2 Days with EA Sports Active 2 Kinect
November 20th, 2010 • 1 comment
EA Sports Active 2 is the most ambitious Kinect workout title. In addition to the trainer-led workouts of the Wii original, the new version adds a heart rate monitor and a social fitness tracking website. I recently picked up a copy, and have found it mostly delivers on its promises albeit with some noticeable shortcomings.
The initial setup of the game is a bit lengthy. You’ll be learning how to pair the heart rate monitor with the Xbox 360 and setting up your profile and avatar before you can even begin your workout. The setup is easy enough, but it is time-consuming. I completed this setup and launched directly into the 9-week program which looked like the meat of the experience.
This assumption is most likely true although selecting it resulted in my trainer (also a Devon) proceeding to kick my ass all over my own living room… all at medium intensity! I’m certainly not in terrific shape, but I’m not in bad shape either. I have been known to ride a bike; I walk a good bit every day at my job; and I’m mindful of my diet. The game didn’t really seem to care.
I was wishing the game had given me a bit more guidance before turning me loose to figure things out on my own. For the most part, it’s is very good at handholding. For example, each new exercise is introduced with a helpful tutorial video. However, in the case of where to begin once my character had been created, the game fell a bit short.
I ended up quitting that program in favor of the 3-week cardio program which is very satisfying at the medium intensity. Players might want to start with individual workouts and build up to one of the programs. I would have loved for the game to assess my fitness level and choose a program automatically based on that assessment rather than having to blindly stumble through the process myself.
As of this writing, I have completed two workouts in my own program, buddied up with my wife for a workout in her easy-intensity cardio program, and completed most of a one-off workout — the reason for that not being completed are detailed a bit later. The workouts consist mostly of typical exercises like push-ups and squats with the occasional game-like activity peppered in for variety.
Before Active 2, I had never worked out with a trainer. I found the direction and encouragement the virtual trainer provides very satisfying. If you’re having trouble properly completing an exercise, the trainer will try to tell you what you’re doing wrong. Start struggling near the end of a set of repetitions, and the trainer will count out the final reps. The trainer even appears on-screen at the beginning and end of your workouts to lead you in warm-up and cool-down activities.
Although the trainer is great, he sometimes can’t tell you what you’re doing wrong. My first ever workout was never completed. I was on exercise 15 of 22 in a 20 minute workout. The exercise was V Crunches — my first seated exercise. You typically play by mirroring your avatar. So, I tried to turn my body the same way my avatar did. He was angled about 45 degrees from the screen. I started doing my crunches and noticed my movements were not registering properly.
I found I could turn slightly more toward the screen at the extension in the exercise and the game would recognize my movement. Then, I could turn back to have it recognize the contraction. Unfortunately, this made the exercise exponentially more difficult. I had to quit which resulted in none of my exercises up to that point in the workout being counted. It was a bummer to say the least.
I have since learned that floor exercises are always done at a 90 degree angle to the screen. This brings me to another point. Remember the hullabaloo about Kinect space requirements? EA Sports Active 2 turns that up to 11. I had already cleared about 10-12 feet of play area in my living room and found I needed about 3 feet more for Kinect to properly register the floor exercises. They would still work before, but I had a persistent “Move back from the TV” message displayed on-screen.
For all the depth of the stat tracking and information presented here, it left me wanting more. It takes very basic nutritional information and uses this to fill your “gauge” which is a composite score based on your exercise and nutrition for the day, but it never really makes any specific recommendations for nutrition based on this information.
The same goes for other exercises done outside of the game. They can be recorded using the journal, but they don’t count toward total calories burned. Once this information is composited into your gauge which is scored out of 100, it seems to never be liberated from it again.
Active 2′s singular social feature, Groups, is very superficial. You can see a list of all members of your group in a table with seven statistics to compare to your own. I can click the name of a group member to see a bit more detail, but that’s it. It very much seems like an afterthought.
Perhaps the biggest downfall in the game is with its interface. It is very poorly designed for the Kinect. You will find yourself navigating multiple levels of menus trying to palm tiny menu selections and waiting quite a while for the next menu to load. It appears as though the menu was designed for a controller, but, quite frankly, it’s a bit of a pain to keep grabbing a controller to navigate and then find a good place for it while I’m working out. I would much prefer the interface itself not be part of the workout.
Minor complaints aside, EA Sports Active is so far proving to be a great fitness tool. For someone who knows little about fitness but still puts a value on it, it’s nice to have guidance about what I need to be doing in an exercise routine. The workouts are fun. Most importantly, I now lie in bed typing out this review and, before I started, my fingers were the only part of me not sore and burning. That’s good, right?
Procedural Stories in Practice: Torchlight II
November 16th, 2010 • 3 comments
At Runic Games, if it isn’t randomized, they don’t even want to hear about it. The office restrooms change sexes several times per day, each employee takes a new desk at random intervals, and the water cooler is just as likely to spit out boiling oil as H2O. It’s the same way my posts bounce between fact and fiction without so much as a kind word of warning. In Torchlight, the team further iterated on the concept of randomized dungeons with great success. Now, with Torchlight II, Runic is experimenting with an idea rarely explored: random bits of story.
You’ll still get the randomized dungeons you love, and, if you’ve followed the game, you may already know you’ll be getting outdoor areas as well which will also be randomly generated. In the early days of procedurally generated dungeons, the engine built the dungeon one tile at a time. These days, designers build large chunks which the engine pieces together to form a cohesive area to explore.
