Am I dead? No! Just might as well be; am neck deep in the crunch time. It's pretty much work-sleep-work these days, with just enough eating in there to stave off death.

That said: the game's shaping up! It might be the best Spider-Man game yet--not that that's a terribly high bar, given that we pretty much stole all the good parts of the previous Spider-Mans and replaced all the bad parts with at least slightly less bad parts.

If we can just make it to the end.

An interview with Reiner Knizia:

For the games I've set aside, I have thirty drawers here in my studio. And I don't allow myself to work on more than thirty games at the same time. No sane person can work at more than thirty games at the same time.

I like that because it's so definitive and so arbitrary at the same time. Thirty-one games: madness!

His explanation is reasonable, of course, though it seems to me to be a personal rule that doesn't generalize too well; depending on what you call a drawer, I can imagine not being able to deal with more than about five, or that the entire rule's silly--stories of writers and artists with stacks of notebooks and sketchbooks, concepts in the hundreds ready to be brushed off and made use of. How long it takes to reorient yourself when you set one down and pick up another is probably the biggest question/difference; and that varies both by individual and by medium.

Thinking too far in this direction, multiplying things by years, leads you quickly enough to mortality and the limits of a human, so let's hang back a bit.

And have a puzzle! I keep thinking, when confronted with a puzzle, that I should be able to look at it, and--armed with my knowledge of its rules, and a clear view of the entire board--be able to visualize the complete solution. I totally don't, though; I keep noodling at it, making moves and seeing what happens, until I develop just enough technique to blunder my way forward. That's how I approach everything else, too, so. Just need to reassure myself that, yes, learning is taking place; later, once the intuition firms up, I can work on the theory.

(one thing I like about that puzzle--aside from the visual look, which totally works--is that there's a point seven or eight moves short of the end where you know you've done it; the entire thing is a mix of movement and preparing-for-future-movement, and then the preparing runs out and it's a straight shot to the exit. it's a nice release of tension.)

MGS3: two more bosses down.

The Fear was frustrating at first; switching from looking around to aiming in first person is still jarring, and tracking someone who's hard to see and fast-moving (and slightly above your field of view) can be a little tricky. It makes up for it by him being a little slow, a little dumb. After a bit I started to figure out tricks to determine his position--ping the sonar when he starts yelling--and in the end, Metal Gear is still a game about talking on the radio putting stuff between you and them.

During the fight I ran out of disinfectant. I like the game's field medicine system: it's a nod towards realism, without actually being realistic in any way. I dislike that there isn't much actual gameplay to it. The resource management is pretty arbitrary, with bandages and disinfectant in much higher demand than everything else, and all components randomly picked up on the field. (ok, so some of them are plants you stab out of the ground with your knife! because you're snake eatin'! again, though, that's flavor not gameplay.)

The End was a little underwhelming. I expected more from it; I remember hearing people's tales of epic hour-long sniper battles, but it turned out to be fairly straightforward. Did they tone it down for Subsistence? Was my difficulty set too low? It did seem designed for a protracted but pretty safe battle--the enemy does only stamina damage, and the field is full of delicious goats--but it lacked a certain intensity. Which was cool, in its own way, just not what I'd been led to expect.

Some reflections from David Hayter, on MGS's Otacon ending:

"It felt like it was written to be romantic," [he] said. "It was just humiliating." He did mention that MGS3 and MGS4 had fewer script issues than the first two games, and he now has more power to veto particular lines. Still, he only has so much pull. "If I have a big speech about love on the battlefield, well, that's what I have to talk about," he said. "Some things are easier to say than others."

As always, Hideo gets the last laugh.

Playing through MGS3:Subsistence, trying to catch up before #4. The camera really is an improvement over plain old MGS3.

I've experienced a bit of a field reversal--you know, the thing where a vase becomes two faces, etc., etc.--and the game's starting to seem like an entertaining radio program broken up by sneaking. Our host is a ravenous but somewhat dim-witted secret agent, and his guests are experts on a range of topics: flora and fauna of Russia and Asia, camouflage and military hardware, movies of the fifties and sixties, even the occasional aside about loyalty and patriotism in a changing world. It's entertaining!

They seem to have the magical ability to see what's happening through the radio, but, eh. As Vince says, if you're still on the Hideo train after Liquid's magic arm, it's too late: you're going wherever he's taking you, and there's no use in complaining.

They say that even a stopped clock is right twice a day; the other way of looking at it is that eleven o'clock never really goes away.

