It's interesting to be addicted to a "game" which involves sweating profusely and getting sore from exertion. I've been putting in 60+ fitness minute credits almost every day for a couple weeks now. That actually takes well over an hour. I'm gaining weight, which really wasn't the intention but isn't unexpected. At first I played a lot of balance games - fun, but not much exercise per se - but now I've relegated those to the few minutes left remaining.

I'm sure I can keep this up for a few more weeks, but I suspect that sooner or later I'm going to get sick of the limited dialogue and music, and complete nearly all of the challenges. Definitely my normal problem with doing this sort of exercise is that it's crushingly boring. I know there are variations on these themes out there, though, so maybe I'll play some similar stuff? We'll see.

The Wii makes me think of Portal turrets. It's stark white, cutesy, talks in pseudo-baby-talk, and shoots you down. :P Every time I turn it off, I expect it to complain "Whyyyyyyyyyy", or even "...I don't blame you..."

Far Cry 2 ate my life. I've finished it. I kind of feel a bit numb.

( There's so much to talk about... )

I've finally dove into the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:Shadow of Chernobyl. I almost always play a bit past the curve; I like the issues in a game known or resolved by the time I get to it. Unfortunately, Stalker had such a plethora of issues that there's still quite a few left... CTD's are not uncommon. I've had one save-game corrupted, and two mysteriously disappear. There are spawning issues which are just annoying as hell. I've had whole teams of bandits literally spawn right next to me. Worse, I've zoned right into the middle of a pack of mutant pseudo-dogs. Hauling around loot can be a major chore. Places you have to go through regularly re-spawn enemies every day.

It is remarkably atmospheric and very imaginative. The combination of elements of gritty realism side-by-side with the magical and fantastic draws me in. I just have to put it down in annoyance every so often after I zone into an enemy base surrounded by guys shooting assault rifles in my face, and try to reload only to find my save-game is corrupted in such a way that friendly factions are mysteriously enemies now (not good!)...

I played Penny Arcade's game today. I love the title. The game was vaguely entertaining, which is damning with faint praise so let me elaborate.

Humor: Penny Arcade is always a bit juvenile, and the game is no exception. Honestly it's a bit more tame then I expected. The joke/game-time ratio was probably a bit low, although it definitely made me laugh out loud at several moments. (Favorite line, regarding weapon upgrades: "When in doubt, add spikes." Favorite conceptual gag: Trapping evil mimes with invisible boxes.)

RPG elements: There are no alternate advancement paths. You just get better, get more abilities, and get more/better stuff. Getting basic stuff is trivial, actually, since treasure chests re-spawn and monsters only spawn through triggers. Uninspired.

Combat: The combat system works surprisingly well in most circumstances. I found selecting the right item in the combat inventory a bit daunting in real time, and the whole thing isn't explained very well (I still don't know why the "heal whole party" item forces you to select a target - I lost battles due to forgetting that). Nonetheless, it's intuitive enough to make do. Later battles in particular are a lot of fun: juggling three characters, selecting their actions, blocking enemy attacks, dealing with all the various resistances, weaknesses, and abilities, both of the enemies and available to the player. It's frenetic and right on the edge of what is manageable, which I guess is what makes it fun. There's a lot of combat, so it's a good thing that it's enjoyable.

Adventure Game elements: Yay, quests and quest logs. But ugh, spare me the hunt-and-click fest. I really don't want to have to hunt every tiny little visual element to see what it might do, especially given that the vast majority of them do nothing, including the ones you can click on. I mean, I expect to maybe miss some secrets that way, but a whole quest? Give me a break.

Mostly fun, generally interesting, occasionally frustrating, occasionally boring.

Continuing the tradition, Episode 2 does a lot to vary the gameplay of the basic FPS formula. Aside from that, there's also a surprising amount of relatively coherent (for Half-Life) story in this one. Sadly, to make that happen, there's quite a few of what I would call "de facto cut scenes". Half-Life tries very hard to keep you in your character, so they never do standard cut scenes, but in this one I think it got quite forced. They're constantly finding excuses to take away your control of the situation or even, in several cases, yourself. It's not entirely new (this did this a couple times in Half-Life 2, and frankly less believably - "why yes I will voluntarily climb into this prison module rendering myself captive and helpless"), but it's wearing pretty thin for me.

What's also wearing kind of thin is Gordon's complete inability to engage in social activity. That wasn't a big deal in Half-Life where there is very, very little social activity to engage in, but again, in this episode there's a lot that could be done but can't be done, if you know what I mean. As just a tiny example, when I finally won the last battle of the episode, one of the rebels holds up his hand to give me a high-five, and I can't do a damn thing about it. I totally felt like I snubbed that poor guy.

( Highlights, Lowlights, and Spoilers... )

Well, I'm bored but don't want to go outside (yay air purifier), so I'm basically glued to the computer.

Portal... If you don't know, it's a short, episode-length game that comes with Valve's Orange Box. It's a first-person perspective game using the Source engine, apparently set somewhere/sometime in the Half-Life multi-verse. Unlike Half-Life, it's not really a shooter at all, per se, but more of a puzzle game.

