the-inbetween.com

Battlefield 2 Retail

The full version of Battlefield 2 plays the same as the demo, but now there are more maps, a new faction, and some new vehicles. What I wrote about the demo's gameplay still holds true. There are a few gameplay design decisions that I don't like too much -- like the magical fix-anything commander crates and that the Special Operations class gets no points for destroying strategic enemy installations, despite the fact that the other Support classes get points for essentially sitting on their asses around other players -- but nothing to get hung up about.

Mini review: solid gameplay; decent performance/look; horrendous, sluggish, unfriendly user interface; attrocious server browser; laggy and buggy rank tracking. The meat of the game is good, but the wrapper blows. Sadly, such poor interfaces are -- and I feel like I've said this, even more sadly, a million times -- the norm rather than the exception.

It's the laggy ranked servers that bug me the most. There are additional weapons that can be unlocked in the game, but to do so you have to play on the global ranked servers. Your global stats are also tracked on these, and only these, servers. Unfortunately, these are also the laggiest piece of shit servers around. There was one good server that I managed to find, but that one had a mere 16 player maximum. There was a 64 player server that was tolerable, and I tore it up there, but it seems as though those stats weren't even recorded. I was awarded a medal. Now it's lost somewhere in the great TCP/IP garbage can. ARGH.

It's been said by some that the Battlefield games are always best after a patch. I do not like this.

Also, I managed to figure out my screenshot woes. It seems as though ingame screenshots work fine, but summary screen shots go to the clipboard instead of to the hard-drive. I have no idea why. It's weird. But at least I now know how to preserve those ego-inflating scores when they (inevitably) come along. Too bad I already lost so many of them.

IGF Web Browser Games

The IGF competition now has a "Best Web Browser Game" category, which should prove to be a benefit to those more indie than indie game developers that had no business being in the same category as the six-figure budget types of indies. That always struck me as an odd disparity -- to have games with $200,000 budgets in the same category as those with budgets in the negative dollar range. Such differences are inevitable, as "independent" paints a broad picture, but it always seemed a little bit unfair.

Of course, there's no reason why anyone couldn't do a quarter-million dollar browser game (Habbo Hotels costs, for example, are seven figure), but with the lower consumer expectations and attention-spans -- browser games are seen much more as quick diversions -- that wouldn't seem like the greatest of investments. Not for something non-persistent, at least. And because of that, the market is far more self-sustained at the lowly, indie maker level.

The other benefit is that browser games are far easier to deploy and are generally easier to develop. So about that IGF-off...

PSP Stuff

A lot of people are repeating the GamesIndustry story about how UMD film sales have topped 100,000. I think they're repeating it incorrectly, though it's likely to be a mistake on GI's part. They quote:

Sales of films distributed on Universal Media Disc (UMD), Sony's proprietary disc format for PlayStation Portable, have topped 100,000 according to the platform holder.

Which seems fine unless you remember this USA Today story from last month: Two UMD movies have now sold more than 100,000 copies each: Sony's House of Flying Daggers and Resident Evil 2.

Which leads me to conclude that this is what was meant:

Sales of individual films distributed on Universal Media Disc (UMD), Sony's proprietary disc format for PlayStation Portable, have topped 100,000 according to the platform holder.

I expect better fact checking than this from GI.

Also, here's a hypothesis: the large explosion of "homebrew" PSP development is due to the fact that PSP owners, myself included, have absolutely nothing to play on the device. There is a dearth of quality new releases for the system. Launch titles can only sustain for so long.

Of course, that's not (entirely) true, but that is a big factor in sales and the main reason why the DS is pulling further, and further away from the PSP in Japan. I wish I had recent numbers for North American hardware sales.

Anyway, a "homebrew" exploit that doesn't require extra hardware (second memory card) is out now. I shall try it out. I am, however, annoyed by the bandying of the word "homebrew". When the first PSP exploits were revealed and the first emulators started showing up, it was said that it was a boon for "homebrew development". This can be true, but for the most part it's bullshit. I had a rant, but I'll just write one comment: faulty justifications are worse than none at all.

Minish Cap

I am playing The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap. It is a nice change of pace from Battlefield 2 and from bitching. My only annoyance is that after playing through some half-dozen Zelda games I am very familiar with the routine of the story-line. It would be great if I could skip all that exposition and head straight for the dungeons -- the meat of the game -- right off the bat.

