Brand new post for a brand new obsession. I found myself briefly enjoying a rather familiar/unfamiliar sensation. Well, emotion. I'm sure the one reader I have won't be surprised. A second one (presuming that such a creature exists) may be. Fear, is the emotion I'm talking about.
I'm sure it has something to do with the delightful cocktail of chemicals and the relief following fear disappearing.
But on to the main event.
Slender Man. According to the internet was created as the result of the Something Awful forums.
If you're familiar with Fringe, the idea of an Observer is the best place to start. Bald, be-suited, seemingly capable of being anywhere. Now, take that basic shape, and sort of smudge out the face until it looks like a mannequin. Then stretch it to 7-8 feet tall, and give it absurdly gangly arms, and squish it sort of thin, and have it behave like a cross between a J-Horror antagonist, a Lovecraftian monster and a sub-atomic particle.
That is all.
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Santhworld
I'll be the first to admit, text adventures are a wholly zombified medium of video games. But I was rather fond of Zork when I first got my hands on it a few years ago. The inherent problem of course, with any text adventure game is the inability of the designer to think of everything.
Take Santhworld for instance. It's a quasi-text adventure. The game graphics are mostly static images, but you control everything with an old-school text parser. No clicking is necessary. At one point, a section of the road up-ahead is blocked by a fallen tree. During one of the earlier iterations of this game one can, especially if they're familiar with the sort of twisted madness that passes for "logic" in some adventure games, acquire a saw not too far ahead of this. The obvious solution is "use saw on tree" to which the game promptly responds "NOPE!". Obviously an oversight on the part of the developers.
So onto the real bit here.
Santhworld. Specifically Mysteries of Nepris. I'll clear the air by saying that I'm associated with the group responsible for building the world you're traipsing through, but as my talents lie in directions decidedly opposite to game development, the most I've done is provide feedback for this particular project. A pseudonym of mine appears in the trivia section since I was responsible for some of the content there.
I haven't played it in a while, but my patience was a little... shall we say worn by the time I put it down. Mostly it's the combat. RPG-esque turn based combat is usually a cakewalk for me, but the game isn't what you'd call well documented at this point. It's incomplete so some things don't work the way one might expect and the game doesn't do an especially good job at explaining them.
The puzzles are puzzling though and artwork is fairly good in my estimation. The combat is where things fall down, again mostly because of the lack of explanation. I'm given to understand that the game is much farther than where I got to before putting it down out of frustration and I think that the difficulty could be dialed back a bit in a few areas. Perhaps they've made those changes since last I picked up my trusty sword and went adventuring.
If you've got an itch for some old-school text-based fun, this might just scratch it. You could certainly do worse. Just mind that you keep a finger over the save button.
Take Santhworld for instance. It's a quasi-text adventure. The game graphics are mostly static images, but you control everything with an old-school text parser. No clicking is necessary. At one point, a section of the road up-ahead is blocked by a fallen tree. During one of the earlier iterations of this game one can, especially if they're familiar with the sort of twisted madness that passes for "logic" in some adventure games, acquire a saw not too far ahead of this. The obvious solution is "use saw on tree" to which the game promptly responds "NOPE!". Obviously an oversight on the part of the developers.
So onto the real bit here.
Santhworld. Specifically Mysteries of Nepris. I'll clear the air by saying that I'm associated with the group responsible for building the world you're traipsing through, but as my talents lie in directions decidedly opposite to game development, the most I've done is provide feedback for this particular project. A pseudonym of mine appears in the trivia section since I was responsible for some of the content there.
I haven't played it in a while, but my patience was a little... shall we say worn by the time I put it down. Mostly it's the combat. RPG-esque turn based combat is usually a cakewalk for me, but the game isn't what you'd call well documented at this point. It's incomplete so some things don't work the way one might expect and the game doesn't do an especially good job at explaining them.
The puzzles are puzzling though and artwork is fairly good in my estimation. The combat is where things fall down, again mostly because of the lack of explanation. I'm given to understand that the game is much farther than where I got to before putting it down out of frustration and I think that the difficulty could be dialed back a bit in a few areas. Perhaps they've made those changes since last I picked up my trusty sword and went adventuring.
If you've got an itch for some old-school text-based fun, this might just scratch it. You could certainly do worse. Just mind that you keep a finger over the save button.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Unskippable? Or What's Wrong With Dead Space 2
I recently played Dead Space 2.
I am not impressed. The first Dead Space was an excellent game, it had good pacing, good set pieces, interesting changes in interface, and a reasonable story.
Dead Space 2, much like EA's other sequel set in space, throws the baby out with the bathwater.
While Mass Effect went from Space Opera to Action (IN SPACE), Dead Space, went from Survival "Horror" to "Survival Horror".
But my problem has nothing to do with the change in genre. My problem? Is unskippable. Cutscenes and tutorial to be precise.
Now, I don't begrudge developers making you sit through the cutscenes the first time around. People put a lot of work into this, but I think there's a limit. For instance, when I start New Game+ (a mode which requires you to have completed the game) I do not expect to have to watch these things over again! Especially since they're just exposition. "Hey, Issac, this is what you're doing next!"
Another problem is that the game switches right from cutscenes into Quicktime Events or gameplay without much warning. Particularly on a smaller screen. There are elements elsewhere that make me want to say, "if you're going to have QTEs then you might as well use them."
Between Issac Clarke, Bastard Child of Gordon Freeman and Samus Aran, Monster-slaying godling, and Issac Clarke, whiny bitch with a silly looking face? I'll pick the former. There's a reason protagonists have had a policy of being silent. They tend to sound stupid when the speak.
I am not impressed. The first Dead Space was an excellent game, it had good pacing, good set pieces, interesting changes in interface, and a reasonable story.
Dead Space 2, much like EA's other sequel set in space, throws the baby out with the bathwater.
While Mass Effect went from Space Opera to Action (IN SPACE), Dead Space, went from Survival "Horror" to "Survival Horror".
But my problem has nothing to do with the change in genre. My problem? Is unskippable. Cutscenes and tutorial to be precise.
Now, I don't begrudge developers making you sit through the cutscenes the first time around. People put a lot of work into this, but I think there's a limit. For instance, when I start New Game+ (a mode which requires you to have completed the game) I do not expect to have to watch these things over again! Especially since they're just exposition. "Hey, Issac, this is what you're doing next!"
Another problem is that the game switches right from cutscenes into Quicktime Events or gameplay without much warning. Particularly on a smaller screen. There are elements elsewhere that make me want to say, "if you're going to have QTEs then you might as well use them."
Between Issac Clarke, Bastard Child of Gordon Freeman and Samus Aran, Monster-slaying godling, and Issac Clarke, whiny bitch with a silly looking face? I'll pick the former. There's a reason protagonists have had a policy of being silent. They tend to sound stupid when the speak.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Brink- Complaints
I'm not a huge fan of multiplayer, but I enjoyed playing Battlefront (the second, the first was a bit of a shambles when it came to a bunch of things), so I assumed brink would be a bit of a return to that for me. Sadly, not so much.
The biggest problem I have with brink is that the controls aren't... intuitive or explained, except through an in-game manual. A quick tutorial sequence *would not have been amiss*. This is one case where I would certainly advocate explaining how the game works, rather than when I manage to fumble my way to doing something, linking me to the appropriate page of the *in game* (and there's my problem) manual.
The game's a rental, so RTFM doesn't exactly apply here. If there had been a little booklet I probably would have read it, but I still think I'd be missing some skills, and rather than being thrown into the deep end having *the option* of a tutorial would have been nice.
The other problem I have stems from comparison of the game to another game. The game has a vault, duck, wall-run mechanic that makes it seem like it wants to be Mirror's Edge. The problem is of course that Mirror's edge was all about that and had an entire controller to nuance that mechanic throughout, while Brink maps the entire jump/vault set of skills to one button. So I can never quite be sure if I'm going to jump, slide along a wall or bounce up to another ledge. It seems as though the game has some sort of uncertain grasp as to whether or not the same technique will work the same way if you try it a second time.
Oh. And the character models are terribly uninteresting.
The biggest problem I have with brink is that the controls aren't... intuitive or explained, except through an in-game manual. A quick tutorial sequence *would not have been amiss*. This is one case where I would certainly advocate explaining how the game works, rather than when I manage to fumble my way to doing something, linking me to the appropriate page of the *in game* (and there's my problem) manual.
The game's a rental, so RTFM doesn't exactly apply here. If there had been a little booklet I probably would have read it, but I still think I'd be missing some skills, and rather than being thrown into the deep end having *the option* of a tutorial would have been nice.
The other problem I have stems from comparison of the game to another game. The game has a vault, duck, wall-run mechanic that makes it seem like it wants to be Mirror's Edge. The problem is of course that Mirror's edge was all about that and had an entire controller to nuance that mechanic throughout, while Brink maps the entire jump/vault set of skills to one button. So I can never quite be sure if I'm going to jump, slide along a wall or bounce up to another ledge. It seems as though the game has some sort of uncertain grasp as to whether or not the same technique will work the same way if you try it a second time.
Oh. And the character models are terribly uninteresting.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Mmm... Filler
Some games have a serious problem. They hide their best parts behind mindless tedium.
A few examples:
Dragon Age: Origins- The Deep Roads
The Deep Roads is, doubtless the longest, most tedious, repetitive section of Dragon Age. At least to me. I purposely leave Orzammar for last just because of the Deep Roads. For those not familiar with the Deep Roads, let me describe them. Grey or brown tunnels, stretching endlessly, filled with monsters that you have to kill. This section, as the Spoiler Warning crew mentioned, can easily take 8 hours.
There are some interesting quests in there, but for the most part, the Deep Roads is delicious, delicious filler. What we really want to do, is get to the climax of the area. A high school student that paid attention in English can tell you that a good narrative has a build up, and then a climax, followed by the denouement, or simply the wrap up.
Where each of these falls in the book depends on the style, the story and the writer. It's also worth noting that too long of a build-up gives us a bit of a Charlie Brown effect. We're ready to run up and kick the football of literary climax, but the author keeps pulling it away. Now imagine that the first section of the book isn't even build-up. It's all flat. Where most of the other quests have you getting to the fun bits (the Fade sections, exploring ancient ruins), when you're doing the Orzammar questline, you're rather stuck.
First, you have to earn the trust of one of the guys who wants to be king. This, on its own, takes a good few hours as you need to go through a dungeon filled with rogues and criminals.
That done? Good! Go find us our genius! You wander through the deep roads, kill a bunch of stuff. Not fun. Bored yet? No? Go do the same thing only it's twice as big and fight a boss monster! (This is actually the good part.) Are we there yet? NOPE! Navigate the trap infested corridor, choose which side you want (dwarves v. golems), fight it out and then return to the guys.
So what we really have is a lot of failed attempts to build momentum here. Half the problem is that Orzammar is made up of no fewer than five different areas. Most of the time, the game will have you running from one end to the other. That's usually two loading screens per fetch quest, repeated at least once. I like that the area seems to be a living breathing city, but there are other ways to suggest that than by making me run through this place a few dozen times.
When you're choosing a noble to side with? That's building a bit of momentum that is instantly destroyed when you have to go and clean up the criminal element of the city. First you need to find someone who'll talk to you about the gangs, then you need someone to give you a special token to get into the hideout, then you start beating up dudes. For about an hour.
And you still aren't done. Orzammar takes two-thirds of the the game the first time you play it.
