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Since I’ve been taking a rare weekend off, I took the time to download the latest batch of XBLA demos to check out the latest slices of (hopefully) juicy bite-sized gameplay. The results were mixed.

Braid

I’d actually downloaded the demo for this a while ago, but at that stage I’d been pretty short of time, and on getting frustrated with a particular section I had tossed it aside and gone with the far more immediate Geometry Wars 2 instead. But, I came back to it, and when you’re in a more relaxed state and can take the time to ponder the game, it’s actually very good. An interesting platform-puzzler with a nice central idea (the manipulation of time), very solid game design, and a nice art style. Personally I’ve yet to appreciate the genius of the narrative, which seems a little overly self-indulgent to me right now, but people have been applauding it for where it ultimately culminates so I’ll just reserve judgement on that for now. We’ve bought it anyway; it’s certainly interesting enough to justify the purchase.

Mega Man 9

I’ve never actually played a Mega Man before, and 10 minutes with this convinced me I hadn’t been missing much. Quite why Capcom would choose, in 2008 with the full glories of modern technology at their fingertips, to replicate the graphics and sound (and I use that term in the broadest possible sense, ‘poorly modulated noise’ would be more accurate) of the NES with quite so much authenticity I don’t know. I really don’t see the point of creating a new product and making it look and sound like the emulation of an old one - surely if the gameplay is that good, smoothing off a few rough edges and making the sound not shred my eardrums would not be a heresy? Next, you discover that the difficulty level is such that it makes Ghosts and Goblins look like a cake walk. I didn’t even get to the end of the first level before grinding my teeth to powder. Maybe if you grew up with the NES and Mega Man (I didn’t, the NES was never officially released in the UK and I don’t remember even the later ports of MM being very  popular), maybe you’ll find this nostalgia captivating. Although to be honest, my experience of going back to old games (such as through the Wii Virtual Console) has been profound disappointment and shattered memories; it’s generally best to just remember your old games as fantastic, rather than to re-experience them, IMO. However, many reviews have said MM9 is great, so I will have to assume that someone out there likes this game. I personally found it to be a stupidly hard, annoying platform game with some of the worst graphics and sound I’ve sat through in a long time, and about as entertaining as paying someone to randomly stick a fork in my leg. But I guess there are people who are into that kind of thing too.

War World

Oh dear. The first thing I noticed is that it makes what I thought was a fundamental set of incredibly basic demo errors, which in themselves would make me toss it away. Firstly, although the full game allows you to choose from around 10 mechs, the demo only lets you use one. Assuming there are differences that would nuance the gameplay, any developer with half a brain would imbue the demo with 2 mechs to test at least, to allow the player to see what the kind of differences might be. Secondly, the demo is limited by time - you can play for no more than about a minute before you’re kicked out, making any kind of evaluation of the game almost impossible. If this was a quality game, hobbling the demo like this would be absolute stupidity on the part of the game developer. However from what I read, the game is a bit rubbish so perhaps not letting you see much of it in the demo is a blessing. What struck me most of all in the tiny slice of time I got to experience it was that they got the scale all wrong. If you’re going to make a game about robots, they have to be big robots. The smallest one should be as big as tall as a 2-storey house, minimum. Instead, they’ve taken the bizarre decision to make the robots only slightly taller than Bob Hope, meaning that it comes across as just a poor UT3 knock-off with robot skins. Inexplicable.

Duke Nukem 3D

Talking of nostalgia, this was fun to put on for about 10 minutes. Duke is of course basically Doom with a sense of humour, some more interesting weapons & environments, copious one-liners stolen from Evil Dead and They Live, and strippers. Certainly entertaining in short bursts, and it provoked fond memories of the deathmatch games we used to have in our youth (there were a number of hilarious pipe-bomb incidents in particular that resurfaced in my memory on seeing familiar parts of maps). But, the world has moved on - it best serves like an old family album, reminding you of the good times - so much of this kind of game relied on the technology (wow, we can look up and down, sort of!), it’s not really enough anymore to hold your interest for very long.

So, Braid is recommended, everything else only if you’re a masochist or have nothing better to do with your time and money

Looks like I could be getting my wish and Rock band 2 will be out in the UK before the end of the year:

Yep, that’s a UK official Microsoft ad saying it, so I think that’s pretty certain (for 360 at least). So it’s November - unsurprisingly the very time that GH:WT comes out - makes sense.

