of older RTS games - Conquest: Frontier Wars most closely resembles it, although Sins is definitely the better game. It incorporates a number of features that mark it out from the crowd - nothing revolutionary, it's simply a case of developers Ironclad being suitably shameless in incorporating worthwhile features from other games. It also looks pretty spectacular, and runs well on system that's a couple of years off the pace.

Back to Work Tomorrow

2008-01-02T22:36:00.000Z

I've been off now for nearly two weeks, it's been great. But the really amazing thing is that I'm looking forward to going back. I really am fortunate to be able to honestly claim that I love my job. Although, perhaps fortunate isn't the right word, as I didn't exactly fall into game development, it took me a while and a few wrong turns before I got there. But I'm grateful to have made it.

You know you're in the right job when you get some time off and end up doing the same sort of stuff you'd be doing anyway. Coding things at home provides a good counterpoint to what I do at work. When you work on a big commercial game it's a little bit like working on a Boeing 747 - the project is so vast and contains so many complex parts it is literally impossible for one guy to learn it all, so you end up very focused on the one part of the project you are responsible for, with really very little idea on how the rest of it hangs together.

Working on my own stuff provides a nice balance. Perhaps it's why so many professional programmers enjoy coding in their spare time - it allows you to exercise the bits of your programming brain you don't often get to stretch at work. There is also a certain satisfaction on working on something small enough to be fully understood.

It's certainly a habit I've seen in other devs. Some make old 8-bit games or write emulators for old platforms. Some enjoy hacking their DS or PSP just to see what they can get working. People often associate programming or computer literacy in general with logical, linear thinking, but for many of the programmers I've known, it's simply a different kind of creativity.

I often have difficulty explaining to family or friends who ask how games are made, or ask what I do for a living. It is nearly impossible to explain to someone in anything like remotely meaningful terms how a modern video game is made if they have no prior knowledge of software development or anything to ground my explanation on. I usually go one of two ways - either I attempt to give them a full grounding in the last 50 years of computer science, starting with the Turing machine and working from there, or I oversimplify to the point of insulting them. I find a better approach is to ignore the nitty gritty and explain what the company I work for does - a developer's place in the grand scheme of things, via a very sketchy music industry analogy - developer is to musical artist as publisher is to record label, but that gives them the wrong ideas as to my own personal contribution, not to mention a vastly exaggerated estimation of my net worth :)

Attention, Fantasy Authors of The World

2007-12-30T23:14:00.000Z

There's something about the position of claiming something is 'art' that has never sat easily with me. Perhaps it's the fact that the creative medium I feel most attached to (games) gets a fair amount of flak for being either dangerously violent drivel (Manhunt) at best, or self-consciously seeking that constant edge of 'new media' cool (Edge Magazine, The Escapist etc).

More specifically, I feel that attempting to portray games as art is just inviting our critics to laugh at us. Games are a medium. It is possible to create something considered to be 'art' in any medium, but that doesn't mean games are art. Television isn't art. Cinema isn't (usually) art. Newspapers are not art.

Moreover, I do not quite understand the need to be accepted as art. Who cares? For me, craft is important. Design is important, engineering is important. I'll look at a well engineered game and admire it in the same way I admire some feat of civil engineering - because I have some insight into the processes and work and effort that are required, I understand and appreciate the level of human ingenuity and thought that goes into making something that seems culturally vacuous to someone like my mother.

And games can exhibit great design, something that I appreciate when I look at an Ipod or a Dyson hoover or a Ferrari. There are other elements too - some games are well written, have exceptional storylines or feature incredibly artistic visual styles or worlds. I'm not desperate for everyone to recognise them as art, though.

I've been prompted into this, somewhat tangentially, by reading the latest and concluding novel in Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series, Confessor. I'll lay my cards on the table - I'm with a vocal minority on this one, in that I loved the series at the start, but increasingly grew tired of the incessant amateur philosophising of previously action-driven characters. It just gets worse and worse as the series goes on. And I think these two strands of thought (games as art / fantasy writing) are linked - I read fantasy novels not because the genre contains the cream of the world's writers - it doesn't. I read fantasy because I generally enjoy the settings, narrative and the action. There are exceptions - I can recognise Tolkien as art even if I never particularly warmed to LOTR.