Hence. Kojima (born 1963) grew up under the full weight of the seventies that I only caught the tail of--the fear of nuclear annihilation, the oil shock--and it shows.

None of that stuff actually went away; you just get a different slice of Kojima's sociopolitical neuroses depending on what decade you catch him in.

NO I HAVENT PLAYED MGS4 YET I DONT EVEN HAVE A PS3 (nor have i played mgs3 through to completion. maybe i should fix that.)

ps> i have gotten on the muxtape train. speaking of things influenced by the decade of your birth.

I wrote my first Ajax thingy the other day. It's... remarkably easy? And it feels so magical!

It's weird. When I first learned how to write programs, files scared me. Reading and writing to the console, drawing lines and shit on the screen, all that made lots of sense. But I had a weird block against any kind of file I/O. I don't know if it was the opening and closing, or the fact that you couldn't actually see inside the file, or what. (Hard disks for consumers were uncommon in my youth! Things booted from floppies, or from ROM. Personal computers, too, had cartridge ports. In other "I am old" news, we have interns who are unfamiliar with Michelle Pfeiffer, R.E.M.) But I've pretty much worked past that. Now it's client/server stuff that bothers me. Web stuff makes it easier, I think, because your browser can do a pretty good job of pretending to be one side or the other until you have all the pieces in place.

As for Google: LOTRO has their own Thottbot/Wowwiki analogue where players can look up quest/monster/lore info. And they use Google Maps. (an example) It makes sense; why reinvent the wheel on the streaming-zooming-large-image-scroller if you don't have to?

I'm also trying out Google's Reader, which, again (and like their newsgroup viewer) uses the whole Ajax infinite scroll thing. I find it kind of irritating to have the scrollbar constantly scooching up as more data comes in, but I don't think there's necessarily a clean solution to that one. There are certainly strong arguments to be made for the one they chose. And it's one of the flashier solutions to the problem of large data sets that you rarely go very deeply into, which I think appeals to them.

(unrelatedly, from RPS: more sporenography)

Wizard 101 just opened up its beta. It seems to be crafted for the express purpose of making game industry executives slap their foreheads and say 'why didn't I think of that!': Harry Potter plus Magic: the Gathering, in MMO form. It's aimed young, for sure.

It's pretty well-crafted, with some number of interesting facets. Combat is turn-based but takes place in the world: it draws a giant circle, and everyone moves to their appropriate spots; turns happen as soon as everyone's chosen an action or the timer runs out. If you stumble into someone else's circle, you take a spot on the players' side, and once the current turn ends you get to input commands with everyone else for the next turn. Usually another monster will stumble in to keep the sides equal; but no matter how many enemies are wandering around, they won't step in to make a combat unfair for the player.

Its biggest problem (well, maybe its second-biggest problem) is that the combat is slow, without much variety. The basic choice Magic gave you was this: "do I spend a card and a point of mana to do three points of damage, or do I use them to put down a creature who can do one point of damage a turn, forever?" W101 only gives you the first choice. There are healing spells, and spells that increase damage done/reduce damage recieved, and different grades of offensive spell, but that's about it. Also, each attack is a creature, and so there's a casting animation, a creature-appearing animation, and a creature-attacking animation you need to sit through each turn for each combatant. They're not bad, as such animations go, but they slow things down considerably.

But it's got all the systems you'd expect from an MMO: quests (just like warcraft with more comic sans), equipment, and so forth. There's no explicit looting--just get a message saying 'you got [boots icon] comfy boots!'--which is okay for gear but a little weird for random quest drops. To be kid-friendly it has a really aggressive profanity filter; any word that isn't in the dictionary gets turned into $%*#%. Which, eh, is mildly irritating, though probably good for the kids. Except that at this point in the beta they don't have plurals of most words yet. "Hey, dudes!" I try to greet people, and wind up cussing them out instead.

ps> hey #$*@^! if you're tired of linking to rick astley, don't worry! spore is on its way.

So, yeah, it's been ten, eleven-hour days for the last month or two; not much room for anything interesting to happen, much less to post about it. I guess it's good that games are all slated for Christmas, because it's a lot easier to not notice that you're going home at 9 pm when the sun's still up. For certain values of "good".

On the lol branes test: . As expected, it being, y'know, the same test as always. It's cute how they're all, "you'll get along great with other ATs, because you'll both be messy and neither of you will mind!" If only it worked that way.