Woohoo - looks like we can look forward to having 500 tracks to choose from this side of the pond too, instead of a just the measly 400 (!) we’d have with RB1 + DLC. All the refinements to the little niggles should be great too (like drum fills that use the samples from the song, better quickplay etc) We still don’t know what the 20 free DLC tracks are in RB2 yet, my guess is they’ll wait until the GH:WT marketing machine starts up in the USA (which I think is next month), and use that as an extra card.

I’m actually getting better at Won’t Get Fooled Again on Hard on the drums. Every time I play it I can’t help but admire Keith Moon; his drum parts are just so far out there in comparison to almost any other. He might have been a nutter, but he was a genius with a pair of drumsticks.

Oh, Love Spreads is as good as I hoped too, huge fun on guitar and drums and definitely one of my new favourites. And we have a full album of Chili Peppers next week - in a way it’s a shame they chose Blood Sugar Sex Magick, By The Way or Californication would have been my personal choice, but still, it should be good.

Bruce Byfield wrote an interesting article (discovered via Matt ‘Alfresco’ Asay’s blog, which should be required reading for anyone in this field) about the sometimes unsteady alliance between open source and business that, on the whole, I agreed with - within a given context. I do think, however, that his context was weighted towards the larger players in market that are fusing open source with business opportunities though, and wanted to share some of my experiences and conclusions from the perspective of a more individual player in the business.

Apologies for the length of this article, I had a lot to say

Read the rest of this entry »

Ugh. I’ve liked the Prince Of Persia series (although I only mostly only experienced the latest lot as a spectator, my wife played them more), but I have some misgivings about the gameplay trailer for the latest one.

My gripes:

1. Firstly, all that jumping & grabbing. It really doesn’t seem very fluid, more of a vertical shuffling game than the graceful acrobatic series of moves I’ve come to expect of PoP.
2. That magic-using woman giving you a ‘leg up’ in mid-air seems to be a rather lame excuse for a double-jump system. From what people are saying it even sounds like her assistance is automatic,  saving you implicitly from death-by-plummetting (or rather, from the abrupt deceleration that comes at the end), which if correct would seem to completely undermine the peril that goes with doing aerial somersaults.
3. QTE-style combat moves that were getting repetitive even in the short trailer
4. That horrible Buffy the Vampire Slayer style banter. The American accent and jovial flippancy just grates on my nerves even in the demo. I know they have to be commercial, which means appealing to American generation X-ers, but it’s just completely at odds with the setting. I know they can’t give him a realistic accent and still hit their target demographic, any more than they can call it ‘Prince of the Islamic Republic of Iran’ and expect to it to sell to the white bread masses, but it just sounds so wrong. It may even exceed Assassin’s Creed’s ability to make the main protagonist sound like an annoying tit whenever he opens his mouth (Altair clearly should have been doing movie trailer voice-overs).

I might be being too harsh on the back of an early gameplay trailer, but I definitely have my misgivings. The graphical style is nice though.

Damn, this game is good. The first one was great of course, but suffered from being a bit too limited in scope - it was great for a quick blast but the fact that there was really only one game mode worth playing (the other being a retro take on the same thing) made long sessions unlikely. The sequel resolves this by including 6 different game modes, with competitive and co-operative multiplayer variations thrown into the mix.

All the game modes are fun, and all quite different, with the possible exception of ‘Evolved’ and ‘Deadline’, which are variations on a theme; the former being ended by losing all your lives, the latter giving you a fixed time limit. The addition of new enemy types, and the genius of the ‘gates’, which both reflect shots (giving you extra points if you hit things with the reflections), and give you a bonus if you fly through them (destroying nearby enemies), but include the twin dangers of lethal points on either end and that they can lure you into flying into difficult situations to chase a bonus. Definitely a great risk / reward system. They’ve also changed the multiplier system, basing it on collecting ‘geoms’ from vanquished enemies, and it has no upper limit, leading to multiple-hundred multipliers if you’re good. It really does separate the men from the boys, and I can only look on in awe at some of the scores in my friend list (Falagard, how the hell?). This surely does harken from the arcade machine era.

