I’ve also been spending the last while splitting my free time between development on Albert’s pet project, TweetMeUp, and a theme for this site that isn’t Kubrick.

Thank all that is good, right? More on that when it comes, though.

Here!, see for yourself:

Explosions. Everone loves those things to bits, barring the things that get blown to bits in the making thereof, but they didn’t really have a say in anything to start with, so we won’t dwell on that particular aspect. Just look at any entertainvid and you’ll see an abundance of things getting blown up in spectacular ways, with more debris flying around than you can embed in your torso. Flash!, boom!, bang! Everyone gets all excited and point at the lovely devastation all around.

Nearly everyone, anyway; the Pascifists of Serenita XI don’t like explosions, but their idea of action involves spilling their coffee, which hardly makes for riveting viewing.

As with all things in the Universe, however, sometimes you get a species that just decide to take things that one little step too far. For example, humans managed to take the ability to post images of cats on the Internet to a level where no other intelligent life deigned to stoop to. Returning to the explosive subject at hand, we introduce the Garflaxians of Rghut IV.

A Garflaxian isn’t the kind of alien you’d want to bring home to meet your parents, considering that their idea of a formal introduction is a salvo of guided missiles armed with gigaton nuclear warheads. To the abject misery of the rest of the Universe, they’d finally grown tired of reducing their solar system to a handful of craters posing as planets, and had set their sights (literally and figuratively) on the rest of space.

And so, this is where our story begins.

I think it shows promise, and I intend on annoying my Twitter followers with choice snippets at irregular intervals. Poor bastards.

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

So, apparently Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars ended up performing rather poorly, selling just shy of 89,000 units during its March release month.

I bought GTA:CW about a month ago, finishing the main storyline last Tuesday, and found it to be the best portable game I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing. As I’ve been telling other gamers I know, GTA:CW is an extremely good reason to buy a Nintendo DS if you don’t already have one. Given the technical constraints of the DS hardware¹, GTA:CW is a testament (and indeed, a monument) to the ability of dedicated programmers to push a platform to its very limits without noticeably sacrificing elements in the game to achieve their goal.

Stylistically, the game is reminiscient of the original Grand Theft Auto, although the camera takes a more angled view of the world than the strictly top-down camera from the earlier game. Objects in the game are modelled in 3D, using a cel-shaded appearance which works very well with the overall presentation. Larger objects, such as buildings, eschew the cel-shading for detailed textures, with attention paid to cosmetic details such as having separate day/night textures. The engine is prone to stuttering when there’s a lot happening on the screen, such as when you’re racing away from half the Liberty City Police Department, but, fortunately, not so much that it renders the game unplayable.

GTA:CW is a vast game, being set in the same city as its big brother, Grand Theft Auto IV, with the exception of one of the islands. I’ve been playing GTA:CW almost every day since I bought it, and I’m still discovering new side missions and events. Barring that, there’s excellent replay value in the game, since every mission is replayable. Additionally, the game tracks the time taken to complete a replayed mission, awarding you gold, silver, or bronze medals depending on how quickly you get the job done. When this is combined with Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection and the Rockstar Games Social Club², you can synchronise your statistics so that you can compare your performance with that of other GTA:CW players³.

Granted, some of the side events are all variations on a theme (Rampages, for instance, differ only in their location, the score to beat, and the weapon given), but it’s all stepping stones to reaching a 100% completion statistic, as well as seeing just how high a score you can set for the rest of the world (effectively) to try and beat, giving a clear incentive to the player to actually bother with the events in the first place. There is effectively no gameplay incentive to do these tasks, since the monetary reward is miniscule when compared to the vast amounts of money to be made from the drug-trading minigame. However, there is a clear player incentive, in which a challenge is set to beat, firstly, the target score set by the game, and afterwards, the record score set by the player themselves.

Contrast this with the tasks given to you in the Space stage of Spore, where you’re invariably performing a repetition of a limited set of tasks, differing in certain parameters, such as the world(s) to visit. While there is a gameplay incentive to raise your standing with an alien race, to obtain money, or to obtain Missionista badges to unlock new technologies, the player incentive is somewhat lacking. Once player incentive is largely removed from a task, it becomes less of a challenge to the player, and it becomes a grind. Whether it is an experience grind, a money grind, or any other kind of grind (I’m a poet and I didn’t know it), the fact remains: it stays a grind. There’s a reason the word “grind” is used somewhat derisively in this context.

