As Always, Gameplay Trumps Graphics

 Reviews  Comments Off
Apr 292010
 

I have been moving back into “Zelda: the Ocarina of Time,” and I am continuously getting impressed with it. I’m still fairly early into the game, but man, there a number of things that I’m just really liking — many of which are also little flair elements that aren’t crictical to the gameplay itself, but go miles into drawing me into the experience and deepening my enjoyment.

Again, for those not aware, this particular game is about 10-12 years old, and the 3D graphics are incredibly simplistic. Still, I’m having much more fun with this game than any number of more modern releases. “Ocarina” has often been referred to as one of the very best games to be released, not just for the Zelda series, but also for the Nintendo library as a whole, and it’s not hard to see why.

So far, the game has been moving along fairly quickly; I was momentarily stumped on one puzzle, but there enough clues and hints around that so far it hasn’t been an issue. Navi, of course, makes a nice way to remind players what the next major objective is, so you don’t have to worry about wandering around lost for ages.

But it’s the little things that have really been making this game come alive: the “rockin’” (so to speak) music in the Goron city, the dry humor that (every now and then) bubbles up in the word balloons, and the various idle animations & sounds that the kid (“Link,” we’ll call him, even though you can name him whatever you want) has which always makes it clear that he is just a little boy.

There are also a lot of things that take place which I find myself greatly amused by; last night, I ran across two separate scenes that actually made me laugh:

  1. When Link plays a tune and the Goron King, a big, rock like creature with a big frown, starts dancing like a maniac (maniac!) on the floor (dancin’ like he never danced before….), Link actually slowly backs away from him, which is exactly what I think anyone watching would have thought.
  2. Later on, the King is impressed with Link’s help and pats him on the shoulder. However, given that Link is a little boy, the King accidentally knocks Link flat to the ground. The timing was worthy of Laural and Hardy.

I will admit, I have been getting a bit frustrated with the camera swinging around, especially during battles. The Lock-in system works, but a number of times I keep screwing it up and wind up losing track of the enemies. there’s also an odd quirk which is that I can kill spiders up on walls, but then am unable to retrieve the “golden skulls” which I need to complete a side quest. I’m hoping that this will be rectified when I get the boomerage, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Regardless, though, still having a lot of fun with the game. And so far, Link (despite being, like, 6 years old) is as much of a Mack expert as Commander Shepard: already it seems that he has three love interests. Talk about getting started early.

Sore, but Serviceable

 Life in General  Comments Off
Apr 282010
 

I returned to my own supreme court last night, namely the basketball court of Zogsports, after having taken a powder for the past couple of weeks to give my ankle sprain a chance to heal up a bit. The doctor said to wait about 2-3 weeks, and even then, it might be best to just hold off entirely for about a month and a half, to allow it to fully heal.

Still, after 2 weeks, the ankle had been feeling much better, and I had even partaken in some Penn Station Dashes without any ill effect, so I was optimistic that I could play without completely collapsing my ankle. To be safe, though, I had my ankle brace on, and started out fairly light. Well, maybe that “light” lasted about 23 seconds, but it’s hard to know for sure. I do know that once the game got moving, I was hustling about as per usual. And, happily, no injuries occurred, even after I was tackled by a guy who was going for a rebound. Today, fittingly enough, my right ankle is sore, which is the ankle I normally use a brace on (this was the one I rolled three times in one season, after all).

I think I played all right, and I think that when I first started I played a bit better because, with lingering concerns about my ankle, I was playing more relaxed and loose. In the end, we went 3-1, and since the past two times they played the team went 1-3 each time, I like to pretend that, as the song goes, “It’s All About Me.” Heh.

I will admit that despite some dumb mistakes by me in the third game (which we lost), I played better than I expected, and my favorite moment was in the last game, where about 3-4 times in a row, I knocked away an inbound pass to the guy I was covering. It was just kind of funny because it was like, “Let’s watch that play again, shall we? Ah, that never gets old!”

I also found out that most of the other teams in the league hate our team, now, but honestly, it’s not hard to figure out why. Namely, one of our players tends to play a bit too aggressively when he’s out there. It’s one of those weird moments where he’s a really nice guy off the court, but when he’s playing, he tends to be something of a jerk. Not in terms of trash-talking, but just that he’ll play far more physical than he thinks he is, and hence, even though he often fouls accidentally, people assume that he’s doing it with malicious intent.

This is sad, because not only do I want to try to make some more friends through Zog, but how am I supposed to woo the hot chicks on the other team if I’m from the “Bully” squad? So sad….

