GeekApproach

Twitter launched it’s very own photo-sharing and video uploading service today, courtesy of the great minds behind Photobucket (who are still around..apparently?). You can’t help but feel bad for TwitPic or yFrog or any of the number of photo-sharing services that launched with the open API that Twitter provided. All you needed was an API key and some gumption perhaps to create the next cool thing that could operate as an adjunct on the site. Now that any number of these sites have taken off, Twitter has decided to step in and offer their own service. So what do you do if your TwitPic? Die off in oblivion I guess…

Last week Google announced some housecleaning for some of it’s API’s: Places, Prediction, Tasks, and Translate. Of these 4, I’ve only used Translate to any real success (or need). However, the outcry of some of the developers in the comments is truly sad. Some of these folks have created entire applications or infrastructure around these API’s that Google freely hosted. There was never a guarantee that these things would stick around forever. I don’t think anyone ever really thought about it–Google offers essentially unlimited space for just about everything, why would they even bother to deprecate and remove code they were giving away for free? Some of these services have been replaced with elements that can be called from within an HTML5-compliant browser so its not a complete loss. But if I were a dev that was using the Translate API through JS or other libraries, I think I’d be a bit pissed off.

So where am I going with this? These platforms that are created by these companies are artificial islands of relevance. By leveraging the (often) free API platform you’re helping raise the awareness level for those tools that you’re using: I had a friend show me how to write simple JS Translate widgets that would real-time translate a page in the DOM without re-requesting the page. I’ve seen rather kick-ass things done with data manipulation done using the Charts API. For me, they increased my awareness of some of the cooler things one could do with Google’s external tools. Maps is a huge one–something I’d like to leverage in a future showcase.

Gaming is one area where I can draw a lot of corollaries. With the rise of the mature PC FPS in the late 90′s, games were becoming little islands of activities. Mod tools were being released by the developers or often being generated by the community and were being used to create substantial in-game works. I one saw an interactive museum someone built in the Half-Life 1 Source engine. Game mods for Unreal Tournament? How about Akimbo Arena, or any of the more create DM maps made available? id Software made it easy to modify Doom and put it back out provided you weren’t modifiying the core game engine files. What happened to these platforms? For the most part they were killed off by console gaming. With a “security” barrier barring entry, user-made downloadable content has been a no-show on the Xbox or PlayStation systems. Often publisher’s will pack together a sampling of top-rated mods from the community and push those out under their own container, but this is few and far between.

Most of the mod tech I’ve seen recently is visible, but doesn’t get a lot of exposure unless you’re specifically looking for it. Bethesda highlights folks who are still creating mods for their games such as Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind at least once a week. I’m sure somewhere, there’s a kid making a mod for Quake 3 Arena, but I haven’t been looking for it regularly. For me that platform island is no longer relevant and is gone.

Next week I’ll explore some of the newer platforms out there and what those companies are trying to do to bring you on board. It’s a busy week between Apple’s WWDC, and the opening of E3. We’ll see.

In a word, it’s stupendous. It’s amazing to think that motion-capture technology has come this far. Watching characters faces light up like this or try and lie to you is rather addictive. The polygons surrounding their faces are a bit low in detail, but it’s not horrendous. I applaud Team Bondi for not trying to make this thing extremely life-like because I’m sure it would’ve been incredibly difficult.
   

Robert Zemeckis continues to try and market no-cap technology to the movie studios. Most of these efforts have fallen flat, or launch with awful results: See The Polar Express, and A Christmas Carol.

Uncanny Valley much?

Anyway, more info later with a full review. Suffice to say, I think this will capture my attention span for a while.

