Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

Skyrim Wrapup

2012-01-31T16:15:00.000Z

I bit the bullet and finished the main quest line of Skyrim last night. Apart from a rather more epic than usual quest finale there is no obvious indication that I have finished the game. My quest log is still full and there are plenty of adventures still to be had in the world. My level 21 character is also far from complete with plenty of skills and abilities still to unlock. Nevertheless I think I will take a break from the game now. I have 86 hours played since starting the game on Christmas day and I think it is time to move on. For the record here are some random thoughts as I prepare to put it aside:

1. The world of Skyrim is utterly stunning both in towns and in the countryside. If you never do any quests just spend some time getting lost in the wonderful scenery.

2. The main quest line is suitably epic and entertaining. How could anything with Dragons in not be? Of course there are also hundred of side quests raiding from trivial tasks to epic saga's in their own right. My gut feeling is that the side quests are not as imaginative as those in Oblivion however.

3. In my opinion Bethseda has finally fixed the levelling system that was so broken in both Morrowind and Oblivion. I didn't spend much time thinking about the leveling system in fact. It just seems to work. You get better at stuff by doing it and there are no hidden meta-game mechanics to worry about.

4. I played as a pure Mage which work fine and got me through the game without many problems. I was a bit disappointed in the magic system overall though. Two spells effectively got me all the way through the game: the low level destruction spell Firebolt and the low level Healing spell. Perhaps I could have been more creative in my use of magic but nothing else seemed to match the effectiveness of these bankers particularly given the much higher magicka requirements of stronger spells.

5. The addition of followers to the game is a great idea both in terms of providing additional tactical options and in terms of adding colour to the game. I stuck with Lydia for most of the game. Given that I refused to wear armour on my mage character it was nice to have a meat shield on which to hang the assorted metalware I picked up along the way. Of course all the usual companion nuisances like crazy pathing and doorway blocking also applied.

6. The interface of the game on PC has come in for some criticism for not making good use of mouse and keyboard. It didn't cause me any real problems but I can see how it would have been nicer to drag inventory around with a mouse for example than clicking "R".

7. The one interface feature that did disappoint me was the quest log. It does the job of highlighting quest objectives and showing them on the map but it is missing vital options.You cannot ever abandon a quest for example and there is no way to filter the quests. Even more disappointing is the minimalist quest descriptions it provides. In many cases there isn't even enough of an explanation to remind you what the quest is all about. Given the effort put into voice acting they surely could have afforded a few writers to pad out the quest text.

8. Finally the thorny question: Is it better than Morrowind or Oblivion? Overall I would say yes, the areas it has improved (in particular the wonderful open world and the fixed levelling system) outweigh the areas it has fallen back. It doesn't beat those games in every respect though. Magic was better in Oblivion and much better (with more complex abilities) in Morrowind. Oblivion also had many sublime side quests that I haven't seen equaled in Skyrim (Haunted house, Secretive Village, Naked Dinner party, Painting come to life etc).

Gaming Update: Its All Skyrim and now STO

2012-01-26T20:37:00.003Z

Placeholder post really to record my current games. I have spent an inordinate amount of time playing Skyrim. For some reason game isn't really conducive to blog posts but it is probably my favourite Elder Scrolls game to date. For some reason I seem to be progressing very slowly. More than 70 hours played and I am only level 18 and still not finished the main questline.

On a whim I downloaded and installed the newly free to played Star Trek Online. Actually it wasn't a whim it was a direct response to an unsolicited email invite from Perfect World Entertainment. It seems I have a Perfect World account as a result of one of the Steam Challenges I entertained myself with over Christmas. All well and good except that my Star Trek online account is now tied to a throw away Perfect World account with a silly name.

Anyway I have only played a couple of hours of the game so I still haven't got a clue about what is going on. I did manage to kill a few Borg and blow up some of their cubes though. A couple of random observtaions from clueless me:

- A couple of hours into the game and I haven't found the item shop yet. Where are all the flashing neon signs saying "Spend Money Now"?

- Did I really just read that you cannot get hurt at all on normal mode missions? Surely that can't be right? I know the current trend is to cater towards casual players but if that means what I think it means it sounds a bit extreme.

One point worth noting is that I have been quite busy in the real world these last few weeks but that hasn't stopped me spending a lot of time gaming. When I am busy I tend to go into Zombie mode: work, game, sleep. Normal social interactions take a back seat because I really don't have the energy. This does influence the type of game I play however. Challenging strategy games are out because I am too tired for them. Multiplayer shooters are also out for the same reason. RPGs work well because I can play at my own pace and they provide an ideal dose of wind down escapism.

Goggle's lack of joined up thinking strikes again. Android Blogger Fail.

2012-01-17T11:42:00.000Z

I use Google's blogger platform for this blog and I have a Samsung Galaxy phone running the Google Android operating system. One might be inclined to assume therefore that posting to my blog from my phone would be well supported. One would be wrong. Some months bag Google updated the blogger posting interface and I haven't been able to get it to work properly on my phone since.

Fist attempt: Using my preferred Opera mobile browser on the phone. It really is a terrific mobile browser and seems to work well with every website. Except for Blogger. I can read posts well enough but I cannot create new posts. I get a message saying "This browser is no longer supported by Blogger".

Second attempt: Using the default Browser built into Android (Gingerbread edition). Surely Google's own Android browser will do the trick? Sadly no. I can get the page for creating a new post but it refuses to activate the text entry box and give me a keyboard.

Third Attempt: There's an app for that. Well of course there is. There is an app for everything these days. I downloaded the official Blogger app from the Android market. I was a bit disappointing that it doesn't appear to facilitate reading and writing comments but at least I can finally create and edit posts. At first I was satisfied. Then I noticed that I was experiencing problems with low battery life and phone slowdowns. Looking at running processes I was surprised to see that the official Blogger app has a persistent process that runs constantly on the phone regardless of whether you are using the app or not. When I kill the process it re-appears so the only way to get rid of it is to uninstall the app. Most suspiciously my phone runs better (better battery and fewer slowdowns) when the app is not installed.

Final option: There are a number of third party blogger apps available on the market. I haven't tried any of these yet because I am worried about handing over my user name and password to a third party app. Since I have yet to find a satisfactory solution for posting to my blog from my phone I will probably have to look for a trustworthy one and try it.

My favourite thing in Skyrim is ...

2012-01-17T11:15:00.000Z

... simply walking peacefully through the country side. Not only is the scenery drop dead gorgeous but the place feels alive with insects, birds and forest animals. I love that there is never just one way to get from A to B, there is always a multitude of high roads, byroads and twisty paths to choose from.

I am as lazy as the next gamer and I use instant travel extensively when I am pursuing quest objectives but my heart lifts whenever I realise that I am going somewhere I have not been to before and must therefore walk through as yet unexplored territory to get there.

Pro Tip #1: Ditch the horse. Exploring is much easier on foot and you feel more in touch with the country side. I am not even convinced that Skyrim horse 's are faster than travelling on foot.

Pro Tip #2: Constantly stopping to slaughter the local wildlife seems out of place on an idyllic country walk so I recommend the shout "Kynes Peace". It calms wolves, bears and other animals so you can just walk by unmolested. Doesn't seem to work on Dragons unfortunately.

Pro Tip #3: The biggest problem with trying to get anywhere in Skyrim is the multitude of ancient tombs, bandit camps and other places of interest along the way that are sure to tempt you to stray from your intended path. While dunegoneering is an enjoyable part of the game it breaks the immersion of a country side stroll. I recommend going just close enough to get the map location and then continuing on your way. You can come back easily with fast travel when you are in a more bloodthirsty mood.

Netflix Ireland, The facebook mistake

2012-01-10T10:53:00.000Z

Netflix appears to have made an error with facebook integration that has dissuaded some Irish people from trying out the service. I experienced it myself, I read others complaining about it in forum posts and during feedback to a Reed Hastings interview on Irish radio this morning.

You can sign up for a Netbook free trial using Facebook or just just using an email address. The sign in page does not appear to give you a choice however - you just get offered one or the other leading many to assume that you have to use Facebook to access Netflix. Some may enjoy the social networking aspect of Facebook integration but others are put off by it and have been dissuaded from trying Netflix because they do not appear to have a choice.

Worse still is that the algorithm for offering facebook or email seems to be borked. I assume it uses cookies to decide whether or not you are a Facebook user but something isn't working correctly. I don't use Facebook but on my computer my only choice was Facebook login. My wife uses Facebook but on her computer the only choice was email login.

Netflix comes to Ireland, First Impressions

2012-01-10T10:33:00.002Z

I signed up for Netflix's just launched video UK and Ireland video streaming service last night. Bullet point first impressions follow:

1. The sign up process is very slick and almost frictionless (the one difficulty being a face book tie in - more later). I got a 30 day free trial and they assure me I can cancel at any time without obligation so I was comfortable enough giving them my credit card details.

2. Also impressive was the range of options for viewing. I tried the PC and the Wii. Both were very easy to set-up and easy to use. Other options included Xbox, PS3, Iphone/pad , Android phone/pad.

3. Picture quality on the Wii at 460p using composite cables was better than I expected and much more convenient than connecting a laptop to the TV.

3. The service was very easy to use on both PC and Wii. You can browse under a relatively small number of categories or you can search alphabetically. This simplicity makes the system easy to use but it could be a limitation if the number of videos available was greater.

4. The price of €6.99 /month for unlimited streaming is very attractive. Consider that conventional cable/satellite TVpackages cost €25/month upwards and DVD rentals cost several euros per night.

5. On the downside the selection of films and TV shows is pretty poor. There are only about 70 titles on offer s in each category most of which are old and many of which I have never heard of. The headline offerings that they are using to push the service include small number of popular TV shows including Braking Bad, Prison Break and Heroes. Netflix have promised to improve the selection as subscriber numbers rise but the licensing situation in Europe is messy. The rights to the best shows and films are owned by Satellite and Terrestrial broadcasters who have no interest in promoting streaming.

6. I am surprised that there is no pay per view element. I would have though that offering pay per view for the latest shows and films would be a natural extension of Netflix's service. I heard a radio interview with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings this morning and he went so far as to recommend Itunes for the latest shows. If Netflix was intending to offer premium content later then he would hardly point customers to a competitor.

6. Given the ability to view shows on the kid's Wii. I was pleased to see a parental controls option where I can block adult content but I couldn't find any way to adjust this setting from the Wii itself. This means that when my wife and I want to watch an adult show we need to log in to a computer before and after to adjust permissions.

Skyrim Thoughts

2012-01-09T17:25:00.000Z

I have been playing Skyrim on and off since Santa Claus provided a copy on Christmas day. In previous Elder Scrolls games I always got sucked into the meta game and ended doing silly things to try out all the content and min max my character. This time around I am sticking to a role playing approach, only doing things which feel appropriate for my character. It means that this character will miss whole swathes of content but it still makes the playthrough more enjoyable. It helps of course that the world of Skyrim is stunningly beautiful and it is a perfect game to get lost in.

In terms of the changes to game mechanics I like the simplified levelling system. The only thing I really don't like is the ugly and useless quest journal. Morrowind's quest journal may have been unhelpful but at least it was pretty. I have have had to resort to online wikis to help me remember what various people said to me in relation to the many many miscellaneous quests so badly described in my journal.

For reference my character is a Nord Mage. Its a somewhat accidental choice because Nords generally hate magic and start with depressed magical skills but I reckon there are a few rebels in every society. In role playing spirit I do not use any weapons nor do I wear any armour. The game is still pretty easy except for occasional bosses and even then I can generally get through by running around kiting the boss while waiting for my magicka to recharge.

Do you have an obsolescence plan for PC games?

2012-01-03T12:47:00.001Z

I don't just play games, I also collect them. Even though the advent of digital distribution has removed the tactile element of owning a shelf full of games I still like having a large collection that I can browse through. Regularly enough I will dig out an old classic to play or replay. Given the rapid time to obsolescence of just about any piece of technology these days it is entirely remarkable just how PC games have withstood the march of technology. Thank to the enduring legacy of the (30 years old now) IBM Pc supported by the trojan work of the emulation community I am pretty confident that I could get any of my old games to play on my current up to date PC if I really wanted. I even have an old floppy disk drive in an attic just in case.

This unusually fortunate circumstance may not persist forever though. Technology will probably move on eventually to devices that are sufficiently different in form that even emulation is no longer feasible. Many are now predicting that mobile tablet computers will replace desktops and that closed architectures will prevail over the open general purpose architecture of current desktop PCs. Emulation may no longer be possible on these devices.

When such a change threatens the future viability of any media format you need to think about whether or not you want to preserve the ability to read and use the older format. Perhaps you are happy to let the collection go or perhaps you want to preserve the means of using it in the future. Not being into music I never bothered to rescue LP's or cassette tapes. When DVDs replaced VHS I was happy to let most of my old watched movies go but we took steps to convert our wedding video. We also converted our old 8mm family videos to DVD.

What then is the plan for maintaining the life of PC games? I guess my current plan is to keep my last PC in an attic somewhere along with the collection of game disks. In the dying days of the PC I might even take the time to hunt down the patches required to activate offline versions of digital games and store working copies of as many of them as I can on a big hard disk.

Belarus Bans Foreign Websites ???

2012-01-02T20:25:00.000Z

It seems that Belarussian citizens are to be protected from the evils of foreign websites. Clearly President Lukashenko hasn't been following my advice for despots.

Look what we made

2012-01-02T18:00:00.000Z

We dug out an old K'NEX construction set that my wife bought me for Christmas seventeen years ago and made the Big Ball Factory as a family. My 10 year old daughter must take the bulk of the credit but we are all rather proud of our contributions.

Of course it is a rule of the internet that whenever you feel a little bit proud of something there is always someone out there who will make your efforts feel completely inadequate: http://youtu.be/-vX7a15J7z4

Dropbox arghhhhh you goofed.

2011-12-31T08:55:00.001Z

Like many others I have become dependent on Dropbox to share files between the various internet connected devices in my life. A recent update to the mobile version of Dropbox for Android made an such an enormous boo boo that I am surprised that there has been no outcry about it.

To understand the gaff you must understand how Dropbox works on mobile devices. On a normal computer Dropbox keeps a full copy of every file in your Dropbox folder and constantly keeps these files updated via the internet. This approach would be far too expensive in memory and data allowance for a phone so the mobile version of dropbox does not keep a local copy of every file but instead only downloads files to a cache directory as you need them. Once you accept that you have to manually upload and download the system is a reasonable compromise and programs can still work on the copy of the file stored on the cache directory.

So far so good but a recent update to Dropbox made several changes. First they moved the location of the cache from /mnt/sdcard/dropbox to /mnt/android/data/com.dropbox.android/files/scratch. This change is more of a nuisance than a serious problem because it breaks any links in programmes that used files stored in the cache directory.

The real gaff however was that the update deleted the original cache folder and everything in it. Deleting user data files is always a no no. I was unfortunate enough to be in an area without internet when I realised what had happened and I was rightly annoyed to discover that my offline versions of several key data files had ben deleted. Others may have lost recently changed data files that had not yet been synchronised to the internet.

Terrible move Dropbox. Never delete a user's own data files without warning.

The games of Christmas 2011

2011-12-30T22:43:00.001Z

I didn't blow the bank this year but nevertheless I have stocked my gaming cupboard quite well between sales, presents and impulse purchasing over the holiday period. The list of acquisitions is as follows:

Orcs Must Die+DLC, Steam, €4.96:
This is great fun, I spent several days playing it and I am still only half way through the campaign. Between Sanctum and his game I have come to the conclusion that I cannot enjoy tower defence unless I actually participate in the action myself alongside the towers.

Dungeons of Dredmor, Steam, €1.47:
Highly regarded roguelike game but not really my cup of tea. I played just enough to get the holiday achievement.

Railworks 3 +DLC , Steam, €3.49
To be honest I will probably only dabble in the game but I have had my eye on this train simulator for ages so I had to buy it when it came on sale (90% off).

Batman Arkham City, Gamers Gate, £11.98
I really enjoyed Arkham Asylum and this is supposed to be better. I am looking forward to playing it when a window of time opens up.

E.Y.E., Divine Cybermancy, Steam, €2.49
A hugely ambitious Deus Ex like game from a little known French studio. I may play it for a bit until I get pissed off by the many flaws mixed in with the brilliance.

The Elder Scrolls Skyrim, Boxed gift from my family, Price Unknown
Hailed by many as the game of the year. I have only managed to put about eight hours into the game just enough time to do a couple of side quests. So far I like it. They appear to have completely overhauled the levelling system that was so broken in Oblivion and that can only be a good thing.

Star Wars Republic Commando, Steam, €2.24
I played the demo years ago and have always intended to play the main game but never gotten around to it.

Section 8 Prejudice, Steam, €3.24
It's a shooter, It seems to be all right and it was cheap.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, Gamestop store, €27.99
I had a few vouchers and this was the best price I have seen for the game so I succumbed to a moment of impulse. The main campaign took me just 9 hours .I suspect the achievement focussed "Special Ops" mode will take a lot longer than that however - especially as it can now be played solo or co-op. Of course multi-player is the real reason for any Modern Warfare game and I have yet to sample that.

Wings of Prey, Steam, Gift ,
WWII flight simulator. Thank you very much to Txster of Grumpy Gaming fame.

Crimecraft, Mafia Wars: Steam, Free to Play
I installed this for the sole reason of getting the holiday achievement (a snowball death match). The game itself seems quite good with plenty of multi player shooty action but I am very suspicious of pvp focused free to pay games. Inevitably you need to spend a lot of money to play competitively.

Rusty Hearts, Steam, Free to play
Another game I installed only for the holiday achievement. It is a kind of anime, action fighter mmorpg. The few missions I ran for the achievement were enjoyable enough and the game seems to have a surprising amount of depth but nevertheless I doubt I will be returning to it.

Spiral Knights: Steam, Free to play
I had actually installed this before but I only got around to playing it during my achievement hunt over Christmas. This is probably the best of the free to play games I tried and I especially liked how easy it as to just jump into a group with others for a mission. Unlikely to play again though.

Notable games missing from the acquisition list:

Star Wars, the Old Republic Online, I do intend to try this blockbuster mmorpg eventually, probably in single player mode but at the moment I have too many games and too little time to get into an mmorpg.

Shogun 2 Total War
I held off buying this in the Steam sale because Gamersgate have it at a similar sale price for another week. This will probably be my first gaming purchase of the new year.
Battlefield 3
I love a good shooter but I suck at multi-player so there is no way I am paying full price for game that is multi-player focussed and has only a short single player game. I didn't see this on sale at an attractive price point yet so I will wait this one out.

Has SWTOR Sold Out? Even on Origin?

2011-12-22T11:23:00.000Z

Only a couple of days after launch it seems that digital download sales of SWTOR have been halted.