‘King’ involves only being able to shoot while inside ‘bubbles’ which decay as soon as you enter them, ‘Pacifism’ is a grueling mode where you can’t shoot, and can only destroy enemies by flying through gates (incredibly tricky), ‘Waves’ is a continuous onslaught of waves of ‘rocket’ enemies that travel from edge of the arena to the other in great lines that you have to frantically shoot holes in to survive, and ‘Sequence’ is a series of setpiece levels that you just have to survive, destroying all the enemies in 30 seconds, and feature some of the most outrageously intimidating enemy sequences since Robotron 2084. If you’re not squealing like a girl by level 5 as you desperately bolt for cover, you’re clearly on some kind of chill-out medication.

This is easily my favourite arcade game so far, finally edging out Pac Man Championship Edition (a stellar game too - buy it). If this was 1982 you could put this in a cabinet and take it down to some public area and just watch it devour people’s money insatiably for weeks. Having just watched King of Kong recently (great film if you’re a retro game geek in need of some nostalgia) it seemed highly appropriate. Now we get to pay a mere £6.80 for unlimited number of plays - we’re so spoiled. Highly recommended.

Some people think I bash Microsoft a lot on this blog, and maybe that’s true, but I don’t think I ever do it unfairly. To prove that I don’t just comment on the bad stuff, here’s a major piece of positive news about the software behemoth: Microsoft appears to have fixed the flaws in the Open Specification Promise (OSP).

The major flaw in the OSP when it was originally announced is that the promise not to sue people who developed upon or used Microsoft protocols and formats extended only to those who operated non-commercially. This of course made the whole OSP basically useless, because the primary area where people want to inter-operate with Microsoft is in the enterprise, where, rather unfortunately, most companies do not work for free. Most enterprises are not particularly happy about engaging the services of purely voluntary organisations, at least in visible or critical areas, because of the potential exposure to core business functions; they need support contracts, even if in practice they don’t strictly need or use them - I’m sure that I’m not the only person at the sharp end of getting problems resolved who ended up getting good answers faster from nonprofit communities rather than official support channels.

Anyway, all of a sudden and with little fanfare Microsoft appears to have addressed this; on Friday they updated the OSP to remove the non-commercial clause. The surprising bit is perhaps not that they realised it was broken (I’m sure the beleaguered pro-open source elements in the company knew this from the start), but that the upper echelons allowed them to fix it. The rhetoric spouted by the likes of Ballmer does not gel with this kind of move, and even the recent high water mark of Ballmer committing MS to being more open had the look of a man who had a gun to his back, and it didn’t take long for him to start beating his drum about patents again after that. I’ve been skeptical the action on the ground would be free from gotchas or caveats, and the original OSP certainly reinforced this. No longer.

With this change, Microsoft has made a significant step in the right direction. Companies deploying & supporting the likes of Samba, OpenOffice & POI have operated under something of a cloud until now, glancing nervously over their shoulders in fear of suddenly becoming a target for the three hundred pound gorrilla beating its chest about patents and Linux, and customers felt the anxiety too I’m sure - leading to less credibility being afforded to those kinds of alternatives. If MS stay true to this agreement it really does open opportunities for better competition in the commercial sector, which can only be a good thing for customers. Keep this kind of practical change up Microsoft, and I might even start liking you again. Just get rid of that relic of 1980’s capitalism you have at your helm

The main problem with democracy is that you give the vote to a large number of people who don’t have the slightest idea what they’re doing. They’ll believe hype, be swayed by style over substance, and vote for what’s fashionable, or blindly along party lines. As Churchill once said, democracy is the worst form of government … except for all the other ones.

I think the results of the latest Sourceforge Community Choice Awards underlines this from a somewhat less critical perspective. I didn’t promote Ogre for this years awards mostly because I felt some of the award categories had become a bit frivolous and made it seem a bit of a joke. Take “Most Likely to Get Users Sued”, and particularly “Most Likely to Be Accused of Patent Violation” - for one, all software companies are exposed to the blighting trend of suppressing innovation by patenting trivia, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t encourage it, and for two, one of the sponsors of the awards this year is Microsoft, whose execs repeatedly bleat on about Linux violating their patents so it’s in pretty bad taste to have that category in there. Red rag / bull anyone? As it happens, we still ended up being a finalist in the “Best Project for Gamers” category, so thanks to the people that thought of us anyway, even if we didn’t prompt you.

