Tea Leaves

As I outlined before, a large part of my life is spent shopping. This is not to say that I buy a lot of stuff. Mostly I just make mental lists of what I would like to buy, in an ideal world, depending on what my current obsession is. Since my most recent obsession is game consoles, naturally I have been shopping for them latey.

This, of course, makes no sense at all, since the Xbox that I have is perfectly adequate. It is still what I would have bought first, and IMHO has the strongest collection of titles plus Xbox live. The purpose of this exercise is not really to aquire a new console (although that is is likely end result), it is to be able to answer the question what would you get if you wanted to buy a non-Xbox console right now. This, of course, depends on several factors. To me, the three most important are:

1. What does it cost?
2. Does the thing fit in my TV stand?
3. What games do I want to play on the thing?

This is a great time to be shopping for consoles. We are late in the latest cycle, so they are all dirt cheap. Also, there are tons of games available for basically every platform, and there is probably one more major round of releases before people start concentrating on the next cycle. This eliminates question (1) from the discussion. All of the major consoles are basically free. It also makes (3) much simpler, because all you have to think about are exclusive titles.

For a long time, these facts, plus the small and cute thing had basically locked me into thinking GameCube. The PS2 is just too big and clunky, and its exclusives are uncompelling. The GameCube basically makes its entire living off of excellent first party titles that I haven’t played yet:

- Zelda
- Mario (Sunshine, Kart, Golf, Paper, etc)
- Zombies (Eternal Darkness, Resident Evil, etc)

All this in a nice small package that can also play my GBA games on the TV if I want. What could be better?

Sadly, all grand plans can be undone with time and more research.

Time brought us the small cute PS2. Curses. Research found a few titles exclusive to the PS2 that appear to be worth trying.

- Japanese cult games (Ico, Katamari Damacy, Rez, and so on)
- Ratchet and Clank (mmm, explosions)
- Crazy RPGs (Disegea, Shadow Hearts, Shin Megoosy Foobar: Nocturne(*), and so on)

In the past, I’d have written this stuff off as not likely to be enjoyed. But even the RPG has come into my field of vision as a fun thing to do from time to time so now the latent object syndrome kicks in and we are off to the races finding all of the cool strategic turn based titles that Japan can crank out.

Happily, the Christmas season can cure all ills. You can’t find a new style PS2 anywhere. All sold out. So now I don’t have to worry.

But, should the question of which console to buy come across your mind, here, at least, is the information you need to make an “informed” decision.

(*) I just made up that name, because Shin Megami Tensei is a stupid name and hard to remember.

It’s hard to know how to shop for a videogamer. How do you find something that’s appropriate for their age, fun, and not too expensive if you don’t play games yourself? The answer is: you bend to my will and let me choose your gifts for you.

My goal here is to recommend games beyond the “big names” — the fact is, most gamers are more than happy to go out and buy the big marquee titles themselves; if there’s a gamer in your family with an Xbox, for example, she or he probably already has Halo 2. Instead, I’m trying to find the more oblique, offbeat, and inexpensive selections.

Atari Anthology - $19.95 - Xbox or Playstation 2 - Perfect for the older gamer who used to own an Atari, this title will evoke feelings of nostalgia and guilt that will overwhelm the delicate and overjoy the unthinking. It contains 85 of the original Atari VCS games. Only in-house Atari titles are represented. Frankly, all of these games are available in more comprehensive collections for various computer systems, but there’s something to be said about playing them on a TV with a reasonable console game controller. Available in both Xbox and Playstation 2 versions. Appropriate for all ages, but probably most appreciated by those over 30.

Katamari Damacy - $19.95 - Playstation 2 - If you can only buy one game for someone, and they have a Playstation 2, make it this one. You will instantly be transformed from whatever you are to this person — friend, mother, gastroenterologist — into “the glorious angel who bought me Katamari Damacy.” “Odd” doesn’t begin to describe this game. It goes through strange, past whimsical, and wraps all the way around into profound. The colorful graphics, the insanely infectious music, the oddball concept, and the straightforward yet challenging gameplay meld into the perfect game. You can read a review of it, if you’d like, but it’s not necessary. This is the one. Buy it now. Appropriate for all ages; there’s some cartoony violence, but it’s as nonthreatening as an all-consuming ball sweeping up all in its path can be.