I am still undecided about purchasing the game but I logged into Origin to check out pricing. At first I was a little bit surprised to see that the only version listed was the digital deluxe version costing €75. I was even more surprised when I clicked the link to be told: "Product No Longer Available". Thinking I may have missed something I searched again for any other edition but no. There was none available for sale.

Then I went to the Bioware website which directed me to the Origin Web Page for Ireland: http://store.origin.com/store/eaemea/en_IE/html/pbPage.SWTOR_IE/ While the web page does list the standard edition (at a price higher than I have seen it in stores) the purchase button is greyed out and I could not purchase the game even if I wanted to.

Interestingly the link to purchase additional game time works. Could it be that EA are actually restricting sales of the game in order to reduce crowding?

EDIT: False alarm it seems the origin web page is working again and the retail version is now on sale. Perhaps it was something to do with server downtime this morning but why then were game time cards still on sale?

Steam Christmas Achievement Whoring

2011-12-22T09:58:00.000Z

Over the last few days I have surprised myself by how much fun I am having collecting Steam Christmas achievements. Ostensibly these are for Steam related prizes but the prizes themselves have so far been unexciting: a free game I am unlikely to ever play, discounts off several others I have no interest in and several lumps of coal. Collecting the achievements themselves however provides an interesting excuse to look at games I might otherwise never had played.

Apart from a couple of "click this box to win" achievements most of them require you to achieve a certain goal in one of the games that is currently on sale on Steam. Many can be completed fairly quickly by an entry level character but others require hours of play to get to the correct spot in game. Happily there is help at hand in the Steam forums with guides and even save games to help achievement collectors towards their goals.

Of course it is a waste money to buy games just to earn a fairly worthless prize so I have to restrict my efforts to those games I either own already, intend to purchase anyway or can acquire for a trivial amount (read free). Even under these restrictions I have so far been able to knock out achievements in Orcs must Die (clear the first level with a particular type of trap),
Psychonauts (hunt and cook a bird and a squirrel),
Spiral Knights (hit a player with a snowball)
Dungeons of Dredmor (brew a particular potion).

In each case the achievement took me about half an hour starting from scratch with the exception for Psychonauts where I had to download a save game to get to the correct level. As someone who normally hates achievements because they often distract from playing the game I find it strangely entertaining to start a game with no intention of playing normally but just to follow a set of instructions required to get a bizarre achievement.

If I were a despot: Part 1 - Controlling the Internet

2011-12-19T10:59:00.000Z

Why do despotic governments make such a big deal about internet firewalls and trying to clamp down on "insidious foreign websites" like Facebook and Youtube. It seems to me that such loudly proclaimed efforts are as amateurish as those of the most inept Bond villain.

Can these would be megalomaniacs not see that the internet is the greatest surveillance tool ever invented? No longer do we have to pay an army of informers to eavesdrop on the conversations of their friends and families. Gone is the need for midnight secret police raids on subversives meeting in abandoned warehouses. Instead of such outdated techniques monitoring the communications of your citizens over the tubes of the internet will provide vastly more information.

Rather than banning Youtube, Facebook or any other seditious website invest in warehouses full of hard disks and record all of the online activities of your populace. The more seditious the website the more useful will be the information it gathers for you.

Amateur security experts may fool themselves that encryption and anonymising services will keep them safe. Happily for the would be despot no security system is safe from a well organised man in the middle attack and it should be relatively simple to ensure that you are the quintessential man in the middle. The usual techniques of bribery, coercion, threats to family members and such will quickly ensure that not a single byte travels over your national internet that doesn't also go through your own monitoring system. Do not advertise this fact. Let it be done with the lightest of touches. Should one of your citizens wish to use encryption or anonymising services then let them. Well, rather, let them use the carefully altered versions that you, as man in the middle, have substituted in their place. The more accomplished phishing organisations have developed such practices to a fine art so it should be relatively trivial when you have the resources of a nation behind you.

Indeed the biggest problem you are likely to face is the extreme surfeit of information that is going to be collected. You will have ready access to the most private communications both innocent and subversive of your citizens. Happily several large organisations have refined the science of mining useful information from a vast sea of data to a high degree. I am sure that their techniques can be copied or more likely bought.

Needless to say you are going to have to change your recruitment policies. Candidates with a creative flair for information processing and degrees in computer science are likely to be of more use to future leaders than those with an ability to painfully extract fingernails. It would be no harm either if recruits had siblings, spouses and other family members to whom they felt a protective attachment. Might be a good idea to keep a few of the fingernail pullers on hand too. Just in case.

Anyway I am not a despot nor do I want to be one so I can only be grateful that no real world government has figured out the incredible surveillance potential of the internet because done well such practices would be extremely powerful and very hard to detect. Oh, wait ....

To SWTOR or not to SWTOR

2011-12-14T09:20:00.000Z

Christmas is one of the few times of the year when a combination of loosened purse strings and available free time allows me the luxury of sampling recently released games. This year there are a few possible contenders for my Christmas holiday gaming list: Skyrim is a leading candidate while Arkham city, Shogun 2 and even Modern Warfare 3 are all possibilities and then of course there is the tantalising prospect of SWTOR.

The timing of SWTOR couldn't be better for a Christmas gaming blitz and there is something magical about the early days of an mmorpg. Settings, quests and activities that will come to be regarded as tiresomely repetitive over the coming months and years are still seen as fresh and new. The only trouble is that it is an mmorpg and I thought I had grown out of mmorpgs. My recent attempt at logging into LOTRO to sample the Isengard content lasted all of 30 minutes before I got bored and logged out. I don't think this is just burnout with one game. The whole mmorpg genre fails to inspire me. In fact at this point in my life I feel tired of all multi-player games. I play games for escapism and release from the stresses of every day life. Having to deal with other humans even if it is just a bit of friendly guild banter takes more social effort than I feel like putting in at the moment. I realise of course that modern mmorpg's can be played solo and SWTOR seems to excel at this but if I am going to play solo - then a game designed specifically for its solo experience is likely to be better.

Another factor is that if I do get into an mmorpg it is likely to consume all of my available gaming time for the next weeks and months. How then am I going to fit in Skyrim or any of the other games I really would like to play?

So: To SWTOR or not to SWTOR that is the question.

Mr Fixit or Mr. Breakit

2011-12-12T12:28:00.000Z

I seem to have spent the entire weekend fixing things. This would normally be a cause for pride of accomplishment on my part except for the fact that at least one of the breakages was completely my own fault.

The first patient was a cable remote which had stopped talking to the set top box. After several batteries were wasted by various members of the family who assumed that batteries were the problem I decided that I had better roll up my sleeves and "look into it".

Looking into it consisted of prising the plastic cover apart and peering at the circuit board inside, knowing full well that if there was anything seriously wrong I wasn't going to be able to fix it. While peering I noticed that the keypad matrix on the circuit board was covered in a syrupy gloop. The rubber keypad mat had its own fair share of this gloop. Guessing that this wasn't a design feature I carefully cleaned both and re-assembled. Hey Presto the remote works and Daddy is a hero.

The second case was my wife's PC which has been acting up for a few weeks, hanging irrecoverably at random intervals. These hanging incidents were just frequent enough to annoy my wife considerably but neither frequent enough nor predictable enough for me to make a serious attempt at solving the issue. It ffinally came to a head at the weekend when the computer sat down for good and refused to boot. My keen photographer spouse was quite distraught at her inability to get into photoshop but I was actually pleased. I knew from experience that a fault that stops the machine from working at all is usually easier to diagnose and fix than one that occurs randomly once a day.

She actually has five big hard disks on this machine to store all her photos but the problem turned out to be related to the main windows disk. A combination of binary search, trial and error, booting from puppy linux, disk repair using another machine, reseating all connectors and cleaing the machine out with a vacuum cleaner got us up and running again and I am hopeful that the problem is now fixed. Kudos again for Daddy.

The final repair job is the one that consumed most of my time and is the also the one that is entirely my own responsibility. It arose from attempts to upgrade the operating system on my Android phone. They say that if something isn't broken then you shouldn't try to fix it and that certainly applies here. Yes my phone was running an older version of Android but it was working great and it did everything I needed it to do. Complicating matter further was the fact that the latest version of Android hadn't been officially released for my country yet so I had to install a hacked version downloaded from the web.

I am not completely clueless. I have hacked my phone before with great results but this time things didn't run so smoothly.

Although the upgraded operating system appeared to work very well the first problem that I had failed to anticipate is that the upgrade wiped all my apps and data. This wasn't the disaster it could have been because I was able to restore everything from backups and from the cloud but reconfiguring everything to be the way I like was time-consuming and tedious. It was made harder by the fact that the wifi seemed to be acting up and attempts to download anything more than a few megabytes invariably failed.

Eventually the wifi issue got to me and I went to google to discover that this was indeed a known issue for some phones using this latest version of the operating system. Various tweaks to the phone (and to the wifi router) were offered as solutions by commentators but I tried all of them and nothing worked. In fact my ham fisted repair attempts made things worse leaving me eventually with a phone that couldn't connect to the internet at all either via wifi or packet data.

At around midnight on Sunday I came to the twin realisation that a) My attempts at repairing the new operating system weren't working and b) I needed the phone to work better than this for the week ahead. I resigned myself to a late night and went through the tedious process of downgrading back to an official version of the Android operating system (which wiped all my stuff again) and then re-configuring and reinstalling everything I needed again. It was 2am before I had a fully working phone and could finally go to bed.

DRM makes criminals of us all.

2011-12-11T10:29:00.000Z

I recently found myself in a position where the only practical solution for me to enjoy ebooks I had legitimately purchased (would have been) to engage in the highly illegal pursuit of using a drm removal too. The cause was a clash of software upgrades and activation limits with a healthy dose of misunderstanding from me thrown in.

I am not a lawyer and the law on drm circumvention is pretty confusing at the moment. There is an EU treaty from 2001 which appears to makes it highly illegal to even think about anti drm but it hasn't been transcribed into my own countries national law yet and I believe there is still some discussion over possible exceptions (ie fair use provisions).

Well I am not going to admit to breaking the law but I will say that Google informed me that there was a very easy to use open source, community supported tool available to perform drm removal (if I felt so inclined). I quickly realised that this tool (if I were to use it) would make the whole process of managing and reading ebooks a lot more robust and future proof as well as making it more enjoyable by allowing me freedom to choose whatever reader I liked best.

A curious thought struck me as I was thinking about this drm removal tool. A genuine criminal I wouldn't need this apparently highly illegal piece of software. A criminal would just download a pirated version without drm. The only people who need to use drm removal are those who have already acquired (presumably legally) a piece of drm protected content.

They are going to have to bring back farthings.

2011-12-06T17:26:00.001Z

First we had digital retailers like Steam discounting AAA games from €40 down to €10 and it felt like a revolution.

Then the revolution moved on to indie titles which usually cost €10 or €15 and these were discounted down to €1 or €2.

Now we have the Android Sale discounting mobile games that normally only cost a couple of euro down to €0.10.

Pretty soon they are going to have to bring back halfpenny's and farthings in order to allow this discounting madness to continue.

Wot I am playing

2011-12-06T17:15:00.000Z

Finished Red Faction Armageddon. I enjoyed this third person linear shooter a lot but I agree with reviews that give it a "good but not great" rating. Red Faction's unique selling proposition is an engine which allow for insane levels of property destruction and Armageddon brings a unique repair capability to the mix. Unfortunately most of the time the stuff that gets destroyed is the platform you are standing on or the box you are trying to take cover behind and this gets somewhat tiresome.

Currently playing Sanctum. I don't generally like Tower defence games.Partly this is because I am bad at them but also because I find it very depressing to watch an inexorable stream of monsters march towards my inner sanctum despite my usually inept efforts at stopping them. Sanctum however spices up the mix a bit by inserting you into the fray in FPS mode and I find that is enough for me to overcome my dislike of the tower defence format.

Portal 2 two screen coop on one PC.

2011-12-01T00:23:00.000Z

I mentioned before that I intended to try Portal 2 in "unofficial split screen co-op mode. Well split screen on a small computer monitor is a recipe for a headache especially when the game defies gravity as much as portal. However a minor bit of extra fiddling allowed us to drive two seperate screens from one PC.

The Steam forums describes a complicated method of doing this that I couldn't get working so this simpler method which worked for me might be of use to someone.

1. First I followed the instructions in this post to get split screen multi-player working: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1847904
A minor issue not mentioned is that you need to enable the console from the keyboard/mouse options menu
I am using keyboard and one wired Xbox360 controller as suggested. Getting the controller to switch to channel 2 was tricky at first but as Chameleon8 mentions plugging it out and in again during loading works. The trick for me was to do the plug / plug out quickly.
2. When game is running make sure you have vertical split screen. Use the console command ss_splitmode 0 if necessary to change it.

3. To get the image split between monitors I went back to the desktop and used my graphics card software (ATI Catalyst for me) to configure the two screens as one big screen. In catalyst this is called grouping and is accessed under the desktop management of the catalyst control centre. I am sure Nvidia cards have a similar feature. Both screens have to have the same resolution so I set them both to the resolution of the smaller monitor. This means a small loss of quality but it isn't really noticeable.

4. With both monitors acting as one big widescreen I ran portal in multiplayer again and this time the image stretched across both screens. I enabled vertical split screen and hey presto player one on one screen and player 2 on the other.

It is takes a minute or two to set up but it is worth it. We are having lots of fun together working through the levels.

Could my daughter be the new Felicia Day?

2011-11-28T19:34:00.000Z

There is a Minecraft craze going on among the nerdier boys at my 10 year old daughters junior school. Apparently most of the girls are oblivious to this but my little angel is an old hand at the game thanks to her daddy.

Portal 2 finished now on to split screen multiplayer

2011-11-27T23:13:00.000Z

Really really good.

A really well polished experience with plenty of humour and a good story to tag along with. I loved the ending. Puzzles are probably a bit easier than the original although I had my share of head scratching moments none the less.

I have actually gotten my daughter interested in playing although I get motion sickness looking over her shoulder. I came across a how to post telling how to get split screen multi-player on one PC. It was a bit fiddly to get going but now it works an I am looking forward to playing a few co-op levels with her.

Curious that Valve should include the code for split screen multiplayer on the PC version of the game but not actually offer it to players.

Fun Android Game: Defender

2011-11-27T11:13:00.001Z

Edit: My statement that you need more than 50% wall remaining to get a bonus crystal is not correct. In fact you need more than 30% of your whatever maximum wall is. You start out with wall of 100 and it increases in steps of 10. If you maximum wall is more than 150 then you need more than 50 remaining to get the bonus. A bigger wall is still better though because you always have a safety margin of 70% of your maximum wall.

My mobile distraction of choice this week is Droidhen's simply named "Defender" on my Android phone. Defender is a wall defence game where you use a combination of a bow and magic spells to fend off hordes of enemies. It is very slickly made with attractive graphics and fun gameplay.

Defender is free to play in the "but you can pay if you want to progress faster" sense. Lest you doubt the efficacy of this business model I should point out that Defender is riding near the top of the Android money making chart at the moment. There are two strands to progression in the game: gold upgrades your bow which is essentially a single target weapon while crystals upgrade your area of effect magic spells. Both gold and crystals can be bought in the cash shop as well as earned in game. However you get gold for every enemy killed but you only get crystals when you complete a level. This means that non paying players can farm gold but not crystals by restarting a level over and over which leads to asymmetric progression. Despite this some players report having gotten well into the hundreds of levels without paying anything.

Gold and crystal acquisition appears to proceed at a linear rate while the cost of upgrades rises exponentially so be warned that like all free to play games this could become very expensive if you get hooked. I have no intention of spending any of my very limited gaming budget on on the game so Droidhen will have to accept the limited publicity value of this blogpost in payment. Eventually I am sure I will get tired of the farming aspect but for the moment I find it fun.

For anyone thinking of trying the game here are a few things that took me a couple of restarts to learn:

1. Crystals, needed to upgrade spells, are in very limited supply so use them wisely. You can earn up to 2 crystals on a normal level and up to 5 on a boss level but otherwise you will need to buy them in the cash shop.

2. Cash is earned for every monster killed so you can farm as much as you need (albeit slowly) by restarting a level over and over.

3. If you have less than 50% wall remaining at the end of a level you lose a crystal and there is no way to recover this so it is better to start over before you complete if your wall has more damage than this. Pressing the pause button will give you an option to restart.

4. Don't forget to upgrade your walls (using gold) when you can afford it. This will make it easier to meet that 50% wall target at the end of each level.

3. Resist the temptation to convert crystals to mana. The game will constantly bombard you with helpful reminders to do this but crystals are too valuable to waste this way.

Is high end PVP all that different from high end PVE?

2011-11-25T01:35:00.002Z

Thanks to Syncaine for pointing out the excellent Rooks and Kings videos of truly impressive Eve online encounters.I am no expert on EVE but it is clear that Rooks and Kings are masters of their trade employing extreme theory crafting to come up with builds and strategies that allow a small number of highly co-ordinated ships to take on defeat forces that appear to be far superior to them on paper.

Clarion Call 3 is the best video because it has an epic storyline but it makes more sense if you watch the sequence in order from Clarion Call 1 to 3. Essentially they have developed a number of precision tanking strategies that enable their small fleets to absorb all the damage that large opposing fleets can throw at them thereby allowing the Rooks and Kings fleet to pick off their enemies one by one.

The thing that struck me most about these videos is how similar the Rooks and Kings approach is to that of high end PVE guilds in other games. The employ extensive theory crafting to min max their builds. They assign and master individual roles. Most telling of all is the dispassionate way they seem to deal with their enemies. There is no evidence of personal animosity here. The opposing forces are an obstacle to be overcome just like a raid boss in a pve game.

Perhaps Rooks and Kings are unusual in their approach but they are obviously very good at what they do. It suggests to me that high end pvp need not be all that different from high end pve

X3 Reunion update

2011-11-23T11:22:00.000Z

I finally got around to completing the third mission which caused so much grief earlier. Despite having picked up a Nova heavy fighter in the meantime I actually used the Buster ship I started with in the end. A bit of combat experience earned fighting pirates made all the difference and I was able to deal with the fighter escorts quickly enough to follow the target as he jumped between systems.I think the key lesson I learned in combat is that strafing (using the A &D keys) does actually work and helps avoid enemy fire even though it is hard to notice the sideways movement against the background of the stars.

I am sure I will need to move up from my Buster eventually but for now I am enjoying its combination of speed and firepower. It is also loaded with the software I need to control a small but expanding fleet of ships. I now have three Buster medium fighters, one Nova Heavy fighter and a Mercury hauler.

