A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work
May. 28th, 2009
03:33 pm - IF meetup tonight @ MIT
I'm going to the Boston interactive fiction meetup tonight, 6:30, at MIT 14N-233 (Nick Montfort's office). Guest: Steve Meretzky. Come join!
(Ha ha, that was totally my first-ever pasted-in Tweet, suckas.)
http://groups.google.com/group/boston-i
May. 21st, 2009
12:12 am - Jmac's Arcade #6 - Pac Man
If you see a little icon instead of a video player, clicking it should make it appear... (Blah LJ)
Feb. 18th, 2009
10:19 pm - Well, that's depressing
Wired reports that unscrupulous players now have the power to disrupt online multiplayer Xbox games by DDoSing individual players. It's possible thanks to some new tools that make it easy to get the IPs of the people you're playing an Xbox game with, rent a slice of botnet time, and willfully firehose the former with the latter.
I didn't know this until just now, playing an otherwise delightful game of TF2 with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
lediva and a pile of anonymous members-of-public. Playing on defense, we both found our connections had become unusably choppy moments before our opponents' raiding party showed up, time and again - how curious. I was blown clear off the server at one point. Ms. Diva suspected the likely culprit, and forwarded me the article link even as we soldiered on. (We still managed to win, but jeez.)
As far as I know, there's no practical way to defend against this, or even react using the system's reputation tools, other than blanket-voting-down every member of an opposing team - it's impossible to know which of them threw the DDoS at you. This is a real bummer, and rather a wet blanket on the idea that NXE's friends-only chat channel would let you play with strangers online without being exposed to idiocy. Boy if only there were some way to easily gather a group of non-strangers to play together and etc. etc.
Feb. 7th, 2009
11:25 am - Boob tubage
Been on my Xbox 360 a lot lately, both to play games and watch TV...
I learned from "Penny Arcade", of all places, that most (all?) of Doctor Who, new and old, is now available via streaming Netflix, which I am able to enjoy via the Xbox. So, I finally got to watch "Blink". Hooray. Even classicaljunkie liked it! We are likely to go back and start watching season 3 from the start. (I gave up midway through season 2 when Sci-Fi Channel was broadcasting it, either after the Satan-in-space one or the Cybermen ones. It was just too cheesy.)
I finished "Operation: Anchorage", the first chunk of Fallout 3 DLC. Meh. The super-easy combat isn't any harder, and the game once again makes it even easier by pairing you up with a literally invulnerable NPC buddy. (The main storyline has one of these too, but at least you can choose to make the game harder by telling him to stay home.) I had fun with it, but I am unlikely to purchase further expansions for this game. I still have plenty of the main map to explore, should I feel like it later.
I picked up "Castle Crashers" finally. It's stupid fun, as expected. Also lots of poop jokes. I wish 360 controllers weren't so dang expensive or I'd go pick up a couple more, just to be able to host a four-player local game.
My field trip into non-random Xbox Live play last Tuesday evening was a success, thanks to Anthony and Sean. I got to try out the new "party" system, introduced to all Xbox users with last November's OS update, and confirmed that it will dovetail quite nicely with a certain project of mine.
Hmm... I'd better go hit the trenches and finish up what's left of said project, now.
Feb. 3rd, 2009
03:39 pm - On Xbox Live tonight
I'm going to be online for some Xbox Live shenanigans at 9PM eastern tonight. TF2 and Castle Crashers are likely to be played, and maybe some Carcassonne. Feel free to join me! Note that I'm going to concentrate on how player-herding menu options work at least as much as on actually playing any games... this is a research trip!
Dec. 31st, 2008
10:59 am - Fancy an Xbox game after New Year's?
Hey XBox Live Gold Account-Havers,
For mysterious reasons, I wish to personally investigate how the "Party" system works for XBL-connected consoles. Anyone up for a game of something in the 2009ish part of the week? Perhaps Thursday evening? Or whenever... I'll be around.
( Games I have )
Dec. 21st, 2008
11:28 am - Wii Fit
classicaljunkie and I got Wii Fit as an early Xmas prezzie. It's nice! I recommend it if you have a Wii but lack a solid exercise regimen. I'm skeptical about the game's longevity, but it is teaching me some new, worthwhile stuff. If nothing else, it's like a super-interactive exercise video, with feedback.
It's a bit too interactive at times, though. It needs a mode where it leads you through a workout of several linked exercises, rather than letting you choose exercises one-by-one until you feel like stopping. Not only do I not always want to choose, but the break of a minute or two for menu navigation and (unskippable) high-score-list admiration feels artificial.
