05.29.08
Posted in Game news, Games at 16:46
It’s a fetching title, isn’t it?
At first, you might think “A-hah! At last the UN has recognized that access to Deus Ex is a basic human right and started distributing the game for free to third world countries”, but no - actually it’s Gametap. But that’s almost as good! According to favourite blog Rock, Paper, Shotgun (RPS):
Gametap, that surging faucet of digital delivery, has announced that it’ll be featuring candidate for best game ever, Deus Ex, on its free games roster as of next week.
Finally my concerns about the possible necessity to include Deus Ex with The Nameless Mod in future job applications are void! Furthermore, it is no longer necessary for all those friends of mine who have lost 2-3 Deus Ex CD’s (when will people learn to take proper care of their artifacts, seriously?) to pirate the all-time greatest game when I draft them to playtest TNM. Just check out the first comment from the RPS post to see what I mean:
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- Game: Grand Theft Auto 4
- Music: Ruslana - Wild Dances
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05.27.08
Posted in Hardware/Technology, Personal at 08:43
I’m gone for a week, and I manage to get 12 spam comments in the mean time. I think my CAPTCHA is broken, time to finally switch to ReCAPTCHA. Of course… I need to get my ‘net connection back first.
Our connection went mental on Wednesday - it didn’t die, it just sort of lost its mind. About half the pings we send time out, and when we do manage to connect to a site, it goes incredibly slowly. Most of the time I can’t connect to MSN, and when I do, about half my messages are never delivered or received. Worst of all, I can’t get my mail. I had 41 mails waiting for me when I last tried to check on Friday night, and surely I will be drowned in mail when I finally regain my connection.
The main problem is that my ISP, YouSee, has pretty terrible service. It’s not for a lack of trying, but their internal communication could use some work. It seems their support department and their technician department only communicate through some sort of helpdesk system, and I can’t contact the tech department directly. So I need to talk to the supporters, who then tell the technicians they should call me, and the technicians will then call “between 8 am and 4 pm”.
So, uh, I should just stay at home waiting for them to call…? The first appointment we made with them was for them to call us Monday between 8 and 10, but they never did. Then we called their supporters, who reminded the techs (via the helpdesk) to call on my cell phone, which they did 4 hours later. In the middle of my second viewing of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. At this point my dad was home, but they didn’t think to try the home number when nobody answered my cell phone.
So, uh, if TDC Cable wanted more customers, maybe they should’ve improved their customer support workflow a little instead of just changing their name to YouSee?
After a week without ‘net at home, I’m seriously starting to go a little crazy. Not a lot, I’m just constantly slightly frustrated, restless, and uneasy. It’s a mix of boredom and the complete absense of my social network. Sure it’s not a disaster for TNM if I take a week or so off from the project, but it’s a week I could spend improving the mod and fixing bugs which is instead being spent playing GTA4 when I don’t really want to play at all.
Three things I’d take to a deserted island:
- My computer.
- A solar power plant.
- The Internet.
- Game: Grand Theft Auto 4
- Music: Napoleon XIV - They're Coming to Take Me Away
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05.23.08
Posted in Game design, Games at 10:33
When I attended elementary and junior high school, the Danish school system operated under a paradigm called “responsibility for your own learning”, which sounds a bit awkward in English but rolled off the tongue somewhat easier in Danish (”Ansvar for egen læring”). The jist of it was that if the pupils do not cooperate with the teacher, they will learn nothing - you get as much out of classes as you put into them.
When I wrote my paper about Oblivion last year, one of my primary points was that the greatest weakness of such an open game is that the player has a lot of responsibility to make the game fun. They call them sandbox games for a reason - if you build a castle out of the sand, you can have fun; if you take a piss in it, not so much. Oblivion allows you to wander off into the mountains and become tremendously bored. This is the weakness of its narrative but the strength of its gameplay, because you can also wander off into the mountains and have loads of fun.
I spent most of yesterday playing Grand Theft Auto 4 because our Internet connection is on the fritz at home, and God forbid I’d have to open a book or something. One of the missions I did had me chasing two bikers on a motorcycle through the city. At one point they would drive unto the train tracks and take the chase into the subway tunnels. At the entrance to the tunnels, they paused for a moment, long enough for me to line up a shot. I emptied a whole clip of my SMG in their general direction, killing one of them, but the other survived somehow. I followed him into the tunnels, spraying clip after clip of bullets at him before realizing he was immortal - I wasn’t meant to kill him yet.
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05.17.08
Posted in Game design, Game news, Games, Personal at 01:14
So this week has been relatively interesting. Events have occured that were worthy of bloggage. I will now try (and fail) to do them justice. I will also include photos, and this will possibly help. Buckle up, it’s gonna be a long one - even for me.