 Posted by at 10:08 am  Tagged with:

And It Continues to be Easy (For a Change)

 Games, Interactive, Stuff I Made  Comments Off
Apr 272010
 

First off, the link for my “officially completed” UT3 level:

Engine Room

This was a bit of a relief in that I was finally able to wrap things up. As I mentioned in my previous post, being able to test on a separate machine was, indeed, very handy. And, it’s also one of the biggest pains as a game developer — getting playtesters and ways to beta test your work. In this case, not having a separate computer to test on really slowed me down. Consider: if I was not able to test the game at work, I would have had to wait for either someone from the forums to download and test, or one of my friends. in both cases, that could take weeks, if it happens at all. Being able to “cook” the map last night and upload it to the file site, then come in this morning and really quick test it on my work machine was sooooo much better.

This has also been hanging around my “To Do” list since the summer; I last really worked on it during October of last year. Boy, that feels good to strike it down! Smote the sucker! Boom!

Anyway.

I have ideas for a couple of other maps, but I think I might hold off starting anything until I wrap up a number of other creative projects that are floating around; like, for example, the Madness board game. There’s another thing that needs playtesters to fully complete, and hence, that’s why it’s be so friggin’ slow at moving forward.

Easier Than Expected

 Work  1 Response »
Apr 262010
 

Last night, I finally got around to replacing the texture of the lifts in my UT3 level. I had been putting this off for, well, months, mainly because I just didn’t want to go through the process of recooking and republishing everything. The first time through doing that took quite a long time, and I had little interest in revisiting those aspects.

However, the replacement of the texture went easier than I expected — since the lifts are animated, they require separate “rules” in how they interact within the level, but the static meshes that they are built from are treated like any other static mesh: just place the new material on the base mesh and all instances of it are updated properly.

“Oh. That was easy.”

I then cooked the level, knowing it would take around 5-10 minutes due to the size of the level and lighting, and now just have to make some of those less-fun adjustments to the .ini file and readme info, so that everything is properly updated.

Of course, there are still a couple more things beyond that: I need to upload it all in zip file form to a public FTP site, get Mr. 188 to test it on his computer to make sure it runs properly, and then post a link to the file on the EPIC forums. I’m not expected a world-beater reaction, but it will be very nice to finally get this off my plate, and it also gives a little more ammo for the resume.

Hmm, thought: I have Steam installed on my work computer… I bet I can install UT3 here as well, and then do separate testing without having to bug Mr. 188. That’s handy, eh?

Mystery of Nature

 Life in General  Comments Off
Apr 252010
 

Before I go out on a date, I put on some colonge, and usually wash my hair with a nice-smelling product so I, in turn, will give off a pleasing aroma for my date.

However, it means that this only works within the confines of my apartment, because as soon as I go outside, take the train into the city, and am actually on the date, no trace of the scent is to be found. Certainly, I have yet to hear a girl complement me on my scent. (I haven’t had any complain, either, so let’s be grateful for that, at least.)

But then, the second I come back into the house, I can again smell the pleasing whiffs from my earlier efforts. And no, it’s not that it’s just the apartment that smells nice, because I wasn’t using the cologne out in the kitchen or living room.

So, …yeah. Not really sure what’s going on here, but seems like that there’s a warp in the space-time continuum or something.

I’ll have to see if a girl ever actually notices and comments on such matters. Another scientific investigation, perhaps?

 Posted by at 7:23 pm  Tagged with:

For Science!

 Life in General  3 Responses »
Apr 222010
 

Okay, so after my last post, I’ve been thinking, and have decided to get back into Online Dating, and in a big way. Part of this is because, well, being lonely pretty much sucks, but more to the point is that this also gives me a chance to keep track of my own success rate. Naturally, there are a lot of variables I can’t track (for example, I won’t really know which profiles are “active”), but, at the same time, I can mark down how many girls I’ve reached out to on different sites, how many replied, and how many of those have led to actual dates. After the first date, nothing really counts, because the real question here is how many attempts are actually leading to dates. Regardless if the date is fantastic or an absolute supermassive black hole in terms of suckage, getting to the actual date is the important thing.

I should note that it says something about me that I’m heading into this fully expecting to be sending a lot of emails without having a good success rate, as it’s safe to say that if I land a girlfriend, no more e-mails will be sent out. I like to think that it’s just being realistic, and I am speaking from previous experience, after all.

In any case, should be fun. Maybe I can turn it into a book at some point!