The basic hook is that you get a portal-creating device. You "fire" once at a flat wall, and it creates a blue oval. You fire with the other mouse button and it creates an orange oval. Once there are both ovals, they form a single portal - you (or anything else) can see and pass through it freely either way. You can fire as much as you like, but there's only ever one portal, so if there's already a portal and you make a new blue oval, the last blue oval disappears and the new one connects to the orange oval - which in turn remains in place until you create a new orange oval.

Oh, and you're mysteriously immune to falling damage. Which, as it happens, is a really good thing, since you can create portals in walls and ceilings, and some of the puzzles involve moving at remarkably high velocities...

With that fairly simple premise, they create a wide variety of environmental challenges, each more interesting than the last, and combine them slowly and steadily over the game. The whole game is in some sense its own training; it's really kind of neat how they slowly introduce game mechanics, show you how they work, make you use them a couple times, and then throw in twists and combinations. I never got completely stuck, but a few spots took a fair bit of thinking to figure out.

The story, what little there is of it, is also quite interesting. It's definitely in the Half-Life 2 minimalist storytelling style, where you can just barely sort of piece things together by the very end. Much of it is cutely disturbing, or disturbingly cute, or something like that. I'd say more but I really don't want to spoil it.

Anyway, I highly recommend it.

I'm not quite sure where to start, here, so I guess I'll go chronologically through the rather vast leadup to my post, which is inspired by the Escapist article Are You Evil. Many of you probably already know everything I'm going to go through on the leadup, but some of you don't, so here goes:

First, the Milgram Experiment. Milgram tested people's willingness to shock another supposed volunteer (faked by an actor) to death based on simple urging by an authority figure. His results were, well, shocking: nearly 2/3rds of the subjects administered every single zap.

Now, despite the fact that nobody was really hurt beyond the stress of the situation, more modern ethical restraints prevent such studies from being carried out. Some researchers instead did the experiment virtually (link). This was especially different in that the subjects know the whole situation is faked; they're told so, they're sitting in a VR rig, and the "people" they're interacting with are pixellated, and so on. And despite all that, the results are quite comparable.

So, that brings me to Bioshock. In Bioshock, the player is repeatedly presented with a choice of what to do with "Little Sisters". Little Sisters look and act like little girls, at least to the extent allowed by the simulation (it's not particularly convincing, actually), with minor differences (most notably glowing eyes). You don't really have all the information about them at the start of the game, but you eventually find out that they really are children who've been implanted with some weird stuff, mentally conditioned (brainwashed, really) and sent about the grim task of harvesting bodies for genetic material.

They carry something called "Adam" which buys the powers you can get in-game. You get 160 Adam if you "harvest" (i.e. kill) one. You get just 80 Adam if you save them, returning them to being little girls instead of little genetic factories (their eyes even stop glowing), although most of this difference is actually made up by getting a 200 Adam gift for every three you rescue (plus a few other goodies).

Whuf. Okay. That's the background.

Now, my question is, what does a player's choices in Bioshock say about them as people? If the Milgram and VR studies are accurate, possibly quite a bit; if it's true that people react about the same to VR entities as to real entities, then you should be able to conclude that someone who saves the little girls in Bioshock would do the same in RL (real life), and, more disturbingly, vice-versa. My friend Patrick saved the first one (when another character had just basically screamed at him to not kill her) but, once acquainted with the difficulty of defeating their "Big Daddy" protectors, harvested the rest. Peer pressure, eh?

Or maybe I just want to think it says something about me that I couldn't possibly harm one of them, even just to see the other ending. :P I had a similar experience in Knights of the Old Republic: I wanted to play with a darkside character and all their cool powers, but I couldn't bring myself to be enough of a jackass to make it work well.

Ah, I get my life back now...

The game is really good. Maybe I'll say more later, but... Probably not. I doubt I'll replay it any time soon.

I swear, the first "minigame" of Bioshock is getting the damn thing to work. I had to download and install the latest version of DirectX for 9.0c, even though it's supposedly not even FOR DirectX 10 at all and sure as hell doesn't come with the game. In fact, my DirectX version is still listed as 10... Even though it clearly updated in some way and now Bioshock works - more or less. I also had to install the brand new beta version of the nVidia graphics drivers, after which it seems to be more stable. I'm glad I didn't get the Steam encryption bug some other people got... Whuf.

And, it still doesn't properly support widescreen. Instead of giving an image that's wider in the horizontal dimension, it gives a zoomed-in image which is narrower in the vertical dimension! I had to push the monitor back a foot or so to view it properly, which of course is totally missing the point of having a widescreen monitor. Hopefully that'll be fixed in the first patch - soon.

I guess this is what I get for being so excited about a new game. I actually pre-ordered it and started it up at launch! Usually I wait at least a few months - if not years. That rule of thumb has always served me well in the past.

Anyway, um, don't expect to see much of me for a while. I expect I'll be a bit...submerged...

Things to not do with your new Nintendo:

http://www.kotaku.com/gaming/top/the-japanese-super-safe-wii-safety-manual-218939.php

I don't think many of you are TTLG readers, so I have to share this with you:

http://www.linerider.org/

It's very simple - you draw a line, and some poor shmuck tries to sled down it. You can make it as complex as you want... Check out some of their videos, too!