If there was a sort of "Lost Levels" remix of Link to The Past, where the game only consisted of a dangerous overworld and many interconnected dungeons, I would so buy it.

Hey, it worked for Metroid: Zero Mission!

Westerns

I grew up with the films of the late 80s and early 90s. The staple of the time consisted of slasher flicks, cornball 80s action movies with Seagal and Van Damme and the Governor, and the comedies starring Bill Murray or John Candy, many of which were regulars on Sunday afternoon television. Not the greatest bunch of movies, but at ten you're not expected to have the greatest of tastes.

Westerns were never in the picture. They seemed like a long lost relic of the past, not suited to the pre-teen late-80s sensibilities.

Now that I'm older and slightly wiser, I'm finding myself increasingly interested in the Westerns of yore. Lucky for me, Showcase Action's Western Weekend gave me the perfect opportunity to catch up; and catch up I did, with A Fistful of Dollars, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Unforgiven. A good start if I say so myself. Sergio Leone's Man With No Name films, in particular, appeal to my loner habitualness.

Naturally, I started thinking about how interesting a Western-homage could be in video game form (cause I am a nerd and I think of such things), but contemplating how a game like that would work convinced me of the fact that such a game -- as far as so-called "A" titles are concerned -- will never happen. It would require a lot of minor changes to the "formula", like having every single bullet count and making the drawing and holstering of the gun an important play mechanic (none of this stiff-arm always carrying a gun in front of you garbage), but with dozens of such minor ideas a game like that could be pulled off.

But it won't. There's a lot that could be done, and it would be fresh to do it because few have tried, but I doubt it. Maybe some independents here or there, but no major developers (the ones with their heads up the ass of FPS convention). With the current industry's fixation with anti-heros, you'd think that it might turn its collective eye to the genre chock full of them instead of the world of rappers and 70s gangster movie licenses. But they won't.

Instead, we might just get a mindless blow-em-up bullet fest or a Western with Vampires or Zombies or something else exceedingly retarded without the slightest inkling of humour. My pessimism and cynicism for original "top-tier" games knows no bounds.

Newsflash for High Moon Studios: if your game was a movie, it would not be near the top of this list of Westerns, alongsideThe Good, the Bad and the Ugly. No, it would be at the bottom, right beside Billy the Kid versus Dracula.

This entry needs more Wild Gunman.

Battlefield 2 Demo

I had no real intention to play Battlefield 2, nor did I know when it was coming out, but I was given some "encouragement" and a high-speed download link for the demo and thus, after a dozen minutes, I couldn't not install it.

I have never played the previous Battlefield games. In fact, the Battlefield 2 demo is the first PC game I have played online since, literally, the early days of Counter Strike (and the late days of Delta Force). Yet, despite all this, BF2 feels very familiar. In a good way.

Once you get past the irritating game interface (why does that feel like the standard? ARGH) and into the actual game, you pretty much know where to go, what to do, and how to do it. BF2 doesn't try to reinvent the wheel at the macro combat level, and as such it remains (relatively) accessible at that get-in-and-mindlessly-shoot-things level.

And it does that scale of things well. The classes seem balanced, the weapons and the damage they inflict feel fair (including the not rediculously over-powered sniper rifles), the vehicles don't dominate the game (a good infantry group can take out any ground-based vehicle pretty effectively), and the stock map seems to have many different tactical options. It does what has been previously done (and not solely in the previous Battlefield games), and it does it well.

On the micro level, the game becomes more complex. You have your commanders calling air strikes and launching UAVs and dropping supplies, enemy artillery and radar sites to destroy, the more complex air vehicles, the squads with their own unique objectives and the (rather strategic) spawn points that follow the squad leader. All these options (and more) are there, though poorly documented and explained in the demo, if you choose to get deeper into the game, but they are never essential for a quick gaming experience. They don't ever alienate the more "casual" player.

The squad leader spawn points, in particular, are a great feature that can make an assault on a base that much more intense and strategic. However, in the hands of an incompetent leader, that spawn point can become a liability. I was playing on one server with zero spawn time -- a crazy game experience on its own right -- and I kept spawning in the gun turret of my commander's attacking tank. The tank was tearing it up in the enemy base, but I kept spawning in the vulnerable turret position with a giant target on my head. I think I was killed four times in a row before I even realized (thanks to the instant respawns) that I was getting sniped. When I clued in, I immediately changed my spawn point and removed myself from that squad.

