Acausal Connecting VehiclesAn enjoyably weird moment of synchronicity. As those of you who follow me on Twitter already know, I woke up yesterday morning and was immediately assaulted by the image of the giant vagina bicycle taxi. (Protip - the comments are the best part of the link).
Shortly thereafter, on the way to work, I encountered this:
Who knows. Maybe it’s just Gina’s van.
Irony, Thy Name Is NikoSo, what have I been doing for the past week?
In what can only be described as a perhaps inevitably ironic turn of events, immediately after posting my snarky item about how I had no intention of buying or playing Grand Theft Auto IV, the editor-in-chief of a game magazine informed me that he was sending me a copy to review.
So, I’ve been playing the hell out of GTA IV. You’ll see my real review in PTD in a few weeks, but I’ll say up front that the game has surprised me in more than a few ways.
Damn it.
A Slight ApologyThe Celtics finally lost a playoff game at home tonight, even with Ray Allen finally showing up. Why did they do this? They couldn’t defend the Pistons. Why couldn’t they? Well, because Detroit actually has a lot of different offensive sets rather than just playing a two on five pick and roll game. Therefore, I apologize to them for my earlier outburst. I guess I was wrong.
Note: I was probably unfair to the Lakers and the Spurs too.
An Experimental ForumAs something of a test, we’ve set up a web forum, here. If you’re a regular reader, please consider registering and trying it out.
We’re not sure whether this is something we want to support, but I figured it would be an interesting experiment to set it up and see if there’s enough of a community that’s interested in using it. The choice is yours.
Kudos: Rock LegendOne of the strangest games you’ve probably never played is Princess Maker. Ostensibly a parenthood simulator, Princess Maker is yet another male attempt to define, categorize, understand, objectify, and, ultimately, dominate teenage girls: reduce a girl to a finite state machine that can be told what to do, and command her to become the ideal woman. Make the right decisions, and your “daughter” will become a princess, or perhaps, if she’s Jewish, a doctor. Make the wrong decisions, and she works as a tavern wench or whore.
The psychosexual aspect of this is, needless to say, fascinating (you should see some of the pictures I decided to not embed as representing Princess Maker) but that’s not what I want to talk about today. Rather, I want to talk about the mechanics of the game: at its heart, Princess Maker is a scheduling game. There are so many days in a month, there are countless potential activities, and you can bully your adopted daughter into engaging in just 2 activities per month. Those activities will increase or decrease her abilities, or her stress (or, of course, her weight). The core of the game is deciding how she spends her time.
In Japan, the game is one of the forebears of the Hentai game. In these games, you schedule a protagonist’s time, engage in some branching dialogue, and inevitably your character has sex with 5 or so girls (or boys) along the way (SomethingAwful’s Rich Kyanka nicknames one game’s girls as “Smarty”, “Sporty”, “Youngy”, “Angryy”, and “Sicky”. These five will be in every hentai game. You’ll see.)
Hentai games never really took off in a big way in the United States, which I think is proof that perhaps things here aren’t quite as bad as they could be. But using scheduling as a game mechanic is something that American game developers have been trying recently, in a different setting: rock band games.
The first game of this sort that I came across was Shady O’Grady’s Rising Star, which I reviewed for PTD Magazine. Despite the unfortunate name, I quite liked Rising Star, a game which combined the addictiveness of RPG-like levelling up with the loose, chaotic feel of the American music scene. Some of the game’s core activities (such as songwriting) were accomplished via minigames, while other activities required driving around town, or simply deciding what songs were in the set list. The game had some rough edges, but had a punchy, vital feel to it.
Kudos: Rock Legend shares some superficial similarities with Rising Star. Like the earlier game, your goal is to manage a band into rock superstardom, starting from practically nothing. Like the earlier game, some of your advancement in the game comes from simple scheduling, while some of your advancement comes from playing minigames. The game’s feel, though, is quite different: where Rising Star felt rough but vital, Rock Legend is much more polished, but also presents more of a cool aspect to the player, and here I mean cool both in the sense of “popular and accessible” and also in the sense of “somewhat chilly.” The requirement in Rising Star to go on tour and actually drive around to gigs lent a bit of (enjoyable) chaos to the game. Rock Legend maintains more of a “control panel” approach to the subject.
Rock Legend is remarkably free of chaff or busywork. On your band’s road to fame, every turn matters. On any given turn you have a number of choices: you can write a new song (with a clever min-max minigame played in music notation, much cleverer than Rising Star’s ponderous game of Concentration), you can practice your songs, improve your musicians’ skills, or undertake PR activities. Lastly, you can simply rest and recuperate to try to reduce your band’s stress.