Capturing pirate ships remains my most reliable means of earning money and ships but I did manage to make a few profitable trade runs in the Mercury. Remote trading requires a lot more micro management than I expected. I can control it remotely but I still have to manually give it orders to buy and sell. This could be a matter of not having the correct software installed. The documentation on what software upgrades do is poor and even web resources are often ambiguous. One point I find particularly confusion is whether you need to have the software installed in the ship you are flying or the ship you are controlling.

While my efforts at economic expansion are progressing slowly I am learning more about how the economy works. I can bring down the price of goods in a factory for example by stuffing its pipeline with raw materials and letting it ramp up production. Such lessons may prove useful later when I am able to take a more strategic view of trading.

X3 Reunion continuing adventures

2011-11-22T09:51:00.000Z

When I started playing X3 I tried to get a far as I could without consulting faqs or guides. After persevering for almost twenty hours I decided it was time to compromise my principles. There are too many undocumented features and the user interface is just too unhelpful to try to struggle on.

Simple case in point: When you buy a new ship you are immediately presented with a menu of fittings that you can add to your purchase. Unfortunately this menu is just a list of whatever parts are available in the local system. It isn't filtered on any way. Even if your ship can only handle a single 1MW shield the game will happily sell you ten 25MW shields to fit to it. There doesn't seem to be any way of accessing information on what fittings your new ship can take until after you exit this menu. Such frustrations with the user interface are commonplace.

My current compromise is to consult the internet for help with game mechanics but I am still trying to avoid "spoilers" such as guides on how to make money. This still makes for grindingly slow progress and after twenty hours I am still flying the ship I started with. I have got a few software upgrades to help with combat and trade and I have spent a good deal of time mapping out the galaxy. My attempts at bounty hunting are a mixed bag. I can handle pirates one on one but they usually come in packs which defeats me. I did hav ea windfall when I attacked a lone pirate in a Falcon (bigger ship than my own) and the pilot panicked and bailed out leaving me to collect his ship. I couldn't afford to equip a second fighter so I dragged it to a shipyward and sold it for a half a million credits which I promptly reinvested in a hauler.

Now with more than one ship to play with I can finally begin the "real game" of X which involves the use of powerful remote control software to build up an empire of autonomous vehicles and stations. One meagre hauler isn't going to make me rich but it is a start. I am going to try and find a profitable trade route for it to ply while I head out with my fighter looking for more jumpy pirates who are willing to donate ships to me.

X3: Reunion - for gamers who think Eve online is too casual.

2011-11-21T09:13:00.000Z

Tim (Van Hemlock) has been playing a bit of X3 Terran Conflict which reminded me that I have an unplayed copy of X3 Reunion on my shelf since way back in 2005. This game is hard. There is no tutorial and the manual seems intended to intimidate rather than inform aspiring players. I could complain about the dreadfully unintuitive user interface except that I have a strong suspicion it is deliberately made that way to frighten off those who are not hard enough. The carrot for those who persevere, I am told, is a universe of unparalleled depth where the dedicated can carve out an empire.

First hour in game:Hmmm, there doesn't seem to be a tutorial. In fact I am being asked to teach some rookie pilots the ropes. Thankfully I have played enough space games to know that you don't aim at the enemy ship you aim at the little lead indicator which tells you where they will be by the time your bullets get to them. I manage to shoot down a few bad guys and we survive.

Second hour in the game: I have spent most of my time in game to date getting hopelessly lost. You can ask passing ships for directions but the most common answer is to go through the North (or South, East or West) jump gate. Where the heck are the gates? And What does North mean in Space anyway? How can a space faring race not know how to make a map?

Third hour in the game I have gotten through the first couple of missions. Mission three is kicking my butt big time. I am supposed to capture a baddie in a big lumbering ship. Unfortunately he spawns waves of fighters and then jumps to hyperspace. If I stop to deal with the fighters he gets away. If I ignore the fighters and go after him I get killed while my own jump drive charges up. I think I need to earn some money to upgrade my ship before trying again.

"I started in a fighter so perhaps bounties are the way to make cash.Except you need a police license to collect bounties and I can't afford one yet. It seems that I shall have to do some trading to earn the cash for a license. "

5 hours in: Wandering aimlessly through the galaxy I have managed to work my seed capital of 5,000 credits up to a staggering 5,200. Trading is hard when you lack the software to check prices without docking at a station (I can't afford it yet) and dynamically adjusting prices mean that a route that is profitable the first time may be lossmaking the next.

8 hours in: I finally found a way to make some money by using my meagre cargo hold to haul illicit alcohol. I manage to amass 40,000 credits before the police catch up with me. Given that every credit I have is invested in my cargo hold there is no way I was going to comply with their request to dump it over the side. I run for it and manage to make it to the temporary safety of a station. Unfortunately I now appear to be a hunted criminal.

9 hours in: The police were surprisingly reasonable (gullible?) when I hailed one of them to explain that it was all a big mistake and that the alcohol was purely for medicinal purposes. The agreed to forget the matter and I can fly around again without fear of arrest. I am getting bored of smuggling moonshine. Let's buy that police license so I get earn some dosh by shooting pirates. Oh no! It seems my standing with the police is not good enough to be a bounty hunter. There is that little matter of my resisting arrest

On the bright side I notice that after 9 hours of wandering around the galaxy I have ended back in my home system. This just happens to be the most populated system I have come across yet and there appears to be plenty of opportunities for a rookie to make money from trading or doing jobs that the citizens have posted on message boards. No doubt if I hadn't tried to do a few missions and ended half way across the galaxy I would have had a quicker start just staying put.

Skyrim a runaway success. Hope for Humanity after all?

2011-11-16T21:01:00.000Z

I probably won't get to play Skyrim until the Christmas Holidays but I am very pleased to see that Bethseda have something of a Mega hit on their hands.

Of course I can't comment on the game until I play it but if I know Elder scrolls games I am sure it has oodles of depth and dashes of genius with quite a few flaws as well. I am also absolutely sure that this is not a casual game at least not in the Angry Birds / Farmville sense.

A little experiment in human behaviour

2011-11-16T09:23:00.000Z

We keep a jug of filtered drinking water in our fridge. The water from the tap is perfectly palatable but chilled water is that bit nicer so the jug is popular.

It is a matter of seconds to fill the jug but it takes several minutes to trickle through the filter and a lot longer to cool down to a nice level of chilliness. It is therefore very frustrating to reach for the jug and find it empty and I take care to top it up every time I use it. Unfortunately other members of my family do not seem to be as considerate and on many occasions I have gone to the fridge only to be disappointed by a nearly empty jug.

My usual response in circumstances like this is to express my dissatisfaction loudly in what my kids term a "Father Rant". This makes me feel better for a little while but long experience has convinced me that such rants are incapable of producing any lasting change of behaviour. On this occasion therefore I decided to be a little more scientific.

Analysing the problem it soon became clear to me that I was probably the only person who ever filled the jug. Others who used the jug after me found it contained enough water for their needs and used it without replenishment. Because they did not need to fill the jug to meet their own needs they did not think to fill the jug afterwards. When I next came to look for the jug it was invariably almost empty.

My first thought was to stop filling the jug after I use it. My thinking was that I I stopped filling then there wouldn't be enough water for others and eventually it might dawn on them that they have to start filing it themselves. In the interest of science however I decided to take an even bolder approach in order to test the hypothesis in the extreme case. I started emptying the jug completely every time I used it. This required a certain amount of subterfuge but I managed to pull it off for a couple of days.

The results were immediate and conclusive. Every time I went to the fridge I found a full jug of water despite my emptying it completely every time I used it. Clearly the empty jug was providing the signal to others to start filling as anticipated.

I was initially enthused by my experiment. Finally I had discovered a method to change other people's behaviour through the application of scientific principles. How many more familial annoyances might I be able to deal with in a scientific manner: The lights that are left on unnecessarily? The dishes that are not cleared off the table? The toys that seem to accumulate in inappropriate locations?

I was smugly contemplating such future scientific triumphs after having just replaced a carefully emptied jug into the fridge when I noticed my my youngest daughter go to the fridge open it and reach for the jug.

The look of disappointment on her face when she saw it was empty broke my heart and dragged me down to earth with a crash.

The scientific experiments are over. If it is my lot in life to be the filler of water jugs so be it.

A hint for Homeworld 2

2011-11-14T21:10:00.001Z

Homeworld 2 came out to a lukewarm reception eight years ago. The latest patch doesn't even work on a modern computer so it is quite possible that I am the only person on the planet still playing it. Nevertheless that will not stop me from giving my own unasked for piece of advice to any other retro gamer out there thinking of trying it. This is not game breaking advice nor even a spoiler really but it is a hint that I have not seen mentioned elsewhere in the guides that were written many years ago.

So for what it is worth my advice is to experiment with sensor distortion probes. These act like normal probes sweeping away the fog of war and illuminating enemies over a wide area but they have the added advantage of obscuring any of your units within the probes range from the enemies viewpoint until they get very close. It is like stealth mode for your entire fleet. What is not to like?

I have looked over the guides on Gamefaqs and surprisingly none of them recommend this very useful probe. I suspect that this is because in most levels of Homeworld 2 the action starts straight away and continues without let up to the end of the level. You cannot hide units that are already engaged in combat so the sensor distortion probe would appear to be useless.

However it is in just these relentless battles that I find the sensor distortion probe can be invaluable. The thing is that the Vagyr enemy usually attacks in waves. One of the main difficulties of the game is that there never seems to be enough time to regroup and rebuild between waves so the relentless onslaught eventually overcomes your dwindling forces. This is a situation where the sensor distortion probe can really help. If you get a few (two or three may be enough) probes up before the end of a wave to cover your entire force then once the current attackers are eliminated you effectively disappear from the map. You will not be attacked again until you peep outside your stealth bubble. This allows you the time you need to rebuild your forces.

Pressing TAB will highlight the spherical zone around a probe that you are safe to operate in. The Vagyr will send out the occasional scout or probe of their own so be sure to have some fast strike craft on hand to dispatch them before they get close enough to blow your cover. The sensor distortion probes have a wider viewing range than their stealth bubbles so you can always see an enemy coming before they can see you.

It gets even better.

A rather cheap tactic is to send out a roving squad of bombers to take out undefended enemy capital ships while most of your forces are hiding behind the stealth bubble. Carriers make particularly good targets but destroyers and even battle cruisers are doable if they don't have a fighter or corvette escort. Just be careful not to drag the enemy back with you when returning home.

An advanced tactic is to use multiple probes to build a stealth tunnel between your position and an enemy stronghold. With care you can sneak a strong strike force right up to their doorstep and take out shipyards with minor losses.

Homeworld 2

2011-11-13T22:55:00.000Z

I loved the original Homeworld the beautiful beautiful atmospheric space based RTS from 1999. Homeworld Cataclysm was a worthy follow on but when Homeworld 2 came out in 2003 it didn't receive the same universal praise. Perhaps influenced by those lack-lustre reviews I never got around to playing the game until now despite the copy that has been sitting on my shelf of "to be played" games for years.

Anyhow the game has kept me entertained for more than a week and I have only one more level to go before I complete the single player campaign. With the benefit of distance I can see that it is a good game but it suffers from comparison with it's predecessor. As a follow up it would have had to pull a few surprises to have the same impact as the original game and it doesn't. The first game just overflowed with brilliant levels but here the level design is competent rather than stunning.

The developers also took a curious approach to difficulty setting. The levels are quite challenging overall. Like most single player games however it does get easier once you figure things out but the game ensures that the AI always has a big advantage in forces so you can never get too complacent. Rather than give a difficulty slider they have auto adjusting difficulty which adjusts the number of enemies you have to face in accordance with the reserves of forces you bring into each level. This means you can game the system by deliberately depleting your own forces which is just silly.

A personal gripe is that the pace of the game has increased since the first Homeworld. There is rarely time to marshal forces at the start of a level before an enemy attacks. This is made worse by the fact that most levels auto-complete once you achieve the final objective so you often find yourself catapulted into a new level with forces in rag order after a heavy battle.

The game plays well enough on Windows 7 64 bit in its original version. Oddly enough the later 1.1 patch is not compatible with Windows 7 but I didn't find any game breaking bugs in the unpatched game. This would be an issue for mult-iplayer of course but good luck finding opponents at this stage.

I hope I have as much to say when I am 86

2011-11-11T10:36:00.000Z

Thanks to Bill Harris over at Dubious Quality for linking to this wonderful piece: An 86 years old gamer's reflections on life.

Living in a house with paper walls. Thoughts on privacy in a connected world.

2011-11-08T09:48:00.004Z

Tom (name changed for reasons of confidentiality) is a real life friend. His kids play with our kids. Tom and his wife have come to parties in our house and we have had dinner with them. There is nothing unusual in this except that Tom is also a gamer. Those under the age of 35 may find it hard to believe that this is unusual among men of my generation. For most of my generation gaming ended decades ago ago when the pursuit of the opposite sex became a more pressing concern than pushing coins into a Space Invaders machine. Sure they may have enjoy a few games of Wii Sports with their own kids but that is the extent of their knowledge of the modern state of the game.

Anyhow Tom is a gamer and I want to talk about our gaming relationship. A few years back this amounted to no more than brief conversations about the latest Call of Duty while our wives discussed other issues. The we realised we were both on Steam and we added each other to friends lists. While conflicting real life timetables meant we never actually got around to playing multiplayer together it does mean that every time I turn on my computer a little icon will tell me whether Tom is also logged on and if he is playing a game. I assume he also gets these notifications about me.

For some reason this bugs me. I have other friends on Steam and I couldn't care less about their gaming habits but it is different with someone I know in real life. I don't want to know what Tom gets up to on a Friday night and I doubt he want to know what I am doing at 8:00am on a Sunday morning. Sometimes I deliberately sign out of Steam just to get a bit of privacy. I think Tom does the same.

I have heard it said that the Japanese have a highly developed code of manners because for so long they lived in houses with paper walls. It is as if humans who are denied real privacy develop unspoken codes of conduct to compensate.

This post was sparked by a post from Tobold in which he talks about going back into Facebook using his real name after having been banned for using a pseudonym. I have so far resisted the urge to create a real name Facebook account primarily for reasons of privacy. I do have a LinkedIn account but that is very squarely grounded in the professional realm and does not impinge on my personal privacy.

Being on Facebook under your real name is surely the ultimate incarnation of "living in a a house with paper walls". Has a new etiquette developed to reflect this? Do you deliberately screen out information about your friends and contacts?

A lesson in usability from an octengenarian.

2011-11-07T13:02:00.002Z

If you want to learn about usability then spend some time teaching an elderly person to use a piece of modern technology.

Yesterday I got a phone call from an elderly relative who had bought a new TV and was having difficulty tuning in the channels. It quickly became apparent that I wasn't going to solve this over the phone so I hopped into my car and went around to her house.

"Everything worked yesterday" she told me. "The man who installed the TV tuned in all the channels and showed me how to use it but I accidentally pressed the wrong button this morning and now I can only get channel 1"

The TV was a brand new Philips LCD and a few minutes playing with it convinced me that there was nothing wrong. The installer had programmed in 15 channels including all the channels this lady wanted to watch.

"It's all working now", I said. "You must have gotten stuck in a menu somewhere. This is how you get back out of any menu".

"No No" she insisted. " I pressed the wrong channel and now it is stuck. I cannot get the other stations".

Ah, I thought. "Perhaps it would help if I wrote down which numbers correspond to which stations." I spent a few minutes going through all the stations writing down the channel names opposite the numbers. She didn't seem overly happy with the list. "It's all very confusing" she said. "If only I hadn't pressed the wrong button it would be OK"

"Don't worry" I confidently predicted "I will show you how to change channels and how to get back out of any menus you press by accident".

I sat down with her and showed her how to enter the number of any channel. She was clearly unhappy with the procedure. When I handed her the remote to try for herself she stabbed at the buttons, sometimes getting the right digit more often getting no number or getting multiple digits. "This is very confusing" she said again.

The Philips remote didn't help. The number buttons were small rubber keys with the numbers written in squinty text above them. Even I had to strain to make them out and this lady hadn't a hope.

"Ok, Ok" I said." Here is an easier way". In my experiments I had noticed a menu mode for changing channel. Pressing a button in the middle of the remote brings up a menu that fills the screen with 15 boxes. You then use an annular ring like a joypad to navigate to the channel you want and press OK. Perfect. I couldn't think of an easier way to pick a channel myself.

"Pressing that button and you get a menu" I explained. "Do you see those 15 big boxes on the screen? Each of those is a channel. Can you see the channel numbers"

"No" she said as she stared at the unfamiliar pattern on the screen " Let me get my glasses".

Eventually I managed to explain to her that one of the boxes was highlighted and that would be the channel that came up when she pressed OK. "All you have to do is navigate to the box you want using the arrow buttons around the ring."

To my gamer trained instincts navigating a menu using a joypad is second nature but this octogenarian had never used a gamepad in her life.

"It's all very confusing" she pleaded again. "The man set it up yesterday but I pressed the wrong button and now I can't use it"

"To hell with that" I thought. I'll show her how to use the channel up and channel down buttons. There are only 15 channels after all so it won't take her too long to go through them.

Unfortunately instead of discrete channel up and down buttons the remote had a second annular ring outside the previous one with channel + and channel - on the right and left sides of it. This lady's arthritic thumbs struggled to press the narrow annular ring without pressing something else at the same time. As often as not she would advance two channels or none at all.

We had a minor breakthrough when she realised that she found it easier to press the channel down button than channel up. She managed to switch down through all of the channels with only a few mis-hits until she got to channel 1. Then she pressed again and got to channel 15.

"How did I go from channel 1 to channel 15" she asked perplexed.

"The numbers loop around in a circle" I tried to explain.

She wasn't buying it. She looked at me and once more said "It's all very confusing. It worked yesterday after the man installed it but I pressed the wrong channel and now I can't get the programme I want".

When I tried to explain to her that there was nothing wrong with the setup of the telly it was as if I was talking a different language. She was sticking to her story that it worked yesterday after it had been installed but some button she pressed had broken it and now she wasn't able to change channels. This lady may be in her eighties but mentally she is all there so I was confused. Could it be possible that there is a magical mode that makes it easy to use for the elderly? I searched for one and couldn't find it. Maye she is just too proud to admit that she cannot use the remote but to be honest it is a usability nightmare. The buttons are too small, the text is not clear enough and the timings are too unforgiving for someone whose dexterity is not what it used to be.

I have abandoned my attempt at teaching her to use the Philips remote. I am now on the lookout for an alternative remote with big clear buttons but that won't necessarily solve the unforgiving timings. I also need to be careful not to hurt this lady's feelings.

For anyone who is interested you can download a copy of the manual for this TV here: Philips 3000 Series manual. There is a good picture of the offending remote on page 8.

Restraining the nerd inside

2011-10-31T13:35:00.000Z

Sometimes I have to sit on my nerdy instincts.

A couple of days ago a memory stick I use in work to carry files between computers failed. After buying a new memory stick my inner nerd quickly got carried away with the possibilities.