 Posted by at 11:24 pm  Tagged with:

OKCupid’s Misfired Arrow

 Life in General  7 Responses »
Apr 212010
 

So, first off, if you didn’t know, I have been a member of the online dating world for quite some time. Starting during my time in Dayton, I have been on and off various sites as, well, it’s honestly a bit easier for me to meet people more my style that way. After all, that was where I met Bambi, and before then (through a rescue ranger fan site) met another lovely young lady that was quite spiffy. True, I did have an excellent relationship with a girl that I met while in Grad School, but alas, that is the exception and not the rule. So, as a result, I like to think that I can speak with some authority on the topic of online dating in general.

Well, I ran across an article posted on one of those dating sites, OKCupid, and, well, it’s really a bizarre thing for them to talk about:

Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating

Now, OKCupid is a free online dating site, that supports itself through ads, mainly, but — and here’s the kicker — they have “subscriber” level themselves. It’s about $5 a month, and called the A-List. And now here he is telling everyone who is paying that they are pretty much idoits for doing so. It’s like GM posting about how American Car Companies are untrustworthy and poorly run, and conveniently only use Ford and Chrysler as examples. And the guy never once makes any mention of this in the blog post, like OKCupid is still totally free. Sure, it is free, but if paying for a dating site is so horrible, why not cancel that aspect of the site and refund the subscribers money? I mean, it makes me very skeptical of his arguments when he labels a blog post something akin to “Paying for dating sites is wrong unless its for mine.”

At the beginning of the article, the writer — Christian — admits an important fact:

As a founder of OkCupid I’m of course motivated to point out our competitors’ flaws. So take what I have to say today with a grain of salt.

He then proceeds to crunch a bunch of numbers to try and show why paying for online dating is such a horrible idea, but in the end, all of his arguements can be applied to online dating in any form — free or pay. So, in effect, he makes an impassioned plea for people to give up online dating, which includes, well, his site.

Honestly, I still can’t figure out how on earth he missed this connection. Forget the paying aspect of it — a lot of his numbers are really much more about the difficulties of online dating for most people, and in fact could probably be used to convince some people to forget online dating altogether. After all, there’s nothing in his numbers that really makes a difference if people are paying or not. But, before I get too far, I’ll note some of my reactions to his comments, speaking as a veteran of online dating.

First, he points out a truism on all dating sites: women get too many messages from bad matches, and men get far too few replies. This is in general, mind you — I’m sure that there are some guys that get a large amount of replies, and first contacts, even. Also, I think it’s fair to say that guys, as well, probably get more messages from bad matches than from those that they are interested in. Speaking from personal experience, on OKCupid, I don’t get a lot of first contact, but when I do, it’s been about 99% from women that I have absolutely no interest in.

Then he goes through some numbers to show that it’s in Match.com’s and eHarmony.com’s best interests to lead their customers on with profiles that are either non-paying (and thus unable to respond to messages) or with profiles that are not even active any more. Now, this is something that is true — and, ironically, he doesn’t even take it as far as he could have. Because besides the fact that out of the 20 million or so subscribers on a site like eHarmony are inactive or non-paying, there are also a far more that are just not going to be worth the time to pursue, even if they are active and paying. For example, some people may live too far away, love cats while the other person has deathly allergies, or there just is no chemistry.

But, you know, OKCupid is just as guilty of this. Remember, they make most of their money through ads. Ads only generate good revenues if the site owner can prove that a lot of eyeballs are looking at the pages. This means that the more people on the site, the more eyeballs. So, it’s in OKCupid’s interests to get and keep as many people on the site as possible. Now, this isn’t to say that they are leading people on with false profiles or whatnot. But a number of times when I’m looking to search for matches, it will default the search criteria to women aged 18-55, within 1000 miles, and online anytime in the past decade. The last one is particularly telling — Christian talks about the evils of leading people on with profiles that can’t reply, and yet his site will often show you “matches” that haven’t logged on since the Bush administration. Isn’t that basically the same thing?

Then he points out that eHarmony says right on their site that their user base is completly refreshed once every 6.5 months

The most charitable way to interpret this last sentence is to assume their average account life is 6.5 months.

Well, no. the most charitable way to interpret that sentence is that within 6.5 months, their users have found the love of their life through the site and are happily together. And besides, wouldn’t that also mean that every 6.5 months there’s a whole new batch of single people that are available to contact? Isn’t that a good thing?

Next he shows how having only 1 in 30 people to talk to due to a subscriber wall is a such a bad thing, by showing 30 “attractive, single OKCupid users” and then hiding all but one behind a “Can’t Reply” graphic. But that is making the incorrect assumption that such a ratio would be any better on a free dating site, such as OKCupid. For example, you’ll note that he said nothing about whether or not the users showed were currently active or not, nor where they were located, and he certainly can’t say that just because all 30 theoretically can reply, that they would. And more to the point, it’s not like these sites are actually offering only 30 people to choose from. Scale it up to where “only” 10,000 people can reply, and chance are that it doesn’t make as much of a difference whether or not there’s a subscriber wall.

