Bravo, Microsoft...

I have to say that sometimes Microsoft really makes me lose my speech... Just click on the error below to see it.


Yes, cannot have two open files having the same name, even if they are located in different folders. I mean, who is writing the code for you, high school students or what?

Start crushing!

Today I will begin with two definitions related to the game I would like to talk about.

Crush

• (n.) The act of crushing.
• (n.) Temporary love of an adolescent.
• (v.) To become injured.
• (v.) To compress with violence, out of natural shape or condition.
• (v.) To humiliate or depress completely.

As you have probably guessed, the game in question will be Crush on PSP. Already the title alone is a sort of double-entendre, since almost every definition from the list above has something to do with game's content.


Game's protagonist is Danny - young, troubled man, hospitalised for insomnia. His condition stems from his psychological condition - he has been injured, had love problems, is deeply depressed. And now, using a strange machine and mad doctors' help, he wanders the dark corners of his psyche, literally crushing his problems...

Oh, but before I continue, here comes the second important word.

Projection

• (n.) The act of projecting out from something.
• (n.) The representation of a figure or solid on a plane as it would look from a particular direction.
• (n.) A defense mechanism by which your own traits and emotions are attributed to someone else.

As I was saying, Danny is undergoing a therapy. In order to do that, doctor puts him into strange machine, called C.R.U.S.H., that allows him to walk through his own mind in sort of virtual reality inside his own head. The machine gives him the ability to 'crush' this reality - simplifying it from 3D to 2D.

The whole game mechanics spins around the concept of crushing. It will be easier to imagine for those that have studied technical drawing and know how orthogonal projection works. If you haven't, then have a look at the image below to get a general idea.


A-ha! So now you know why I chose these two particular words. Yes, the whole game is about crushing and projection, in almost every sense of these two words, both in the sense of crushing the world inside Danny's head and projecting it from 3D to 2D, and in the sense of his projections, love issues and memories of being hurt long ago.

Personally, I have been waiting for the game impatiently and had high expectations about it. I am glad to tell you that at least once I am not disappointed.

Top-down view before crushing...

The game is original, fresh and absolutely brilliant. I dig its dark atmosphere, great dialogues between Danny and Doctor, novel concept, art direction, music, execution, everything. Oh, and how many times do we get a captivating story in a puzzle game?

I liked the fact that player cannot die too easily and there are practically no cheap deaths resulting from bad control scheme or maliciousness of level designers. The game is well balanced and relatively forgiving in terms of player's mistakes. No way to get stuck and having to reload a level anytime either. Also, the game plays very well in relatively short bursts. A medium difficulty level takes four to eight minutes to finish, with the average of six.

...and after crushing.

I have seen that some reviewers complain about the game getting very difficult too quickly. I would say that it is not exactly so, it is just the question of whether someone has spatial imagination or not. As for me, being an engineer, having studied technical drawings and played with creation of 3D graphics for quite some time, I had practically no problems with imagining how to crush the level to proceed. Of course, there was some head scratching involved, but contrary to many puzzle games I have played, this one doesn't get impossible to finish.

All in all, I highly recommend this game to every PSP owner. The library of PSP games has just gained another original jewel. And if you want to see the trailer, check here.

Go go goo vs Troddlers

I have slightly ambivalent feelings towards the game I wanted to present here today.


The game, called Go go Goo (which you can download here), is theoretically a fine example of PSP homebrew - finished, polished, with interesting idea, decent graphics and nice execution. The game is a little similar to Lemmings, because there are little creatures wandering around mindlessly and player needs to help them. Instead of changing the behaviour of the creatures, player must create blocks to force them to go where they should go. I was not too keen on graphical style of the game, but this is just a question of my taste - the audiovisual part is done with a lots of care.


So far seems like everything is fine, so why the mixed feelings?

