It's pretty much what they promise on the package! Manipulable objects drawn from a dictionary of tens of thousands, you type the names of things and they appear onscreen.

Part of the joy of the game is the sheer size of the dictionary; I get a little burble of glee every time I type in something obscure like TRANQUILIZER DART or GRYPHON and the object appears. And levels are nicely divided into puzzle levels and action levels, with puzzle levels testing your ability to come up with just the right object and action levels testing your ability to use objects effectively.

There's a lot of the game I haven't figured out yet. It rewards you for using objects you've never used before, which is nice; I'm already noticing a tendency to stick to a small number of known effective objects--in particular, WINGS and JETPACK are about the only ways I know to gain personal flight, and I haven't found many LADDER and WALL substitutes. Once you beat a level you can go back and beat it three times in a row, using different items each time, to master it; I haven't done this much, but if I'm feeling completionisty after I make it through 150 more levels I might.

And, yes, the controls are a little janky; you click to use or move objects and click to tell your guy where to go, and if you miss an object your guy will often wander into trouble. And there are a lot of people and animals that I'm not really sure how to use--I created that GRYPHON hoping to use it for flight, but it turned on me and killed me instead. Animals can eat food, and maybe that improves their disposition? But that seems like a laborious process when I could just use a HELICOPTER or a UFO instead.

Muramasa the Demon Blade is a ridiculously pretty game. The screenshots were pretty, the concept art was pretty, but it looks even better in motion: things animate and parallax, and there's a general feeling of hugeness and abundance; you run through one delightful hand-painted screen after another.

I was an Amiga partisan back in the day, and I remember games crowing about how many layers of parallax they had. Shadow of the Beast II proudly boasted seven! Nowadays they don't even bother; the Wii has almost two hundred times as much memory as my Amiga 500 did, and the PS3 and 360 over a thousand. The only limit on how many layers you have and how big they are is how much your artists are willing to draw, and paint programs have come just as far from the days of Deluxe Paint.

There's a neat effect they do when you're entering the enemy castle. The first hallway is painted with Japanese landscape paintings, in the traditional style; the next hallway has the same paintings, but they parallax--like you're looking though the gold leaf to the impressionistic landscape behind. Nice and surreal. As in Odin Sphere you both recover health and gain XP from eating various foods; this time round, they've lovingly animated the cooking and eating process, step by step.

(How it plays is almost but not entirely beside the point, at this point; but it plays well! Better than Odin Sphere, at least. The hard difficulty is sufficiently brutal; bosses telegraph their attacks well enough, but everything does an unforgiving amounts of damage. I'm still only five levels or so into the game, so it's hard to tell if there's enough variety to sustain it, but the character movement is fluid and enjoyable and they have a decent and varied repertoire of attacks. I'm using my old Gamecube controller, which is nice; I imagine the default Wii setup is somewhat clumsy.)

Just finished Karl Schroeder's Permanence, a sci-fi novel of spacefaring civilizations. It always surprises me when I see a recent book in the genre. I have this vague idea that all the possible (or perhaps canonical) variations of deep-space SF have already been written, and that nothing new can really be said. It's got a few neat wrinkles, though; I guess when your canvas extends infinitely in space and time there's some room to play around. The berserker robots have already happened and burned themselves out, which took care of one bunch of civilizations, and plenty more have come and gone for other reasons; the universe is littered with the ruins of departed civilizations. The overriding concern, as the title suggests, is permanence; how do you order a civilization to last over spans of millions or billions of years? All the evidence humans can find points to its impossibility.

Which perhaps explains why everyone in the book is so obsessed with the notion. For us, in a universe with no visible Precursors, the future still seems open-ended. If in a hundred thousand years we're no longer recognizably human, I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing; and if in a thousand thousand we're not here at all, that's still a pretty good run.

All in all, a fun book. I do enjoy the big-picture SF stuff. Needless to say, they find some stuff that challenges the previously held belief about aliens vs. permanence, and there's some medium-term human societal conflict involving worlds that have access to FTL and worlds that don't (it requires a certain solar mass to use), and the slightly silly nature of the evil human faction (micropayments!) betrays the book's recent vintage. It chugs a little in the late middle when they get away from the alien stuff and kind of hang around in Humanville and then do some Shooting Things In Space, but it gets back to the important stuff quickly enough.