Mass Effect 2- The Scanning Mini-Game
I can't speak to the mini-game from the player's point of view, only from the point of view of having watched someone play. There's a reason that Spoiler Warning turned the probing mini-game into a Q&A series. It's boring. You need these resources to upgrade your ship, which you need to get a good ending (ie. One where 95% of your crew isn't dead). It's tedious and repetitive. Pointlessly so. This didn't need to be there.
Sims Medieval- Responsibilities and Resource Points
I was tempted to say Sims Medieval- The whole game, but that would be wrong. The Sims Medieval is a Sims game. Like the other Sims games. Only you're in Generic Fantasy Europe and you have sims. You can only control one or two of these (I think three is the most I've seen possible at once) sims at a time. These are your heroes. They all have little archetypes that they fit, you have your monarch, and a spy and a wizard and a knight and a bard... Here's the problem. You have to build up their numbers.
When you first start the game, you have to make your monarch (or use one of the premade ones but who does that? That's like buying a box of cookies for the cardboard and plastic) and run through a brief tutorial.
Once you finish the tutorial, you get "Resource Points" with which you can make another building, RTS style, which will unlock a new hero. Maybe. Depending on which building you build. The problem is that the rewards for completing the game's quests (Resource Points) don't scale, while the cost of building new buildings to procure new Sims does. This is a problem.
The other problem is the responsibilities in the game. Each sim has a set of responsibilities that they need to complete each day. If you're the king it might be holding court and listening to petitions. If you're a knight, you could be training someone to fight. These have a time limit. If you don't complete them, your progress on the quest goes down. A lot of the time, the quests themselves have filler, by making you walk back and forth from A all the way to Z. And the responsibilities aren't well explained. If you don't know where to find sagewort or how to make a potion?
It's a lot of mucking around to get to the good part, which is the questing and making new sims. After having played this for a few hours, I've found I want to be able to make my Sims more frequently. It's like they know they don't have a solid game, so they're filling it up with sand. Actually, I'm pretty sure that's what happened.
Dear Game Developers: If you don't have a whole game, perhaps you should finish making the game.
A few examples:
Dragon Age: Origins- The Deep Roads
The Deep Roads is, doubtless the longest, most tedious, repetitive section of Dragon Age. At least to me. I purposely leave Orzammar for last just because of the Deep Roads. For those not familiar with the Deep Roads, let me describe them. Grey or brown tunnels, stretching endlessly, filled with monsters that you have to kill. This section, as the Spoiler Warning crew mentioned, can easily take 8 hours.
There are some interesting quests in there, but for the most part, the Deep Roads is delicious, delicious filler. What we really want to do, is get to the climax of the area. A high school student that paid attention in English can tell you that a good narrative has a build up, and then a climax, followed by the denouement, or simply the wrap up.
Where each of these falls in the book depends on the style, the story and the writer. It's also worth noting that too long of a build-up gives us a bit of a Charlie Brown effect. We're ready to run up and kick the football of literary climax, but the author keeps pulling it away. Now imagine that the first section of the book isn't even build-up. It's all flat. Where most of the other quests have you getting to the fun bits (the Fade sections, exploring ancient ruins), when you're doing the Orzammar questline, you're rather stuck.
First, you have to earn the trust of one of the guys who wants to be king. This, on its own, takes a good few hours as you need to go through a dungeon filled with rogues and criminals.
That done? Good! Go find us our genius! You wander through the deep roads, kill a bunch of stuff. Not fun. Bored yet? No? Go do the same thing only it's twice as big and fight a boss monster! (This is actually the good part.) Are we there yet? NOPE! Navigate the trap infested corridor, choose which side you want (dwarves v. golems), fight it out and then return to the guys.
So what we really have is a lot of failed attempts to build momentum here. Half the problem is that Orzammar is made up of no fewer than five different areas. Most of the time, the game will have you running from one end to the other. That's usually two loading screens per fetch quest, repeated at least once. I like that the area seems to be a living breathing city, but there are other ways to suggest that than by making me run through this place a few dozen times.
When you're choosing a noble to side with? That's building a bit of momentum that is instantly destroyed when you have to go and clean up the criminal element of the city. First you need to find someone who'll talk to you about the gangs, then you need someone to give you a special token to get into the hideout, then you start beating up dudes. For about an hour.
And you still aren't done. Orzammar takes two-thirds of the the game the first time you play it.
Mass Effect 2- The Scanning Mini-Game
I can't speak to the mini-game from the player's point of view, only from the point of view of having watched someone play. There's a reason that Spoiler Warning turned the probing mini-game into a Q&A series. It's boring. You need these resources to upgrade your ship, which you need to get a good ending (ie. One where 95% of your crew isn't dead). It's tedious and repetitive. Pointlessly so. This didn't need to be there.
Sims Medieval- Responsibilities and Resource Points
I was tempted to say Sims Medieval- The whole game, but that would be wrong. The Sims Medieval is a Sims game. Like the other Sims games. Only you're in Generic Fantasy Europe and you have sims. You can only control one or two of these (I think three is the most I've seen possible at once) sims at a time. These are your heroes. They all have little archetypes that they fit, you have your monarch, and a spy and a wizard and a knight and a bard... Here's the problem. You have to build up their numbers.
When you first start the game, you have to make your monarch (or use one of the premade ones but who does that? That's like buying a box of cookies for the cardboard and plastic) and run through a brief tutorial.
Once you finish the tutorial, you get "Resource Points" with which you can make another building, RTS style, which will unlock a new hero. Maybe. Depending on which building you build. The problem is that the rewards for completing the game's quests (Resource Points) don't scale, while the cost of building new buildings to procure new Sims does. This is a problem.
The other problem is the responsibilities in the game. Each sim has a set of responsibilities that they need to complete each day. If you're the king it might be holding court and listening to petitions. If you're a knight, you could be training someone to fight. These have a time limit. If you don't complete them, your progress on the quest goes down. A lot of the time, the quests themselves have filler, by making you walk back and forth from A all the way to Z. And the responsibilities aren't well explained. If you don't know where to find sagewort or how to make a potion?
It's a lot of mucking around to get to the good part, which is the questing and making new sims. After having played this for a few hours, I've found I want to be able to make my Sims more frequently. It's like they know they don't have a solid game, so they're filling it up with sand. Actually, I'm pretty sure that's what happened.
Dear Game Developers: If you don't have a whole game, perhaps you should finish making the game.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Discrete Skills
The problem, I think with the divide between gamers and non-gamers is the skills required to play. Not Leet skills, or even mad skills, just the basic tool-use that you've likely acquired between the 1980s and now. Gamers might see each individual game as a rehash of something they've learned somewhere else. Even the vague differences in the shape of a controller don't matter much.
I've only got a gamecube and a handful of games on hand at the moment, but let's say you're playing Halo? You run up to a guy, strafe around behind him (making sure you keep him on screen) and melee him to death. To you, this might be a single skill. Two at most. The ability to get close to an enemy and kill them without firing, or dying yourself.
To a non-gamer, trying to do the same thing is several discrete skills. Separate things they have to learn.
The first thing isn't the controller. It's the screen. What do all the little blinking lights mean, which ones are you supposed to shoot. I got my exposure to shooters in Goldeneye. As much as people may argue, shooters have not changed significantly since then.
Once they know what the game is telling them, they have to be able to tell the game to do things. This means using the controller. I started playing games on an old NES system in a basement in the late 90s, and on my cousin's N64 when I would visit them. Holding a controller properly (so you can reach all the buttons) and knowing where the buttons are is more difficult than you might think.
An NES controller had an A and B button, a four ways you could push the D-pad, as well as a start button and select. Jump forward to the Super NES, another two buttons next to A and B, plus two shoulder triggers, start and select. From eight to twelve buttons.
Another jump forward to the N64! Six buttons on the one side (A, B, and 4 C buttons) a 4 direction D-pad, two shoulder triggers, a start button and a Z-button on the underside, as well as an 8 direction analog stick. This puts us at 22 possible "buttons". Adding to this that the basic shape of the controller has changed and we're now working in three dimensions.
Sixth generation consoles!
The Gamecube: two analog sticks (8 directions each) A, B, X and Y buttons, two shoulder triggers, a Z button located above a shoulder trigger, the D-pad and a start button. 28 "buttons".
The XBox: A, B, X and Y buttons, a d-pad, two analog sticks, start/select, two shoulder triggers and a black/white button pairing. The analog sticks "click" to add an extra button. 32 "buttons"
The Playstation! (Dualshock controller) Two analog sticks, four shoulder buttons, a four button set on the left and right sides, start and select. 30 "buttons".
That's between 28 and 30 discrete inputs. We're not even going to get into the fact that an analog sticks can tell the difference between the force being used on them, or combinations of buttons. Now imagine you haven't played a game before and you have to figure out how to use this monstrosity, and you have no idea what you're doing.
So now you've learned the hardware. Time to learn the software!
Just to list the things that people might take for granted that they've learned:
2D platforming
3d platforming
Fine-motor skills
Hand-eye-coordination
Tropes (it's glowing, so shoot it, lots of ammo here: boss battle)
Circle strafing
Basic game puzzles
Basic game cues (red arrows denote where I'm getting shot from, blood on the screen means I'm getting shot)
Use of cover
Grenades
Button combinations
Circle strafing is a tricky one, I think, for new gamers to grasp. I really got started playing video games on a gamecube I got for christmas, it is also my gaming system while I'm away from home, so I'll use it as an example.
In Metroid Prime, you can lock on to an enemy using the left shoulder trigger. While locked on (holding this trigger) you can circle around the enemy by tapping the B button and pushing the control stick in the direction you wish to circle. In some cases, you are expected to fire while circle strafing. For a new gamer, this might be overwhelming.
I intend to take the time to introduce a non-gamer to gaming at some point in the future, so we'll see how the discrete skills approach works.
I've only got a gamecube and a handful of games on hand at the moment, but let's say you're playing Halo? You run up to a guy, strafe around behind him (making sure you keep him on screen) and melee him to death. To you, this might be a single skill. Two at most. The ability to get close to an enemy and kill them without firing, or dying yourself.
To a non-gamer, trying to do the same thing is several discrete skills. Separate things they have to learn.
The first thing isn't the controller. It's the screen. What do all the little blinking lights mean, which ones are you supposed to shoot. I got my exposure to shooters in Goldeneye. As much as people may argue, shooters have not changed significantly since then.
Once they know what the game is telling them, they have to be able to tell the game to do things. This means using the controller. I started playing games on an old NES system in a basement in the late 90s, and on my cousin's N64 when I would visit them. Holding a controller properly (so you can reach all the buttons) and knowing where the buttons are is more difficult than you might think.
An NES controller had an A and B button, a four ways you could push the D-pad, as well as a start button and select. Jump forward to the Super NES, another two buttons next to A and B, plus two shoulder triggers, start and select. From eight to twelve buttons.
Another jump forward to the N64! Six buttons on the one side (A, B, and 4 C buttons) a 4 direction D-pad, two shoulder triggers, a start button and a Z-button on the underside, as well as an 8 direction analog stick. This puts us at 22 possible "buttons". Adding to this that the basic shape of the controller has changed and we're now working in three dimensions.
Sixth generation consoles!
The Gamecube: two analog sticks (8 directions each) A, B, X and Y buttons, two shoulder triggers, a Z button located above a shoulder trigger, the D-pad and a start button. 28 "buttons".
The XBox: A, B, X and Y buttons, a d-pad, two analog sticks, start/select, two shoulder triggers and a black/white button pairing. The analog sticks "click" to add an extra button. 32 "buttons"
The Playstation! (Dualshock controller) Two analog sticks, four shoulder buttons, a four button set on the left and right sides, start and select. 30 "buttons".
