Zoë, dear, three words:
Buy a gun.
Masters of Doom
I love this book. I think it’s one of the best books about the history of video games ever written. It tells how John Carmack and John Romero both got into video game development, how they met, how Id Software was formed, and how it all fell apart. The writing style isn’t quite conversational, but neither is it as dry as most histories; the book is very easy to read. It’s also thoroughly indexed and documented, just like a history should be.
The book has its critics. Some people mentioned in the book have stepped forward to say “That’s not exactly how it happened”. Which is fine; no history book is going to be perfect (and there’s no real reason to think that these people’s versions are any more accurate than what that actually did make it into the book).
But most people who criticize the book do so on the grounds that it’s not harsh enough on Romero at the end. They point to the author’s relatively even tone as he details Romero’s actions during the development of Daikatana (which, of course, is simply the same tone the author used throughout the rest of the book). They even point to the fact the author thanked Romero in the afterward for letting him crash at Romero’s place, thus proving his inability to be objective!!!1!!lots of exclamation marks! I guess the author should have dropped his objectivity, allowed his blood to boil, and thoroughly castigated Romero for trying to make a game. Jeez.
Anyway, the book is great. You should definitely read it if you have any interest at all in the history of PC gaming.
Dreamfall
Mental note: do not start up a new adventure game at 10:30 at night, “just to see how it looks”.
I started on Dreamfall last night. Dreamfall is an adventure game with a few action elements in it, and is the sequel to the widely praised The Longest Journey. It was developed by FunCom and published by my very own Aspyr Media.
The first thing I noticed about Dreamfall is that its keyboard/mouse control scheme is a crime against humanity. If you play this game on the PC, do yourself a favor and use a gamepad. Mine is actually a trusty green PS2 Dual Shock controller attached to a PS2-to-USB adapter, and once I got it set up properly the camera stopped whipping around wildly and the game settled down into a very nice control scheme.
The second thing I noticed about Dreamfall is that it is pretty – by far the prettiest game of its type I’ve ever played. The artists did a good job keeping the human characters out of the valley but still making them more realistic-looking and expressive than mere cartoons. The voice acting is also very good once you get past the cliched prologue. The world of the future it presents is surprisingly plausible, because it’s basically this world…only more so.
Now, that’s all fine and good, but is the game compelling? Um…yeah. It compelled me to stay up way too late seeing what would happen next, and I can’t wait to get back home this evening and play it some more.
Downsides? I played straight through the first two chapters last night and did not run into a single puzzle that gave me any trouble whatsoever. All to often, Zoë will actually tell you what you need to do. I know, I know, adventure games can’t be too hard if they are going to hit the mainstream (again), but at some point it would be nice to hit something I have to actually think about. I’m sure it’ll get tougher later.
Also the stealth and combat elements in the game are both trivially easy…why even put them in the game if you’re not going to utilize them well?
But overall, it’s off to a good start, and I haven’t even gotten to the…weirdness I know is coming.
IE HATE
I guess I’m going to have to recheck this site in IE every time I post, or else the menus are going to pop down underneath the content again. IE insists upon putting extra padding pixels in when it parses a CSS file beyond the ones I have already specified. So if you came here recently under IE and saw nothing but a blank white field, it should be fixed now. Maybe. For the next five minutes or so.
E3 Reaction
I watched all three press conferences live. My reactions:
Nintendo: By far the best of the three conferences. They managed to present a great sense of fun, starting the moment a grinning Miyamoto took the stage with a Wii remote (I guess I’m used to the name now) to conduct a virtual orchestra that was playing the Zelda theme. The only odd part of the conference was the fact that they didn’t announce a date or a price…even though both should be obvious. The Wii will ship in either October or (more likely) November, and will cost $250 at the most. Why not just go ahead and announce?
Nintendo is in a great position for this round of the console wars. First, they are at the bottom, so there’s nowhere to go but up. They will have the cheapest console by far, with the most interesting technology. And the Wii is basically just a souped-up GameCube, which means that GameCube games will run natively (no emulation or extra hardware required) and their third-party developers already know how to make Wii games.
