SteveStreeting.com

I really enjoyed the original Professor Layton, and was glad to get the sequel (Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box – for some cultural reason ‘Diabolical Box’ on the web site, I assume internationally some people haven’t heard of Pandora’s Box) from a friend as an early Christmas present. So far it seems like more of the same “puzzles embedded in slightly hokey but nonetheless enjoyable story, set in a whimsical Victorian era”, which is precisely what fans of the original (which includes me) wanted. In many ways it reminds me of reading The Famous Five books as a child, to the extent that I’m expecting someone to propose the consumption of ‘lashings and lashings of ginger beer’ and for Timmy to say ‘woof’ in his traditional enigmatic fashion, at any moment.

There’s only one problem. They seem to have decided to increase the amount of voice acting this time around (at least in the introductary sections), and Luke – the Professor’s constant companion and apprentice mystery solver – has an absolutely terrible mockney accent. I actually had the US version of the original (because EU distribution was terrible), where Luke’s accent was fairly standard ‘public school received pronunciation’ style, but in the EU version they mocnkeyfied him it seems. Here’s a comparisoin of the two Curious Village versions:

This time I’ve got the EU edition and they seem to have decided to let it all hang out and compete with Dick van Dyke for the oscar of Worst Cockney Accent Ever. And you know, I think they’d win. It’s that bad. I can’t find any videos online of the EU version, but this basically sums it up:

“Bloimey Prowfesha, wot’s that?”

NNNnnggg. As heart-warming as the rest of the game is, and as trivial as this issue is (and in no way does it detract from the game’s enjoyment), when this boy chimes in it’s like nails down a blackboard for me and probably anyone else in the country; I hate to think how Londoners would take it.

I know the game is taking an incredibly whimsical view of the world, that’s part of its charm, but how did anyone not notice how grating that accent was? My only conclusion is that it was acted and organised by people who have watched Mary Poppins several hundred times over until they are slightly unhinged.

I’m a fan of Tim Schafer. Quite apart from the fact that his Wikipedia page shows him lovingly holding a jar of Marmite (good man), he’s been a writer/designer/coder on some of the funniest, quirkiest games in history: Monkey Island 1 & 2, Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango and Psychonauts. How can you not love this guy?

It’s a terrible tragedy that Psychonauts didn’t sell better – sure its platforming was a little ropey at times and the game was padded out in places with uninspiring sections, but buried within this game were some of the most original, funny and bizarre ideas ever to grace the medium. In what other game can you wander the deranged mind of a conspiracy theorist, a twisted suburban landscape filled with badly disguised secret agents trying to prevent you from discovering the true nature of the Milkman? Or the mind of an unexpectedly sensitive undersea monster where you, as the human representative, are portrayed as a Godzilla-sized klutz of a human, terrorising a civilised city populated by tiny little fish monsters that scream and run away from you in panic? Genius, pure genius. And yet, most gamers just ignored it, the philistines. It was based on this history, and because I felt a responsibility to buy games from people like Mr Schafer in the hope that lights like his won’t disappear from the gaming world to be replaced by more CoD / MoH games, that I bought Brütal Legend.

The Good: From an art direction standpoint, Brütal Legend is a triumph. It’s a joy just to drive around the landscape looking at the towering stone statues of guitars jutting out of the landscape, mountains of bone and metal, and the roiling stormclouds (which give a nice lightning storm sometimes too). The distinct areas have a feel of their own and fade beautifully from one to the next, and the sense of scale is always great. Their goal was to capture a world hewn straight out of the classic metal album covers and posters, and they have undoubtedly achieved that, it looks wonderful. There’s a ‘lore’ story covering it all which is suitably grandiose and over the top, encompassing demons and titans and generally fits the atmosphere very well.

Musically they’ve packed a lot of stuff in here. I’m not a huge metal fan, but there’s no doubt that when combined with the visuals it sets the tone perfectly, and I even started to like many of the tracks that I previously wouldn’t have had time for. There’s some great comedy numbers in there too – such as “Destroy the Orcs” by 3 Inches of Blood which is hysterical (“Kill the orcs, slay the orcs, destroy the orcs!!”), and whenever Master Exploder kicks in I can’t help smiling.