Goodkind, I think, falls prey to the trap that some game commentators or developers do, namely that they feel they have to go out and prove the worth of the medium. They don't. Forget about proving your worth and remember there is as much to admire in a finely crafted and well honed story that brings enjoyment and escapism to millions as there is in writing something that gains recognition outside of your current fanbase.

In the end, I think Goodkind just doesn't want to be a fantasy writer, as his later novels just get further and further away from my definition of fantasy.

Games I Need to Get Off My Arse And Finish

2007-12-17T23:02:00.001Z

In no particular order:

Twilight Princess
Stalker
The Witcher
Rainbow Six: Vegas
Hitman: BloodMoney
Overlord
Half a dozen other half-finished 360 offerings.

I'm a real sucker for not finishing games. I wish I was a little bit more protestant in my gaming work ethic (oxymoron?) but basically in recent years like most people heading into their late twenties I've become time-bound, not money-bound. Hence I end up buying a hell of a lot of games I don't ever finish. I can even predict with a fair degree of accuracy which genres of game I will complete, and which get neglected after something else pops up on the radar. I usually end up finishing RPGs or good story-driven FPS games like The Darkness, HL2 or Bioshock purely because I want to see what happens at the end, and I find the immersion that a great story brings very compelling.

On the other hand, although I do love RTS and strategy games, my attention tends to waver once the novelty wears off and the challenge begins. I love the thought of a good strategy game like Medieval: Total War 2, but I invariably lack the patience to really get the most out of games like these.

I'm trying to be a bit more careful these days about what I pick up - I've deliberately avoided buying great looking RTS games like World in Conflict or (criminally) Mario Galaxy purely because I tend to find the lack of coherent narrative off-putting.

Mass Effect

2007-12-16T19:36:00.000Z

Having finished Mass Effect, I don't know whether I loved it unreservedly, or was slightly disappointed. I suppose if I have to ask then it must be the latter.

Bioware are one of my favourite developers on the planet, mostly because I am an RPG nut. If it's got a kobold in it, I'm there. Bioware have such pedigree, but either Bioware have lost their way a bit or the market is changing and I'm not.

Since KOTOR (so I suppose we're only really talking about 2 games here, Mass Effect and Jade Empire), it does appear as though Bioware have increasingly attempted to make their RPGs more cinematic and real time. While I don't really have a problem with this per se, the effect is that there seems to be less time for the sort of meat and veg content that I really loved about their games. Obviously BGII was, for a kobold-lover like me, the pinnacle of the genre. KOTOR was a little short and a little shallow for my tastes, but the fact that it looked great and was a Star Wars RPG more than made up for it.

Jade Empire, however, was far too linear for my tastes, the combat lacked obvious depth and the universe, while interesting, lacked the psychological meat hooks that franchises like Star Wars and D&D have in geek men of my generation. Mass Effect is a bit of a return to form, but it really just doesn't stand up to the glory days.

I'm worried (and I suspect) that Bioware's deviation from the classic formula is more a reflection of where they think the most sales lie. While I really love the interactice cutscenes of Mass Effect, and quite enjoyed the comabt, when I think of the dev time that went into making these systems my fondest wish is that they immediately halt new engine features for Mass Effect 2 and 3, and concentrate 100% on story, content and interesting locations (of which there were far too few in ME).

I suppose I just fear that the glory days of RPGs (Fallout 1/2, BG 1/2 and Planescape: Torment) are behind us. Hopefully Bethesda can pull things out of the bag.

Assassin's Creed

2007-12-16T19:21:00.001Z

My disappointment with Assassin's Creed is, if nothing else, a testament to the power of expectation. I wanted the freeform fun of Crackdown with the intricate planning and execution (pun intended) of Hitman: Blood Money.

I think AC delivers absolutely the environment I was expecting - it's an incredible looking game, and the free running is ace (I'm still scratching my head as to how this was accomplished, they must have some clever procedural geometry tagging to identify foot/handholds, you'd need a legion of artists/designers otherwise). Ubisoft have this sort of context sensitive movement/animation stuff honed to a fine art, it began in Prince of Persia and Splinter Cell, and the dividends are really arriving now. It will be interesting to see where it ends up.

