So the word is out that super-special, high-definition version of the original moon landing tapes have been… found?

That is… unexpected. But this is what really caught my eye:

Actually, no. I’ve read the theories, and the deniers aren’t upset about the quality of the videos, but the content of them and the details surrounding them. Each side has an answer for the other, and I can’t imagine how higher resolution will settle any of the long-standing arguments. This is just going to give them new high-def footage to obsess over and a fresh batch of oddball facts to add to the list. This whole “found tapes” business is extremely fishy, and even though I don’t doubt that the moon landings took place, I have to say I feel like I’m missing something when I hear about these new tapes.

• These original tapes were reportedly “lost as soon as they were made”, which doesn’t make a lot of sense. Someone put those tapes away. There couldn’t have been that many people in Parkes that would have handled them. They keep saying “tapes”, but of course the footage of the disembarking Armstrong is all on one tape, a recording of an exceedingly famous event. How does something like that get lost at all? The guy who pulled the tape out of the clanking steam-powered tape-maker they used way back in the savage 1960’s had to have been aware of what he had in his hand.

• Okay, they got lost. This is a government operation, after all. But how did they stay lost for 40 years? The guy who pulled the tape never spoke up? Did someone put them in a box next to the Ark of the Covenant and then have a heart attack? This is arguably the most valuable footage human beings have ever shot. To reuse an old but appropriate phrase: We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t keep track of our old VHS cassettes? And we don’t make backups?
• And suddenly the tapes are found, just in time for the 40th anniversary. As I’m sure the conspiracy theorists will say How conveeeenient.
• Word has gotten out, but the tapes haven’t been officially announced yet, and instead they’re giving coy non-denials. This does not help their case. This is science, and being transparent and open with your data is more important than politics and public relations. The deniers claim the US faked the moon landings for bragging rights. And now we’re going to suddenly release a fresh batch of data, 40 years after the fact, and it’s being treated by a publicity stunt by NASA.

  I’m half expecting them to do a big George Lucas “Digitally Remastered” release in full color and surround sound.

I’ll say this a second time just to make sure we’re clear on this point: I don’t doubt that the moon landings happened.

My uncle was involved in the program, and built some minor whoozit for the lander. There were a lot of people on that project. The idea that so many engineers could keep a secret (lie) for their entire lives (I’ll bet over half of them are dead now) is just ridiculous. (Engineers lie about as well as politicians can identify the load-bearing members on the unneeded bridge they had built in their district.) Compare the deceptive prowess of those hundreds of engineers with (say) the way the government is always leaking secrets held by small groups of spies and politicians. Having said this, the whole business with the lost tapes is more than a little fishy. This is not going to soothe the skeptics at all. It will do the very opposite, and give them a few more items on their laundry list of objections.

I do look forward to seeing the footage released. I would be very surprised of Google didn’t put it up a nice HD version for us all to gawk at.

I filed this post under “rants”. I’m not sure who I’m ranting against. The skeptics and their absurd conspiracy of thousands? NASA and their bumbling, tin-eared, PR-focused response to the skeptics? Myself for giving the skeptics yet more attention? I don’t know. I think I’m just ranting at the situation in general, which will go on annoying us for years to come. And also because I’m eager to see the new footage and I can’t yet.

UPDATE: Now it is suggested that the story is a hoax. Disappointing, but a lot more believable. Perhaps this is for the best. At least we don’t have to worry about NASA adding footage of Greedo shooting first.

56 comments. Copious verbage.

Inappropriate invasions of personal space? WILL THE HORRORS OF THE APOCALYPSE NEVER END?!?

Eh. Maybe.

See Also:left 4 dumb

Only 11 comments.

Steven Peeler (of Kivi’s Underworld* and Depths of Peril fame) has begun work on the next title from Soldak entertainment, and is looking for ideas, suggestions, and feedback from the community. The official forum thread is here, and from there you can branch off into a number of interesting sub-topics. I hope he’ll forgive me for poaching a bit of the discussion and posting my thoughts here.