Well, I'm an oldtimer in the world of computer games and I have played a lot of them. And I can't help but remember one particular game I have enjoyed long time ago. It was called Troddlers. I played it on my PC, but it was also present on Amiga, SNES and probably a couple of other machines of the era. The game was a little similar to Lemmings, player had to create blocks in order to... I think you can see where this is going.


If you think that I am exaggerating, try comparing the first level screenshot presented above with the ones below (Troddlers screencaps come from two different versions, hence slight graphical difference). There is certain degree of similarity, isn't there?



Yes, Go go Goo is similar to Troddlers to the point of being a rip-off. Now, Troddlers is an old game and there is a significant chance that younger players will not know it. It is practically considered abandonware and you can download it from Home of the Underdogs. Lots of effort went into coding Go go Goo and into new graphics, there's no denying it. Therefore one can ask, what's the big deal? Why even point that out?

The answer is that if you are using somebody's else work or idea, it is nice to give them a credit for it. It is called good manners. So even though I do appreciate the work that went into creation of Go go Goo and I actually think that not mentioning Troddlers anywhere in the readme file is not all that serious, I can't help feeling a little uneasy about it. See, I told you I have ambivalent feelings.

Nevertheless, I encourage you to go and try it out. For the memory of Troddlers, you know.

On World of Warcraft and dancing

I haven't played World of Warcraft even once in my life. Why?

I know how easy it is for me to get addicted of something and how many addictions I already have, therefore I try to avoid adding things to that list. For example I don't smoke and I havent ever tried cigarettes. Seeing how addicted to smoking some of my friends have become, how they have lost their sense of smell, how much they pay for their cigarettes and how twitchy they get when they can't smoke - all that made me sure I don't want to go there.

Similarly, I have seen some of my friends get addicted to World of Warcraft in really scary way : after programming for living for ten hours a day they would spend another six or eight playing WoW. Red eyes, lack of sleep, no time for their families - just playing. No wonder they call it World of Warcrack. I have decided not to give it a try in order not to get drawn into this beautiful world. I have watched movies from the game, enjoyed tales and machinimas, ambiance and whatnot, but I didn't dare to risk losing yet another chunk of my life to another computer game addiction.

Nevertheless, I have recently seen a great movie on Kotaku showing different races' dances and their original source material. The way in which the movie was composed is simply great and I can't help but to present it here too :

And seeing this video made me think about a machinima called "Not Just Another Love Story" that I have seen long ago, also revolving around the theme of dance (amongst other things, ahem, ahem). The part I have in mind starts at 5:30 and continues to the very end of the first part. It is a depiction of a disco, where all World of Warcraft races are dancing together. The whole movie is great (you can download it from here), unfortunately also a little long. Still, I recommend seeing the aforementioned dancing fragment - it is hilarious and the atmosphere of heavy party is somehow well conveyed (look at all the pretty lights;). Plus I dig both the music and of course the beautiful Elvish girls, so...

If you're very impatient, you may go straight to the second part of the video and there is a similar scene there at the very beginning (in fact it is the same scene, continued), albeit not as good as near the ending of the first part. If you don't get the final message of the video, don't worry - I didn't either. It is explained here.

Don't these movies make you want to go out and shake your hips a little?

PS. Oh, and don't even get me started on World of Whorecraft...

Prince of Persia

When I was playing Prince of Persia for the first time, it was on the old IBM PC AT 286 with Hercules graphic card, monochrome amber monitor and no sound card (just a beeper). Playing it a couple of years later on VGA with SoundBlaster was like playing a new game, but the core gameplay remained the same. You can see it below :

The beautiful things about the game were the fluidity of animation, the wealth of moves that main character could pull off and the oriental atmosphere, somehow conveyed through rather limited graphical and audio means that the computers back then could provide. There even was a ZX Spectrum version!