Recently I had some time to enjoy the latest demo from People Can Fly, titled Bulletstorm. It’s an apt title as gameplay centers roughly on a score-based mechanic of how “creatively” you kill the other guy.  Numerous environmental traps are available for the assist such as impaling spikes, large drop-offs, and the occasional exploding container or barrel.  You’ll also have access to an electrical grapple or “hookshot” (to steal from Zelda parlance) to grab enemies and bring them to you and release them in slo-mo– thereby increasing your fun and the amount of creative ways you can think of to destroy them.  Gameplay looks kinda ripped from the Black playbook, a game that ranked you with points based upon how creative your kills were while you ran through levels.  A more recent comparison would be to Sega’s rather under-rated The Club which had a squad-based approach, but the same type of scoring mechanics.  Apparently folks didn’t like shooting up other folks for creativities sake, or they just didn’t like the full package of either of those games.  Who knows…

Visually the game looks purty.  Utilizing and being published by Epic Games has something to do with it–The latest version of the Unreal Engine is in full “bloom” so to speak with such graphical improvements like “god beams”, and accurate lighting penumbrae.  Audio is good too–punchy shotguns and machine guns felt real and the amount of audio feedback was quite nice for warnings about ends of clips or incoming grenades.  Both of these things I would expect as they are right out of the Gears of War playbook.

However, what is not or maybe sorta not is the raw amount of testosterone this game is meant to convey.  Example: The word “dick-tits”.  I think during the end of the demo in its closing video the main character make some comment about not sitting around like a “dick-tits”.  I actually had no idea what this word meant, and the amount of new vernacular thrown at you during the course of a 10 minute demo was kind of ridiculous.

I’m not sure how effective it is because the last time I saw this much ridiculous masculinity was in Army of Two and I don’t think that did to successfully.  I mean, how many of you had to think of just what the hell Army of Two even was after you read that? Exactly.

To jog your memories, I’ve embeded this handy YouTube video showing some of its finer moments below:

In the end, I had a decent time with it.  It feels like a brighter, less depressing or apocalyptic Gears of War.  Time will tell if it can be set apart, but the month of February sure looks pretty empty for video games in general.  It might just provide the boost they need to get this thing off of shelves.  So what are you waiting for “dick-tits”?

EDIT: 7:42 AM 02_06_11: Here’s some more videos on “creative killins” in Bulletstorm:

This new trailer for Deus Ex: Human Revolution (courtesy of Kotaku) is pretty bad-ass.  I loved the previous Deus Ex games, at least I recall playing them both.  Concluding them is another story…  The trailer below highlights some of the new “digital shininess” that seems to be permeating SciFi/Action/Adventure titles these days post-Mass Effect 2.  I’m not unhappy about it all; on the contrary, I think this is a good thing for games.

I just hope that Square-Enix doesn’t screw it up too much.

Just a quick note to say that I just tried to play some Halo 3, local single-player mind you (I know my limits). Wow. What a frustrating mess. Controls aren’t like Call of Duty OR like Gears– I’m throwin shields and stuff out when I want to reload my guns. It sucks!

Not to mention that the game came out in 2007 and in 3 short years it has not held up…I’m disappointed!

Bah… Back to Assassin’s Creed II.

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West gets my vote for “best game that no one will play in 2010″.  Its kinda sad to admit that a week and a half after its release but I think their publisher just didn’t put the marketing dollars behind a smart, beautiful and (most importantly) fun game.  I guess that sort of leaves me with the duty of writing about why it was so good.

The game is loosely based off of one of the “Four Great Classical Novels” of Chinese literature, Journey to the West. Judging from the brief synopsis at Wikipedia, I’m honestly not sure how “loose” loosely is aside from taking a few of the characters names and using them in the game.  Speaking of characters, there are only a few but they are very well-rounded.

You’ll play as Monkey, a fairly bad-ass drawin in the “I’m-ripped-like-Marcus-Fenix” style who wields a dual-edged lightsaber-like baton.  While escaping from a huge flying slave ship, Monkey crashes in a post-apocalyptic and (rather dystopian) New York.  He awakes to find himself fitted with some sort of slave control collar that makes his life inexplicably tied to Trip and her request that he take her back to her people some 300 miles distant.  This sets off an odd character dynamic that I’ll get into in a second here.

Trip, Monkey & Pigsy

The last character, Pigsy makes his appearance in the final third of the game which is sad because its all over far too soon.