It’s in the management of your band members that the game shines. Rising Star purported to model complex like/dislike dynamics between band members based on personality, who wrote songs and which songs were performed or recorded, and so on. But in practice, I found that if you just threw hotels and cocaine at your band, they’d all manage to get along. In Rock Legend everything can be going gangbusters but your bassist will simply leave because he’s stressed and unmotivated. You really have to pay attention to keep everyone happy, particularly if some of your band members are naturally taciturn.
There’s one drawback that deserves specific mention. The background music of the game is, or at least sounds like, a single track. With vocals. After a very short time, you will learn to hate this song. I tried turning the sound down, but one of the minigames, a Simon variant, is easier if you have the sound back on. Rising Star managed this in part by letting the player assign their own MP3s to songs in their set list, a touch I thought was cute. Rock Legend either needs some similar mechanic, or it needs a wider variety (or simply less intrusive) background music. In the grand scheme of things, this is pretty minor — you can always turn on your own MP3 player, of course — but it stands out as a rough spot in such an otherwise polished game.
I found Rock Legend to be an enjoyable diversion, although at times a bit static. The level of interface polish on the game is impressive, but the cool tone was somewhat at odds with the subject matter. At the core, though, this is a good game: it gives you all the challenges of a well-balanced time management game in a single package.
Kudos: Rock Legend by Positech, $22.95. Available for Windows and Mac OS X. A free demo is available on both platforms.
Disclosure statement: the publishers of Kudos Rock Legend graciously provided a copy of the game for review.
Pick and Roll and Pop and Pick and Roll and PickToday a short basketball rumination and tutorial. With the Celtics in a serious playoff run for the first time since I was in college (yes, they made the East Finals in 2002, but that doesn’t count because even if they won they’d have been crushed by the Spurs or whoever) I’ve been watching some NBA basketball on TV lately. One thing I have come to realize is that I’m really tired of watching the pick and roll.
The pick and roll is to basketball what 4/4 time is to pop music. It is foundational and yet infinitely varied. When run with creativity and flare it is a beautiful thing to watch in addition to being nearly impossible to defend. The basic principle is to set up the guy with the ball in a spot on the floor and bring one other player over to set a pick, or a screen. The ball handler moves so that his man runs into the screen. Timing is important. The screen can’t set up too early, or the defender can just run around it. It can’t set up too late, because then the defender will draw a foul.
OK. So let’s assume that we get a good screen on the ball-handler’s defender. Now here is the situation. You have two offensive players and two defensive players. The screen has just knocked one of the defenders off the ball. At this point, the defense has essentially three choices:
1. Have the defenders switch. Often this results in a big guy guarding a small guy or the other way around. In either case it makes scoring easier. The offensive team can, at this point, take advantage of this mismatch and force the defense to help, which leaves someone on the floor open for a quick pass and a good shot.
2. Trap the ball. In this scheme, both defenders jump out on the guy with the ball hoping to tie him up. The problem here is that typically you run this play with a guy who can pass. So, when the double team happens the guy who sets the pick is now free to cut to the hoop (if the double went to the outside) or step to open space to the outside (if the double team went inside). In either case he gets a pass for a wide open shot, often a dunk.
3. Fight over or under the pick. Here the guy being screened will fight through the screen and try to stay with the guy with the ball. This will take some time, so the second defender must rotate out to the guy with the ball then back to his man. This is like a soft double team, and if done badly leaves the ball handler with a free shot, or a free lane to the hoop.
There are endless variations on these options. You can pick and by design roll to the outside or inside and set up a give and go. You can fake the pick and cut back door. You can split the double team and score or pass off for an open dunk before the help defense arrives. There are infinite possibilities, if you are good at this. When set up and executed well, there is really nothing the defense can do against it. You need an alert and fast team defense to keep every pick and roll from being a sure score. So, what’s not to like? It sounds like a sound tactic for the offense to use every chance it gets.
There are three problems.
First, team defenses in the NBA are good enough that you have to be really good at the pick and roll for it to be effective. Help defense and quick rotations from the weak side cut off those easy cuts and step back jumpers. Quick hard traps make it difficult for the ball handler to actually make a move or a pass against the defense.
Second, hardly anyone is really good at running this offense.
Third, some teams run this play almost every trip down the floor, making themselves predictable and easy to defend.
Take Cleveland in their most recent series with Boston. They played entire games where the only half court set they ran was “Give the ball to Lebron 25 feet from the basket and watch him dribble for 15 seconds or so. Then run a high pick and roll with one of his stiff big men who can’t shoot or move and then let Lebron try and score 1 on 5.” Sometimes they changed it up and ran the high pick and roll with a small guy instead. This is not only bad basketball, it’s horrendous to watch as well. No wonder they shot something like 40% from the field for the entire series.