It turns out Ian Bogost is even more cynical about The Beatles: Rock Band than I am.

I Get Your Fail is a neat blog about the bugs that crop up in half-finished games, the sorts of thing you might have heard me lol about in the past; skip past the programmers' griping if that's not your cup of tea and check out the screenshots.

Guild Wars is an interesting if somewhat flawed game, but its concept art is top notch; here's a neat interview with the artist, Daniel Dociu. (he mentions going through a Kowloon Walled City phase, which I'd heard about but never seen photographs; it's striking how contained it was--laws and treaties allowed it a certain cube of space, and people built to fill every cubic foot of it.)

Disney's going to buy Marvel. It's a little surprising, but it makes sense--they're in the same business, give or take. We're all wondering what effect it'd have on our licensed games; having just come off a Marvel game, it feels somewhat personal. But it seems like there are long-term contracts in place that aren't running out for several years yet. At that point they might have in-house development capability. Which they really don't quite have at the moment.

You'd think it'd be a treasure trove of hilarity, but Penny Arcade has about the only good joke I've seen.

My bad, it's Devil Summoner I'm playing, not Devil Survivor. Though that's on deck.

And I was playing Digital Devil Saga 2 over the break, which I found smoother going than the first, mostly. You get Devour Mana bundled with the first hunt skills you acquire, which basically means infinite mana if you're eating regularly. As you should be! Though needing to eat all the time fits a lot better with the first game. They didn't warn me that characters would go away, so I spent a lot of time trying to get back the skills that I lost when they left.

They've got a good trick, and they're milking it for all its worth; in Devil Summoner, if you hit a monster's weakness, it goes into pinata mode and every time you hit it magic points come out. Which... on the one hand, it's even more feast or famine than the other games (except maybe Persona 3+), but it is a totally fun mechanic. It's not fun running out of magic points, but just getting them for free removes a layer of strategy; having to actively do things to bring them back--particularly things that you can do along the way while defeating enemies--adds back some necessary complexity.

It makes me want to play with RPG systems; if only I had the necessary art pieces...

This Gaming Life was among the books I tried to catch up on during the interval, but I couldn't make it through. It's the old problem with reading a popular book about a field that you're really familiar with--there's none of the crunchy detail that would make it interesting to you, and where it presents the generalities it always couches them in metaphors that never ring quite true. I had the same problem with Dreaming In Code, for instance; on the one hand, it's nice to see "software is hard" communicated to the world at large, but at the same time, I found it irritatingly vague and subtly wrong in a million tiny ways. Which is understandable, given that Rosenberg is a journalist and not a programmer. But Rossignol isn't! He is a gamer; so while it's kind of admirable that he was able to make a popular book about a culture that he's so thoroughly immersed in, the oversimplification also frequently reads as a kind of defensiveness. (though it's blurbed pretty heavily by people who are gamers and game developers and etc., so... maybe this isn't a universal problem, or maybe these people aren't thinking about their own edification, but that it'd be a great book to recommend to non-gaming acquaintances; or maybe blurbs are social currency and not actually statements to be taken for their meaning. :/)

Another part of my frustration with This Gaming Life was that I actually enjoy his specialist writing; like, he's starting up a series looking back at his five year stint in EVE that should be fun. If somewhat low-hanging fruit; EVE is one of those games that's more entertaining to read about than to actually play.

More text adventuring! The Gostak (via) is a written in a fake language (well, ok, a vocabulary-swapped English):

Finally, here you are. At the delcot of tondam, where doshes deave. But the doshery lutt is crenned with glauds.

Glauds! How rorm it would be to pell back to the bewl and distunk them, distunk the whole delcot, let the drokes discren them.

But you are the gostak. The gostak distims the doshes. And no glaud will vorl them from you.