Comedy wise, it’s good near the beginning. The parody elements are amusing, particularly the ’70s real metal’ versus ’80s hair metal’ war that kicks it off. Jack Black is quite funny at times, and not as annoying as you might expect (although I don’t generally find him that annoying anyway, but he is toned down a bit here).

The Bad: It runs out of steam way too fast, in almost all areas. While the art continues to be breathtaking (and mostly why I kept playing), the gameplay elements get very repetetive with basically only about 5 types of side-missions which just repeat ad nauseum and just a series of collect-em-up achievements which get tedious once you’ve explored the admittedly sumptuous world. There just aren’t enough original ideas; the metal parodies are great right up to the end of the hair metal war, then it just repeats the same thing with a Goth / Emo style for the rest of the game and you feel they’ve used up all their jokers already. The comedy script sputters down to embers too, with Black’s lines getting ever more predictable and a tiresome, all basically variations on a theme.

I didn’t like the RTS gameplay elements either. I’m not a big fan of RTS’s anyway, but even I know they need more subtlety than this. I don’t think the console controller worked well at all, and the mechanics here were the traditional scissor-paper-stone of units (which is fine in itself) and a few control points which added little except resources, and that was it. Like the poorest of RTSs most maps could be won by just being the most efficient at working the interface, meaning you’re the first to build the biggest units and the first to capture the resource points. Since there are absolutely no advantages for terrain, nor any fixed emplacements that you can build, it basically comes down to a build-race-and-tank-rush style gameplay, which means really very little strategy in my opinion. These were sections I just tried to get through as fast as possible, which is also the best way to win. A low point.

And, although it’s amusing to see the ‘hair metal’ units mirroring the ‘real metal’ units but with garish headbands, sparkly bracelets etc, in gameplay terms this was a mistake, because it makes telling your units apart from the enemy really difficult at times. Not a problem after the first third of the game but it bothered me early on.

Conclusion: I don’t regret playing it, because it was a good experience, particularly visually and aurally, but there’s no getting away from the conclusion that Double Fine felt they had to create something with a wider appeal this time, and a more recognisable ‘theme’ that was marketable in a way their previous game wasn’t, and that that has become restrictive. I don’t blame them for taking this route – after all both Grim Fandango and Psychonauts were critically acclaimed original pieces that were hard to classify and sold relatively poorly. Brutal Legend fits a marketing strategy in a way that Psychonauts never could, you can grok it very quickly just from the imagery and it has a recognisable star. But at the same time the game definitely feels like it was stuck in its own straight jacket – it had enough ideas to take it through the first 2-3 hours confidently, and then it had just used up all of its best lines and ideas and had to find some way to string that out to 10 hours – compared to Psychonauts where they could just turn on a dime and do something completely different, the Brutal Legend world & canon seems to have become an anchor in the latter sections. The artists did a fantastic job in making enough content for that to be worth your while exploring it right to the end, but from a gameplay and writing standpoint this is not Tim Schafer’s finest hour. If you’re not specifically a Tim Scafer fan (and carry a deep collective guilt like I do that the gaming public ignored some of his best work) I’d have to say this game is worth renting just to experience the visuals, but not buying.

I’ve been branching out with my hobbies particularly in the last year or so, mostly because my back problems now prevent me from spending every waking hour hunched over a PC, coding. In a way that’s a shame – I lament the sudden drop-off in coding time and hence productivity – but it’s also good to broaden my horizons a bit. I’m 36 now after all, and spent the vast majority of my spare time in the last 8 years on Ogre, so maybe I deserve a break After all, I get to work on Ogre a bit as part of my day job now anyway, if not as much as I’d like.

So, I recently bought a set of electronic drums, specifically the Roland TD-9KX. It took a while for everything to turn up, and quite a lot of time to tweak the setup until I was comfortable with it (and even now I’m still making small adjustments), but it’s been great so far. It’s amazingly expressive for an electric kit.

Now of course, I didn’t buy this kit as a Rock Band peripheral – that would be crazy, I’m learning to play drums properly in the first instance. But still, when you have this expensive kit in the room it feels silly to use the old plastic Rock Band drum kit when we play, so I sought to hook it up. I also wanted to map the inputs as realistically as possible, so for example I wanted to map the closed and open hi-hat separately (to yellow and blue respectively) so I could use the pedal for songs that had that charted (which is most of them).

