Occasionally Gaming-Related Expressions (also ludicrous thoughts and rants)

When we last left off, the mesh was completed, rendering was still a mystery, and I hated the control scheme.

Things have changed since then.

For one, I no longer hate the control scheme. Well.. there’s still things that nag at me, to be sure, but I can get by. Another thing heavily in favour of blender is.. well, everything that comes after mesh-creation. I really like the material editor(s), I really like the composition window, and I absolutely love the uniform node-manipulation graph/interface. What follows will mostly be pictures, with minor comments as needed.

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Purely on a whim, yesterday I decided to get back into making 3D stuff for fun. Up till now, I’ve made a few spaceship models for a mod (XTC mod for X3: Terran Conflict). They weren’t bad. They were also made in 3dsMax, which his a crazily expensive program for something that’s an extremely amateurish hobby for me. The student edition is not bad by any means, but if I’d ever plan to use those models in any meaningful way… I’d be screwed, to put it short.

Thus, enter blender. Fully open-source, allegedly a complete alternative to Autodesk’s products.

How bad could it be, right?

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Got an annual payment-fee for the domain name of this thing. So, it’s a year old already! And, my, most of that year has been nothing but silence. That *may* change again, but things won’t be as they were. For one, I just plain don’t have a never-ending stream of new games that I could talk about each week. I’m not into indies, AAA’s are selective issues, and when I get a game, I like to play it through a ton of times.. which still gives enough material for 2 articles, tops. So, I can’t afford to try and force the past rates  it will only end in me burning out (again) and this place going silent (again). So, what to do?

Well. Here’s a quick enumeration of the changes coming:

1) I’ve taken up modelling again. This may last for half the summer, it may last longer. I will post stuff I make, and maybe some posts about stuff I find out whilst doing that. But It won’t be regular, and it won’t be any kind of guides/tutorials/etc. This is my personal alias-place dot com, so I’ll just use it to dump my stuff in here.

2) If I find somethign worth writing about, wrt games, I might write about. But again, don’t expect a larger frequency, or any sort of stability. I won’t chase out stories for writing’s sake (Alas, I have to face it – I’m not a writer at heart, and the raw act of writing, whilst satisfying, is not sufficient for me to do all the time as a main hobby).

3) I might post random posts about.. well, anything I find interesting enough to waste 2-3 hours by making a post about it.

Tl:dr – This place will become more lively again, but no schedules, no obligations, and no guarantees. PSA Over.

Unless it is virtual fire. Then it is completely okay to play with it for ever and ever and everer and evererer…

Little Inferno is now obtainable on steam. You might want to keep that fact in mind (free tips brought to you by Tomorrow Corporation). It’s a short, charming game about burning things – all kinds of things, from toys and plushies and bricks to trophies and planets and chainsaws and squirrels. It’s made by the creators behind World Of Goo, and if anything’s certain, it’s that the artstyle, sense of humour and narrative methods have all carried over.

If this doesn’t remind you of World Of Goo, then… then you should also play World Of Goo.

Little Inferno is a trifle of a game – it is very short, it is made as a mimicry of modern iOS games with their infinite unlock-by-money and wait-to-play mechanics. It has a list of catalogues containing stuff to burn, and you unlock said catalogues by burning stuff you have access to. You get money by burning stuff, and you spend slightly less money on buying more stuff to burn. While unlocking things, you get brief letters from your neighbour and the “Weather Man” telling you brief snippets about the world of Little Inferno. The meat of the game, however, is in the combinations of things that you burn – burning the right things together is a “combo” that gives you.. well, extra stuff so you can burn the next batch of things bettererer. “And that’s pretty much it.” – Jim Rossignol, of RockPaperShotgun. Read the rest of this entry »

By now, I assume most of the people who are following the gaming industry ‘big news’ have at the very least formed some kind of an opinion of Dishonored. Maybe that it sucks. Maybe that it rocks. Maybe that they hate all the world for spoiling the tutorial. Maybe that they got as far as X and they think that Y is a superb innovation, but P is not. Why P? WHO CARES. At any rate, this game is big, this game has been gushed over so hard that its code has drowned in an Olympic pool of gushjuice, and I’ve had the time to play it through three times, step back, let it settle a bit, and reflect. And all that reflection has sprouted the following thought: Dishonored is a game you don’t want to replay more than exactly twice.