The Gostak
An Interofgan Halpock
Copyright 2001 by Carl Muckenhoupt
(For a jallon, louk JALLON.)
Release 2 / Serial number 020305 / Inform v6.21 Library 6/10

Delcot
This is the delcot of tondam, where gitches frike and duscats glake. Across from a tophthed curple, a gomway deaves to kiloff and kirf, gombing a samilen to its hoff.

Crenned in the loff lutt are five glauds.

>_

Which makes for a neat experience; instead of exploring the world and solving puzzles as you come across them, you spend the first half hour just figuring out your basic commands, and then what everything is, and then broadening the number of verbs you have, and by the time you actually figure out what the puzzle is you're able to knock it down pretty quickly. (Mostly.)

The standard text adventure format is a bit of a rosetta stone; there is trickery that you can use to bootstrap yourself without having to resort to jallons--though I have to admit I did get stuck twice at the very end, once in a way I really should have figured out. As the intro text shows, there's a certain amount of idiomatic Englishness that remains, which does help. Taking copious notes is pretty much necessary, and a map is really helpful. It took me a while to work up to drawing a map, because even once I'd figured out the directions, I didn't know which was north; I spent some time dithering before it dawned on me that it doesn't matter and just picked one.

And I did, in fact, distim the doshes. It's fun, figuring out what words mean! But at the same time, there's figuring out and then there's figuring out; I've got a decent picture of how things function, but what they are is still really pretty unclear, which is kind of a neat sensation in itself. Partly, of course, I think the (somewhat magical) world is constructed in order to be ambiguous, and the way meaning is divided among verbs doesn't quite line up with the way it is in English.

Apparently the name comes from a linguistics example about how you can derive a certain amount of meaning from syntax alone.

Took a day off to, basically, hang out at the DMV. :/

But it needed to be done, so that's one thing out of the way.

Finally finished off Shadow Complex; all in all, a really solid game. There are a few minor irritations when you've finally got all your powers and are trying to 100% the map: all the collectibles are marked on the map, but there's a spot with two in one room that it'll mark as collected once you pick up the first. There are only two paths from the left side of the map to the right; one is tricky to navigate, the other triggers the final boss and ends the game once you have all the powers. The enemies stop getting tougher about a third of the way through but you keep powering up until the very end, with the result that encounters start out lethal and get steadily easier. Which is cool at the end, when the focus is on exploration more than combat, but it's frustrating that you keep getting in tough fights before you've really have a full set of powers or have mastered the controls, and then once you are close to full power there isn't really a tough enough fight to test yourself against. Rooms with air vents are the perfect environment for a Metroidvania, and they do a good job of exploiting that.

What to play next, is the question? I've got Devil Survivor waiting for me at work due to bad planning on my part; I guess I could go grab it if I need an excuse to leave the house.

I have to admit, The Beatles: Rock Band struck me as a terrible idea, a self-indulgence on the part of Harmonix's music snobs that could never justify the (presumably exorbitant) cost of the license. The Beatles themselves are so firmly associated in my mind with Boomers--not part of the generation that plays videogames, even lightweight ones with plastic instruments--and particularly that odious Boomer nostalgia and self-regard that there's no way anyone of my generation who didn't want to prove how in tune they were with the history of all music would voluntarily associate with the Beatles or a Beatles product. There's something a little jarring about using rock music to express solidarity with your parents.

But maybe it's just me! Apparently there's a whole Beatles resurgence in progress.

Disclaimer: This is a mass-cultural, not a personal, resentment; my own parents were pretty good about this, and stopped pushing music on me once I outgrew Raffi on my Fisher-Price record player.

Disclaimer #2: This is also not a professional resentment, despite my working for Guitar Hero manufacturer Activision; their marketing department neither needs nor wants my help.

I don't play interactive fiction as much as it feels like I should. I was raised on the old Infocom games, after all, and there's still something about how they work that really appeals to me: the prose style, the pacing, even the little verbal tics; and there's a kind of simulation that they support that's delightfully discrete and logical, a completely different beast than the 3d physics-heavy sims in modern games. But I'm also terrible at keeping huge maps in my head and I lack the patience and memory to attack trial-and-errory puzzles.

