New Years Resolutions

• Use more . . . dramatic pauses
• Listen to more music, expand library
• Collect data
• Read more
• Be less of a dick sometimes
• Practice Harmonica more
• Not have a new years resolution

Yeah, a few months late. I found this in my drafts folder, I had forgotten to hit ‘publish’

My life is funny

I was showing some people the drafts on my book, a collection of humorist, er.. articles, and they asked me where I come up with the ideas. I pulled out the notebook and said ‘from here’. This, of course, did not answer their question. Where do you get the ideas you write in the notebook? I looked at them quizzically and pointed all around me.

You are my source of material. Life. Everything around me. I see a goose laying nest in a trashcan in front of a blockbusters. That’s funny. Nobody is going to disturb the bird. in front of a blockbuster.

Or this conversation (IM) with a friend who is having girl problems

ME: but take solace this fact
ME: many girls are out there wondering why no guys seem interested in her
William: Lies, I am sure.

My girlfriends mom asks her girlfriend “Hunter is just one of those people that is always laughing, isn’t he?”

Yeah, I suppose that’s perfectly apt. Look at the world and laugh with it. If you can’t laugh with it, laugh at it.

The most important part of a game is its beginning

The hook.
I know it’s sad. It’s sad for developers, It’s sad for consumers. All of that content that has been worked so hard on is, for the most part, being ignored. For a few different reasons, people are not playing through games to the end.
Why not?
Well, I can tell you. I am one of these people who stop games after starting them. My friend Ben, he puts hundreds of hours into few games. (Notably: Mount and Blade: Warband, Minecraft, Garry’s Mod). I seem to put few hours into hundreds of games. I have not beaten as many games as I would have liked. Recently the ‘done with’ list of games which I have beaten include VVVVVV, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood and Bit.Trip Beat (for the Wii). Also notable are Portal and Portal 2, but I do plan on going back and playing these games through again. (Portal 2 for second time, Portal for 4th or 5th, I can’t remember). So why do I play portal again instead of picking up Greed Corp, Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, Assassins Creed, Max Payne 1&2, Bully, or Far Cry 2? (never launched any of these games except Greed Corp) Well, for the most part these are big games. They require large time commitments. It is easier for me to launch a arcade type game. By arcade, I don’t juts mean Geometry Wars or Bit.Trip, I mean any game that doesn’t really have a level, campaign, or story mode. This is Team Fortress 2, Killing Floor, Flotilla, Swarm Arena, Multiwinia, That sort of thing. TF2 still wins as game I have put most time in (probably not ever, but in the last three years). 98 hours is a long time for one game to hold anyone's attention*, and TF2 has done well? Why? Is it the updates? Well, sure, but the updates are the reason I am not playing it right now!
*I probably have put more time into minecraft, but I (luckily, IMHO) have not logged those hours. Days.
Let me get back to the point, The most important part of a game is its beginning. Lets take Trine for example. I wrote a long piece on it (mostly) yesterday, after playing it for an hour. Will I pick it back up and keep going? Sure, but if something doesn’t change in the boring level design (admittedly, I am not far in the game) I will just drop it and play something else. What I do have is options.
The game needs a hook. Games need to grab us from the beginning. Often, this is not by throwing us in some huge action sequence and give us a taste of the game. If the game is story driven, It may juts be by showing us an interesting story. Portal is a good example, a better is Half-life. When do you even begin half-life? After what? 20 minutes of that rail? And that damn tutorial level?
Look 2 posts back about what I say about Crysis. The first level is very important. It shows us how to play and shows us what to expect. Puzzle games have this easy, they just introduce the puzzle mechanic. Surprisingly, adventure games also have it easy, because you just look at the story you wrote for the game, and start at the beginning. Then you playtest and make the level work. Look at that last sentence. I think developers may be spending too much time refining their epic boss fight and not enough time properly starting the gamer off on the right foot. If I enjoyed the first hour of gameplay, I am more likely to sit through the rest of the game. Go ahead and start a game of slow. But do not be mislead, When I say slow, I do not mean boring. I don’t mean ‘uh, make that level longer. More useless platforms’. What I mean is have a lenient learning curve at the beginning. Give them obstacles that show difficulty but that they can get past. Too often games have levels that act as walls. You are fine up to here, but 1/3 into the game you can’t get past that one giant shadow of the colossus and toss the controller aside in favor of GTA or a racing game, something you can just pick up. There is something to be said about the resilience of a gamer. Before you blame me for being a quitter, realize the amount of time I have spent in Super Meat Boy, a notoriously difficult game. Its short levels act as often checkpoints, and you can skip a level if you get stuck, so while it is insanely difficult, it is open to players not giving up.
Darwinia is another example. I have just gotten past the first level, and I have put half an hour into the game. I don’t feel like I have accomplished anything, but playing multiwinia is showing me what I could be doing in single-player form. The game is supposed to be brilliant, but I haven't played it that far yet. The checkpoint is just the beginning of the damn level, so when I die its 20 minutes lost. Yet I plan to try again, but look, over there, Minecraft!
Checkpoints. Saving. Have them in your game. Have them often. A boss may kill me, but I won’t go fight it again if it means replaying the entire bloody level like an ADD kid learning piano. Replaying levels is something nobody wants to do, In my opinion.
Maybe that means shortening your game up. Condensing it to get rid of boring, repetitive levels that drive away gamers. Yeah, content will be missed, but that is the media you create in. You want your game to make the player attempt to unlock everything, not force them too (IE: Portal, Portal 2). Filler levels just screw with difficulty curves, and add to the whole ‘wall’ thing. Who says games need at least 8 hours of gameplay? Take Portal for example. 2 hours or so long, one of the best games of all time. Have your game be as long as it is, not as long as you think it should be.
The hook may be important for getting a gamer to play, but the hard part is getting them to play again. Pick it back up and try the level again, keep going through the levels. Continually add interesting things.
Maybe I am nit-picking here. Maybe this all goes back to me just not being good at gaming, since other people seem to be beating half-life with ease. Many other people. Hmm, I should launch that one again. (Then move on to half-life 2, and its parts.) But will I? Eventually, but Multiwinia, TF2, and Killing Floor are just more inviting.