The size of chunks fed into the engine has been growing and this sequel with its outdoor areas brings a significant increase in the number and variety of pieces composing a single area.“…the largest dungeon we had in Torchlight was maybe six or maybe seven chunk types and that was in Palace towards the end of the game and that was a very linear progression but it was still a pretty lengthy one. For the outdoor areas forTorchlight II, I think right now we’re averaging around 14 chunks for one of the bigger outdoor areas,” says Patrick Blank, the game’s lead level designer.
The outdoor areas are a natural evolution from the fully underground questing in the first game. It’s a great change of pace for the player to be able to get out into the open from the cramped catacombs. Runic’s founders made the same jump going from the first Diablo to the second back when they were Blizzard North. However, quest randomization in the Diablo series was… well, it barely existed.
In Torchlight II, you will find random events along with other random quests tied to, what Runic calls “landmark areas.” The random events sound very much like those of Red Dead Redemption. JD Wiker, Torchlight II’s resident wordsmith, told me, “An event quest could basically just be a little piece of art asset that just happens to be sitting there like a burned out wagon or something.” This burned out wagon would then have a task associated with it — perhaps finding the bandits who destroyed the wagon or returning a ring found in the rubble to its rightful owner.
The landmark areas, on the other hand, are larger set pieces. JD’s example is the cemetery. “So, if a zone has a cemetery landmark in it, it’s because there are quests available that are associated with that landmark. If you’re following the story, you should get the associated quest. And, if you’re a thorough player, who takes a lot of side quests, you’ll probably get an unrelated quest or two that goes to the same place.”
NPC motives for assigning a quest also have some variance. JD provides an example. “(The NPC) will have you go take care of a task that’s going to be the same because that’s the event task, but each time you encounter him, he’ll have different quest text. He may say, ‘Go fetch me the big rubber ball.’ I’m thinking of that because I’m looking at (Runic Minister of Culture, Wonder Russell)’s Dog, Falcor. He may say, ‘Go fetch me Falcor’s big red rubber ball,’ one time because he was playing with Falcor and he needs Falcor to come back. The next time he might say, ‘Go fetch me the big rubber ball because Falcor’s old rubber ball is worn out and I need a new one.’ It’s the same task, it’s just that he’ll have a different text of why he wants you to go on that particular task.”
It’s reminiscent of recent Rockstar games in which the dialog is slightly different on subsequent repeats of the same task. Although, in those cases, the scenario is the same each time. Anyone who has had to repeat missions in GTA 4 can attest this is a welcome addition to that game, and, in a game that begs to be replayed like Torchlight II, the feature will be welcome to players.
Just as dungeons remain constant in a single game, so do quests. It is only in starting a new character that the procedural content generation engine works its magic. JD explains, “…it’s not going to be that you’ll run into this guy and each time you run into him he’ll say, ’Oh, by the way, I need another rubber ball.’ It’s you’re going to run into him, and he’s gonna say, ‘Get me a rubber ball,’ and you’ll go get it and he’ll be done with you. He’ll have nothing else to talk to you about the rest of the time except to say maybe, ‘Hey, thanks again for picking up my red rubber ball,’ but when you play the game again or play with a different character or whatever — if you’re playing multiplayer and someone else approaches him, they might get completely different text when they talk to him.”
These new additions are exciting, but it made me wish there was some way to incorporate some of these ideas into the main story. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a videogame that was tailoring a story to your action just as a GM might in a game of tabltop D&D? When asked about the prospect, JD has some great insight. “I think it’s theoretically possible. I think that it shifts the workload onto the person who’s generating that system you’re describing. Instead of the level designers being able to plug things in where they want them or to set things up so that the random bits mesh together well, you’re putting a lot of this onto the writer so that no matter which direction the characters go or which random event pops in, it will all eventually tie back in again at the end. If that’s what you’re describing, I think it’s still a lot of work; it just shifts who does that work.”
Gaming is in a transitional period in which narrative is taking on a much larger role than it has in the past. That usually comes in the form of crafted stories. In the wake of this change, it’s refreshing to see a developer like Torchlight continue to push in other directions, namely that of procedural content generation, all the while still conveying an overarching story. “There is an overarching storyline and it is not randomized,” says JD. “So, everytime you play, you will be on that main storyline quest if you follow it all the way through, but there will be side quests and quests revolving around landmarks and event quests and quests that involve the lore of the world.” There is an undeniable appeal of a singular story created by a writer, but the real draw of the game is the way it randomizes bits of story. Random elements in games have been around since Rogue hit in the 1980s, but the approach still has merit. With Torchlight II’s refined approach to randomization, everything old is new again.
I Found Myself at PAX 2009
November 5th, 2010 • No comments
You might think it hyperbole if I told you PAX 2009 in Seattle changed my life forever. I would forgive you for thinking so. After all, headlines are written to glue your eyes to the page (or screen, in this case). They are often embellished just to hook the reader. I would love to hook you. This headline is, however, different in the respect that it is 100% accurate. This is my story.
First, a little background: he can’t quite remember how it all started, but a boy in Knoxville, Tennessee, somehow came around to the subject of the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle, Washington, with his wonderful wife. The boy is sometimes frugal and sometimes quite the opposite with travel spending falling squarely into the former category. He had never done much traveling and ascribed little value to it — certainly much less than the cost of a plane ticket.