I've heard it claimed that painted models fight better. It isn't true.

So, I'm about halfway through the basic warriors, although I haven't started doing their bases yet (that should be a relatively quick, all-at-once process). I think I'm actually much more than halfway through in terms of time spent, since I've already tackled the hardest tasks: the faces and the banner bearer, including four of the six characters. Everything else is just spikes, drybrushed hair, squad markings, and a handful of extra details on the remaining two squad leaders.

After this, the Archon... I'm hoping to get her done this coming week as well as finishing off the warriors, but I suspect I'll still be working on her when next Sunday rolls around.

( Pictures... )

Since I've committed to finishing painting my Dark Eldar by the end of May, I figure I might as well let you see their current status:

( Dark Eldar images )

So, I was thinking about mikeclaytablet's assertion that the Dark Eldar are the kinky army of Warhammer 40k. It's a pretty justifiable claim, they're all about whips, chains, and slaves, nevermind the skin-tight leather and half-naked gladiators.

So, why stop there? Wouldn't it be cool to model up each of my squad leaders after a particularly bizarre fetish? I think the end result would be just too disturbing, though...

I've completed F.E.A.R., here are my thoughts on it, hopefully spoiler free.

Gameplay: The AI was frankly not as bright as I'd been led to believe, but does a good job of rewarding tactical behavior, especially in the early game (late in the game many of the tactical situations get far too simple to be interesting - by the end there was a real sense of certain aspects of Gauntlet). I didn't find the melee options terribly useful, kicking someone is nice and all but I generally carried a shotgun. The slow-mo was a nice touch and worked smoothly into the plot, but I found it was best used for aiming and didn't do much else with it, which was a shame. I'm tempted to see how far I can get without using weapons; kind of like playing Doom 2 with just the chainsaw.

Could've really used some distinct challenges a la Half-Life 2 - or even Tron 2.0. Weren't these the same guys who did Tron 2.0, anyway? It's kind of a disappointment in comparison. The weapons were pretty bland, though skeletonizing whole rows of enemies with the PPC was a lot of fun. For some reason the grenades were particularly entertaining. The barks were kind of overdone, they were so loud it got to the point where I didn't worry about looking for enemies until I heard them.

There were very few different enemies. The vast, vast majority of your opposition is just puds with various guns and armor. (Mind you, they do that well, and they're generally dangerous, especially mid/late in the game. Watch out for opponents rushing with shotguns when you re-load, I think I died that way more than any other...) And then, the substantially different opponents only come at you a handful of times.

Level design: Typical stuff here. Frankly, I'm sick to death of the blatantly linear design, where going after your mission and going in the only possible direction are synonymous. For some reason that really breaks immersion for me. Ah, Deus Ex, System Shock, how I miss thee... Several of the levels got painfully repetitive - and surprisingly empty. You spend a significant amount of time making your way through very similar-looking areas with little or nothing in them. It helps a bit with the surprises, I guess. There's a few interesting trigger-based fights but they're few and far between, with the vast majority of the combat between you and a squad of baddies - occasionally in interesting terrain but all too often just your standard shooting gallery.

Creepiness/atmosphere: One of the game's strongpoints, IMO. Unfortunately, when the gameplay is good it's not creepy and when it's creepy the gameplay is either non-existant or very simplistic. Some good starts, some good sound-work and visual effects. It doesn't build horror as well as it ought to, largely due to the simplicity or perhaps just paucity of the plot. Still, good stuff here, if you like that sort of thing. It's strongest near the beginning and of course towards the end.

Plot: Some excellent elements; comic, tragic, and so on. Typical of an FPS, it's plot-light, but what's there is good, although some things seemed a bit random and frankly I'm still not entirely sure about what all was going on or, more importantly, why. Much is unexplained. There were some actions you were forced to take that didn't make much sense to me, too, but then I always want more say in my actions than I get in practically any game.

Anyway, this looks mostly like a bitch-fest but overall I enjoyed the experience.

Apparently, if I'm sick, and I play a couple hours of F.E.A.R., then take Nyquil and go to bed, I get nightmares and don't sleep well. :P

It took rather a long time, but I finally got over my disgust about characters in the opening sequence instructing me in the use of the mouse in-game and in-character. So now I'm playing the long fabled Knights of the Old Republic. I don't even LIKE standard RPG's (roll-playing), but the characters have me hooked.

I'm practically the opposite of most of my friends. They skip through conversations and cinematics as quickly as possible to get back to whacking things; I'd rather just do the plot elements and skip the actual game (one reason why I find utterly linear plots unsatisfying). I'm thinking more and more that I'd love to play a game where character interactions WERE the game. I guess the Sims sort of qualifies, but it's more sandbox than I'm thinking, and free-speech games are essentially fixed-speech games with substantially under-qualified interpreters.

No, something more like an adventure game, but without focus on objects and puzzles, a massively flexible plot, and cool characters.

I'll probably have to write it... I have a lot of ideas already...