Insertion and Recon
The conference started Wednesday, but I went to Malmö (roughly pronounced Marlm-soundthatdoesntexistinEnglish) on Tuesday so I wouldn’t have to rush off to check in half-way through the conference. On my way to the hostel, I realized I could pretty much walk the whole way through parks, just occasionally crossing the road to get from one park to the next. This turned out to be a good thing, because I ended up walking that route 7 times throughout Tuesday.
After I’d dumped my baggage at the hostel around noon, I grabbed some lunch and then headed back to the station to meet Ruben. I was fairly excited about this, since I’ve known Ruben online for years ever since he tested my NWN module and recruited me to play in his massive DM’d campaign. For the best DM I’ve ever had the honour of playing with, I was a little disappointed to find that he wasn’t an enormous immortal being of pure light, but he was a nice guy, so I quickly forgave him for letting down my expectations. (Dunno if Ruben would want me posting a picture of him here, so I won’t). We took a few walks around town, then split up to relax before dinner. We met up again half past 6 and quickly found a nice but affordable place to eat. Then we wandered around a bit, had some coffee, and went back to sleep.
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- Game: All of them
- Music: Mindthings - Exponential Tears
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05.12.08
Posted in Games, Personal at 16:36
Following a really good review of GTA4 in my daily newspaper, Politiken, I was going to post a long-winded entry about the vast differences between game reviews in the mainstream press and reviews in the more specialized gaming press. Unfortunately, it looks like N’Gai Croal beat me to it. My entry was going to be a lot less opinionated and more observing, since I really liked Vigild’s review in Politiken, but apart from that, I don’t really know that I have anything to contribute to the discussion.
So instead, you’re going to get a random picture dump of photos I’ve taken over the last 2-3 weeks, because I love taking pictures and I love showing them off almost as much. First up is a batch of photos I took because the motifs remind me of various games - I’m really geeky that way. Then you’re getting a couple of random pictures too, because I’m a very self-indulgent person.
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| Half-Life 2, Water Hazard |
Half-Life 2: The Lost Coast |
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| Grand Theft Auto 3: San Andreas |
Myst |
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| Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare |
I’m going to put this in a game some day, mark my words! |
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| Clearly they’re developing a lethal zombie virus in here. Or they’re controlling the national surveillance grid. Watching us all. |
No game, really, the lighting was just hella good for photography that day. |
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| The inevitable cat photo! |
‘Tis I! |
Tomorrow, I’m leaving for Malmö to attend the Nordic Game 2008 convention. Expect plenty more photos and a rundown of speaks I’ve attended when I return, Friday.
- Game: Grand Theft Auto 4
- Music: Surfact - Step Into the Light
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05.08.08
Posted in Games at 11:12
It was inevitable. There’s no use fighting it anymore. I have to write about Grand Theft Auto 4. However, GTA4 is huge, so I will just write about my favourite part.
My favourite part is the police missions.
When you get into a cop car (and you should, as often as possible, because not only do they steer very reliably and drive very fast, their sirens will make other traffic stop and pull over to give you the road and being in a cop car allows you to pass over bridges without paying toll), you can press the right shoulder button while holding still to access the police computer. This gives you a range of choices, the most entertaining of which is the Most Wanted list. Here is a list of the most dangeous criminals in the city listed by their crimes, ready for you to locate and eliminate. Here is your chance to atone for (some of) the murder and theft you do in the rest of the game.
And have tons of fun while you’re at it.
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- Game: Grand Theft Auto 4
- Music: Rammstein - Engel
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05.07.08
Posted in Game design, Games at 13:27
Have you noticed how popular handheld camera is these days? If you’ve ever studied film, you most certainly can’t help but notice every time you turn on your TV. It’s especially noticeable in action series like Battlestar Galactica where they not only film approximately 95% of their shots with handheld, but they even simulate handheld camera in their CGI space scenes!
It’s a good trend because since the invention of steadycam, handheld camera has been visually tolerable and subtle as well as dynamic and exciting. Naturally the style has spilled into games, which constantly nick ideas from films as well as feed new ideas and styles back into the older medium. Mass Effect’s space sequences featured camera work pretty much identical to the floaty simulated handheld cameras in Battlestar Galactica, Gears of War used shaky and up-close-and-personal handheld camera to show the nasty chainsaw kills, and Guitar Hero sometimes simulates handheld camera to give the impression of a camera man amidst the audience at the front of the stage.
Most recently, I’ve noticed Grand Theft Auto 4 has a bit of a love affair with the handheld camera. It’s used in pretty much every shot of every cutscene, and GTA4 features many many many cutscenes. Far more interestingly, however, GTA4 features several different camera modes, one of which is seemingly randomly placed handheld camera positions. This camera mode makes the action look remarkably cinematic, making the extended car chases even more convincing than the impressive AI and the dynamic open city already makes them, but unfortunately I find it quite difficult to steer properly with the shifting, sometimes very inconvenient camera positions.