Said wife, knowing he would enjoy the trip immensely, “sealed the deal” so-to-speak by purchasing weekend passes for the convention. The boy experienced mixed emotions as this is something he had dreamed about since reading videogame magazines as a child and being enthralled by the loads of new game information coming each year out of CES and, later, E3. He was also sure it would be quite expensive, and, although they live comfortably, they are not exactly swimming in excess.
It worked out well. They had a small nest-egg thanks to a Great Recession tax credit. They borrowed money from themselves and made a vacation out of it. Plane tickets were purchased, hotel room was booked, and the boy prepared to embark on what he did not yet know was a journey of self-discovery. (Groanworthy, yes?)
The trip was a cascade of firsts: his first convention, his first time west of the Mississippi, his first flight… It was an exciting event to the boy who craves adventure far more than he actually has opportunity to experience it.
More importantly, it was the first time he realized his interests were just as valid and important as those of anyone else. It’s hard not to think a hobby is important while surrounded by 69,999 other geeks who love it just as much as you do. When you hear about game conventions, it is a tale of thousands of sweaty, smelly gamers stuffed into a building for 12 hours a day. All the boy noticed oozing from their pores was the same enthusiasm and passion he feels for the hobby.
The boy felt like a star. He was in his element. He was surrounded by games yet unplayed by the masses but, more importantly, by people who shared his love for the medium… and were confident and intelligent.
He met awesome people like Dan (of is better with beer) , Elaine (of Some Other Castle), and Nick (who blogs at UltraNurd.net). He rubbed elbows with minor gaming celebrities who are, to him, more important than anyone who ever appeared in People Magazine. During PAX, he was on an level playing field with these guys. He chatted up Anthony Gallegos, Arthur Geis, and Tyler Barber of Rebel FM, Matt Chandronait and Jason Bertrand of Area5, among others.
For that weekend, he was a celebrity. He faked being important and confident until the fakes were real. He was important. His ideas and thoughts were important. His hobby was important.
Perhaps more important still in this process of self-discovery is that the boy was able to take his new knowledge that gaming was no less than football, jogging, or watching TV, and extrapolate from there. If this was true, it must also be that his social and political ideas, no matter how marginal and wacky they are (and they are both marginal and wacky), must have value too.
He was always confident in himself internally, but, until this event he kept himself closely guarded. Sure, he related to people on a surface level and had no problems making friends. All this came along with the nagging feeling that perhaps he wasn’t good enough or that he was childish or, in terms of the political and social ideas, that he was too idealistic.
Now, he can project himself and his interests without fear. Upon reflection, the impact of the event has spread throughout all aspect of his life. At first, he feels silly to even suggest that a videogame convention could somehow change his life. Then, he remembers that his experiences and the value he derives from them are also valid… just as are his interests and his ideas.
He goes through life now with a renewed vigor and hunger to achieve his dreams. You may call it naive, but he doesn’t really care anymore. It isn’t naive to him. It is him. It is what he has become.
Oh yeah. He also got to play some games.
This first ran at a cool new site called Clocktown started by my friends Griff and Krystle. You will see me posting there periodically.
The Drama of NBA 2K11
October 24th, 2010 • No comments
Professional sports simulations are, by their nature, almost unable to move in the same direction as gaming as a whole. While Mass Effect, Uncharted, and Enslaved are free to push narrative forward, the nature of sports games forces them into a position of making their simulations incrementally more accurate year after year. By following along with the dramatic career of the most famous athlete ever to play the sport, 2K has managed to add a pinch of story into their main course of spot-on simulation.
I am certainly not a rabid sports fanatic. There was a time I was pretty obsessed with basketball, but that was many years ago. Nowadays, I’m one of those clueless folks who has never heard of the current superstars in any pro sport and doesn’t even know which sports are in-season at any given time.
However, I have fond memories of my interest in basketball. If I take this thought a step further, I have fond memories of a time when I would buy and play several basketball videogames every single year. It started with the SNES version of Bulls vs. Blazers and the NBA Playoffs.
In the early ’90s, your favorite team had better make the playoffs or else you wouldn’t see them in that year’s sports title. As far as the game was concerned, they didn’t exist. Also, you wanted to avoid moving around too much with the ball or else you might incur the wrath of the overzealous refs in the form of a charging call.
Developers made incredible strides by the time I tired of playing. I must have quit sometime in the era of the PS2 and Xbox. While I enjoyed playing these games, they improved only incrementally each year. This, along with the fact that I no longer followed basketball, pushed me away.
Fast-forward about seven years. I came very close to picking up NBA 2K10 after seeing some stellar reviews. I figured it had been long enough since I played for me to notice some substantial improvements. The $20 price-point on PC also helped. However, I ended up putting that off because of my extensive backlog at the time.
By the time I was ready to buy, 2K had dropped some delicious info on their next game in the series: the cover athlete would be Michael Jordan. My interest in basketball had coincided almost perfectly with Jordan’s storied career with the Chicago Bulls. This was no coincidence.
As a result, I decided to stick it out for the next game. I was sure I would enjoy it, and the nostalgic draw of being able to play as Jordan was a great incentive to wait. After all, I had already waited more than half a decade.
I fired up the game and was immediately dumped into the shoes of the man himself — a young Jordan facing off against Magic Johnson and the Lakers. I listened to the commentary as the game began. I still count this as the aspect of basketball games most improved in my absence.
As I listened to them recount the events surrounding the game and what was at stake, it occurred to me that I was experiencing something I never had in a sports game before: drama. I was living out a story. The developers wrapped-up this intensity with the rules of basketball and tied it neatly with a nice physics-engine-shaped bow. At that moment, those mechanical improvements helped me to live out this unfolding drama which depicted actual historical events.