Wolverine Making a rendition of the Redshirt Prince

ART. How’s that for a source of argument?

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Foreword: this will be divided into two sections: non-spoiler stuff and spoiler stuff. There will be a fair warning about the spoily writeup starting, so you can choose that as a place to stop reading if you are not down with spoilers and all. So, we’re kosher? Then let’s go.

Dishonored: Moonlit Tower

Click to embigenify (applies to all images in this post)

Dishonored is certainly a heavy hitter for 2012. Journalists have praised this game as being a potential GOTY (game of the year) or at least a strong contender. It’s a completely new IP, full-scale AAA release, developed by Arkane (massive gaming industry cred), published by Bethesda (massive piles of money cred), and it’s a stealth game. And it’s awesome. Who would have guessed, eh? However, Dishonored is not without a few flaws. Because I am about to outline them, one by one, it may seem that Arkane’s production is bad. … It really isn’t. There will probably be a followup post about the stuff that Dishonored does exceptionally well (and there’s a fair number of those, methinks). But for now, let’s charge up our cyborg nits and set them to ‘pick’ mode!

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Generally, I do not like platformers. I don’t like the often-pretentious puzzle platformers that rely on ‘quirky’ set-dressing to disguise a rather simplistic, unenjoyable, overly punitive core mechanic. Then again, I also tend to dislike pretentious reviews, and here I am doing something dangerously similar to just that. ANYWAY. Some days ago, I bought a humour-driven 2d platformer called “Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit”. It generally has had a good reception. It has an objectively decent sense of humour. It has a gorgeous, vibrant art style. It has very satisfying and responsive controls, meaty attacks and plenty of unique interjections of over-the-top ‘executions’. It relies a lot on check-pointing. There: that’s the general description and what-you-need-to-know basis upon which to create a lacklustre, advert-like, meaningless and impersonal “review”.

Now, onto the actual thing I want to talk about. This game confirmed my opinion that no matter the appearance, if the core gameplay of the game is not enjoyable, then the game as such is not enjoyable. Hell Yeah! manages to be unenjoyable because of a composition of two things: deceptively finicky platforming, and poor check-pointing.

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Cover of the book "Hydrogen Sonata"We don’t really appreciate the raw length of time, I think. We immerse ourselves in elaborate worlds, galaxies, universes where, thanks to sciency-sounding magic technology, the worth of a year has been demoted to less than that of a second, where entities (for they often cannot be called human anymore), and the events they are intertwined in,  take imaginary millennias, aeons, galactic cycles to unfold. Is it any wonder, that we, who love delving into the imagined worlds of SF-nal giants, lose track of just how weighty and loaded a single year is, in this meatspace we’re stuck in. A mere year – and yet, there’s so much raw entropy packed inside each one. As real human beings, we are still slaved to it, so much so that even ten years is an incredible amount of time, for us, to be doing any single thing.

Iain M. Banks has been doing that single thing – writing science fiction – for far more than that.

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Looking back on GW2

Why was this blog effectively dead for a whole month? Because I was completely absorbed in Guild Wars 2 for almost a whole month. I think that particular flu has passed, though – out of my system. It has left traces, though – lasting impressions, memes, and memories. And it would be a terrible shame to not put all that month into at least one post’s worth of material. So, that’s what this post is going to be – a bunch of musings on GW2 after a month’s worth of exposure to it.

 

One of the screenshots ArenaNet used for promoting GW2

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For a glorious two whole years, I was permitted to have a sneak peek at a very specific part of heaven. That part where you can just buy a PC game, without worrying about processor frequencies, number of cores, ram amounts, videocard numbers and other highly technobabble-sounding pseudononsense. See, stuff like that – being able to not worry about whether the game will run or not – that’s normally a forbidden fruit in PC gaming. Something you aspire to, but never quite reach, because every developer and their friendly neighbour copycat will work their absolute best to make their game work for the fewest reasonable number of people. The upgrade cycle is.. or was.. a vicious one. New advances in graphics blingosity. New advances in tetra-pass extremo-aliasing. Gigasampled ubertextures with anisotropic, subtropic, tropic and arctic filtering. New advances in making your desktop burst into flames. Or, you know, throw the good old “game.exe has stopped working” on install. And then things settled down. After reaching an optimum level of shininess on consoles, the PC game visuals finally levelled out.

And then Bethesda revealed the system requirements for the PC version of Dishono(u)red. Oh bugger.

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