Sometimes it does suggest a good follow-on exercise after you complete something, but instead of offering you a "Hey great let's do that" button, it leaves it to you to find where in the menu-maze that second exercise is, and start it up yourself. How could they miss this?
It'd also be nice if you could navigate the menus using only the foot device, a la DDR, rather than having to pick up and put down the Wii Remote all the time, often just to press the A button. Really, would puttting an extra A button in toe's reach on the board have been that hard? (It already sports a toe-friendly power buttton.)
And, too bad about the BMI, which everyone (even my doctor) seems to agree isn't a very useful metric, at least in terms of presenting a normal/overweight/obese range that hardly applies to all humans. But we knew about this deal ahead of time, so we're not taking it too seriously. We laugh as the Wii performs its initial judgement on new players, which is invariably HELLO YOU ARE ENORMOUS followed by ploomp ballooning up the player's on-screen Mii, who is like "WTF". whatever
Dec. 5th, 2008
01:06 pm - YOU GIVE TO ME RIDE
I now officially agree wth mmcirvin and rserocki that Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection is a hot little number and totally worth $20, especially if you spent a lot of time around pinball machines during the 1980s and 1990s. The level of simulation is truly amazing, and evident that true pinball otaku had a hand in creating this disc. The tables look, sound and act exactly as their real-world counterparts, as far as I can tell.
Get the Wii version, if you can; the controls are simple and clever, essentially letting you play "air pinball". My only complaint is that the motions necessary to play pinball well emphasize the Wii controllers' assumption that I have smaller hands than I do. My right trigger finger quickly starts to ache from pulling on the too-small B button repeatedly, and my right palm continually presses the 1 and 2 buttons by accident, which in this game changes the camera angle.
Despite this, I have just played Taxi like 10 times in a row. Still haven't managed to pick up Santa. One day.
Dec. 1st, 2008
06:30 pm - Assault Heroes and Catan on sale
Microsoft's having a sale on these two downloadable games for Xbox 360. Assault Heroes, a top-down shoot-em-up with Robotron-style controls, is ~$3.13 (i.e. 250 Microsoft Points); and Catan, a very nice port of Settlers, is $6.25. I already own the latter, and just picked up the former, because hey.
Both support network play, so If any of y'all would like to Xbox Live either game up with me, give a shout.
Gee if only there were some web-based service I could use to announce that I own and enjoy a certain game, and wish to play it online with others. I know, right?
(Yeah, I should make a Gameshelf post about this. I should made a GS post about a lot of things. Doo dee doo.)
Also on sale for $6.25 is Boogie Bunnies, which is Snood except cuter and stupider. I wasn't blown away by its demo, but if you want to play a, er, Snoodlike on your high-def TV and you have 500 Microsoft Points burning a hole in your Microsoft Points Containment Unit, go for it.
Nov. 18th, 2008
07:06 pm - Fallout 3 fallout
After on-the-dot two weeks of calendar time, I finished Fallout 3's main quest.
( Lots o spoilers )
We'll see if I end up starting a new game, creating a completely different kind of character and seeing how much that affects gameplay. I've never bothered to do that with a game before, but I was so impressed by Fallout 3 that I'm really tempted to try. Just not right now.
Nov. 14th, 2008
03:34 pm - Still fantastic, a little buggy
Fallout 3 continues to be a tremendous piece of work. I am really having some problems putting the damn thing away. The game's clock says I've put over 40 hours into it, which I grudgingly believe to be accurate. (Hmm, I don't know if it counts time that I spend staring at my status screen, which is how I sometimes leave it paused for a while.) EIther way, this is the most engaging CRPG I have ever played. I like it so much that I am choosing to look past its recent habit of locking up whenever I try to use certain doors, or fast-travel to certain locations. (The fact it has a good autosave system also helps.)
My character has really gotten her ninja on. The first few levels were a little rough (as is so for any PC who voluntarily takes a low-hit-die class) but she became so adept at the snipey-snipey that I've turned up the game's difficulty level. This makes open combat more expensive, and therefore makes all this sneaking seem more worthwhile. I am predicting that when I've completed the game with this character, I'll go back to the start and roll up a big bruiser, just to see how differently the game plays. I don't do this, normally. Crazy.