Emily Short just (a few months ago) released Alabaster, an collaborative* experiment in conversation systems: eleven writers, eighteen endings. One of her fractured fairy tales, it's of a genre that can come off as pointlessly edgy (omg what if Snow White was a vampire!?!?) if not handled deftly; it is handled deftly. It's also a one-room puzzle, give or take, which is a plus in my (navigationally challenged) book.

It's a good background to her interesting series of blog entries about conversation systems; there's a lot of neat subtle stuff going on under the hood. After reading it I was all excited to go and code up a conversation system myself, but alas I have no game to attach it to. (Some of it is pretty specific to the turn-based, freeform-input world of interactive fiction; some of it I could see being adapted to other systems.)

While on the subject: I could've sworn I mentioned this when it came out, but Violet (or the browser-playable flash version) is a charming one-room puzzle with a situation that should feel very familiar to all of you. Go, it's a quick play.

[* I wasn't paying attention when it came out, but apparently in-process builds of the game would let you enter in new conversation elements if you got to a spot in the game that warranted it, which it would package into a file to send back for integration into the next build.]

Hmm. I had some WoW links saved up from before I went into crunch.

Here, Eric at Elder Game provides an industry veteran's best guess at what's happening with the live team, and an interesting look at how it feels to be running a game like that. It explains one extremely noticable phenomenon: with the latest expansion, they've been making changes more quickly and with less caution than they used to; his claim is that the steady hands have all left to go work on Unannounced MMO and Unannounced MMO #2, and the new people in charge, seeing an opportunity to fix the broken things that have been chafing for so long, are going a little bit crazy.

In this one, Ravious at Kill Ten Rats argues that WoW's rough and somewhat hollowed out leveling-up game will be its undoing. I was all ready to point out that that's not necessarily the case: that the people who solo and putter around will still do so, and the people who like the endgame are already there or are willing to power through to it; that the only people who really suffer in the current state of affairs are people like Ravious, who play a bunch of MMOs and really like the traditional MMO gameplay of grouping etc., but don't play any one MMO enough to get to the endgame (which is really not that far away). But then Blizzard went and announced an expansion in which they're retooling the leveling up experience, so maybe they know something I don't. Or that the solo puttering-around also gets stale, three years on, and could use a bit of freshening up.

And, while we're here: Ta-Nehisi Coates is great, but he has never been more wrong. Maybe I am just defensive about dwarfs.

Apparently there's a controversy! People are talking about boycotting Shadow Complex. punchyninja pointed out an article where Peter David, the game's writer, showed up in comments to argue against the boycott. Mainly using the "boycotts stifle free speech!" argument, which I don't put much stock in. Buying or not buying a piece of media is about the most fundamental communication you can make about it, and certainly the only one that has an effect on the corporate scale. "Buy it and then use your own free speech to shout louder!" is counterproductive in two ways; any publicity is good publicity.

The reason for the boycott is the game's involvement with Orson Scott Card, which is kind of interesting; it's set in a world he helped create (and wrote the apparently tarrible novel for) but he didn't have much to do with this game in particular--he's in the credits under 'Special Thanks'. Though, to be fair, the studio's worked with Card in the past (he wrote their Advent Rising) and will again (they've licensed Ender's Game.) But it's kind of amazing and gratifying how much of a persona non grata he's become; unfortunately for him, he decided to become a publically raving homophobe at the same time as his books started sucking.

Shadow Complex! I downloaded it based on very little information; it was a well-crafted Metroidvania by Western developers using the Unreal engine, but that's about all I knew.

And it's lived up to that. The movement is a little wonky, being neither as swift and agile as Castlevania or Metroid nor as rigidly constrained and predictable as Bionic Commando or Prince of Persia. But it's got the powerups and map exploration, and brings a little something new with enemies that enemies that are able to move on the z-axis and a guns-and-cover-based combat system.

The plot is the baffling part. It's set in the world of Orson Scott Card's Empire, his 2006 novel of a near-future American civil war brought on by an insane left wing terrorist group, the Progressive Restoration. (which itself makes me cranky; not only am I not a big fan of the name "progressive", but the whole point of being a liberal is you don't do restorations.) Why would they choose this, of all things, to adapt? I'm not a big fan of Card the person, and particularly dislike his politics, both social and international, but I figured they were fanboys of Ender's Game or whatever, and as long as the politics don't intrude on the game too much, it's not a big deal.

