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Life and times of a webgeek

Category Archives: Gaming

Friday Fun Link – Forget-Me-Not

Check out Forget-Me-Not, a tough as nails riff on the gameplay mechanics of the arcade games of the 80′s. It’s free on Windows and OSX and $1.99 for iOS. I bought it on the phone but didn’t like it because it’s hard to control on a touchscreen. No such difficulty with a keyboard though and you can’t beat free. Gameplay is a combo of pac man-esque pellet munching, simple shooting mechanics, and maze escape. Did I mention it’s tough? Remember – you can (and will) shoot yourself, and that’s not a good thing. Gameplay video:

Example of why Games for Windows Live sucks

This is not even close to the best example of why it sucks, or the worst experience I’ve had with it (I’m thinking of you, Bioshock 2), but it’s fresh in my mind so I’m going to share it.

I wanted to try the new free-to-play RTS Age of Empires Online. I had been following a ‘No more games that use Games for Windows Live’ policy ever since a set of really awful experiences with Bioshock 2 a year or so ago, but a free game from a studio whose games I’ve really enjoyed in the past convinced me to give GFWL another chance.

I downloaded and installed the game, but when I tried to login to GFWL, which I have to do in order to play, it wouldn’t let me. Tried on the GFWL website and was informed someone has been trying to login to my account with the wrong password so many times my password is invalid.

I reset password, a reasonably straightforward process, hurrah! I am pleasantly surprised.

Try again to login. I’m informed I must provide product key and am unable to login. wth? It’s a free game, and anyway, why should that block me from logging in? Confusion.

Examine email looking for product key. Find none

Examine spam folder looking for email with product key. Find none. Grossed out by contents of spam folder.

Examine Age of Empire Online FAQ and message boards looking for someone with the same problem. Find nothing.

Google this problem. Find nothing.

GFWL lets you specify a backup email address. Look there and in that account’s spam folder for an email with a product key. Find nothing. More hot spam folder grossout action.

Ponder. Wth? With these things you can always find someone with a similar problem via google, and eventually arrive at a solution. I can’t so…what does that mean? It’s unique to me? Seems inconceivable? What out of all the parameters in play would be unique to me? My password. I check. I’ve made a typo. Try to login using the correct password. Eureka! I’m in.

Why the FUCK did GFWL send me off on a 30 minute goose chase looking for a product key when its issue was I had an invalid password?

Because it’s Game For Windows Live, a product seemingly designed to put anyone who tries it off of gaming on windows.

Age of Empires Online is ok – it’s definitely worth a look if you’re into RTS. Pluses include fantastic art direction and a ton of content. Cons are incredibly bad unit pathing issues and a brain dead AI. Message me if you’re playing and want to connect. Meantime, I’m back on my ‘will not buy products which require the use of GFWL’ policy. Developers and publishers, please: spare your customers the agony of this entirely shitty product. There’s no money hat large enough to make this worth the bad mouthing your product will get. Look into steamworks or anything, anything at all*, besides GFWL. It’s shit.

*(Except the stuff Ubisoft is doing, and, err, EA’s Origin stuff…jesus. Software publishing is going to the dogs! Just fucking use Steamworks, they appear to be the only company that recognizes customer experience should be primary).

Made a donation to the Gary Gygax Memorial Fund

Gary Gygax at Gen Con Indy 2007. Gygax is stan...

Image via Wikipedia

Their website does a terrible job if helping you understand why you might consider donating and what they’ll do with the money, but I still gave $20 to the Gary Gygax Memorial Fund this week. Gygax is one of the creators of Dungeons and Dragons, originally a set of miniatures supplements he wrote with his friends that grew into a global brand. He also founded one of the earliest gaming magazines (Dragon Magazine), launched what became and remains the US’s largest gaming convention (Gencon), produced a hit animated television series (Dungeons and Dragons), and more. Gygax’s games and company played a huge role in my middle childhood, and I still have a stack of his books and supplements tucked into my basement rec room’s game cabinet. The intent is to build a statue commemorating his life on parkland in downtown Lake Geneva, WI, where he lived and worked for most of his life. He deserves the recognition.

The memorial is going to be in downtown Lake Geneva, in this park.