- Some of the material is sensitive so it needs to be encrypted lest the memory stick gets lost or stolen.
- Some of the computers I use lack the appropriate software for decryption and restrictive user rights can make it difficult to install.
- For convenience and security reasons wouldn't it be better to have a bootable operating system on the memory stick that had all my software pre-installed?

So it was that I set about trying to build and install a custom version of Puppy Linux on my memory stick so that I could have a portable self contained working environment.

Puppy Linux is one of the coolest pieces of software on the planet. A self contained operating system that will boot from CD or memory stick and runs on just about any computer you can find. It runs in memory and is fast and responsive yet the default installation is surprisingly fully featured. However it is Linux and a fairly specialised install of Linux at that so any deviation from the default package is not for the faint hearted. The difficulty is further compounded by the fact that Puppy seems to be between versions at the moment, changing from an Ubuntu base to a Slackware base. Four hours after starting I was still struggling to get my custom Puplet to work (puplet is the the name for a custom install of Puppy).

Enjoyable though this hacking was I had a slowly dawning realisation that I might still be playing with this in a month's time and not yet have solved the underlying problem of carrying sensitive files from one PC to another. Ignoring the indignant protests of my inner nerd I decided that the most expedient solution was to install the decryption software on my Windows laptop. If no sensitive files are involved then memory stick on its own will suffice but if encryption is needed then the laptop comes too. It isn't an elegant solution and it isn't a clever solution but it works.

I am still going to try and build my custom version of puppy but I amn't fooling myself by pretending it is work any more. This is purely for entertainment.

Deus Ex Human Revolution. Random thoughts on finishing the game.

2011-10-29T09:50:00.000Z

1. DXHR really feels like true successor to the 2000 classic. All of the freedom of choice is in there. You really are presented with big open world levels and left to figure things out for yourself. The augments feel powerful and for the most part offer useful alternative ways of completing objectives.

2. This freedom of choice is not as surprising in 2011 as it was in the year 2000 but it is nevertheless refreshing.

3. I like the story. I found it sucked me in sufficiently to encourage me to "role play" my character. Not as good perhaps as the Mafia games but nevertheless still far better than most.

4. Getting into my character's role was absolutely the right way to play the game for me. On a normal difficulty I found the game play quite easy for the most part so if I had fallen into the trap of min maxing my character I am sure it would quickly have become trivial to the point of tedium.

5. Although I was role playing a basically moral character I found that he naturally got more aggressive and violent as the game progressed. With chain gun toting mercs gunning for Adam and his friends it would have seemed utterly stupid to perform non lethal take downs on them. Nevertheless stealth was always his most powerful weapon and he did try to avoid harming the innocent.

6. It took me 48 hours hours to finish the campaign. I took my time but that is still longer than most modern games.

7. I found the controls and interface were fine on the PC. I briefly tried a game pad but went back to keyboard and mouse. The only exception was the Map which is awful in either mode. It uses a vertically layered approach which makes navigation impossible in towns and multi-storey buildings and it sorely needs the ability to place custom markers.

8. While the game's faithfulness to the original pleased me I was also somewhat disappointed at the lack of progress in over a decade. The AI of npcs in particular is terrible. Many of them stand in one place for the whole game and parrot out fixed dialog trees. Enemies patrol endlessly in static loops. In many ways it feels like this game could have been made in 2001. Surely AI programming has progressed since then - it would go a long way to making the world feel more alive.

9. I understand the frustration voiced about the games boss fights being so out of character with the rest of the game. I found them challenging enough but I wasn't eschewing violence so I was happy enough to shoot my way through them. The final boss fight was a bit disappointing though. By that stage of the game my character was almost fully upgraded and more than a match for anything the game threw at me. I managed to complete the encounter before I realised what was going on.

Trine

2011-10-29T09:15:00.000Z

The last game from the Indie Bundle I got around to playing was Trine. This is a platformer with a twist in that you can swicth between three different characters each with different abilities in order to overcome the various challenges that the games levels throw up. This is a style of game play made famous by 1992 game called the "Lost Vikings" from a little known company called Silicon and Synapse who soon after changed their name to Blizzard entertainment.

I have very fond memories of the lost Vikings and it is generally acknowledged as a classic so it is surprising that the format has rarely been copied. "Project Eden" was one such attempt set in a 3-D world but that game failed to grab me. Trine is more faithful to Viking's platformer heritage and proved good enough to keep my interest to the end.

The good bits:
1. The graphics are drop dead gorgeous. The loving attention to detail really makes the game a joy to behold.
2. Controls are tight and responsive.I tried both keyboard and game pad and both work well.
3. The three characters have well selected varying abilities: A melee fighter with a shield, A ranged archer and a Wizard who can manipulate objects.

The bad bits:
1. No mid level save (this seems to be an inherent problem with Frozen Byte's games. I think I read somewhere that it is a limitation of whatever platform they use to develop the games.
2. In my opinion the game doesn't make enough use of the character's special abilities. The melee fighter in particular is almost redundant.
3. As a consequence of 2 the game, in my opinion, relies too much on precision jumping and not enough on puzzle solving. At times this gets tedious to the point of boredom.

Lady Killers

2011-10-27T07:49:00.000Z

"Did you know" my wife asked out of the blue "that the average gamer is a 43 year old woman?"

Somewhat surprised at my lovely lady's new found knowledge I mumbled "Um... are you sure they aren't talking about Facebook games"

"Perhaps. I read it in the newspaper. Also did you know that there are four kinds of gamers: achievers, socialisers, killers and something else. I am an achiever".

She is too. My wife holds every achievement possible in Plants versus Zombies and now she is in the process of repeating the feat with Bejewelled 3.

I am delighted that the mainstream media has not forgotten Richard Bartle's seminal piece of gaming research although I am somewhat surprised to see it being used in relation to Facebook games. Modern them park mmorpgs have diverged very far from the open world MUDs that spawned Bartle's research and sometimes it feels like his work has been forgotten.

By the way I would watch out for that 43 year old lady gamer. She gets up to some pretty dubious stuff if Google is to be believed: http://www.google.com/search?q=43+year+old+woman

Approaches to difficulty in puzzle games (Panda free zone)

2011-10-22T11:51:00.000Z

Despite the name of this blog I am not really a puzzle aficionado but I do enjoy the occasional intellectual challenge. I have been playing SpaceChem on my PC for a couple of weeks now and I would certainly classify it as a challenging puzzle. On my phone I have a tile shifting game called Red Stone which looks simple but is also in fact extremely challenging.

Although both these games have a high level of difficulty the consequence of that difficulty is very different. On the more challenging levels of Red Stone I quickly run out of moves and I have spent literally hours shuffling tiles around in circles without making any progress towards a solution. SpaceChem however is a building game at heart and regardless of how unreachable a solution appears at first it is always possible to make incremental progress towards the final goal. Every failed attempt teaches you something that brings you closer to a solution.

In Red Stone I am well and truly stuck on the ninth level and I have actually become weary of starting the game knowing that it will just result in more frustration. In SpaceChem however it isn't really possible to get stuck so I can make some incremental progress every time I play. Red Stone makes me feel bad about myself while SpaceChem makes me feel good about myself.

Needless to say I much prefer SpaceChem to Red Stone.

Turbine predicts the day of my death.

2011-10-20T07:51:00.000Z

Logging in to check my Lotro account (in response to yet another security breach warning) I was dismayed to see a big red "Pending Cancellation" notice bannered across my subscription details.

Squinting down through the fine print I saw that yes indeed my LIFETIME membership was due to expire on June 1 2061.

Think about it.

I will be 97. Not a bad age but with medical advances and such I was hoping to hit the hundred. Ah well.

Memoir 44 - Now it really is free to play

2011-10-19T21:35:00.000Z

I noticed a subtle change when I logged in to Memoir 44 last night. The first two scenarios are now completely free. This brings the game more into line with other free to play games where you can play a cut down version of the game for free forever but have to pay to get the full flavour. The first two scenarios are going to hold anyone's attention for very long but at least they are there.

SpaceChem: Look why I made:

2011-10-13T23:04:00.000Z

Look what happened on my very first attempt at Challenge Going Green:

This is the first time I have ever gotten to the left hand edge of the of the cycles chart so I am pleased with myself. Mind you it was a pretty straightforward challenge - no fancy insights involved just applied lessons learned from previous levels.

A different type of free to play: Memoir:44

2011-10-13T19:34:00.000Z

Logging into Steam yesterday I spied an advertisement for a free to play game called Memoir:44. I hadn't heard about this one before so I decided to check it out. To be honest I haven't got beyond the tutorial yet but I have already discovered quite few things that are different from other free to play games.

The first point is that the game itself is a faithful online implementation of a successful and well reviewed board game that has an enthusiastic community of both online and offline players.

The second point is that rather than the usual f2p model of letting you play a version of the game for free and then charging for an enhanced experience Days of Wonder have settled on the far more straightforward approach of simply charging you in "gold coins" for every match you play. You can buy batches of gold coins for between €0.03 to €0.04 each depending on quantity and battles cost 2 or three gold coins depending on the scenario you pick.

Battles seem to last about half an hour so that works out at around 20c per hour of entertainment which seems like very good value to me. I think this is a great system that is immune from game breaking item shops and cross subsidies among player groups. Everybody pays for exactly what they get.

I suppose the only problem really is that it is hard to justify the free to play label. They do give you fifty coins for free which should see you through your first ten hours of play (about twenty games) but to be honest this is probably the purest example of a pay to play game I know. It is very well explained on the Steam page but the games chat box is still full of Steam visitors complaining that "Hey this game is bogus because it isn't free".

I do hope that this doesn't harm the game by generating bad publicity because it seems to be a good game with an enthusiastic community and a very fair business model.

A Guilty Confession about Leisure Suit Larry

2011-10-11T12:21:00.000Z

Leisure suit Larry is being re-released. I owe a lot to that game. Nearly a quarter of a century ago it was the first "real" PC game that I ever finished and I was blown away by how much more sophisticated this was that the blocky Space Invaders and Pong games I remembered from arcades. (Of course no one could ever accuse Larry's humour of being sophisticated but the gameplay was head and shoulders above anything I had ever seen). That one game led me to Lucas Arts Adventures and from then to Doom and from then to the enduring gaming hobby that remains with me today.

Thats not the confession.

The thing is I didn't own a PC at that stage (late 1980's) few people did. Instead I pulled an all nighter in work to play a bootlegged copy someone had smuggled in to the office. I finished it in the small hours of the morning and I can still remember the feeling of euphoria. I knew this was the start of something big and important.

That isn't the confession though. This is:

Unfortunately the PC I played the game on never worked properly again and some important work files were lost. I never told my boss or my colleagues about my night time exploits particularly after we heard a rumour that certain copies of Leisure Suit Larry had a nasty worm that damaged PCs.

SpaceChem: Are you a component miser or speed merchant.

2011-10-10T16:21:00.000Z

At the end of every level in SpaceChem the game taunts you with histograms showing how well your design fares against the rest of the community. Having just arrived at an inspired solution to a tricky problem it is always somewhat sobering to realise that your "brilliant" solution is solidly stuck in the Average section of the graphs. Some herculean corner cutting efforts later later and you can maybe shift your design to the lower slopes of the main sequence but there are always better solutions to the left of yours and indeed there is often a whole new peak far to the left (left being fewer cycles or fewer components). No amount of tweaking will shift your creation to this new lower peak so clearly an entirely new and better concept is required.

Anyway having endured this process multiple times I am firmly convinced that a given solution can be fast or it can be thrifty but it is very difficult to be fast and thrifty at the same time. Speed seems a more laudable goal to me than miserliness so I am firmly in the speed merchant camp (or would like to be). I will happily throw parts at a solution with joyful abandon in the hope of shaving off a few extra cycles.

The bundle keeps on giving: SpaceChem

2011-10-09T15:22:00.000Z

My excursion into the world of "pay what you want" is turning out to be far more rewarding that I expected. The lynchpin game of the bundle is the very popular Frozen Synapse and although I was keen to see it for myself I didn't expect it to hold my attention for long. It's too early for me to give a definitive verdict but after playing a few levels of the single player campaign it hasn't grabbed me yet. I do see the quality of the game and I suspect that if I was more into multi-player I would get more out of it.

What I didn't expect was how much entertainment I would get out of the "extras". I really enjoyed Shadowgrounds and its sequel Shadowgrounds Survivor, two old school top down shooters. I should warn you that the original Shadowgrounds has extremely long levels (up to two hours) with no checkpoints. A respawn system gives you some relief if you die half way through a level but if you quit it is back to the start of the level so forget about playing this game in small increments. The sequel "Survivor" has mercifully shorter levels and better game-play balance but the story and overall game design are less ambitious. Both games are highly recommended.

Just when I was about to conclude that I had gotten my money's worth from the Shadowgrounds games I got an email telling me that the bundle had been expanded to include "SpaceChem" and now I can play that too. SpaceChem is a complicated looking puzzle game so I didn't expect much from it but since downloading it last night it has grabbed my attention. It is complicated and it is challenging but arranging the assorted building blocks in order to produce the right combination of outputs is extremely addictive. After each level the game shows your score against a histogram of other players and I find myself compelled to go back in and tweak my designs to try and shave off a few extra cycles or a few extra components. This is a game about building complicated machines to solve puzzles and about being proud of what you built. SpaceChem opts for the "Throw you in the deep end" method of tutorial leaving players to figure most stuff out by trial and error as they work through the challenging levels. In a world where many games go for extreme hand holding this is actually refreshing and there is a great sense of ownership and pride when you do figure stuff out. There is an ever present worry though that I will eventually hit a puzzle I just can't figure out by myself.

Farewell Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T07:56:00.003Z

I have never owned an Apple product and yet Steve Jobs has changed the world I live in at least four times.

Jobs and Wozniak's Apple II made the computer personal and in doing so it made the information technology revolution something that everyone of us could share in. Prior to the Apple II only geeks and hobbyists with their own soldering irons need apply.

Later the original Macintosh transformed our expectations of how humans should interact with these strange new thinking machines. It matters little that the the Mac never competed with the more generic PC in terms of sales. It also matters little that few of the ideas in the mac were entirely new. It was Jobs and the Macintosh that showed all of us what was possible.

In more recent times the Ipod and Itunes revolutionised the business of not just music but creative content generally. Again it matter little that the ideas were not particularly new. This time Apple's vision of a product with superior design that was simply better for humans to use than any of its competitors worked and
the I- brand became a tsunami that carried the new paradigm of digital media along with it.

To my mind the Iphone is probably Jobs most important contribution of all. This disruptive product has made portable computing and constant inter-connectivity a reality for millions. In so far as human intelligence can be measured not just by what is in a man's head but more by what information can he access at a moments notice then you could say that the Iphone and similar portable computing devices represent the next step in human evolution. I don't include the Ipad yet in my list of products that changed the world because it is too early yet to gauge its full impact and because I remain to be convinced that the IPad is more than just a big Iphone.

Of course there is a reason why I have never owned any Apple products. Their closed architecture, high price business model never appealed to me. In recent times Apple's vision has become even more controlling and to my mind stifling. Apple's insistence that the only software you put on their product must come from Apple's own retail channel is not just stifling, I believe it is downright dangerous. Mobile computing is too important and too transformative a technology for for one company to be allowed so much control over it.

Regardless of my misgivings about Apple's business model I salute the extraordinary man who has made such an impact on our world and who sadly passed away yesterday at only 56 years of age.

Steve Jobs RIP

EDIT: I didn't even mention Jobs inspirational support of Pixar. I guess I am not a film buff but judging from other comments around the web Jobs Pixar work was as important as his computer stuff.

News story from a bygone age

2011-10-05T19:12:00.000Z

This story of a rural pensioner (apparently) running an unlicensed pub in the remote mountains of Donegal made me chuckle. It is like a tale from a bygone age.

The garda (policeman) who visited the premises consumed approximately FIVE alcoholic drinks before deciding the venue needed to be shut down. Definitely going above and beyond the call of duty there.

The pensioner is appealing the case proclaiming that:
"I have sold no beer to nobody"

Humble Bundlers are even slicker than I thought

2011-10-03T10:33:00.000Z

A couple of posts back I mentioned that I was hugely impressed by the design of the Humble Bundle website. Well it turns out I didn't know half the story. Azuriel decided to test the system by making an offer of $0.01 and was good enough to post the results on his blog "In an Age". You should go and read it. Hats of to the Bundler's for a really really great piece of website design.

Torchlight versus Shadowgrounds: Fake versus Real Progression.

2011-10-02T10:32:00.000Z

The first game from the latest humble bundle that I tried out is Shadowgrounds Survivor.

There are a lot of similarities between Survivor and Torchlight, a game I finished just a couple of weeks ago. Both games are essentially linear crawls through dungeons infested with assorted creepy crawlies. Both games use third person perspective and have very simple click to interact controls. Both games have level up mechanics and rpg elements. Of course Torchlight has a fantasy setting while Shadowgrounds has a Sci Fi setting but that isn't the real difference between the games.

The first real difference is that Torchlight has "strong" level up mechanics where your character's strength and abilities get increased many fold as they gain levels while Survivor has weak leveling up with characters getting a few new weapons and some useful skills but never doubling in power or strength.

Bizarrely it is Torchlight that feels to me like the more repetitive game. Torchlight's progressions feels like fake progression. The monsters you face all get stronger as you progress through the game but since your character level increases proportionately the difficulty level of the game remains flat. The game does have an illusion of player choice in the skills you choose to equip but in reality character level is everything. In Survivor the enemies you face don't level but you do face larger groups and tougher varieties as you progress. Since your character doesn't get significantly stronger the only way to survive the tougher encounters is get better at the game. Learning to make best use of the small upgrades that leveling provides is one of the key survival skills. This leads to the paradoxical situation that the small upgrades in Survivor have a much bigger impact on gameplay than the big level increases in Torchlight.

Another key difference is that Torchlight is a much longer game that uses randomly generated maps for almost all the levels. Shadowgrounds is shorter but its hand crafted level maps are much more enjoyable to play to my mind.

It is almost as if in Torchlight the gameplay is entirely secondary to the supposed thrill of "leveling up". This point is really rubbed in when you overcome the final boss and instead of fanfare and closing credits you are immediately pointed to another pointless randomly generated dungeon where you can keep leveling up, presumably forever.

So I far prefer Shadowgrounds Survivor to Torchlight. Yet Torchlight received better reviews averaging 83 on Metacritic as opposed to 79 for Survivor . Torchlight has also been far more successful commercially and the forthcoming sequel is eagerly awaited by many fans. So much it seems for my taste in gaming.