It's clear though, that as clever and talented as the devs at Ubisoft are, they're still mortal like the rest of us when it comes to identifying that elusive 'fun' factor. My problems with the game are the same as those that have been widely noted - namely the shockingly poor side missions, and the lack of depth to the main assassinations.

Other disappointing points:

Cutscenes. Lots of them, most of them dull.
Voice acting is ok, but the lead is very poor.
The story line is Deus Ex with none of the bite, depth or immersion.
Scholars mechanic is absolutely lame, really incredibly poor.

The game suffers as well from having designed itself into a corner - game AI is not really advanced enough to have convincing 'hide in plain sight' mechanics, guards are either ridiculously suspicious (death penalty for bumping into someone), or completely blind. That's not really the fault of Ubisoft, more that designers should really be wary of what is realistic and design their way around such limitations.

It's a bold game in many ways, but I do think this case the tech is really let down by poor design.

A long time coming...

2007-12-16T19:14:00.001Z

Decided to try to update this thing a bit more often, I've really got into the habit of keeping a blog at work and I find it fairly satisfying, so I'll make a point of updating here, purely for my own amusement.

Things that have occurred since I last blogged:

I have moved house, and found that the rumours are true - it IS just about the most stressful thing you can do.
I have moved jobs, which has been pretty fantastic.
I have played many good games.

Red and Dead

2007-06-19T18:18:00.000Z

I'm noticing something of a crescendo building in the specialist press on the issue of Xbox 360 reliability. Pieces on Eurogamer as well as other industry sites are really starting to pick up on this issue. There was the lamentable interview which was frankly embarrasing for all concerned, this guy could clearly get a job as a Labour government minister. He's clearly in a difficult position in that he can't admit any liability lest the litigious hordes descend upon his Redmond masters, but really...MS need to get on top of this issue. Sony sooner or later are going to stop tripping up on their own shoelaces, and the 360 really needs to have an unassailable lead at that point.

I've heard all sorts of (anecdotal) stories about horrendous failure rates. I'm personally on my 3rd, so I need little convincing. But stories abound of game studios experiencing 50% failure rates on their internal kit, retailers dealing with huge numbers of returns.

I'm a big MS fan. I loved my Xbox, as a developer I'm a massive fan of their developer-orientated approach to gaming, and I love XNA, but one thing is for sure - the failure rate on these things is hugely over the industry average.

The Magic of Zelda

2007-06-13T21:25:00.000Z

Having lent my Wii to a friend for a while, I've recently just got it back and have begun to really get into Twilight Princess. As has been said by many, it's a fabulously designed game and a testament to the fact that Nintendo really do know how to 'play the ball' rather than the man. Their entire strategy of recent years has been a case of cutting the Gordian Knot - if you don't like the way the game is going, the best strategy is to change the rules of the game.

In a way, I'm a little disappointed that Microsoft haven't entirely dominated the market with the 360 (although it's certainly been successful), because as a lifelong gamer, the 360 ticks every one of my boxes. It's a console for gamers, with quality genre staples in abundant supply. With the success of the Wii, all the industry players have become acutely aware of the potential of the segments of the market that have before now been largely ignored, and as a red-blooded FPS-lovin', RPG-goblin-slayin' traditionalist just very occasionally wishes that the types of games I love (beardy RPGs and immersive Deus Ex/Looking Glass-style thrillers) were more prevalent. It's not unlike the arrogant film critic who laments the unwashed masses love of the latest Holywood blockbuster, but at least I know it's elitist bollocks.

But getting back to Zelda, it's amazing how a game that, on the surface, looks as though it shouldn't be played by anyone older than 12 years old can be so strongly engaging -especially when it lacks many of the things that we seem to think make a game thus. It has no orchestral soundtrack (being resolutely MIDI), there's no voice acting, the artistic style is still firmly Nintendo, and the plot is, well, exactly the same as every other Zelda game. But I still find myself drawn into this daft little world.

Part of, certainly, is how strongly TP resonates with my memories of Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time. At times, it practically seems like a remake of OoT - it was clearly an intention on the developers part. It could be something of a reactionary response to some of the criticism Windwaker faced, which I'm ill-placed to comment on having never played it. But still, TP is a brilliant game, and I really do admire Nintendo's approach to the current generation.