It was truly a revelation. I have yet to touch any aspect of the game other than the Jordan Challenges. Why would I want to? I can live out moments that were incredibly important to me when I witnessed them all those years ago. Not to mention I still have yet to complete all the challenges as they are surprisingly difficult. I’m sure that, once I do complete them, I will happily begin my own drama by drafting Jordan into the current league.
You may wonder what makes this any different from playing as your favorite current star in any sports game. In those games, you merely take your team through a fantasy season. That experience may also be enjoyable and certainly has its place, but it lacks one thing that makes the Jordan Challenges unique: context.
For example, one of the challenges is to score at least 55 points against the Knicks. At face value, this challenge is very shallow. The context is introduced by that brilliant and dynamic commentary I mentioned previously.
Before it starts, you can read about the circumstances surrounding that particular game. In different scenarios, you hear that Jordan is playing in his first outing since returning from retirement or the commentators mention articles from local newspapers. This detailed commentary continues throughout the course of the game.
These minor details make the scenarios feel much more real. Much like one of the many random objects littered around the worlds of Bethesda’s RPGs, NBA 2K11 has an attention to detail you expect from a game driven by narrative. Fortunately for us, that’s what this game is: a sports game driven by narrative.
I recognize much of this could be lost on someone without proper context. For one, if you didn’t know these scenarios were based on actual games, the challenges would lose weight. The reason they are so dramatic is that they really happened! Each of those games — and countless others — are tiny little stories of triumph over adversity. These stories, when taken as a whole, make up a career whose equal is not yet on the horizon and one that no player will eclipse for years to come.
Almost every aspect of NBA 2K11 is stellar from the quick response to the deft transitional animations, but that’s not the real draw of the game. It allows you to experience a level of drama and emotion that digs deep past the typical surface level provided by these games. You won’t simply make the buzzer-beater to win the fantasy finals; you will, as Michael Jordan, make the game-winning shot against the Utah Jazz in 1997 to win his sixth and final NBA Championship in his last game as a Chicago Bull. It’s specific details such as these that push NBA 2K11 from the starting five to the Hall of Fame.
[Thanks again go out to Bryan Harper for his help editing this piece.]
Ignorance Is Sometimes Awesome (Or How I Ended My Fun with Recettear)
October 18th, 2010 • No comments
In the case of machines we come to rely on, there are definite advantages to knowing as much as possible. In the case of videogames, it usually helps me to have much of the inner workings hidden behind a thick curtain of mystery and wonder. I was reminded of this sad fact soon after beginning my third attempt repaying my father’s loan in recent indie darling Recettear.
In order for you, dear reader, to understand fully, I need to tell you a bit about the game — give you some much-needed context. In Recettear, you manage an item shop to earn money used to repay the gargantuan debt left behind by your father. If you make all the payments, you win the game. If you miss one, you restart the game with your current level and inventory intact. No one wins on the first try. At least, no one wins on the first try without help.
By the third go ’round, I was ready to put the game to bed. It’s enjoyable, but I can only take so much of theGroundhog Day-ness of it (read: not a Dead Rising fan). With about 20 hours logged and two attempts blown, I resorted to searching out strategies online. I found some excellent information… and by “excellent,” I mean “thorough”… and by “thorough,” I mean “terrible.”
The game has been available for a matter of weeks. This is the only fact you need in order to understand that the Internet has already discovered every quirk, every eccentricity, and every bit of minutiae anyone could ever glean from it without combing through the source code line-by-line. The Internet is working on that as we speak.
Said strategies told me exactly how to make customers happy with the precise selling prices necessary to gain their trust. Then, they told me when and how to take advantage of this newfound trust to gain maximum profits. That sounds familiar. Gain their trust, then take full advantage when they express gratitude. Hmm. I felt like I was back in sales training at Comcast. This is not a good thing.
Up to this point, the game felt really dynamic. The shoppers obviously had different thresholds for how much markup they could tolerate, but I had yet to discover exactly what those were. I had noticed the little hearts which indicated the shopper was very happy with the price, but I didn’t really even know how (or if) this affected the game. It was the simpler time in the relationship before you discovered she pees in the shower and likes erotic fan-fiction based on The Simpsons. I was enjoying the process of slowly uncovering the game’s mysteries.
This new information armed me with more than enough to complete the game on my next attempt… but I never did. Now that I knew how simplistic the game’s wants and desires were, it was really more joke than game. It was immature like a baby — a simple little bundle of wants and needs without the tools to properly convey them. Sadly, my love affair with Recettear had ended.
Every game has these limitations. We human beings live every day in a world of almost infinite possibility. We want our games to capture as much of that possibility as they can… and they do. Sadly, that isn’t much.
Each choice and branching decision we can make in a game is a developer sitting in front of a computer saying to himself, “Maybe we should let the player do this cool thing!” He codes for a while, and — presto! — we have a facsimile of a tiny choice we might make in real life available to the character, our connection to the virtual world.
Games are sold based on what they have rather than what they don’t. Being proper enthusiasts, we gorge ourselves on all the information leading up to release. We bring home the new game excited about the possibilities. To return to the box metaphor, once we have this box inside our home, it’s hard not to see the box’s dimensions, regardless of how sexy the box is.
The walls of the box are little disappointments, little things we try that didn’t quite work as we had hoped; they are options we would have had in life (if life were like the world of the game) that we now discover are missing.