This post is probably about Trine

What I think so far, one hour after playing.
Man, I wish this game wasn’t so boring! I picked it up at the humblebundle, which is a fantastic idea and I love it (have bought every one so far, plan on continuing to do so). So most of this complaining is really not worth anything, because I didn’t pay crap for this game. Now I am going to switch back and pretend that I bought it for $20, which is what it sales for and thusly how much the developer values it.
Go ahead and start complaining, I am writing this review to soon! I should play more! Well then don’t consider it a review! Problem solved.
Perhaps I just am not any good at video games, because it is often hard for me to get into them. I find my main problem launching the games, once I begin I am obsessed like the rest of us, but its ‘I could spend this time juggling’ or ‘I could spend this time interacting with females’. When I do remember that I am a gamer, and subsequently all of those thoughts go ahead and launch themselves out a window and towards a conveniently placed but unexplained spike pit, I launch the game and get going. Speaking of unexplained spike pits, that seems to be a theme, isn’t it? At least in Mortal Kombat you could say “That’s not the point now, is it?” But I am playing an adventure based puzzle based leveling based Physics engine based– wait, what am I playing here? What is this game trying to be? Lets assume it isn’t trying to fit features in one box (which it does not appear to be) and just takes little influences from here and there. There are three characters you can play as. A Magician, A flexible hot chick thief, and a knight. Not the most original characters, particularly when we refer to them as ‘thief’ or ‘knight’, but this isn’t the point. Pressing the 1,2,3 key on the keyboard switches them out like weapons in any other game. And why do we switch them out? To take advantage of their weapons, I mean, unique abilities. The magician can create boxes. (and platforms, probably other stuff, but I guess I haven't gotten that far yet). You create the stuff by drawing squares with your mouse. The time it takes, and my propensity for having my rectangle be not god-damn-square enough makes this very frustrating. Particularly when I am rushing, lets say this is because 5 or 6 skeletons are attacking me and I need to draw some squares to create my steampunk box that will crush them like ants! oh wait, I missed. Oh wait, I’m dead. No problem, I can just re-spawn as one of my other characters. This is probably one of the only reasons that the game chooses characters over weapons as a mechanic. It is unnecessary gameplay wise, and gives the developers 3 times the number of 3D characters to animate. Already I am tired of the jumping animations, but this is a small complaint.
My real complaints so far are with the actual platformingness of the game. I always hated platform games that made me backtrack, or treated the level as not a simple side scrolling obstacle-get-past level. Fuck you, Castlevania. I despise these large levels where I don’t have a minimap and have to run around back and forth trying to find the puzzle to solve. The whole thing is the puzzle? Go right? Pull the lever (or in this game, step on the hard-to-see/distinguish from background button) and then go left and fall down the opened hallway. Not something I haven't seen before, but I don’t like it! It may be clever to look at the whole level and say look at this neat puzzle, but when you have to zoom in and solve it without knowing where anything it, it just doesn’t work. This is a general complaint, it hasn’t happened much in this game so far.I hate not knowing where the damn key is so I can open the stupid door in yet another dungeon in yet another castle. Thankfully this game does not have a key-door puzzle (yet!). What it does have is annoying physics-based puzzles. It has this, but no real physics engine.