I am not prepared.

2007-06-13T15:20:00.000Z

I have succumbed, I had wrenched myself free of it, but thanks to the wiles of still-addicted friends I have been summoned back to the world of Azeroth, in all its imperfect glory. After spending about 2 days downloading gigabytes of patches and the expansion, I'm finally in.

I plan things to be different, this time. I will never, ever join a guild, unless I have personally met each and every member in the flesh and verified them to be a non-chump. My last guild almost drove me out of the game, with their sheer mediocrity. There's something about group behaviour where, in the absence of half-decent leadership, people seem to boil down to this lowest-common-denominator, wishy washy semi-communist bullshit, where everybody seems to be permanently thinking about how to avoid getting fucked by the rest of the guild, and so starts the frenzy of pre-emptive fucking. Who can be arsed?

Not me, I've decided guilds are for chumps. Except in the following circumstances:

- small guilds made of real life friends, because you know where they live if a beating needs to be administered.
- Gnome-only guilds. I've yet to meet a bad gnome player. It's as though the sort of player who wants to play a gnome is by his very nature a good human being, and this goodness shines through to their style of play. Healing could be a problem, so one or two dwarves could be admitted, but no damn elves.

I realise, somewhat wistfully, that I'll never get to see most of the super-high end content. It's not that I begrudge people who like to eat, sleep and bathe WoW their fun, rather, I wish (selfishly) that Blizzard spent a little more of their time and considerable resources on small group or solo/couple content. It still remains the case that the most enjoyable times I've had playing WoW have been spent in a pair. Why are there no dungeons designed for a duo?

Still, Outlands looks very nice and my gear is so shit that every piece of tin falling off a ragged orc is a huge upgrade, so it ain't all bad. I plan to amble my way up to 70, do very little group content and then park the character until Blizzard release the next expansion, which I calculate to have a 0.5% chance of being solo/casual focused. I'll take those odds.

Titanomachy!

2007-05-17T00:48:00.000Z

I've just finished playing through God of War 2 on the PS2, which exceeds even its illustrious predecessor in quality. I've been thinking what makes this series special - there are a number of features that mark it out from the crowd, but the single overriding impulse I get from playing the game is an overwhelming sense of the development team's ambition - it literally pulls out all the stops to amaze the player.

Those of us who are lifelong gamers recognize that as we age and mature the sense of wonder that accompanies a great game becomes rarer - not because great games are less common but because age seems to raise the benchmark for what constitutes an outstanding experience. While the median quality of games has risen out of all recognition when compared to my childhood, it seems that the dizzy heights of gaming nirvana arrive less often. God of War 2 is one of those rare peaks that makes me remember what I really love about gaming. The technical feats are obvious to anyone that plays the game, particularly when mindful of the PS2s limitations. But it's far more than that.

Firstly, I'm an absolute sucker for a revenge tale, and Kratos's journey is the very epitome of vengeance. Secondly, the mythological setting hits all the right notes from my childhood - Jason and the Argonauts, Clash of the Titans and all that good stuff. The base mythology is tremendously close to everyone in the West even if our direct knowledge of it is limited. The artists and level designers working on this series are incredibly gifted at evoking a sense of grandeur - there are few games that manage to top the sense of sheer magnitude of the world, even thought the game itself is not a free form explorable world and is very narrowly defined. Yet the game never misses an opportunity to inspire awe - the level set in and around Atlas the Titan, the opening battle against the Colossus of Rhodes (has there ever been a more action packed opening level in a game?).

The game mechanics almost become secondary to the story and the world, but they are no less polished. While not quite as hardcore as Ninja Gaiden, the gameplay is in the same mould. And the non-controlled camera must be one of the most successfully implemented in the history of 3D gaming, it literally never gets it wrong despite being entirely out of the player's control.

With the third game in the series a no brainer (and quite clearly set up from the ending of GoW2), I think any sequel would be the game that forces me to break the bank for a PS3.

"Gaming corrupts our disposition and teaches us a habit of hostility against all mankind"

2007-05-06T18:37:00.000Z

I'm feeling quotatious today, what can I say?