Some games are worse than others. Perhaps they show you an obstacle that would be easy to jump over, but they didn’t give you a jump button. They show you buildings which are meant to be real, but you cannot enter and explore. Some games shine their light elsewhere and are less concerned with possibilities.
I was never bothered by my inability to jump in Mass Effect. OK, that’s not entirely true… there were probably times that was a little annoying, but since the game is focused on conversation and narrative, it wasn’t really a big deal. Now, when I wasn’t able to say exactly what I wanted to say in conversation… that is another issue entirely.
In games like Recettear where much of the focus is on one or two mechanics meant to compose the fun of the game, the limitations are front-and-center. Haggling in life is dynamic, interesting, and, if you have the proper disposition, fun! I can make an offer and explain why, playing to their sympathies. They may refuse but later call me up and say they decided to accept. The motives of both parties are complicated as are their criteria for an acceptable offer.
On the surface, Recettear appears to have captured many of these traits. As I said, I played through more than 20 hours and was enthralled. Of course, in the back of my mind I always realize there are limitations. They don’t have an army of dudes (and dudettes) sitting around haggling with me on the back-end.
Part of me just wants to forget. I know a computer program has more limitations than life, but I want to get lost in the simulation. My only hope is that the simulation is deep enough that I never actually butt heads with the limits. Ignorance is sometimes awesome.
Once those limits are apparent, having been revealed to you either through play of the game or from above (i.e. the Internet), the game loses something. In a game like Recettear where a big piece of the fun is in haggling with shoppers and trying to figure out what makes them tick, losing that sense of mystique is damning. The game is about that discovery. I hope, for your sake, you acquire that omniscience through play. If so, you have gotten from the game what the designers intended. Take the information when its handed to you on a silver platter, and — trust me on this — you’re only hurting yourself.
Minecraft: It’s the Journey, Not the Destination
October 3rd, 2010 • No comments
Minecraft is less a game and more an impressive toolset that throws players into a world and allows them to build (or destroy) wonderful things. This is, perhaps, the most discussed aspect of the game. However, the yin to Minecraft’s yang of digital Legos gets decidedly less attention: exploring a mysterious world. If you, like me, look at the fantastic structures built by other players with awe but also with the feeling, “I will never have the time to build something that ridiculous,” you may find the more appealing draw of Minecraft is getting to explore a random and unknown world.
Years ago, games were often not documented well-enough, and, before the Internet, this was a serious problem. Now, we have the opposite problem: games are often too well documented sometimes forcing you, the player, to suffer through hours of banal tutorials before letting you actually play the game. Minecraft is the antithesis of this approach. But, unlike its counterparts of yore, Minecrafthas the giant network of documentation we know as the Internet on which to rely.
It’s sometimes a bit cumbersome for the modern gamer to have to search for documentation online rather than having it in-game. Despite this, the approach does have its advantages. When you first generate your world in Minecraft, you have no idea what to do or what is possible within the confines of the game world. Everything waiting for you in this vast random world is a mystery waiting to be discovered. In fact, many of the best tutorials available (like this one) are written sparsely enough to show you the basics while preserving much of the mystique.
The minimal documentation lends itself to a succession of startling discoveries, the first being that the game allows you to craft certain tools and objects using the resources you find in the world. This knowledge along with the specific recipes for a couple of basic items were the extent of the preparation I made going into my own first play session.
The “game” for me is setting some goal for crafting a particular item and then doing whatever necessary to attain it. One of my typical early goals when I start a new game is to make torches so that I may light the way as I dig deep and discover some of the hard-to-find minerals in the game. For this, you need coal.
I found some coal but not enough to produce the torches necessary to really get deep to where the good stuff is. This led to my digging a shallow mine into the side of a mountain. As you can see, even the crafting goals I set for myself tend to devolve into more exploration than actual crafting. I wasn’t finding much over the standard stone until I made a very literal breakthrough.
As I dug further into the mountain, I found myself falling. To what, I didn’t know, but I ended up in a cavern already hollowed out below the mine I myself was digging. This is a single-player game, mind you, so it was surprising to find a seemingly deliberate network of caves below my own handiwork. I started to explore.
The caverns were, for the most part, very much like the hallways of rock I had hollowed out above. That’s when I came across a room surrounded by a different type of stone than I was accustomed to seeing. There was a small opening from this room into the main corridor. I peaked inside to find the undead welcoming committee firing at me with abandon. The opening was quite small (only a single block wide and a couple of blocks tall). The skeletons had great difficulty getting even an arrow out to me let alone they themselves escaping to bring me to my doom.
My character was, at this time, ill-prepared for any sort of battle scenario. I was much more interested in — that’s right — the exploration aspects of the game. I had a plethora of picks but only a single sword. Luckily, I found the skeletons at the back of the room were content to continue firing their arrows despite the obstructive positionining of their cohorts. Most of the skeletons were eliminated by friendly fire leaving me only one or two to clean up.
I finished them off and placed a torch on the wall to find quite a bounty. Much to my surprise, the wall was lined with chests loaded with items I didn’t even know were possible. It was at this moment I realized the monsters must be crafting too. (Although they may not actually be crafting in-game, this seems to be the only logical explanation for the existence of such items in my otherwise unpopulated world.) I looted as much as I could before I found myself being fired on yet again. Another skeleton was behind me and struck his killing blow before I could make the necessary adjustment (i.e. my sword prying apart his ribs).