Harvest Moon - A Wonderful Life - $19.99 - GameCube - The Harvest Moon games can be a bit saccharine, giving a somewhat idealized view of farm life, but they nonetheless provide a view into husbandry of animals and crops that kids seem to adore. The game centers around doing chores and making schedules (rotating crops, for example). I find this sort of thing a bit tedious, but to kids under 10 it exerts a disturbingly magnetic pull. I wouldn’t get this for a teenager, but for younger kids it’s a good choice.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004: A Century of Flight - $24.95 (or $4.95 (!) with coupon) - Windows PC - It’s become harder and harder with each passing year to justify using Windows as a game platform. Flight Simulators are probably the last class of games — outside of text adventures, which are more of a boutique hobby at this point — that realistically require a PC to play. MS Flight Sim is still best-in-class, and is beautiful to look at. Not really appropriate for kids, unless they’re obsessed by airplanes — this is a real simulator, and not so much a game. If the giftee loves to fly in real life, and doesn’t have this yet, this is a no-brainer. Also, you can use this coupon until 2005 to obtain a mail-in rebate of $20, making this game, effectively, free.

Reiner Knizia’s Samurai - $19.95 - Macintosh - Boardgames are different overseas. One of life’s ongoing mysteries is why German mass market boardgames are interesting, clever, and fun for all ages, while American mass market boardgames — like Monopoly — are boring, stupid, and aren’t any fun. Reiner Knizia is a famous German boardgame designer, and Samurai is one of his classics. Played on an iconic map of Japan, players play chits to try to exert influence over three different social groups — samurai, peasant, and priest — to gain domination. The computerized Mac version of this boardgame provides a decent single-player challenge via computer players, and also allows play over the Internet. The user interface is intuitive and the game is visually appealing. There is a demo available for download. Appropriate for all ages.

I hope you enjoyed this little list. If you’ve got suggestions, feel free to add them below. Extra bonus points if the game you suggest is under $25.

If you just eat turkey and salad, and green vegetables, and skip the mashed potatoes, stuffing, candied yams, and so on, Thanksgiving dinner doesn’t actually make you feel so full that you might die.

I say that L-Tryptophan is just a convenient excuse to deny that gluttony makes you sleepy.

I listen to NPR, as required by my “urbane liberal” membership. If you listen to NPR also, you know that the passage of the seasons can be marked not only by the weather, but by the reappearance of certain set pieces, regular as clockwork, like old friends.

Or, in the case of Susan Stamberg’s cranberry relish recipe, mortal enemies.

Stamberg recites this little bit of culinary performance art — originally inflicted upon the world by food writer Craig Claiborne — every Thanksgiving, without fail. She always talks about how her revolting concoction of cranberries, onions, and horseradish “sounds awful, but is actually delicious.”

I am here to tell you: the woman is lying.

I’m an adventurous, nontraditional eater, who enjoys strong tastes and rough contrasts. The Stamberg relish recipe has no redeeming qualities. I would not feed it to a rat. It is so utterly vile that it transcends mere loathsomeness. It is the Platonic ideal of repulsive food. Through some sort of near-miraculous negative synergy, it takes three foods which are versatile and delicious and turns them into a foul brew that does violence to the very concept of food.

Here’s a better cranberry relish recipe.

• Cranberries, 2 bags
• Walnuts (a bag of walnut halves is most convenient)
• A few oranges and/or grapefruit
• Sugar to taste (optional)

Peel the oranges and grapefruits and chop them very coarsely; you want 1 inch chunks about half the size of your thumb. Put cranberries in the food processor and pulse until coarse (you don’t want to liquify them). Put cranberries, citrus, and walnuts in a large bowl and toss thoroughly; add the sugar at this stage if you want it, but I prefer this dish bitter (the juice from the oranges will give you some sweetness). Put in your refrigerator to macerate overnight.

