Teamonkey's LJ

Samhuinn Fire Festival

2006-11-01T00:30:03Z

Samhuinn Fire Festival
Originally uploaded by tea_monkey.

5 billion trips to Ikea later...

2006-09-21T21:02:38Z

...I'm in.

They really don't wear coats in Newcastle do they?

2006-09-18T21:17:30Z

Tired - having a few days off this week after working 19 of the last 21 days, including a 12-hour stint yesterday. Spent today driving the 6-hour round trip to Newcastle. Nice place. :)

Soaking wet.

2006-09-14T22:32:55Z

Looking forward to having next week "off" even though I'll be moving house twice in that time. Still it'll be better than the 12-hour days I've been doing recently.

Also, the internet fallout today makes amazing reading. Utterly incomprehensible.

Tech lust unsustainable :(

2006-09-02T17:41:18Z

Drove in to town this morning and noticed that the driver's front tyre was slightly flat. On closer inspection there was a deep crack that ran almost all the way round the tyre. I went to a garage and pumped it up, but didn't want to risk it on the bypass, so off to Kwik Fit I went. The guy hoisted it up, the driver's front was knackered like I thought, the driver's rear had a worn outer wall, the spare had rotted and the passenger's front was worn on the inside and so not only did it need a new tire but it needed realigning.

It needed to be done, obviously, and I'm glad I caught it before a blow-out happened or something, but it's galling because it cost me exactly the same as a Core Xbox 360 :(

Tech lust

2006-08-28T14:28:11Z

Seriously, I must be in heat or something. I really want a new toy so very badly.

I want one of these:

One of these:

And I'm also pretendy shopping for a nice projector to play games on.

Unfortunatly I've got to move house in the next month or so and the car needs an MOT in the next few weeks.

*sigh*

Tired, sweaty and listening to a party mix

2006-07-01T23:03:44Z

After a week of crunch time, I spent the day packing and shifting stuff out of the house on the hottest day of the year so far. Nearly all moved out now thank goodness.

One of our neighbours is 60, apparently, and boy do they know how to party. Streamers and Vengaboys.

Meh

2006-06-20T08:26:23Z

I've been off ill today and yesterday with a nasty cold. It's such a waste, I don't even like football. And it's Summer and lovely outside. And the consoles are all packed away in boxes ready for moving house.

Oh well, nothing to do but sit and sweat it out of me.

Ordeal

2006-06-17T20:52:49Z

Moving house again, this time in with the in-laws for a short while to save some cash for the Mrs to head off to uni in September.

Fuck me if there isn't a lot of paperwork to do. I've got sixteen separate organisations to inform. :(

Calton Hill, Edinburgh

2006-05-10T19:30:08Z

Calton Hill, Edinburgh
Originally uploaded by tea_monkey.

What a lovely day!

Vader of the Opera

2006-04-28T19:38:23Z

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n97ztLmxH8A

God, LJ is shit.

Wii

2006-04-27T18:40:23Z

What can I say?

A good night for a steak pie supper

2006-03-27T18:03:17Z

Had an average night's sleep last night. Woke up at 6.30 this morning to drive the missus to a seminar thing she was organising. Got to work dead on time and got a reasonable day's work in. Played Battlefield 2 for the first time in ages at lunch and also somehow managed to win a round of Tetris DS. Stayed behind an extra half-hour to get to a stage where I was confortable leaving my work. Weather was light rain but comfortably warm. Bought some milk and power cards for the meter on the way home as well as pie and chips.

All in all a pleasantly mediocre day. :)

Missing, presumed gone

2006-03-04T18:06:10Z

Not posted in a while, but I'm not dead. I've been playing lots of Eve Online and that's about it really. But I've also bought my first car, look!

My Car!
Originally uploaded by tea_monkey.

Isn't she beautiful?

New Year's Resolutions

2006-01-12T19:59:09Z

These are all games that I've started and not clocked. Most of them are quite far along too and my Deus Ex 2 save is well over a year old now.

1) Resident Evil 4
2) Deus Ex: Invisible War
3) Far Cry
4) NOLF 2
5) Jet Set Radio
~~6) Call of Duty 2~~ - Top game! Very well done. :)
7) Nexus: The Jupiter Incident

These are games that I've bought and not even started yet.

