Today I Learned...

EA defends always on DRM ruining SimCity by claiming playing alone is pathetic and soulless. With bonus classic extrovert mistake "you can only have variety if you involve other people."

In other news, did you know that survival horror games are absolutely brilliant for recovering introvert points?

Tropico 4 is basically Tropico 1 with a few fiddly bits added and better graphics. That's okay; Tropico was a good game, and I have gotten used to the inferior UI of 4. I'm told the Modern Times expansion pack differentiates it, but the only reason I own a game as new as T4 is that it was a birthday gift, you will never convince me to pay that much for a game. Tropico (any iteration) is mostly an economy management game in which you play the dictator of a banana republic, trying to develop your economy while fulfilling your populace's need for religion, medicine, and booze.

I enjoy the game, despite never quite seeing eye to eye with it. I like the challenge of the delicate balance of having enough people of the right sex with the right education level. The game keeps dumping new people on me and I don't think there's anyway to get education such that a real number of high schools produces new graduates at exactly the rate they keep dying off. The game is also obsessed with the size of my swiss bank account, and I just don't care.

distinguishes itself from other economy games by being lumpy. You don't get paid the second you manufacture something. You have to wait until a boat picks it up from the dock, but it won't even get to the dock until your teamsters pick it up from the building that created it. If you have a multi-stage supply chain (and g-d knows I love me some multi stage supply chains) and some bad luck, it could be decades before you get paid for a piece of wood. But your workers are paid immediately, so you have to keep a cushion with which to pay them. This is not a particular problem in the early game, because you get annual foreign aid and are allowed to go into debt. But neither of those numbers scale with your payroll. If your teamsters miss a high-payout export for a few months in a row- which is trivial to do- you can end up in game-destroying debt. Especially if there's a natural disaster as well. You can try to fix this by hiring more teamsters, but it doesn't actually earn you more money.

The other solution is to incorporate an industry that generates smooth payouts and isn't dependent on teamsters: tourism. I don't know how much of my prejudice against tourism is that it took forever to be profitable in the original, and how much is the absence of intricate supply chains, but I wouldn't otherwise be very interested in tourism. The jobs are low quality, it's a pain to keep the workers happy without exposing the tourists to local color, and the money isn't that good. But it's steady.

This is but the best example of some really thoughtful game design in Tropico. It's not a thrill-a-minute game, but it is solid.

The first comedian to be funny about video games:



"Oh my G-d, I'm in a gun battle. Which one of these buttons isn't crouch?"

And while he's talking about unlockable content, this covers my current feelings on RPGs as well:

"I'm 38. I unlocked it in a shop with a credit card"

On the minus side, the cat will sometimes silently grab your leg during the scariest part, or use his toy that sounds just like a monster walking directly behind you. You take the bad with the good.

I could give a more detailed review, but basically it comes down to: do you enjoy being scared? If so, purchase Amnesia: The Dark Descent, ideally waiting for it to go on sale for $4. If no, proceed directly to watching people play it on youtube, because this is hilarious. My favorite is Screaming like a girl Season 2, but is more popular.

I'm playing Condemned, a game the clerk warned me I'd need to play with the lights on so I didn't piss myself in fear, but thus far (20% in) seems to mostly just be startling and poorly lit. And when I say poorly lit, I mean poorly lit- there's some collection side quest(dead birds, seriously), and even when they give me a detector and I was walking right over one, I couldn't see it, because the bloody flashlight beam was too narrow. This made it easier to be startling, because I couldn't flashlight sweep faster than the antagonists (crazed homeless people, seriously) could reach me. Finally I had the bright idea to mess with the tv contrast and brightness, and now the game is much more playable.

The interesting thing is that rendering the world viewable also made it scarier. Previously, I was forced to adopt an attitude of "well, the crazed homeless people are going to hit me, and I'm going to flail around with my length of pipe, and either I survive or I don't." It was be fatalistic or ragequit. Now that I have a chance of seeing them coming, preparing, and fighting with some sort of strategy, it's scarier, because there's time for a sense of dread to build. I feel like there's a lesson for survival horror games here.