After respawning, I returned to my little slice of Hell-on-virtual-Earth, killed a couple of skeletons, and took another look around. In the center of the room, a small odd-looking cube cried out that it could be the source of the enemies. I tried to destroy it but failed.
In a few seconds, more enemies had spawned and put a fatal stop to my investigation. Sure, this didn’t end with any sort of climactic battle or even a single Earth-shattering discovery, but the entire event was a cascading series of discoveries that each changed my view of what Minecraft is.
The whole thing was a humbling experience. There I was, thinking I had this game figured (“It’s about crafting. Duh!”) when the game rose up and dumped a cup of undead ice water in my face. I had only scratched the surface.
Even veteran players are constantly discovering new facets as the developer pushes out updates automatically through the client. Rather than breaking all the additions down in plain view as is often the way of developers, Notch, as he is lovingly called by his throngs of adoring fans, simply pushes out the update and lets the community organically discover their shiny new cubes of wonder.
Exploration and discovery are such highly sought-after human experiences, it’s no wonder many thousands of players have signed on to bash cubes and rip apart trees with their bare hands. Notch has created an engine that builds interesting worlds and hands them over to the player. We have a vast expanse, little guidance, and no pesky tutorials telling us to go here or to click this button to make stuff.
Maybe after I’ve played a bit more, I will tire of exploring and get down to just building, but I think there will always be a part of me that wants to see what’s out there. Given a new world and the tools to make it ours, who can blame us for first taking a look around?
The Hidden Kinect Requirement: Mixing Motion Controls and HD Visuals
September 15th, 2010 • 1 comment
High-definition motion controllers bring new possibilities, and with them, a new set of problems. You’ll find plenty of discussion online about the space requirements for Kinect — a subject many gamers already broached with the Wii. What you won’t find is discussion of a brand-new, more nuanced problem specific to this forthcoming high-def hardware: your vision.
The basement of my house has become what some might call a “mancave.” I have a modest 46-inch HDTV connected to my consoles and my PC. Until recently, I kept my futon about 12 feet from the screen, and it was from there that most of my gaming took place. Everything worked out beautifully — except my computer.
Sure, the PC itself functioned well enough, but since it’s the only device that utilizes all 1920 horizontal pixels, it was very difficult to see detail in some games, and it was nigh impossible to see text when browsing the web — most web fonts are one or two pixels wide and two or three pixels high on the display. Seeing seven or eight square pixels out of more than two million on a 46-inch display from a distance of 12 feet is not a happy endeavor, even with the magic of corrective lenses.
It was then I realized that as displays become better, you need to be closer to them to see all that…er…betterness. The THX HDTV setup recommendations state that to find the optimum seating distance, you should “divide the size of your screen by .84.” If you’re starting from the viewing distance rather than the TV size, you can multiply by .84 for the opposite result. This means that a viewing distance of twelve feet — my original set up — would require a 120-inch screen to properly take in the splendor of the images present on screen. On the flip side, it also means that I should be about four to five feet from my 46-inch set. Since neither solution was workable, I looked around for some looser recommendations.
I found an online viewing-distance calculator which provides the hard-and-fast THX recommendations alongside a slightly more realistic recommendation based on a specification written by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. (This is the guideline I will be using for the remainder of this article.) I could see myself upgrading to a 60-inch screen at some point. That puts me at about eight feet for a happy viewing experience. I tightened my room up by sliding the futon closer to the screen — the prescribed eight feet — and now suffer much less eye strain. Once I do finally upgrade to the bigger set, I suspect I will have no problems whatsoever.
Perhaps this deserves a bit more explanation: Back in the days of standard definition, a 36-inch set was enough for almost any space. The picture on that set had 480 vertical lines of on-screen rendering composing the image. The pixels had to be large enough that those 480 lines filled the screen to create a single, unbroken image.
Today’s high-definition displays pack 1080 vertical lines of pixels. In order to fit more than twice as many pixels on a display of the same size, the pixels need to be smaller. Tiny pixels are naturally harder to see. But the reason high definition looks better is because those extra pixels deliver additional detail that the fewer pixels of standard definition can’t describe. Viewers don’t need to be able to distinguish individual pixels, but they do need to be able to fundamentally register each one to get the full impact of the image — most easily evidenced by my web-text example.
I’m skirting around the point that this is a consideration many people never make when buying a TV. Games haven’t traditionally featured distance requirements between the player and the display. But the Wii broke new ground in that respect. Players now need to ensure they have space to fling their white, plastic remotes as they jump, shoot, and minigame their way to glory.
So, what’s the difference? This is old news, right? Not if you factor in one of the biggest selling point of cutting-edge visuals: high definition. I could hook up a Wii to my grandparents’ floor-model Admiral and still see every one of the Wii’s 480 vertical pixels from across town. On the 360 and PS3, the lowest-resolution games are nearly twice that of the Wii, with a few games venturing further up the high-def ladder. Motion controls impose an “artificial” distance requirement on your living room set up, and as I squinted at my PC from afar, the mythical Wii HD is started to look much less attractive.
Microsoft has set the space requirements for Kinect at a reasonable six feet. This is not terribly difficult as this viewing distance merely requires a 45-inch diagonal-set measurement for proper viewing — remember I’m the guy who has a TV with a standard-manufacturer measurement of 46 inches. It does, however, exclude those with 36-inch, 37-inch, and 42-inch displays, which are all relatively popular. If you’re interested in complying with the THX spec, you’re looking at a 54-inch display, even at this distance. Other sources claim more space is needed to play properly — in fact, much more.
