Elf Sternberg

As an aside on the previous post, I noticed that the newest iteration of Simon has four pucks, one for each color; they intercommunicate with a modified bluetooth protocol, so it's possible to make the challenge of Simon harder by spatially re-arranging the colors. Well, that's more interesting that Guitar Hero.

Omaha and I played a little of the Portal 2 Co-operative Mode during lunch. If this is it, I'll be very disappointed if Valve gives up on epic narrative. That's been the story for a while now: Valve makes so much more money as a game distribution company via Steam, and a licensing agency via Source, than it does as a game production company, that it doesn't make sense for Valve to maintain a production team to make high-end games like Half Life or Portal 2. Hell, they bought Left For Dead, prettied it up and released it in record time. It has very little narrative: "There are zombies. Survive them." It has awesome AI, but so did Half Life 2, especially the later episodes.

Valve's only reason for producing high-quality games is to provide a test bed for Source. It would be a shame if the kind of brilliance that brought us Half Life and Portal would be shunted off, in favor of commercial success. Valve has that. Sure, it costs a lot to make a triple-A game. It costs a lot to make a blockbuster movie. Iron Man cost $135 to make, and it sold 35 million tickets. Half-Life 2 sold 12 million copies, but its list price was four times a theater ticket; arguably, Half Life 2 was a bigger seller than Iron Man.

Why is Eggman obsessed with, well, whatever it is he's obsessed with in whichever episode you're playing? His cybernetics, manufacturing capacity, and automation are post-scarcity. He has access to trans-lightspeed technology. The man could have whatever he wants!

There's a very simple reason, I think, for why Doom 3 was a successful product, and yet the sequel, Resurrection of Evil, was a complete failure. The reason precisely echoes the failure I saw in Bloodrayne 2, and it's a simple failure: Resurrection of Evil has absolutely no sense of humor.

Doom 3 had it. There were moments in the story where the incongruous contrast between the relentlessly cheery propaganda of the UAE playing in the hallways and reception areas gives you a jolt of comedy, a moment of humor. The same is true of the various PDAs you pick up along the way. There is a sense in Doom 3 that there is life on Mars, that the people who live there were trying their best to survive against difficult circumstances. As you read the emails left behind, you read about poker games, and missed families, and someone losing their lucky dice just before a D&D game, and offers to go target shooting out on the surface.

There is absolutely none of that in Resurrection of Evil. The Mars of RoE is relentlessly inhuman. Everything is grim and dark, even before Hell was unleashed. The people you meet along the way have no reason to be there other than that you need them to accomplish the next goal. There is no sense of a living, vibrant world; only a set piece through which your character picks his way, a rat in a maze.

Wow, things you never want to see on your laptop. This was caused by Prey::

Aug  4 22:41:01 chi Critical temperature reached (100 C), shutting down.  
Aug  4 22:41:01 chi acpid: received event "thermal_zone THM1 000000f0 00000001" 
Aug  4 22:41:01 chi acpid: notifying client 5278[0:1000] 
Aug  4 22:41:01 chi acpid: executing action "/etc/acpi/default.sh thermal_zone THM1 000000f0 00000001" 

And then the computer just went.... off.

I finished Quake 4, and I have to say that, all in all, I was impressed with the total package. As a follow-on to Quake 2, this "Return to Stroggos" was about as well put-together as it could possibly have been. There are plot holes big enough to drive a truck through (really, if you use the enemy as raw material, would you really start to modify them into a monster killing machine before you reprogram their brains?) and there's always the "gee, the bad guys sure leave a lot of Terran Alliance ammunition lying around, don't they?" Ocassionally, that was excused: you'd find the wreck of a flyer that had crashed into the building nearby, but once you'd entered the heart of the system the writers ran out of excuses and just said, "Here's your ammo. Enjoy!"

Quake 4 was supposed to be different from Doom III, even though both are built on the same engine. Quake 4 was supposed to be a stand-up fight rather than horror, but it can't escape from an essential truth: The Stroggs are gross.

The storyline goes something like this: The Stroggs are nanotech-engineered supersoldiers. They're incapable of engineering themselves or making anything better, and their whole purpose is to take over the universe. We don't know where they came from, but one can assume that they consumed their creators long ago. They can mass-produce a special-purpose line of nanites that make flesh do all sorts of different things, and then they use that flesh. So, in true Doom-like fashion, you end up in a waste processing center where the intakes consist of rows and rows of stumped torsos into which waste is being dumped and out of the other ends the cleaned product is separated from the waste. Later, you discover that being "in the bowels" of the waste processing center is not a metaphor.

There are new and horrible monsters, and this game was definitely written so that nobody could get through it with "just the pistol" or "just the shotgun." Some of these beasts are truly, deeply nasty. And your buddy is a cold-hearted engineer name Strauss who never gives you a fraggin' break, not even after you've been turned into a Strogg.

Quake 4 definitely explores new territory when it comes to high-resolution artwork in support of a violent and shamelessly disgusting but fun bit of pandering. If you go for the violent, Quake 4 is a game for you.

Oh, and a word of praise for the programmers of the Linux edition: I never turned the game off. Never. When I was done with a level, I just left the hero sitting there waiting for more. Sometimes I'd come back and someone had found and killed him and I'd just restart, but most often not. Despite running in-game animations constantly for three solid weeks, the game never crashed once, never died, didn't grow in memory uncontrollably, didn't require a reboot, didn't slow the machine down (bittorrent and usenet continued to run in the background just fine, and the controls and products of both were available to the laptop via SSH). All in all, a solid and shining example of code that others should seek to emulate.

After an afternoon of giggling girls at a birthday party for one of Kouryou-chan's friends, I got home with a headache. A lot of water, some food, aspirin, and caffeine later, I felt better and went downstairs to try out a re-rendition of the Doom I classic module, Knee Deep In The Dead. I had my doubts that it would be anything at all like the original.

I was wrong. "Hangar" and "Nuclear Plant" are exactly like their originals, only with the super-nice Doom3 skins and much buglier monsters. Yes, it's Doom3, so the monsters are faster and tougher, but they seem to have the original AIs and the Imps' firepower has been modified to be more like that of the original Doom. I was absolutely giggling over the accuracy and artistry of the project. Whoever did these was totally rock-on. I wonder if we'll see Doom3 conversions of The Shores of Hell or, better yet, Thy Flesh Consumed.

By the way, here's a question: What is the MLA style for video games? On the assumption that book titles are underlined (or italicized where possible), and chapter titles are surrounded in quotations, I've been italicizing major releases and quotating level names. I looked to see if anyone had brought it up, and sure enough, The Columbia Guide to Online Style has with respect to titles, but not to levels.