I like consoles because they make things simple. If I want to futz with exactly what hardware I have, I'll use a PC. Consoles Just Work. That is one reason I didn't get a grown up console (PS3 or XboX 360)- too many choices as to exactly what hard drive size I wanted, and too expensive to fix after the fact. I could save money by modding it myself, but that's a lot of... not exactly work, but a lot of decisions and anxiety, plus with the red ring of death so common you really didn't want to void your warranty. Meanwhile, the Wii was there, telling me it was a perfect black box I never needed to think about. But then the Wii kept making up new peripherals, and the cost of the xbox proprietary hard drives dropped to the point that I don't feel like I'm being ripped off for lacking the can-do spirit to mod it myself. Microsoft and Sony have both introduced motion control peripherals since then, but somehow it seems less daunting now.

Meanwhile, games keep coming out for consoles. No AAA game coming out this year could play on even a top of the line computer built in 2006 (year the 360 was released), but they're all out for the consoles. They can do this because advances in the algorithms expand the horizons of what they can do- most obviously in graphics, but I'm sure in other gameplay aspects as well. If you showed me Silent Hill 2 (2001) and Resident Evil 4 (2005) side by side, I would bet you money they had significantly different hardware requirements. RE4 just looks so much better, even though SH2 is wrapped in fog to lower the computational power needed. But unless there are little gremlins swapping out the processor when I change the disc- and I'm not ruling that out- it has to be software advancements.

I feel like this is vaguely good for the moral character of developers. No, you can't just require everyone to overclock their processor, you have to think about what you're doing. If you really genuinely need something for game play reasons, invent some new math. It builds character.

It was half an hour in before I got to do anything but listen to other people talk. But don't think I was uninvolved- I had to keep hitting X so they'd keep talking.

So this was going to be my review of Portal 2, but that's going to be pretty quick: great mechanics, puzzles that are fun but not as fun as the first*, dialogue that lacks the memeability of the first but is guaranteed to give you at least one thing you can't stop saying**, and a completely unnecessary explanation for questions NO ONE WAS ASKING. I'd heard the multiplayer did a better job at living up to the fun puzzle hunting feeling of the first, which was a terrible thing to tell me because it meant that both parts of the game labored under the massive expectations generated by the awesomeness of its predecessor, rather than just the single player. It's a good game, but don't pay retail for it. My $30 for a used copy was tolerable, $50 for a new copy is too high, if you can find a portal buddy to wait for a price drop with you do that.

Portal 2 is fundamentally a puzzle game, and playing puzzle games with someone who has already solved them sucks, so you need to pick out a friend ahead of time and promise yourselves to each other. Pick someone you like, because communicating plans is difficult and they will kill you several times. If at all possible, pick someone who's roughly as good as you. My portal buddy B scored well on the "liking each other" and "unlikely to stab each other" metrics, but got stuck once in the entire single player game, compared to probably a dozen times for me. The first 80% of the multiplayer campaign was us walking into a room, him telling me where to put portals before I'd even seen what was happening, and then us suddenly being done. It was pretty much the same experience as playing with someone who'd played it before.

But the last 20% is where it got interesting. The difficulty curve in Portal 2 is pretty good, and suddenly he could no longer just see the answer. And it turns out, he had no backup strategy. Meanwhile, I had built up my figuring things out skills through the single player campaign, leading to conversations like this:

Me: [mechanic] the [mechanic] over there.
B: Why?
Me: I dunno, but it's clearly set up to do that, so let's try it and see what happens.
B: But... then what?
Me: That's a problem for future us.

This didn't reverse the discrepancy by any means, since he had as good a chance as I did at seeing the next move. At best it maybe got to 60/40 in my favor, 50/50 is also plausible. But this portion was a lot more fun, which makes me think that the whole thing would have been a lot more if I'd been playing with someone of equal skill.

Related Anecdote: I am pretty good at math, but my brother is amazing. He took an IQ test in elementary school and scored perfect on the math section. I had to be taught math, he would just see it. But that meant that when he eventually got to math he couldn't just see (and this took till high school, but it did happen), he was screwed. He had no problem solving method beyond looking at the problem and knowing the answer. Meanwhile, I'd been developing my "writing things down" and "intermediate steps" methods for years, and ended up going much farther in math than he did, and with much less frustration.***

I think people or at least Americans tend to conflate initial skill level, rate of learning, and skill level ceiling, and I think it does us a disservice. I know I've flat out given up on some things- remembering names and faces, having some sort of directional sense- that I'm now pretty sure I could improve on if I put effort into it. It's amazing what a difference conceiving of something as learnable makes.