Take this image for example. First I tried using my night character, and pushing the spiny swastika around. This actually got the thing spinning, Newton's second law out taking a piss at the time, but otherwise was useless to me. I became my mage and made some boxes that spun it up. Puzzle solved! haha! Let me just jump off and, oh damn, I fell.
This brings me to my second complaint, one which is pretty much the same for all 3D objects in 2D world platformer games. Its difficult to judge exactly where you are supposed to land. The objects, in their being rendered in a 3d world, stretch across the x axis, and often I try and jump onto one and miss. This is not the game I am supposed to be beating, this is jumping onto a ledge, or mysterious floating plank of wood. The reason I stopped after an hour (I will pick back up, don’t worry) is because I was too damn frustrated. At least give the character a nice wide hitbox, which is somewhat present on the Thief character (the jumpy chick), she is too busy being dead for me to use her. She is dead because all I have done is used her, only switching to knight when I hear one of two different enemies I have been presented with so far. (and one painfully easy boss, in fact, the AI is pretty stupid and predictable. Not that I have a problem with that)

Yar! Shoot that arrow at the floor! Why are those spikes there? Is that a mushroom? What is with the dust camera filter? Why is there a fence? Make sure I don’t suddenly gain the ability to walk along the z axis and fall off? Nope, its just for show, another thing my brain needs to cognitively identify and say ‘not intractable, avoid’.
Here is another thing I dislike about the game:
This element. I know that ever since the half-life series, every physics based puzzler needs a see-saw of some sort, but really, what the hell is this? I have to angle it, jump on to the top of it, then let it keep spinning so I can fall off, or jump just in time to miss another platform. I have already encountered 3 or 4 of these things and I am not far in the game at all. I really hope they go away, it is a game that points out how flawed the platform mechanic is in the game. It makes me frustrated.