I’ve read several comments from other people about GTA:CW where they’d complained about the control scheme for the game. Now, I’m a lefty (which actually does make a difference at times), and I can play the game without too much trouble. Sometimes it will happen that my stylus hand obscures part of the screen which would normally have been visible for a right-handed person, but not so much that it messes with the gameplay. By and large, I find that it works quite well. There are some times when you feel like you could use a third hand to interact with the touch screen while you’re both steering and accelerating (already a two-handed operation: one hand on the directional pad and the other on the B/X buttons to accelerate/brake), but I found that it adds to the intensity of an already hectic car chase (for example), without increasing the difficulty to an impossible level.

Another nice touch (I’m just full of these bad puns, aren’t I?) this game has, when used in conjuction with the online element, is that once you finish the game, you can “download” missions from the Social Club, effectively extending the lifetime of the game. I’ve already completed two of these extension missions, but there’s currently a mission (set?), “Mr Wong’s Laundromat”, advertised on the Social Club as “coming soon”, so hopefully I’ll be able to add a few more to that list soon.

Let’s hope the sales of this game have picked up in April, or will pick up in the future, so that other developers can see that there is actually a market for these games on the DS platform.

Verdict: Buy a DS and buy this game!

[1] Two ARM processors, an ARM9 and an ARM7 clocked at 67MHz and 33MHz, respectively, making it roughly on par with the venerable (and, at the time, popular!) Intel 80486. The ARM9 processor is used for most processing, including 3D graphics, while the ARM7 provides functionality such as audio, Wi-Fi, and is the sole processor used when playing Game Boy Advance games (clocked down to 16MHz). In terms of volatile memory, the DS has 4MB of built-in RAM. A reverse-engineered technical specification of the DS, though, notes that careless use of the ARM9 could result in an apparent clock speed of only 8MHz!

[2] The Social Club website is just terribly slow, in my experience. Makes it a bit frustrating to use.

[3] My GTA:CW friend code is 506998942103, for anyone who wants to add me!

Fast forward to the past two years, where we saw the release of Mass Effect (November 2007) and Fallout 3 (October 2008). When I’d bought my Xbox 360 in January of 2008, Mass Effect was one of the titles I’d purchased with my console, based mostly on what I’d read over at Ars Technica about it. A few weeks later (making for 24 hours of playing time altogether), I’d finished the game. Mass Effect now ranks as one of my favourite titles in my collection.

I specifically mentioned Fallout in the opening paragraph, since the Fallout games are probably my most favourite games of all time. So it was with great anticipation that I awaited the grand arrival of the next installment in that cherished universe; but also with great trepidation. See, I was also guilty of the fear that Fallout 3 would be “Oblivion with guns”, as our friend The Internet so eloquently put it.

The Elder Scrolls games are, in my opinion, wonderful achievements in video gaming… for a while. Then you begin to realise that, apart from the main plot, the game is a vast expanse of repetitiveness and empty interactions with hollow, cardboard characters. Morrowind was later more or less a vessel for compulsively mapping away every last shred of the war fog from the overhead map and determining how to best maximise gain of statistics: hearkening back to the “lawnmowing” of the Might & Magic games where one would systematically walk through the overland map to visit each and every map square, and the metagaming approach cursed by “serious” tabletop game masters everywhere. It becomes less an immersive role-playing experience than a system to be gamed (oh, a pun!) and fully mapped.

If this was what was to become of Fallout 3… utter not the words!

The sad thing is that I haven’t even bothered finishing Fallout 3 since I purchased it in November/December of last year. Maybe I’d walked into the game with expectations that were far too high. In some ways, this may well be true. For example, I’d expected that Fallout 3 would be rid of some of the absolutely mind-bogglingly stupid bugs in the Gamebryo engine, such as the excessively annoying “stuck in a rock” bug; a bug which I have encountered in each game from Morrowind right up to Fallout 3, often costing me a reload into the distant past.