This brightened up my day. From the comments to this video: "grind session was so great haha i miss that game" (and several others in that vein). ^___^ That was, like, my first game, fresh out of school. And, yeah, Tom sure can put together a soundtrack. It's kinda too bad we don't make games with soundtracks anymore.

Penny Arcade vs. Stephen Totilo (of MTV)'s Review Week. The thing that struck them--as it struck me--was his desire (in his reviewer's bill of rights) to get full boxed copies a week before the game ships. B...because that's the actual customer experience?

I mean, I remember eagerly devouring the manual as my mom drove me home from the mall, but that was twenty years ago. (And I have to drive myself home from the mall, which leaves less attention for the reading.) I do miss the tchochkes that came with boxed games, but those are so uncommon these days as to be insignificant. The collector's edition is a perversion of that, I guess, but still not quite the same. You don't know if you'll appreciate the poster or cloth map or glowing rock until after you've played the game.

Partly, of course, I'm just chafing: "you want to take *how many* weeks off the end of my schedule?" I mean, I guess the time doesn't have to come out of the development budget, but... if there was any slack in the printing and stamping parts, we woulda taken it already. There's a little bit of wiggle room: if one company chose a novel and cumbersome storage medium using strangely-colored beams, the final version of games on competing platforms might be available a little bit sooner.

But mostly it's the focus on physical distribution media that makes me cranky. You are a citizen of the 21st century, Mr. Reviewer! Bits are bits! And all that.

Making sure it's a final build is good, though. That I approve of. I still remember seeing reviews of Wakeboarding with screenshots from E3 attached. It might not have been the best/most important game, but ffs guys.

It goes both ways.

So, I beat TWEWY, only to have it it reveal its Kingdom Hearts ancestry (most accurately described here). There's something really compelling about a game that says "Here is a checklist of all of the things in me! Go catch up on what you've missed!" even if you don't actually go through all of it; it gives you a nice picture of the boundaries of the space.

Which is why you should do it late, of course. Too early, and it can feel confining; the sense of exploration loses out when you've already got a todo list with neat slots for everything that's about to happen.

Looking back: the 'you get XP when you turn it off!' thing sounds like a blessing, but it is in fact a curse. Every time you turn it off, you need to make sure you have the pins that need shutdown XP equipped; equip the wrong pins and they'll get the wrong color of XP and evolve or master improperly. It's vexing. They've made 'oh, I'm done for now, let's turn it off' another avenue for min-maxing.

I think it's spoiled me for games that you only make you do one thing at a time.

We're getting into the final phase: new features have slowed to a trickle, and the focus on bug fixing has begun. And there are a lot of them.

It's one of the more controversial parts of the Joel Test, #5: "Do you fix bugs before writing new code?" It seems pretty straightforward, and the arguments for it are good. You have to fix the bugs eventually anyway, so why not do it earlier, when the code is still fresh in your mind and other people's code hasn't grown around and into it.

But--and perhaps this is exclusive to games, but I doubt it--in practice, people are always waiting on features to come in before they can do their jobs. I could have been making sure that the game behaves properly when the player signs in and out of their Xbox Live account, but then Joe woulda just been picking his ass waiting for me to get combat XP awarding hooked up. (and when more drastic gameplay features come in, it can cause whole levels to need to be redesigned; there's only so much you can build while imagining how a mechanic is going to work.)

Soon, though, I'm going to have to get stuck in on the next-gen loading and saving stuff. I guess it's a testament to how far we've come that I've been playing my 360 for years and I still have only the vaguest idea of how profiles work; the default one user on a console just works.

(While we're on the subject: Joel Test #7 is the one that makes us laugh; we also arguably fail 8, 9, and 12. There are people who claim they do all 12, but I suspect they're liars.)

Watched season 2 of Top Chef over the weekend. It's a frustrating show to watch, in some ways. Yay for food, and yay for a competition that's actually about making stuff and mastery of a skill; but the people making the show don't share that confidence, and they keep pointing the cameras away from the food and toward the people.

Whom they stir into the pettiest of dramas. "O noes somebody's cheating let's all wear our serious faces!" Except, for fuck's sake, they've got someone standing there pointing the camera at somebody who's sneaking a free bag of fruit; why don't they tell them to put the damn thing back and let the game continue? It's embarassing.

I do like the long-form game show, though, particularly when it's one of these crafty things where it takes a while to get a sense of the individual players' styles. They haven't quite shaken off the legacy of Survivor, though, down to the protection-from-elimination/elimination cycles and the interviews with people where they say "I'm not here to make friends, I'm here to win."