I think its sad that when I first raw the cobblestone floor the character is standing on, my first thought was “shoot a portal!”. I am good at portal, at thinking with portals, but it has infected me while playing other games. “This level would be easier if I could just portal up to that ledge”.  Also, is that a D-pad back there? Maybe I am dying in this game because I am too easily distracted by all the flashing lights and sounds.
I knew from the beginning I wouldn’t even try to get all the potion's (which come in a few flavors thus far, health, energy, experience, and the like). I found out the game has a level-up-some-traits part to it and now I realize I probably should go back and get all the little green glowy vials. I really don’t want to do this. I have never been one for 100% completion because it is boring. I am playing the game to beat it. I know I have beat it because usually credits roll and it says “the end, congrats” in sparkly flashy letters and maybe some confetti drops down and cheery music plays. I won’t turn around and play the whole damn thing again just so I can tell my friend I collected every coin. Coincidently, I did collect every coin in Super Mario Galaxy, well, that’s not true. I did it with my friends during a 24 hour marathon. After which we looked at each other and said ‘That was neat, now what’ and then ‘Lets do it again with Luigi’. Many hours later, we looked at each other again, said ‘that was neat, now what’ and then left my basement and had our eyes burst into flames by the bloody sun.
Where was I? Oh, right. Trine. I guess my complaints are not really with this game but with this genre of games in general. The last time I played a 3D, 2D platformer was when I beat Lost Winds on the Wii a few years back. I enjoyed that game, but sometimes had the same problem I do here with edge-recognition. Other games all have this same problem. My question is why not go 2D? making a 2D game does not make you a cheap developer. You may think that it puts you in a category with online flash games, but trust me- it doesn’t! (no fears). Not that there aren’t good online flash games, but I digress (for once).  Just because the game is 2D does not mean it isn’t good! For example, Braid. And yet it Moves. VVVVVV. Super Meat Boy. The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom. Toki Tori. And this is just going through my game catalog (2D platformers). Sure, you may want to set yourself apart from the indie crown and present yourself as a ‘rea'l’ game company, and there are a lot of successful platformers that blend 3d and 2d well. (say, New Super Mario Bros). But notice how thin those are. It’s 3d, but only just. The platforms are for the most part perfect cubes, no artistic angly bits of non-land-on-able brush that hangs over the end (the latter not a problem with trine specifically)
I do not know the back story, I skipped through the intro bit (ok, the intro was actually a character introduction, playable (a good idea, high-five), but I skipped through the cut scene parts)

I stopped playing Trine when I got here, Moving the spikey balls (really? any explanation given? No? Maybe I am not far enough to know why the hell there are a bunch of booby traps (hehe, booby)in what looks to be the MASSIVE basement of the wizards, and the knights house!) But why has never been a problem before! (Stop making jokes that princess peach got captured again, you don’t play Mario for the story, do you?) (Not that story is something to be ignored in games. Case in point: Portal). The worlds worst testicles spikey balls killed both my knight (shield only stops one direction, balls all around me!) and my thief. (jumping over didn’t work). I reluctantly grabbed the mage and started fondling the games balls. I mean, I rubbed them around the screen. I mean, I clicked and dragged them (ooh, magic) to the other side of me. This happened until one hit another, rolled back my way. I stopped my current magic ball molestation to stop the one heading towards me, but I seemed to forget that the one I was currently molesting was now hovering directly over me, no longer being kept aloft by my curser. Oh crap, died.
The level design of this game looks like it was stretched out, to provide more gameplay. Repeated level bits everywhere and it is long and boring. I can see that I will have to backtrack (lazy, really, just a time-filler) to solve some puzzles.
I did watch one trailer with co-op, and saw what the game wants to be in its heart. The co-op of this game looks so fun, I actually bought it for a friend. (Instead of buying them Bloody Good Time, which is a bargain bucket game). Yet to try it, but it looks promising.
Hopefully the screens have shown you how pretty the game is, I will credit it to that. Sadly, the pretty-ness is terribly distracting.

More later when I play more. Later.