That's between 28 and 30 discrete inputs. We're not even going to get into the fact that an analog sticks can tell the difference between the force being used on them, or combinations of buttons. Now imagine you haven't played a game before and you have to figure out how to use this monstrosity, and you have no idea what you're doing.
So now you've learned the hardware. Time to learn the software!
Just to list the things that people might take for granted that they've learned:
2D platforming
3d platforming
Fine-motor skills
Hand-eye-coordination
Tropes (it's glowing, so shoot it, lots of ammo here: boss battle)
Circle strafing
Basic game puzzles
Basic game cues (red arrows denote where I'm getting shot from, blood on the screen means I'm getting shot)
Use of cover
Grenades
Button combinations
Circle strafing is a tricky one, I think, for new gamers to grasp. I really got started playing video games on a gamecube I got for christmas, it is also my gaming system while I'm away from home, so I'll use it as an example.
In Metroid Prime, you can lock on to an enemy using the left shoulder trigger. While locked on (holding this trigger) you can circle around the enemy by tapping the B button and pushing the control stick in the direction you wish to circle. In some cases, you are expected to fire while circle strafing. For a new gamer, this might be overwhelming.
I intend to take the time to introduce a non-gamer to gaming at some point in the future, so we'll see how the discrete skills approach works.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
I hate misandrists
I have spent the last three hours in a presentation about partner abuse.
I have decided, as a result, that western culture has a rather serpent-like tendency to be misandrist.
Not familiar with the word? Let's look at it for a minute!
Misandry:
The hatred of, or pathological aversion to men.
Well, Nonesuch! you say, from where do you draw this conclusion?
I'm glad you ask Timmy!
This presentation had three guest speakers, two of them were women. One of them was a victim of domestic abuse which, don't get me wrong, is terrible. The other woman was the exectutive director of a local women's shelter who, following her piece, showed us a 17-year-old abuse victim's bit of movie maker work, which denigrated men.
Following this, I was in a round table discussion led by a female, where the person sitting next to me could not keep their mouth shut about their father and other less than admirable examples of men.
Let me make this perfectly clear to people. I have no problem with women. Anyone who harms their spouse/partner/whateveryoucallit should be strung up with their own innards. That isn't right.
A colleague of mine witnessed a guy strike his girlfriend after I might note, she would not let him go past her.
Now. I was not there. I did not witness this. But in most people's minds, since the lady was on the ground, it was the dude's fault. You really need to wonder? Why did he hit her? What brought it to that point? People typically do not hit people for no reason.
I hear people speaking quite audibly behind me in the hallways, about their stupid boyfriends.
I'm hoping to make it quite clear: These people are squeaky wheels. So of course you hear about them. You don't hear about people who are perfectly fine.
In my own experience, women can be incredibly unpleasant people, emotionally abusive and whatnot. I don't hold that against anyone. If I think you're an idiot, it's because I legitimately think you are an idiot.
I implore people not to lump their bad experiences with one person of a gender onto the entire gender. I am not a rapist, a domestic abuser, an alcoholic, a male chauvinist or similar, so don't treat me like one, and don't treat my fellows like one.
Unless they deserve it. In which case, kick them in the balls for me.
I have decided, as a result, that western culture has a rather serpent-like tendency to be misandrist.
Not familiar with the word? Let's look at it for a minute!
Misandry:
The hatred of, or pathological aversion to men.
Well, Nonesuch! you say, from where do you draw this conclusion?
I'm glad you ask Timmy!
This presentation had three guest speakers, two of them were women. One of them was a victim of domestic abuse which, don't get me wrong, is terrible. The other woman was the exectutive director of a local women's shelter who, following her piece, showed us a 17-year-old abuse victim's bit of movie maker work, which denigrated men.
Following this, I was in a round table discussion led by a female, where the person sitting next to me could not keep their mouth shut about their father and other less than admirable examples of men.
Let me make this perfectly clear to people. I have no problem with women. Anyone who harms their spouse/partner/whateveryoucallit should be strung up with their own innards. That isn't right.
A colleague of mine witnessed a guy strike his girlfriend after I might note, she would not let him go past her.
Now. I was not there. I did not witness this. But in most people's minds, since the lady was on the ground, it was the dude's fault. You really need to wonder? Why did he hit her? What brought it to that point? People typically do not hit people for no reason.
I hear people speaking quite audibly behind me in the hallways, about their stupid boyfriends.
I'm hoping to make it quite clear: These people are squeaky wheels. So of course you hear about them. You don't hear about people who are perfectly fine.
In my own experience, women can be incredibly unpleasant people, emotionally abusive and whatnot. I don't hold that against anyone. If I think you're an idiot, it's because I legitimately think you are an idiot.
I implore people not to lump their bad experiences with one person of a gender onto the entire gender. I am not a rapist, a domestic abuser, an alcoholic, a male chauvinist or similar, so don't treat me like one, and don't treat my fellows like one.
Unless they deserve it. In which case, kick them in the balls for me.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Jam
I enjoy jam. It's sweet and delicious, and you can use it in so many ways. Unfortunately, I have to walk to the grocery store and I'm a student. A friend got me to buy a bag of frozen berries, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries and blackberries for making smoothies and milkshakes because I don't eat especially well.
This week I discovered another use for those berries.
Jam is essentially crushed up bits of fruit, the juice and sugar. So I'm making up breakfast, I've got scrambled eggs, hash browns and toast. I'm out of butter, and my jam is upstairs. I open the freezer to put the bag of hash browns back, and spot the bag of berries. I've almost reached the end of the bag.
"Hey me! Jam is just crushed up fruit and stuff, throw those in the pan!" So I do it. Jam also has sugar and pectin (which is what makes it happy and more solid). I have a bunch of brown sugar in a bin, throw that into a cup with some water to dissolve it and toss it in the pan. Boiling it down to increase the sweetness. Pouring the resultant sweet, sticky mess onto some toast makes it delicious.
Hot jam. This is my new favourite thing to put on toast.
This week I discovered another use for those berries.
Jam is essentially crushed up bits of fruit, the juice and sugar. So I'm making up breakfast, I've got scrambled eggs, hash browns and toast. I'm out of butter, and my jam is upstairs. I open the freezer to put the bag of hash browns back, and spot the bag of berries. I've almost reached the end of the bag.
"Hey me! Jam is just crushed up fruit and stuff, throw those in the pan!" So I do it. Jam also has sugar and pectin (which is what makes it happy and more solid). I have a bunch of brown sugar in a bin, throw that into a cup with some water to dissolve it and toss it in the pan. Boiling it down to increase the sweetness. Pouring the resultant sweet, sticky mess onto some toast makes it delicious.
Hot jam. This is my new favourite thing to put on toast.
Ethics
A course, or even basic learning about ethics seems a little weird.
Marking someone on their ethics seems wrong to me.
Whether or not something is ethical is subjective. It is true, that some ethics are widely shared by cultures, not killing people, not stealing, but when we're getting into case studies, having right and wrong answers for the subjective ethics of a group of students is wrong.
Suggesting that something is more or less ethical is fine. Telling someone that their code of ethics is wrong, is in and of itself, unethical. At least by my system.
Ethics studies are silly.
Marking someone on their ethics seems wrong to me.
Whether or not something is ethical is subjective. It is true, that some ethics are widely shared by cultures, not killing people, not stealing, but when we're getting into case studies, having right and wrong answers for the subjective ethics of a group of students is wrong.
Suggesting that something is more or less ethical is fine. Telling someone that their code of ethics is wrong, is in and of itself, unethical. At least by my system.
Ethics studies are silly.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Curry-beef, veggie bean monstrosity.
It's better than it sounds.
I cook experimentally, when I don't know what I want to eat. The result is either utterly horrible or bloody delicious.
This evening's dish started out as baked beans in a pot, on the stove.
Poking through the freezer I found the last of my pre-portioned ground beef, and the bag end of a mix of frozen veggies. So I toss those in the frying pan together on high.
I find a jar of curry powder in one of the cabinets, and once the meat has started to cook, I throw that in with some salt and pepper.
Mix it up and add soy sauce. With the beans still cooking away. I add some basil leaves to the mixture, cook it up a bit more, and then throw the beans into the frying pan and turn the heat down by a third.
There's still some beans in the bottom of the can (they always stick there) so I toss some vinegar in to get them out. No sense wasting food, I'm on a budget. Add a handful of brown sugar and throw that in.
Mix it all together and serve it up. With a bit of brown toast. I haven't tried it, but it might taste good on top of rice. Or replace the beans with rice? I'm not sure. I'm certain it could be kicked up in some way.
Disclaimer: This isn't a recipie. It's guidelines. You could, in theory, achieve the same dish by following this vague set of instructions. Or at least one very similar, but if you really want to cook? Live a little. Deviate from the guidelines. Don't like curry? Try chili powder! Add more spices, less spices, make it with chicken instead of beef. Throw the veggies and meat into the beans. Do what you will with it.
I cook experimentally, when I don't know what I want to eat. The result is either utterly horrible or bloody delicious.
This evening's dish started out as baked beans in a pot, on the stove.
Poking through the freezer I found the last of my pre-portioned ground beef, and the bag end of a mix of frozen veggies. So I toss those in the frying pan together on high.
I find a jar of curry powder in one of the cabinets, and once the meat has started to cook, I throw that in with some salt and pepper.
Mix it up and add soy sauce. With the beans still cooking away. I add some basil leaves to the mixture, cook it up a bit more, and then throw the beans into the frying pan and turn the heat down by a third.
There's still some beans in the bottom of the can (they always stick there) so I toss some vinegar in to get them out. No sense wasting food, I'm on a budget. Add a handful of brown sugar and throw that in.
Mix it all together and serve it up. With a bit of brown toast. I haven't tried it, but it might taste good on top of rice. Or replace the beans with rice? I'm not sure. I'm certain it could be kicked up in some way.
Disclaimer: This isn't a recipie. It's guidelines. You could, in theory, achieve the same dish by following this vague set of instructions. Or at least one very similar, but if you really want to cook? Live a little. Deviate from the guidelines. Don't like curry? Try chili powder! Add more spices, less spices, make it with chicken instead of beef. Throw the veggies and meat into the beans. Do what you will with it.
Monday, March 21, 2011
The Weather Outside is Weather
It's been snowing and raining outside. At the same time.
What are you doing weather? Do you hate doing one thing? Do you hate sidewalks that can be walked on?
What are you doing weather? Do you hate doing one thing? Do you hate sidewalks that can be walked on?
Monday, March 14, 2011
Inception
So, a while afterwards, let's make a point of this.
It's not worth the hype. The bit at the end seems like a bad cross between the Matrix and the Village. Not to say that the Matrix (at least the first one) was a bad movie. And, really, the only problem with the Village was its predictability. Twist endings have their place. They've become culturally ingrained enough that it's very hard not to telegraph them.
So, before we get into any great detail:
WARNING SPOILERS FOR AN OVER-HYPED MOVIE BELOW.
If you do not wish to ruin the plot twist of Inception, cease reading now.
You have been warned.
So. It's not really real. And there's multiple interpretations. Saito shoots Cobb, Cobb goes even deeper. Maybe Saito wouldn't come back. Maybe Cobb is dreaming on his own, really deep, like he did with Mol.
Whatever.
The problem is when people say "it blew my mind" you have to realize, this means that you have something of a poor imagination. Or else some people have rather large ones.
