General mind-dump of Jonas Wæver
I want to write about stealth. I got Assassin’s Creed yesterday and completed the first assassination, and it’s definitely not a disappointment so far. However, it’s largely been sold on its unique brand of stealth which is based on blending into a crowd rather than sticking to the shadows. This could be translated into “we’re not Splinter Cell”, but it’s not quite as original as they’ve tried to make it sound - Hitman has been doing more or less the same thing for 4 games.
I actually finished another, much simpler video at the same time as I made Last of the Wilds, but I figured it was enough to post one video in a day. This is really just an amusing bit of recording of Stella expressing her extreme displeasure over a malfunctioning cat’s toy we bought last week. I find it pretty funny though, so here you go. It’s only 8 mb.
I just completed Bioshock with Casper. I played most of it, which is ironic since he owns the game, but he did take over when my nerves needed a rest. Since I’m a pathological scaredy-cat, having completed Bioshock is quite the overcoming for me and something I would’ve never expected to be capable of when the game was released. At the end we were both motivated mostly by the desire to finish the game before Assassin’s Creed hopefully arrives tomorrow, so we skipped a lot of optional areas towards the end. Nevertheless we’re through it now, and I’m sure we’re both better men for it.
We got the happy-happy-joy-joy ending because we’re both such righteous fellows, and it was a very good ending indeed. It left me feeling very happy and accomplished. The plot twist two-thirds through the game was so shocking it easily compares to KOTOR and probably would’ve been impossible to pull off in any other medium. I would go so far as to suggest it really made you consider (if not question) the way you play most computer games and the way they’re structured.
Now I really hope I get Assassin’s Creed tomorrow. I’m tired of waiting.
Having finally acquired a proper video editing program, I pulled some recent cat footage off the tape in my camcorder and made a little video with it. I decided to edit it to the instrumental Last of the Wilds by Nightwish because it was a great fit and I’m really into celtic music at the moment. The result, should my video plugin choose to display it, can be seen below as a 19mb flash file:
In addition, I have uploaded a more high-quality 62mb downloadable MOV-file 
for those of you who don’t like streaming video (weirdos). And in addition, I accidentally encoded it in MPEG2 
, but even RAR’ed it’s 185 megs. It’s very big and very high quality though.
Apart from Call of Duty 4, I have been enjoying two additional entertainment products these past few days. The first is Team Fortress 2, which has surprised me quite significantly by not being frustrating or boring or just plain uninteresting. I really don’t have the patience for competitive multiplayer in general - cooperative play is the definition of Awesome as far as I’m concerned, but games that pitch me against other people rarely keep my interest. Once in a while though, something will come along and push the right buttons. It happened with Counter-Strike, it happened with World of Warcraft’s battlefields, and now it’s happened with TF2.
There are several reasons for this. The primary reason is that TF2 is (as the name implies) a team-oriented game, meaning I’m not measured exclusively on my own ability to kill the enemy players. This is enhanced by the class system which offers several support- or defense-oriented options in addition to straight-out assault. Yesterday I kicked ass as the rather n00b-friendly Soldier, but today I found my niche as a medic. I didn’t even realize how much better I was at playing medic than any other class before I looked at my stats after the last game today and realized I’d scored 3 points more as a medic than in my best round as Soldier in spite of having played Soldier far far longer. This means I can be valuable to my team even if I do suck at killing the other guys.
Alright, I’m changing this post a bit because I don’t want to make Smike mad (for real, that is) and I also think it has more value as a quaint little putting-the-obvious-into-words(-and-redundant-diagrams) than a failed jab at one of my 4 regular commenters.
Level design primarily has two purposes: Gameplay and aesthetics. Levels in games can either need to look pleasing or realistic - often both, but an equally important and somewhat more fundamental purpose is to make sure the game is fun to play. Depending on the game you’re working on, there can be various different demands the levels need to fulfil. What I perceive as the most basic of these demands is whether or not the level should be linear or non-linear. In my opinion, either can work really well, it simply depends on the nature of your game. Games with linear level design sometimes appeal to different players than games with nonlinear level design, but in my case (and in many others’ I’m sure) a linear game simply provides a different sort of experience.
I have created two simple diagrams to illustrate how significant the difference between linearity and nonlinearity in level design is. If you’ve ever spent any time actually thinking about this, I’m sure it’ll seem extremely self-evident, but it was nice for me to put these concepts into words and illustrate them even though they’re pretty easy to grasp. First of all, here is a level as it might appear in Half-Life - picture a set of corridors and rooms, perhaps a door leading into a courtyard with another building with a conveniently open door on the other side, and more corridors and rooms beyond:
By all accounts, I shouldn’t have enjoyed Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare nearly as much as I did. The singleplayer is just 6 hours long, it’s almost completely linear, the action is non-stop and relentless, and the plot is a barely decent excuse for shooting terrorists (and also, according to the PCG review, stolen directly from a season of 24). Nevertheless, I’m having loads of fun playing it for the second time.
I always enjoyed the Call of Duty games, although I never bought the first two - I just borrowed them from a friend and played through them once. Out of principle, I frowned at World War 2 games because it’s been done to death, but Call of Duty kept me interested by not crediting the Americans with singlehandedly winning the damn thing. You got to play a Brit and a Soviet, and hilariously those campaigns tended to be more enjoyable than the straight-forward infantry combat of the American campaigns (even if CoD2 had that awesome D-Day scene with the Rangers).
I’m still recovering from Portal. Everybody’s been telling me how perfect it is since it came out, so I had really high expectations going into it. Each of my expectations was fulfilled and then exceeded. The game is funny, creepy, and at times downright hair-raising. Certain scenes made my heart race like I’d run half a marathon. It challenged my intellect, my coordination, and my reflexes, yet it was never frustrating and I never got stuck more than 5 minutes. In short it really is fantastically original and brilliantly executed and perfect on its own terms - and don’t just take it from me, take it from everybody.
And furthermore, she is watching you.
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