Wiki paints a different picture of Card's involvement, though: the world of Empire was created by Chair, the game developer, and the novels are just licensed spinoffs. Which is more problematic. It's like I just gave Glenn Beck 1200 Microsoft points. :(

As far as I can tell, the politics don't intrude too much on the game; if I hadn't read anything about the controversy, I'd never have known. (The name of the group would have puzzled me, but so far I've only seen it in one weapon description, and would probably have just ignored it.)

So, WoW is going back to the old world, with an expansion that only slightly raises the level cap and mingles the new content with a reworking of the old content.

To a certain degree, the old content needs reworking: they turned up the experience gain without rebalancing any of the quests, and so you'd wind up outleveling zones before you were done with the quests in them. And they've made class changes to balance things at endgame without thinking too hard about whether they were too weak or too strong at lower levels; the net result is that the 1-60 game is kind of broken at the moment. It's certainly possible to level a character through it, but it's not the clean, tight experience of the 60-80 content, or even the 1-60 content when it was first released. And they've learned a lot about how to make good quests. Perhaps a little too much; in a lot of the most recent content it felt like they were giving up some of the charm and organic feel of the old stuff in exchange for more efficient questing, and it started to feel very similar.

It's always neat to see how they try to evolve the mechanics. I think the first expansion had them introducing a lot of neat new ideas, and then in the second they tried to consolidate: keep what worked best, add a few new things, but the focus was primarily on balance and fairness and removing inconveniences. Which is interesting from a high-level design perspective, and you appreciate it as a player, but it's not very exciting.

It could just be that they're bumping up against the limits of the system: there are only so many ways to do damage to a target, and by now they're pretty thoroughly explored.

Pitchfork has just released (just finished releasing) their top 500 songs of the '00s. An interesting experience. When I first heard about it, three days ago, I flipped to #500 and began to work my way forward, and I started to feel despair; having graduated class of '99, did my musical education also end before the decade began? The only artists I recognized--one in every thirty or so--were thanks to petronia's (infrequent but delightful) music posts.

Then I mentioned the list to some coworkers (one of whom was arguing strenuously that Green Day is the most influential band of the last twenty years) and they immediately paged to the front to find #1; it hadn't been posted yet, but even 20-50 were refreshingly familiar.

A list of that size is just kind of arbitrary, particularly at the butt end, and they have to get it out early, because there's no way anybody's going to care about it closer to the end of the decade, when list fatigue's set in. I suspect the front end is for arguing and the tail end is for evangelizing. But, listening as I go, I'm just at #380. So it's a little early to tell.

(another anecdote, courtesy of the Green Day-favoring coworker: when he listens to rap, his wife will interject "how can you listen to that? that's not music, they're just talking!" which just shows that--pace gibson--the present is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.)

I've been playing a bunch of Little King's Story; it's engaging, but I'm trying to see the game that's racked up so much fulsome praise and... I'm just not feeling it. Animal Crossing meets Pikmin in medieval clothing, is the gloss. And I like all of those things! And you've got a town full of little guys, and you go up to them and give them all little jobs (for which they wear different hats!) and you chop down trees and dig holes and etc., etc., and it sounds like the sort of game that I could really get into.

But I haven't. The interface is frustrating, in many ways. Combat demands more fiddliness than the troop controls allow me to pull off. One example: you cycle through troop types by pressing a button. But there's no back button, so if you press once too many times you have to cycle all over again. They have a little indicator of who's active and who's next, but it only displays a few units at a time.

And the map isn't very good, and you have to walk everywhere yourself, and... I'm starting to feel like it's just not the game for me. And the charming fairytale stuff doesn't quite charm me, but that's entirely a matter of taste.