* I’m still working on my review of Kivi. No, I haven’t forgotten about it.

As I said in my introduction to Kivi’s Underworld, I don’t think dungeon-crawl gameplay got a fair turn. Unlike (say) adventure games or shooters, the genre fell out of favor long before the possibilities had been exhausted.

It came out in 1990, but I didn’t play Eye of the Beholder until 1991. I didn’t have one of the sexy VGA cards like the kind used in this screenshot. I played this game in four color CGA mode. Also: Uphill! Both ways!

I don’t have any earth-shattering suggestions on the genre myself, so I’m just going to list the gameplay elements which draw me to these games. I’m also going to point back to old-school turn-based dungeon crawlers like Eye of the Beholder and Nethack, which are part of the lineage of modern day Diablo clones and thus have some wisdom to impart.

This isn’t so much a list of suggestions as a list of observations from these games over the years.

Story

These games are not generally about story, and they suffer when you try to shoehorn in too much exposition and intrigue. (Plus, that sort of business can get expensive if you try to do it with cutscenes.) On the other hand, the boilerplate, “Bad guy is thirty levels down and wants to kill us all. Go get him.” is hopelessly dull, cliche, and lazy. It front-loads the story with exposition and then doesn’t have anything interesting to say until the end.

I think the “mystery” foe is a nice compromise here. Send the player into the dungeon in search of the source of the evil / corruption / plague / rash of high golf scores, but don’t tell them what they’re dealing with. At regular intervals you can give them another spoonful of story which answers one question and introduces the next, leading up to the big reveal of the bad guy and his plans near the end. It entices players with a question or a mystery, it spaces the story out, and it keeps the story doses small so that they don’t break up the flow.

Shops

The presence of shops in the game actually dictates whether or not looting is part of your game. Without the ability to sell stuff to an NPC, found items become very binary. It’s either something you want to use, or it’s worthless. Looting adds a dimension to the gameplay, and the lack of a system for turning useless (to the player) loot into resources makes the game very combat focused. Personally, I think loot is probably a lot easier to implement than combat, from a game design perspective. (To be fair, I’ve never authored either.) So leaving out loot is leaving out a lot of gameplay for not a lot of work. (Relatively speaking.) I love the moment-to-moment choices posed by found items. If you’ve ever hit your encumbrance limit in an Elder Scrolls game and been paralyzed not with burden but with indecision, then you know what I’m talking about.

Leveling System

When it comes to leveling, I am a spreadsheet fan, but I’m not a fan of shoehorning paper-based systems into computer games. I love the complex SPECIAL system used by fallout. I want choices and variety. On the other hand, that sort of thing can really kill the flow of a dungeon crawler. Ideally, the system should be easy to grasp and not take the player too far out of the game.

At the heart of leveling is the fact that players are choosing some reward(s) when they ding. This choice should be meaningful and a little difficult. The player should be presented with several things that they want, and be allowed to choose one or two. Do you want more hitpoints / greater carrying capacity / more darkvision / more speed / more secret-finding ability / more lock opening ability / more damage dealing / more magic mojo.

A lot of games focus on the combat - centric skills and overlook the fun of resource management skills. The ability to carry more stuff, consume less stuff, and determine the value of found stuff should not be overlooked. These games are often called “third person looters”. Loot is an important part of the game, (to me, anyway) and the in-game skill set should reflect that.

Dungeons

I really like games where you work your way deeper and deeper into a single dungeon complex. I realize it’s absurd to have the city sewer system be a maze. With lights. And traps. Four levels deep. And it doesn’t make much sense for those “sewers” to happen to join (and be above) a prison, which leads to some caves, which lead to inexplicable underground ruins, which lead to different caves carved out from an entirely different tileset rock, which lead to boiling magma chambers and the lair of Satan’s bigger, meaner nephew. It makes no sense, but damn it, this is what dungeon crawling is all about. There is a purity to this approach that I find deeply compelling.