I’m looking forward to seeing where simulated handheld cameras can be used in future titles. Assassin’s Creed had something like it in pretty much all the fight scenes, which worked really well (sadly when people describe the game’s often unstimulating and repetitive combat system, they usually neglect to give it credit for the never inconvenient dynamically placed cameras). In any case, I don’t see cutscenes in games going away any time soon, and now that games can apparently fully simulate handheld cameras in-game, more studios than ever will need to hire cinematic designers and cutscene directors. Oh, would you look at that? I happen to be pretty well qualified for the position 
- Game: Grand Theft Auto 4
- Music: Surfact - Track 4
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05.06.08
Posted in Games, Personal at 17:17
It’s a pity I never got around to writing a post-mortem of sorts over the Quest for Glory campaign that my good friend Ruben ran in Neverwinter Nights over a period of three years. I have a couple of half-finished drafts lying around in WordPress, but nothing I write seems to really do the campaign any justice. How do you summarize the multitude of feelings stemming from completing a roleplaying campaign that lasted 3½ whole years? Search me.
It’s not a campaign that’ll be forgotten anytime soon, though, that’s for sure. Especially not now that we have a fantastic portrait of the group to treasure forever. After seeing how well Obsidian’s drawing of Trestkon turned out, Ruben decided to commission the portrait, which depicts all six major characters in the campaign, only omitting the character Alarah, who left the group after the second session. The drawing is an homage to the campaign the likes of which I’ve repeatedly failed to create in writing.
I immediately whipped up a wallpaper with the artwork for Ruben. I’m not using it myself because it obfuscates my icons too much, but I’m still pretty happy with it. I just wish I could claim credit for the drawing - in truth not even the photo in the background is mine (we have no mountains in Denmark), and the logo, I nicked from the cover of the Quest for Glory 5 box. That doesn’t make me any less happy with it, though. For a 1680×1050 version of it, and an attribution of which characters appear in the portrait, please visit my freshly updated Campaign Chronicles page, which also has a pictorial journal from the whole 3 years of the campaign in which I was fortunate enough to participate.
As for the title of today’s post… well, how much more glory could you possibly need than this? Job well done, I say.
- Game: Neverwinter Nights
- Music: Surfact - Scarecrow
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05.04.08
Posted in Music at 20:21
The observant reader may have noticed a band called Surfact has been graced with a position in the Music slot of all my posts lately. Surfact is a relatively new Danish grunge/metal band whom I finally got around to noticing after listening to their excellent song Supression exactly as I was finishing a blog entry.
I dug out their MySpace Music page and gave the five songs on there a listen, and I realized I’d heard no less than three of them on the radio and liked them all without realizing they were from the same band (that’s the problem of listening to the radio while you work, you forget to pay attention). I looked into them and discovered that they’ve only released one album so far, Terrific Downfall. I decided I ought to own this album.
After hunting across the city for it, I finally managed to buy the last copy in the third shop I visited. Then I got home, sat down to give it a good listen, and fell in love with every song on their record. I also noticed that I was already familiar with a fourth song on there from the radio, Monkey On Your Back, which was a pleasant surprise. It’s always kinda tricky to recommend music on a gaming blog, because I have no idea what sort of songs you, my readers, are into, with a few exceptions. However, I believe if you enjoy grunge a’la Pearl Jam, the softer side of metal a’la Muse, or just good rock in general, you are quite likely to enjoy Surfact. Give them a listen and judge for yourself.
- Game: Grand Theft Auto 4
- Music: Surfact - Sundown
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05.03.08
Posted in The Nameless Mod at 17:38
I can’t help but wonder if there’s something wrong with The Nameless Mod. The only person so far who’s completed it is Gelo, who went through it twice because we desperately needed somebody to. We’ve had (I think) 7 people outside the team play the game, and nobody has completed it yet. The latest round of testing was done on the A200 build, which is pretty much the finished game plus a few bugs and without most of the voice acting, and yet our testers are working at an epically slow pace.
Our testers assure me the game is great, impressive, comparable to a professional game, whatever. But none of them have actually completed it. Far as I can tell, the farthest anybody but Gelo has made it is our third mission (out of 5), meaning something like 30% of our game is largely untested. Surely if they’d been testing Deus Ex or Half-Life 2, they’d have forgotten about everything else and just been swept away by the experience? Somehow we must just be completely failing to keep the player’s attention…?
I don’t mean to whine, but it’s amazingly demoralizing when you’ve worked on a project for 6 years and then even the people who volunteer to test it (presumably your most dedicated fans) can’t really maintain interest in it. Testing should be the easy job, you just have to play the damn thing and write down whenever you find something that isn’t like it should be, so what the hell is the problem?
If you’re one of our testers and you’re reading this, don’t take it personally. I’m not mad at you, just worried about the quality of my own work.
- Game: Grand Theft Auto 4
- Music: Surfact - Monkey On Your Back
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