Eat with a very, very large spoon. The longer this sits in the refrigerator, the better it will get. So make enough that you have lots of leftovers.

Enjoy.

(Thanks to Stewart Clamen for the title of this article.)

Around Thanksgiving, in my house, the pheromones that men emit while bonding flow thickly and freely. In the haze of their L-tryptophan enhanced post-prandial stupors, men move slowly, so as not to alarm their pack-mates. Belts are loosened. Talk of politics is avoided. Attention focuses, inevitably, on whatever sport is on TV. Often, this ends up being football, naturally, but every so often I’ll walk into the room only to find all eyes focused in rapt attention on a golf match.

I have great respect for the skill required to be a competitive golfer. It is a subtle game. It requires more stamina and strength than you’d think, if you’ve never tried it. Put on a replay of an amazing putt and I’ll be able to appreciate it, as long as I don’t have to watch for more than about 30 seconds or so. But I can’t understand the point of watching an entire golf match, or even a hole. As a spectator sport, it is composed entirely of interstitial pauses. Watching golf because you “like sports” is like listening to John Cage’s 4′33″ because you “like music.” When a golfer is taking a shot, the game is interesting. At all other times, the sport is of merely academic interest.

Realize, then, the pain it causes me to admit that WRC Rally racing, which I love, is the golf of the motorsports world.

Rally is about timing. Drivers compete only indirectly. Each driver and co-driver attacks the course, and the best time wins. Unless something has gone very wrong, there are effectively no passes in rally, except for simulations created by compositing telemetry data after the fact. If you played the most popular rally videogames, you might not even realize this, since they typically offer an “everyone races the same dirt track at once” experience, a race format that would probably lead to molten flaming death in real life. The game manufacturers do this for an obvious reason: to most people, time trials are more boring than wheel to wheel racing.

There is not an obvious solution to this problem; which is mostly one of presentation and immanence. The networks — for both golf and rally — are increasingly moving towards highlight reels. Take all the action from a single day and compress it into ten minutes, or an hour. Viewed this way, both sports are marvelously dense with thrills and cliffhanger moments.

And yet, as a viewer, this treatment leaves me cold. A highlight reel is not a sporting event. Sports, like news, or a good chilli, is best served hot. As a spectator, I can’t even stand watching a sporting event more than a few minutes lagged on my Tivo. Once the Steeler game is over, I could care less about seeing what happened. I want to watch in the moment. I want to be in the moment.

A few years ago, Speed Channel would broadcast a compressed highlight reel each night after the day’s rallying. Last year, they moved to showing a single three-hour show on the day after the rally finished. This year, they are showing a one-hour highlight reel a full week after the rally ended. For that entire week, I creep around the Internet like a cat burgler, hands ready over my eyes, lest I find out that Petter Solberg and Subaru won in Wales, and therefore I won’t want to bother watching the highlight reel. Most Americans have no idea what WRC Rally is. Speed Channel isn’t helping; viewership is down.

Combine this with the fact that WRC Rally is a monstrously expensive sport, and you have a sport in freefall. Citroën and Peugeot — the only two teams to have won the manufacturers title in the past five years — have both announced that they are leaving the sport at the end of 2005. When even the team that is winning the championship is fleeing, how do you make a compelling case to other manufacturers that this is a value proposition they want to be a part of?

WRC Rally is not going to disappear tomorrow, any more than F1 will. But if something isn’t done to improve the ratio between the expenses of running races where it’s more or less expected that half the drivers will drive their cars off a cliff and into a tree, and the returns for participating in the sport, then the participating talent pool will continue to shrink. Colin McRae has already decided that the Paris-Dakar Rally is more worth his time than WRC. Who will be next?