Anyway, the winners were announced at OSCON:

• Best Project: OpenOffice.org
• Best Project for the Enterprise: OpenOffice.org
• Best Project for Education: OpenOffice.org
• Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition: phpMyAdmin
• Best Project for Multimedia: VLC
• Best Project for Gamers: XBMC
• Most Likely to Change the World: Linux
• Best New Project: Magento
• Most Likely to Be Accused of Patent Violation: WINE
• Most Likely to Get Users Sued: eMule
• Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins: phpMyAdmin
• Best Tool or Utility for Developers: Notepad++

I think this illustrates that the majority tend to dilute good sense - many of these winners are entirely illogical. phpMyAdmin as the next $1B acquisition? Come on, what planet are you on? Do you seriously think any business could make back that kind of investment on phpMyAdmin? OpenOffice.org the best project for Enterprise? Only if they actually start using it more, and in my experience enterprises are extremely unlikely to stop using Microsoft Office any time soon (it is appropriate for the Best Project for Education though, and would be appropriate in a Home Office / Small Business category too, if there was one). Linux is most likely to change the world? It’s done it already, although not single handedly by any means (at the very least GNU had a big hand in it). Notepad++ is the best project for developers? Sure it’s good, but it’s a Windows-only text editor, I’m surprised there wasn’t a cross-platform tool in this slot, like Eclipse or Code::Blocks. The “Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins” is phpMyAdmin? I don’t know any serious sysadmins who would consider that their most important open source tool - useful though it is, in production environments doing backups on demand via a web interface or tinkering with live data directly isn’t exactly a good thing to be doing on a regular basis, I’m sure there are many other open source projects that professional sysadmins would pick ahead of it, which makes me think the majority voting for it were people running small sites and not the sort of person you’d normally call a sysadmin.

I think this illustrates that popularity contests aren’t necessarily the best way to recognise achievement and potential. I appreciate the sentiments here - after all there are already other awards picked by ‘enlightened panels of experts’ so allowing the community to have their say is a good idea in principle (just like democracy ;)) - but I think in practice the results can be pretty meaningless in some cases, because those in the community who are experienced enough to vote rationally are drowned out by those who are not.

NB: Let’s just be clear - this post is not about me being bitter that Ogre is not in the winners list, honestly!

I’ve had an Ubuntu 7.1 ("Feisty Fawn" "Gutsy Gibbon" - doh) desktop install for a while for testing purposes, and as usual they moved to a new version within a few weeks of me getting it set up. I don’t have a lot of free time and I’m still not a convert to desktop Linux, so I wasn’t in a rush to upgrade to the spanking new Ubuntu 8.04 ("Hardy Heron"). I actually configured an Ubuntu 8.04 server machine recently for a client, but that was simple & easy as Debian-based, command-line only servers generally tend to be. However, someone raised an issue with the Ogre build with some of the memory allocator changes on 8.04, which only occurred with the updated version of gcc it comes with, so that forced my hand. This morning I had a spare couple of hours so I thought I’d give it a go.

Luckily, Ubuntu (like all Debian derivatives) comes with a semi-automated way to upgrade to a new major version so it wasn’t going to be a fresh install. Some people like to start from scratch, but I’m busy and besides, I deliberately wanted to do an upgrade rather than a clean install to see how well it worked, since I’ve never done it before. I figure this is what a ‘regular user’ would do, given that the automatic updates are constantly prodding you about upgrading, and I’m always interested in putting desktop Linux through it’s paces in the way I think an average non-technical user would, because I hold out hope that one day, it might not be such a pain in the ass and will become a more realistic option for the masses.

Firstly, I was very conscientious and uninstalled Envy, since it makes changes to your kernel and there are very strict warnings about removing it before doing a distribution upgrade. That gave me my first problem, in that after returning to the default setup my screen was horribly corrupted, as I’m woefully used to seeing with desktop Linux. A quick flip to a console, changing the resolution to a basic VESA mode and restarting gdm sorted that out at least. So then I was free to install the new version via the regular software update wizard. That went pretty smoothly, and after restart I had the new default ‘heron embossed’ backdrop, albeit still at my low resolution and software drivers. Rather than install the new version of Envy (NG) right away, I figured I’d give OOTB Ubuntu a chance and let it install the proprietary drivers itself.