It's not really a mind-blowing revelation. Mind-blowing was learning when you were a kid, just how big something was. Or maybe it was learning that things could die? It altered your perception in such a way that your mind was expanded. That's the important part. Expanded.
So the idea that this whole world might not be real is shocking to you? You had honestly never considered that before? Are you actually reading this? Does it even matter? Look the point is, it's not a huge deal. Inception is not a bad movie. I'll admit, it ran a little long for my taste, but it's not horrible. It might even make an interesting mechanic to try to express in D&D.
It's just not as good as people make it out to be, and I think everyone needs to take a minute and think about it. It's a movie. It's different. I feel a little bad if you had never considered what the movie presents before.
But ask yourself:
Does this movie really mean that much?
It's not worth the hype. The bit at the end seems like a bad cross between the Matrix and the Village. Not to say that the Matrix (at least the first one) was a bad movie. And, really, the only problem with the Village was its predictability. Twist endings have their place. They've become culturally ingrained enough that it's very hard not to telegraph them.
So, before we get into any great detail:
WARNING SPOILERS FOR AN OVER-HYPED MOVIE BELOW.
If you do not wish to ruin the plot twist of Inception, cease reading now.
You have been warned.
So. It's not really real. And there's multiple interpretations. Saito shoots Cobb, Cobb goes even deeper. Maybe Saito wouldn't come back. Maybe Cobb is dreaming on his own, really deep, like he did with Mol.
Whatever.
The problem is when people say "it blew my mind" you have to realize, this means that you have something of a poor imagination. Or else some people have rather large ones.
It's not really a mind-blowing revelation. Mind-blowing was learning when you were a kid, just how big something was. Or maybe it was learning that things could die? It altered your perception in such a way that your mind was expanded. That's the important part. Expanded.
So the idea that this whole world might not be real is shocking to you? You had honestly never considered that before? Are you actually reading this? Does it even matter? Look the point is, it's not a huge deal. Inception is not a bad movie. I'll admit, it ran a little long for my taste, but it's not horrible. It might even make an interesting mechanic to try to express in D&D.
It's just not as good as people make it out to be, and I think everyone needs to take a minute and think about it. It's a movie. It's different. I feel a little bad if you had never considered what the movie presents before.
But ask yourself:
Does this movie really mean that much?
Thursday, February 3, 2011
What makes Nintendo good?
What is it about Nintendo's games that makes them good?
I honestly can't be sure. The music is quite often good, and despite their systems being underpowered when compared to the competition, I've never found that the first-party titles for Nintendo systems fail in that regard the way some third-party titles seem to. But those are both cosemetic, so I suppose I should list suspect one here.
Formula. Nintendo's games are formulaic as far as the gameplay is concerned. The difference between playing a handheld Zelda game and playing a console Zelda game are essentially nil when you get down to the nuts and bolts.
You go through dungeons, kill the bosses, gather items that let you beat harder monsters in other dungeons and eventually you save the princess. The differences lie in the way that 3D and 2D Zelda games handle each of those. The 2D Zelda games prefer to use things like block or torch puzzles, and even the boss fights are fairly straight-forward. They are the simpler game but it doesn't mean that they're the easier game.
The 3D Zelda games tend let the player use the aspects that the 2D Zelda games don't have to great effect, the wider range of controls gave rise to the Ocarina, the greater range of movement from an analog stick has given us special sword moves for Link to use. Adding a third axis to the game gave us the hookshot and its variations.
But at the end of the day, Link is still hauling his ass through dungeons, saving the princess. New features might get added, changing into a wolf, putting a scope on your bow, playing music to cause effects, are all just modifiers. You still have to go through that dungeon.
Metroid hasn't changed too much. You're still shooting aliens, running around through alien planets getting keys that happen to be shaped like weapons and armour. I'll be the first to admit I'm a little scan-happy, but handing me an exposition gathering tool is really just another way of getting me to type "examine X". And I always type "examine X".
Mario is still jumping around. He's learned new ways to jump, jumped to new places but at the core of it all, Mario has been and is always a platformer. No matter how many sports games or Mario Parties they make.
I honestly can't be sure. The music is quite often good, and despite their systems being underpowered when compared to the competition, I've never found that the first-party titles for Nintendo systems fail in that regard the way some third-party titles seem to. But those are both cosemetic, so I suppose I should list suspect one here.
Formula. Nintendo's games are formulaic as far as the gameplay is concerned. The difference between playing a handheld Zelda game and playing a console Zelda game are essentially nil when you get down to the nuts and bolts.
You go through dungeons, kill the bosses, gather items that let you beat harder monsters in other dungeons and eventually you save the princess. The differences lie in the way that 3D and 2D Zelda games handle each of those. The 2D Zelda games prefer to use things like block or torch puzzles, and even the boss fights are fairly straight-forward. They are the simpler game but it doesn't mean that they're the easier game.
The 3D Zelda games tend let the player use the aspects that the 2D Zelda games don't have to great effect, the wider range of controls gave rise to the Ocarina, the greater range of movement from an analog stick has given us special sword moves for Link to use. Adding a third axis to the game gave us the hookshot and its variations.
But at the end of the day, Link is still hauling his ass through dungeons, saving the princess. New features might get added, changing into a wolf, putting a scope on your bow, playing music to cause effects, are all just modifiers. You still have to go through that dungeon.
Metroid hasn't changed too much. You're still shooting aliens, running around through alien planets getting keys that happen to be shaped like weapons and armour. I'll be the first to admit I'm a little scan-happy, but handing me an exposition gathering tool is really just another way of getting me to type "examine X". And I always type "examine X".
Mario is still jumping around. He's learned new ways to jump, jumped to new places but at the core of it all, Mario has been and is always a platformer. No matter how many sports games or Mario Parties they make.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog
If, like me until recently, you haven't seen or listened to Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, I will make this quite simple. GO WATCH IT! At the very least, listen to it. It is on youtube for crissakes. However, I imagine such people will be few and far between, but if you're still waffling about it, let me try to convince you of the brilliance of this form of aetheric entertainment.
Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is/was an internet series from back during the Writer's Strike. Remember? There wasn't anything new on TV? Well, our good friend Joss Whedon and his brothers got together with some friends (namely Nathan Fillion, Felicia Day and Neil Patrick Harris) and made a short web series. The "Blog" is divided into three acts, each about a quarter of an hour, so it isn't a huge timesink to watch. The series follows the escapades of Dr. Horrible (played by Neil Patrick Harris) as he attempts to join the Evil League of Evil. Horrible is consistently foiled by his nemesis Captain Hammer (played by Nathan Fillion, Mal Reynolds of Firefly). We are also introduced to his obsession with a girl who does laundry at the same laundromat at he does, Penny (played by The Guild's Felicia Day). Have I mentioned it's a musical? Between bouts of plotting, plot and scheming (all different things I assure you) we have sections of each episode (roughly three per act) that are sung and my are they brilliant!
It's just a really good series, and I'd hate to spoil it for people, so if you haven't already seen it, GO DO SO! THE INTERNET COMMANDS YOU!
Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is/was an internet series from back during the Writer's Strike. Remember? There wasn't anything new on TV? Well, our good friend Joss Whedon and his brothers got together with some friends (namely Nathan Fillion, Felicia Day and Neil Patrick Harris) and made a short web series. The "Blog" is divided into three acts, each about a quarter of an hour, so it isn't a huge timesink to watch. The series follows the escapades of Dr. Horrible (played by Neil Patrick Harris) as he attempts to join the Evil League of Evil. Horrible is consistently foiled by his nemesis Captain Hammer (played by Nathan Fillion, Mal Reynolds of Firefly). We are also introduced to his obsession with a girl who does laundry at the same laundromat at he does, Penny (played by The Guild's Felicia Day). Have I mentioned it's a musical? Between bouts of plotting, plot and scheming (all different things I assure you) we have sections of each episode (roughly three per act) that are sung and my are they brilliant!
It's just a really good series, and I'd hate to spoil it for people, so if you haven't already seen it, GO DO SO! THE INTERNET COMMANDS YOU!
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Red Dead Redemption
So, I've been playing Red Dead Redemption.
And I've got to say it doesn't quite live up to the hype.
To break it down these are my problems.
*It's bland.
*It's uninteresting
*More rails than Neverwinter Nights
The game scenery is bland. Despite the claims of an open world, you can't really travel anywhere unless you complete the story. And yes, the scenery changes from area to area, but inside of each individual region, you're treated to delicious copypasta terrain spread over a series of monotonous ridges and valleys.
Oh. And you have Mad Drowning Skills. For all this claims to replicate the West, the inability to cross a river or swim, or ford a body of water on a horse is discouraging. It's almost as if they don't want you to explore. They're the chest high walls of this game and frankly it is insulting. You enter a body of water and you die, simple as that.
The game is plainly uninteresting. You move from area A to area B and do the same things you were doing in the beginning. You are restricted in what you can get unless you follow the story along. Again, almost like they're cordoning off your sandbox world. It irks me that game developers feel the need to do this. They let you run around in between missions but then plainly prevent you from having certain skills required to complete them. For instance, the lasso. I wouldn't be half as angered with this if they'd just squish all this tutorial bullshit into the beginning of the game and then step back.
All water is instant death. There's a great big river separating you from Mexico in the south and another one cutting you off from "Civilization" in the north-east.
Your equipment and the tutorials that teach you how to use it are directly integrated into the story, so you won't have the whole kit until you've gone through the story. What's the point of letting me off the rail before I've gotten everything?
Not a fan, folks. Not a fan at all.
And I've got to say it doesn't quite live up to the hype.
To break it down these are my problems.
*It's bland.
*It's uninteresting
*More rails than Neverwinter Nights
The game scenery is bland. Despite the claims of an open world, you can't really travel anywhere unless you complete the story. And yes, the scenery changes from area to area, but inside of each individual region, you're treated to delicious copypasta terrain spread over a series of monotonous ridges and valleys.
Oh. And you have Mad Drowning Skills. For all this claims to replicate the West, the inability to cross a river or swim, or ford a body of water on a horse is discouraging. It's almost as if they don't want you to explore. They're the chest high walls of this game and frankly it is insulting. You enter a body of water and you die, simple as that.
The game is plainly uninteresting. You move from area A to area B and do the same things you were doing in the beginning. You are restricted in what you can get unless you follow the story along. Again, almost like they're cordoning off your sandbox world. It irks me that game developers feel the need to do this. They let you run around in between missions but then plainly prevent you from having certain skills required to complete them. For instance, the lasso. I wouldn't be half as angered with this if they'd just squish all this tutorial bullshit into the beginning of the game and then step back.
All water is instant death. There's a great big river separating you from Mexico in the south and another one cutting you off from "Civilization" in the north-east.
Your equipment and the tutorials that teach you how to use it are directly integrated into the story, so you won't have the whole kit until you've gone through the story. What's the point of letting me off the rail before I've gotten everything?
Not a fan, folks. Not a fan at all.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Alan Wake - 4 of 4 - Old Friends and Loose Ends
We left off the last post with Alan in the Well-Lit Room, in possession of the Clicker, and a passel of existential questions. Those will come at the end since the game is left rather open to interpretation.
The second piece (did I forget to mention that?) dictates the conditions for Alan returning to Zane's Cabin. He has to go back to Cauldron Lake with the clicker, and jump.