Not that Mass Effect wasn’t without its share of issues. A notable bug I ran across was when you have to race from Kora’s Den to the alleyway in the Wards where the Quarian, Tali’Zorah, is to be killed by a group of assassins. When I arrived at the door to the alleyway and passed through, the cutscene played right on cue, and when I regained control… the alleyway was empty. Somehow, the game had glitched, and had removed an integral plot piece: the Quarian and her would-be assassins. Luckily, I’d saved right before entering the alleyway, and, after reloading from that save point, things proceeded as one would have expected it to.

Away from this meandering tone, then!, and on to business. If one examines the playing styles of Mass Effect and Fallout 3, both games tend to drift towards the action RPG end of the spectrum. Mass Effect is solidly an ARPG, but drifts somewhat more to the classical RPG elements between plot points, effectively giving your character free rein on what to do in the galaxy. Fallout 3 is ostensibly a classic RPG, but is, in actual fact, an ARPG. I think that, to a large degree, this is what ticked me off about FO3, but endeared me to Mass Effect. Fallout 3 should be an RPG: plain and simple. As it is, it’s a twitch-trigger blast-fest with some conversation trees thrown in for good measure and to keep the plot moving (I exaggerate, of course, but it drives the point home, methinks). I never really resonated with any of the characters: they were just text trees with voice acting added to the mix. Another thing which really annoys me in games is the “filler” NPC. They have no agenda, no personality, no goals: nothing, save for the same inane chatter that breaks any semblance of immersion, since you will later know all of their limited one-liners off by heart. The saddest thing? Even though FO1/FO2 also had fillers, their floating text actually had me giggling out loud at times. Fallout 3’s fillers had me cursing out loud at them to shut the hell up already.

Mass Effect, on the other hand, makes it clear from the word “go” that it is a squad-based action RPG. You’re riding it on some cinematic rails, and you’d better be strapped in for one hell of a ride. This is the same approach that Gears of Wars utilised to excessive success, albeit being a purely tactical action title rather than alluding to any semblance of an RPG. If you can talk to an NPC, it’s because they will actually contribute to the storyline (be it the main plot or a side mission). Bioware opted to have filler NPCs be animated furniture: there’s no option to have them spout the same handful of lines at you over and over again, a decision I much prefer to the cookie-cutter responses that invariably get really old really quickly. For a highly plot-driven game, Mass Effect pleasantly surprises with the amount of freedom that you’re given once you finish the introductory portion of the game, when you are inducted into the ranks of the Spectres and are given free rein to roam the galaxy as you wish. This time around, I intend on completing all the side quests (and thus levelling my character up: since I’m now playing on Hardcore difficulty, I anticipate that the boss battles will be utterly sadistic at best) before proceeding with the plot points. The reason for this is that I think the main plot will be experienced so much the better when played through as a cohesive whole, since the pace rapidly picks up in the latter stages of the plot: something you don’t want to break by grinding on a few side quests while the rest of the galaxy waits in baited breath for its imminent extermination.

Unfortunately, this is where Mass Effect falls flat once more. Fallout 3 is an example of a gargantuan undertaking in level design and modelling: every scrap of rusted metal and broken concrete is placed uniquely in the game world, so you’ll never see the same set of features twice. In the sense of conveying an authentic sense of being in a ravaged wasteland, Fallout 3 delivers twice its weight in gold. Mass Effect, on the other hand, suffers from the same problem that the earlier Elder Scrolls games suffered from: after a while you get to know all the scenery building blocks like the back of your hand. While plot points are beautifully mapped out down to the details and contain a vibrant host of characters to interact with, side quests are invariably either situated within identically-shaped and laid out ships/bases/lairs, or on uninhabited, barren, mountainous worlds littered with a few salvageable debris sites, mineral deposits, and thresher maws, which causes the side quest section of the game to become somewhat of an experience point grind. Every now and then you’ll receive a side mission on one of these planets that actually involve speaking to a minor NPC. Unfortunately, these dialog options merely allow you to resolve the side quest in such a fashion so as to alter Mass Effect’s version of an alignment/morality slider the way you want to. Not much immersion value, that is.