There's been disgracefully little time for gaming, recently. It's a poor show, frankly. Her Majesty would not approve, if she knew what gaming was. Which raises the question, if Her Majesty was a gamer, what sort of games would she indulge in? A recent visit to the former Royal Yacht Britannia revealed a love of card games, so there's a hint - I think the Queen would be partial to all sorts of casual games. She's probably got a DS, come to think of it.

One important reason for a lack of gaming recently is the untimely demise of my second Xbox 360 - this one was a replacement for my launch day purchase which shuffled off its mortal coil within one solitary week of the day I excitedly brought it home. I've owned four Microsoft consoles - two original Xboxes, and two 360s. 3 out of 4 have died unnatural deaths. Now, that's as anecdotal as evidence can get, but still. Bill G, if you chance across this post, please go to Peter Moore's office and give him a clunk over the head from me.

All this would make the most recent games I've spent any time on the following:

C&C3. Great, vintage, micromanagers-not-welcome-here RTS goodness. For the love of God, bring back faux-Holywood cutscenes. There's tons of cool actors out there looking for work, and I want to see them in my games. EA is on the case, but what about the rest of you? Money, schmoney, get on it!
LOTRO. WoW in Tolkien clothing, and I mean that as a compliment. In Turbine's position, I'd have done the exact same thing.
Crackdown. Crackdown is an absolutely fabulous game - I'm a total sucker for anything remotely resembling 'freeform' gameplay. My gamer tag carries a dark secret - I actually purchased Superman Returns on the 360 - but this is as nothing compared to the lamentable fact that I actually enjoyed it.

I have no idea what design principles they were aiming for in the making of crackdown, but two things stand out for me. The most immediately obvious is the progression of the character, which adds a Diablo-esque pavlovian reward feel to the whole thing. But more importantly, as far as I'm concerned, is the fact that the core mechanics are absolutely razor sharp. The acid test as far as this genre is concerned is this - if you shrunk the game world to the size of a city block, would it still offer much fun? I can't think of a game in the 'free-form' genre that GTA3 reinvigorated (what was the first, I wonder - what came before 'Midwinter'?) that does this quite as well as Crackdown. You could play in a very small area in Crackdown, and still have masses of fun, and that's indicative of the quality of the core mechanics - the combat, the physics and the general 'feel' of the game. GTA3 or it's sequels cannot boast the same thing.

Compare and contrast Crackdown with Superman Returns. Now, granted, the developers are tremendously constrained by the license. Superman is a little bit like the Genie from Aladdin - 'infinite cosmic power' but absolutely sod all freedom to use it. If Molyneux got the Supes license, he'd soon have him sprouting horns and surrounded with flies, levelling buildings and vapourising the good citizens of Metropolis with his laser vision. Which makes for a better sounding game, frankly.

But licence restrictions aside, Superman Returns is cursed by plain old poor design. The usual litany of complaints are there if you're being fussy - the combat is pretty ropey, the graphics, while impressive enough, don't quite stack up with most other next-gen titles (although there are, I'm sure, compelling technical reasons for this in terms of what's being shown on screen). But the number one complaint has to be the complete undercutting of the entire point of a free-roaming action game by compelling the player to partake in constant 'city-saving' activity, othwise it's game over. That is one of the worst design decisions I've seen, frankly, and whoever thought it was a good idea was clearly not thinking straight at the time.

People can forgive a lack of content or ropey graphics, if you provide them the tools to make their own fun. If you give them Superman, a massive city to play in, and put some half decent game mechanics in there, you're not going to set the specialist press on fire, but by and large most people who buy the game are going to be reasonably happy. But by enforcing regular bouts of 'city saving', you are effectively turning what is already a marginal experience into a chore, and removing the one true redeeming aspect of the game - it's sense of freedom.

"We'd all like to vote for the best man, but he's never a candidate"

2007-05-06T15:37:00.000Z

It's just passed election time here in Scotland, and it has been a pretty noteworthy affair all round. Confusing ballot papers, inefficient machine counting, disruption at a number of polling booths, and the end result of Scotland not electing a Labour government for the first time in half a century.