Later on, he makes this point:

If you’re a subscriber to a pay dating site, you are an important (though unwitting) part of that site’s customer acquisition team. Of course, they don’t want to show you too many ghosts, because you’ll get frustrated and quit, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re relying on you your messages are their marketing materials to reach out to non-payers and convince them, by way of your charming, heartfelt messages, to pull out their credit cards. If only a tiny fraction of your message gets a response, hey, that’s okay, you’re working for free. Wait a second…you’re paying them.

Er… no, that’s not even close to being true for Match; I haven’t used eHarmony in a long time, but when I did try it, it worked completely differently, as well. In eHarmony, you actually started off with a set of simple yes/no questions to see about basic interest, then moved up through a few more steps before you started e-mailing each other. So, you couldn’t get past those first steps unless you were already paying. As for Match, you cannot read emails unless you are a paying member — you don’t even know who the e-mail is from without being a subscriber. This is crummy on a seperate level, but the assertion that you’re providing their marketing material is just flat-out wrong, and the lack of basic research into this is disturbing.

Here’s another fun fact:

There is a negative correlation between the number of messages a man sends per day to the reply rate he gets. The more messages you send, the worse response rate you get.

As far as I can tell, this is from OKCupid’s own data. So, again, I’m not sure how this is really helping their cause. It’s not saying, “You wasting your time on pay dating sites” so much as “You’re wasting your time on dating sites.”

Finally, he wraps up the post by pointing out how eHarmony fails over 90% of the time to get people married. Interestingly enough, however, he provides no data on how OKCupid does in that category. In fact, throughout the entire post, OKCupid’s own success rates in comparison to Match and eHarmony are blatantly absent. It’s like a comparison ad without the comparison. And, again, throughout the entire post Christian never once makes any attempt to justify the A-list pay level of OKCupid.

It’s just such a mind-bendingly bizarre article that I cannot wrap my mind around it. I looked through some comments, and most people are totally in favor of it; I will admit it was a bit disturbing to see that very, very few people actually made any mention of OKCupid’s own A-List service, or the stunning lack of data about OKCupid’s own profiles and “success rate.”

Anyway — this was not a deeply-thought out response. Just something that struck me as so odd I wanted to jot down my random thoughts to it. I will say, however, that if that this did anything to my own take on online dating, it would to basically give it up. But, well, I doubt that will happen any time soon.

 Posted by at 12:08 am  Tagged with:

The Blasphemy of Cereal

 Life in General  Comments Off
Apr 202010
 

While at the glory that is CostCo last night, I saw that Cheerios, that time-honored bastion of healthy breakfast rituals, has actually released a “Chocolate Cheerios” brand, made, it assures us, with “Real Cocoa!”

Personally, I was appalled at this obvious breach of moral contract! Cheerios must remain pure! Free from the blatant grab for market share that this so clearly is! What’s next? Sugar-Coated Special K? Quaker Oats Oatmeal with Marshmallows? My outrage poured forth before me, down the aisle in a river of seething rage.

Then I bought a couple of boxes. After all, I like things that taste like chocolate.

 Posted by at 11:40 am  Tagged with:

With a Cough and a Couple of Movies

 Life in General, Reviews  Comments Off
Apr 202010
 

Ever since my allergies decided to freak out over a week ago, I’ve since been struggling with this friggin’ hacking cough, and I have to be frank: it’s getting pretty old. My nose isn’t running as much anymore, at least, but it’s been replaced by having my mucus back up and require to be expunged from my system via the rather less-than-attractive art of spitting. While I understand that in many young men’s eyes, this is considered “cool” and “hip,” but it’s really not all that glamorous to me to have to deal with it somehow while in the office, or worse yet, on a date. Things seem to settle down as the day goes on, but still, it will be nice when this is pretty much cleared up.

The throat condition, combined with the sprained ankle and recent acquisition of Mass Effect 2, has meant that I really have not done a lot the past couple of weeks. For the most part, it’s just been work and home, with only one or two exceptions. With any luck, this week I can start being more productive, given that the ankle is feeling better (and having played through Mass Effect 2 a few times now), I’m hoping to get back into something of a productive mode. Ironically, this includes playing through some other video games that I have been putting off. Again, if you think it’s impossible to be productive playing games, I would asset that it is no more unproductive than reading books, watching movies, or viewing pretty much any reality television show.