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Friday fun: Id’s Doom in your browser

A great demonstration of how much progress is being made with javascript. Spend some time at lunch today playing the original Doom from Id in your browser. Performance is a little sluggish on my middle of the road imac at work, and the sound lags behind the action, but it’s still pretty impressive. It also sort of mimics my original experience with Doom back in the day, when it was sluggish as heck on the old (386? 486? I can’t recall) machines we had at the office when it came out. Anyway, worth a little stroll down nostalgia lane. Mind that you should try this with a modern browser. Enjoy!

Minecraft plus Studio Ghibli plus time = brilliance

So you have to be a nerds nerd to really appreciate this but man, if you fit the bill, this is fantastic. This:

Is the worlds imagined by Studio Ghibli as recreated by a bunch of folks using the Minecraft engine.

If you’re unfamiliar with Studio Ghibli, stop what you’re doing and go watch Laputa, Castle in the Sky, or Grave of the Fireflies, or Porco Rosso, or, well, anything they’ve done, but especially those. Shorthand explanation would be that they’re a Japanese analog to Walt Disney.

If you’re unfamiliar with Minecraft, and you have a computer that’s less than 6-7 years old that can run Java, go spend the $15 or so to register. It’s a 3d lego toolkit with world generation, multiplayer, and zombies, plus a whole lot more, but that should be enough right there. Plus it’s absolutely brilliant.

Just my luck: no functioning consoles

So my primary hobby is gaming, and I spend a fair amount of time and money on it. What are the odds that in the same timeframe Sony Playstation’s PSN service would go down for a month+ due to being hacked, and my just over 3 year old (read: just out of warranty) xbox 360 would Red Ring of Death? 100% likely as it turns out. Just a couple of days after the PSN network blew up, my Xbox died as I sat down to watch a movie on it. I’m especially pissed about the xbox because I intentionally held off buying one for several years because the RROD issue became well known and I decided to hold off for a hardware revision, assuming Microsoft would address the issue. They didn’t. Supposedly it’s addressed in the newest ‘slim’ models (I bought an Elite shortly after they came out), but at this point, having had my first generation xbox die and now my 360 die, I’m not so sure I want to buy back into the platform. It’s a real dilemma though, because I have literally dozens of games for the thing, as well as many peripherals (the controllers alone go for $50/pop and I have 4 of them), and selling everything off will earn me pennies on the dollar. Plus, I’m figuring my soon-to-be toddler would enjoy the Kinect motion control stuff MS is pushing these days.

So…what to do. I can’t decide. I’m sitting pat for now. E3, the biggest gaming industry trade show, is next month, and I’m going to see what comes out of that before doing anything.  I should note that while the PS3 still works, mostly, aside from multiplayer, I’m worried trophies won’t sync correctly when the network comes back up, so I’ve been staying off of it. Meantime, it’s back to gaming on the PC primarily.

No audio over hdmi on windows 7? Solution:

I bought a new monitor and am replacing my 5.1 speaker set with speakers built into the monitor – basically I’m reducing clutter on my desk and am going to use headphones when I want quality audio from the computer. Having a baby changes your priorities ;-)

The problem was, when I got everything wired up, I had no audio coming from the computer. Ultimately this boiled down to a driver issue that’s related to the fact that when you’re using HDMI, your video card is responsible for delivering the audio to your output device. I had to update my realtek audio drivers, disable all devices, then restart the machine and reconfigure, before I could get audio out. I found this forum thread helpful, as well as this image illustrating the three places you need to make changes to your system configuration in order to get audio out.

While this is a driver issue ultimately I blame Microsoft for this – it’s hard to imagine making something as simple as ‘I want sound from my computer’ more complex.

Posting this in case it’s helpful to others.

Video shrunken/ not fullscreen using an HDMI cable? Solution:

I bought a new monitor and connected it to my video card via HDMI. The video output was shrunken, with ~1″ black borders all around the screen. At first I thought the monitor was defective but I tested using a DVI cable and the display was fine. Much googling later, I figured out it’s an issue with ATI/AMD’s catalyst control center. Basically you have to set overscan to 0% in the catalyst control center to rid yourself of this issue, something that’s not at all intuitive – even finding where to change that setting is a chore. This post on aoclarkejr.com was super helpful and has pictures of each step you need to take. I found that via this forum thread. Posting this just in case it helps others solve this issue.