Alan leaves his cohorts, Sheriff Breaker, Barry the Agent and Cynthia Weaver in the Well-Lit Room. He clicks the Clicker on which turns the world to day time. I mentioned earlier that the vehicle bits could have been transitioned some other way, and I'm a little torn over this one. You drive through the day through what is otherwise idyllic scenery. At one point, you have to get out of the car and pass through a tunnel, and at this point everything goes to hell. You have to fight your way back to Cauldron Lake. And let me tell you, this is at once the best and worst part of the game. If you didn't enjoy the last hours of play, you won't like this. Frankly, it's feels stretched out, so I'll summarize. One of the manuscript pages mentioned that the Dark Presence is incapable, because it is bound by the manuscript, of actually doing anything to Alan. It can't properly affect him. But it can manipulate things and people around him. Sort of like poking something out of a high place with a stick. And now it has taken this to the limit. The Dark Presence has manifested a swirling mass of... stuff. Everything that's ever wound up in Cauldron Lake, Boats, busses, planes, trains and ruttin' automobiles it tries to hit you with, in addition to the efforts of the Taken. But Alan makes it to Cauldron Lake, and rips apart this Tornado.
I remember reading Shamus' review of Fear when I picked up the game a while back. I never finished the game, but what he mentioned about the ending is similar here.
In a normal game, like say... Masterchiefmas #Eleventy Billion, you'd walk into the room armed to the teeth and do battle with the Dark Presence, now represented by some sort of terrible evil shapeshifting thing. You'd kill it with fire and everything would be happy. But that's not how this works. Remember, we're trying to get to the typewriter with the last page of the manuscript. We have to write The Ending.
You jump off of the edge of the lake into the water with an exclamation of "Hell". Alan then has to use his flashlight to illuminate the various glowing words, a-la Scribblenauts, to create a path to the Cabin and then the Cabin itself.
Upon entering, he thrusts the Clicker into the hole in the Dark Presence's chest, made by Zane years before. And then he sits down to write the ending. And this is what gets me. They make a few assumptions about how a horror game, or a novel has to go. The ending feels more like a B-Movie to me. There's no satisfaction, and I'll deal with that in a second.
Alan writes Alice to safety. She drags her self out of the water and onto the ruined bridge to the island, but Alan is nowhere to be found. As the camera pans over the town, we can see that Everything Is Right With The World, until we pan down towards the Diner. Remember Cynthia Weaver, the old lady who was keeping the Macguffin? She was referred to as "The Lady of the Light". Remember Rose? Diner Waitress, knocked us out with some drugged tea. We see Rose holding a lamp in a way reminiscent of our good friend Cynthia. And then we return to Alan, still in the Cabin beneath the lake. And the last thing we're given by the game is the words
"It's not a lake. It's an ocean" in the sort of doubled voice that we've come to associate with Taken and the Dark Presence.
So, what are the problems here?
For one, we have no reason to care that Alice is safe. I personally never connected with her. The character was shallow and annoying. It was the goal of the game to retrieve her from the ancient evil, but I found myself liking Alan and the other characters, you know the ones who were on the screen for more than a few minutes, a great deal more. A note to the developers at Remedy: If you want us to do save the girl, give us a reason to like her. Make the player connect with the victim, at least for a bit.
We have no closure as to the fate of the three people we left in the Well-Lit Room. I didn't mention Barry during my review, so let me do so now. Barry is your sidekick, Alan's agent. And he's an excellent character. He's also comic relief. Sheriff Breaker was sympathetic to your cause as well, and Cynthia Weaver probably deserves a helping of "Well Done Thou Good And Faithful Servant". To leave out the people you left behind at the end of the game like this, for the sake of... what? Sequel potential?
And that's my third gripe. They expect to make another game. I remember playing the Sands of Time trilogy and in my opinion (as well as others') one of the best parts of those games was the fact that if you didn't want to play the next instalment, you didn't feel like you were losing the ending. Because you weren't. Maybe it's just me, but it's not impossible to give the player a sense that this story is done with, but there might be others, without saying "hey! There's going to be another game".
And last. Alan. We've dragged this little meat-puppet through hell, and now he's possessed by an ancient evil. Bad form, Remedy, bad form. You mean to tell us that we go through all that bullshit (and don't get me wrong, there is bullshit) and it's not even a Pyhrric victory? We lose when we finish the game? And according to all sources, this is the ending. The only ending. The hero becomes the villain. Like the bad sequel to a good movie.
I mentioned that they seem to like Stephen King and I'll go ahead with this. I've read quite a bit of his stuff. By no means all of it because the man appears to be quite the prolific writer but never have I run into something like this, where its an everyone loses sort of situation. Not once. There's always some sort of victory, Pyhrric or not. It might be as simple as escape, and it never has to be a clear win, since this is horror after all. But how many movies do the same thing? Horror doesn't have to be about vanquishing the evil. In fact, it shouldn't. But evil does not have to win either. You go through a movie or a novel or a game, scarred and worried for characters and it makes their victories, however small, seem that much sweeter. Taking that away leaves a sour taste in my mouth and quite a bit of contempt for the developers.
The lead up to the ending includes a speech about "balance" by Alan. And the scales are anything but balanced. Consider. Zane destroyed himself to seal evil in a can. Wake woke it up. Wake has to put things right. He rips the form that Zane gave the Dark Presence a new one, despite the ominous "strike me down..." line. So where does it say that it needs to take a new form right away? Why does it have to be Wake? Did the Dark Presence have a shape before Zane gave it one?
Could we not take the Silent Hill approach? And by this I mean the approach that the earlier games took. As long as the backdrop and the story remain consistent, you can write a sequel.
So, let's rack them problems up shall we?
Hey! We're not done yet! or Don't worry, we're making another game syndrome.
No closure.
Poor ending.
The journey wasn't bad. The ending makes the rest of it look and feel like a waste of time.
The second piece (did I forget to mention that?) dictates the conditions for Alan returning to Zane's Cabin. He has to go back to Cauldron Lake with the clicker, and jump.
Alan leaves his cohorts, Sheriff Breaker, Barry the Agent and Cynthia Weaver in the Well-Lit Room. He clicks the Clicker on which turns the world to day time. I mentioned earlier that the vehicle bits could have been transitioned some other way, and I'm a little torn over this one. You drive through the day through what is otherwise idyllic scenery. At one point, you have to get out of the car and pass through a tunnel, and at this point everything goes to hell. You have to fight your way back to Cauldron Lake. And let me tell you, this is at once the best and worst part of the game. If you didn't enjoy the last hours of play, you won't like this. Frankly, it's feels stretched out, so I'll summarize. One of the manuscript pages mentioned that the Dark Presence is incapable, because it is bound by the manuscript, of actually doing anything to Alan. It can't properly affect him. But it can manipulate things and people around him. Sort of like poking something out of a high place with a stick. And now it has taken this to the limit. The Dark Presence has manifested a swirling mass of... stuff. Everything that's ever wound up in Cauldron Lake, Boats, busses, planes, trains and ruttin' automobiles it tries to hit you with, in addition to the efforts of the Taken. But Alan makes it to Cauldron Lake, and rips apart this Tornado.
I remember reading Shamus' review of Fear when I picked up the game a while back. I never finished the game, but what he mentioned about the ending is similar here.
In a normal game, like say... Masterchiefmas #Eleventy Billion, you'd walk into the room armed to the teeth and do battle with the Dark Presence, now represented by some sort of terrible evil shapeshifting thing. You'd kill it with fire and everything would be happy. But that's not how this works. Remember, we're trying to get to the typewriter with the last page of the manuscript. We have to write The Ending.
You jump off of the edge of the lake into the water with an exclamation of "Hell". Alan then has to use his flashlight to illuminate the various glowing words, a-la Scribblenauts, to create a path to the Cabin and then the Cabin itself.
Upon entering, he thrusts the Clicker into the hole in the Dark Presence's chest, made by Zane years before. And then he sits down to write the ending. And this is what gets me. They make a few assumptions about how a horror game, or a novel has to go. The ending feels more like a B-Movie to me. There's no satisfaction, and I'll deal with that in a second.
Alan writes Alice to safety. She drags her self out of the water and onto the ruined bridge to the island, but Alan is nowhere to be found. As the camera pans over the town, we can see that Everything Is Right With The World, until we pan down towards the Diner. Remember Cynthia Weaver, the old lady who was keeping the Macguffin? She was referred to as "The Lady of the Light". Remember Rose? Diner Waitress, knocked us out with some drugged tea. We see Rose holding a lamp in a way reminiscent of our good friend Cynthia. And then we return to Alan, still in the Cabin beneath the lake. And the last thing we're given by the game is the words
"It's not a lake. It's an ocean" in the sort of doubled voice that we've come to associate with Taken and the Dark Presence.
So, what are the problems here?
For one, we have no reason to care that Alice is safe. I personally never connected with her. The character was shallow and annoying. It was the goal of the game to retrieve her from the ancient evil, but I found myself liking Alan and the other characters, you know the ones who were on the screen for more than a few minutes, a great deal more. A note to the developers at Remedy: If you want us to do save the girl, give us a reason to like her. Make the player connect with the victim, at least for a bit.
We have no closure as to the fate of the three people we left in the Well-Lit Room. I didn't mention Barry during my review, so let me do so now. Barry is your sidekick, Alan's agent. And he's an excellent character. He's also comic relief. Sheriff Breaker was sympathetic to your cause as well, and Cynthia Weaver probably deserves a helping of "Well Done Thou Good And Faithful Servant". To leave out the people you left behind at the end of the game like this, for the sake of... what? Sequel potential?
And that's my third gripe. They expect to make another game. I remember playing the Sands of Time trilogy and in my opinion (as well as others') one of the best parts of those games was the fact that if you didn't want to play the next instalment, you didn't feel like you were losing the ending. Because you weren't. Maybe it's just me, but it's not impossible to give the player a sense that this story is done with, but there might be others, without saying "hey! There's going to be another game".
And last. Alan. We've dragged this little meat-puppet through hell, and now he's possessed by an ancient evil. Bad form, Remedy, bad form. You mean to tell us that we go through all that bullshit (and don't get me wrong, there is bullshit) and it's not even a Pyhrric victory? We lose when we finish the game? And according to all sources, this is the ending. The only ending. The hero becomes the villain. Like the bad sequel to a good movie.
I mentioned that they seem to like Stephen King and I'll go ahead with this. I've read quite a bit of his stuff. By no means all of it because the man appears to be quite the prolific writer but never have I run into something like this, where its an everyone loses sort of situation. Not once. There's always some sort of victory, Pyhrric or not. It might be as simple as escape, and it never has to be a clear win, since this is horror after all. But how many movies do the same thing? Horror doesn't have to be about vanquishing the evil. In fact, it shouldn't. But evil does not have to win either. You go through a movie or a novel or a game, scarred and worried for characters and it makes their victories, however small, seem that much sweeter. Taking that away leaves a sour taste in my mouth and quite a bit of contempt for the developers.
The lead up to the ending includes a speech about "balance" by Alan. And the scales are anything but balanced. Consider. Zane destroyed himself to seal evil in a can. Wake woke it up. Wake has to put things right. He rips the form that Zane gave the Dark Presence a new one, despite the ominous "strike me down..." line. So where does it say that it needs to take a new form right away? Why does it have to be Wake? Did the Dark Presence have a shape before Zane gave it one?
Could we not take the Silent Hill approach? And by this I mean the approach that the earlier games took. As long as the backdrop and the story remain consistent, you can write a sequel.
So, let's rack them problems up shall we?
Hey! We're not done yet! or Don't worry, we're making another game syndrome.
No closure.
Poor ending.
The journey wasn't bad. The ending makes the rest of it look and feel like a waste of time.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Alan Wake - 3 of 4 - Story
Alan Wake has a lovely story, I must say.