Considering that the main character is forced to make this long journey against his will, the interaction with Trip starts out pretty argumentative.  The story and script which were written by Alex Garland (of 28 Days Later, and The Beach fame) are smart and fast-paced.  The character model, voice and game direction are provided by Andy Serkis who played Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies.  The combination of smart direction and a great story make for a great trip through New York and the lands beyond.

Combat is fast but a little lame.  All of your battles will be with mech units, turrets, and mini-bosses left from some long ago war.  Often your best path involves using Trip as a decoy, or strategically taking out certain mechs in order to move on.  There are a few environmental kills that can be made, but they almost exclusive to the first third of the game in New York.

X360 Box Art

I should also mention how great the artistic direction is– the world is beautiful.  The team seemed to have taken as much brown out of the palette as possible.  New York is green and lush, overgrown with foliage.  The mountain levels are reddish-gold; the mech factories, sludge levels, and trash levels are brilliant.  You’ll traverse via foot, bike, air, submarine, and mech before the game is over.  The engine uses Unreal technology so for better or worse, everything has that characteristic “individual glow” that reminds you very quickly of Gears of War.

Lush, overgrown New York

Of the things I didn’t like: plastforming.  A large element is finding out the suitable path to advance, taking out mechs along the way.  It’s a lot like Prince of Persia, but with a magnetic object attachment.  Aiming with the stick and a button you’ll just move from handhold to handhold.  There’s rarely the question of what the next position is and most importantly: you’ll never fall.  Sadly, you’ll never fall off of anything!  Each time you need to leave a platform or an object you’ll have to jump, each and every time.  I found that really annoying, especially when you occasionally get caught on objects that appear to be flat or contiguous but aren’t.

Lastly the game length.  I finished all 14 chapters in about 11 hours. There is some light re-playability with orb collection.  I grabbed about 520/1000 Gamerscore on the first play-through too.  They all seem achievable and since it’s all single-player probably easy to pick up within 2 playthroughs.

I wish I could recommend the game at the $60 price point– It feels like a $40 game and given the lackluster push from Namco Bandai in marketing dollars I think it’ll hit that point very quickly.  Add to the glut of holiday titles in the next 10 weeks and I think you’ll see it in the bargain bin soon enough.  A darn shame considering how much time and solid effort went into this title. Here’s hoping Ninja Theory’s next game, a reboot of Devil May Cry will be enough to keep them going.

Minerva’s Den is the expected final piece of DLC for BioShock 2, and ironically the first piece of single-player campaign content since the game’s release in March.  For a title with such a rich single-player portion I was amazed that it took them this long to finally create a piece of standalone content, but it’s been worth the wait.

You play as Subject Sigma in pursuit of Reed Wahl within Rapture Central Computing in Minerva’s Den.

Reed Wahl, whom you're hunting in Minerva's Den.

The levels are smartly designed filled with the art deco paintings we’ve been used to during the main game.  There are plenty of splicers and in a fitting touch, tons of automated machines to take advantage of and destroy.  The pack starts out slowly with few plasmids at your disposal and the new weapon, the Ion Gun not being terribly useful or fun.  The game quickly picks up and you’ll be using some of your favorite plasmid and weapon combinations to great success. (Except for one…)

A few of the enemies have been improved– the big bumbling  Brute Splicers have made a comeback and this time they have numbers.  You’ll have a few battles that’ll push your ammo count to the limit, but I didn’t need a Vita-Chamber once during my playthrough on Medium.  There are also elemental variants of Houndini Splicers that make their presence known in the last third of the DLC.  A new Big Daddy type known as the Lancer also awaits you.  He seems to be a bit faster and possibly a bit stronger than the last variant but with enough time you’ll wear him down.

Killing a Big Daddy nets you a Littler Sister to harvest or carry which brings back one of the most mind-numbing phases of the original game– playing protector.  There are 6 little sisters to rescue and after 3 and 6 you’ll have to fight a Big Sister for your pleasure.  Again, these battles aren’t particularly hard but sort of annoying.  It sorta made me long for the original BioShock; at least there wasn’t a “protector” section built-in.

The deplorable Ion Laser in action...

