T w e n t y S i d e d
It’s early Monday morning and I’m enjoying a little videogaming before work. Suddenly the whole show powers down. Poof.
Oh no!
Ohnoohnoohnoohno.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Mystery Plug”
Avast! Buried Treasures.
I was messing around on Half.com. (Ebay’s sister site, no bidding) and lookie what I found:
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Okay, No One Lives Forever isn’t that big a deal, but these other two have been out of print since before the turn of the century.
I missed all three of these when they were new. I will note that you can very accurately judge the worthiness of titles past by looking at their selling price on sites like this. Grim Fandango (1998) and Full Throttle (1995) were selling in the $15 to $30 price range, depending on the condition of the box / manual. Scrapland (2005) was selling for an abysmal seventy-five cents.
I remember seeing Full Throttle in stores, but I never picked up the box and checked it out. I saw the art and figured it was some sort of action game. With a tough guy in it. Probably some kinda lame Duke-Nukum knockoff. Meh. By the time I knew what it was the thing was long gone. I hope I can get it to run.
I knew Grim Fandango was good. I heard about it. Made a note to get it. By the time I got around to it the thing was out of stores. They didn’t make very many, and they sold out quick.
I played the demo of No One Lives Forever 2. Loved it. Strangely enough, I love send-ups of the sixties James Bond formula more than I like the movies themselves. I even watched Austin Powers 3 all the way through, for crying out loud. I don’t even think Mike Meyer’s parents did that. At any rate, here is a game from 2002 which still looks fantastic to my eyes.
I’m still playing and writing about Episode One, but it’s nice to have a game to play and a few games waiting to be played. I haven’t been in this position in years.
Free Game: Command & Conquer
As part of the 12th anniversary of Command & Conquer, the original game is now available as a free download. You’ll need some CD burning software (like Nero) as the game is available as two ISO files, each of which contains one of the game’s original CD’s. Just burn the images to two CD’s, apply the patch (to make the Win 95 based game work on XP) and enjoy.
I never got into Command & Conquer. Nothing against the franchise, I just never got around to trying it. I’m not a big RTS guy to begin with, so this isn’t much of a surprise. Having said that, this game was huge in its day. If you ever wanted to see what you missed, now would be a good time.
Get the original Command & Conquer here.
Thanks to the Rampant Coyote for the link.
Half Life Episode One: First Impressions
Half-Life 2 ended in an appalling cliffhanger. (Spoiler: You and the female lead were caught in the midst of an explosion. Time stopped the moment before you were obliterated, and then there was a little monologue from one of the other characters. Roll credits. There were ways to justify the main character’s survival, but Alyx seemed to be doomed.)
The opening of Episode One wiggles out of the situation established at the end of Half-Life 2, and while it had the stench of deus ex machina, it was also fun and humorous.
Half Life 2 didn’t really answer any of the main questions: Who is the G Man? What is his goal? Why is he using Gordon – who most likely resents him – to achieve his goals? As I played the game I started to get the feeling this was an X-Files sort of mystery: Lots of mysterious stuff that doesn’t really lead anywhere except to further mystery. I’m a big fan of story arcs and endings, so I’m not crazy about the prospect that there may not be any answers to reasonable questions about the plot. If they aren’t going to tell a coherent story, the least they could do is give us something fun to do.
Which is exactly what we have here. The upside to this making-crap-up-as-you-go approach to storytelling is that it lets them look at the response from one game and adjust the sequel accordingly. Did you like the stuff with the gravity gun at the end of Half Life 2? Did you like teaming up with Alyx? The voice-acted and motion-capped characters? The physics puzzles? These elements seem to be what scratched everyone’s particular itch, and this time around we get a double helping.
The first half hour of the game is… not cutscenes, but scenes nonetheless. Half-Life never breaks immersion by moving the POV outside of the protagonist, and doesn’t lock the player in place without a very good in-game reason for doing so. What we end up with are scenes where NPC’s interact with each other (sometimes nodding in the direction of the camera) but leave you free to move around and watch or ignore them as you see fit. Sometimes developers talk about making the player “a character in a movie”, and this sort of setup is the closest we’ve come to that lofty ideal. The plot may grind on, but you never have an external POV imposed on you, and you’re never deprived of control of your character. I wish more games went this route. (Then again, I wish there were more first-person games in general.)
The game is just packed with cool moments. I’m not against a little padding here and there as required. Half-Life 2 had longish stretches of conventional combat without any dialog or plot advancement, and I didn’t mind. But here they’ve taken the various scenes and set pieces and placed them one after another, without stretches of filler. The result feels almost decadent.