Scotland is a politically interesting country. Like many places, the great fault line of Scottish politics is nationalism, but we're at least fortunate in that our breed of nationalism is benign. But what really makes Scotland interesting, in my view, is that it's a country where the vast majority of people could in some measure be described as politically 'cautious' in a way that might lead you to expect large numbers of Conservative party votes. Where religion exists in Scotland (rapidly retreating under the relentless onward march of secularism - a religion in its own right), it's politically conservative - we're a nation of Calvinists. Scots would tend to hold views on immigration and criminal justice that would naturally place them to the right of the political spectrum.

And yet, Scotland is also the birthplace of the Labour party and the centre of lively left wing political radicalism, and for fifty years was the unassailable fortress from which Labour sought to rule the rest of the UK.

Part of the reason for this dichotomy is the position and perception of the Conservative party here in Scotland, as well as the composition of the nationalist movement itself. The Tories, of course, are strongly identified here in Scotland with 'Englishness', which places them at a distinct disadvantage. A Scottish Tory walks the ever difficult high-wire of attempting to maintain a 'Scottish' appearance while distancing themselves from the inevitably Eton/Oxbridge educated leader down south.

The second challenge a Tory faces is the almost fanatical levels of hatred levelled at Margaret Thatcher, which have been seared into the Scottish political conciousness. Because of the real or imagined (I make no attempt to judge either way) catastrophies Thatcher heaped upon Scotland, she is probably the most polarising figure in modern Scottish history. Imagine the hatred your liberal friends pretend to have for George W. Bush - now multiply that a hundred fold, and you can begin to imagine how hated Thatcher is in parts of Scotland, particularly the west coast and former industrial heartlands.

Thanks to Thatcher, there is effectively no party of the centre right in Scotland. The Conservatives are a spent force, and thus the electorate have two realistic choices for government in the devolved parliament - the SNP and Labour.

The SNP are an interesting bunch. Formed from the merger of a number of nationalist parties over the years, they are riven at their core by a left/right divide. The only thing that really glues them together is the prospect of an independent Scotland. Which is what makes these times so interesting. With the SNP now the largest party in Holyrood, they are going to be facing some real internal challenges. The fundamentalist wing of the party will not want to budge on a referendum for independence, but with only 47 seats, the SNP will have to negotiate with another major party to form a government. Alex Salmond will have to convince the die hards of his own party to be patient.

The way ahead is deliciously uncertain, for once, in Scottish politics. The SNP, although in the driving seat, would do well to remeber that support for independence in Scotland remains low (remember, we're cautious). The electorate will want to see proof of the SNPs ability to govern the devolved parliament before we countenance independence. But if Alex Salmond can inject some much needed charisma into the normally drab proceedings at Holyrood, and begin to earn the SNP a reputation for competence, then the prospects of an independent Scotland at some point in the future become much greater.

Trivia

2007-04-08T08:44:00.000Z

As much as I loathe to bore potential readers with the daily inanities my mind conjures, today's random mind bullets are better than average, so I'll share. And this is my first attempt at a blog so I feel I've got a lot of catching up to do. They are also game related, so by sticking to my sworn theme I justify their telling.

Random Thought One: Funniest Gaming Experience

I was reminded recently of the funniest gaming experience I've ever had. I'm talking Grim-Fandago funny - that humerous. It was....(drum roll)....Chu-Chu Rocket on the Dreamcast, 4-player, with 3 colour blind participants plus normal-sighted me.

Now, I don't mean to make fun of the colour blind, my best friend is a ...etc. But as my gaming buddy Richard pointed out to me, almost 10% of the male population is colour blind to some degree. Which makes for some hilarious gaming-related hi-jinks. Chu Chu Rocket is the perfect game to play with colour blind people. 4 players, 4 different colours, and the ability to help as much as hinder your opponents (by accident, if not by design).

I can still feel my ribs aching from that day. I lack the vocabulary to accurately depict the chaos. If you ever played Chu Chu Rocket, I'm sure you can imagine.

Random Thought Two: Cutscene Vanity

One pet gaming peeve of mine is unskippable cutscenes. I always imagined (rightly or wrongly), that the decision was at least partly based on the fact that it was bloody difficult to get that cutscene working, so by Odin's Beard they were going to make you watch it. It has been suggested to me that the inability to skip the splash screen on Fish! is my own vanity playing up. I'll plead the fifth on that, and merely say that future versions will behave more in accordance with my own oft-stated gaming principles.