The first thing I did was buy a MIDI interface – because the 360′s controller inputs are encrypted, you can’t just use a standard MIDI to USB converter so I bought a dedicated box to do it.  If you already have the GHWT drums you can just use the MIDI input on that too, but since I didn’t I decided to get this because it was compact.

The next thing was to configure the MIDI outputs on the TD-9 to properly map to the inputs in the game. Although there is information in many places on the Internet on how to do this, I didn’t find a single place that listed everything together, and I had some issues with the partial information that was out there, so I’m going to set out everything together here.

The first thing you need to know is the MIDI notes for each colour in Rock Band, and what they represent, which is available elsewhere but I’ll include for completeness:

*= in a small number of tracks, e.g. Everlong, the snare and closed hi-hat are reversed. You probably want to use a second kit definition to swap these over when playing these tracks

So, in one of  your kit definitions (typically you want to use kit 50, “User Kit” by default) you need to edit the MIDI out settings to reflect these settings:

1. Press F2 (Func) then F3 (MIDI)
2. In the ‘Pad’ tab:
   

   K	36	C	*45
   S	*38	C	*45
   1	*46	R	*48
   2	*48	B	*48
   3	*45	A	27
   H	*48

   The asterisks which appear in the display, which I’ve included, just mean the MIDI code is assigned to more than one pad, which is fine. Also important is that on dual-triggering pads there are actually 2 of these tables (see whether it says ‘HEAD’ or ‘RIM’ in the corner). To switch, just hit a pad in the appropriate place. Personally I set the rims of the main pads, and the edges of the cymbals to be the same as the main head/bow but that’s up to you. Triple-triggering ride cymbals show up as head/rim on this page, and the bell is the ‘B’ entry, of which there is only one.
   If you do set up your cymbal edges this way, be careful of dual triggering. I found the standard sensitivity settings to be fine but some people have dialed their pad sensitivity down to prevent it. Personally I didn’t want to change the feel of the kit for real playing so didn’t do this. I had originally increased my cymbal sensitivity a notch or two because I felt they weren’t loud enough, but now I’ve been using them a few days I’ve found I don’t need to do that anymore (I’m less shy about whacking them!). I was getting double-triggering when the sensitivity was up, but not now it’s back to standard.
   Some people have also adjusted their other triggering settings to avoid dual-triggering on the main pads and kick pedal for example, because the kit is so sensitive it sends a hit even if you only lightly hit it, or the kick pedal beater ‘bounces’. So far I haven’t changed this because again I want normal operation when playing for real, and I’ve adjusted my kick pedal beater angle to reduce the cases of unintentional ‘bounce’ (which is good to remove anyway) and try to be more accurate on the pads. I figure it’s better that way than to tune your kit specifically for Rock Band triggering.

3. Press F2 to access the ‘Other’ tab:
   

   HH OPEN (BOW)	*48
   HH CLOSED (BOW)	*46
   HH OPEN (EDGE)	*48
   HH CLOSED (EDGE)	*46
   HH PEDAL	0
   X STICK	0

That sets up the separate open/closed hi-hat settings which I wanted to use for yellow/blue respectively. Again note that the hi-hat is dual-triggering (bow and edge) but I’ve set them to the same thing.

That’s all you need to do for the kit-specific settings, now you need to alter some global MIDI settings. So exit out of the kit settings, to get back to the main screen, then:

1. Press ‘Setup’ then F2 (MIDI)
2. On the ‘Global’ tab you should leave everything as the default – for completeness:
   

   Tx/Rx CHANNEL	CH10
   Tx PC	ON
   Rx PC	ON
   NOTE CHASE	ON
   LOCAL CONTROL	ON
   SOFT THRU	OFF

3. On the ‘CTRL’ tab (press F2) you should set the following:
   

   PEDAL CC	OFF
   HH Compatibility	EXTERNAL
   HH NOTE# Border	90

   These settings are very important if you want to use the hi-hat pedal properly. The “HH Compatibility” setting ensures that separate MIDI notes are sent for open and closed hi-hat, rather than just one note for the hi-hat and expecting the receiver system to remember the current state and use the ‘Pedal’ MIDI note to switch between them. The “PEDAL CC” option is also very important – I found that if I didn’t change this to ‘OFF’ then when the hi-hat pedal was depressed (to switch from blue to yellow), there was a delay in the next note which threw everything off – I presume that the HH pedal note was confusing the receiver (even though it’s set to 0 in the settings which should be an ignored note)

So there you go; a complete guide to using the TD-9 as a Rock Band controller – this took me some experimentation and collation of several very large forum posts to get completely right, so maybe someone else will find this useful.

