T w e n t y S i d e d
This episode of Shamus Plays will have more nudity than any other. And also dog vomit.
‘Best’ Of Spoiler Warning
It’s bound to happen when a group has the kind of rock star runaway success that we’ve had with Spoiler Warning. The sudden fame and money has really come as a shock to most of us, and I think we went a bit sideways there for a bit. There’s been a rift forming between Randy and the rest of the group for some time now. It came to a head near the end of the series when Josh and I got fed up with the way Randy’s hotel vandalism and drug abuse was getting in the way of our greed and womanizing.
So now Randy has broken off to pursue a solo career:
(Randy explained to me that the name of this episode comes from the story of drummer Pete Best who put out “Best of the Beatles” after he was fired from The Beatles. I mention this because I’d never heard this story before and I found it interesting.)
More seriously, there’s no real drama behind Randy leaving the show. Randy is open to doing more in the future. We still hang out and everything is cool, he’s just not doing the show right now. Our Fallout 3 series starts next week. We’ve already recorded the first couple of episodes with Rutskarn, who doesn’t actually like it when we call him Ringo.
Stolen Pixels #189: Eeevil!
Oh my gosh Shamus, WILL YOU SHUT UP ABOUT UBISOFT ALREADY?
Let’s Play Assassins Creed II:
(Part 1 of 1)
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Since the Assassin’s Creed 2 DRM is now truly broken, I thought it would be nice to “celebrate” by giving the game a try. Susan Arendt said in her review that, “You’ll find a lot to love, I promise. Assassin’s Creed 2 is the best kind of sequel.” Wired calls it, “The ultimate killer app.” Yahtzee didn’t threaten to sodomize the developers or eat their young, which is pretty high praise from him. In fact, I haven’t found any negative reviews of the game at all.
Of course, all of those reviews were talking about the console versions. Let’s see how the PC version holds up. I have a review copy here and it’s about time I fired it up and saw what all the fuss was about.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Let’s Play Assassins Creed II:
(Part 1 of 1)”
Immersion: The Videogame Car
This is why you crash all over the place in Grand Theft Auto games:
Link (YouTube) |
In the introduction he talks about how driving a car in first-person mode is “inconvenient”. This goes back to the need for in-game maps and how people tend to get lost more easily in games: No peripheral vision. Driving in GTA is no problem in first-person mode until you want to make a turn, at which point the whole thing falls apart. Not only do you not have peripheral vision, you can’t even turn your head.
This is an understandable limitation if the designer doesn’t want to have to make the interior of each and every car in the detail required for a proper in-cab view, but still: You can’t drive if you can’t see where you’re going, and sometimes you’re going ninety degrees to the right or left. Moving the camera up and behind the vehicle lets you see the stuff you need in order to make a reasonably safe turn, at the expense of introducing the problem depicted in the video.
I do like the way Half-Life 2 handled vehicles, where you steer with the step left / right buttons and the mouse is used to move your head around. It still can’t really cure your lack of peripheral vision, but it at least lets you turn your head to compensate. I’d love to try that scheme in a proper metropolitan setting and see how it holds up in traffic. My hope is that I’d be able to drive from the apartment to the bowling alley without totaling my car in the process.
Experienced Points: Impossible (to beat) DRM
This week’s column is about how the Ubisoft copy protection could actually be made powerful enough to keep the pirates at bay for months. Their latest system lasted only six weeks or so, but a better designed system could have endured a lot longer.
Adding a bit to what I said in the column:
Typically a server responds to the client. You run your World of Warcraft client, connect to the server, and then your client will send a request, “Hey, I just showed up in the Goldshire and I need to know what characters are here.” The server then sends you this data. It’s a request / response system that’s fairly easy to reverse engineer. If you’re trying to write your own server, you look at what the client sends and see what the server sends back. Then you make your version of the server do the same thing.
But you could make the process really, really difficult to track by simply making the client a passive recipient of data. The client would just send actions about where the player is standing or what they’re doing, and the server sends the client data without prompting. The server sees you get near Goldshire, then waits several seconds, then sends you the info on the town. It’s pretty easy to figure out a situation like this one, but as the data becomes more crucial to the game and the responses become more obtuse, it becomes harder for the cracker to know what their copycat server should send, and when. Tracking something fast-paced and chaotic like combat would be a nightmare.
The mantra of security people is “obscurity is not security”, which is true only if you need your data to be safe “forever”. If you’re guarding against reverse-engineering a remote system and if you only care about the first few months, then it possible to make a very very safe system. Think of it this way: All of the scripting data of the game is on the server side. Dude A standing here, item B here, door C opens with key D, etc. Somebody – probably a small team of people – spent months setting up those scripts. You need them for the game to work. The cracker can either replicate all of the work done by the original artists, or he can play the game and every possible scenario in it to harvest the data from the server.
(Reading the above, I think I duplicated some of the points I made in the article. I apologize for that. This was a 2,000 word concept that I foolishly tried to cram into a 1,000 word column, and it think the clarity suffered for it. Looking back, I should have split this into a two parter. Fool!)
Anyway: DRM is bad. Boo hoo, pout pout. Etc.
Stolen Pixels #188: Test Your Shooter-IQ!
No, I’m NOT slowly becoming bitter and angry, resenting an entire industry for its fumbling, ham-handed attempts to entertain me with beige scenery and tawdry storytelling.
It’s actually happening quite fast.
I think I need to get away from shooters for a while. You know, take some time off. I think I’ll just quit paying attention to shooters for the next oh crap I can’t do that can I?
From The Archives:
Marvel's Civil War
Team Cap or Team Iron Man? More importantly, what basis would you use for making that decision?
Games and the Fear of Death
Why killing you might be the least scary thing a game can do.
Silver Sable Sucks
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
The Biggest Game Ever
How did this niche racing game make a gameworld so massive, and why is that a big deal?
The Truth About Piracy
What are publishers doing to fight piracy and why is it all wrong?
Trashing the Heap
What does it mean when a program crashes, and why does it happen?
Chainmail Bikini
A horrible, railroading, stupid, contrived, and painfully ill-conceived roleplaying campaign. All in good fun.
Project Button Masher
I teach myself music composition by imitating the style of various videogame soundtracks. How did it turn out? Listen for yourself.
Dead or Alive 5 Last Round
I'm not surprised a fighting game has an absurd story. I just can't figure out why they bothered with the story at all.
Batman: Arkham City
A look back at one of my favorite games. The gameplay was stellar, but the underlying story was clumsy and oddly constructed.