Why am I writing about it now, though? Well, because I have just learnt that the remake of the game is hitting Xbox Live and I quite liked what I saw. Furthermore, I feel about it the same way as when I was replaying Prince of Persia in colour and with music on my new 386 - that the new audiovisual beauty is just adding to the great gaming experience. Watch the new Prince of Persia Classic trailer below and see if you agree with me :

Starcraft

I know, I am not the first to report this, but I simply must share it with everybody : Blizzard has just announced Starcraft II. I am overjoyed - for me this is probably one of the most important announcements of this year.

I remember spending hours and hours again playing the single player campaign. I just loved the story, the voices, the atmosphere and the music. This dark futuristic world had me drawn into it. And not only me - I still hear about people buying new computers with powerful Geforces and Intel Pentiums, only to install Starcraft as the first game...


And then there was multiplayer. Countless hours spend fighting over the LAN and internet, building up armies, trying to oversmart the opponents. There was even some diplomacy involved. The stories of how my friend managed to defend his main base with his last dying Archont, how I eradicated all enemy mining outposts with a small squad of Dark Templars, how my brother lost all his tanks to Psionic Storm... We all have those kind of memories, don't we? Even now in my current company Starcraft is number one in our Cyber Sports, not to mention Korea, where Starcraft is a national religion.

Who would have thought it all begun with such ugly looks?...


In fact, it was even worse in early alpha, - if you want to read more about the evolution of Starcraft, head straight to Starcraft Legacy webpage.

And actually now, the saga continues... This image of hundreds of Zergs attacking Terran fortification sends shivers down my spine :


There are of course changes, like no more Dragoons, new units, increased numbers of the armies at player's command, but from the movies that surfaced it looks like the core gameplay is essentially the same. I can hardly contain the excitement, even though my skeptic part tells we are probably in for a long wait.

The best way to discover all that is in store is to head to the official Starcraft II page, but also check these three trailers : artwork trailer (showing above), gameplay trailer, CGI trailer. Alternatively you can download movies from here and watch more media here, on Kotaku.

I also heartily recommend to check these fan-arts on DeviantArt : Terran Ghost, Protoss, ink art, Hydralisk, fan rendering of Dragoons, Starcraft Ghost's Nova ink, another Nova, Nova sketch as well as lots of others.

En Taro Adun!

Guns... lots of guns...

A very interesting post on weapon progression in games appeared on Grey Goo Games. I agree with the author that there are not many games that get this particular aspect right. F.E.A.R. was handling it pretty well, in my opinion, but the essential question remains :

Why is it that in almost every game with guns in it the player starts out with the weakest gun and then gets stronger and stronger weapons as the game progresses?

Click here to read the entire post - I assure you it's worth two minutes of your time.

BFG creed courtesy of Jinx

I do not agree on every point in the post, though - for example I think that giving and then taking away some more powerful guns is a nice trick to keep player at their toes. Personally, I simply loved that moment in Half Life when Gordon Freeman loses all his arsenal and player must learn to survive on the weakest weapons again. That was one of the memorable moments of my gaming.

Interesting reply from Grocal appeared in comments, and since I noticed that most visitors don't check comments, I quote it here :

Author of this question forgot the fact, that in those games enemies are weak on early levels. Let's take Quake for example. Enter impulse 9 from console and start making your way with RL. Where's the challenge? Anyway... I think games should keep some kind of pace - killing simple, weak enemy with your weakest weapon should be almost the same as killing tough guy with RL or "my RPG" ;)

I've not played "FEAR" yet so I can't say whether its weapon handling style is good or bard. I think we got used to classic scheme "weak first, RPG later" and suites us. This way we can feel the progress. But I think there are ways to make it more interesting. One way is to take away your weaponry like in HL or change it's use or way it works like in HL2:EP1 or - my favourite - give only two or three spots for weapons and make player decide what to wear and use during combat (like in Far Cry as I can see). There is also one variation of the last situation - "buy mode" - more skillful in game you are, more cash you have, more powerful weapon you can buy.