Linear VS. Sandbox Games

I am typing this up while I am waiting for my friend to beat Portal 2 so I can begin the co-op missions. I beat it last night, 6 hours after I started and less than 20 hours after the game was released (or so). This friend is crapping me for not savoring the game, but I have a lot of games to play and 100% completion is only something I have ever done with Lego: Star Wars* or NFS:HP2. Good games, but not great ones. I can’t bother myself to complete every goddamn side mission and buy every goddamn weapon, particularly in single player games where I don’t need it to beat the game. Here enters the pure sandbox game. I do stress pure, Ill get to that in a minute. For example, I am going to use minecraft. There is no win. There is no endgame, but at the cost of storytelling. There is no story. The game is open, and you set your own tasks and tackle your own problems. This works well in the Lego-like-creative world of minecraft, and other developers seem to be taking note from this direction in gaming (not minecraft specifically), which at first sounds like a good idea but in reality turns out to be bullocks. What happens is the developers add a piece of openness to the game. Think Grand Theft Auto. This open-ness works for Grand Theft Auto, and for its sequels (less and less, I would argue, but this is a different rant). Other games use openness in, in the most minimal sense, a way to select missions, such as in the LEGO: Movie title series. You run around a map and run into the levels to play. Worked for Mario, and it works here, in its Easter-egg filled fun way. When games take this, what is essentially map selection, and start integrating it more and more into the game, quality degrades. Eventually we enter another category, still in the ‘open’ spirit, which is covered in objective based (cover based) shooters. Here is an objective. Got it? Level up. Now you can do more objectives and beat the game. An example of this, (lets be fair and use a good game) is Borderlands. What is the storyline in borderlands? I don’t know, I spend all my time trying to level up my sniper character. –I am always reluctant to pick snipers because I feel like the gameplay is more repetitive and flat with them, (wait, wait, boom, headshot, move on). At least borderlands isn't that cover based (then it gets repetitive). Unfortunately, I am really good at sniping. I enjoy TF2, the balance is well done (or it was, I stopped playing when an big update comes out, let it rebalance and ‘newbies’ to stop playing medic (or whatever). Ill get back into it soon). Anyway, my reflexive skills with the point and click mean the open games are not as good, but this gripe is on the few with character trait selection, and mine to bear. Where was I? Oh, right, open-ness. Borderlands works. Because its fun and pretty and entertaining, but not all games have the other positive attributes, and really, really should be linear. Giving a user a way to go around is fine when they get stuck, like in many puzzle games, but sometimes you just need a god-damn linear story. Want an example? Oh, lets say Portal. Mario platform games. Half-Life series. Tell me these are not good games? Hey, developer, next time you want to add some open-ness to a game, look at the good games that have done that, and the good ones that haven't. Ok, now look at your game. Is it linear at heart? (Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. Wanted to have some openness with the co-op system, but is for the most part linear. Good game). Integrate openness in your games, but the next time I am running around searching for my god damn objective without a shit’s clue what I am supposed to be doing? I will stop playing your game. Do I stop playing puzzles because I am stumped? No. They are puzzles. That’s the point. But do I stop when I don’t know where I am supposed to go? Yes. Hey, look at me, I am in another room with textured wallpaper and pretty graphics, none of which I can grab onto or do anything with. Where am I supposed to be? What should I be doing? (oh, thanks borderlands, cluttering up my screen) (oh, thanks WW2 shooter. “Kill Enemy” “Get to safe house”. gee, thanks, REEEAAALLL fucking helpful).
It is hard for me to say no to making games open. I want innovation and creativity. But We seem to have lost that. This is a problem with little big planet, minecraft, spore, and other similar games. Users are not level designers. We will make shit. We will make YouTube videos of us playing with out shit. But those games are designed with that in mind, from the beginning. They are sandbox. They are supposed to be that. This game over here? Not. It doesn’t work. Lets stop that, shall we? Hey, you, developer! Stop making me make these decisions in your non sandbox game! Just tell me what the fuck to do! That guy? Do I shoot him? yeah? ok, cool. done. now what?
Maybe I want to be babied. But studying that game to learn what environment indicators (what 3D models mean what) is not something I should do in my games. Or at least, I don’t want to. I don’t want to rely on my ‘ah, that door, that can be opened, let me go there’ abilities. I would rather rely on my point and shoot abilities in a shooting game. Developers, take it down a notch. Look at your game, look at what it is supposed to be, what it wants to be. Make it the best damn that, that you can. Innovate somewhere! But do it from the beginning, not as a late addition in an attempt to have a unique game.
I stop playing games because I get stuck. Stuck on a puzzle? maybe. Stuck cus I cant drive fast enough, or shoot enough heads, possible. But most likely, stuck because I am wandering around pointlessly and without goal. GTA at least had a lot of different things to do! Your game doesn’t, and suffers from that. These games are bogged down in side-missions and quests and I have forgotten the whole storyline. Poop!
I wish I could name more examples, but a bad one is the first Crysis. I could not beat the first level. Yeah, really. I will man up (man down?) and admit it. The ambiguous level had a steep curve. It started out with a 5 min long learn to jump, crouch, move, run, etc. Then I kept walking 'to the location’, the objective told me, ambiguously, uselessly. Oh look, I seem to have pissed off the British armada of foot soldiers. Kill a few, not all, walk into ambush, start again. Maybe I walked into the wrong area? Enemy headquarters? Bad Idea? Sounds like one. So where should I go? I don’t know! This empty hut? Hey cool, ammo. Thanks for that. Where is the objective? oh wait, I got killed. Now I need to start again, with the walk, crouch, jump tutorial. Really? Either too steep a curve, or the mechanics are not introduced slowly enough. (you can jump no. Go kill those people. (wait what? – ahh!)). It’s OK to start a game slow, pacing is important and I guess I just failed. Online didn’t help – who makes a walkthrough for level 1? really? So I stopped playing this fun game (multiplayer is, was, fun!) because I got frustrated with, what I voiced at the time as ambiguous objectives and level design (still a problem), but now I source it at a quest for open-ness in games. They let us approach the enemy in any way. This is cool, but can you tell me your recommended method? at least? Star Fox’s Peppy type pop up (“Take those out from a distance, cadet!”). Openness lets me ignore this, but not telling me at all? lame.
I conclude my rant with If you are going to be open, spend time on it, playtest it with people who didn’t design the damn level, and make sure you want your game to be open. Please.
While GTA is on my mind Its AI makes me cry tears which I drown myself in, the game was cartoony and fun in its origins but loses more and more of that, turning towards realism with every step. I hate this movement in games, because the focus should be on fun! Also, the newer ones, vice city being the one I played the most, is repetitive and boring (until you use cheat codes and create havoc, but even that gets old). The AI sucks. OK, small GTA rant over.
*98% before I got a life