Friday fun link: Glorg

Glorg is worth checking out simply on the strength of its design. It’s a minimalistic one button rpg inspired by roguelikes with great art design and music. This isn’t a deep experience, but it’s perfect for your friday lunch break. Pay attention to the timing on your mouseclicks – it’s not obvious at first that timing plays an important role. A video is below:

Return of the Friday fun link: Cursed Treasure

Cursed Treasure is a fantastic flash-based tower defense game with a level up system. If you’re a fan of the genre you don’t want to miss this one. It doesn’t bring anything new to the table, it’s just really well executed, has good graphics, UI, and sound, and enough depth to keep you engaged. I finished all levels with a brilliant rating. A hint: the fear power of Crypts is really powerful. I found it easiest to focus on leveling that tower type up. Also holding down shift lets you repeat actions, something that’s not obvious and which is critical to beating Ninjas with your fireball.

Game finished: 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand

50 Cent: Blood on the Sand
Image via Wikipedia

Continuing my trawl through games I started then set aside, last weekend I completed 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand. This is a dumb, fun, 3rd person cover based shooter. It’s a riff on the same gameplay mechanics in Gears of War 1 and 2 with an over the top plot and mixed production values. The story follows the adventures of 50 cent and his crew in the middle east. They get ripped off by a concert promoter who offers them a jewel encrusted skull in lieu of payment. This also gets ripped off and 50 cent and his buddies spend the rest of the game shooting and cussing their way through various middle eastern locales in their quest to retrieve the skull. This game has no pretensions of grandeur – it’s the videogame equivalent of a B-movie and it pretty much delivers. The graphics, models, and audio are all middle of the road, but the feel is solid and the game isn’t long enough to wear out its welcome. It has a bit of arcade scoring in the mix, where stringing together insults and combos raise a score multiplier, but for the most part I just ignored this and blew through the levels. I only busted out a curse/combo now and then as I unlocked new curses, for the laughs rather than to help with the score.

You can find this game for under $20 new and often for under $10, and it’s worth it for the laughs at under $10. It won’t win any awards for originality but it’s a fun ride while it lasts.

Video below of some gameplay and cutscenes to give you a sense of it. I finished it on the xbox 360, it’s available for the PS3 as well. It’s got an average of ~72 over on metacritic, and that feels about right to me.

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Game Finished: Gears of War 2

Gears of War
Image via Wikipedia

I’m still on a roll, finishing games at a rapid clip. Susan was out of town for several days at a conference which also helped.

It’s clear Gears of War 2 was written for 15 year old males, and for the most part I hated it. I disliked the first one and traded it in before finishing it, and ended up with the sequel because of a buy 2 get 1 free sale at Gamestop. I’d heard the sequel was an improvement on the original, and it probably is on a technical level, but the abysmally stupid plot, awful dialog, and mediocre game mechanics all drag the thing down into ‘don’t bother playing this dog’ territory. The script writers are channeling braindead hollywood action flicks from the 80s, think, say ‘Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando‘ level dumb dialog. Lots of folks loved this game (it’s got a 93 rating over on metacritic for example) – I guess I’m just not in the target audience for this one. My appreciation for it wasn’t helped by the fact that I played it right after Halo ODST, a game with a refined combat and gameplay aesthetic that Gears of War 2 compares very poorly to. The one positive thing I can say is that the game does have some imaginative settings with impressive scope, especially when you venture underground into vast cavernous areas with ancient temples, sunken cities, and a giant worm out to get you – that part was a visual treat. Everything else…I disliked.

The clip below plays some of the cutscenes from the game and gives a pretty good idea of why I disliked the game. Video quality’s not that great but the audio is really the point. Don’t play this with other people around, it’s definitely NSFW.

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Game finished: Halo O.D.S.T.

Halo 3 - Master Chief
Image by Ricardo Saramago via Flickr

I finished Halo O.D.S.T. (aka Orbital Drop Ship Troopers), the 4th game in the Halo series (or like the 8th, if you count the Marathon games as the spiritual predecessors they were) over the weekend. I ended up enjoying it a lot more than I expected. I’ve solved all the Halo games at this point, including 2 of them in coop, and I figured I had seen everything the Halo games had to see at this point, plus Halo 3 concludes the Master Chief‘s story arc, and I sort of figured without the Master Chief I wouldn’t be interested.