In which I am humbled by the bundle

2011-09-29T16:14:00.000Z

I have previously been very dismissive of "pay what you like" offers. My limited understanding of economic theory convinced me that there was no rational justification for customers to pay more than the bare minimum. I couldn't accept that this was a viable business model and I was sure that these offers were no more than a passing fad.

Well, maybe I was wrong. The humble indie bundles continue to thrive generating substantial revenue for indie developers and a chunk of money for worthy charities to boot. I got an opportunity to experience a bundle first hand last night when I bought the latest humble offering the Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle.

I was most impressed with how slick the process is. A single web page quickly lets you know what is on offer and lets you place an order. Choosing the price you pay is trivial and you can even choose how your money is allocated using sliders. This sounds like it could be complicated but it is absolutely not. This is the slickest easiest online checkout I have sever seen. This is a masterclass in encouraging the impulse purchase. There is even live chat support - all available from that same page.

The order delivery is equally slick. There is no logging into accounts and navigating through multiple screens to find your digital goods. Immediately after ordering you get a link to a personalised web page that has all of your games available for download. That same page even offers codes for installing your games under Steam, Impulse and several other gaming platforms.

One single web page for presales and order processing. One single page for order delivery. This is not a passing fad. This is the cutting edge of digital retailing.

I am perhaps most surprised at the price I chose to pay. I could have gotten Frozen Synapse for 1c but paying more than the current average ($4.50 or so) would get me several other games. My rational mind screamed $4.51 but in the end I paid $15. I still amn't entirely sure why. Guilt? The slickly set up order page defaulted to a price of $25 which was I believe the original price of Frozen Synapse. Frozen Synapse is a game I have heard a lot about and I am keen to try it but I know that I probably won't play it for very long. I was never going to buy it at $25. I probably wouldn't have bought it for $15 in a Steam sale but here I was paying $15 for it in a bundle with a bunch of other games that I have never heard of. The donation to charity aspect is nice but I can't say that influenced my decision. Some strange combination of rationality (I'm not paying $25) and irrationality (I'm not going to be a meanie and pay $5) combined for me to settle on a price of $15.

I still don't understand how all this works but I have to accept that it does. Is this a new business model that overturns the naive assumption of my undergraduate economics textbooks or is this just a natural outcome of traditional economic theory in a business where manufacture and distribution cost have become almost zero? I don't know.

In which nothing much is said for no reason other than it is Monday morning.

2011-09-26T11:00:00.000Z

I have noticed that bloggers reluctance to write posts over the weekend tends to spill over to Monday morning. Therefore this is probably as good a time as any for me to break my blog silence of over two weeks. I haven't got much say but hopefully I can get away with it given the lack of blogosphere competition this morning.

Busy life at the moment has sapped much of my time and enthusiasm for gaming. I did spend quite a few hours finishing the main Torchlight campaign as an alchemist. Torchlight is a superb example of its type but games of that type normally quickly drive me to utter boredom with their progress quest like repetition. It is a measure of just how busy I have been in the real world that I stuck with it long enough to finish the campaign.

I have been making very slow progress through Deus Ex Human revolution. I feel it is a game that deserves full attention in order to get the most out of it. The game world is full of detail and the variety of augmentation offers many ways of exploring it. You could just blast through the game as a killer warrior or you could (almost) just sneak your way through but I feel that taking either extreme misses a lot of the variety of the game. I am actually trying to role play a character who is basically humane but who is passionate enough to use violence when the situation warrants it. For example when I was asked to infiltrate the police station I used stealth to avoid casualties but when a later mission confronted me with the special forces who murdered my colleagues and ex girlfriend the gloves came off. Thinking about "what would my character choose" rather than "what gives me the best game play advantage" is a very rewarding way to play the game but it does take concentration and I haven't been able to give much of that to gaming recently.

I have also found some time to install and play Atomic City Adventures from Windstorm studios. This is a open world driving/shooting game a bit like Grand Theft Auto meets Crimson skies. There is a lot to admire in the game, not least the wonderful 1930's meets the atomic age setting but it does have flaws. The wooden driving controls take some getting used to and this is not helped by the fact that your hoverbike regularly gets stuck in the scenery. Nevertheless the game is very enjoyable and will easily entertain you for a few hours.

What happens if people stop buying $60 games

2011-09-08T11:19:00.000Z

I am cheating a bit here because the bulk of this post is a copy of a comment I left on Andrew Anderson's blog Systematic Babble. Andrew's post reflects a growing trend in gaming which suggests that the days of the $60+ game could be numbered.

Like Andrew I am generally not willing to spend $60 on a game and nowadays there is so much gaming entertainment to be had for so much less that that price point has become almost silly. However I must admit to a certain hypocrisy here. Even though am miserly in my spending I still really enjoy AAA games with Hollywood level budgets. I would hate to see a future in which the demise of the $60 game meant that only free to play and Iphone games survived. Anyway here are my thoughts as expressed in that comment:

I agree that the $60 price point is rapidly becoming unsustainable but I don’t think my gaming hunger can ever be fully sated by $1 Iphone games.I still want to play AAA games with cinematic production values. As an adult with limited time available I am very comfortable with the trend towards short but intense single player campaigns. I am not however prepared to pay $60 for less than 10 hours of gaming.

As a PC gamer my current compromise is to wait a few months and buy the AAA game in an online sale. Reviewing my game purchases for last year my average spend per game was less than €10 and I still got to play all the games I wanted albeit a little bit behind the crowd. To be honest it feels a bit like cheating to get so many great games for so little money and I don’t know if this situation is sustainable long term. Game developers probably need those $60 dollar sales to pay the massive costs of developing AAA games.

I am no futurologist but here are some possible scenarios following a collapse of the $60 game market:

1. AAA developers stick with their current strategy of $60 up front and then charge for lots of expensive DLC. Only a few big franchises manage to sustain this price level and even they start hemorrhaging sales once the public tires of them. A video games market crash not seen since the 1980′s ensues.

or

2. AAA game developers move to a free to pay plus micro transaction model to try and bolster revenues. This does generate a lot of extra revenue for game developers but has negative impacts on game design as titles are modified to coerce users into spending as much money as possible in the item shop.

or

3. AAA game developers reduce their prices substantially and the market responds positively greatly increasing sales. The increase in sales more than offsets the reduction in unit price and a new boom in game development ensues.

or

???

New Survey: The Average Age of Gamers is 106!

2011-09-06T12:19:00.000Z

Thank you to a recent tweet from Syp for reminding me of one of the most ridiculous things on the internet that seems to hit gamers more often than others. I am talking about the ludicrous age verification checks that ask you to tick the year you were born in order to "prove" you are old enough to view content.

The whole concept is ludicrous because it is trivially easy for a minor to lie about their age in order to see the prohibited content. In fact given that these almost universally employ roll down lists it is far easier just to scroll wildly towards 1900 than it is to pick out your exact date of birth. I suspect that most people do just that which is why I imagine a survey of the average age of gamers picked up from such tools would indicate that we are all well into our dotage.

Of course randomly scrolling down the dates has its own hazards too. On a couple of occasions I have inadvertently hit the wrong date and was told: "Sorry you are too young to view this content". This is a complete nuisance because the incorrect age seems to get stored in a cookie leaving you locked out of the content until you can figure out how to reset it.

I guess there is some spurious legal justification for these ridiculous checks but yet I cannot imagine any court in any country accepting the "evidence" produced by one of these.

MW2 single player versus MW1

2011-09-05T08:32:00.000Z

Having played and enjoyed the single player campaign of Modern Warfare 2 over the weekend I am finally ready to share my thoughts of how it compares to it's predecessor only twenty two months too late!

I realise that these games are most famous for multiplayer but single player is still important both because many players never get beyond a brief flirtation with multi and because the single player game will live on long after Activision turn off the online servers.

Storyline: I was very surprised to find that MW2 has a strong storyline that is both ambitious and audacious. It is certainly more coherent than the thread which ties together MW1's series of missions.

Pacing: The action has cranked up a bit from MW1 to MW2 and the game moves along at a faster pace. Indeed the pacing of the game is pretty much flawless. This is a game that is hard to put down. There are no boring filler patches and there are no unfair difficulty traps. The checkpoint timings are so good as to be virtually un noticeable.

Difficulty: MW2 is definitely an easier game than 1 but this is because there are no unfair difficulty traps in 2 while there were several in 1.

Missions: MW2 has come out on top so far but finally we have an area where it's predecessor triumphs. Modern Warfare 1 has many moments of sublime brilliance and some of the missions rank up there as all time greatest video game experiences. Missions like "All Ghillied up", "One shot one kill" and "Death From above" remain on in the memory and I still go back and replay them regularly. While MW2 has better over all pacing and coherence there really aren't any standout moments. There wasn't a single mission that gave me an instant urge to replay it. Indeed only a day after finishing the campaign I struggle to remember an individual mission at all.

Overall: It is curious that despite the single player campaign of MW2 winning out over its predecessor in many areas I have absolutely no doubt that MW1 is the better and more important game. Modern Warfare 2 is more polished over all and exhibits significant competence but Call of Duty 4 had moment of standout brilliance.

MW2 Boycott Finally Ends

2011-09-03T08:03:00.001Z

Surely the most ignominious moment for PC Gaming in recent years was when so many members of the loudly protesting Steam Modern Warfare 2 boycott group were exposed to be actually playing the game.

Well I guess I can lay claim to some small bit of personal pride that I did not cave in and maintained my own personal boycott of the game. Of course this was somewhat easier for me because my boycott wasn't based on a sense of entitlement as to what Activision should or shouldn't put into their games. For me the big issue has always been the price of the game. The €60 initial purchase price was more than the game was worth to me.There was just too much other gaming entertainment available to me for less money to make that a worthwhile purchase.

Given that the game racked up more than a billion dollars in sales it it perhaps no surprise that MW2 maintained it high price point far longer than most other games. The price did fall but only slowly and while I kept an eye out for it in various sales it always seemed to remain just outside the value sweet spot until yesterday.When I saw the game on offer for €10.44 on Impulse I realised though that my comfort zone had been reached and I could finally end my long and lonely boycott.

Buying Game Codes on the Grey Market

2011-09-01T11:49:00.000Z

My exasperation at regional pricing differences for Deus Ex Human Revolution led me to stumble across a wide range of "grey market" resellers who Sell activation codes for Steam games at substantial discount over US /European prices. Intrigued I spent some time researching these before concluding that it would be better to stay away from them but just in case it could be useful to others I will summarise my opinions on the subject here:

1. There are a wide number of websites selling cheap Steam codes. Some of these sites seem to be very dodgy, some of them seem to be run as legitmate businesses.

2. The business model is to buy games cheaply in bulk in a low cost market (Eastern Europe or perhaps Asia) and then resell the code to customers in higher priced markets (America / Australia / Western Europe) at a profit.

3. In many cases the code is taken from a boxed retail copy and the supplier may offer a scan of the box. I am not sure what extra protection this provides.

4. It works best for games that do not have a region lock because then you can just enter the Sinagporean or Russian code into Steam youself and it works. If a game has a region lock the reseller may propose alternate routes involving Russian VPNs or even sending your Steam login details to the reseller in order to fool Steam into thinking you are in Russia / Singapore. This sounds foolish to me and is probably illegal.

4. Some of the better known resellers seem to have good customer service with support forums and representatives who respond to customer issues.

5. Some of the resellers accept third party payment services (for example paypal) which gives some security against your credit card details being sent to a dodgy website.

6. In my opnion (and I am not a lawyer) there is nothing illegal about buying a game code from Singapore or from Russia. Trying to spoof Steam into thinking your are in a different country using VPNs etc may well be illegal. Regardless of the legality however buying a code from an unauthorised reseller does go against Steam's terms of service and Steam are under no obligation to honour that code. If the code doesn't work then Steam will not help you and you are at the mercy of the reseller. From browsing forums some of the resellers appear to be good at supportng their customers in these cases and some don't

7. Even if the code works initially Steam can revoke it at any time perhaps after you have been playing for a few weeks. Steam have most notably done this for the Orange Box and also for Modern Warfare 2. I don't know how they decide which codes are unauthorised but it is probably a regional thing. They only seem to bother cracking down in the case of a few high profile games. I wouldn't be surprised if they crack down on Deus Ex HR next because the market seems to be flooded with cheap Russian codes for the game.

8. All of the normal hazards about dealing with little known websites in unknown places apply: These include the possiblity of fraud, identity theft or even that you will be in receipt of stolen goods. The better known resellers seem legit but that is just my opinion.

My overall conclusion:
Although I detest regional pricing and normally support the idea of grey markets on balance in this case I think the risks outweigh the benefit:

Benefit:
-Can get a Steam game at a significant discount (perhaps as little as half price)

Risks:
- Possibillty of dealing with dodgy websites: fraud, identitiy theft, stolen goods.
- Possibility of game not working or being revoked at any time by Steam.

Some further reading on the issue:
Laws of play has a good analysis with a legal slant but they are very anti-grey market. Somehow I find myself unable to share their sympathy for poor Activision who spent $50M developing a game and $200M advertising it.

More details on Steam revoking MW2 keys and previously Orange Box keys

Adam Jensen Steals Turbines Money

2011-08-30T09:03:00.001Z

Normally I am a miser when it comes to game purchases. My threshold of pain is about €10 which pretty much rules out new releases. Nevertheless I had made up my mind to pre-purchase the Isegard expansion for Lotro despite having sufficient Turbine points accumulated that I can probably buy it from the TP store after release. Having bought my lifetime sub at the lowest ever price of £75 some years ago I feel it is probably time I gave them some extra cash.

Unfortunately reconciling myself to spending more than I need to on a game has weakened my resolve and I now find myself seriously eyeing Deus Ex Human Revolution (currently €36 from Get games). I know I will be able to get it much cheaper in a few months time but once in a while it would be nice to be able to play a game while everyone else is still talking about it.

If I do splurge on Deus Ex that exhausts my budget and Turbine will have to wait for new cash from me.

Decisions, Decisions.

EDIT: When I went tot purchase Deus Ex I found that I could get it from €10 cheaper from the same site if I lived in the USA or the UK. This has annoyed me sufficiently that I have put off my purchase for the moment.

Napoleon: That's Egypt done, can I be Emperor now please?

2011-08-29T12:41:00.000Z

Following a very rocky start the remainder of the Napoleon Total War Egypt campaign was something of an anticlimax. I faced no more rebellions and by garrisoning my conquests with a couple of units of militia I found I could keep them subdued if not entirely happy. Napoleon's sojourn in the South of Egypt was time consuming but worth it in the end because one Southern Egypt was pacified neither the Bedouin's nor the Mamelukes managed to raise a significant force again. Most surprisingly the time limit was more generous than expected and by January 98 Napoleon's grande armee had worked its way from Awlad in the South West corner all the way to Tyre and was only a few turns from taking Damascus itself with a whole year to do it in. The Ottoman's proved a tougher enemy than the Mamelukes with several large combined forces well supported with artillery. By this stage though I had built the Grand Armee up to a full stack of experienced troops and the Ottoman's never had a chance. The only point of note is that after sitting quietly for most of the game the Ottomans made multiple sorties to try and recapture towns just as I approached Damascus and the end of the scenario. I am pretty sure this was scripted as they went for victory condition towns but it was too little too late.

French artillery again warrants a special mention. I never bothered upgrading Napoleon's two units 6-lber cannon even though I was often faced with larger numbers of heavier pieces from my Ottoman adversaries. What the six pounders lacked in firepower and distance was more than compensated by their high accuracy. With veterancy bonuses I had 88% accuracy with the 6-lbers as opposed to the miserable 37% accuracy of the Ottoman's big 18-lbers. I am sure a human opponent could exploit the limited range of the 6-lbers to punish me but it never seemed to occur to the AI.

The hardest objective in the scenario was the optional one of pushing the British from Cyprus. I put this off for most of the game because I was afraid of Nelson's massive fleet but in the end I was able to sneak and army past him using a decoy. The battle against the redcoats on the island itself was easily the most challenging of the game.

Total War: When do you use autoresolve?

2011-08-27T08:58:00.000Z

For me the battles are the highlight of any Total War game with the campaign map being a secondary albeit also enjoyable part of the game. For this reason when I started out I fought every single battle manually. This attitude has changed over time and I now use auto resolve for a signifcant number of battles.

At first it was simply a matter of saving time. On some turns you can have five or six separate battles to fight, many of which are already foregone conclusions because one side (hopefully mine) has an overwhelming superiority. There is nothing particularly edifying about crushing 100 enemy troops with 1000 of yours and yet you can spent quite a long time chasing them around the map to do it. A few experiments convinced me that if one side has an overwhelming advantage (as shown by the red-green relative strength bar) then the random number generator can generally be relied upon to give a reasonable result. Sure you can experience slightly heavier losses than if you fought the battle yourself but on the other hand you are spared the friendly fire incidents that can so easily happen when you have a momentary lapse of attention directing a large number of troops.

For some time then my rule changed from "fight every battle" to "auto resolve the push overs". If numbers were similar and in particular if I was at a disadvantage I still fought manually on the battle map. I'm no military genius but I can certainly do better than the AI when numbers are more or less equal. There have been exceptions to this rule such as when I used auto resolve to play out the last few turns of a Rome campaign but these were specific unusual circumstances rather than a general change in policy.

Recently however I have started using auto-resolve in a slightly more creative way. I have noticed that while I generally do better fighting manually there are some battles where the random number generator gives better results. Often this is due to the mix of unit types. For example if my force contains only light infantry and I am facing a force of cavalry then I know from experience that it is very hard to avoid a massacre. The auto resolve tends to more kind in these circumstances, perhaps reducing the size of the loss or even avoiding it altogether. I don't do this all the time because it does feel a bit like cheating but it is a handy trick to have up the sleeve none the less.

Napoleon: Egypt Campaign Fun in the Sun

2011-08-26T12:09:00.000Z

Napoleon had a hard time in Egypt and the advisor at the start of Total War's Egypt campaign leaves you under no doubt illusion that you will too. You have two and a half years years to drag your armies from a toehold in North West Egypt all the way over to Damascus in Syria. Everyone is out to stop you including the British, the Mamelukes, the Bedouins and the Ottomans. These guys are so pissed off with Napoleon that the diplomacy option is greyed out - you won't be able to bribe your way out of this.

Things start out calmly enough. You start with three generals, two armies and a foothold in Alexandria. The advisor helpfully suggests that you take Cairo to the South to deal a blow to the Mamelukes and while you are at it why don't you send a few ships to Cyprus to end the British threat too. The Cyprus mission seems a bit premature because the British already have a massive Mediterranean fleet and I don't have so much as a leaky bathtub. Cairo seems more reasonable so I dispatch my largest force under Napoleon to take it Everything goes well for a few short months. Cairo falls to Napoleon and he then leads his army South to root out further Mameluke strongholds while my second army mops up a few weakly defended regions to the West.