So, last month was pretty much crushed under shipping this demo disc. Many lessons learned, at least! Foremost among which is that a demo is as much trouble as an actual game when it comes to getting it past the various requirements; if a game's never shipped on the engine, there are going to be all these loose ends that need to be taken care of. (lesson two, closely related, is that you should be careful about branching too soon; i think we'd have been better off if we just did nothing for about a month before taking their code to make a demo out of.) And then there's a bunch of practical stuff about how to build-monkey a final game which hopefully I'll never need to use again. :/

We sent final but slightly flawed builds down last Monday and have been doing some just-in-case bug fixing so we'll have something to send back quickly if any of them are rejected. It's a little wearying, finishing a game; you've just worked insane hours, eaten all your meals at work, and when you've finally sent off your last build you don't get to take a break but instead sit around for a week and a half hoping that it doesn't bounce. During this time you get to keep poking around in code you're totally sick of, making fixes that, if everything goes well, will never be used.

But it's all over soon, knock on wood, and at least we're back to slacking and going home at normal hours.

yeloson asks:

Is the PS3 as much of a pain in the ass to code for as I've heard?

The answer is yes.

For two reasons, really; and the reason that seems more important is actually less important. (I'm assuming you're a 3rd-party developer making a game for both platforms; and I'm probably a little off on some of the precise hardware details.)

First, the 360's hardware is more straightforwardly organized than the PS3's. The PS3 has 256 MB of video memory and 256 MB of system memory, while the 360 has 512 MB that can be used for either. So you take your level that fits on the 360 and move it over and all of a sudden it stops fitting, because it wasn't split just right between textures and other things. In practice not the biggest deal; you just wind up shifting stuff back and forth between the memory that has free space and the memory that it needs to be in when you use it. The 360 has 3 CPUs, while the PS3 has 1 CPU and 6(?) SPUs, which (from the outside) are like CPUs except they're only allowed to access a tiny amount of memory (128k, iirc). Sony really likes this kind of architecture, where data is loaded by batches into a thimbleful of fast memory and processed by a tiny program*. The different number of CPUs isn't as big a deal as it might seem--you basically draw up a big list of everything that doesn't have to be done on the main CPU, and feed bits of it to processors as they're available--but the memory restriction is a killer. Secondary processes on the 360 can be as big as you like, whereas on the PS3 they need to fit in that 128k. If your game's been written on the PS3, porting it to the 360 is a piece of cake; nobody cares if you're using too little memory and, in fact, it probably runs faster. Porting the other way, though, can be a real pain in the ass: if your animation system (or AI, or crowd simulation, or physics, or whatever) doesn't fit on a SPU, you're either doing a bunch of rewriting or letting a bunch of hardware sit idle.

That brings us to the second reason: the 360 development environment is head and shoulders better than the PS3's. The compiler is faster, the debugger is better (and integrated with Visual Studio!), the devkit is smaller and easier to deal with, the documentation is better; all in all, it's just a better experience. A lot of our programmers only have one devkit; even when I've had both, if I'm implementing a new system or fixing a bug that shows up on both, I do it on the 360. That games would be better if they were developed primarily on the PS3 is kind of a tragic sidenote.

I think he's bluffing, and his reasons are definitely not my reasons, but I'm a little happy to see Bobby Kotick threatening to have Activision stop PS3 development.

* The PS1, with its single processor and straightforward architecture, was a fluke. Sony couldn't afford to make a more complicated machine. Though they made a nod in this direction by only putting in a tiny instruction cache; if one of your loops was bigger than (iirc) 4k performance would drop off dramatically. As soon as being easy to program won them round one of the (3d) console wars, though, they used the proceeds to fund their architectural whimsy.

Where I complain about controller plugging and unplugging! :D

Or I would, but it's boring even to me at this point. I keep learning new things, though, like how the PS3 supports up to seven wireless controllers! And if you assume it only supports four because the 360 only supports four (and because it only has four lights, ffs) then you get bit in the ass by one of your particularly ugly hacks.

The way you have to make sure your program doesn't crash on the PS3 when the user wants to quit out of the game is annoying, though. It's game over! The OS should be able to tear it down without your cooperation.

But the bug list is dwindling; knock on wood, I'll be done with it soon enough.