*Note to developers: where is the one patch of portleable wall? is not a puzzle. It's an annoyance.

**For me? Aristotle vs. MASHYSPIKEPLATE. and "I literally don't have the energy to lie to you." For my friend? I'm in space, which I didn't appreciate at the time because I missed the context, but is steadily growing on me.

***Interestingly, B reported the same experience at math as my brother. I really want to insist that he can't have been visualizing things to the extent my brother was, but some of that is that my brother's right-brainness really screwed him in ways B has not suffered from, and it would be unfair if B also had superior math skills.

This is me, explaining Katamari to a co-worker who said he was tired because he spent all night playing Starcraft.

Me: Yeah, I've been playing Katamari lately.
Him: What's that?
Me: you roll around a ball and it picks up stuff that's smaller than you and it makes the ball bigger.
Him: And then you use the ball to...?
Me: Nothing. I mean, you turn it into a star, but that's just the story, not a mechanic.
Him: but when you pick up certain items, they make you roll faster or shoot lasers or something, right?
Me: Nope. You just get bigger.

The point being: Katamari is an excellent game, but I have probably given up all chance of ever being a hardcore gamer by saying that. Also by being bad at it.

What I learned from Resident Evil was that killing things was fun, but exploration for the point of stealing things was just as fun if not more so. Katamari cuts out the middle man by having a single action that could be construed as both exploring, stealing, and killing, which lets you grow bigger and kill/steal more things. And because you're in the same environment the entire time, you have the satisfaction of moving from running away from things, to absorbing them, to absorbing their houses and then eventually godzilla. It's short, but I refuse to consider that a negative unless a game costs a lot of money, and I borrowed this game from a friend for free. According to the internet Katamari is chauk full of replay value, but I don't seem to be good enough to do anything but make the same mistakes over and over again, so I gave up.

The incessant talking between levels was my biggest complaint. It has that obnoxious old-timey thing where you have to hit a button twice to skip each sentence, with pauses between sentences. If you were lucky. The fact that I found myself leaving to empty the litter box between levels is probably a bad sign. The worst were the levels where, for reasons that don't matter, finishing early meant you'd done poorly. I wanted to retry the level, but I couldn't take listening to my father drone on more than twice, knowing that a gust of wind could have me fail out the next one in 30 seconds too.

Katamari represents a personal triumph for me. I basically had to give up everything but god games because of my weak, inflammation prone tendons. 3 years ago I tried Katamari and loved it, but couldn't play for more than 10 minutes before my wrists caught on fire. This week I played it with no problems. Hurray for healing.

Take home message: stealing things is fun and crushing things is fun and combining them into a single action is awesome.

Thus far (~30% through), Resident Evil 4 is a fantastic game. I enjoy the shooting of things that are trying to eat me, I enjoy the puzzle games, I enjoy the strategy that's required when several things want to eat me at once, and some of them have figured out what that little red laser emanating from my gun means. I enjoy the way my cats lessen the survival horror experience by cuddling me, then heighten it by surprise hugging my head while I'm fighting a giant invisible crustacean. The autoadjusting difficulty is amazing.

But the game suffers from two major flaws: one is that you turn your head agonizingly slowly, especially when you have your weapons out, so it's really easy for monsters to sneak up on you during a firefight. The second is that the girl you are tasked with rescuing is designed to make you hate her. Her self defense skills are limited to ducking (slowly) if you point a gun at her, and running, but only to or behind you, never on her own initiative. They gave her the worst effing dialogue and a whiny voice actress. Thus far she has done two useful things, but I'm pretty sure one wasn't intended by the game designers, and the other features her continuing to turn a crank right up till the very moment a zombie grabs her. I guess she had a lot of faith in my sniping abilities, even though I was very actively and loudly involved in shooting some zombies that were trying to eat me. Basically, the designers did everything short of tattooing "useless twat" on her forehead.

I understand that they didn't have the AI to make her smart at the time (or now, really, depending on who you ask about the AI assistant in RE5), but there was still a simple way to solve one flaw with the other. If an enemy is getting close and is out of your field of vision, have Ashley shout "to your Left" (or right, or behind, if you were stupid enough to engage multiple enemies with open space behind you, you idiot). That way you would have a reason to miss her when she gets herself re-kidnapped. If she could spot the invisible monsters better than you she might even move up to useful.

Oh, and make her shrieks for help a little less grating. That would be great.

Thanks,
-me