So far so good but then everything goes horribly wrong. Cairo erupts into rebellion and a full stack of rebels destroys my defending forces. The Mamelukes make aggressive sorties from South and from the West. The Bedouins send a large force of camel troops northward to teach me a lesson and a massive British fleet turns up on the doorstep of my capital to drop off an army. As if all that weren't enough the workers in many of my captured towns decide to show their displeasure at my occupation by going on strike and rioting. This strangles my economy to the point where I cannot afford to recruit new troops. Arghhhhhhh.

I almost gave up and started over at that point thinking that I must have done something radically wrong. On reflection though I decided that for things to go so wrong so quickly some of these events must have been scripted. I decided to tough it out.

Napoleon's Grande Armee was too far to the South to deal with the main threats so I let him continue his march Southwards to root out Mameluke and Bedouin strongholds. That left my other two generals and a handful of troops to root out the Rebels, the Bedouin and the British in that order as best they could. There were a few touch and go battles but thanks some hastily recruited fusiliers and a lone unit of canon that Napoleon had left behind I managed to survive the immediate threats in the North. Although firearms have altered the face of warfare since Rome days one thing that hasn't changed is that you still need a backbone of solid infantry units to hold a formation and fusiliers provide this. The cannon serves a dual purpose. With round shot its great range allows me to control the battlefield sometimes tempting an enemy to come into closer range, sometimes frightening them from the field altogether. At short range switching to canister shot will quickly rout large numbers of enemy troops with a "whiff of grape".

The widespread unrest in my settlements caused own problems. With the reduced town management features of Empire/Napoleon games there are really only two steps you can take to quickly quell unrest: Stuff the garrison with militia or exempt the region entirely from taxes. Both of these steps incur significant financial costs and further contributed to my ongoing penury.

Is now Late December 1798 and after several months of desperate fighting some semblance of stability has finally been restored to the Western side of the map. Napoleon has been busy mopping up Mameluke and Bedouin strongholds which should reduce the likelihood of further attacks from these factions. The immediate threats in the North have been eliminated and I can start to think about Eastward expansion again. Tax break carrot and militia stick tactics have tamed the unruly provinces and I am finally getting a small surplus of income over expenditure to invest in expansion.

All I need now is a bit of time: time to replenish my armies sorely depleted from constant battles and gruelling desert marches, time to establish an economy to pay for further expansion and time to build up a Navy to stand up to the British. Unfortunately time is the one thing I haven't got. The game ends in barely two years and Napoleon's sorely depleted Grand Armee is sweltering in a one camel desert hovel at the far Northwest corner of the map just about as far as he could possibly be from the end game goal of Damascus.

Napoleon Total War: Italian Campaign

2011-08-24T09:14:00.002Z

In order to try and squeeze a bit of gaming into this fairly busy period I finally got around to installing Napoleon Total War and playing one of the campaigns.

Although it is very similar to Empire in period and gameplay I find the Napoleonic setting and atmosphere are more familiar to me and therefore more immersive. The Italian campaign that I played is really an extension of the tutorial and still has limited units and abilities. Nevertheless it is still quite challenging and the campaign kept me entertained for several hours.

Unfortunately I somehow overlooked the tight timescale allotted and set out to play a marathon when I should have been aiming for a sprint. Playing carefully and cautiously I reinforced all my conquests as Napoleon marched Eastward to displace the Austrians. I guess I should have been suspicious that my "Grande Armee" was so much bigger than anything the opposition could pit against me but I thought I was being very clever biding my time and trying to bribe Austria's friends and allies away before going in for the kill.

I got quite a surprise then when the game alerted me to the fact that I had only 8 turns left to complete the final objective and capture Klangenfurt on the far right had side of the map. At that stage my Grande Armee could not even reach Klangefurt in eight turns never mind capture the town so it looked like the campaign was already lost. In desperation I noticed that if Napoleon ditched his slow moving artillery the remaining cavalry and footsoldiers might just be able to travel the distance in 8 turns.

One of the helpful hints that pops up at loading screen assures us that "cannons win battles" so going against the Austrian strongholds without artillery sounds suicidal. Nevertheless I knew from experience that the campaign AI is not always the smartest so I reckoned that I could still win battles against cannon equipped armies by playing carefully. Unfortunately playing carefully often means playing slowly (for example waiting to be attacked rather than attacking) and it wasn't clear that this approach could get me to Klangefurt in time. I decided to do an experiment, racing my army towards the goal auto-resolving any battles that arose to see how far I might be able to get within the timescale.

Sure enough my route was blocked by several Austrian armies but auto-resolve was kind to me and by pressing auto-resolve / end turn in quick succession I was able to progress all the way to Klangenfurt arriving in late December 1797, the very last turn of the game. At this stage my depleted troops were severely outnumbered and outgunned by the defending army but with nothing to lose I attacked and pressed auto resolve one more time. Surprisingly my luck held. Napoleon won the battle and I was sent into the "Victory" cut scene.

I must admit to finding this a very unsatisfactory victory as the most important battles of the game were decided in a matter of seconds by a roll of the dice. The trouble is I am not sure I want to go back and fight those final battles manually. After all Napoleon was a master of artillery and without it there is no guarantee I would have the same level of success as the random number generator.

I find myself at a dilemma that has cropped up for me before in Total War campaigns with a discrepancy between the things I need to do to win and the things I enjoy doing in the game. I guess that makes me a scrub according to Sirlin's famous analysis. Does Sirlin's "Play to Win" philosophy make sense any way in a single player game?

EDIT: Eventually I went back to a prior save game and played the final battles through manually. Happily I found that the Venetians could be bribed into giving temporary military access which cut months off Napoleon's journey time and allowed him to drag a few cannon all the way to Klangenfurt. There were a few minor skirmishes and two serious battles against full stack armies in which I was very glad of the canon.

Proof that Bethseda's games have longevity.

2011-08-22T08:08:00.000Z

More than five years ago I started this forum thread in which I asked "What are the best side quests in Oblivion?". Rather than a torrent of replies the thread attracted a trickle but that trickle hasn't stopped to the present day. More than five years later the game still has the power to enthuse players enough to want to tell someone about their experiences.

PS. Yes Mad Mike is an alter ego of mine and no my real name is not Mike.

PS Apologies for lack of recent posts. Trying to cram a holiday into a period which was already busy both personally and professionally left little enough time for gaming or blogging.

I took a walk on the dark side

2011-07-26T22:51:00.000Z

Just finished Darksiders and really enjoyed it. You play War, horseman of the Apocalypse, looking for vengeance after he has been framed for the premature roll out of Armageddon. With great post apocalyptic artwork, hordes of demons to slay, loot to collect, monstrous bosses to overcome and puzzles aplenty to solve this game has something for everyone. Some critics have accused the game of being a rip off combination of Zelda and God of War but not being a seasoned action adventure gamer it was fresh and new to me and I thought it was great (even though I did spot some borrowings from Guild Wars and also from Portal).

Third person action adventure games often don't transfer well to the PC because of the control scheme but I am pleased to report that the mouse and keyboard controls are very good in this case. Half way through the game I invested in an Xbox 360 controller so I managed to compare both control schemes. Movement is definitely easier with the controller but aiming is far better with mouse than with a controller. The net result is that combat is better with the controller but many of the puzzle parts of the game (which require precise aiming) are actually better with mouse and keyboard. It's a reasonable trade off with the controller just shading it overall.

As an action adventure noob I was worried that I might hit a difficulty brick wall that my middle aged reflexes would not be able to climb. Happily this turned out not to be the case. Playing on normal I found the going easy enough in general and the boss fights tend to depend on finding the right strategy rather than lightning reflexes. The game is made considerably easier by War's huge late game health pool and by the ability to carry multiple potions which fully replenish it. A word of warning - get in to the habit of always carrying a few spare health potions even though you don't need them for most fights. I made the mistake of tackling a nasty spider boss without any pots and with no way to go back and replenish them. I had to replay the battle over and over, losing out by seconds every time until I finally succeeded. A single health pot would have made all the difference.

Why I am watching Harry Potter films every night this week.

2011-07-16T09:08:00.000Z

A dozen or so years ago I picked up a copy of the first Harry Potter book to read on a plane. I knew it was a children's book but the J.K. Rowling phenomenon had already begun and I was keen to see what all the fuss was about. I finished the book during the transatlantic flight home, satisfied that I had seen enough of Potter to know what it was about but not feeling the need to follow up on the rest of the series.

Curious fact: Since I was travelling home from the USA the American imprint of the book I acquired had the title changed because the word "Philosopher" was deemed to be unacceptable to a US audience at that time so it was replaced with the word "Sorcerer".

Anyway that would have been the end of my flirtation with Harry Potter had not my own daughter caught a severe case of Harry Potteritus more than a decade later. It took her less than a month to read all of the novels and watch all of the films to date.

Needless to say the recent release of the final film has been a source of much anticipation and the entire family has been convinced to go along for the occasion. Which is all very well except that none of the rest of us had been keeping up with the saga. Therefore in an unprecedented display of family solidarity we have been sitting in front of the TV every night this week watching the films in sequential order. We finished number six last night so only number 7a is left tonight before watching the finale on the big screen on Sunday.

Don't ask me for an opinion on the quality of the films. With such an overdose of Harry Potter in such a short period of time it is impossible to make an objective judgement. I have a vague impression that the story is getting better as we approach the end but last Saturday and "The Philosopher's Stone" seems like such a long time away that I cannot be sure.

Dead Space 2 Finished

2011-07-14T21:15:00.000Z

Very Enjoyable Sci Fi Shooter. Very faithful sequel to the first game. Strong on storyline and action. Very gory but not offensive I thought. A few scares but most of the time the fighting is too intense to feel really creepy. Great selection of weapons and upgrade system allows customisation.. One thing I noticed for the better from the first game is that the PC controls feel a lot more responsive. The control scheme is the same so they must just have tweaked a few timings. Overall it makes the game more enjoyable to play.

My Favorite Weapons:
Early Game - Pulse Rifle / End Game - Ripper (spinning blade)

Favourite Chapter:
14 ( The penultimate chapter) - a flood of tough enemies gives no time for a breather as you try to fight your way through to the key objective. Exciting stuff.

Steam's Version of Dead Space 2 Broken By DLC

2011-07-11T14:55:00.002Z

A magic vending machine at the start of Dead Space 2 spews out the best equipment in the game for nothing.

In the original Dead Space you had to collect cash and other loot from corpses in order to exchange for increasingly better weapons and armour which gradually became available from vending machines as you progressed through the game. Dead Space 2 (bought recently in Steam Sale) appears to use the same mechanic so I was quite surprised to find that that the very first vending machine I came across seemed to be surprisingly well stocked. Not only did it contain upgraded versions of all of the game's weapons and armour but it was giving them all away for free!

My first thought was that this was some kind of tutorial mode. I have seen similar things in other games where your character starts out with all his powers but a triggered event at the end of the tutorial strips them all away until you earn them back through the course of the game. This is not the case here however. These super weapons are yours to keep for good.

A helpful post on the Steam forums sheds some light on the issue. Apparently these goodies are all extra downloadable content that for some reason comes bundled free with the Steam install. For many players including myself this is actually a game breaking flaw because it makes it difficult to experience the game as the developers intended. It is not just a matter of ignoring the obvious high end items. In the Steam version even basic items like ammunition and health packs that are supposed to be in short supply are unlocked at the beginning of the game and much more plentiful because of this.

There does not seem to be a way as of yet to remove the unwanted DLC from the Steam install but happily the respondents to that forum post figured out that you can use a Steam code to download the unmodified game directly from EA via the new Origin web store.

Apparently there is some kind of spat going on between Valve and EA at the moment but whether or not that has anything to do with this inconvenience I do not know. If however you bought the game from Steam and would prefer to play the original version without overpowered DLC then you can find instructions on how to do so in the forum post linked above. Not having used Origin before the process was a bit non intuitive for me so I detailed my step by step experience in post number 105 under the moniker of Liambp (Life is a ...geddit?).

Steam's 2011 Summer Sale Not So Sizzling. Is it the end of an era?

2011-07-06T20:33:00.000Z

Zoso blogged that unusually for him he hasn't bought anything yet in Steam's Summer sale. I noticed a similar lack of enthusiasm myself and when I asked in Twitter quite a few respondents commented that they had yet to be tempted by the bargains on offer.

From my own perspective neither the games nor the pricing has been all that tempting although I have picked up one game so far: Darksiders. Significantly none of the triple A games seem to have the sort of spectacular discounts that I remember from previous sales. In fact none of the bargains has surprised me. Everything I have seen so far has already been on sale already at some time and probably will be again so I don't feel any need to take a plunge.

Perhaps there is juicier fare to come later or perhaps we are just jaded with too many sales. On the other hand could it be that maybe the era of give away sales is drawing to a close and the time of game pricing madness is coming to an end?

Single Player Gaming Update: Crysis 2 and Medal of Honor (2010)

2011-07-06T11:48:00.000Z

I played the single player campaign of Crysis 2 a couple of weeks ago. I found the single player campaign to be short and enjoyable. This game adds the ability to upgrade your nano suit which allows for a limited amount of variety which is nice. The New York location makes for a nice change from the tropical island setting of the previous games as well. Overall this game did not seem to be be as "big" a game as the previous two episodes. That isn't just a matter of length, it seems to me that Crysis 2 has less variety of scenarios and enemies than the previous games and is more on rails. One simple example is that you can no longer just jump into any vehicle you see and use it. There are a few vehicular segments but they run pretty much on rails. Still good though, just not as good. Crytek brought out a super duper DX11 graphics patch the day after I finished the game. I installed it and replayed a couple of levels but to be honest I didn't really notice the difference. The base game looked good enough for me.

Next on to Medal of Honor 2010, EA's attempt to tackle modern warfare and dethrone Activision's Call of Duty series. This was something of a disappointment. Although the game combines all the elements in its Afghanistan setting with high tech tier 1 soldiers combating hundreds of Taliban it is far less polished than Activision's games. The "on rails" nature of the campaign is emphasised to the point of annoyance. In many segments for example the game automatically switches you to a certain weapon regardless of whether or not you were previously carrying that weapon in the inventory. You might think that such hand holding would make a game easier but amazingly it sometimes makes it harder. In one example my buddy asked me to snipe enemies on a far away hill. Luckily I had a sniper rifle in my inventory so I pulled it out and scanned the hill for targets. Unfortunately it was very dark and I couldn't see much through the limited zoom on my scope. I fired away at imaginary targets for several minutes while my npc buddy berated me for not killing any enemy. Then, more by chance than design, I took a few steps forward and hit an invisible trigger point. Abracadabra I was suddenly wielding a super duper sniper rifle with night vision long range scope. Arghhh. Similar magical trigger points occur throughout the game and combined with unskippable cut scenes they are a damned nuisance.

I found that this game also raises a few issues in relation to the asymmetrical nature of the conflict. At least in WWII games your opponents had similar levels of technology to you but In Afghanistan playing as a US soldier you are equipped with state of the art weaponry while your opponents wield 1950's era AK47s and RPGs. In order to provide some challenge the game throws hundred of them against you but you would need to be entirely devoid of a conscience to not have some qualms about destroying entire Afghan villages just to rescue one marine not to mention the limited opportunities it presents for exciting game play. To be honest from a pure game play point of view it would probably be more entertaining to play a badly equipped Taliban fighting the might of the USA but I can understand why this would not be politically acceptable in the Western market. For these reasons I am not entirely convinced it makes sense to use ongoing conflicts as a platform for games - better to stick with historical conflicts or with fictional ones.

I didn't try multiplayer on either of these games.

Is free to play really the best business model? (part 3)

2011-07-06T07:00:00.003Z

In part 1 I reflected on how successful free to play is as a business model. In part 2 I looked at a flaw in that business model that could leave it open to competition. Now I want to ask what business model might be better for online games in the long run?

The common flaw that I see in both the traditional subscription model and the free to play model is that customers are not paying for the costs they incur. In a subscription game casuals pay too much and committed players pay too little. In a free to play game casuals pay too little and committed players pay too much. To date "lock in" has tended to distort the market and prevent real price competition which would expose this inefficiency but if some smart competitor starts offering "equal status transfers " where you can carry all of your accumulated standing from one game to a new one then that lock in could quickly become irrelevant.

The best protection against this form of competition is to charge customers according to the costs they incur. For most games this probably means a combination charge consisting of a fixed standing charge and an hourly usage charge.If you have a small number of players then the fixed costs probably dominate and you may find a fixed monthly sub makes the most sense. If you have a lot of players however you may be able to dilute the fixed costs sufficiently to eliminate the standing charge and an hourly charge makes most sense.

If you do this right and match your price to the costs incurred then you shouldn't have any vulnerable segments of your customer base who are exposed to predatory capture. If someone does undercut your price then they are probably losing money.

Is free to play really the best business model? (part 2)

2011-07-05T07:00:00.025Z

The biggest flaw I can see with current realisations of the free to play model is that a company relies on relatively small set of committed players to generate almost all of their revenue while a much larger number are enjoying some of the benefits of the game while paying little or nothing.

Case in point: Tobold, a committed player, has spent €250 and has enjoyed 2,500 tank battles (if I am reading him correctly). I, a more casual player, have spent €10 and have enjoyed 400 tank battles. Of course direct comparison of tank battles is not the full story and it is entirely possible that Tobold has gotten great enjoyment out of acquiring and using high level tanks while I have wallowed in the low end. Nevertheless I can say I have enjoyed my time and I am certain that Tobold did not get 25 times more entertainment from the game than I did despite having spent 25 times as much.

So in a free to play game committed players are subsidising the more casual. Cross subsidy is nothing new. In a subscription game the casual player subsidises the hard core and surely that seems less fair. My worry about cross subsidy has nothing to do with fairness however. My worry is that it creates a vulnerability in the business model. If you are relying on a small group to pay above their share and therefore subsidise everyone else then your entire business is very exposed to a competitor who creates a new product which offers the same benefits but gives a better deal to that hard core of paying customers. That is easy to do because those customers are already paying way more than their cost so there is plenty of room for a competitor to undercut you and still make a profit.

Of course this assumes that online gaming is an efficient market and that players will make rational decisions based on price.This doesn't really happen because players get locked in to the online games they spend so much time in. A player who has spent hundreds of hours getting to the upper tiers of World of Tanks is not going to be tempted to go back and start at tier 1 of a competing game just because it will cost them a few dollars less every month.

The success of free to play however shows that customers will make decisions based on price (free is a very attractive price) and lock in is not such an unassailable bulwark as might be assumed. All a competitor has to do is to mirror the benefits you have accrued in the original game. This is already standard practise in other industries. For example I have a healthy no claims discount built up on my car insurance but I can go to a competing company and they will honour that discount in order to convince me to switch.