Giant Bomb’s Jeff Gerstmann stated on the August 10 Bombcast that he recommends 13 feet in order to get the entire player into the Kinect’s calibration frame (the discussion begins at around one hour and seven minutes). My second, more liberal HD recommendation source indicates that a 12-foot viewing distance needs an 88-inch screen. Needless to say, mere mortals like you and I will probably never own a screen of the size necessary to discern a 1080p display from 13 feet — the Kinect’s purported optimal registration range. But let’s get a number, anyway, just for giggles.
That number is a staggering 96 inches (or 116 inches [120-inch manufactured screen] based on the official THX specs). Unless you plan on buying up the local movie theater and converting it into your personal gaming palace, you will most likely never properly play a 1080p game at a distance that is optimal for both the Kinect and the high-def game you’re using it for (according to Gerstmann’s hands-on recommendation).
Many of you may be wondering if this is really such a big deal. Of course, it’s all a matter of perspective. For the hardcore, the anal retentive, or those like me who are lucky enough to be both, the thought of losing fidelity in a lovingly crafted game is an affront to our sensibilities. We painstakingly select a display which will best compliment our beloved pastime. We believe games are art and want to experience everything they have to offer. And for everyone else, it’s a moot point.
It is akin to the VHS and DVD trend of so-called “fullscreen” movies — which actually only displayed a portion of the frame at any given time. The majority of buyers didn’t care about the artistic integrity of the film and merely wanted their SDTV filled from edge to edge with picture. But purists wouldn’t hear of recklessly cropping a film in the name of practicality.
My concern is that it’s all antithetical to the marketing message of “high-definition motion control.” After all, high definition doesn’t matter if the player is too far away to see it.
Games you missed: The Witcher
August 3rd, 2010 • No comments
The Witcher is a PC RPG. It was developed in Eastern Europe. Those two traits taken together have a pronounced stigma. Games developed in this part of the world (particularly PC games) are thought to be buggy, unfinished, or broken despite some inevitable interesting ideas. Spoken dialog will, most likely, be awkward and poorly done. Crashes are expected. The Witcher is often lumped with other games and scoffed at by most gamers. There are always players willing to put up with the problems of any game to find the deeply buried redeeming qualities. Developers of these types of games have their own band of cheerleaders willing to overlook or downplay almost any faults. Therefore, it’s easy for the average gamer to write off the praise The Witcher has garnered as the same sort of sentiment some players feel for other seriously flawed games. The Witcher needs none of that. The Witcher is a gem of a game combining the polish of big-budget US developed RPGs (I’m looking at you, BioWare.) while presenting a slightly darker, more mature story than those counterparts.
Geralt is a witcher, a phenomenon described best by someone else (I don’t recall who.) as a dark medieval version of a Jedi. He has the strength of many mortal men and commands magical powers. Geralt is a very nuanced character and much of that nuance is up to the player with a refreshing lack of contrivance like the prescribed morality of recent games like inFAMOUS, and, to a lesser extent, Mass Effect 2. What I mean is this: those games give you choices, but the game already knows which choice is the good choice and which is the bad choice. This allows the game to shape outcomes of events based on whether you are basically good or basically evil. It makes sense in the context of a game. The Witcher, however, emulates the Dragon Age approach giving you multiple choices, each with consequences, none being clearly “good” or “evil.” In fact, the word “emulates” is a terrible choice here as the game pre-dates BioWare’s epic by more than two years.
Just as I claim this game doesn’t have the caveats of those other wacky PC games, I must say the game does have its own caveats although they are few and minor. The edition you will be buying if you should buy today is the enhanced edition which includes additional animation and corrected translations. This edition fixed some problems people had with the dialog in the original version. In its current incarnation, the dialog is not up to the standard of something like Uncharted 2, but it is more than serviceable. The voice actor playing the part of Geralt is excellent and has an appropriate soft-spoken gravelly quality befitting to his appearance. The biggest problem I have had with the game is the opening sequence. It is something of a tutorial in a confined area which is a very poor representation of the game which lies ahead. After an hour or two of being stuck in this small area, having your hand held everywhere you go leading you from one quest into another, the game sets you free into a much larger play area. The entire world is not open a la the Bethesda games, but describing the area as “open” is not inaccurate. You will receive both story quests and side-quests which you may complete at your leisure while within that area. Later, the game will move you into another large area. The game has proceeded like that through the first three chapters and appears to be continuing along that path. I am currently about to move on and have been told by an NPC that I should finish anything I want in this area before moving on as I may be unable to return.
Having played Dragon Age, the game is quite refreshing. It doesn’t need to maintain a strict battle/story rhythm. It’s content to let me spend half an hour talking with town bigwigs trying to feel my way through the political climate of the area. The story is excellent making this approach very successful. When combat does occur, it feels gimmicky early. The physical attacks are based on a rhythm. If you initiate each attack in the sequence with proper timing, you will continue the combo allowing you to perform the bigger hits later in the combo. Later, you’ll start picking up new “signs” (the game’s spells) and recipes to make the battles a bit more interesting. For the most part, combat is quick and doesn’t get in the way of the real meat of the game.
I have logged 30 hours in the game right now and have no plans of slowing down. The game is paced perfectly for a working person like myself. I can sit down with the game for 30 minutes to an hour a couple of nights a week and have an intensely satisfying experience in which I have advanced my character and some sub-plots by doing a couple of side missions in addition to advancing the main story of the game slightly. The pacing complements that nicely.