None of that is necessary! In particular, you can see them chafing against the need to knock somebody out each week, when a strong challenger stumbles (hit in a weakness--for fuck's sake, how many times do we have to hear "well, I'm not a pastry chef"?--or just messing up while under one of the fairly severe constraints) and they have to hem and haw and judge somebody else's thing worst just to keep them around.

As I mentioned, the show's greatest weakness is, ironically, in its craftsmanship; it's bad at showing you the act of cooking, it's bad at showing you the final product, it doesn't trust your memory to survive commercial breaks or the gap between shows (and the resulting repetition is in fact more harmful to comprehension when viewed continuously, with commercials removed). It's still fun, though.

Also, in case you missed it: lightning vs. volcano.

The other day I was hankering for something desserty, but the kitchen was close to empty; there were ingredients of all sorts, but no eggs. I'd used them up making gougeres, which are suprisingly fun to make, though they give your stirrin' arm a workout. But everything needs eggs!

I did have the dregs of a box of Rice Krispies, though, and so I present:

( recipe )

Good for a quick hit of nostalgia without having to melt then eat an entire stick of butter, and cleans up better too. All around more manageable.

A week or so ago I was all nodding along with the D&D 4e guy when he was all "we've disentangled a lot of the unnecessary parallelism in the D&D cosmos; just because there are four elements, we don't need to have four flavors of djinn, or because drow mirror elves in the underground, you don't have to have evil underground orcs and hobbits, too." They're also cleaning out the dragon list, and making a lot of the undergrounders and goblin variants grow into their niche or be discarded.

There's some wisdom to it. Having a structure is a good way to spin out a lot of content on the cheap, but if it doesn't lead to meaningful differences between (or, worse, leads to things that aren't really condusive to gameplay) it's just wasted crap.

At the same time, it's fun! It engages the brain, in some small way, at the cost of making things seem artificial.

I just noticed that TWEWY switches out its pedestrians based on the brands you've made popular in the area; it's a subtle thing that you don't notice right away, but it's a nice touch. The brands themselves are all based on the Chinese zodiac: gothic lolitas shop Lapin Angelique, while Tigre Punks caters to its crowd and the more budget-minded consumer wears the simple, cartoony fashions of Mus Rattus. Again, totally fake, but a good structure for catching 'em all.

Which is something that D&D just doesn't provide. Each terrain type has its own elf, good dragon, and evil dragon, for instance--but there's no game mechanic that requires adventurers to check each one off a list, or whatever. The structure's there for the enjoyment of the GM, or the book's author, not the players. I'm not sure how much that can change, really, without substantially changing the nature of the game or the scope at which it's played. So it's probably best that they're dismantling it.

They've found a new electronics component.

A couple decades ago, this dude was all, "Y'know, we've got resistors, capacitors, and inductors, but there's a hole in the chart right here!" This thing he gave the unfortunate name of 'memristor', but, eh. It wasn't that big a deal; certainly I'd never heard of it.

Then a few days ago, people at HP manufactured one! It...could be very useful? It's certainly tinier than any non-volatile memory yet.

There is a joy to filling in the missing box, to setting up systems of parallel things that all mesh together nicely. "It's the pleasure of Sudoku!" I want to say, but I hate Sudoku--it has the mechanical act, true, but there's no sense to it. Like reading a book full of randomly generated grammatically correct sentences: you smell the paper, you turn the pages, you connect subjects and verbs in your head, but what's the point?

So, I'm playing around with a little Web project; Google's app engine (appspot lol) is intriguing, though I haven't done much more than page through the docs. It's in Python, though, which makes me happy. Ruby still gives me the heebies.

( programming language grumpery )

I stumbled across something kinda neat, and the comments reminded me why I've stayed away from this crap for so long: 'Why doesn't this work in IE 5 for Mac/Opera/Safari 1.0.2! Halp plz!'

What am I getting myself in for?

Of course I'm not going to care that much. Hell, I don't even know what I'd do to get IE 6 back on my machine; I've actually got an Opera on my Wii, though hell if I'll actually fire it up. If I ever make this public I might have to actually install Firefox.

Bleh. And as Joel points out, there's a whole new round of this foolery on its way.

ps> google charts looks pretty awesome.

Still enjoying it. Apparently The World Ends With You is the American title, plucked out of a random scrap of peculiarly Japanese-seeming dialogue; the original title was What a Wonderful World! or some such, which didn't take for trademark reasons? Or something.