I found out today that the title of this piece is sadly not original. In fact, much of what I have to say is even told more concisely here. But I figured, why let lack of originality stop a good rant. So here we go.

The new Metal Gear Solid game is out, and I noticed that aside from the exception above, all the game review sites seem afraid to tell their readers the truth, which is that if this game is anything like the other two in the franchise, then it completely blows. Since they can’t possibly not think this, they must be talking in code. Luckily, I have broken their little code. What follows is a guide to translating the game reviews into rational language.

What they say: The game has an epic storyline.

What they mean: You will spend several hours in the game conversing with a motionless head over your in game radio.

What they say: The game is cinematic.

What they mean: For every twenty minutes of gameplay, you will watch three hours of cut scenes revealing a plot that could only make sense to a serious meth addict.

What they say: The game’s controls follow the classic configuration and provide Snake with a great combination of stealth and action moves.

What they mean: You can walk, or aim your weapon, but not both at the same time. This makes you the world’s most bad-ass super spy.

What they say: The game camera could be better, but it’s not too bad.

What they mean: Worst third person camera ever. You will spend more time looking at the floor or the wall or the ceiling than actually being able to see your enemies and environment.

What they say: The enemy AI forces you to use those stealth skills to the limit.

What they mean: To avoid your enemies, you can walk around underneath a carboard box.

What they say: The game is has a high degree of difficulty.

What they mean: If you have to hear the screams in the GAME OVER screen one more time you will rip your ears off the side of your head.

I hope this simple guide will help you in understanding all the glowing reviews of Metal Gear Solid.

Just finished the single player in Halo 2, so I feel like I can talk about the game in more detail.

Good:

The single player campaign improves on the first game in almost every way. For example, in the first Halo, there was a load screen for every large chapter of the game, but then none within each level until you got to the end. In Halo 2, there is a load screen when you start the game but then there isn’t another one until you quit. Ever. Whoever implemented this gets super genius kudos.

At first, the enemies seem a bit too easy on the Normal difficulty level. While they seem to fall down easier, they also seem faster and meaner than in the first game. The new enemies are mostly enjoyable. By the end of the game, they were beating me up pretty well. I like the energy sword, and I like the shotgun. Dual wielding the plasma rifle is also useful.

The plot twists and turns much like the first one, but overall the pacing is much better. The stages were more linear, with no backtracking and fewer sequences of dozens of identical hallways to get lost in. There are multiple moments in the game where the action is so frantic that you will want to cower under the couch and sob like a little girl.

The ending is a bit abrupt, and hints at a sequel much more explicitly than the first game does. But the final stage is much less annoying than “the drive the warthog off the end of the earth” deathmarch that ended Halo 1.

People have complained that the game is short. These people are nuts. What they mean is, the game’s pacing was not padded out with worthless backtracking missions and boring driving.

Not so good:

There were some rendering glitches in my game, especially in the in-engine cut scenes. What would happen is that textures, or sometimes whole objects would just pop in from nowhere after a scene change. These were relatively rare.

Checkpoints still suck. But there were only one or two sequences between checkpoints that were so long as to piss me off. Usually, these took the form of “you must kill these 10 things over and over again because you keep dying on the 9th one”.

I still hate the Warthog, but the power sliding makes it less stupid.

Too many of the weapons are basically useless. Or maybe I’m just useless trying to wield them.

Multiplay:

The multiplay rocks. I don’t think much more needs to be said about it. My only gripe is that the respawn times don’t give my hands enough time to rest between rounds.

I have a friend who won’t play The Sims. She won’t even try it.

This is someone who likes whimsical videogames, who enjoys nonviolent, nontraditional games. So it seemed to me that even if this wasn’t her cup of tea, it would at least be worth trying. I asked her why she was so sure it wasn’t for her.