1) F.E.A.R.
2) The Nomad Soul
3) In Cold Blood

Also, I have to clock Shadow of the Colossus again in hard mode to get to the final colossus.

Books I've bought and need to properly read.

1) Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling
2) Godel, Escher, Bach
3) Code Complete 2 - what have I done with it?

I need to read more fiction too. I don't read enough, unless it's on t3h internets.

Quake 4

2005-12-09T00:45:55Z

Another game that people seem to like but I think is dire.

I'm quite near the end now, I've battled through it all, but I just want to end it right now. I need to complete it to make the time I've invested in it worthwhile.

There are bits of it that are OK. The bit at the beginning was quite atmospheric and the bit I went through a couple of lunchtimes ago was actually nicely paced and well balanced. The rest is a combination of "dull, dull, dull" and "oh fuck off".

The worst bit is the weapons. They're all weak. You shoot a bad guy in the head at point blank range and they probably won't even react, it just decrements their health points by some amount. A funny thing is that it turns the bodies into ragdolls and gives them a push with a force of however damaging your last shot was, so you fire one, two, three shotgun blasts at them without them breaking a stride, then the fourth kills them and nearly sends them into orbit. In this game a headshot with a railgun will not kill a grunt, nor will a shotgun blast at close range. Firing a black hole at a medium-sized enemy does not guarantee a kill.

Bits of this game are quite fun. Lots of this game is not.

Mario Cart DS

2005-11-26T17:19:55Z

201923
556072
Teamunky
UK

Fahrenheit, again

2005-10-22T14:43:54Z

When I played through it for the first time I thought it was flawed. It started off well, but I always had this feeling that it just wasn't clicking, and then the plot became all silly and most of the time was spent button mashing.

I've just tried to play some of the sections again to see how it changed the events of the game, and I found that I couldn't bring myself to do it. I'd start playing a chapter, then have to go and do the washing up or clean the toilet or just do anything except play the game. Because without my original excitement about the game and the urge to press on and complete it, the game is dire.

It's bad, it's really truly awful. Unskippable cutscenes, sporadic savepoints, no subtitles and the worst camera in a game I've ever seen, are some of the technical issues that bring it down. The plot's pretty awful too. Whole sections lifted from The Matrix, mixed in with conspiracy theories and mysical rubbish. Oh, and throw in some crap about aliens and AI too. Throw in a couple of scenes of the lead female protagonist with no clothes on, that will make people realise that this game's not for sweaty teenage boys.

The gameplay issues are even worse. It's supposed to be a serious game, one that brings gaming into a more mature era, so why does so much of the game rely on old concepts like button mashing, collectable items and extra lives? The existence of these things in the game, poorly executed as they are, jar with the entire, you know, thing... purpose... raison d'etre of the game. It's a mish-mash of terrible design decisions stapled together into one game.

This one's going straight on eBay.

Yours,

Disgusted, Edinburgh

Adventure games

2005-09-17T21:40:23Z

Now is a really good time to be an adventure gamer. A really good time. Grim Fandango kind of marked an end to the genre, many thought it to be dead, then a few years later Broken Sword 3 picked it up again (a bit loosely) and now we've got Fahrenheit and Bone, and coming up in the next two years we've got Sam & Max 2, Dreamfall, Broken Sword 4, Frontier Development's The Outsider, and whatever Ron Gilbert's got planned. How good is that?

My thighs are worn through with all the rubbing.

Fahrenheit's here

2005-09-17T18:40:16Z

It is good. You need to play it in silence and give it your undivided attention. Buy it now. That is all.

Java Thrust

2005-08-12T19:42:30Z

A couple of months back a guy called Mark Mainwood asked me a few questions about how to do the physics in one of my favourite games, Thrust. He's now finished it and it, along with a couple of other games, are avilable to play here. Double bonus: they're all Java Web Start, which is a Good Thing.

3 games everyone interested in games design should play

2005-08-06T13:25:53Z

The last couple of weeks I've played a few interesting and, in my opinion, important games. So, in reverse order...