Fallout 3 had an enormous amount of potential, but one gets the feeling that in attempting to create such a rich setting, the developers spread themselves a bit thin in the creation process thereof. Had it been smaller and more detailed, though, it would have lost the sense of wandering a desolate wasteland, populated only thinly, and then only in dense concentrations for survival. I do miss the delightfully detailed conversations from the first two games, though…

All in all, I’m happy I bought both games, though. I enjoyed Mass Effect immensely, clocking 24 hours of playing time the first time I saw the main plot through to completion, even with the bugs and sometimes annoying interface elements present in the game. Fallout 3 was also a game I played more or less non-stop for quite some time, something which is only possible for an established fan if they enter the game with a definite mindset of not expecting the earlier games. It’s a completely different beast. The criticisms I’ve raised above are merely my meandering thoughts on the fall of role-playing games as we knew it, but it doesn’t stop it from being a highly enjoyable game. At several points in the game I’d stopped and just thought to myself, “Wow, that’s quite something.”

Apparently a new Fallout is now going to be developed, set in Las Vegas, something that’ll bear closer inspection once the time comes. As for Mass Effect 2: oh my. I can hardly wait!

And that’s that for this monstrosity of a post. We will now resume with our normal programming consisting of F-bombs and tangential trains of thought.

I rounded up a couple of people last week to join in on a Paranoia XP play-by-email (PbEM) game. So far I’ve got three active players and a couple of lurkers (i.e. CC’d recipients). The first game update was sent out earlier today, but I’m still waiting on responses from the players.

I will be posting a timeline of events as they unfold on this site as a set of pages. Keep them peepers peeled!

If anyone else wants to join/spectate on the e-mails as they happen, drop me a line or your e-mail address and I’ll get in touch.

In the aftermath of my 24th birthday, I can proudly announce the addition of two new items into my bookshelf, one new to me, and one a familiar friend: Consider Phlebas, by Iain M. Banks, and the classic Dune, by Frank Herbert.

I had previously read another of Iain Banks’ science fiction novels, Against A Dark Background. Initially, I had mixed feelings about the book, since I recall being vaguely confused about what the whole book was meandering towards. Once it got there, though, I appreciated both the setting and the story a good deal more. For some reason, I’d picked out Consider Phlebas as the next Banks novel I’d like to read, a fact my girlfriend pounced on when trying to figure out what to get for the momentous occasion of the commencement of the next cycle in my aging process. So far, I’ve gotten up to page 142 of the 467 between the covers, and I like what I’ve been reading so far. I actually haven’t realised how starved I’ve been for some new science fiction material. Once I’ve finished Consider Phlebas, I fully intend on re-reading it. Come on, every book needs at least one re-read.

Regarding Dune: man, I love that book. It’s probably one of my all-time favourite novels. Ever. Which is why it’s heartbreaking to see it given such a despicable front cover. For crying out loud, the word DUNE consists of several tiny little five-pointed stars clustered together. Really now. It’s a hard science fiction novel, not My Little Fucking Pony.

In other news, the Wordpress gallery tag thingy isn’t that great, but flowing in all of the covers would probably have looked even worse.

if(lots of conditions)
{
    doSomeStringCopies();
    if(a certain condition)
        doSomething();
        doSomethingElse();
    doFinalStringCopies();
}

Bear in mind that the consistency of indentation of the actual code was nowhere as nice as above.

Notice the problem? doSomethingElse() will be called irrespective of the secondary condition, resulting in bad things happening because a certain field does not contain a valid value for the doing of something else, but is entirely valid in terms of the business rule.

This is why you always surround your compound code structures with braces: because you never know when someone’s going to slide a “fix” into your code and neglects to add the braces. Several people (who have obviously never been burnt by this problem, and if they have, they should have their keyboard license removed from them) might think that bracing a compound structure which contains only one statement makes the code look uglier or more unreadable, but it definitely makes it a lot more maintainable.

(As an aside, I have a feeling that this is one of my more poorly written entries. Shame on me, I know.)

The event logs of a dying iPod.

A few years ago I bought a Seagate 160GB hard drive, anticipating my imminent requirement for more disk space. Eventually, the time rolled by where I actually needed that space, and that’s when the abovementioned hard drive crashed spectacularly. It has since been replaced with a new unit which has (touch wood) been working smoother than yo’ momma’s thighs.