I sometimes run across other recent, not-quite-buggy In-play oddities, which I assume are the different NPC's scripts colliding in strange ways. Last night I discovered a minor character lying dead in the center of the town my PC lives in. There was no explanation for it, and none of the NPCs were paying any mind to him. After looting his corpse (hey, it's still an RPG), I picked him up and waved him around at passers-by, but they just said their usual scripted "Hello! Nice day!" greetings to me, their friendly-if-eccentric young neighbor. I then had some Weekend at Bernie's fun, propping him up in a chair outside of my house, but he kept sliding off. I settled on taking an empty bottle and laying it by his head: there, it just looks like he's merely dead drunk, now. Much better. Role playing!!
Nov. 6th, 2008
10:53 pm - Fallout 3
Fallout 3 is fantastic. I've been in the mood for a wide-open, American-style CRPG and this not only fills the bill, it may be the best example of its class I've played. I've dropped over 15 hours into it since Monday evening - ouch. It's leaning as hard on my addiction button as my last serious Angband streak did last year. Gonna have to ration my playtime.
I created the same type of character I played in Fallout 2 - a small woman with high INT/CHA/DEX. Dumping most skill points into Sneak, Lockpick, Speak and Small Guns. Trying to play "the stealth game" for real. It didn't work out that way in Fallout2, when I didn't try hard to maintain any sort of character-type out of the gate, and so spent most of the game running around in a bright purple robe zapping people with a customized cattle prod in broad daylight. Being a bit more judicious with character-building this time around.
I like that the game doesn't take itself too seriously; it's full of crazy little rules, especially regarding modifiers attached to items. The setting's got a whole lot of logical inconsistencies, but if you put on a lab coat you suddenly become better at hacking into computer systems, and I love that, so I don't care. (Right now my character is wearing a Solid Snake suit that gives her a Sneak bonus, and a gray fedora that lets her detect enemies around corners better. Yes.)
The writing and plotting are so cool and full of delightful surprises - literally from the very first moment you start a new game - that I'm not even reading the list of possible Xbox Live achievements you can get. I find myself as spoiler-averse to this game as I have been to any recent TV series I've enjoyed. That's rare.
I wish that my posts about Fallout 2 from five years ago were easy to find. They're buried deep in the untagged middle ages of prog-LJ.
Oct. 21st, 2008
10:58 am - World of Goo.
World of Goo is a brilliant game. If you have a Wii, you owe it to yourself to drop $15 on downloading it.
I'd classify it as a cross between Lemmings and a Tinkertoy set. On each level you need to guide cute little critters ("gooballs", in this case) from a starting point, across variously hostile terrain, and then to an exit. But where Lemmings had you assign various worker-roles to some of the critters in order to make a path for the others, Goo has you using them as building material.
The gooballs like to be picked up with the wiimote, and if you drop one near two or three of its buddies, they'll reach out and link up as a lattice. Thus you construct towers, wedges, bridges, and various other structures that non-linked gooballs can walk across to the exit. The game uses a full-bore 2D physics engine, and the things you build act like "real" (in a Flatlandish sense) structures of their shape would, if made out of a rubbery material. A lot of the puzzles involve figuring out how to use up as few gooballs as possible to build stable supports for the up-reaching ones, and it's a real joy to play with.
This is surely the best Wii Ware game published yet, and worth every penny. Go get it. (Thanks to queue for the rec!)
Sep. 28th, 2008
05:48 pm - Precious
The new thing I say when a video game ceases to be fun, by making me do something I already did over and over, is: This is not treating my time and attention as precious.
Why, yes, I did just finally get to the Meat Circus stage in Psychonauts...!
While I'm here: any game recs I need to know about? Know ye that I really really want to play Dwarf Fortress, but ffs, I cannot get past the interface. I just can't do it. It's like trying to read a really smashing novel where all the text on every page is encoded as a stereogram. And covered in bees. I don't know.
What are you playing?
Sep. 6th, 2008
10:46 am - TF2 followup, and Xbox Live observations
I was amused to find that 50 percent of all the people I have played with in Xbox Live have awarded me an "Avoid" flag, meaning that they've asked Live's matchmaker to make it less likely to encounter me in the future. I assume that they are all past teammates from my TF2 sessions, which I played without a headset on - thus ignoring anything that they had to say to me - and invariably appeared at the bottom of every end-game scoreboard. Heh heh.
As one who has designed a system like this in the past, I found it interesting that the Avoid flag comes in two flavors, established by answering a three-part quiz as you assign the flag to a player. If you give it to them because they're too good, or too crappy, or just plain clueless about the game (which is a separate answer from 'too crappy'), then the matcher will take it into account from then on, but the target player isn't otherwise affected. If, on the other hand, you Avoid them because they're a disruptive player in some way - a jerk, a quitter, a spoilsport or just irritating - then you will also negatively affect their public reputation. Furthermore, that player will be informed of their perceived transgression. (In my case, it was none of these, so people just thought I sucked / was clueless. Which I can't disagree with, I suppose.)