Sony: Sony’s conference was literally “more of the same” – the same game types we already love to play, only with graphical improvements. The PS3 is going to look fantastic, and apparently every game made for it is going to be a dirty, grimy post-apocalyptic first-person or third-person shooter. The only innovation they actually have is the tilt control, which of course was added after they saw the Wii remote and doesn’t work as well as Nintendo’s version. Tilt control is one thing, but the Wii remote actually gives you what is effectively a mouse pointer – this was explicitly demonstrated in Nintendo’s demo of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
Microsoft: Boring, boring, boring. Halo 3 trailer was terrible. The crowd snickered at Viva Pinata, even though that’s just the type of game Microsoft needs to expand their audience. It’s telling that Microsoft is currently struggling to expand its audience out of the 18-34 male demographic while Nintendo, which already has a market across all demographics, is fighting to expand the entire gaming market. And in the end, I’ve got no sympathy for Microsoft here…they are simply reaping what they sowed with their “She kicks high” crap.
It wasn’t until near the end when they demonstrated how the Xbox 360, Windows Vista and cellphones could be integrated that I perked up. That type of close integration has been necessary for a long time, and it’s strange that a game studio is having to be the one that gives it to us. So at least Microsoft can say that it has truly innovative new technology, unlike Sony.
Microsoft has one big problem, though. They launched before Nintendo announced the Wii remote. Sure, they can still make a controller with tilt features, but it won’t be standard in the box and thus developers won’t be able to rely on it being there. Now, it’s possible that Microsoft will come out with a tilt controller and push it hard and it’ll effectively become the “standard” 360 controller. Sony was able to do this with the Dual Shock controller for the PS1. But it’s going to be tough.
Big winner: Nintendo, though if they had just announced date and price it would have been a Flawless Victory.
Second: Microsoft. They truly innovated with Live and now they are extending it even further.
Loser: Sony. “We’re afraid to try new things! We’re going to give you everything you already play with better graphics! And we’ll charge you six hundred freakin’ bucks to do it!”
Talk
I have a (bad?) habit of considering just about everything a teaching moment for my daughter. She’ll ask me some simple question and I’ll grin evilly and she’ll sigh, knowing that she’s going to have to listen to me explain something in nauseating detail for the next half-hour or so.
So we are driving up to Grandma’s yesterday and we pass a sign touting how AT&T and SBC have merged again and I tell my daughter about how they were forced to break up in the mid-Eighties because the government felt that AT&T was misusing its monopoly power. Then I said, “Okay, now the government is letting the smaller companies like SBC rejoin AT&T again. Why do you think the government is allowing that?”
And she replied, “Um…so you can talk about it?”
A fine bit of snark, that. I was actually pretty proud, even though it was directed towards me.
She did quickly come up with the answer that I was looking for (that the telephone companies now have viable competition from cellphones and the internet) so I was proud of her for that, too.
Star Revolution Update 4
Finally, a new image!
This isn’t really a screenshot of Star Revolution. It’s a screenshot of a prototype of the tactical combat system I’m working up. I’m going to actually release this prototype when it’s completed (I’m hoping by the end of the weekend) and let you guys rip it to bits for me. If you’ve played any turn-based tactial games in the past (Jagged Alliance, Final Fantasy Tactics, Front Mission 3 or 4, Advance Wars, etc) you shouldn’t have any trouble figuring out how the system works, but I’m hoping that the changes I’ve made will make combat go a little faster and look a little more fluid.
Yay! Wait…
Hey, whaddayaknow? Gamasutra has started a game development podcast! Awesome!
First topic: the demographics of video game players.
Wheee.
Tiles
This just warms the cockles of my heart. (For the record, that’s the full tile sheet for Ultima VI. That site also contains full maps and tile sheets for The Savage Empire and Martian Dreams, as well.)
It’s also pretty surprising. Ultima VI was the biggest tile-based RPG of its time – the world was represented by a single map that was 1024×1024 tiles in size. The world felt large and varied, but now that I look at the tile sheet…there aren’t nearly as many individual things on it as I thought there would be. The tilesheet has 2048 tiles, but many tiles are taken up by multiple animation frames for a single object. A full 64 tiles are used just to animate the water! The designers did a good job of making different parts of the world feel different, despite the limitation.
Once again, I’m having trouble finding decent terrain tiles for Star Revolution. Not only am I having trouble finding Earthlike tiles, I can’t even begin to figure out how to find or generate tiles for non-Earthlike environments. This is all going to have to be solved, of course.
If You Wait by the River Long Enough…
…you will see the body of your enemy float by.
Or Lucas will finally get around to releasing the version of Star Wars that you really want.
Also check out the the trailer for Lego Star Wars II on that page. That game looks like it’s going to be very, very fun.