I only ended up getting the game because Toys R Us had a buy 2 get 1 free sale after Thanksgiving and I couldn’t find anything else I was interested in. My first session with the game seemed to confirm my suspicion – been there, done that, I thought, and I quickly set the game aside for others. One of my New Year’s resolutions was to clear out my game backlog before buying any new games though, and I love buying new games, so I returned to it and warmed up to it as I played.

The Halo series does a pretty good job with their basic combat mechanics, and their level design focuses on setting up repeated ‘situations’ or skirmishes that require tactical thinking, skill, and sometimes a little luck. The same skirmish can play out wildly differently each time you approach it after a failure too, which helps enormously with enjoyment. In terms of what ODST brings to the party this time around…well, not much new. Some tweaks to the weapons, graphics, vehicles, a lack of the more resilient Master Chief, and that’s about it. The relatively short plot follows the misadventures of a squad of soldiers on a mission in a city under siege by alien invaders. It’s told non-linearly, and while in the end it’s not that exciting, by the standards of most first person shooters it’s actually pretty solid. I played on normal difficulty and either the game is fairly easy or I’ve played enough Halo games to do really well at them, because I mostly found it pretty easy.

The one new thing that ODST does bring to the table is a multiplayer mode called Firefight that’s pretty fun – it’s basically the human players versus increasingly powerful waves of AI characters in skirmish battles. It’s tough, frantic, and a good deal of fun. The rest of the multiplayer is basically what you see in Halo 3 with a bunch of additional maps included, including some which were DLC for Halo 3.

So – would I recommend it? Qualified yes – if you’ve played Halo games and really enjoyed them, no question, you should pick it up. If you’re a singleplayer only player, well, it’s a tougher call. The single player is fun and well designed and has an above average story for the genre, but it’s also fairly short. If you’re a Halo 3 multiplayer fan, it’s probably worth picking up just for the Firefight mode alone.

Roundup of reviews of the game
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Game Finished: Ratchet and Clank Future: Quest for Booty

Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty
Image via Wikipedia

I’m on a roll thanks to one of my New Year’s resolutions. I finished Ratchet and Clank Future: Quest for Booty earlier in the week. It’s a short coda to the previous game, Tools of Destruction, and explains how Ratchet figures out where Clank is after he…disappears at the end of Tools of Destruction. I scored the next game in the series, Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time on sale over Christmas and I wanted to finish this game so I could move on its sequel. This is the 8th (!!!) Ratchet and Clank game and it doesn’t bring much new to the table. There’s more of a focus on puzzle solving than in the previous games, and it’s really short, maybe 3-4 hours long, but it’s still got the trademark Ratchet and Clank humor and I enjoyed it well enough. The series features run and gun arcade adventure with some light puzzle solving, a lot of saturday morning cartoon humor, and generally great graphics. I’ve played all of them and solved several of them, including this one, but if you’re going to skip one, this is the one. Counterbalancing that is it’s cheap – I got it for $9.99 from the Playstation store as a download. Below is an ~8 minute video showing off some of the gameplay. Bottom line, if you’ve played the previous games and enjoyed them, you’re likely to enjoy this one as well.

New Year’s resolutions

I’m a bit behind, granted. I have a good excuse – came down with pneumonia and it really knocked the stuffing out of me. I’m just starting to feel myself again after fighting this off for three weeks, and I’m still fighting a cough and dealing with fatigue issues. Anyway, I made two resolutions this year: To get back on track with my diet and exercise regimen, and to follow an example I set myself several years ago with my buying habits.

The diet and exercise resolution has turned out to be easy thanks to the bout of pneumonia. My weight had been creeping up and by this fall I was over 180 for the first time in a number of years, something I had begun to worry about. Stomach issues and a generally slacker attitude to exercise had me off my regimen for almost all of the summer and fall, so I figured, time for a new years resolution to address it. Pressures off now though – I’m down under 170 for the first time in at least 4-5 years. I just need to keep it off. As soon as my stamina is back it’s back on the exercise regimen, possibly adding in running, which I haven’t done regularly since I left Maine.