Now I just have to train my brain to hit the note charts properly while still using the correct cymbals and hi-hat pedal as well, and not just falling back on the 4 basic pads as per the Rock Band controller. The hardest for me is the open hi-hat (learning to use my left foot too) and the ride / crash combinations since they’re backwards spatially (on a real standard kit the first crash cymbal is to the left of the ride cymbal). You really need to know the song so you know which specific part to play, but that’s the point – I’m hoping it’ll help me learn a few tracks to play stand-alone too.

I’ve basically ignored Bayonetta for the last 12 months, because it never struck me as something I’d be interested in – I was never that impressed by Devil May Cry and similar games which to me just felt like random button mashers, and Bayonetta seemed to be relying far too much on how much leg and cleavage its main protagonist could show in any given screenshot. I’d pretty much written it off as a cycnical attempt to recycle old ideas but to tap into the frustrated teenage male demographic with guns, kung-fu, the occult, blood and cleavage – clearly a winning formula in that market.

I was completely surprised, therefore, when I read Edge this month and they gave it a 10, citing its inventiveness and variety. I don’t buy Edge for the reviews particularly, but they’re always hard to please  and when they rave about something, it’s often worth taking notice. So, I downloaded the Bayonetta demo and had a go this weekend.

First impressions were a resounding ‘WTF?!!’ – confusion, chaos on-screen and ultimately, death. But, after retrying with the benefit of the tutorials, I started to get the hang of it. And surprised myself with the number of belly laughs it provoked and how much fun it was.

Because make no mistake – Bayonetta is utterly insane. It’s as if the designers have necked a whole ton of LSD and spent 3 sleepless days watching manga, playing Street Fighter and Contra, and doodling images of oversized fantasy anythings that can transform into anything else at a moments notice. Preferably while plummetting from orbit.

At first it seems confusing, but pretty quickly you get the visual and audio cues of when to dodge attacks and how to string together the ridiculous combos. Some of which seem to require the character to generate additional special powers by switching to ‘leotard mode’ (I have no idea), or to weave her hair into a vast slavering dragon. It’s completely and totally bonkers, and I didn’t want it to end because I just wanted to see what other crazy things they would come up with. There’s certainly a lot of button pounding going on, but it didn’t feel anywhere near as random as I expected – a bit like a speeded up & more forgiving version of Street Fighter, where you flit between doing things you intended to do, and doing other random moves that you didn’t intend necessarily but were roughly in the right direction and looked cool anyway, so you can totally tell yourself that you meant to do it, at least on a subconcious level.

There’s so much going on on screen, and even during the demo the ante keeps getting upped to the extent that you’re chuckling at the sheer ridiculousness of it all, that you would think it would get hard to play. At times it does get a bit busy, but they seem to have made the controls and camera angles appropriate such that most of the time it tends to work extremely well. It looks gorgeous the whole time, and the frame rate stays outrageously high given the amount of things going on (note: this was on 360 – allegedly the PS3 version isn’t quite as smooth, so you’ll have to grab it and judge for yourself there). Edge compared it to Super Mario Galaxy in terms of how well they managed to derive a camera angle appropriate for a given scenario, regardless of how outrageous, and I could see that from the demo to a degree.

In short, I never remotely expected to like Bayonetta, but despite myself I’m really keen on it now. That’ll teach me to judge a book by its cover, or rather a female protagonist by how much leather she’s wearing. With it being released on 8th January, next month seems to be the new Christmas.

I have to hand it to the guys at the Clan of the Gray Wolf, who are doing a 1,000 song Rock Band marathon for the charity Childs Play, all streamed live on the Internet. Presumably this is linked with the fact that Rock Band itself recently crested the 2009 target of having 1000 in-game tracks – and a month earlier than their deadline.