You are Alan Wake, a famous writer who hasn't written anything in two years. You've travelled with your wife to Bright Falls, which is in the middle of the mountains and surrounded by what some people would call "untamed wilderness". Mostly forests, which is where Alan spends most of the game. Ostensibly you are here for a vacation. You start by running into the mayor/late night radio host on a ferry, and ask him to keep your involvement quiet. This is the high point of the game. It's all downhill from here folks.
The story is divided into episodes. Alan has one or two overarching objectives, along the lines of "go here, do this" and has to deal with the complications along the way. It's a little like a TV show really, the framing for each episode functions just like the recap before a TV show, and the end of each episode includes a neat little title card and musical sting. I could see it working out as a TV show to be honest. As mentioned by Yahtzee in his review, they really don't stop between episodes. You segue straight from episode into episode recap, which is frankly annoying. I used this to put down the controller and do other things, or skipped through. It wouldn't have killed the developers to let the game stop between episodes.
You procure the keys to the cabin you'll be vacationing in from a creepy old lady in black, before returning to the car only to see the person who you supposed to get the keys run out after you drive off, shouting that you've forgotten your keys. Oh dear. We also meet a few other people of note, including Rose, the Waitress, and Cynthia Weaver, a crazy old lady who keeps mentioning that "you can hurt yourself in the dark". If this isn't foreshadowing, I do not know what is.
Upon arriving at the cabin, you've got to turn on the lights, and go upstairs to find that your wife (GASP) expects you to try to write something, and has contacted a local doctor for therapy, since he apparently specializes in the treatment of artists.
Alan storms off in a tiff and goes to lean against the railing for a while before he's interrupted by his wife's screams. I think I've mentioned that while most of the graphics in the game are lovely, the faces leave something to be desired, but Alice, Alan's wife is really terrible. The lowest possible point in all this.
She somehow falls of the edge and into the waters of the lake the house sits on. This lake is apparently part of the caldera of a dormant volcano. Wow. And so Alan dives in, only to wake up a week later in a crashed car with no memories and blood on his face. He stumbles off through the darkness and the woods to get attacked. Fun. When he finally manages to contact the police, they claim that the island on the lake, the cabin they had been staying in, the whole shebang had been destroyed in the seventies. Sunk right into the lake.
Alan, being the sort of guy he is spends quite a bit longer buggering around looking for signs of his wife. The first is that she's been kidnapped. The man who apparently kidnapped her gives you two days to turn in a manuscript to him in return for Alice. The manuscript is the central point of the plot, which I'll get to in a bit. This man, Mott, works for Doctor Hartman, the same doctor Alice wanted him to see. After the initial meeting with Mott, Alan has two days to produce the manuscript. He loses a day to some drugged coffee after the Dark Presence puppets a local into mentioning that they have the other pages. At this point, the manuscript is all but written. The only thing remaining is to write the ending.
To make matters worse, an FBI agent has showed up looking for Wake, and when Alan doesn't show up to meet him at the police station, he gets a little ugly and starts shooting. By the time Alan makes his way to the rendezvous where he's meant to turn in the manuscript, things have changed. Alan now has to go somewhere else to make the exchange. The Dark Presence gets there first, and engineers an attack on Mott, as well as allowing Alan to discover that Mott never had his wife in the first place. Alan somehow falls into the lake and wakes up, drugged, in Doctor Hartman's clinic. Hartman doesn't care about the Dark Presence, he's just a greedy git. He gets what's coming to him when the Dark Presence shows up at his clinic.
Alan breaks out with gusto and the idea to head down to a farm owned by some crazy old rocker dudes, who apparently know something. Things don't go especially well. Alan holds off an assault of Taken on a rock stage, quite similar to the Midnight Riders Finale in L4D2. Discovers that the only person who knows how to stop this whole mess is a crazy old lady, who we met in the diner scene at the beginning of the game. Cynthia Weaver, remember her? He and Barry then get drunk on some moonshine and passes out to wake up in jail.
At this point we still haven't solved the matter of the missing week. The moonshine is, for lack of a better word, tainted with the water from Cauldron Lake, and lets Wake do a neat little out-of-body re-run of that week, during which he wrote the manuscript and engineered his escape.
Alan, the Sheriff and his agent Barry have to cross the town in the dark to get to the power station, where Weaver is holed up. Things go wrong, and Alan falls out of the rescue chopper they're trying to take there. Upon arriving, he learns that Zane left something in the care of Weaver, in what she calls "The Well-Lit Room" (capital letters and all). And that he should go retrieve this. The chopper with Barry and Sheriff Breaker in it crashes, and Alan leaves the safety of the secret passage (a lit water pipe you had to drain) to go fetch them. This goes about as well as planned and you all eventually wind up in the well lit room.
Yahtzee mentioned that someone on the design team must have had a thing for Stephen King, and I won't argue. The thing about the lake is that for some reason, artistic types can tap into a sort of power there that changes reality. There's one catch. It's attached to an entity called the "Dark Presence" currently inhabiting the creepy old lady in black.
Most of what we know about this is the result of a man named Thomas Zane, who owned the cabin that disappeared. The one that Alan and Alice had been staying in. His girlfriend died, and Zane attempted to harness this power to bring her back. Which he did. Sort of. The Dark Presence is a greedy little ancient evil, and tries to turn the efforts of anyone using this reality altering power to it's own ends. Including Zane and Alan Wake. In the case of Zane, it inhabited the body of his "resurrected" love. Zane managed to kick it back into dormancy, in a fashion, but had to do so at the cost of his own life. He literally erased himself and all of his work from existence, which a few exceptions. Lacking a creative mind to work with, the Dark Presence was stuck in Cauldron Lake until Wake showed up. The Presence engineered the disappearance of Alice and then set Wake to work with the promise that if he wrote a story, he could bring her back. Not quite so, since the objective is really to set the ancient evil loose on the world. Wake managed to write himself an escape by including himself in the plot of the novel. It's a clever little plot device that I don't really mind. Wake is now effectively a character in the story, bound by whatever rules are in play, as well as the author of the story and therefore the author of fate.
His escape a week into the plot of the novel was aided by resurrecting Thomas Zane and bringing him to his aid. Zane then spends the rest of the game dropping pages of the manuscript on Alan's path. These have various uses, but occasionally they're foreshadowing and advice about what's up ahead, so reading them is beneficial. And they're just plain neat.
But back to the main plot.
Another twist here. The entire story has been a self-fulfilling reach-around. In the Well-Lit Room is Zane's loophole. The failsafe device is a shoebox, containing two things. A page of manuscript written by Zane, and the Clicker. Alan mentions the Clicker in a flashback. It's a thing from his childhood that his mother gave him, a light switch. Turn the Clicker on and the dark disappears. Figuratively, if not literally. And the manuscript page narrates the event in which Alan is given this safety net. Which raises quite a few questions.
This post has gotten a little out of hand, so I'll leave the conclusion to the story and to the review for tomorrow.
You are Alan Wake, a famous writer who hasn't written anything in two years. You've travelled with your wife to Bright Falls, which is in the middle of the mountains and surrounded by what some people would call "untamed wilderness". Mostly forests, which is where Alan spends most of the game. Ostensibly you are here for a vacation. You start by running into the mayor/late night radio host on a ferry, and ask him to keep your involvement quiet. This is the high point of the game. It's all downhill from here folks.
The story is divided into episodes. Alan has one or two overarching objectives, along the lines of "go here, do this" and has to deal with the complications along the way. It's a little like a TV show really, the framing for each episode functions just like the recap before a TV show, and the end of each episode includes a neat little title card and musical sting. I could see it working out as a TV show to be honest. As mentioned by Yahtzee in his review, they really don't stop between episodes. You segue straight from episode into episode recap, which is frankly annoying. I used this to put down the controller and do other things, or skipped through. It wouldn't have killed the developers to let the game stop between episodes.
You procure the keys to the cabin you'll be vacationing in from a creepy old lady in black, before returning to the car only to see the person who you supposed to get the keys run out after you drive off, shouting that you've forgotten your keys. Oh dear. We also meet a few other people of note, including Rose, the Waitress, and Cynthia Weaver, a crazy old lady who keeps mentioning that "you can hurt yourself in the dark". If this isn't foreshadowing, I do not know what is.
Upon arriving at the cabin, you've got to turn on the lights, and go upstairs to find that your wife (GASP) expects you to try to write something, and has contacted a local doctor for therapy, since he apparently specializes in the treatment of artists.
Alan storms off in a tiff and goes to lean against the railing for a while before he's interrupted by his wife's screams. I think I've mentioned that while most of the graphics in the game are lovely, the faces leave something to be desired, but Alice, Alan's wife is really terrible. The lowest possible point in all this.
She somehow falls of the edge and into the waters of the lake the house sits on. This lake is apparently part of the caldera of a dormant volcano. Wow. And so Alan dives in, only to wake up a week later in a crashed car with no memories and blood on his face. He stumbles off through the darkness and the woods to get attacked. Fun. When he finally manages to contact the police, they claim that the island on the lake, the cabin they had been staying in, the whole shebang had been destroyed in the seventies. Sunk right into the lake.
Alan, being the sort of guy he is spends quite a bit longer buggering around looking for signs of his wife. The first is that she's been kidnapped. The man who apparently kidnapped her gives you two days to turn in a manuscript to him in return for Alice. The manuscript is the central point of the plot, which I'll get to in a bit. This man, Mott, works for Doctor Hartman, the same doctor Alice wanted him to see. After the initial meeting with Mott, Alan has two days to produce the manuscript. He loses a day to some drugged coffee after the Dark Presence puppets a local into mentioning that they have the other pages. At this point, the manuscript is all but written. The only thing remaining is to write the ending.
To make matters worse, an FBI agent has showed up looking for Wake, and when Alan doesn't show up to meet him at the police station, he gets a little ugly and starts shooting. By the time Alan makes his way to the rendezvous where he's meant to turn in the manuscript, things have changed. Alan now has to go somewhere else to make the exchange. The Dark Presence gets there first, and engineers an attack on Mott, as well as allowing Alan to discover that Mott never had his wife in the first place. Alan somehow falls into the lake and wakes up, drugged, in Doctor Hartman's clinic. Hartman doesn't care about the Dark Presence, he's just a greedy git. He gets what's coming to him when the Dark Presence shows up at his clinic.
Alan breaks out with gusto and the idea to head down to a farm owned by some crazy old rocker dudes, who apparently know something. Things don't go especially well. Alan holds off an assault of Taken on a rock stage, quite similar to the Midnight Riders Finale in L4D2. Discovers that the only person who knows how to stop this whole mess is a crazy old lady, who we met in the diner scene at the beginning of the game. Cynthia Weaver, remember her? He and Barry then get drunk on some moonshine and passes out to wake up in jail.
At this point we still haven't solved the matter of the missing week. The moonshine is, for lack of a better word, tainted with the water from Cauldron Lake, and lets Wake do a neat little out-of-body re-run of that week, during which he wrote the manuscript and engineered his escape.
Alan, the Sheriff and his agent Barry have to cross the town in the dark to get to the power station, where Weaver is holed up. Things go wrong, and Alan falls out of the rescue chopper they're trying to take there. Upon arriving, he learns that Zane left something in the care of Weaver, in what she calls "The Well-Lit Room" (capital letters and all). And that he should go retrieve this. The chopper with Barry and Sheriff Breaker in it crashes, and Alan leaves the safety of the secret passage (a lit water pipe you had to drain) to go fetch them. This goes about as well as planned and you all eventually wind up in the well lit room.