As far as new contacts either by design of Plasmid availability or my own stupidity I ended up hacking a ton of bots and turrets to have at my disposal.  Again, this is fitting considering the content is based around a rather smart computer system dubbed “The Thinker”.  At one point the game even drops a fictional letter from Alan Turing in our midst– geeks will remember Alan Turing as the father of computing with his idea of a Turing machine capable of logic.

In the end I found Minerva’s Den to be totally worth it at $10.  It gave me about 4-5 hours of additional content, was for the most part very fun and enjoyable, and the ending was graceful and smart.  I highly recommend it.

I thought I’d drop a quick post about an awesome new game that I haven’t actually bought yet on XBLA, Shank.

Shank Freeze

Shank is a side-scrolling action game drawn in a cel-shaded format very similar to Penny-Arcade.   In fact, if the PA boys haven’t brought up a fuss (which they should) I guess it’s all fine, but the similarity in the art styles is rather striking.  Anyway, the game itself seems to be ultra-violent with lots of blood splatter and varying death animations.  Shank’s girl is kidnapped and he’s going after the parties responsible.

I only played about 30 minutes through including one boss battle, but I was hooked pretty quickly.  I think the asking price , $15 is a bit steep considering I don’t how much gameplay is there.  But I strongly urge you to go check it out if only for a short while.  From what I understand the multiplayer seems to hold a lot of promise as well.

Shank in Action

CNN has a post up this morning about this Fall’s upcoming “must-play” lineup.  I’ll spare you some of the pain there and tell you the five they’re mentioning:

• Halo: Reach
• Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock
• Fallout: New Vegas
• Civilization V
• Medal of Honor

I”m experiencing a bit of indifference because for the first time in a long while, I don’t really want to play any of the games coming out in the very expensive, normally quite crowded holiday season.  It’s actually kind of strange because I’ve been into video games for quite a while.  I know that I’m experiencing some changes in my personal life with my attempt at heading back to school to finish up a BA degree soon but still… What is this?

Games represent a lot to me– aside from enjoying a (sometimes) interactive storyline, I enjoy playing them both for their rewards and their experience.  My friends also play video games and so it’s common topic of conversation: “What are you playing this week?”  ”Did you try out (insert title here)?”.  Often we talk about shared experiences of beating a tough boss or finding some cool new thing that we’ve never seen before.  Unfortunately I find myself to be getting burnt out by the “sameness” of some of these titles.

Let’s take a look at that list again: 3 out of 5 of those titles have a colon in their title somewhere suggesting that instead of providing a number indicating the sequel’s position they decided to not tell you just which one this is in the series.  All of the titles are sequels– this is Halo 5, Guitar Hero 5 or 6, Fallout 4, Civ 5, and Medal of Honor 5 or 6.  Of these titles I’d say I’ve played all of their predecessors at least once, and some of them I really enjoyed.  All of the titles seem to have had an inception somewhere around 2001 it seems as well aside from Fallout (which received a reboot a few years back), and Civ (which seems to go long stretches in between game variants anyway).

2001 was the start of the Xbox-PS2-GameCube race that apparently has moved the industry to where it is today: 3 large companies competing over the same market, and pumping out the same titles over and over.  When did I suddenly start not liking the same stuff?

Some of it has to do with playing smart original titles that don’t necessarily fit any of the existing categories and surprising myself.  A lot of these titles belong in the scene I’ve dubbed “Indie-cade“, sort a mash of Indie Arcade.  These titles are often created and produced from one or two brains instead of a team of 30-100 people.  One title that I recently finished, Limbo was done with 5 people including art, dev, music and production.  That’s crazy and really cool at the same time.  They’ve now sold over 300,000 copies on XBLA, which I hope means it paid for itself and are continuing their awesome sales run. Limbo itself has a very simple concept: get the main character through this side-scroller with one action button, and survive. There are booby traps, environmental puzzles, and occasionally an enemy or too that wants to kick your butt.  The game took me about 6 hours of playtime and was well worth the $15 I think.

I told you it was B&W...