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At the time of writing they’re 46 hours in which given that they’ve tackled 615 songs so far, represents not quite two thirds of the way. Even though there’s 6 of them taking shifts (3 playing, one commenting), this is still an ambitious thing to be trying – we haven’t even tackled the 80-odd song Endless Setlist 2 in Rock Band 2 yet, and probably never will! I can’t imagine how bad their blisters are going to be after this, not to mention their vision – my guess is that the whole world is going to look like it’s scrolling upwards for them in the next week.

Anyway, much respect – I encourage you to donate if like me you respect this kind of crazy endeavour which is nevertheless brimming with geek cool.

My wife & I loved playing Left 4 Dead. Sure it only had 4 campaigns and became repetitive after a while (but we still logged 30+ hours on it), but there was just no other game like it. Not only was it the best co-op experience I’d ever had, defly encouraging real co-operative play (rather than just feeling like you happen to be in the same game at the same time) without it ever feeling forced, but it was also without doubt the best zombie apocalypse simulator ever. It made Resident Evil 5 look like a tired old horse being ruthlessly flogged around the track one more time to please its unimaginative masters.

I was a little worried about Left 4 Dead 2 when I saw the final intro movie and played the demo. Had they decided to go into full-on daytime carnage mode and forgotten the pressing suspense elements? Having had the full game for a couple of days now, I can report that the answer is most definitely and pleasingly ‘no’. In fact what they’ve done is taken everything that was great about Left 4 Dead, and added a whole extra layer of extra stuff which works incredibly well.

We bought it on PC because that was the best experience (we had L4D1 on both PC and 360 and the PC version was much better – faster, more detailed, higher resolution etc), and everything seems to have had an extra visual bump. I’m playing it at 1680×1050 with everything cranked up to the max and it runs really well and looks great, especially considering how many zombies are running around at times.

It’s impressive how well the new elements interact and improve on the gameplay. The environments themselves are very much more individual – we’ve only played through 2 of the 5 campaigns so far but their visual style and the events that occur are now far more varied. While in L4D1 the environments were great at times (my favourite was the airport), the actions that happened inside them were mostly the same. Even in the two settings we’ve played so far, we’ve had great variety – trying to escape a burning building with smoke obscuring  your vision (friendly fire is a particular problem since every flailing silhouette looks similar), running around a roller coaster, starting up a rock concert stage show to attract the attention of a chopper, it’s all great fun. They’ve mixed things up more so you have to switch weapons more often – gone are the times when you could pick a single weapon and ammo-up where you could, now you’re more likely to find small selections of discarded weapons which you need to switch for the current gun you have which is running low, meaning you have to adapt more. The new special infected definitely add a whole new dimension and can make things go pear-shaped quickly, particularly the spitter which can split the group up for precious seconds as a pool of steaming acid cuts you off just long enough for someone to get into trouble. The choice of new items adds a new element too – should we carry more medkits, or should at least one of us have a defibrillator unit in case the worst should happen? If we’re going to have to make a run for it, say to turn off a noisy carousel which is attracting the horde, maybe an adrenaline shot might be more useful than pain pills (temporary health restoration)?

All the people who complained that this was a sequel instead of a free content pack need to be quiet now, because the improvements in the sequel are easily worth paying for. Valve took a major risk with Left 4 Dead; no-one had embraced co-op gameplay quite so completely (so as to basically make playing alone unattractive), and no-one had tried to make an AI ‘game master’ (director as they call it) adapt a dynamic and semi-randomised game to the players before, thus making a co-op game which had the replayability only competitive multiplayer games had achieved before. But, it worked, and arguably created a whole new type of game. Watershed games like this don’t come along that often, and when they do I think developers deserve to be rewarded for it.

Left 4 Dead used to be the best co-op game, and the best zombie game around – it’s fitting that it should be superceded only by its sequel. If you remotely like co-op gaming and share the current fascination with the zombie apocalypse, I doubt you will find a game better than this.

My broadband connection was on the blink this morning, which affected me less than it would usually would have because I had a dentist appointment, so I didn’t think too much of it. I heard on the radio when driving to said appointment that the whole island was affected so that made me feel a little better, and everything came back about an hour after I returned.