So… what suggestions do you have for the Soldak team? What gameplay elements are crucial to these types of games? What do you think would make them better? (Either the Soldak games specifically or the genre in general.) You can leave a comment here - I’m pretty sure Steven will stop by - or you can stop by the forums and join the existing discussion.

Sweet mercy. 61 comments!

Here is some footage from a novelty round we had on the server yesterday. It was a full round of medics. Only medics. On both sides.

Later, there was also a sniper round. And an all spies round. And a round of only scouts using their bats. And a round of pyros.

Good times.

35 comments. It's getting crowded in here.

So, a new (to me) series at the Escapist is Movie Bob. As someone who has only a cursory knowledge of movies and directors, I really appreciated his take on Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell. Like Yahtzee, his aggressive and profane style either works for you or it doesn’t, but I always enjoy reviewers that can educate me on the director, the history of this particular movie, the cast, or whatever else is useful for putting the thing in context. Drag me to Hell looks like something I would pass up even if it was free, but I still enjoyed his take on it.

But I’m linking his Transformers review, because I very much agree with the point he makes mid-way through. Warning: This is coarse, profane, rude, and angry:

This is something I was trying to say in my review of the original previous movie: Just because the source material is a “toy commercial” doesn’t get you off the hook for basic fundamental movie making concepts like characterization, cinematography, dialog, casting, and pacing. Movie Bob says it better, though. Note that I haven’t seen the new movie, but everything he says applies just as well to both movies.

Imagine that Michael Bay’s Transformers is - as Movie Bob says - the Batman & Robin of Transformers. What would the Dark Knight of Transformers look like? Or the Charlie & the Chocolate Factory. Basically, imagine the fun or interesting movies we could have gotten for that $200 million dollars, if they would just put the project in the hands of someone who wanted to do something more than capturing blurry footage of Stuff Blowing Up.

Sweet mercy. 60 comments!

Open thread to talk about server issues, games, MMO hookups, Looking for Guild requests, or suggestions about what Gamepunx magazine should do with the bailout money.

Have fun.

46 comments? This post wasn't even all that interesting.

Here is my take on the “demo mode” thing Nintendo is crowing about.

Some additional thoughts, which I cut from the article:

Demo mode is even worse than it seems at first glance. If I understand the patent, it’s actually pre-recorded video, not captured or (better yet) AI directed inputs. They make it sound like you can turn demo mode on and off at will, but the way it reads, it sounds like turning it off just sends you back to some pre-determined checkpoint. So what they are really bragging about is the ability to (basically) watch YouTube videos and play from someone else’s save games. This is even less useful than a simple automated self-play mode. And finally, I don’t see how this system will be useful in non-linear games. In Zelda for example: If I use this feature to skip a tricky boss fight, what it’s really going to do is show me a video of someone else beating the boss, and then download a preset save game starting from just after the boss fight. Is that save game going to retain all of the other state variables? (Hearts, resources collected, etc.)

Well, it’s bad, but at least the other console companies aren’t bending over backwards trying to emulate Nintendo. Man, then we’d really be in trouble.

Feeling chatty? There are 22 comments.

Guess who startled the witch?

For the readers who just can’t bear that one of their webcomics is running a series which doesn’t tickle their particular fancy, I am happy to report that your long period of agonizing not-finding-things-as-funny-as-you-would-prefer is drawing to a close. There are about 4 or 5 Left 4 Dumb remaining. And remember, if you don’t find a joke funny, it’s your duty as a human being to scroll down past a dozen comments saying, “This is hilarious” and leave a comment of your own informing the author that his work is stupid and unfunny and he should have quit ages ago. That’s a really important part of the whole webcomic process that far too many people overlook. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never commented before or have nothing invested in the series. The important thing is that you guide someone else’s work through hostility and degradation. If anyone gives you a hard time, just point out that you’re only trying to offer “constructive criticism”.

Thank you. I’m sure with just a little more work we can finally bring about LOLtopia. Don’t give up the dream.

See Also:left 4 dumb

56 comments. Copious verbage.