What can I write about The Witcher which hasn’t been written, and why would I write it now? This is simply stale, right? That might be true if not for a fantastic sale at GamersGate where the game is on offer for $6.78! This is no sponsored post nor am I earning any sort of commission. I picked the game back up a couple of months back after two false starts where I quit before finishing the tutorial and thought this the perfect opportunity to pass this gem on to you, dear reader. If you buy the game and enjoy it, please keep your eyes peeled because information has been trickling out about The Witcher 2 since the big reveal at E3. The developer has coded their own engine rather than repurposing an old BioWare engine as they did for the first game. Even though the repurposing worked remarkably well, this should allow them to edge closer to their vision.
Torchlight Texture Project v1.2
July 31st, 2010 • No comments
I suspect many of my gaming readers may already own Torchlight. Hell, they’ve practically been giving it away on Steam. It has been offered at $5 no less than twice and $10 countless times since its release a few months ago. Some of the draw for many players is in the form of the low system requirements. The game even employs a “Netbook mode” in its options although I still doubt it would run on most of the glorified calculators which carry that moniker. This advantage is something of a double-edged sword for many as this leaves the graphics looking slightly sub-par even in the higher detail levels. Behold! The Torchlight Texture Project!
This is a replacement for many of the textures in the game. I don’t know exactly every single texture which was replaced, and I believe even the author(s?) of the project seems to have lost count at this point. Suffice it to say that a large chunk of this game looks quite a lot better thanks to some nice high-resolution textures. It doesn’t at all break the style of the art in the game. Install away without fear!
About this whole “installation” business. The installation of the mod is pretty easy, but it isn’t quite as simple as the author makes it out to be if you haven’t installed any other mods for Torchlight. Yes, you should simply drop the extracted folder into Torchlight’s “mods” folders, but that folder isn’t conveniently located in the program’s installation folder. Instead, you’ll find it at “%appdata%\Runic Games\Torchlight\mods” which you are welcome to copy and paste into your “Run” dialog box at will. If you’re on Windows 7, you should try “%appdata%\Roaming\Runic Games\Torchlight\mods” instead. On the Mac, you need to hit “~/library/application support/runic games/torchlight/mods” to install the mod.
Enjoy your newfound graphical fidelity. If you own the game on Steam and have never installed a TL mod before, you’ll also get a small surprise when you boot the mod for the first time!
Abstracting hardware: obsolescence obsolete (with OnLive)
March 25th, 2009 • 1 comment
Most everyone has heard the news of OnLive, the new cloud-based computer gaming platform. I’m not here to regurgitate that for you. Instead, I intend to give it some context.
Cloud computing is all the rage right now. With netbooks growing in popularity, all sorts of Internet-based services are popping up to make the experience of owning a netbook more rich. OnLive applies this model to PC gaming while broadening its appeal way beyond the netbook crowd. Where an app like Google Documents might outsource a little processor load and some data storage, OnLive’s system will send all of the intense load to your CPU and graphics card associated with PC gaming to a monstrous computer hundreds of miles away. The benefits are clear. While existing web apps have sold themselves to the typical PC user on convenience (e.g. the ability to access documents anywhere), this is the only service I can think of that has a chance to sell itself by saving gamers significant money on the hardware that is typically necessary to run these intensive games… not to mention the dedication to keep up with frequent upgrades just to maintain the performance status-quo. An entry-level gaming PC is going to cost around $800. This system enables a $300 netbook to do the same thing by relegating every task associated with the game other than actual display of the resulting video stream.
There are also implications here for the established modes of game distribution. In my most recent post, I discussed a possibility for a new model of game distribution that does away with the physical product altogether, but that proposition did not suggest any fundamental shifts in the way gaming works—only the way they are distributed. Digital distribution platforms have gained significant popularity over the past year. OnLive’s distribution model is digital, but it seems to be something of a hybrid between GameTap and Steam. I honestly don’t understand the model entirely, but Steve Perlman claimed in an interview there will be tiers of service which suggests a subscription model while the interface’s options for either buying or renting any given title suggests a more traditional model of paying per title. This is serious competition on either front. Steam will have difficulty as games that are available for both services will have significantly lower requirements through OnLive. Subscription services like GameTap typically serve so-called “casual” gamers better and contain few if any new release hardcore games. OnLive is coming into this with major partnerships with huge publishers (and committments for simultaneous release with retail) to give it some more muscle.
For the numerous advantages, this service already has a few small disadvantages I can see. First, the max resolution being quoted right now is 720p which is a bit behind the times. I understand there are now Internet bandwidth considerations as the resolution increases, and I’m sure that is the reason for this choice. It doesn’t make it any better for gamers that crave high fidelity experience with their PC gaming and are accustomed to running 1920×1200 or higher resolutions on their PCs. Second, with any digital distribution model comes concerns about consumer issues. As with other similar platforms, many consumers will likely not be comfortable with the license they are actually purchasing. Every software purchase is merely a license whether or not you receive a physical product, but, frankly, it is much easier for software publishers to enforce unreasonable demands in a license while they still control the software. If I have a disc, I can always resell it whereas a digital software purchase may be impossible to transfer.
For all my excitement, I am sceptical. It sounds much to good to be true. The only way we’ll know (before an actual launch, that is) is by getting in on the beta which should start this summer. If OnLive launches at an attractive price, good performance, and reasonable licensing agreements, this may be the Trojan horse that brings PC gaming back to the forefront.