That didn’t go so well. It installed the drivers, but on reboot I could only see the top-left quarter of what should have been the login screen, as if I had a virtual window. It was still running at the VESA resolution, so I figured maybe it’s just that it’s gotten confused about the hardware driver’s preferred resolution and the monitor resolution. So, after logging in I tried altering the resolution through the standard ‘Screen Resolution’ widget, which I could just about get to within my tiny ‘window’ on the desktop. That worked insofar as the resolution of the desktop changed, but bizarrely now, only the top-left of the monitor area was being rendered, the rest was either blank, or sometimes it would have the desktop background but nothing else (no windows, pointers etc) except in that top-left area. Even Compiz worked fine, but only in that area, I had to pan other areas into view to see them.

So, I tried installing EnvyNG instead. Same result. Suspecting some borked Xorg configuration setting, I initially tweaked the setting I’d changed to VESA manually back to the native resolution and restarted gdm, but that resulted in a hard crash on ALT-F7. Doing some reading indicated that 8.04 has changed the xorg.conf rather significantly, so I dropped back to a console, stopped gdm and use dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg to recreate my xorg.conf from scratch. Restarting gdm afterwards and switching to it with ALT-F7 just brought me a hard crash. Lovely.

Rebooting, I was presented with a complete login screen this time, albeit at default VESA resolution again. Logging in led to a completely white desktop though - I could spin it about as a cube with Compiz and I could see the Compiz logo on the top, but all the other sides of the cube were white. It was also slow as hell, indicating it was running on mesa, as expected, but I couldn’t explain why the desktops refused to render. Dropping back to a console again with CTRL-ALT-F1, I re-enabled EnvyNG and got it to reinstall the driver. Another reboot later and finally everything works again. I looked at my xorg.conf and indeed it’s completely different in structure to the one that had been in place after the upgrade.

The moral appears to be that if you’re upgrading 7.1 to 8.04, reconfiguring the xserver so that it rewrites the xorg.conf should be the first thing you do, before trying to install any custom drivers (via Envy or otherwise probably). For whatever reason the upgrade doesn’t seem to do that, and that caused me quite a bit of hassle. Seems that no matter what, Xorg is always a thorn in my side when I use desktop Linux. At least I can assume that a clean install of 8.04 wouldn’t have suffered from this (I think), but still, it still gives me little faith that a non-technical user can rely on Ubuntu long-term without technical backup to call on, since they would have been funnelled through the upgrade route and had the same problems I had; once again it’s ’so near, but so far’.

Unfortunately resolving this burned up all my time, and I also have to rebuild a bunch of Ogre dependencies which seem to have gone missing. I’ll have to look into the new gcc issues another time.

I happened to be passing through one of our local Fair Trade shops today to pick up some more coffee beans, as is my habit - not only do they have more variety than most regular supermarkets, but their blends are almost universally better quality, thus slaking the taste buds of the discerning Java drinker as well as giving a warm fuzzy feeling that you’re doing something positive for farmers in developing countries, or at least helping them get screwed slightly less than they would otherwise be.

Anyway, the crux of this story is not coffee, because right there on the counter as I was paying I spotted a drinks can emblazoned with the name ‘Ubuntu Cola’, which made me suddenly smirk and chuckle involuntarily in a way that prompted the cashier to give me an unusual look. Of course, I could have spent the time explaining to him that Ubuntu was the name of a free software operating system, and thus to see it turning up on the side of a can of cola was pretty surprising, but we could have been there for a while, and he probably wouldn’t have thought me any less crazy by the end of it either - I suspect he would have just been a little more specific about it (i.e. a crazy geek). As such it was faster just to grab a can, add it to my tab and be on my way.

So what’s it like? Well, it’s a little darker than regular big-name cola and tastes quite a bit like Pepsi, although oddly it seems to remind me of the Pepsi of my youth, perhaps because the ingredient list seems a little simpler and it’s loaded with natural cane sugar rather than ‘high fructose corn syrup’ (whatever that is). Overall pretty good - I usually don’t choose to drink cola these days but it was worth the experiment, if only for the blogworthiness

As it turns out, there’s a whole Ubuntu Trading Company and it appears Ubuntu Cola might just be the first of many Ubuntu food products. I wonder what Mark Shuttleworth thinks of that?