However a friend of mine works at one of the local telecoms companies (and which is also the broadband wholesaler to the others – kind of like our local version of BT) phoned me at lunchtime to ask if my connection was back, since he hadn’t seen me on Skype (I’d actually just forgotten to turn it back on). He informed me that the reason for the technical difficulties was a massive spike in internet traffic caused by everyone playing Call of Duty : Modern Warfare 2

Yes, it seems lots of people decided to take the day off today to play the new release; even in our small juristiction over 100 people queued outside the local HMV at midnight to get their copy early, so it seems that many more people bought it at 9am and went home to fire it up. Given that the game had a day 1 patch (at least for PS3 for a trophy bug, I don’t know about 360) I presume that plus lots of people jumping online all at once was a bit much for the system to handle.

It appears I’m the only person in the world who isn’t obsessed with COD:MW2

As I’ve said before Harmonix really like Foo Fighters, and/or the Foos really like Rock Band, because this week we had more tracks from the band (plus some from Nirvana, where of course Grohl cut his teeth as a drummer before emerging from the shadows as a bloody good all-rounder) which is great in my book. Despite this year’s album being a little too easy-listening for my tastes, Foo Fighters remain one of my favourite bands of the last decade or so.

My last ‘must have’ track was The Pretender, and that got delivered this week, along with Best of You (also a great track) and a couple from the new album, Wheels and Word Forward, which are ok but I can take or leave (in this case, leave). I actually think my list is all Foo-ed out now. Not that I’d resist if they added more to choose from of course

The Nirvana tracks I’m sure are welcome for their dedicated fans, but once again they deftly manage to avoid the tracks I’d pay money for – Smells Like Teen Spirit, Lithium and Come As You Are. I’m not a huge Nirvana fan, clearly they were ground-breaking for their time, but too many of their tracks sound too much alike for my post teen angst tastes. Only those 3 really stand out for me as worth a purchase; the rest feel a bit like rearrangements of the same songs.

And the Joan Jett track? Hmm. Great video for laughing at crap video effects though.

Woohoo, Torchlight, the new ARPG by Runic Games and using OGRE for rendering, is launching today! Well, strictly speaking the single player game launches today, with an MMO version planned for 2010. Torchlight has been developed in Seattle by a veteran team composed of the designers and leads of projects like Diablo, Diablo II, Mythos, and Fate, so you knew this was going to be good.

Well, Runic were kind enough to send me an advance copy which I played a little yesterday, and boy, is it polished. You can really tell the heritage of this team, it’s immediately fun to play and has really great production values with tons of neat little touches and is something of a visual treat, which considering it was designed to work on low-end hardware too (it has an explicit ‘netbook mode’ for goodness sakes) is no mean feat. A level editor is coming out very soon too – the very same one that Runic used to create all the levels in the game – so that will be a lot of fun to play with too I’m sure.

Obviously we’re very proud that OGRE has been a part of creating this title. Torchlight is available to purchase in about 10 minutes time according to the countown clock, as a digital download from Perfect World, Steam, Direct2Drive and other partners. It’s staggeringly good value, so go get it!

[edit]In case you need more convincing, here’s a nice video review / overview:

I’m not sure if this is the intro or just a trailer, since the first game had an intro which led directly to the starting point of the first chapter, which worked well, which this one clearly doesn’t (unless they start you in absolute mahem which would not make sense). If this is the intro, then I have to say I preferred the intro from the first game, which was a bit more suspense and atmosphere and less chainsaws & explosions, but I suspect it’s just a marketing trailer and hence appealing to the attention-span-challenged is paramount. At least this movie, whatever it is, gives you a better peek at the new characters than we’ve had before.

One of the undersold characteristics of the first game was that the characters were genuinely likeable without ever needing to litter the game with cutscenes (beyond the short intro) – just the little snippets of in-game dialog and the AI behaviour (we play only 2-player most of the time) was enough to let you know what they were about, which is no mean feat: Bill was a gruff veteran who is too stubborn to heal himself, Francis was a surly biker who hates everything and kinda likes killing stuff, Louis was an everyman in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Zoey was a naive horror fan completely out of her depth. That’s just enough character to set the scene and get players happy to be embodying the roles in my view. Francis was my favourite in the first game, closely followed by Louis (“Do I look like one o’them?!!!!”) – in the sequel I’m already liking Coach and Ellis particularly. Looking forward to this!