The main character is cut from the same old cloth: an unlikable loner. Amnesiac, even. He warms a little, but I still found him a little grating (but don't worry--the combat system is more than awesome enough to keep you going) until about...halfway through(? it's hard to tell)...when he's explaining bits of Shibuya to his partner, and he's all "X is awesome! I really like their outlook/philosophy, they made a big impact on me! XD" I was startled; dude actually evinced a bit of personality that's not about being grumpy!

And there are cute Shibuya bits in it: rub the possessed dog statue, purchase rare crafting mats at Shibu-Q Heads. I only visited once as a tourist many years ago, so I cannot confirm or deny that the map they give you corresponds to any real-world map; I will however point out that it's garbage at communicating what actions you should take to move your character from one location to another.

A few months ago they added a new 10-man dungeon to World of Warcraft.

Smaller dungeons are in kind of a weird place, progression-wise. The standard path is 5-man -> 10-man -> 25-man (or, pre-expansion, 5-man -> 10/15-man -> 40-man); people who are regularly clearing the largest dungeons gave better gear, and thus more powerful characters, than people who are don't. The barriers are mostly those of organization--not only does it take effort to get that many people in one place at one time, but the dungeons are scaled to require several nights a week to clear; only when you severely overpower a dungeon, at least in certain key roles, does it become feasible to assemble random people and rush a dungeon in a single go.

If you don't have that level of organization--either you can't grow your guild fast enough, or you personally don't have a schedule that fits with guilds on your server (7-11pm PST x 2-4 days, +/- 15 minutes) then you're stuck in 5-10 man content. Which is all good when you're looking at the content that exists from the beginning. If you're adding a new 10-man, though, where does it go? And what loots do you fill it with?

(the answers: just after the first 10-man! and mediocre items, but vanity loots--riding bear!--for those who can complete it under a fairly strict time limit.)

Our guild leader was part of an A-team of people from various guilds who kept running the dungeon 'til they figured out the optimal bear run; then he came back and started doing bear runs with us. And now I have a bear! It's pretty awesome.

The World Ends With You: Psychic War in Shibuya for your DS, courtesy of the Kingdom Hearts dudes. It's... surprisingly compelling!

The battle system is what makes it. Your team is you and a partner: you fight on the bottom screen with the stylus, your partner fights on the top screen with the d-pad. There are the same enemies on both, though they act independently, only sharing health meters.

It starts out frantic: there's way too much information to deal with at once, and you wind up spamming your partner's buttons while trying to figure out the inputs for your own attacks. There's the option to put your partner on automatic, but I turned that off as soon as I could; doing so also gives you 10% bonus experience. After a while you start to figure out what's worth paying attention to, and it gets more manageable. I still don't pay enough attention to my partner; there are defensive options up there, for instance, but I find it too hard to be aware enough to know when to use 'em.

On the menu screen you can turn up and down the game difficulty and your character level; enemies drop different items by difficulty, and the drop rate is multiplied for each level you are below your max. Fighting enemies in succession gives a further multiplier--since healing items and combo attack difficulty don't reset between rounds, it really does give you less room for error.

One last cute thing: what clothing and accessories you can wear is determined by your Bravery stat.

The main character spends the first three or four days as an unlikable jerk--worse than Squall!--but he warms up. The plot is fairly conventional, but with some neat moments in a fairly stylish package.

So, yeah, it's neat! Expensive for a DS game, but I'm enjoying the heck out of it so far.

Visual Studio has some small things that I do really like, and wish other people had too: open containing folder! Click on a file you have open, and it opens the folder with the file in it and highlights the file. Surprisingly handy, for, um, reasons I can't think of off-hand. Like when there's an error in a file and you need to do something to it, like delete it or get it out of Perforce again or something. Vista does that with shortcuts, as I've already mentioned.

I seem to recall way back in Mac OS 7 through 9 somewhere they had something similar, where clicking on window titles let you access the file the window was attached to instead of the window itself, or something, or maybe I'm just making it up because it seems like the sort of thing that's in accord with old-Mac philosophy. The one where you have the meat grinder icon that you drag compressed files onto and it decompresses them. (that sort of thing has generally been replaced with context menus now, which is probably for the best, though the part of me that likes playing with toys misses it.)

I sorta wish people were still experimenting with that kind of stuff; OS X is in some ways glorious, but at the same time it's pretty conservative. Adding context menus but not an extra mouse button is a bit of a "trucks first" kind of feature migration.

Also, some things are just not meant to be energy drinks, I'm afraid.