So here is my plan to undermine a successful free to play game:

1. Make a copy of the successful free to play game that is as close as you can legally get away with. World of Tanks is particularly vulnerable here because all of the subject matter is in the public domain.

2. Concoct a pricing model that offers substantially better value to hardcore players but still makes you a profit on those players.

3. Create a frictionless transfer mechanism that allows players of old game to carry all of their accrued benefits and experience over into your new game. Allow this at an individual and at a group level - whole guilds can transfer over at the click of a button and start up exactly where they left off.

4. Advertise heavily and use whatever dirty tricks you need to to convince committed players to try out your new game. They have nothing to lose because they won't lose their old game accounts if they come over and try your game.

5. Cream off a hefty percentage of the committed paying players and enjoy your profits while leaving the original game with an excess of non paying casual players.

Could this happen? Well if you doubt that it is possible to make a high quality copy of a game that stays faithful to the original but doesn't break the law then just browse the catalogue of Game Loft. The only novelty in my plan is the suggestion that players should be allowed transfer their status and achievements from one game to another. For this to work it also means that you need to have your end game sorted on launch day. Many games launch with a polished newbie experience but limited end game in the hope that the end game will sort itself out by the time new players get to it. I am proposing that you ignore the newbie experience and instead polish the end game because you want committed paying players to transfer straight into it.

In part three (tomorrow hopefully) I will ask if another business model would actually prove to be better in the long run than free to play.

Is free to play really the best business model? (part 1)

2011-07-04T09:18:00.003Z

World of Tanks has a very successful business model. They have an entertaining game which has attracted millions of players and a lot of those players are spending significant amounts of money on the game. A recent post from Tobold suggests that he has already spent €250 on the game and can see himself continuing to spend €100 per month in the future. Perhaps the most significant feature of all this is that those players who have spent money on the game seem very content to have done so. The most common comment is "It was worth it".

You cannot argue with success and this is clearly a successful business: Customers who are willingly spending money and who are happy with what they are getting for it. The success of World of Tanks marks another milestone for so called "free to play" games. Adding this success to previous reports of increased profits from companies who switched their games from subscription only to free to play has left very little room for those who doubt the efficacy of the free to play model. Success breeds imitation so you can bet we are going to see more free to play games, a lot more of them.

I am feeling argumentative though so in tomorrow's post I want to play devil's advocate and expose a flaw in the free to play business model.

New insights into tankophobia

2011-07-01T09:57:00.000Z

Following my confessional post yesterday about my fear of losing battles in World of Tanks I spent some time playing the game to try and get a better handle on what is going on.

I hadn't played for a while so I quite enjoyed the session. I even made a conscious effort to play more creatively and stop being constrained by second hand strategies. So far so good but my dislike of losing battles remains and now I have a better insight into the reason for it:

It all boils down to the daily double experience bonus that you get for the first winning battle of the day on every tank. A handy icon on the tank portrait reminds you which tanks have not yet claimed this experience windfall for the day.

While the double XP bonus is a boon it also becomes a daily chore. I log on and see the tanks in my stable all demanding to be played until they achieve a win.Without consciously realising it I had slipped into a pattern of keeping playing until every tank had gotten its bonus. Only then would I allow myself to stop. I currently have six tanks in my stable so given the 50:50 chance of a victory that means I "have to" play 12 matches on average to get the bonus on every one. Some days I will be lucky and win my first six battles. Some days I will have to play 20 or more battles.

Note how the existence of a daily reward has turned what should be a fun activity into a daily chore. Notice in particular how I have come to hate losing games because every loss means I have to play at least one more round until I get the win and finish my job for the day.

PS: I am pretty sure the 12 matches on average to get 6 wins figure is right but I am currently having a mental statistics block and I am not sure how to prove it.

A funy thing happened on the way to the tank fight

2011-06-30T20:40:00.001Z

It appears that I have lost my nerve as a tank commander.

When opting to limit my investment of real cash in the game to the relatively small sum of €10 I predicted that I probably wouldn't play for more than a few weeks. That prediction appears to have come through because here I am a few weeks later playing other games (finished Crysis 2 and just started Hydrophobia) and my dedication to tank warfare has shrunk from several battles every day to a few sporadic battles over the course of a week.

While I predicted that I would soon lose interest in the game I am somewhat surprised at the reason why. It is not that I have gotten bored with the game. It is more that as I played more of the game I started to care more about winning and losing battles and that extra seriousness has greatly diminished my pleasure in the game. In a very real sense I have lost my nerve. I am afraid to start a battle now in case I lose.

I cannot really explain this change of heart because individual battles in WoT are completely throw away affairs. The randomly selected teams pretty much guarantee a 50% win loss ratio and you still earn cash and experience from losses.

I think it all started when I shifted from playing just for the fun of driving a tank to actually trying to pursue some personal goals. WoT is not a traditional mmorpg with linear progression so you pretty much have to plot your own course. Realising that the heavy tank "end game" was far beyond what I would be prepared to grind to I opted for a more realistic goal of trying to get at least one of the signature tanks of WWII: either the Russian T34, The German Panzer IV or the US Sherman. Even without paying for premium status I figured that any one of these level V tanks should be grind-able within a few hundred battles.The Sherman would have been the quickest to reach but the German tech tree offers a lot more diversity so I set my sights on a Panzer.

To match my new goal directed focus I started studying game information and game strategy. Unfortunately my new found knowledge hasn't enhanced my enjoyment of the game and to be honest I am not sure it has improved my game play much either. Whereas before I would play by instinct now I find myself analysing things based on what I have read.

"Don't go that route, it takes too long",
"Attack along the Eastern edge",
"Don't camp the Forest",
"Be sure and secure the central plateau"

All sound advice that would work well in a game where the entire team communicated and followed an agreed strategy. In the randomly assigned teams it makes almost difference whether you follow a "sound" or an "unsound" strategy. As long as you avoid completely suicidal rushes across open terrain then any move you make is likely to be matched by an equally sensible or equally stupid move on the part of your opponents. Unfortunately that doesn't stop the tendency to analyse what did and didn't happen and in particular to analyse what I should or shouldn't have done.

The net result of all this is that I find I now care more about winning and losing battles and as a consequence I play less, a lot less. Bizarre.

Do cut price games devalue gaming?

2011-06-28T09:52:00.001Z

[Cheating a bit here. I originally wrote this in a comment to an RPS article]

Recently I have been doing a bit of soul searching about the personal impact of the ever reducing price of gaming on the PC.

It has gotten to the stage where I have grown used to and in fact come to expect that I can enjoy an endless stream premium quality gaming on my PC for , if not quite free, as close to free as makes no difference.

While this is absolutely terrific on one level I have to wonder whether it actually devalues the experience of gaming in some way. We are strongly conditioned to equate the value of something to the price you pay for it. When you can get a six month old triple A game for less than a tenner, does it still feel like a triple A gaming experience?

One consequence of this is that my expectations of longevity have shrunk. Ten years ago when I payed full price for Deus Ex or Homeworld I was making a major investment in gaming entertainment and I fully expected that game to keep me busy for up to a month. Nowadays when I pick up a title in a Steam sale for €10 I am happy if it lasts me a weekend and then is promptly forgotten.

Don’t get me wrong. If you offered me a choice of going back to the bad old days of expensive gaming I would refuse but I am simply wondering if something of the awe and reverence we attached to big name games has dissipated because they have become so cheaply available?

Free is No Longer a Unique Selling Proposition

2011-06-24T14:58:00.001Z

Some years back I was tempted into playing a fairly crude mmorpg called Minion's of Mirth for the sole reason that it was free to play up to about level 20. This was back before F2P, before free trials, before the digital download revolution and weekend sales. Back then free gaming opportunities were few and far between.

How things have changed. Not a week seems to go by without another major mmorpg announcing that they are transitioning to a free to play model. It's not just mmos that are affected. Digital downloads and their weekly sales now provide gamers with a never ending diet of quality gaming for buttons. The rise of free high quality flash games and mobile apps have lowered price expectations even further. Today's announcement of a major non mmorpg game: Team Fortress 2 transitioning to a free to play model is particularly significant.

Of course all of these games still hope to make money either through sale of stuff in a cash shop or through advertising but the point remains that you could spend every waking minute playing high quality games without spending a penny.

In this new reality free isn't a big deal any more and is not a guarantee of attracting customers.

Thank Heaven's for Mom's Basement

2011-06-23T09:48:00.001Z

Interesting paper from Cunningham, Engelslatter and Ward about the effects of violent video games on violent crime. What stands out in this authoritative looking study is that rather than increasing crime violent games seem to actually decrease it as reported in Slashdot to cheers from the gaming community.

This is not good news for gamers however. If you actually read the study it strongly supports the argument that violent games increase violent tendencies. It is just that people who spend a lot of time playing games don't have time to go out and commit crimes in the real world. In simplistic terms: Violent video games are breeding a nation of psychopaths but as long as they stay in Mom's basement we will be safe.

As a parent who is also a committed gamer I have quite confused emotions about violence in games. I do want the world to be a safer place and I shun violence in the real world. Yet my gaming is almost entirely based on violence . Indeed I quickly tire of non violent games like Peggle and World of Goo. I have justified my predilection for violent gaming as a safe way of relaxing and a safe outlet for any innate aggression I may have as a result of my cave man ancestory.

I do find there is a level of gratuitous violence that I am not at all comfortable with. I play games to kill the bad guys and rescue the world. I get no extra pleasure from pixelated representations of torture or mutilation. I do not like games that glorify their violence. I generally avoid playing purely evil characters but I have even more difficulty with characters who portray amoral indifference to violence.

Has Eve pulled an Allods?

2011-06-22T09:53:00.000Z

The latest EVE patch brings with it an item shop full of cosmetic items. It took a little while for folks to work out how much things cost because EVE now has four different "currencies". There is good old cash, then there is ISK, then there are PLEX and now we have Aurums. The conversion rules are complicated but effectively exchange rates exist between every one of these currencies except that the only one who can get cash out is CCP.

Anyhow items in the cash shop are priced in Aurums and when you acquire those Aurum's for cash (via the intermediate stage of PLEX) it turns out that a shirt costs about €20 while a humble monocle costs almost €50.Cue nerd rage and when it comes to nerd rage no one does it better than EVE's hardline community.

A couple of years back Allods online was widely praised during beta and had built up a growing cohort of followers who deserted almost overnight when the cash shop was opened and prices were deemed to be a rip off. Many of the complaints have since been addressed but the bad publicity generated still hampers the game.It is hard to believe that any any mmorpg company who adds a cash shop to their game could not be aware of the Allods debacle and the risk of being perceived to "rip off" customers.

EVE is not Allods. The game has a large cohort of loyal players who have stuck with the game through tough times in the past. The vanity items themselves are not required for gameplay. Given that CCP has always come across as being the most clued in game company when it comes to economic issues (they have an economist who studies their in game market for example) it is hard to believe that they didn't know exactly what they were doing in pricing cash shop items. Nevertheless I don't profess to understand it myself. EVE's cash shop prices put the items way outside normal "impulse purchase" thresholds which has to severely limit the total revenues.

All I can think of is that the initial high prices are designed to drain the in game economy of a glut of plexes that have been built up by the games wealthiest players. Once this glut has been dealt with then CCP may lower prices to a revenue maximising optimum. The only problem with this strategy, if it is true, is that CCP takes two major publicity hits: one now because of the perceived high price rip off and a second later when they slash the price of items that some folk have paid through the nose for.

World of Tanks: Why Separate US and EU Forums?

2011-06-20T14:41:00.000Z

Here is the World of Tanks US Forum: http://forum.worldoftanks.com/

Here is the World of Tanks EU Forum:http://forum.worldoftanks.eu/

Look kind of similar don't they? So similar that I originally assumed that one was a mirror of the other but no they are completely separate forums with different logins that are linked to players game accounts.

Its the same game and the same topics come up for discussion. Diligent players keep an eye on "the other side" and copy useful posts over but why oh why do we need two sets of forums in the first place? The internet has shrunk the world to make it a smaller place but folks insist on trying to split it up again for entirely artificial reasons.

To make matters even worse the European forums are quite hard to find because Google and other search engines throw up the .com version before they get to the .eu version. Several time I have read an interesting post and wanted to comment before realising that I cannot because it is on the US site. Even Wargaming.net's own website will lead you only to the US version of the game support site. Why?

Cryostasis: More than a game or less than a game?

2011-06-19T15:52:00.000Z

I have just finished Cryostasis, Sleep of Reason a rather strange game from Ukranian developer Action Forms. It is pegged as survival horror game but I'm not so sure that is should be viewed primarily as a game at all. To my mind Cryostasis is really an interactive novel and quite a complicated one at that. The main plot is a ghostly tale of redemption set on an nuclear icebreaker entombed in the icy grip of a berg. This is overlaid with an ancient folktale that is seemingly unconnected but parallels the events of the current storyline. As I said it is quite complex and I didn't figure it all out for myself but there is definitely a bit of "literature" going on.

The main protagonist plays a scientist who struggles to survive the bitterly cold conditions. Given that you are no doubt wrapped from head to toe in several inches of thick furs and given that all that stands between you and freezing to death is the meagre heat of a few light bulbs it is hardly surprising that your movements are slow and awkward and that combat plays out as if in slow motion. Appropriate though this may be from a story point of view from a gameplay point of view it is a disaster. The controls feel awkward and unresponsive. With everything happening so slowly the overall difficulty level is generally trivial but there are a few unfair difficfulty spikes particularly at boss fights.

Whether you think this title is to be praised or knocked really depends on how you rate interactive story versus game play. I was sufficiently impressed to stick with it to the end but I have to admit that I feel a little bit like I do after watching an obscure art movie, not really knowing whether I enjoyed it but feeling that it was worth watching none the less.

All in all I am glad stuff like this gets made and it probably makes a much bigger contribution to the "games are/ are not art" debate than any hundred million dollar blockbuster.

Game of Thrones

2011-06-17T21:53:00.000Z

This: http://insidetv.ew.com/2011/06/13/game-of-thrones-reaction/ reminds me of why I love Martin's Song of Ice and Fire so much. I was also as shocked when I read the book. He can't do that can he? He just did. Welcome to the roller coaster ride that is Ice and Fire.

Thanks to Wilhelm the Ancient Gaming Noob for pointing this out. Now if only the series would come to a channel I can actually watch on my crappy cable service.

Making the most of the World of Tanks matchmaking chart

2011-06-17T21:30:00.002Z

I am still a very new player in World of Tanks with a mere 230 battles to my name but a recent post from Zoso about the vagaries of the matchmaking system caused me to search out the full matchmaking chart. You can see it here. Be sure to scroll down to the latest version (currently 6.4).

If you locate you current tank in the left hand column and see how far the bar extends you can see the highest level battle that you are likely to be thrown into.

Studying this chart confirms a suspicion I had earlier that there are certain sweet spots on the chart where you can pick a tank that is unlikely to be put up against anything it cannot handle. A level 3 tank destroyer for example will not be put into into any battle above level 5 and I know from experience that a fully equipped level 3 TD can do decent damage to any level 5 tank even heavies. If you upgrade to a level 4 tank destroyer though the level of tanks that you could face jumps by two levels up to level 7. It seems to me that level 3 is a sweet spot for tank destroyers.

The situation with light tanks is even more dramatic. A level 3 light tank won't see anything above level 5 but a level 4 light tank could be thrown against level 9s and there is basically no limit to what a level 5 light can face! The sweet spot for light tanks is in fact level 2 because a level 2 light will never have to fight anything above level 2.

Of course a level 5 light in a level 10 battle can still be a useful scout and I have no doubt that light tank specialists relish this role. Nevertheless studying the matchmaking chart is great for finding sweet spots where you can enjoy competitive matches without having to grind excessively.

What I'm at in World of Tanks

2011-06-12T13:24:00.001Z

Playing three tanks at the moment:

A tier 2 Russian AT-1 tank destroyer which I love. Playing a tank destroyer is a bit like fishing - mostly its a waiting game but every so often you get lucky and haul in a bumper catch. One unexpected bonus of playing tank destroyers is that the stealth bonuses mean I am often one of the last tanks left alive. Several battles have come down to just artillery and tank destroyers left on both teams. If you are only interested in levelling then this longevity is a disadvantage because you get to play fewer matches but I love the intriguing end game as these normally stationary beasts trundle into slow motion battle to try and capture the enemy base or hunt down the remaining defenders.

A Tier 2 PzKpfw 35 (t) light tank. WoTs rating system ranks this tier 2 as less valuable than the AT-1 so I usually find myself thrown into low level matches with tiers 1 and 2 only. It is nice to be a big fish even if it is a small pool but somehow I doubt this is teaching me any valuable lessons about how to drive a light tank at higher tiers.

A Tier 1 Leichte Traktor. This is a weak tank equipped with a pea-shooter gun. I ignored this ungainly tank initially because its weak gun struggles to penetrate even tier 1 armour but recently I have come back to it as a kind of challenge. I have found some success driving it aggressively close to an enemy and using the rapid fire of the auto-cannon to keep them distracted while the tiny increments of damage add up.

Currently saving up for a Marder II tier 3 Tank Destroyer. This is actually a sideways move from the Russian AT-1 but I the Marder seems to have better gun options than the Russian tier 3 TD plus it is a lot cheaper to buy. Happily I have enough "free experience" accumulated to allow me to bypass the German tier 2 tank destroyer so it shouldn't take too long to get there. This strikes me as a very good use of free XP.

World of Tanks: Making it easy to spend real money

2011-06-12T12:09:00.000Z

147 battles in and I am still having lots of fun without spending real money in World of Tanks but I decide to buy some gold anyway. Given my track record with games I am unlikely to stick with it for more than a few weeks so I decided to start small and only spend €9.99 for 2,500 Gold. I will probably spend this on crew training mostly but I may also spend a few gold rescuing some trapped experience from capped "Elite Tanks".

Of course spending such a small amount means I had to put up with a poor exchange rate. While volume discounts are understandable they are a sore point if you have already decided for very good reasons not to buy big. I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that the hit was not so severe. The best rate you can get is 0.33c per gold for spending €99.99 but I still managed a respectable 0.4c per gold for only spending €9.99.

To be honest this makes me much more comfortable buying a small amount of gold. I don't feel ripped off and it makes it much more likely that I will buy another small amount of gold later. There is a school of though that having big discounts on block purchases encourages people to spend more but in my case at any rate it would probably scare me off and make me spend less.

The other way WoT makes it easy to spend money is by having a very wide choice of methods of putting money into the game. I could choose between two billing partners and a multiplicity of payment methods. In the end I opted for Paypal because the current spate of hacking into game companies makes me think that the fewer service have my credit card details the better.

Codemasters Hacked

2011-06-10T15:42:00.000Z

Less than a week after European Lotro transferred back to Turbine Codemaster's servers were hacked. Although I had already moved all of my details are still on Codemaster's servers. Here is the email I received from them about this.