The second resolution is inspired by a successful resolution from years ago. At that time I had gotten addicted to buying books off of Abe books, ebay, and Amazon, and my to-read pile was growing faster than my read pile was decreasing. I resolved to only buy a book after I had finished at least one, and to generally focus on bringing down the number of books in the to-read pile. It worked. I still have a huge to-read pile (>20 books) but it no longer grows and it’s no longer close to 100 books. This year I’m applying these principles to videogames, because my to-play pile is like 15 games at this point and maybe higher. I’ve resolved to not buy a new game unless I finish one, and to focus on finishing off games I’ve left partially completed. I have this terrible habit of starting whatever new game I acquire, playing it obsessively for a week or two until the next game comes, then moving on, rarely finishing anything. No more! I’m working my way through games at a rapid clip, and not opening anything still in the shrinkwrap until I knock games off the list. So far it’s working – I’ve finished 4-5 games since the year began, and this was with me unable to play games for two weeks thanks to the pneumonia.

I’m such a hopeless nerd.

I’ve also put myself on a budget. Mint.com rocks for helping you see where you spend your money. I spend too much of mine on games, and that’s stopping as well.

Anyway, to sum up a rambling post, figure on a lot of  ‘Game finished’ posts from me, especially over the next couple of months, as I focus on a game at a time instead of flitting from game to game.

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How much is your Steam account worth?

Steam
Image via Wikipedia

A little friday fun of a different kind, we’ll call it the  ‘scare the spouse with your gaming expenditures’ edition. Steam is the most successful of the PC gaming digital distribution platforms. I’m a big fan and have been using it for years. The folks at ddgamer have put together a little tool to calculate what your account’s worth. Remember when you look at this that the numbers are based on the current value of the software, not what you actually paid. For me this means my account looks like it’s worth a lot more than I actually paid because I so often take advantage of the weekly and holiday sales Steam offers. Caveats aside, here’s my account, which today is worth $1,603.26. Change the username to your own to calculate the value of your account. A side note – folks have actually been selling off their Steam accounts, so if the number makes you feel sheepish and you want to try and recoup some of that money, you can try selling it on Amazon zshops or ebay or whatever. Mind that Valve (owners of Steam) may not approve, it’s probably a violation of their TOS, etc etc.

Game finished: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

I was surprised how much I liked this game. I finished it on the PS3 over the weekend. On paper, you’d think I would hate this game – there’s not a lot of variety in terms of the enemies you face, by and large it’s a slightly disguised corridor crawler, the graphics are pretty good but the framerate can get low at times, some of the boss battles are really tedious (Gambit, who you fight like 97 times), it’s incredibly repetitive, you can exploit the combat system (grabs are really powerful) and there are a number of annoying scripted quicktime events (ie you have to press the correct button or sequence of buttons at the correct time). The game has two really important things going for it though – the combat is fast and fluid and an absolute blast (and it’s what you spend 99% of the game doing) , and the game captures the essence of Wolverine as ruthless baddass more than any game ever has. It’s one of the best superheroes in tights videogames ever. *

The game loosely follows the plot of the recent (mediocre, I thought) film, fleshing out various areas of the plot with more opportunities for combat and adding in a huge section of flashback material that’s only slightly touched on in the film, but it also strays far afield in parts. The game’s actually up for an award for the script which surprised me when it was announced – not that the game’s script is terrible or anything, it’s above average for this genre but really, that’s not saying much. If you haven’t seen the film, it’s basically an origin story but it jumps around in time a fair bit to tell the story.

Gameplay wise it’s an arcade brawler at heart, with a thin veneer of rpg layered on which allows you to increase the power, number, and styles of attacks, recuperative powers, and special abilities Wolverine has as the game progresses. There’s also some light collectathon stuff going on in the form of dogtags on the corpses of fallen comrades and wolverine statues which unlock challenge missions.

The game’s sort of the videogame equivalent of junkfood – nothing beyond capturing the essence of Wolverine is done especially well in this game, most of the gameplay systems are mediocre riffs on mechanics you’ve seen before, but on the whole it comes together as a fun little brawler.

Below is a video of one of my favorite sections of the game, wherein Wolverine manages to take down a Sentinel. Few things will make you feel more baddass than that ;-)

* One caveat here – I have not yet played Batman: Arkham Asylum yet, and it’s supposed to be even better.

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