“It’s like this,” she said. “In Kindergarten, we used to play ‘house.’ Playing ‘house’ is fun, and you and your friends take on different roles and do different things. But inevitably, there would be that one person who took things to a level of detail that turned a fun game into drudgery. So you’d be playing ‘house,’ and you’d pretend to have ‘dinner.’ And then after dinner, if that person was playing, you’d have to wash every dish. And put everything back in the cabinets. And scrub the floor. And take out the trash. And so on. When I look at The Sims, it looks to me like it was made by that same person.”

This isn’t meant to trash The Sims (After all, I have already done that.) It illustrates the point that “realism” in games, like honesty in the face of the question “does this make me look fat?” can be an overrated virtue.

What most game players seek is not realism, but iconic verisimilitude. You want the game’s settings and mechanics to seem realistic, but you don’t usually want them to actually be realistic.

Examples abound. In Electronic Arts’ Formula One racing games, you can turn off all the driver aids and turn on realistic crashes. For most players, this has the effect of making their car impossible to control. The very first time they brush into another player or a barrier, pieces of their car fly off, and their race is over. That’s “realistic” — if you’ve ever seen an F1 car lose a wing because of contact with another car, you know this — but for the average player, it’s not a lot of fun. Compare this with Project Gotham Racing 2, a game that some players call realistic, in which the typical online race may have hundreds of high speed collisions with no injuries and no retirements.

It’s not fair to simply dismiss PGR2 as “not realistic.” Rather, the effort to create realism is concentrated in certain areas and downplayed in others. Immersion in a virtual world is enhanced by realistically modeled environments, noticeable differences in the handling of cars, etc. However, there are plenty of places where realism is blown off: damage is “realistically modeled” visually, but doesn’t make the cars harder to drive. There are no traffic lights. You don’t get parking tickets. You don’t have to send in monthly car payments.

Most people would distinguish Counterstrike from other first-person shooters by describing it as “more realistic.” It has lovingly modeled weapons. Weapons are lethal — getting shot has consequences. Dying means you are out of the mission. You can’t magically grab a first-aid pack and be healed. On the other hand: dying is fast - no sitting in a puddle of your own blood, gut-shot and moaning, à la Reservoir Dogs, for 2 hours before finally expiring. There’s no real negative consequence to being almost dead — you can lose 99 points of “blood” and still aim just as well as when you started the round. None of the characters faint or vomit at the sight of blood. If the hostages you are rescuing get shot, there’s no corresponding civil suit. Apart from the hostages, there are never any innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire. You never have to wonder if your character has adequate life insurance to take care of the wife and three children he left behind.

And that’s OK. Just like its kissing cousin “open-endedness”, “realism” is best used in small doses (by comparison, you’ll never hear someone say “There was a bit too much fun in this game, for my taste.”) In the real world, there are no second chances after death. In nearly every videogame ever made, the character’s death is quickly followed with another opportunity to try again. (There actually are some exceptions to this, but they are rare enough that we can name them: Wizardry 8, The Temple of Elemental Evil, and Angband each have an optional “ironman” mode where the death of a character is permanent. You are not allowed to revert to an earlier save; saves in that mode are for pausing only, not for backup. Steel Battalion for the Xbox will delete your savegame if you die while in a mission. To the best of my knowledge, that’s the full list of current games that try to punish you “permanently” for dying.)

If the elements that the author brings to a videogame are ludology (the game mechanics) and narrative (the story), what the players bring is curiosity and a willingness to suspend disbelief. In this way, game players are like movie audiences. Filmmakers have had decades to develop a vocabulary that is detailed enough to create immersion but not so finely-grained that it annihilates the suspension of disbelief with boredom (”Let’s make dinner,” someone says, and then with just one simple cut, everyone is sitting at a table, eating.) Game developers are still working on their vocabulary; the medium is still in its youth. And unlike in film, where formalism without narrative has been completely, utterly rejected by the viewing public (and has thus become solely the realm of experimental artists), formalist games without narrative are still among the most popular (Tetris, anyone?)