The blog has suffered a little since I’ve had a very hectic week, with multiple clients to keep happy, a couple of social events and since most of last weekend was taken up with organising Ogre SVN conversion and various chores I seem to have had very little downtime - my only gaming all week was a couple of hours on Crackdown. My energy seemed to finally run out last night when I found myself dragging my half-comatose body to bed by 11pm - completely unheard of in our house. A little recharging required this weekend I think. I might even allow myself at least some time off during the bank holidays next week for a change.

Of note, I finally got around to trying the newly update Trackmania Nations Forever today, and it’s a lot of fun just like the previous iteration. This time we have dirt track sections and water which were previously reserved for the commercial Trackmania United, but otherwise it’s pretty much the same, which is no bad thing. Easily the best free game you’ll play, and I also really like their take on online play modes - short tracks which are easy to iterate & restart quickly if you screw up, everyone being ‘ghosts’ to everyone else means you’re fully in control the whole time and the random elements are removed - IMO it just makes the whole experience less frustrating than other competitive online games I’ve played, where the high skill level of a minority of players can easily damage the experience of more occasional players. TMN is one online game you can dip an and out of now and then and rely on having fun each time, which is a rare thing in my experience. Definitely a recommended download.

Everyone and their dog is playing GTAIV right now of course - I’m not, mostly because I have way too many games to play already, I might pick it up later on when I have more time. The uber-hype has put me off to some degree, I understand how ‘cool’ it is to be able to run around New York Liberty City doing whatever you want in some ways, but I do also wonder whether the absolutely teutonic effort that went into creating that is such a good thing on a grander scale. I mean, it’s clever for sure, and the anecdotes it will no doubt create for players for some time to come will be entertaining, but given that it cost $100m to create it, I can’t help thinking that the money could have been halved, and the remainder spent on creating 10 other ‘fresher’ game ideas like N+ and the like. How much money did it cost to make the world open enough to allow you to get drunk in bars, beat up random people and have realistic individual responses, watch TV, and the FOX-baiting practices involving ‘women of negotiable affections’? It appears that lots and lots of people want to have the freedom to engage in those sorts of activities in a game, but to me it seems rather pointless. If you like watching TV, or getting drunk and falling over in the street, feel free to go do that for real, you don’t need a game to do it (unless you’re a minor, who no doubt revel in that virtual ability) - I wouldn’t consider that to be a gaming experience I would particularly pursue myself, and in a way I consider it to be something of a waste of game creation talent and funding. I’m sure it rounds out the virtual world wonderfully, but it still seems rather frivalous - really, I don’t want to live in a game world, if I did I’d be playing WoW 16 hours a day, and thus the simulation of minutae seems to me, well, wasteful. I remember thinking the same thing about Shenmue all those years ago - sure I can use a vending machine to get little figures, and go do a day job in a highly realistic fashion, but this is a game for christ sakes, how much of a waste of effort is that? I guess I can’t judge until I play it but still, it makes me shake my head to think of how much money was spent making unnecessary things like the hooker animations (unless you’re 13, in which case you probably think they’re entirely necessary). The weird thing is that I can see the point if it’s a fictitious world - fantasy, far-future, post-apocalyptic, whatever - because then that world is something you can’t experience any other way. But all that effort recreatign New York - anyone can go walk around that right now if they want, or any similar city near them. Sure, they won’t be able to do the stuff that Niko gets away with, but all those everyday things that have so painstakingly been recreated can be experienced right now, for real. Is there really any merit to recreating them all in a game? I dunno, maybe I think about these things too much.

Finally, I’m also open-sourcing (MIT license) my wxWidgets-based MVC framework for Ogre that I built last year, as the foundation of an app I currently have in cold storage due to changing priorities. I figured other people might as well get the benefit out of the framework in the meantime, since plenty are always asking for a good basis for tools. It supports all the good stuff you’d expect like proper MVC separation, switchable tool-based controllers, generic property and event systems, 4-pane ‘cross’ layout, maximisable viewports, dockable windows, rubber-band selection implementations etc. It’ll be joining the other 50-odd projects living in Ogreaddons right now, hope you enjoy it if that’s your cup of tea.