There seems to be a mistake here, in that the system assumes that game skills are communative. IOW, if I consistently crush you at chess (yes, there's a chess game somewhere in Live Arcade), I don't think either of us would assume that I'd therefore wipe the floor with you at Halo 3 as well. But the system seems to treat it as just so. Now, I may be assuming too much here; the system knows what game the two of you played together last, so perhaps it affects only its weighting regarding that one game. But if it does, it doesn't say so.
I know about the different types of Avoid-flag because I played a rollicking game of Aegis Wing on Live the other day, whose sole downer was a little boy who got a bit hyper as the four of us approached the last level, and started chattering non-stop, eventually breaking into a sort of sing-song screeching. (He stopped when the game's host threatened to kick him off.) After the game, when I saw that there was an Avoid-reason category labeled "Inappropriate use of voice, such as shouting, singing or inane chatter", I laughed.
The opposite of Avoid is Prefer, and there's no refinement for that; if you Prefer a player, the matchmaker will try to pair you up with them more often, and their public rep improves.
Sep. 1st, 2008
04:52 pm - FIAH! FIAH!
I finally played a little bit of TF2 via XBox Live. It's fun! I took ahkond's advice and stuck to the newbie-friendly Heavy and Pyro classes, and then just wandered around frying dudes, taking short breaks when suggested. (Suggestions usually being implemented as headshots.)
You know a game with this structure is successful when getting killed doesn't make you say "dammit" but "ooh, I wanna try that!" (You can see who killed you, where they were, and how they did it.) See also "Street Fighter 2", back in the heady days of Sputnik and Gagarin.
Sorry I can't play with you PC peoples...
Aug. 31st, 2008
02:16 am - xbox name change
Yeah, so I dropped a sawbuck to change my Xbox gamertag (username) away from my real name. (If I understand correctly, current Xbox-friends needn't adjust anything to compensate.) While the tag now points at my domain name, it adds just enough abstraction-distance to make me comfortable while staying within a global namespace I don't feel silly or false in using.
After buying "gold" Xbox Live memberships for myself and classicaljunkie, I quickly concluded that having my full legal name being my handle wasn't at all like using a full name in an internet forum. Basically, when I would sit down to play Uno with XxHiReDhItMaNxX, WLD BLDOG 1980 and BLOODYSTOOL69 - or whomever - I would essentially be inviting them all to address me by my real name (out loud, via their headset mics) while their pulsatingly macho American handles kept me from doing the same. This made me feel more than a little creeped out, and reminded me of nothing so much as the time I lost my official plain-red Cohasset Youth Basketball League T-shirt, back when my parents had signed me up for basketball, and so I played a game wearing a red T-shirt my mom found that had my name on it, making me the only kid on my team wearing his name. This would be the last game of basketball I would ever play, my friends.
Aug. 9th, 2008
08:09 pm - What Braid is about
I've been reading people's interpretations about the plot of "Braid", and most of them strike me as not so much wrong as overly literal, or just incomplete. Here's my take.
( Spoilers, obviously. )
Aug. 7th, 2008
08:02 pm - I finished Braid
Posted some thoughts over on the shelf, which as usual don't have much to do with the actual gameplay but I think they're interesting anyway.
My favorite thing about the actual gameplay was that it quickly earned my trust, and never let me down. It didn't take long to learn that every single object, platform or creature on the screen serves a purpose, so getting stuck on a puzzle means stepping back, taking stock of what materials the game is handing you, and wondering what you can do with them. I love this.
There was only one puzzle I took issue with, where it took me quite some time to realize that my approach was wrong, versus my reflexes being too slow. The first (incorrect) solution to it almost works, missing the target by milliseconds, and encouraging another try. Which will also fail. Fortunately, it was deep enough in the game that I didn't completely lose hope, and the correct solution occurred to me while I was in the office this morning, working on something else. And that's a sign of a good puzzle game.
Aug. 6th, 2008
02:56 pm - Understanding among gamers
dougo is visiting to play Braid, since he doesn't have an XBox. We played the intro levels together, and then I vanished upstairs, both because I have a lot of work to do today before I go to a networking thing this evening, and because I'm very spoiler-averse and want to figure out the game's many puzzles by myself.
I apologize, but it's not really necessary, since we're both gamers of that sort.
(Braid is farking gorgeous BTW. If you have an XBox 360, please download it and play through its free trial levels.)
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