Mills Mess Explanation

I recently learned Mills Mess (the juggling move). It was very complicated and took me a while to learn. I hadn’t realized I had previously ‘discovered’ it while playing around with under and overhand tosses. So here is an easier (in my opinion) way to learn mills mess.
Prerequisites (and to be fairly good at them):

• Reverse Cascade (outside – in/overhand)
  
• Under the arm

Start juggling a cascade. I would use one off-color ball. When the off color ball comes around, juggling it under the arm and toss it strait up. Then immediately do it again with the other arm. You are juggling jugglers tennis but instead of overhand, its underhand.
At the same time, when you are catching the ball that was tossed by the under the arm throw, throw that one outside-in/overhand. For now just throw it all the way over. If you keep this pattern up, you will have one ball in the center of two other balls that are flying over and under around it. The trick that makes this mills mess is, on the overhand toss, only toss it into the center of your body. Let your other arm (crossed, above) stay out of the way before you catch it with the other one (crossed, below). Now you should be doing mills mess.
Remember the path the balls are taking. They all seem to be following each other in the infinity sign/sideways eight pattern. Keeping this in mind has helped my mills mess drastically.
Don’t forget your tempo, be patient with the second (uncrossed arms) toss. Wait for the previous ball to hit its apex for each toss.
Also, here is how I learned mills mess:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiMHQ7nOa0k

Juggling

I can Juggle. Don’t believe me? Too bad. I learned because, while on a unicycle, I was tired of people asking “but can you juggle?” –what, is the Unicycling not talented enough? Well, hey look, I can! (on the unicycle!). When I learned to juggle, I learned the basic three ball routine and, after I got it down, I didn’t move on to anything else. I really got it down so that I could do very well, and I can do it on a unicycle. Recently I have started moving on to learning move juggling techniques, and I have been practicing for almost an hour every day this week (no Facebook, look at my free time!)  Anyway, juggling is fun and worth picking up, which I recommend you do!