But I warn you, every time you skip that splash screen, a weighted-sum force flocking agent shaped like a fish dies.

Random Thought Three: Bring Back the Tank Rush

I love a good RTS. And by good RTS, I mean 'flashy, unstrategic RTS'. And by God and Sunny Jesus I hate micromanagement. Gaming buddy Richard and I speak of this regularly - he is the world's biggest fan of the unstrategic RTS. As he puts it - 'If I build 40 mammoth tanks, I sure as hell don't want them destroyed by 4 tiny crap 'counter units'. Screw that. The only thing that should beat 40 mammoth tanks is 41 mammoth tanks'.

Amen.

Fish!

2007-04-06T09:41:00.000Z

***Update 2*****

Thanks to Ziggy for spotting (and more importantly, solving!) the graphical artifact problem he was seeing. Source code and the installer has been updated with the new version, although it should be noted the changing renderstate (the solution involves turning the depthbuffer off during the water pass, then re-enabling it) within the draw loop may cause a minor performance hit, but not worth worrying about for now.

On a side note, I personally own 5 PC's of different ages/configurations. With close friends, I have easy access to maybe a dozen more.

And not one of them has an ATI graphics card. Could constitute a blind spot in my testing plan :)

*** Update ***

I've since wrapped all this up into an installer - FishInstaller.zip. It will install the .NET 2.0 Framework (if you don't already have it) and the XNA runtime, but you will still need a very recent version of directX 9.0c (December 2006 or later), as it has updated libraries that XNA requires. So if you can't get the demo to work, try updating your directX version - that's the likely problem. Apologies for that, no real way around it for now. Rumour has it that MS are currently working on a distribution technology to make this all a bit easier.

Here's the latest version of DirectX if required.
The latest DirectX 9.0c release. (45Mb)

***************

This is a little demo I wrote using Microsoft's recently release XNA framework. XNA is the spiritual successor to managed DirectX, essentially wrapping up directX and hiding some of the nastier elements from the novice coder, as well as providing a lot of useful functionality that's common to most games.

To run the demo, you'll need:

- A PC that meets the XNA framework requirements (the pertinent one being a graphics card that supports DirectX 9.0c and shader model 2.0 , which is pretty much everything from a Geforce 6 onwards).

Instructions

The demo begins with a simple splash screen, after the fish have demonstrated their literary skills you can proceed by pressing the Space bar.
The main demo is a simple enough sandbox, demonstrating real-time flocking behaviour based on Craig Reynold's classic flocking model. You have three constituent behaviours - cohesion (the force that attracts fish to each other), separation (the opposite), and alignment (the force that keeps them pointing in a similiar direction).
All the behaviours begin toggled off. The water effect begins toggled on.
Left mouse button spawns fish, right mouse button spawns obstacles (I know they're not particularly nautical, but I'm no artist as we can all see - pause it and zoom in on the fish if you don't believe me...)
You can change the strength of the constituent behaviours and observe the effects.
Arrow keys move the camera (top down, RTS-style), mouse scroll to zoom in and out.

Things to note

Classic flocking is computationally expensive (On^2), but there's a few tricks to get that down. A cell-space partitioning system is used here, so each fish only flocks with the fish in the surrounding few grid cells. Without such optimisation, this algorithm brings even a very powerful CPU to its knees very quickly - at around 130 fish on a E6600 dual core. With cell-space partitioning we can raise that several fold (depending on your CPU speed).
There's no actual collision penetration constraint here, only collision avoidance by the fish themselves. So you will see cornered fish clip through obstacles occasionally if the combined forces compel them to.
The water refraction effect is achieved by drawing the scene to a render target, applying this to a texture, and then perturbing and displaying this texture on a disc model that is placed between the scene and the viewer. Based on the 'refraction' effect found in Rendermonkey, if you're interested.

Finally, if you want the full source and all the trimmings - RainbowFishSource. The whole thing is really an offshoot of a simple game engine a friend and I are writing together. Hopefully should have some more to show in the coming weeks and months. Oh, and thanks to Gary Kacmarcik for his XNAExtras bitmap font code, a big time saver.