Yahtzee mentioned that someone on the design team must have had a thing for Stephen King, and I won't argue. The thing about the lake is that for some reason, artistic types can tap into a sort of power there that changes reality. There's one catch. It's attached to an entity called the "Dark Presence" currently inhabiting the creepy old lady in black.
Most of what we know about this is the result of a man named Thomas Zane, who owned the cabin that disappeared. The one that Alan and Alice had been staying in. His girlfriend died, and Zane attempted to harness this power to bring her back. Which he did. Sort of. The Dark Presence is a greedy little ancient evil, and tries to turn the efforts of anyone using this reality altering power to it's own ends. Including Zane and Alan Wake. In the case of Zane, it inhabited the body of his "resurrected" love. Zane managed to kick it back into dormancy, in a fashion, but had to do so at the cost of his own life. He literally erased himself and all of his work from existence, which a few exceptions. Lacking a creative mind to work with, the Dark Presence was stuck in Cauldron Lake until Wake showed up. The Presence engineered the disappearance of Alice and then set Wake to work with the promise that if he wrote a story, he could bring her back. Not quite so, since the objective is really to set the ancient evil loose on the world. Wake managed to write himself an escape by including himself in the plot of the novel. It's a clever little plot device that I don't really mind. Wake is now effectively a character in the story, bound by whatever rules are in play, as well as the author of the story and therefore the author of fate.
His escape a week into the plot of the novel was aided by resurrecting Thomas Zane and bringing him to his aid. Zane then spends the rest of the game dropping pages of the manuscript on Alan's path. These have various uses, but occasionally they're foreshadowing and advice about what's up ahead, so reading them is beneficial. And they're just plain neat.
But back to the main plot.
Another twist here. The entire story has been a self-fulfilling reach-around. In the Well-Lit Room is Zane's loophole. The failsafe device is a shoebox, containing two things. A page of manuscript written by Zane, and the Clicker. Alan mentions the Clicker in a flashback. It's a thing from his childhood that his mother gave him, a light switch. Turn the Clicker on and the dark disappears. Figuratively, if not literally. And the manuscript page narrates the event in which Alan is given this safety net. Which raises quite a few questions.
This post has gotten a little out of hand, so I'll leave the conclusion to the story and to the review for tomorrow.
The Plan
Everything needs a plan. Or at least some vague sort of goal that you can change if it doesn't work out.
I started this blog three years ago and it's risen sporadically like a zombie, or some strange sort of plant. Which really isn't a good use of the space. So I suppose it need a goal for this?
Update the blog every day. That's the plan. Let's see how it goes
I started this blog three years ago and it's risen sporadically like a zombie, or some strange sort of plant. Which really isn't a good use of the space. So I suppose it need a goal for this?
Update the blog every day. That's the plan. Let's see how it goes
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Alan Wake- 2 of 4- Gameplay
Carrying on from yesterday, more about Alan Wake.
You play Alan Wake, a writer with writer's block on vacation in scenic Bright Falls, Maine. He wears a tweed jacket with elbow patches and a hood.
Mr. Wake is not the most in shape of characters it would seem, he's not very good at running and doesn't do well with falls.
Wake does battle with assorted possessed people, birds, and objects, collectively referred to as Taken. The Taken are possessed by what Wake refers to as "The Dark Presence" a sort of ancient, terrible evil of the Lovecraftian set that really wants to get out of the can that it's been sealed in. To this end, it needs wake.
You start off in a nightmare sequence, where one of Wake's fictional characters attacks you with an axe. You are granted a tutorial by means of a magic floating light that delivers a flashlight and a revolver. Brilliant, isn't it? You wake up to your arrival in Bright Falls to find out your controls. The quick run down:
A to Jump (when appropriate)
B to Do Things (when prompted)
X to Run/Dodge
Y to Throw things (in combat)
Left Trigger to Focus Flashlight (when you've got one)
Left Bumper to Insert New Battery
Right Trigger to Fire Gun (when you've got one)
Right Bumper to Reload
Left Analog Click to Focus camera (when prompted)
Right Analog Click to do nothing.
D-Pad to select weapons.
Now, I'm playing on a 360, on Normal Difficulty, using the alternate control setting, which I've mapped above. This switches the functions of the bumpers and the X and Y buttons.
My biggest gripe about this control scheme is that X button. It's the only dual function button in the game. If they'd swapped the left analog click with the right analog click and placed the run button on the left click. Which would have sorted out the whole mess. As it is, when I push down the X button to tell Alan to run, he does this sort of running crouch like someone is shooting at him to start with, and occasionally will do so in the middle of running. It looks a little silly to be perfectly honest.
Most of the controls are context sensitive. The game is split into three distinct modes. One: Walking around safe. You can't jump, shoot and it's usually daytime so you won't have a flashlight. This supposedly being a horror game it inevitably leads into Night.
During the Night you spend most of your time wandering through a pine forest, and adjacent. It's more or less the same pine forest, with assorted bushes, bear traps, boxes with supplies stashed in them almost everywhere, and occasionally hidden glowing graffiti. You can usually jump, use your flashlight, (if you've got one), run and interact.
At night is when you run into Combat. During combat you can shoot, throw equipment, dodge, run and interact (though it's not recommended).
When you're safe, the game usually wants to deliver plot of some sort, usually by conversation with an NPC, or move you between areas. You occasionally find collectibles in this mode. These include coffee thermoses and manuscript pages. Both are used as part of achievements in the game, but the manuscript pages work into the plot. More on these in another post. Occasionally, a manuscript page will give you a brief glimpse into events to come, otherwise they're merely delicious fluff surrounding the gameplay. Alan is also less prone to narration when he's in this mode, which can be handy.
The thermoses and manuscript pages are more plentiful at night, as is one other game fixture. Glowing graffiti appears in the dark when you pass a flashlight over it. The nature varies from helpful arrows to indicate the direction of a supply chest, to splotches of paint which do the same, to cryptic comments or advice painted on the walls. The supply chests are often as not, a bit of a trap. Once you've finished with the chest, there's a good chance a few Taken have snuck up on you and are patiently waiting to beat you to a pulp when you turn around. It's only fair really, since the chests usually contain the means to put the hurt on these guys.
You'll spend a lot of your time finding excuses to run around in the spooky forest, which is fine.
Taken can come in several different flavours.
Possessed humans: These use assorted tools to try to bash your skull in, shovels, picks, woodcutting axes, nail bats, tire irons and the like. They like to come at you in small groups, it's rare to just find one. They also have an infinite supply of things to throw at you it seems, knives and the like, which can be awkward. To injure them, you have to first blast away the protective coating of darkness with your flashlight. You can do this by pointing it at them, or more quickly by focusing the flashlight, which drains the battery. Once that's done, dispatching them is a matter of point and shoot.
Some of these are a little tougher than others. Members of the local police, and big burly fellows wielding sledgehammers or chainsaws can take a little more effort and can make things seriously painful for Alan if he can't time his dodging right.
Possessed flocks of birds, original Colonel Hitchcock recipe are an annoyance. They don't hit hard, but they tend to be numerous and can attack from all sorts of directions. They're also incredibly fragile, and don't need to be shot to die, only exposure to the flashlight, or a flare.
Possessed objects are a different beast altogether. They come in all shapes and sizes, from oil drum size barrels, to gates and doors, to construction equipment. They all fall if you can hold your light on them long enough, but they can be misery itself to dodge because of their size.
Aside from these, Alan can find hunting rifles, shotguns and flare guns and his standby revolver. Each of these has its ups and downs. Properly used, the shotgun can deal with more than one enemy at a time, however with the exception of the pump action shotgun, the shotgun will only hold two rounds at a time, so correct use is important. The hunting rifle is a little slower on the rate of fire than the revolver, but packs more kick, being capable of breaking through the protective layer of darkness in some cases. The flare gun will outright kill Taken they're shot at, and are excellent for use against the possessed birds.
You're also granted flares and flash-bang grenades during various sections of the game. Flares can be held in the hand to ward off Taken, or dropped to create a sort of safe zone that strips away the Dark Presence around them. Flash-bangs, correctly used, will slay Taken outright, and are best used against groups when possible.
In portions of the game, they ask you to drive vehicles and this is a straight failure. The vehicles all handle the same, and by this I mean poorly. The camera swings wildly, and while the driving sections break up the gameplay well, they really only serve to move you from A to B, and you could do that another way. Does every game need a bit where you drive vehicles?
But I digress, the gameplay is solid, and if you don't mind the few flaws, you'll probably enjoy it. Alan does have an annoying habit of falling through cracks in the floor at times, but over all not bad.
You play Alan Wake, a writer with writer's block on vacation in scenic Bright Falls, Maine. He wears a tweed jacket with elbow patches and a hood.
Mr. Wake is not the most in shape of characters it would seem, he's not very good at running and doesn't do well with falls.
Wake does battle with assorted possessed people, birds, and objects, collectively referred to as Taken. The Taken are possessed by what Wake refers to as "The Dark Presence" a sort of ancient, terrible evil of the Lovecraftian set that really wants to get out of the can that it's been sealed in. To this end, it needs wake.
You start off in a nightmare sequence, where one of Wake's fictional characters attacks you with an axe. You are granted a tutorial by means of a magic floating light that delivers a flashlight and a revolver. Brilliant, isn't it? You wake up to your arrival in Bright Falls to find out your controls. The quick run down:
A to Jump (when appropriate)
B to Do Things (when prompted)
X to Run/Dodge
Y to Throw things (in combat)
Left Trigger to Focus Flashlight (when you've got one)
Left Bumper to Insert New Battery
Right Trigger to Fire Gun (when you've got one)
Right Bumper to Reload
Left Analog Click to Focus camera (when prompted)
Right Analog Click to do nothing.
D-Pad to select weapons.
Now, I'm playing on a 360, on Normal Difficulty, using the alternate control setting, which I've mapped above. This switches the functions of the bumpers and the X and Y buttons.
My biggest gripe about this control scheme is that X button. It's the only dual function button in the game. If they'd swapped the left analog click with the right analog click and placed the run button on the left click. Which would have sorted out the whole mess. As it is, when I push down the X button to tell Alan to run, he does this sort of running crouch like someone is shooting at him to start with, and occasionally will do so in the middle of running. It looks a little silly to be perfectly honest.
Most of the controls are context sensitive. The game is split into three distinct modes. One: Walking around safe. You can't jump, shoot and it's usually daytime so you won't have a flashlight. This supposedly being a horror game it inevitably leads into Night.
During the Night you spend most of your time wandering through a pine forest, and adjacent. It's more or less the same pine forest, with assorted bushes, bear traps, boxes with supplies stashed in them almost everywhere, and occasionally hidden glowing graffiti. You can usually jump, use your flashlight, (if you've got one), run and interact.
At night is when you run into Combat. During combat you can shoot, throw equipment, dodge, run and interact (though it's not recommended).
When you're safe, the game usually wants to deliver plot of some sort, usually by conversation with an NPC, or move you between areas. You occasionally find collectibles in this mode. These include coffee thermoses and manuscript pages. Both are used as part of achievements in the game, but the manuscript pages work into the plot. More on these in another post. Occasionally, a manuscript page will give you a brief glimpse into events to come, otherwise they're merely delicious fluff surrounding the gameplay. Alan is also less prone to narration when he's in this mode, which can be handy.