Even in the “classic” game 7, most of the offensive sets on both sides of the floor were pick and roll plays with Lebron or Paul Pierce. Once in a while the ball would be moved without being dribbled, but not often.
My question is, where has the creativity gone on offense? Are team defenses just so good now that the creative half court offense with a lot of motion and ball movement has died?
Back in the day (he said, pulling out his walker and cane) the Celtics (say) had four or five distinct offensive sets. There were isolation plays, pick and roll, the low post inside/outside stuff, and various plays that would run Bird or whoever off a series of picks along the baseline or up and down the lane. Back then we used to make fun of Utah because their only offense was the pick and roll with Stockton and Malone. Utah never won it all because their only offense was that pick and roll.
These days it seems like every team is Utah. There are exceptions. I actually saw Boston run a few different things, especially for Ray Allen, which didn’t really work. The Spurs play a thuggish and clunky offense, but it does feature effective ball movement and a few different sets rather than the endless dribbling that is indicative of the game these days. I’m sure New Orleans has more in their bag of tricks than the sorry offense they showed in their game 7 tonight, but I haven’t seen it.
Anyway, don’t get me wrong. The pick and roll is a wonderful thing and a classic distillation of offensive basketball tactics. But it’s boring to watch 80 pick and roll plays a night. This is me begging the NBA for teams that do something else once in a while. Otherwise the NBA will become a place where nothing but boring happens.
Mass Effect: It Didn’t get BetterI was a bit skeptical of Mass Effect so I didn’t pick it up until I found it at the Exchange at something of a discount. I called Pete, “Is Mass Effect worth $40?”. He said he thought it was. I’m not going to say he’s a liar. Reasonable people can disagree about these things. I thought that the experience started out slow, had a slow middle, and ended, well, slow.
Mass Effect follows a fairly standard RPG structure. The game interleaves mission episodes that are mostly combat with a combination of interactive and non-interactive cut scenes. We can cover these systems one at a time.
The combat missions in the game start badly and get more and more tedious as the game progresses. They start badly because the NPCs you are given as squad-mates all have different strengths and weaknesses, but you have no way to know which ones to bring on any given mission until you are already and on the ground and you can’t switch them out anymore. Then you can choose between starting over again or just slogging through. The game makes up for this insult by making the combat really boring.
Bioware has spent their last few games trying to move the standard Western RPG combat system away from turns, dice rolls, and little floating messages with hit points in them. In Jade Empire they were inspired by Kung Fu movies and fighting games and created a combat system that played like a really crappy Kung Fu movie or fighting game. In Mass Effect the paradigm is the science fiction squad shooter. The result plays like a really sluggish science fiction squad shooter.
Combat is split between weapons and force powers, er, “biotics”. The problem is that the weapons are slow and wimpy and the force powers, er, “biotics” have nearly no effect on your enemies as far as I can tell. I found I spent most of my combat time trying to figure out
1. Who the hell was shooting me and where they were standing.
2. Where the hell my squad went and what they were doing.
3. Fighting the radial menus instead of filling my enemies with hot lead and watching them meet a horrible bloody and violent end.
I was pretty much bored after 10 minutes of this and immediately dialed the combat difficulty back to Easy so I would not have to think about it.
The vehicle combat is even worse. The Mako handles like a Halo Warthog whose suspension and steering system have fallen out on the ground. It is nearly impossible to drive the vehicle in a straight line, as it prefers to swing wildly left and right and then flip over in the air after hitting almost any small obstacle. It is doubly impossible to hold the vehicle steady and shoot things at the same time. So here is how you end up fighting in your bad-ass space tank. Drive to point A. Park so you can aim. Shoot some stuff. Do this until the shields are low, then go hide to let the shields charge up. Lather, rinse, repeat until you want to die.
Mixed in with the main plot missions are a bunch of side missions that you find by exploring random planets until you find something do to. Then you land on the planet and do a tedious collection mission. If you are really lucky, you’ll have to drive the Mako to finish it. In the best of these missions, you have to make your way through three identical bunkers to collect and shoot three identical sets of items to achieve three identical outcomes before you are allowed to leave. After doing this mission I stopped doing any of the side quests whatsoever. I bet that’s a good ten or twenty hours of mindless repetitive tedium that I missed out on.
