Twenty Sided

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Apr 24, 2012

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 268 comments

 Josh Plays Shogun 2 Part 18: Anno DominiPrevious Post

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In our meandering conversation, I took away this: This game was either intending to be scary and generally failed, or it created expectations of scary-ness that it never intended to fulfill.

One of the biggest sources of tension in Silent Hill 2 was that you never knew what to expect. The uncertainty creates doubt, which leads to a certain degree of suspense. It left you to figure things out for yourself. This flashlight explanation was not needed. Or if it was, it could have been reduced to a little text message like “aim the flashlight at the attacker”. I’m usually in favor of easing players into a game as carefully as possible, because learning under stress can lead to frustration. But this is one case where a little bit of confusion would have been fine.

The Ball of Light even greets you warmly. He’s friendly. He takes the time to say goodbye and lets you know you can have your dream back now, instead of just vanishing without explanation. He’s basically Alan Wake’s own personal Navi.

I like a lot of things about this game, but this opening is a major problem with regards to the tone it’s trying to set.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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SWTOR “Free” Weekend

By Shamus Posted Monday Apr 23, 2012

Filed under: Rants 183 comments

 Supplying Demands for More DemandPrevious Post

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A few weeks ago I created a SWTOR account, planning to take advantage of the free weekend. But then Mass Effect 3 came out and I played that instead. I didn’t even realize that I’d missed the free weekend until Mass Effect 3 was over. I think it was Tuesday when I finally noticed the SWTOR icon on my desktop.

So then another free weekend came along and I tried to get in. But it wouldn’t let me, because the free weekend was for “new accounts only”. I complained in Twitter, and the TOR twitter minder told me to email support and they would fix me right up.

I sent an email explaining the problem: I have never logged in. I never used the free weekend promotion. I want to try the game, but the free weekend is only for “new” accounts. I was detailed and specific. Two days later (after the free weekend ended) they sent me a reply that just moronically repeated back exactly what I told them. “The free weekend is for new accounts only.” Thank you. You have correctly identified the stupid policy I was asking you to fix / reconsider / adjust. (More sensible policy: One free weekend per account.)

I had someone try the invite-a-friend program on me. Same result. You can’t get into the game unless the account is “new”. (New? Like, what? In days? They don’t tell you.)

I suppose I could create another new account. I’m not crazy about this idea. Making a new account is a massive pain in the ass. I’m talking about filing-your-taxes level of hassle, here. They make you set up multiple secret questions, and were very, very picky about what my password needed to look like, so much so that I was forced to break from my password-generating system. (They INSIST you use a special character.) Worse, my now-useless SWTOR account is inextricably linked to my EA / Origin account. So, if I created a new account for the free weekend I would never be able to join that with my existing EA account. I’d have to go through registration again, using a different email, and then maintain a different set of credentials just for SWTOR, and why am I even contemplating this?

While I’m annoyed at having my time wasted (downloading the client takes a LONG time, on top of the account-creation paperwork, plus the time wasted trying to idiot-proof my support email) I’m more mad at the sheer single-minded stupidity of the company. On one hand, they are running advertisements and sending out mass emails. Free weekend for new players! Free weekend for existing players! Account extensions! Invite-a-friend! They’re begging people to come play this thing. But then I show up with a very minor problem and nobody can do anything about it.

Isn’t this supposed to be a promotion? Like, to attract new people to the game? I do not feel very attracted by this point. I feel like BioWare owes me for the time I wasted jumping through their hoops.

The result? I’m playing a lot of Tera and Firefall. Have you heard about Firefall? I missed it two years in a row at PAX. Then I saw this look at the game from Extra Credits:

Link (YouTube)

So that’s exciting.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Supplying Demands for More DemandPrevious Post

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PAXCast 2012 TRANSCRIPT, Part 2

By Shamus Posted Sunday Apr 22, 2012

Filed under: Video Games 65 comments

 PAXCast 2012 TRANSCRIPT, Part 1Previous Post

Next PostJohn Carmack 2012 Keynote Annotated:
Part 1 

Interesting fact: It took Josh and I about three hours to record this hour-and-a-half conversation. Then I split it into to parts, and it took about an hour to edit each half. Then it took Gale some unknown interval of time to listen and make a transcript of the whole thing. Then it took another hour and a half (per segment) to gather up the screenshots and links for the final post.

The upshot is, these two posts combined represent about eleven hours of work, plus whatever Gale put in. I mention this because Josh and I had a conversation about how doing a podcast would be the easiest way to cover PAX.

Man, everything is easy until you do it. Anyway. Here is part 2. Thanks again to Gale for this transcript.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “PAXCast 2012 TRANSCRIPT, Part 2”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 PAXCast 2012 TRANSCRIPT, Part 1Previous Post

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Part 1 

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Experienced Points:The Half-Naked Elf Problem

By Shamus Posted Friday Apr 20, 2012

Filed under: Column 289 comments

 Experienced Points: In Defense of Hepler ModePrevious Post

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Earlier this week, Captain Maybe commented on the stripperific outfits in Tera. This week’s column has some of my thoughts on the matter.

This issue generates way more heat than it needs to. You can’t bring this subject up without someone throwing the word “prude” back in your face, as if you were calling for everyone to dress like monks.

I can imagine a game where the women all have normal looking armor, and the men prance around in loincloths. As a guy, your combat taunts are all sex based. (Like, clench a rose in your teeth and make some super-lame innuendo.) You can see how that would be…

Okay, I’m undercutting my point here, because that sounds hilarious. But only because it would be so novel. But if all games did this? If in every game women were “regular” people, and the men were all half-naked, wouldn’t that feel… goofy?