F.E.A.R. Demo

I love Monolith. They're one of the most underrated devcos and some of my heroes. There are at least one or two genius level designers there. Some of my favourite gaming moments come from No-one Lives Forever and its sequel.

Anyway, F.E.A.R. looks great. I see it as a cross between System Shock 2 and Max Payne. The levels are linear, as always, but the thing that makes it better than nearly any other FPS is the AI. Not only is it completely unscripted, but the enemies take full advantage of the scenery. One time I played it, one of the bad guys went for cover by diving through a window. Next time I played it I decided to cover the window and the guy ducked behind a control panel and chucked a grenade at me. If you block an exit point with something they're intelligent enough to find another way, or even climb over and under obstacles. Brilliant! Combine that with some meaty weapons and what looks like some genuinely pant-messing moments and we've got a winner. Even without the AI it would be an above-average shooter. Looking forward to this one very much.

Shame it's published by Vivendi, really.

F.E.A.R. demo torrent

Katamari Damacy

What a charming little game!

Been wanting to play this for ages now. I've heard so much about it and none of it has been bad. Unfortunately I thought my only option was to get my PS2 chipped (hard to find someone to do it these days), but I went out on a limb and bought Katamari from eBay (from "pliskinsmullet" - good seller) and Swap Magic for £15 from this place and much to my joy, it worked like a charm.

You take the faceplate off the PS2 drive tray and it reveals a little gap underneath. You boot off the supplied DVD, use a little hooky bit of plastic to open the drive and also to close it again with the Katamari disc in. The PS2 doesn't realise the disc's been swapped and a quick tap of the X button boots the inserted disc, whereever it comes from. A bit fiddly but well worth it.

Anyway, Katamari is fantastic. Perfect in everything: execution, presentation, sound, graphics, difficulty and gameplay. Just lovely! :)

The bit that interests me is how the gameplay changes as you progress through the level. You start small and get bigger, but as you get bigger the things that you were trying to avoid become the very things you want to collect and the things you once wanted to collect are too small to waste your time on. It's so simple but it means the level stays fresh as you play it, with new elements added all the time and something to strive for. You want to get big enough to roll up people, then trees, then cars, elephants, planes... It's just great.

Facade

After playing the Fahrenheit demo a few days I started looking for research on interactive storytelling and found this game. Well, it calls itself "interactive entertainment," which I suppose it is. It's interesting but it's not fun.

You play the role of a friend of a married couple who invite you for a drink one evening. You head over to their small apartment and see that their marriage is in trouble and they really conned you in to coming over to give them advice.

Of course, as soon as I found out that I was placed in an uncomfortable social situation I decided to inflame the situation. Repeatedly kissing Grace and demanding a drink from Trip, I was soon out on the streets. But that's why it's important - they will actually react to what you're doing. This is the beginnings of the holodeck, you mark my words.

It's not flawless though. Ernest Adams likes it and says that it tries to do five things:

Natural language parsing and conversational interaction
Natural language generation
Emotional modeling
Facial expressions
Body language

The last four things it does very well indeed. Disturbingly well, in fact. The two avatars witter and bicker and hold conversations with each other and it's really hard to tell what's scripted and what's not. They cross their arms, go and stare out the window, sulk in the kitchen and throw you out by your collar. They behave realistically to your actions, at least more realistically than in any other game, and most of the time it's pretty convincing.

The whole thing is let down by Adams' first point. Natural language parsing is just not happening right now. It's not ready. You speak to the characters by typing at them. They only respond to a few commands and pre-scripted sentences and you're not told what they are, so much of the time they just act confused as if you've just farted loudly. It's very annoying. Restricting your vocab to a few choice phrases and letting you select them from a menu would have worked much better and wouldn't have detracted from the experiment much at all (since without it you just have to guess what those pre-determined phrases are anyway).

I'm not entirely convinced that it's as dynamic as it appears to be, either. Like Fahrenheit, it appears to be a branching storyline with the sum of your actions determining which branch the story takes. The difference here is that the branching depends on the emotional state of the characters, which seems to be modeled pretty well. So although it often looks like they're choosing what words they're saying to each other, they're just reading from different parts of a script.

Roll a dice, add the score to happiness, multiply by anger, subtract confusion. If you score 0-10 go to page 45; 11-30 go to page 56; 31-45 go to page 90, and so on.