Related to the sprained ankle, I have decided to take off sports for a couple of weeks, or so. I skipped last week, and shall do so again this week; next week I might give myself limited playing time, as the last thing I want to do is re-aggravate the injury. On a more pleasing note (in a weird sort of way), my basketball team went 1-3 last week, and my football team (apparently) were shut out again, in a blowout. So, this makes me feel better because, well, if the teams had done just brilliantly without my presence, it would have not been a great feeling. Selfish of me? Sure is, by golly! Woo!

[ S H I E L D B R E A K ! ! ! ]

I had a chance last week to catch a couple of movies via the wonders of YouTube. I should note that in both cases I doubt that they were up on the site with the blessings of the people who controlled the IP, and yet this did not prevent the IP holders from getting money from me; mainly because I wasn’t planning on buying or renting the films to begin with. Maybe I would have watched if aa friend loaned me the disk, but I suspect that still would not have led me to spending money for the films.

The first film was the Ray Harryhausen classic, “Jason and the Argonauts,” from 1963. And yes, I use the stop-motion animator’s name by the film, not the director, or lead actors. I had actually been interested in seeing this film after running across a (what else?) YouTube short about classic movie monsters, and Harryhausen is pretty much “The Man” when it comes to that. Bouncing around YouTube, I ran across the scene where the giant bronze statue of Talos first comes to life (which, to be frank, is pretty wicked cool), then I backtracked and managed to find the rest of the film.

It was intriguing to me in a number of ways, although it wasn’t something that I would call a particularly “good” film. The things which stick out for me:

  • There are a lot of guys running around without their shirts on, and oft-times not even decent leggings. But here’s the kicker – in today’s Hollywood, you can bet that all the men would be severely ‘roided up and oiled, like they were about to step into a WWE title match. Sure, the men featured were in good shape (they had to be for the journey, after all) but it wasn’t as if they were working out at Gold’s Gym 4-6 hours each day, either, or guzzling protein shakes.
  • The story actually threw me for a loop at the end. I will say that I did like how the betrayal was played out – I was honestly thinking that Medina had, in act, been the one to squeal on Jason, although I was thinking it was just an accidental circumstance. The actual source of the betrayal was actually pretty cool when I saw it revealed.
  • The film, however, ended rather abruptly, it felt, largely because here it was gearing up for the return of Jason to battle for his throne, but rather, it ceased once he had the golden fleece and was back on the ship. I’m not sure if this was because there were plans to make it a series of movies, but honestly, it really sort of felt like “Oh crap, our budget is almost up! Quick, we gotta end this thing—roll the credits!”

Still, I’d say that the film is worth watching, if nothing else than for when Talos first comes to life and turns his head towards the intruders. The stop-motion animation actually lent itself well in this case, too, as it fit into the idea of a living giant bronze statue moving awkwardly about; bronze is not its most flexible while at room temperature.

Oh, and I have to wonder why Talos never used that sword he was carrying around. Aside from bringing the movie to a swift end, anyway.

As for the second film, “Snatch,” it was good to finally see this, especially given that I actually have “Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels” at home. The opening sequence is great, and if I was going to buy a copy, this is the reason why; from the credit sequence that shows the group walking around on security cameras (and notice that the movie credits are actually showing up on the security monitors, a very nice touch) to the now-famous sequence of all the characters introduced. It’s not only a great way to actually introduce the characters (not the actors, mind you, but the characters themselves), but it’s also just a fun romp through edits and wipes that set the mood for the film itself.

I’ve often heard it said that people who see “Lock” first like that film better, and people who saw “Snatch” first like that film better. I can see why, as they both have a very similar style that, when you first see it, really grabs you, but when you see the next film, it’s more familiar and thus not as “fresh.” Both films are good, but I admit I follow the crowd here and having seen “Lock” first, I enjoyed that one more.

In my case, however, it’s actually more due to the story structure. See, in “Lock,” you are introduced to a vast array of characters earlier on, and it’s really a lot of fun watching how they all wind up interconnecting as the movie progresses, climaxing in basically every group from the film meeting (or almost meeting) around the main characters’ apartment. In “Snatch,” by contrast, you actually have two totally seperate storylines going on: The Boxing set-up, and the hunt for the diamond. The two never really intersect; Brick Top is involved in both, but very tangentially – he never had any interest in the diamond to begin with, and after he’s told about it, he makes no mention of it ever again. The dog crosses paths with Turkish and Tommy at the very end, but again, it’s more of a footnote than anything else. You probably could have told either story alone and, with some minor adjustments, both would have been just as strong.

Still, it’s a good run, and (like the aforementioned film) it’s refreshing to see people in films that aren’t all “perfect” human specimens. Brick Top, in particular, isn’t portrayed as the most dapper of souls, and that just reinforces (to me) his realism.

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