Atari Football

Twenty-five years ago, videogame football was three white blobs and three pink blobs doing “the running play” or “the passing play.” Today, nearly all the rules of the game are implemented, player movement is largely motion-captured, and even the trappings of the TV broadcasts are imitated. But despite all this realism, the game does not have the feel of real football. It is, to twist a phrase of Douglas Adams’, something that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike football. The John Madden franchise isn’t actually a football simulator; it’s a simulator of being John Madden.

So go ahead, model the ballistics in your game, or the ragdoll physics of one player tackling another. Go ahead and motion capture and render the graphics at a higher resolution. Play the explosions in surround sound. But remember, the moment you forget that realism needs to be subjugated to the game’s fun factor, and not the master of it, you run the risk that half of your audience will go play Tetris or Bejeweled instead.

Say, does this shirt make me look fat?

Work has been super-busy, so I haven’t had any time to hack on Bonaguil. Therefore, I’m releasing the source code for people to look at and/or play with. All right are reserved at this point; consider this free (as in beer) for personal use, but not in the public domain or GPLable. If you produce a derivative work based on Bonaguil, please give credit accordingly and include the URL of this weblog. Bonaguil may not be included on any archive of games or software being sold for profit; if you want to do this, you’ll need to contact me and arrange a separate licensing agreement.

So if you care, you can download a jar file that includes all resources, including source code. The AI interface is fairly well-isolated, so it should be trivial to implement AIs that are much smarter than the two demo AIs I provided here. If you end up implementing an AI and send it to me, I’ll include it in the next release, if you like.

There was a discussion on our local chat system a while back about the genesis of the frenzy over Halo 2. Pete suggested that the pre-release hype for a game such as Halo has its origins in the hard-wired obsessive addiction that hard-core gamers have for the next big hit, having been searching for the next big hit since their first exposure to games as young men.

This, of course, does not apply to me. My strange obsessive frenzy for Halo has a completely different source that Pete could not understand. After thinking about how to explain it, I came up with the following.

It is actually pretty simple. For any given hobby, there is always the object that you can see, but do not yet own, which will improve your experience in the hobby.

• In photography, that one lens or camera body you do not own yet will make your pictures better.
• In record collecting, you are always after that quintessential performance or recording.
• In cycling, that new frame made out of unobtanium will make you ride faster.
• In cooking, there is that one pan, or stove, or recipe, which will make your sauce, or soup or stew perfect.
• And of course, in games, there is always the next new game which will be groundbreaking and excellent.

By analogy to photography, I’ll call this object the latent object of desire. Back when we captured images on film, the undeveloped image was referred to as the latent image. Exposed film has the potential of an image on it, but the picture itself is not there until you develop it. Any photographer will tell you that exposed film only contains perfect images. It’s only in development that you find out that you did it wrong. So the reality of the actual image is almost always a letdown compared to the perfection of the latent image.

Similarly, the reality of the real object is always a letdown compared to the perfection and bliss of the latent one. Therefore, it is usually much more fun to shop for things than to actually buy them. Not coincidentally, the way I tend to interact with hobbies, especially when I don’t have much time to really do them, is in shopping for latent objects that will improve my relationship with the hobby when I finally have time later. Which brings me back to Halo 2.

The gaming industry, being full of talented sales people, are masters of manipulating the desire for the latent object. This is the reason that “journalism” in the industry concentrates almost entirely on previews of games that have not been released yet. The game not played is still in a state of perfection. The latent game, if you will, has no save problems, no glitches in the online servers, no gameplay foibles, pacing problems, or unbeatable boss battles. Gaming provides an almost unending stream of new latent objects to shop for, to think about, and to compare.

So of course this drives my natural addiction to shopping into a frenzy, and hence the psychological mania over Halo 2. Luckily, I mostly shop, as opposed to this guy.

My other little shopping project of late has been comparing the GameCube and the Playstation 2 as second console purchases. After weeks of painstaking research, it seems to me that it all boils down to Mario and Zombies against Final Fantasy and cult Japanese imports. But more on that another time.