Dear valued Codemasters customer,

On Friday 3rd June, unauthorised entry was gained to our Codemasters.com
website. As soon as the intrusion was detected, we immediately took
codemasters.com and associated web services offline in order to prevent
any further intrusion.

During the days since the attack we have conducted a thorough
investigation in order to ascertain the extent and scope of the breach
and have regrettably discovered that the intruder was able to gain
access to the following:

Codemasters.com website

Access to the Codemasters corporate website and sub-domains.

DiRT 3 VIP code redemption page

Access to the DiRT 3 VIP code redemption page.

The Codemasters EStore

We believe the following have been compromised: Customer names and
addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, encrypted passwords and
order history. Please note that no personal payment information was
stored with Codemasters as we use external payment providers, meaning
your payment details were not at risk from this intrusion.

Codemasters CodeM database

Members' names, usernames, screen names, email addresses, date of birth,
encrypted passwords, newsletter preferences, any biographies entered by
users, details of last site activity, IP addresses and Xbox Live
Gamertags are all believed to have been compromised.

Whilst we do not have confirmation that any of this data was actually
downloaded onto an external device, we have to assume that, as access
was gained, all of these details were compromised and/or stolen.

The Codemasters.com website will remain offline for the foreseeable
future with all Codemasters.com traffic re-directed to the Codemasters
Facebook page instead. A new website will launch later in the year.

Advice

For your security, in the first instance we advise you to change any
passwords you have associated with other Codemasters accounts. If you
use the same login information for other sites, you should change that
information too. Furthermore, be extra cautious of potential scams, via
email, phone, or post that ask you for personal or sensitive
information. Please note that Codemasters will never ask you for any
payment data such as credit card numbers or bank account details, nor
will Codemasters ask you for passwords or other personal identifying
data. Be aware too of fraudulent emails that may outwardly appear to be
from Codemasters with links inviting you to visit websites. The safest
way to visit your favourite websites is always by typing in the address
manually into the address bar of your browser.

Unfortunately, Codemasters is the latest victim in on-going targeted
attacks against numerous game companies. We assure you that we are doing
everything within our legal means to track down the perpetrators and
take action to the full extent of the law.

We apologise for this incident and regret any inconvenience caused.

We are contacting all customers who may have been affected directly.

Should you have any concerns or wish to speak to a member of our
Customer Services team, please email them at
custservice@codemasters.com.

You have been sent this email as part of your Codemasters Code M
membership. If you have any questions or queries about this email or
your CodeM account, please email CodeM@codemasters.com. The Codemasters
Software Company Limited, registered in England (Company No. 2044132)
whose registered office is at Codemasters Campus, Southam, Warwickshire,
CV47 2DL, England. For more Privacy information, please read the
Codemasters Privacy Policy : http://www.codemasters.co.uk/privacy/

I don't really know whether to be worried about this or not. In recent years I have gotten pretty diligent about using different log in details for different systems but there was a time when I was not so vigilant and of course I still live in the same house with the same telephone number.

World of Tanks: Tank Killer fun

2011-06-10T10:28:00.000Z

After spending some time in light tanks (mostly a Tier 2 PzKpfw 35) I decided to try something completely different so I got me an entry level tank destroyer the Russian AT-1.

Bit of a shock to the system at first. Coming from the relative nippiness of light tanks the AT-1 moves and turns like molasses. The lack of turret is frustrating forcing you into an awkward cycle of zoom in to shoot zoom out to turn the tank, zoom in again to shoot etc. Also despite the fact that it is also a tier 2 tank it seems to rank a grade higher than the PzKpfw 35 and gets put into matches with tiers 3 and 4 so you find yourself in matches where just about every other tank on the field is faster than you are, more manoeuvrable than you are and can kill you in an instant.

There is an up side. It wouldn't be a tank killer if it didn't have a big gun. It comes with a tier 2 gun but after a few matches you should be able to upgrade to a tier 3 76mm or even a tier 4 57 mm. These big guns turn your little AT-1 into a glass cannon - able to kill much bigger tanks from long range as long as long as they don't see you first.

Of course the "as long as they don't see you first" is the hard bit especially given how slow the AT-1 is to move around. In my noobness I generally just look around for a bush that is close to the starting zone where I can hide and provide cover to the base and our artillery units. To date I have had mixed success with this. The long range kills are very satisfying when I pull them off and I have saved the day a couple of times by killing raiders who made a cheeky run for our base. More often however I am outflanked and killed especially when I am zoomed in and not paying attention to my immediate surroundings.

Things I have learned from World of Tanks #1

2011-06-08T19:37:00.000Z

Everything every strategy game I have ever played has taught me about the advantages of "holding the high ground" is bullshit. You are far better off in a hole with your gun barrel peeping out than you are sitting pretty on top of a hill. Better yet stay on the down slope of a hill and just edge forward till you can take a shot at the guy over the crest and then reverse back down again.

World of Tanks versus Call of Duty Elite?

2011-06-06T13:43:00.000Z

World of tanks is an online multiplayer first person shooter, make no mistake about it. WASD controls, mouse aiming, left mouse button to shoot, scroll wheel to zoom, small closed maps, Two teams of 15 players each. Sure it has vehicles and sure those vehicles just happen to be tanks but this game firmly belong to the FPS school and bears relatively little relation to the click to target open world model of mmorpgs ...except that it has a cash shop ... and serious players can pay a monthly sub for premium access ... and shock horror, people who pay more money get game changing perks like better ammo and heals as well as the ability to progress much faster.

So why is World of Tanks getting so much love when Activision's proposed addition of a subscription service to Call of Duty is getting so much abuse?

Putting aside emotional arguments based on a dislike of "Big Gaming" in general and Bobby Kotick in particular I can think of a couple of key differences:

1. The $60 entry price for a Call of Duty / Modern Warfare game. In World of tanks you can start to play for free and then if you like the game you can pay more to get more. There is absolutely no suggestion (and no likelihood) that Activision will lower the box price of their game once they bring in the subscription service so there is the feeling that Activision are just double dipping. Activision however have taken pains to point out that you will still be able to do lots without paying a subscription. Indeed it is very hard to find out what a subscription will actually add. Informed opinion is that this is just a toe in the water and that the initial subscription offer will only tempt the hardcore.

2. The E-sports mentality. FPS games have traditionally been ruthlessly balanced games where skill triumphs over luck and quick fingered adolescents get to humiliate grown men with fatter wallets. Call of Duty comes from that heritage and any move towards a system where someone who pays more gets an advantage would be seen as a betrayal of the spirit of such a game. Because World of Tanks doesn't come from that heritage it isn't subject to the same constraints and people seem to just accept the fact that money can buy you power. To be fair to Wargaming.net they do seem to have good balancing routines which balance the teams overall even if individual members of any team have widely differing capabilities. Even if you are in the weakest tank on your team the chances are there is someone on the other side just as weak as you.

Putting the comparison aside one of the most interesting analyses of Activision's move that I have read was made by Bill Harris: He suggests that the whole point of "Call of Duty Elite" is to lock customer's in to a social network infrastructure based on their games. Certainly sounds like a good (if scary move) but why charge for it? The message of social networking surely is that it has to be free.

First Post Brilliance

2011-06-03T22:15:00.000Z

Top Marks to a poster called Simon for nailing GOG's mini review competition on Rock Paper Shotgun in the very first post.

The competition requires a short (<100 words) witty review of any game. Simon's contribution:

Half Life - Its quite slow, you start on a train and nothing much happens. I played it for 3 minutes then uninstalled it, Probably the best train passenger simulator out there but its a bit of a niche market. Two stars.

Well played sir. Well played.

Is grown up fantasy and science fiction making a comeback?

2011-06-01T08:35:00.001Z

Another interesting observation from my visit to the local library last night is that the shelf space dedicated to fantasy and science fiction is growing. I have also noticed the same thing happening in my local bookshops.

A few years back I was concerned to see that my favourite genre seemd to have fallen out of favour and what little shelf space was dedicated to fantasy was given over almost entirely to Harry Potter and the deluge of Teenage Vampire novels. While some of the young adult stuff is very good I don't want to spend the rest of my life reading about teenagers so it is very refreshing to see George Martin, Ian Banks, Alastair Reynolds and their ilk being displayed prominently again and pushed heavily. Patrick Rothfuss appears to be the current ascending star and I am half way through "The Name of The Wind" myself.

Perhaps the millions who grew up on Harry Potter have grown up and are looking for more mature fantasy?

PS. Originally the post title referred to "Adult Fantasy and Science Fiction" except it sounded like I am talking about elf porn. Is there a better term to describe F&SF written for an adult audience?

Thoughts on visiting a lending library

2011-06-01T08:09:00.000Z

I brought my kids to the local lending library last night and I was struck by how wonderful it is to stroll through aisles of books. Seeing them, touching them, smelling them and browsing through them. I have been something of an e-book evangelist for the last few months so it was a grounding experience to be reminded just how much pleasure can be got from physical books.

Apart from the tactile sensuality of it all I was also struck by how much better the browsing and selection process is with physical books than with the crude tools that online booksellers have managed to come up with to date. Choosing books online is a narrowly focussed activity. I tend to know exactly what I want before I start and the search tools quickly (or not so quickly in some cases) bring me to it. Browsing physical books on shelves is a much more open experience tempting one to pick up and read the most unlikely titles. Last night for example, among my usual selection of Fantasy and SF novels I also borrowed a book on soap making for no better reason than it caught my eye.

None of this changes my opinion that paper books are on their way. I still believe the vastly superior economic efficiency of e-books means that their rise to dominance is inevitable. I am sure that scribes of yore lamented the dying artistry of hand scripted manuscripts when the printing press and its ugly mass produced volumes made them redundant but it happened none the less.

Bye Bye Lotro Europe

2011-05-31T19:44:00.000Z

Codemasters European Lotro is now closed and we players will be up and running on US severs in a few days. I logged in last night to see if there was anything happening in game but apart from a splash screen saying goodbye from Codemasters there was nothing special going on.

Can Activision Turn an FPS into a Subscription Game?

2011-05-31T13:47:00.000Z

Interesting news on the wires that Activision want to introduce a monthly subscription service called "Call of Duty Elite" to their hugely successful first person shooter franchise. Apparently the subscription will be optional which begs the question as to what elite players will get that non payers don't. So far I haven't seen any mention of game-play advantages, the focus seems to be on added value features like social networking and statistics. Will that be enough to entice players to open their wallets I wonder?

With millions of players online playing Call of Duty games on a daily basis I can see the $ signs in Activision's eyes at the idea of getting recurring subscription fees but I can't help feeling they are ignoring the trend. In the mmorpg world where subscriptions were once commonplace most games are moving towards a free to play with cash shop model. Of course the most successful mmorpg "World of Warcraft" is still raking in the subscriptions and significantly is also owned by Activision.

Adding subs to a game genre where customers never had to pay before does seem like a much riskier model to me however. Call of Duty is probably the only game that is big enough to have any hope of pulling it but my gut feeling is that they would have been far better to go with a cash shop model such as the one Valve has added to Team Fortress 2.

Clive Barkers Undying on Windows 7 64 bit

2011-05-29T10:41:00.001Z

Clive Barkers Undying is a forgotten Classic game from ten years ago. It is a first person adventure with a clever combination of weapons and magic. It features a creepy and imaginative storyline from Clive himself and really deserved to sell a lot better than it did.

The good news is that it works very well on Windows 7 64 bit without any patches.I used Windows XP sp2 compatibility mode following a recommendation from the internet but I later discovered that the game runs well enough without this. Note however that save games seem to be stored differently depending on whether or not you use compatibility mode so choose a mode and stick with it.

The biggest annoyance was a very long starting time (3 minutes on my system) but once the game was up and running everything went smoothly. I had a few crashes during game-play which is not too surprising given that this was version 1.0 unpatched. I strongly recommend using multiple save slots though and not solely just relying on quicksave because if the game crashes while you are saving you could lose a lot of progress.

This is a ten year old game though and the graphics are obviously primitive by modern standards even though the artwork is very atmospheric and imaginative. The game is longer than a modern shooter with a lot of different locations and enemies. Combat is also very different than a modern shooter. Enemy AI is non existent and so is cover. Enemies run at you and try to kill you so in order to stay alive you either need to shoot them first or more probably keep moving. I died several times to the very first enemies in the game while I shook off my 2011 shooter habits and re-learned to circle strafe.

Highly recommended if you can get your hands on a copy. It is a great pity Good Old Games haven't managed to include it in their catalogue.

EDIT: I somehow forgot to mention that the game is set in Ireland in the 1920's and has the worst attempts at Irish accents I have ever heard. Suffice to say that I found the game sufficiently engrossing that I forgot all about the comedy accents.

Got No Friends? Nevermind Here's SomeYou Can Have

2011-05-24T17:47:00.000Z

Lets just say a "friend" of mine has so far managed to resist the lure of Facebook. Unfortunately this "friend" soon found that an increasing amount of useful stuff is accessible only to Facebookers so he (or she) created a bogus account in a fake name just to get access when needed to various Facebooky things. (A gross violation of the Terms of Service, I know, shame on them. I am not sure if this is an imprison-able offence yet but doubtless it soon will be).

Anyhow given that the entire account is a fake you should not be surprised to hear that this "friend" never bothered to connect to any other friends via this fake account. Indeed this reasonably tech savvy individual even managed to negotiate their way through Facebook's less than transparent privacy options to turn off all of the normal intrusions that Facebook makes.

So far so good but the "friend was most surprised when Facebook started sending him (or her) emails noting with obvious sympathy that he (or she) has no friends.The helpful service offered to find friends for the fake persona and even made several named suggestions to kick the process off.

I am happy to say that, to date, this "friend" has declined Facebook's invitation to broaden his (or her) imaginary persona's circle of acquaintances. Nevertheless the notion of constructing a fully fleshed out virtual alter ego complete with a computer generated social network is tempting.

Playing Singularity

2011-05-20T23:55:00.000Z

Enjoying it so far.

That's all.

PS. Suffers from same issue as last game I played in that it only has one save slot? When did this become a trend? Last I heard even the lowest spec gaming console has enough storage space to allow a few save game slots. Not having multiple slots really restricts your freedom to play around.

Too TiredTo Shoot

2011-05-19T10:19:00.000Z

Last night I wanted to play Medal of Honor Airborne but I couldn't because I was too tired.

The really strange thing is that I didn't realise I was so tired until I actually tried to play. I had a long day at work and it was after 9pm when I finally got to sit down in front of a PC. That's isn't too unusual however and I was very much looking forward to playing the shooter in order to relax before bed. Once in the game I found I couldn't hit a barn door and just got murdered over and over again. At first I was perplexed because I had made good progress previously but thinking about it I realised that I was just tired and my reactions were like molasses.

The unforgiving nature of the game didn't help because I was playing on hard and there is no way to switch the difficulty level without losing your save game. The terrible checkpoints meant that I couldn't make any progress whatsoever in my tired state. (Did I mention that Medal of Honor Airborne has a really terrible save system?).

I was disappointed at not being able to get my shooter fix but I was also surprised at how badly my performance had been affected when I never realised how tired I was. I am really quite bad at reading the signals from my own body. I just expect it to do what ever I ask it to do and usually it just does it. Not last night however. I hope this isn't a symptom of old age.

At least I was playing a single player game and my lack of performance didn't affect anyone but myself. I would have been rightly embarrassed in a multi-player setting like a raid.

Loyal Customers Get Screwed

2011-05-18T18:28:00.001Z

My motor insurance is up for renewal and my current insurer has just sent me a helpful form I can sign and send in to renew my existing policy.

STOP!!!

It is many years since I realised that just ticking the box is a sure way to guarantee you are paying too much for car insurance. It always pays to shop around. Even when I want to stay with my existing insurer it is always worth getting a couple of competing quotes. On several occasions I have found that having a cheaper quote from a rival company in my hand will cause the first insurer to re-quote at an even lower level.

You might think such games are irrelevant in these days of online quotations and automated pricing models but my experience says not. Automated systems will give you a fixed quote but if you can get talking to a human sales rep they always have some leeway to lower their price.

I discussed this situation with a friend of mine who works in sales in a different industry and he made a guilty confession. It is the same in every industry, loyal customers get screwed because they generally pay whatever is asked while while the fickle customer who is hard to sell to and who takes up so much of the salesman's time preparing quotes that are never taken up gets a much better deal.

It makes sense I suppose but it hardly seems fair.

Medal of Honor: Airborne

2011-05-17T09:56:00.000Z

With the colossus that was Call of Duty 4 just around the corner this WWII shooter never really stood a chance of making much of an impact when it was released in 2007 but I was pleasantly surprised after picking the game up in a recent Steam sale to find that there is a very good shooter in there none the less.

The single player campaign is short with only six maps spread across Italy, France and Holland. Nevertheless the shooting action is first class with good enemy AI and plenty of nooks and crannies for enemies to hide in. These combine to make the game quite challenging so I expect most players will be able to squeeze at least a dozen hours of entertainment out of the game.

Innovative points:
-The game is somewhat non-linear because each map has a series of objectives that you can tackle in any order.
-At the start of each level and after every death you parachute in (you are airborne remember) so you can choose where you want to go next.
-Every weapon in the game has three levels of upgrades which you unlock by gaining kills with that weapon. The upgrades include things like increased accuracy or a larger clip and become very useful for the tougher encounters later in the game.

Bad points:
-The checkpoint save system is really painful. You only save when you achieve an objective. The non linear nature of the game and the general difficulty level means that you can easily lose half an hour of game play if you die when attempting certain objectives.
- Unskippable cut scenes at the start of every level. Given the overall difficulty level you will die a lot so you will get to see these cut scenes over and over again.
- Inexplicable achievement system. The game awards stars for how well you do in every mission but nowhere in the game or in the manual does it tell you how to win or lose stars. It is probably something to do with kills and deaths but the question has led to several forum debates and one theory holds that the only way to get five stars in some missions is to deliberately die at a certain point.
- Multiplayer is predictably very quiet. I did spot about a dozen servers online with a handful of players on them but you probably need to bring your own friends if you want to get much out of this in multiplayer.

Things that might annoy some folk but don't really bother me:
- There is no real storyline, the maps feel like recycled multiplayer maps. Nevertheless this suits the non linear nature of the game play and the complex nature of the terrain coupled with pretty good enemy AI means that you can still enjoy a challenging single player game.
- Historical accuracy be damned. Did you know that an MP40 could be upgraded with a 64 bullet clip, or that Hitler bred a race of gas mask wearing super soldiers who fire MG42's from the hip?

- Just about every plane you travel in gets shot down. This gets predictably tedious after a while and I can only assume this was some kind of running joke for the developers.
- Its yet another WWII game played from the US perspective, yawn. At least the game doesn't mention Carentan.