Still, definitely worth a look if you're interested in that sort of thing, or in wrecking marriages.

Facade. All 800MB of it.

On why cutscenes are evil, part the second

2005-07-30T21:42:40Z

There's an excellent article over at Idle Thumbs reporting on a talk by Treyarch's Jamie Fristrom about the use of cut scenes. It appears that I'm not alone in my views.

Choice quotes:

"I've never seen a cut-scene where I haven't thought 'yeah that was cool... I sure wish it had been me doing it'."

"As soon as that direct control is taken away, it is simply a reminder to us that, despite the interactive appearance, we were never in control at all."

Amen.

Fahrenheit

2005-07-27T21:31:18Z

A short demo of Fahrenheit was released today.

I've been looking forward to this for a long time. I'm a big fan of adventure games and of interactive storytelling. You see, I believe that while straight, linear plotlines work very well in book and film, they don't necessarily work for computer games. No matter how good the plot is and how good the characters are (and there are some games with a fine plot and excellent characterisation, despite what some would have you believe) you get the feeling that something's missing.

You're invited to play a part in a wonderful game world with its own rules and its own logic, but the rules and logic are based on traditional linear storytelling principles. Often certain responses can only be achieved in certain predetermined situations. You're on rails, essentially, no matter how you dress it up. There are games with branching storylines, but each branch is linearly plotted and predetermined, like a choose your own adventure book.

Some people argue that we already have that in, for example, MMORPGs. You're given a set of skills that you can use in any way you see fit; you create the story around yourself. It's the lack of plot that gets me, however. Fine, you and a group of mates go off and kill a horde of orcs in an exciting and spectacular way, but that's not a plot, that's an event.

And a string of such events doesn't make a story. You need character development, events, preludes, portentious happenings and other storytelling devices, but the game would have to generate them on the fly, responding to your actions. The question I would like to see answered is whether this is actually possible?

And so Fahrenheit, a game that may or may not answer this question, but it comes closest to it than any other game. Probably. The demo doesn't really give you that much of a feeling of freedom. The demo is just one scene of the story, you start the scene in one place and you can only end it in one way (I think). What happens in the middle is up to you and there are no apparent repurcussions, although they may happen later.

It appears to be based loosely on the branching storyline model. You've got scenes, like I said, that start one way and end another. There might be scenes with multiple endings and scenes that you only see if you've done certain things (the repurcussions of your actions, I guess), but you're reined in by what is effectively a pre-defined branching storyline. It's a step in the right direction, and you can see what they're aiming for, but it's not there yet, at least I don't think it is. Another generation or two of games like these, perhaps.

Naturally I'll be buying the game anyway as I'm a sucker for these things. There aren't enough adventure games around, even linear ones, and this one looks like it could be a cracker. :)

On cut scenes and why they are wrong

2005-07-05T22:08:38Z

So Tomonobu Itagaki, creator of Dead or Alive, is having a good old bitch about the X360. Something (or perhaps someone) has clearly annoyed him and he's having a go, or maybe Sony have given Team Ninja a big wadge of cash to develop for the PS3. One of the things he's criticising is that developers won't be able to squeeze hours of pre-rendered HD cutscenes on a X360 DVD.

As they say, a plan with no drawbacks.

There's absolutely no excuse for long pre-rendered cutscenes these days. Especially in DoA, fer fuck's sake. Firstly, the game engine should be good enough to render any scenes you want (and if not a render will only show up your engine). Secondly, all a long cut scene does is distract from gameplay.

I'm not saying that cut-scenes should be eliminated altogether - there's a time and a place for them - but Why would you want long stretches of non-interactivity in your game? Exposition, perhaps, but I'm not convinced that a cut scene is always the best way. In fact, I'm not sure a cut scene is *ever* the best way.

Take Half Life, for example. It never leaves the first-person view. The cut scenes are still there, and they're on rails and you only have limited interactivity, but they're so much more immersive and effective than the usual fare. System Shock likewise. Both managed to find ways of progressing a strong storyline without cutting away from the game at all.

This is surely the way forward for gameplay, not using the tech to display HD movie clips?