The thermoses and manuscript pages are more plentiful at night, as is one other game fixture. Glowing graffiti appears in the dark when you pass a flashlight over it. The nature varies from helpful arrows to indicate the direction of a supply chest, to splotches of paint which do the same, to cryptic comments or advice painted on the walls. The supply chests are often as not, a bit of a trap. Once you've finished with the chest, there's a good chance a few Taken have snuck up on you and are patiently waiting to beat you to a pulp when you turn around. It's only fair really, since the chests usually contain the means to put the hurt on these guys.
You'll spend a lot of your time finding excuses to run around in the spooky forest, which is fine.
Taken can come in several different flavours.
Possessed humans: These use assorted tools to try to bash your skull in, shovels, picks, woodcutting axes, nail bats, tire irons and the like. They like to come at you in small groups, it's rare to just find one. They also have an infinite supply of things to throw at you it seems, knives and the like, which can be awkward. To injure them, you have to first blast away the protective coating of darkness with your flashlight. You can do this by pointing it at them, or more quickly by focusing the flashlight, which drains the battery. Once that's done, dispatching them is a matter of point and shoot.
Some of these are a little tougher than others. Members of the local police, and big burly fellows wielding sledgehammers or chainsaws can take a little more effort and can make things seriously painful for Alan if he can't time his dodging right.
Possessed flocks of birds, original Colonel Hitchcock recipe are an annoyance. They don't hit hard, but they tend to be numerous and can attack from all sorts of directions. They're also incredibly fragile, and don't need to be shot to die, only exposure to the flashlight, or a flare.
Possessed objects are a different beast altogether. They come in all shapes and sizes, from oil drum size barrels, to gates and doors, to construction equipment. They all fall if you can hold your light on them long enough, but they can be misery itself to dodge because of their size.
Aside from these, Alan can find hunting rifles, shotguns and flare guns and his standby revolver. Each of these has its ups and downs. Properly used, the shotgun can deal with more than one enemy at a time, however with the exception of the pump action shotgun, the shotgun will only hold two rounds at a time, so correct use is important. The hunting rifle is a little slower on the rate of fire than the revolver, but packs more kick, being capable of breaking through the protective layer of darkness in some cases. The flare gun will outright kill Taken they're shot at, and are excellent for use against the possessed birds.
You're also granted flares and flash-bang grenades during various sections of the game. Flares can be held in the hand to ward off Taken, or dropped to create a sort of safe zone that strips away the Dark Presence around them. Flash-bangs, correctly used, will slay Taken outright, and are best used against groups when possible.
In portions of the game, they ask you to drive vehicles and this is a straight failure. The vehicles all handle the same, and by this I mean poorly. The camera swings wildly, and while the driving sections break up the gameplay well, they really only serve to move you from A to B, and you could do that another way. Does every game need a bit where you drive vehicles?
But I digress, the gameplay is solid, and if you don't mind the few flaws, you'll probably enjoy it. Alan does have an annoying habit of falling through cracks in the floor at times, but over all not bad.
Alan Wake - 1 of 4 - First Impressions
I picked up Alan Wake the other day, started playing this morning, so I think I should get the first impressions out of the way.
Praise first then:
The developers have done a good job, graphics wise. I'm not a fan of bleeding edge graphics tech, since it won't run on my ancient computer and the types of games that tend to use it aren't my cup of tea to begin with. They seem to have had a little trouble with the faces, they slip into the Uncanny Valley a little too often for my taste, but I won't begrudge them that.
The scenery is fantastic, but you can always tell when you're on the tracks. I realize they probably have to do this to avoid confusing players, but that little compass at the top should usually be a decent indicator of where you've got to go. And it is.
The interface is minimalistic, which is nice. I don't mind that at all. The health bar and magic objective compass are both in the same spot, which is handy.
I'll go right ahead and say that the controls are a little wonky. I don't like the sprint button, at all at the moment, mostly because there's not really an indicator, subtle or otherwise, as to when you can use it and when it's depleted. The fact that it occupies the same space as the dodge button can make clearing out of groups of enemies a little on the difficult side, since the game sometimes has difficulty interpreting between the two.
For a game that advertises as horror, I think they've gone the wrong way. The most tense parts of the games, the most frightening, are the ones where you've lost your gear and have to ration out things like flares and flash bangs to keep the enemy at bay. These can also be the most frustrating, since this ration cannot be replenished, and it's a little unclear as to whether or not you'll need them later on, or if you'll have them at all.
Maybe that's just the horror fan in me. Rationing the supply of something is the quickest way to make sure the player values it. And I've always liked the idea that the more you have of something in a horror game, be it life, health, ammunition or information, the shorter it's supply should be. The flashlight in games is a favourite example. Especially when they power it with a battery. I've always thought that if they wanted to keep the player tense, the battery should drain faster in areas where it isn't absolutely needed. Keep the player from using light as a safety blanket. Make them stumble around in the dark a little, and watch the shadows in corners. By playing with it just a little, I think you could have a much more enjoyable game.
How does this relate to Alan Wake? Alan is always equipped with some combination of three things: A flashlight, which requires batteries, a gun (several of these exist but you can only carry four) or some form of equipment (flares and flash bangs are what I've seen so far). During some parts of the game, they throw batteries and ammunition at you like they're candy, which doesn't cease to bother me. The game makes it quite clear that shooting at an enemy before you've used the light on them is a waste of bullets (equipment is an exception to this). You're also rewarded for looking a bit off the beaten path with glowing symbols. These symbols are revealed by the flashlight, and lead to caches of supplies marked by a torch. I think they could do away with half the ammunition in the game because I kept finding these on my playthrough and being unable to use all of the supplies there because I already had enough.
And it's not like you can waste bullets very easily. The game gives you semi-automatic weapons, not bullet hoses. An eight shot revolver, a double barrelled shotgun, a hunting rifle and a few others. They don't hold too many bullets, particularly the shotgun. My thankful cry of "pump action!" was completely heartfelt upon discovering that variation.
The flashlight is an odd duck. It has batteries, which you find almost everywhere. To use it on an enemy, you focus the beam, which drains the battery. If you don't empty it completely, the battery will eventually recharge. Something I'm a little at odds with. They seem to contradict each other. While the recharging aspect makes it easier to stretch out one battery if you're clever, the fact that you can carry quite a few seems to negate it's usefulness, at least from what I've been able to tell.
Combat is... interesting. Alan can easily triumph over small groups armed with nothing but his flashlight and a revolver, but when numbers start to turn against him, it can become much more difficult. The fact that enemies seem to have an infinite number of ranged weapons, axes, picks, tire irons and the like, is an annoyance of mine. And the control scheme which mixes the dodge button with the ability to run is also an irritant.
The camera stealing is just wretched. It's (and I'm borrowing heavily from Yahtzee here) almost as though they don't want to scare you. When some enemies have gotten behind you, as part of the game (they've spawned behind you), the game slows down, jerks the camera out of your hands as a way of yelling at the top of it's voice "Hello! Hello! Do you see these scary, scary men? They want to kill you! Maybe you should shoot them!" Now, there are a dozen other ways to have done this within the game itself, without breaking immersion. They could have made a noise. Alan could have narrated that he heard something, which wouldn't have bothered me half as much. They could have simply jumped you and started the fight. They give hints in the environment as to when the Taken (since that's what they're called) are going to show up. If everything seems to get a wee bit darker, if lights start going out spontaneously, if the fog/mist around you seems to be moving a bit faster? They're Here!
Praise first then:
The developers have done a good job, graphics wise. I'm not a fan of bleeding edge graphics tech, since it won't run on my ancient computer and the types of games that tend to use it aren't my cup of tea to begin with. They seem to have had a little trouble with the faces, they slip into the Uncanny Valley a little too often for my taste, but I won't begrudge them that.
The scenery is fantastic, but you can always tell when you're on the tracks. I realize they probably have to do this to avoid confusing players, but that little compass at the top should usually be a decent indicator of where you've got to go. And it is.
The interface is minimalistic, which is nice. I don't mind that at all. The health bar and magic objective compass are both in the same spot, which is handy.
I'll go right ahead and say that the controls are a little wonky. I don't like the sprint button, at all at the moment, mostly because there's not really an indicator, subtle or otherwise, as to when you can use it and when it's depleted. The fact that it occupies the same space as the dodge button can make clearing out of groups of enemies a little on the difficult side, since the game sometimes has difficulty interpreting between the two.
For a game that advertises as horror, I think they've gone the wrong way. The most tense parts of the games, the most frightening, are the ones where you've lost your gear and have to ration out things like flares and flash bangs to keep the enemy at bay. These can also be the most frustrating, since this ration cannot be replenished, and it's a little unclear as to whether or not you'll need them later on, or if you'll have them at all.
Maybe that's just the horror fan in me. Rationing the supply of something is the quickest way to make sure the player values it. And I've always liked the idea that the more you have of something in a horror game, be it life, health, ammunition or information, the shorter it's supply should be. The flashlight in games is a favourite example. Especially when they power it with a battery. I've always thought that if they wanted to keep the player tense, the battery should drain faster in areas where it isn't absolutely needed. Keep the player from using light as a safety blanket. Make them stumble around in the dark a little, and watch the shadows in corners. By playing with it just a little, I think you could have a much more enjoyable game.
How does this relate to Alan Wake? Alan is always equipped with some combination of three things: A flashlight, which requires batteries, a gun (several of these exist but you can only carry four) or some form of equipment (flares and flash bangs are what I've seen so far). During some parts of the game, they throw batteries and ammunition at you like they're candy, which doesn't cease to bother me. The game makes it quite clear that shooting at an enemy before you've used the light on them is a waste of bullets (equipment is an exception to this). You're also rewarded for looking a bit off the beaten path with glowing symbols. These symbols are revealed by the flashlight, and lead to caches of supplies marked by a torch. I think they could do away with half the ammunition in the game because I kept finding these on my playthrough and being unable to use all of the supplies there because I already had enough.
And it's not like you can waste bullets very easily. The game gives you semi-automatic weapons, not bullet hoses. An eight shot revolver, a double barrelled shotgun, a hunting rifle and a few others. They don't hold too many bullets, particularly the shotgun. My thankful cry of "pump action!" was completely heartfelt upon discovering that variation.
The flashlight is an odd duck. It has batteries, which you find almost everywhere. To use it on an enemy, you focus the beam, which drains the battery. If you don't empty it completely, the battery will eventually recharge. Something I'm a little at odds with. They seem to contradict each other. While the recharging aspect makes it easier to stretch out one battery if you're clever, the fact that you can carry quite a few seems to negate it's usefulness, at least from what I've been able to tell.
Combat is... interesting. Alan can easily triumph over small groups armed with nothing but his flashlight and a revolver, but when numbers start to turn against him, it can become much more difficult. The fact that enemies seem to have an infinite number of ranged weapons, axes, picks, tire irons and the like, is an annoyance of mine. And the control scheme which mixes the dodge button with the ability to run is also an irritant.
The camera stealing is just wretched. It's (and I'm borrowing heavily from Yahtzee here) almost as though they don't want to scare you. When some enemies have gotten behind you, as part of the game (they've spawned behind you), the game slows down, jerks the camera out of your hands as a way of yelling at the top of it's voice "Hello! Hello! Do you see these scary, scary men? They want to kill you! Maybe you should shoot them!" Now, there are a dozen other ways to have done this within the game itself, without breaking immersion. They could have made a noise. Alan could have narrated that he heard something, which wouldn't have bothered me half as much. They could have simply jumped you and started the fight. They give hints in the environment as to when the Taken (since that's what they're called) are going to show up. If everything seems to get a wee bit darker, if lights start going out spontaneously, if the fog/mist around you seems to be moving a bit faster? They're Here!
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