At this point, I really should have just stopped playing the game. But, the one small beacon of hope shining through this fog of mediocrity was that playing the interactive cut scenes really was enjoyable. The dialog system really is as good as everyone says it is. Sure, at the bottom it is pretty clear that these are the same old NPCs with the same old branching dialog and that if you walk up to them 500 times in the game they will say exactly the same thing to you 500 times. Also, it’s pretty clear that Bioware has reduced the actions of the player in choosing the next line of dialog to something akin to the classic “Name! Job! Health!” system in Ultima. But the end result is more than the sum of its parts, and every once in a while you can almost fool yourself into thinking that there are actual animated actors up there on the screen reciting the lines that you have written for them. That’s pretty cool.
Of course, whenever you get close to this state of nirvana, you notice that the actor’s faces look all splotchy and their skin sort of shakes and shimmers like a TV with bad cable as the rendering engine tries and fails to deal with real time lighting and texturing. I’m not sure why lighting models on faces are so hard, but I’ve never seen a game try to do sophisticated face modeling without failing in this particular way. The problem was really bad in Oblivion. It’s noticable, but not egregious here.
The game has other well known technical problems as well. Frame rate is spotty, there is a lot of draw-in. The environments all have that same “KOTOR industrial planet oil refinery” sameness to them. It’s not clear to me what all the cycles are trying to draw, but they are obviously working hard to do something which is then completely hidden by the underwhelming art design. Also, the corridors that you run through in this game feel cramped, and they are separated by long loading screens that look like elevators.
Ultimately, everything I’m complaining about here exists to service the plot and narrative of the game. So I guess I should complain about that too. Never, I think, have so many people worked so hard to create so many cut scenes and so much dialog in order to tell a story that is so utterly pedestrian. Yet again we must save the galaxy from an unseen enemy that reappears every few thousand years to do nothing but utterly destroy every living thing in the galaxy for no apparent reason at all. Yawn.
There is nothing here that even reaches the level of a by-the-numbers boilerplate Star Wars or Star Trek novel. The game is laboring so hard to be epic in scope that the whole enterprise spends most of its time collapsing under the weight of its own world building requirements. The writing and dialog start out at a high level, but pressed for time near the end of the game it degrades to something you might see profiled on Mystery Science 3000. And then, when you finally slog your way all the way to the end you find out that all of this was, in many ways, just a bloated prolog. The real fight will come in the inevitable sequel, or the game after that, or maybe in “Mass Effect 2010: Commander Shepard Meets Mork from Ork”.
As a final parting thought, I must catalog the last two unforgivable sins that this game commits.
First, it makes me spend a lot of time running through long hallways, or expansive sewers, or the great plains and there is no jump button to pass the time.
Second, it has dancing NPCs. Dancing NPCs should be summarily banned from all video games, with grave suffering inflicted on designers who violate the rule.
If I had known what was good for me I’d have quit then I found these two problems. But I thought the game would get better. It didn’t get better.
Pan of SteelEveryone has their favorite pans. Mine are restaurant-style aluminum non-stick pans. I’ve used these for years, generally just buying another one when the coating on whichever one I had started to go south. The pans are durable (except for the coatings) and perfect for lazy people like me who don’t like cleaning frying pans. They are also really good for cooking eggs. Always important.
Lately though, I’ve started to think that maybe I’ve been too lazy if such a thing is possible. A lot of people have been expressing worries about those non-stick coatings burning off and poisoning the air and your food. I think such worries are probably overblown, but it did get me to thinking that I should perhaps restrict my use of the Teflon pans to medium/low heat work and find something better for sauté jobs and that “sear in pan then roast in oven” dance that I enjoy so much.
So I started looking around. The natural first thing to try would be cast iron, but I can’t go there. My hands are too tired and wussy, beat up as they are from twenty years of supporting my computer work at the keyboard. The weight of the iron pans is just too much overhead.
Everyone seems to love those All-Clad stainless pans. I love the medium sized soup pots for making, well, soups and stuff.
So at the last All-Clad sale I picked up a sauté pan to see how it works. It did not make me happy. What I found is that there is a curious psychological problem with stainless pans. People want to keep them shiny. So they are really designed to stay shiny rather than actually cook at high heats and in the oven. Get the oil too hot and you get a brown polymerized mess permanently bonded to your previously shiny silver pan. And unlike a nice steel pan, this brown mess does you no good. Everything just continues to stick to it and you are left to stand over the sink and scrub it off with powder so that even if the food sticks, at least it sticks to a shiny silver pan. This is too much overhead for my lazy self. I could care less what the pan looks like as long as it does its job well, and what I found is that a stainless frying pan is just too frustrating.