Some mild spoiler comments follow:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Half Life Episode One: First Impressions”
The New Steam
Yesterday the Orange Box was released. It included several games, including Half-Life Episode 1. Reader Trigear already had that, so when he picked up the Orange Box he had two copies. He was able to “give” me one of his copies through Steam. (Thanks Trigear!) In order to get the game I had to renew my relationship with Steam. I’ve been very harsh on the service in the past, but most of that happened three years ago. Time to see how things have changed.
Steam now has a bunch of social stuff: Friend lists, homepages, personal icons, and instant messaging. It looks like they want to turn it into MySpace for Valve customers. Nothing wrong with that, although for an introvert like me the social features have all the practical usefulness as a shiny new pair of rollerskates for Dr. Xavier. One thing it adds is the ability for others to see what games you own and how long you’ve played them. It shares this information without asking and indeed without giving you a way (that I’ve seen) to choose to not share it. I don’t know if this information is available to everyone or just those on your friend list, but the whole thing made me mildly uncomfortable. If it was an option, I might switch it on, but the inability to hide it gives the whole thing a Big Brother kind of vibe that gets firmly lodged in my craw.
Shamus! It took you HOW LONG to beat that game? Man, you suck! I beat it in half that time. On Expert! Using a joystick! While drunk!
Also part of your personal profile is your “Steam Rating”. When I loaded it up it was at “0.2 – teh suck”. I figured this was some sort of rating I gave to Steam in the past as part of a long-forgotten feedback program. I thought it was there to remind me how I’d rated the service, in case I wanted to change it. Then as I played the number went up and I realized that this was not my rating for Steam, but Steam’s appraisal of me. After playing for a few hours my rating is now “3.3 – Shooting Blanks.” Hey Steam: Same to you, buddy!
So in my experience with the new Steam, it started off invading my privacy and followed that with direct personal insults.
Its puerile fanboi attitude aside, Steam is indeed a better service now than when I was first dragged into it. The fact that Trigear was able to “give” me his license for the game is a major concession on their part. It’s not as good as just letting me do as I please with “my” things, but it’s better than similar schemes and moving in the right direction.
I will never love it, but at least the thing isn’t a bother now. Acquiring stuff through Steam is now less of a headache than just pirating* it, so they have that much of it working right. The DRM stays out of the way and is more or less seamless. I do hate to make this concession and accept this sort of thing, but I have to admit that after the recent BioShock / 2KGames debacle Steam looks downright reasonable in comparison. Yes, I know: Thin end of the wedge, boiling a frog, the camel’s nose. Sigh. I know.
* I don’t pirate games, but I’m aware of the process and how it works. It can be a hassle, but if it’s less of a hassle than paying for the game then the publisher is doing something very wrong.
Jane Austen… Sucks?
I’ve never read any Jane Austen myself, but I’m aware of the fact that her work is viewed as monumentally important and influential to the world of literature, and that she is the author of several beloved novels. In fact, looking at what she’s done, I note that Northanger Abbey is the only one which has not been made into a movie at least once. (Although it has been adapted for television. Twice.) She’s been dead for 190 years, and yet her work is still cherished and read by millions. I think it’s safe to say that she were to somehow put out a bookl tomorrow they wouldn’t have any trouble finding people to buy it.
Which makes this story sort of amusing: A guy takes a few chapters from some of her more well-known novels, changes the names, and sends them off to several large publishers. Not only did they think the work was not very interesting or marketable, only one recognized Jane Austen’s work at all.
Tee Hee.
Strongbad Email: Webcomics
As a followup to yesterday’s post on webcomics I thought I’d share this Monday’s StrongBad Email, which is about webcomics. He takes a few potshots at the major comics and at the end it even has a little comic strip builder. (Actually, now that I’m thinking about it I realize it’s not that little. It’s more robust than most of the web-based comic builder’s I’ve run across.)
The real irony here is that so many people classify StrongBad Email as a webcomic.
From The Archives:
Raytracing
Raytracing is coming. Slowly. Eventually. What is it and what will it mean for game development?
Mass Effect 3 Ending Deconstruction
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
Deus Ex and The Treachery of Labels
Deus Ex Mankind Divided was a clumsy, tone-deaf allegory that thought it was clever, and it managed to annoy people of all political stripes.
Another PC Golden Age?
Is it real? Is PC gaming returning to its former glory? Sort of. It's complicated.
DM of the Rings
Both a celebration and an evisceration of tabletop roleplaying games, by twisting the Lord of the Rings films into a D&D game.
What is Piracy?
It seems like a simple question, but it turns out everyone has a different idea of right and wrong in the digital world.
Zenimax vs. Facebook
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
Dear Hollywood: Do a Mash Reboot
Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here are some casting suggestions.
PC Hardware is Toast
This is why shopping for graphics cards is so stupid and miserable.
The Best of 2013
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.