The art style is fantastic– very minimalist, black and white with some occasional twists thrown in.  If I could hear the soundtrack over my “helicopter-taking-off-Gen1-X360-fan-noise”, I’d tell you it was creepy and effective.  This title was unlike anything I’d played before and unlike the major-AAA titles coming out this Fall.

I picked up a MacBook Pro back in April, one of those snazzy i7, 17″ beasties that I love.  Soon after, Valve released a MacOS Steam client and I started to play some more Indie-cade games on the Mac.  Again, these titles don’t scream AAA but I found them to be more fun than sitting on my X360 playing shovelware.  Torchlight is one of the standout dual-platform games I’ve found and enjoyed playing in-between tasks.

I’m wondering what I’ll by occupying my time with in the coming months– I’ve started a little game with myself to try some of the older titles I own but never really played a lot of.  Maybe I’ll find some gems there, but certainly not coming out of a major publisher.  Perhaps that’s ok.

Apologies for the long delay here between updates. I’ve started a new gig (to be written a in a future post) and have been kind of fumbling around a bit trying to get my rhythm. I also seem to be trying to do an inordinate amount of “household” things as Spring is here and my apartment is a mess. What better way to waste some of that critical time than by playing a game?

The Limited Edition case...

I’ve been limiting myself to a one-game-per-month kind of digestion cycle. Partially this is a money thing– at $60 a pop I’m trying to save a bit of cash for other personal projects. This month I chose Alan Wake and it’s Limited Edition Variant too. Ooh. Gaze at it’s mighty splendor here:
The LE contains the game, a printed book, a bonus .XEX with themes, trailers and an unlockable dev commentary mode. There’s also a nifty soundtrack that I didn’t find relevant until I started playing the game. Hello context!

You play as (duh) Alan Wake an author who takes a brief vacation with his wife Alice to a fictional place called Bright Falls, WA. Alan is suffering from writers block and hasn’t written a page in a few years. His wife find a specialist in the city who could potentially help Alan, but then weird shit starts happening. Alice is kidnapped and Alan keeps waking up in the dark having to fight some mean nasties with the only tools at his disposal: photons. I’m not kidding: the primary weapons are flashlights, road flares, and other lights. Guns play a big part too, but the light-dark thing is the key game component here. The game is episodic in nature and plays out a bit like a TV show which really works for it.

See? Photons.

Other folks have drawn comparisons to The X-Files or Twin Peaks– personally it feels quirky like those with a healty dose of The Outer Limits thrown in. In fact the in-game meta-media (my term for the media assets you’ll actively engage in the game: radio, TV, posters, other messaging) has a TV show called Night Falls. I’ve actually watched a couple of episodes in game. It’s nifty.

Here’s what else you need to know: It’s third-person, smooth, fluid and fun. The story is not exactly a surprise but its still very tense. Audio design is excellent and I really benefited from experiencing it in 5.1. Visual design is somewhat striking but I’m not sure if I enjoy it because I’m from the Pacific Northwest and they seemed to get a fair amount correct. The flora and fauna are very accurate, and the small details are what I like to experience in a game. Something about walking through the forest and noting, really noting that the ferns are the same as the species in your backyard is kind of cool. The woods manages to feel like a tangled place without a path and a led path at the same time. Great cuing. The engine itself specializes in the day/night cycle and things really do look beautiful. Draw distance is quite nice, and I’ve only seen the engine shortcut while drawing fog (super-scaled down res and masive pixelation).

Engine rendering of times of day.

As you might’ve surmised there are a great deal of real-time lights and you can generate gobo effects with Alan’s flashlight and shadows from other objects in path.

Where I’m yanked out rather quickly are the cutscenes. Wooden character animations, and that awful chuck-tooth mouth open close maneuver that reminds me of marionettes. The voice acting is ok, but we’re down here in zombie character land and it shows. It’s a shame really because its about the only negative thing I can find so far.

I’m currently about 40% through the game and my decision is pretty well made up. Alan Wake is worth your time. For a game that’s been in development for 5 years it shows some attentiveness to vision.