Then a couple of weeks ago at Sur La Table, a place you should never go if you want to keep money in your pocket, I spied a pile of those De Buyer carbon steel pans. These were mentioned by many people as an excellent tool, especially for high heat work. So after due consideration, I picked one up.
It is almost too heavy, but not quite. So I put it on the stove and proceeded to burn some oil into it. For those who don’t know, what you do with steel (and cast iron) pans is to “season” them by getting them hot and brushing a thin film of oil in the bottom. Then you let the pan smoke for 10 or 20 minutes and bake this oil into the surface of the pan. The oil bonds with the metal and leaves a very nice non-sticky surface to cook on. It also makes the pan a delicious black/brown color on the inside which projects the idea that you are a bad-ass that cooks a lot:
For some reason, baked oil makes a carbon steel pan great and a stainless steel pan worthless. I looked into it but I don’t really know why. I assume it’s because the sticky oil just sits on top of the stainless pan’s surface rather than getting inside of it and doing some good.
In any case, after about a week of use and a few passes of seasoning I can say that this pan is nearly as good as my old Silverstone pans even for Silverstone pan stuff like eggs and omelets. And for pan-seared oven roasted steak on Mother’s Day, the thing is the perfect tool. It holds heat well enough to get the steak nice and crusty and leave the nice brown bits behind that you need for pan sauce. I could never really get that effect with my old pans, but I would usually shrug my shoulders and just live with it because I’m a lazy bastard.
Finally, since the food generally doesn’t stick, cleanup is easy. Just wipe it out with a paper towel, rinsing if needed. Then dry over heat on the stove and wipe a thin film of oil into the pan if you want.
Overall, a thumbs up. Be careful with the metal handles though. They get hot when the thing is in the oven.
If your local store does not have these pans, you can find them at Broadway Panhandler. Amazon also has pans made by an outfit called “World Cuisine” but I don’t know if they are the same. Internet opinion seems mixed.
The next thing for me to try will be the crepe pans… for pancakes and omelets.
A Simple LinkIt’s a rule of this weblog that we don’t post bare “Hey, look at this” links. I’m breaking that rule for this heartwarming (and heartbreaking) story of a man who introduced his ailing mother to Animal Crossing.
Suicide for fun and profitI think the major conundrum when describing GTAIV is the conflict between the intrinsic and extrinsic narratives in the game. For the purpose of this note, the extrinsic narrative is the one that the player has no control over: backmatter, non-interactive cut-scenes, the story that is imposed by the authors from on high. The intrinsic narrative (also usually called the emergent) is the one that the player imposes on the system, the text he creates through his own interaction with this virtual playground.
First, I should note that theoretically, a player can create any narrative if sufficiently determined — the various *hack games have a variety of conditions for intrinsic narratives that players have created over the years, such as atheist (no prayers), vegan (no meat), &c. That said, any game, in particular the narrative games we’re dealing with here, introduces guideposts for intrinsic narratives. From a roleplaying example, consider how Call of Cthulhu is stacked so that the players lead short, unhappy lives that invariably end in madness, self-destruction, horror, slavery and death. And those are the good sessions!
Anyway, GTAIV’s extrinsic narrative is about the gradual erosion of the remaining fragments of Niko Bellic’s soul as he progressively makes tradeoffs to survive in a hostile and insane environment. Niko already recognizes that he is a Bad Man, and the horrors of his life and the lives of his fellow central europeans are tied together into a story about the Mafiya and clawing to get some kind of a stable existence in Liberty City. In this context, the mad satirical US of the GTA series plays as a cartoonish background contrasting Niko and his believably ugly counterparts. At least up to the point I have played, Niko’s story continues with the certain pace of a tragedy — I know bad things involving Mikhail and Dmitri are coming, and the cutscenes are making me uneasy.
However, GTA’s intrinsic narrative is about the gloriously retarded things you can do within its effectively unfettered framework. My Niko, outside of the cutscenes, drives sportscars at 135 MPH off of ramps to catch air 600 feet above the ground until he’s flung like a rag doll into a Pißwasser billboard. My Niko steals garbage trucks and drives his dates out to go bowling in them, to end the date, he ceremoniously shoots the garbage truck until it catches on fire. My Niko ran over four police cruisers in a flaming ice-cream truck and then escaped by hijacking a sailboat. Outside of the cutscenes, my Niko Bellic is a very bad man, also a very stupid one.
The system developed in GTAIV does make a moral judgment - which is that you can do anything you want as long as you keep your wanted stars down. The conflict between these extrinsic and intrinsic narratives comes, I think, at the expense of the extrinsic narrative — in a more aggressively stupid GTA (like Vice City), it’s not as much of a problem. For this one, I think it is.
A gig