As with virtually all online games, the competence of the other players and the capabilities of the server are almost as important to the enjoyment of the game as the actual game design. If you find yourself on a server running off a 28k modem, or on a server infested with team-killing parasites, or on a server where the team balance is 32 to 20 (ARGH), or on a server full of soloing players that don't realize that this is a team oriented game, you're going to be more frustrated than jubilant.

But if you find yourself on that one utopian server (of death!), then Battlefield 2 can be very enjoyable. And if you find yourself consistently at the top of the scoreboards*, than that enjoyment increases ten fold. It can turn 11pm to 4am without you even realizing it.

(* <brag>Too bad that BF2 seems to have a (almost too convenient) screenshot eating bug, because then I could backup my bragging with proof. Hey, just because I don't play PC shooters often doesn't mean that I am an amateur! Now you'll just have to take my word for it. </brag>)

Murderball

Earlier in the week, I came across a link to the trailer for the documentary "Murderball". It looks like an interesting little film, but when I first saw the words "murderball" I thought it would be a documentary about a very different type of "sport". The Murderball that I know is the one that I remember from grade school.

Like many schoolyard games of the time, Murderball had a very crude but appropriate name. I can't fully remember the "rules" of the game, but it basically consisted of one "player" standing against the school wall while other people whipped tennis balls at him. He had to face the throwers and could only move along the wall to avoid the throws, and if he got hit... well, too bad. I can't remember what (if any) was the mechanic of determining who went to the wall and when, but I don't think it really mattered. The game was just an excuse for youthful violence.

A similar game, "Red Ass", I remember more fondly. In Red Ass, players would whip the tennis ball against the wall. On its return, someone had to attempt to catch it. If they failed -- in other words, if it touched them on the body or escaped their grip -- they were, essentially, "it" and had to run to the wall and touch it to become neutral. The name of the game arose from what happened when a player was "it". If someone was running for the wall, they were a free target. You were supposed to whip the ball at them. If you were quick enough (or if they weren't evasive enough) you'd hit their backside with the ball. Ideally, you'd hit them hard.

Of course, the option to never play the ball was always present, but if you never touched it, you'd never have the chance to hurt your friends (or enemies). At that point, you would just be spectating and that wouldn't be as fun, for to have fun in "Red Ass" is to manage risk vs. reward.

I think there were many variants to these games, and they merged together quite often, but for the most part they were ruleless. Play for the sake of play. Video games seem limited by comparison.

wiki

I was thinking of setting up a wiki on my new ludologizer.com domain, because it seems like the cool thing to do. Then PBWiki launched. In an instant it ended my plan, thanks to its simplicity and easy set up. So I'm using that for my wiki now while the domain, once again, returns to a state of duh. Not sure what to do with it. Again.

The hassle-free set up reaffirmed in me the useful goodness that Wikis can provide. I then followed the links to see the source code that PBWiki is based off of, only to be reminded of the horrendous abuse that they can be subject to.

It's no wonder that the pbwiki wikis are password protected.

The whole ravaged wiki thing reminded me of the good old days of MetaBaby. I remember when it was pure and innocent, before it succumbed to the inevitable internet flood of prolapsed anuses and crap-flooding. But even that sight was better than the modern spammer mess. Back in those idyllic days, spammers were limited to email and weren't (actively) targetting HTTP posts (weblogs, comments, wikis, referer logs.) I miss those days.

MT-Blacklist comment denial on the-inbetween.com [ceci n'est pas]: free-online-poker
MT-Blacklist comment denial on the-inbetween.com [ceci n'est pas]: free-online-poker
MT-Blacklist comment denial on the-inbetween.com [ceci n'est pas]: free-online-poker
MT-Blacklist comment denial on the-inbetween.com [ceci n'est pas]: texas-holdem
MT-Blacklist comment denial on the-inbetween.com [ceci n'est pas]: texas-holdem
MT-Blacklist comment denial on the-inbetween.com [ceci n'est pas]: texas-holdem
MT-Blacklist comment denial on the-inbetween.com [ceci n'est pas]: texas-holdem

Fucking poker bastards.