It is right to certain degree, but the way I see it (and supposedly the author at Grey Goo Games), this linear progression is exactly something that is getting old and maybe could be changed. Why is it we always get some weapon with fast shooting rate and mediocre damage and a rocket launcher? This doesn't mean we can forget about balancing enemies, weapons and difficulty levels.

One of the reasons Blood was so great was its arsenal - voodoo doll, pitchfork, tesla cannon, flare pistol. Half Life kept the weapons interesting and balanced all the way through, too, with additional twist of losing all of them at some point. Half Life 2 introduced Gravity Gun and it was original and immensely enjoyable (the feeling of beating someone to death with a toilet in multiplayer is suspiciously great).

In the game Oni (essentially a 3D beat'em up) there were also some very memorable weapons (rocket launcher shooting swarms of self-guiding missiles or the mercury gun). As for FEAR, it is essentially similar to Far Cry, but the trick is that the player almost always has some cool weapon on them, even quite early at the beginning of the game. So there is always feeling of having some powerful gun that player can resort to in order to feel 'teh powah'.

All of these games broke with the "weak weapons for weak enemies first, then increase the strengh of both" routine - and they all stood up. Therefore I think it illustrates well the post in question, meaning that the issue of designing game arsenal is sadly overlooked part of game design recently.

More about screening...

I have just written about screen program in Linux, now it's time for something vaguely connected, namely "screening". This will be less serious ... or actually more, depending on how you look at it.


Things happening in Polish politics are generally making me sick. I try to stay away from them, but they sort of filter into my life anyways. I stopped visiting computer board that I was frequenting for years because of the nasty political accents that started to appear a little too often. Still, the link below provides some information on recent political events in Poland.

One of my favourite Polish bloggers, Wojciech Orliński, a journalist specializing in culture, music, computer games (he recently hotlinked to my post about Deus Ex in one of his posts, yay) and such, gives an amusing insight into what is going on in Poland recently and what his opinion on it is (in English). Please follow this link to find out what "screening a la Polonaise" is.

I highly recommend reading it for anyone trying to understand a little bit how twisted Polish reality has become for those of us who don't follow the populist crowd.

Oh, and if you are wondering what connection with digital entertainment does this have - check Majestic 12 on Wikipedia...

Screen

I work a lot on remote Linux servers, deploying and testing my code. One of the most useful tools I use all the time is screen. Basically, it allows user to have multiple sessions in one console window and it supports resuming these sessions when connection is interrupted. Where it not for screen, I would waste hours of my life setting up things after getting disconnected. Also, if you don't have Midnight Commander, the ability to have more than one session is also very handy. You can read more about screen here and about handy shortcuts here.

Screen screenshot

One little disadvantage of screen is that if the server is reset, then the user loses all their session information. Nevertheless, there is a trick to speed up a lot setting up new screen session and it's not something very well documented, so I describe it here.

Basically user needs to edit (or create, if it is not there) the file .screenrc in their home directory so that it contains the commands to be executed in its respective screens (aka sessions). Below you can see my example :

info xterm ti@:te@
shell bash
chdir /somewhere/src/
screen -t XXX_source 0
shell bash
chdir /somewhere/some_server/
screen -t XXX_server_1 1
shell bash
chdir /somewhere/some_other_server/
screen -t XXX_server_2 2
shell bash
chdir /somewhere/vobs/
screen -t XXX_vob 3

What it does is basically create four screens in one screen session - think of them as four tabbed browsing windows. Each of them will be using bash shell (just because I like it) and start in appropriate directory (source dir, where I make my builds, two server paths and one vob directory for version control related stuff). Each XXX_something part is the name of the respective session window (displayed on top of Putty terminal, for example). Simple, neat, and very helpful. Also, the structure of the file is pretty much self-explanatory.

I know it is not a very complicated thing, but it saves a lot of time and therefore I thought I'd bring it to your attention. As always, I look forward to your comments.