I’m not saying that women shouldn’t have revealing avatars in a fantasy setting. I’m just saying people should get some choice in the matter. If we all choose freely how to dress, and the world ends up looking like this:

Then so be it. Mammal’s gonna be mammalian. But as long as this look is imposed on players by developers, then the developers are going to take the heat for it from everyone who would prefer to make some other choice.

And if you’re going to make a world obviously crafted exclusively for the 18-24 males demo, then when you start complaining about how hard it is to attract players to your world then I really don’t know what else to say.

In short, I’m not asking you to put pants on. I’m just asking to be allowed to wear some myself.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Experienced Points: In Defense of Hepler ModePrevious Post

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PAXCast 2012 TRANSCRIPT, Part 1

By Shamus Posted Friday Apr 20, 2012

Filed under: Video Games 34 comments

 PAXCast 2012, Part 2Previous Post

Next PostPAXCast 2012 TRANSCRIPT, Part 2 

Gale was nice enough to make a transcript again for us this year, for those of you who aren’t down with the whole podcast thing. Here is part one. Note that I have added links and images, so even if you listened to the podcast you might want to scroll through here and look at the stuff.

S: Hey everybody, I’m Shamus.

J: And I’m Josh. We are here talking about PAX East 2012, which is a convention which none of you have heard of, and we didn’t go to.

S: It’s obscure.

J: Yeah.

S: Let’s dive in, we saw stuff this year, we really focused on the show floor in a way that I didn’t last year, so we’ve got a whole bunch of games we want to talk about. We’re just gonna go plough through this list, and talk about all the stuff that we saw.

J: Yeah, these won’t really be in order, ‘cuz we had the most haphazard schedule that you could possibly have while doing this, and I don’t actually remember when we saw any given game.

S: I know, I lost the chronology here so bad, I have no idea.

J: Yeah, it’s all run together in my head by now. All I remember is, we spent two 14-hour days at the convention centre, and I never want to do that again. [Chuckles]

S: Well, mostly that was because the panels I was on were at the very end of the day, so you couldn’t just leave…

J: All the good panels were at the end of the day, yeah. The LoadingReadyRun, the Giant Bomb, and the Escapist panel.

S: I know, just when everybody is like, “OK, I’ve had enough PAX, I need to go home and pass out.” No, that’s when the best stuff is.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “PAXCast 2012 TRANSCRIPT, Part 1”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 PAXCast 2012, Part 2Previous Post

Next PostPAXCast 2012 TRANSCRIPT, Part 2 

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PAXCast 2012, Part 2

By Shamus Posted Thursday Apr 19, 2012

Filed under: Video Games 154 comments

 PAXCast 2012, Part 1Previous Post

Next PostPAXCast 2012 TRANSCRIPT, Part 1 

So here we wrap up our trip to PAX East. Check out the podcast below, in which we reveal our most favoritist game of PAX East 2012 ever!

PAX is a bit tough for me. I hate travel. To put it in perspective: I hate travel more than I hate going to the dentist. If you gave me a choice of going to the dentist to have some work done, or going on a five-day trip to a convention, I would pick the dentist. When I’m traveling I feel stressed, tired, and out of sorts. My routine is broken and I become neurotic. I’m also terrified of making some public gaffe. (Seriously. It’s like a phobia. Is there a name for being semi-famous and being afraid you’ll say something absurd that will make you look like a fool?)

However… as much as I hate travel, this is the only way I can connect with people in this way. There’s no place else that I could go to meet you folks, or developers, or my friends at the Escapist. So, I go. I put up with the travel, then I crawl home and freak out for a few days. (I slept 12 hours a day for the first four days after we got back.)

What I’m saying is, it’s murder to attend this thing, but worth it.

I think I’ll have one more PAX Post at some point to tie up all the loose ends, and then we’ll be done with PAX for this year. Next week: Spoiler Warning spoils Alan Wake!

Before I go, here’s another picture of Josh and I. He looks a little grouchy here, but it was the last day and we were both tired.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 PAXCast 2012, Part 1Previous Post

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Video Compression Gone Wrong

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Apr 17, 2012

Filed under: Movies 141 comments

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Tasteful, Understated NerdragePrevious Post

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The technology behind image and video compression is an amazing thing. It began as an effort to get more of our pixelated scanned photographs onto a single floppy disk and has now grown into a scientific discipline that blends visual perception with information theory. Throw in some compression algorithms with size / CPU time tradeoffs and a dash of obnoxious patent trolling and you have a field of study that can keep you busy for an entire career.

The early compression systems (like .gif) were just focused on ways to pack together redundant pixels. Kind of “hey, the next twenty pixels are all exactly the same, so instead of repeating the same bit of information 20 times, I’ll do it once with a note on how many times to repeat it.” It was actually a bit more complicated than that, but you get the idea.

A picture of St. Louis during the paleolithic age.

This worked great when images were made from 16, 64, or 256 really distinct colors. If there are only 16 different colors in your image, there’s going to be a lot of repetition. However, as the number of colors grows, detecting duplicates and repeating patterns becomes useless. At some point a clever engineer noticed that while your average image of 16 million colors had almost no points where the same color pixel was used again and again, there were a lot of situations where the pixels were nearly the same.

Human beings sense changes in brightness much, much more easily than we detect changes in color. So, what if we just reduced the color diversity a bit? Don’t mess with the brightness, but just fiddle with the hue of pixels to reduce the number of distinct colors. This can be tricky. Check out this image:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Video Compression Gone Wrong”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Mass Effect 3 Ending:
Tasteful, Understated NerdragePrevious Post

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