Fast-forward to a few weeks ago, where visions of impending doom filled my head when, once again, I had hard drive issues. Luckily (if you can say that) it was only (hah!) one of two things: my primary IDE channel had given up the ghost, or the cable connected to the primary IDE channel was busted. I haven’t tested either one of these hypotheses yet: my hard drives are working on the secondary IDE channel and that’s all I need to know.

But now, the latest victim in this sordid string of sick storage devices is my 3-month old 120GB iPod Classic. I’ve checked the drive’s SMART data in the iPod diagnostics menu, and the reallocated sector count is firmly within the range of 2500-3000, with more sectors pending reallocation. Never mind the fact that some tracks are irrevocably broken, pausing halfway through the song before skipping to the next file. The window pictured above is the Event Viewer on my computer after attempting to playback (i.e. read from the iPod itself) one of the affected tracks using foobar2000 (which, it so happens, gave up with an I/O error after quite some time).

So this weekend it’s off to warranty claims with my iPod, and with it goes just about any musical entertainment at work for the next week or two. Barring a daily selection of media to copy to my flash drive, of course. 512MB has never been so piteously small a capacity…

Also, Albert will now be chortling with self-righteous glee as karma destroys my iPod, after I (naturally) poked fun at him when his iPod Touch’ home button went on indefinite strike. That’ll teach me to laugh at other’s misfortune (even if they are part of the Turtleneck Cult and thus actually deserve it).

(Damn it, there goes my replacement iPod too.)

So, let’s start at the most basic iteration of the game itself, ignoring any details such as interface and representation. As I stated in the original article, the game can be summed up as Dope Wars in space. Thus, the mechanics of the game may be summed up as follows:

1. Sell any inventory so as to make a profit.
2. Buy more inventory at a low enough price to ensure a profit in the future (the nearer in the future and the higher the profit, the better).
3. Travel to a different location, repeating the process from step 1.

This process is repeated until a pre-set time limit is reached, with travelling using one time unit, and inventory actions being “free” actions. The end goal of the game is to amass as much wealth as possible within the time limit, in effect competing with yourself to better a personal best high score.

Each turn, the inventory prices are randomised according to a item’s base value and some measure of variance. The skill involved in the game then relies on the player’s ability to recognise the base values and variances of inventory items, such that they know when a certain item is at a “low” or a “high” price, corresponding to a “buy” or a “sell” on the part of the player.

To add an additional level of randomisation to the game, random events may be introduced that alter the player’s stock or money levels, or drastically alter the variation in prices. This may be implemented using non-uniform random number generation, such that smaller variations are more common than extremely large variations, which may well count for a mere fraction of the random number space, but may potentially yield vast gains for the player.

At this basic level, the game does not invite many opportunities for strategic play, since the game may effectively be “broken” if a player collects enough data about inventory prices, disregarding any random fluctuations/events. The next article in this series will outline some of the ideas I’ve had to expand the gameplay to make the game more interesting and challenging to a player.

At this point, I’d like to share a little gem of a quote regarding stupidity: “I say we just take the warning labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself.”

With that out of the way, I was reading an article about some or the other group getting all flustered about the upcoming Grand Theft Auto DS game, because it contains a mini-game which basically amounts to a version of Dope Wars. The inclusion of this now causes the glamourisation of drugs.

Right.

So, considering the games I played and the music I listened to when I was younger, I should’ve committed suicide (Marilyn Manson), blown out the brains of my classmates before offing myself (Doom), stolen cars and indiscriminately murdered innocents (GTA1), slept with, robbed, and murdered prostitutes (GTA3), killed a number of policemen (well, fuck, pretty much all of the GTA games), et cetera.

It’s retarded. Just because some people have problems distinguishing between fantasy and reality, and the concept of actions having consequences, doesn’t necessarily mean that all people are going to go out and have a GTA-inspired crime spree.

But, lest we forget, in the apologetic society we live in, we always have to cater for the lowest common denominator, and good grief, is that denominator ever so low, and ever so common.

Nyak.