Tolerance

I have a fairly adequate level of tolerance. I sat through a root canal and a wisdom tooth extraction without much issue. Hell, it took me two weeks of agonizing pain before I even considered going to the dentist. I tolerated a four hour daily commute for almost two years straight. I sat through Wing Commander. I took courses in Discrete Mathematics. I have walked through blizzards with an unbuttoned jacket leaving my neck exposed to the blowing snow without ever getting sick or mildly permafrosted. I can tolerate these things.

The heat and humidity, I can not.

I hate how my shirt sticks to the back of my neck. I hate the sticky wrist that I get from using a mouse or wacom tablet. I hate the way the keyboard starts to feel after two or three hours of high humidity use. I hate the greasy, sweaty controllers during a gaming session. I can't work, I can't game, I can't do anything at home except sit and roast and, maybe, watch tv. Lots of rerun movies and Discovery Channel and History Channel. This weather feels so... unproductive.

I miss the winter.

And it's only the beginning of June. Fuck.

Today's bonus content: the most impressive optical illusion I've seen in a while, appropriately named look at the middle.

Patented

It's unsurprising that the most aggravating article at Gamasutra was not written by a game designer or publisher or developer but, instead, a lawyer. The lawyer, quite obviously, supports software patents, even ridiculous gameplay related ones. Of course, to have a lawyer support patents is akin to having a prostitute support prostitution.

Software patents are bad. Period. There are many, many reasons but I'm not qualified enough to succinctly express them. Others are far better at that than I am.

The one thing that I do want to comment on, though, is myth number five.

Myth 5. The "spirit of innovation" works best when there is a free market of ideas, and consumers are better off if video games are not patented.

To which he writes a smug:

A classic argument among those who feel that the entire patent system should be abolished. You might want to make that argument to your representative in Congress, because unless the Constitution is amended to do away with patents, they're here to stay. In drafting the Constitution, our founding fathers recognized that the best way to promote progress in the "useful arts" was to reward inventors who come forward and share their inventions with the public by granting them a limited period of exclusivity in which they can exploit the fruits of their labor. In other words, discouraging slavish copying encourages innovation.

Now, I am not a lawyer (IANAL!), but I doubt that the writers of the Constitution wrote it with the internet, video games, multinational media conglomerates, and the ultra high speed progress of the modern age in mind. Treating it as an absolute, disregarding 250 years of history in the process, seems like a poor defence to me. If the US Constitution can be amended to stop the sale of booze, then it can be amended to fix the broken patent system.

But, really, one does not need to abolish it to fix it. The author of the article talks of history and the founding fathers to push his own agenda, but then fails to mention other historical rulings that would equally apply: for an idea to be patentable it must have first taken physical form, the Court has held in the past that an invention must display 'more ingenuity ... than the work of a mechanic skilled in the art', and With Congress' enactment of the Patent Act of 1952, however, Sec. 103 of the Act required that an innovation be of a 'nonobvious' nature, that is, it must not be an improvement that would be obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the pertinent art. Explain to me how any of these apply to Scoring based upon goals achieved and subjective elements. The patent office doesn't need to be abolished; it needs to do what it is supposed to do and not grant frivolous patents that have a million cases of prior art or are completely obvious to anyone that has played any game in the history of ever.

Fucking absolute thinking lawyers. By that absolute reasoning, one would have the right to make and own a nuclear weapon because the right to bear arms doesn't expressly forbid thermonuclear devices.

(Edit: Slashdot article.)

(Edit 2: Better comments at gbgames, broken down by myth too.)

Bookshelf

The contents of one's bookshelf are probably as good a judge of character (or just plain interests) as anything else out there. Mine is less than voluptuous -- definitely not well-endowed -- but it sums me up succinctly. And yes, it is organized by book height, which probably adds to the Freudian analysis (aside: my DVDs are organized by colour).

Click for larger

The only things missing from that are all my reference books -- almost all of which are either O'Reilly or New Riders. Here be pictures of other peoples' bookshelves. It feels almost voyeuristic.

It is worth noting that, for the first time in a long while, the books are not merely for show. They are actually being *gasp* read. Slowly, mind you, but surely. Slow enough as to not be dulled by it, but fast enough to not forget what the hell was going on two pages ago. I CAN FEEL MY MIND EXPANDING.

Bonus Content: an amusing image showing the dichotomy between Sony's PSP marketing and the PSP reality. Or something.

I obviously belong in the first group.