10.30.07
Posted in gaming at 21:59 by swong
I miss games where you cared about the stuff in your pockets.
Most modern games have streamlined inventory management for a smoother gameplay experience. This is often a good thing. Still, I wish there were more games where something as simple as a rope could really make your day.
I don’t mean adventure type games where your character finds a special item called [A Rope] in a special spot that’s meant to solve a specific puzzle. I mean games where you can buy [Rope] at a store in town, and, get this, you might not have to use it at all. That’s right – something you choose to pack because you might need it, or might not. Add a carrying limit and you’re challenged with some tough packing decisions. Snakebite antidote, or extra arrows? Door spikes, or lantern fuel? A geiger counter could let you avoid nasty contaminated spots, but a spear could let you take down mutant rats without wasting bullets. Choices, choices…
Nethack had a few little items like this: towels, skeleton keys, unicorn horns, and pickaxes to name a few. Experienced players know to hang on to these items when they find them. They might not use them much, but any one of these items can save the player’s life under certain circumstances. A humble towel lets you wipe off your face if someone throws a pie at you, blinding you (this can actually happen in Nethack). Or, you can wipe your hands if they get greasy from eating fried food, causing you to frequently fumble your weapon (this can also happen in Nethack). Wrapping the same towel around your head blinds you, protecting you from gorgons and letting you use any telepathic abilities you have developed (this happens all the time in Nethack).
You never have to think about these things in modern games. Run out of supplies? Die and respawn, or push a “refill” button at the nearest convenient vendor. Items are either really difficult to get and impossible to lose (WoW), or so easy to get that you don’t care about running out of supplies (Teamfortess).
I’m all for fast run & gun, consequence-free gameplay. I’ll jump into a few rounds of UT any night of the week. I just think there’s something to be said about games that reward foresight, planning, and deliberate long-term strategies that don’t manifest as meters on a character screen.
Show me a persistent multiplayer game where you might want to cache a sword, or a bag of healing herbs, or a spare rifle, or a box of grenades, or some fusion fuel canisters out in the wilderness, in case you’re running low. Even better, maybe I might spot another player’s cache if I’m lucky. Gear has to be expensive enough that you feel good for finding that kind of thing, and that there’s some value for you when you do find it, but cheap enough that you’d risk losing your cache, and that you would mostly be annoyed if someone found your stash.I don’t think it’s too hard to balance item costs like that. Situation and convenience can determine value as much as item stats. A common first aid kit might be really cheap in town, but it becomes really valuable if town is a ten minute jog through hostile territory.
Then again, I guess you don’t want players digging treasure holes all over the place on your server.
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10.25.07
Posted in environment at 18:40 by swong
The latest talking point I’m seeing on the SoCal fires is about how they are the fault of environmentalists, and how the fires are releasing as much CO2 as 1/4 of the state’s annual automobile emissions.
See, the US used to “thin out” forests and put out spot fires to prevent big conflagrations. Then the wacky environmentalists came around and said “waah, the forests need fire to live, it’s in their circle of life” or something. Fires were left untamed, and Yellowstone burned down. Or something.
Knew I’d find a link at some point.
I’ll try to dig up a decent source for the CO2 claim as soon as I can.
Here’s the thing about the forest fire claim: it’s the LA/San Diego area. It’s mostly scrub in those hills. It’s pretty much a desert. There isn’t much timber to be felled up there. Logging doesn’t really happen down there. You can’t get much lumber out of a bush. All the “save the trees” folks are working up north.
Item the second: CO2. I see what they’re trying to do: they’re trying to turn the “save the environment” claim back on the greens. Wacky forest protection policies lead to big fires leading to big CO2 releases. Queue laugh track at the silly libs and their backfiring strategies.
Here’s the problem:
- Plants pull CO2 from the air as they grow, not from underground fossil deposits. When a plant burns or rots, some of that carbon is released back into the air as CO or CO2. Plant matter won’t put more carbon into the atmosphere than it absorbed during its life.
- Some stays in the ground as ashes or compost. Over time, the carbon is “locked” into the soil around that plant.
- New plants will grow in the exposed soil, absorbing more CO2.
You can reverse that “1/4 of auto emissions” claim too. As of today (10/25), I’m seeing “500000 acres burned” tossed around the news feeds. 4 times that is 2 million acres, which works out to about 3125 square miles. In other words, California’s annular vehicular greenhouse gas emissions are equivalent to burning 3125 square miles of wilderness. Only… they’re not (see above).
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10.24.07
Posted in best quote, environment at 12:01 by swong
“No scientific conclusion can ever be proven, and new evidence
may lead scientists to change their views, but it is no
more a ‘‘belief’’ to say that earth is heating up than to say that
continents move, that germs cause disease, that DNA carries
hereditary information, and that HIV causes AIDS. You can always
find someone, somewhere, to disagree, but these conclusions
represent our best current understandings and therefore
our best basis for reasoned action”
-Naomi Oreskes, 2007
“Borrowing” (stealing) this idea from Willis, who might have (probably) cribbed it from someone else.
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10.17.07
Posted in gaming at 21:10 by swong
Spy protip number 14:
Disguise yourself as a heavy. No one ever suspects the heavy.
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10.11.07
Posted in gaming at 20:36 by swong
I finished the main portion of Portal last night. It’s a great argument in the “games as art” debate, recently made famous by Roger Ebert. Even the great pundit has admitted that games can be art.
Portal is a puzzle game. Solve the maze, escape the puzzle. Some keen reflexes and mental dexterity are involved in a few of the puzzles, so there’s a time-based element too. The developers could have stopped right there and delivered an excellent game.
But they didn’t. Portal has a story. I think it even follows a three-act structure.
(highlight to read)
<spoiler>
Act 1 awakens you in a strange cubicle, and you’re introduced to your antagonist, manifest as a disembodied voice. Level by level, the rules of this game world are revealed.
Act 2 begins with the completion of your portal device. Your abilities are complete, and you have a goal: surviving the experiment. There’s a little foreshadowing of act 3 here, with hints about your predecessors hidden among gaps in the world that’s presented to you.
Act 3 begins at the fire pit (that was great), and culminates in a confrontation with your tormentor and your eventual escape.
</spoiler>
Strictly speaking, they didn’t need to do any of that. They could have dumped you in a maze, run you through a couple of tutorials, and finished it off with an old fashioned high score screen. N did this very well.
The story, though, was a delicious frosting on the cake of Portal. This is a triumph of game design. I’m making a note here: huge success.
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Posted in the road at 9:12 by swong
Yah. I really wanted to get to work on time today. Except there’s a body on the freeway.
Seriously. The cops are out there picking gibs off of the road right now. It took a bunch of quasi-legal maneuvers just to get out of the traffic jam and back home.
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