You know it's bad when even the commentators are bored. I can't believe I just sat through the entire FA cup final. I know it's always like that - both sides are just too afraid of conceeding a goal that they just can't risk actually trying to score one - madness! You'll be two down before you know it! No team ever won by doing that. I used to give my Dad rather withering looks when he suggested they should make the goals bigger but I totally agree with him now. And maybe some sort of jellified gyroscope inside the ball so it moves and swerves unpredictably. I think if it's 0-0 at full time then neither team gets to win the trophy - they should just be sent home in disgrace. Maybe all the kids who walk out with the players during the opening ceremony could play it out. All rather embarassing as well for the new Wembley - we waited all that time and spent all that money just to watch this? The Roman solution to all this, as we learned this week when that gladiator graveyard was unearthed, was that if you were deemed too wet and boring to watch you would be savagely butchered for the pleasure of the baying croud. Putting the sheer derangedly mental bloodlust to one side, there is a lot to be said for having the rules of the game encourage excitement and showmanship, rather than dull, grinding attrition. + 5 - 4 | § ¶How Things Work: Road Crossings
Ever wondered what the inside of those little 'WAIT' switches at road crossings looks like? Well here's the answer, courtesy of some asbo-baiting local ruffian (and some poor photography from yours truly):
Yes, it is two wires connected to an ordinary household 40 watt bulb, and yes, it is exactly the same circuit you made in Science class when you were about 9. Doesn't the world suddenly seem a much simpler place? + 5 - 6 | § ¶Gym Will Fix It
I'm feeling very virtuous because I've just been swimming at the gym across the road. It was ok - I think I could do it regularly. I need something because my morning walk isn't quite enough to counteract the sitting and eating I do for the rest of the day, and an evening swim is quite pleasant - the sort of thing I might do on holiday. I hope I can stick with it because pretty much any other form of gym-type exercise makes me psychotically bored and unhappy. I just don't know how people do it. At Uni, I tried to do the running machine for only ten minutes in a session, and even that was torture. I couldn't handle the fact that my brain has got nothing to do except think about the fact that my body is in slight to moderate pain, so I thought the next thing was to take my minidisc player along so I could listen to music. The problem then was that I'd get all fussy about what song I listened to, and jogging along in pain with a song in my ears that I didn't want to listen to and couldn't get rid of was even worse than nothing, so I'd be scrabbling at the player to try and change track and nearly lose my balance and lurch off the back of the treadmill into some beefcake lifting weights behind me. The other thing is that there's a small holding bay thing at the front of the treadmill where you can stash your water bottle or music player within easy reach. Problem is, the constant bumping of the treadmill causes the minidisc to skip, which is also infuriating, and so I got to a point where I take a special little hand towel to the gym with me so I can use it as a little cushion for the minidisc to stop it skipping, which is, frankly, madness. + 2 - 7 | § ¶And That, Your Honour, Is The Truth
My mum was in court today, charged with speeding offences. I'm officially the child of a convict. She managed to get away with a fine, even though technically she should be banned, because she pleaded hardship (single parent, needs car to work, oh woe is me, violins etc). Anyway, she said it was very surreal - you're made to stand in the dock, which is glassed off (so you can't spit at the judge?), and they make you swear on the bible - "I do solemly swear, in the name of God, to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth". Rough translation: "I promise, in the name of a non-specific deity in which I do not believe, that I won't lie to you." Interestingly, they don't even make you swear on your own word, which to an athiest surely would mean more than swearing in the name of a God they don't believe in? And surely the fact that you've ended up in court in the first place suggests that you might not be the most completely honest and law-abiding of people in the first place? Wood? Trees? Anyway. GO British legal system. + 2 - 7 | § ¶Tools For The Job
Since my laptop has been broken, I've managed to get my Japanese PS2 to play nicely with the PAL telly, which means I can play all my Japanese games again. I've been trying to finish Biohazard (Resident Evil) 4, which was one of the most critically and commercially acclaimed games of last year, a massive leap forward for the series, blah blah blah, and you know what? I hate it. It's awful. It's almost interesting to play it just to see how much of it I find irritating. Now, the original Resident Evil, back on PS1, was very much a survival horror game, pitting you in a creaky old mansion with the occasional (note: occasional) zombie wandering around the corner, and puzzles to solve to progress to different parts of the mansion and through the story. It worked wonderfully well, and here's why: it worked on a scary horror level because it used fixed cameras, deliberately placed so you couldn't see what was around the corner, or in other circumstances was perfectly placed to show a zombie bursting out of a cupboard behind you, something horror movies do with aplomb. It was also stubbornly third-person, making each battle a panic as you tried to aim properly, and altogether was genuinely scary - no-one ever forgets that corridor. The puzzles were also interesting and challenging, and this gives it an interesting game-within-a-game dynamic, as you simultaneously wander around the house, evading zombies and working out how to open the various doors. This also makes it interesting for the other people sitting on the sofa who aren't playing - you can get involved with the puzzles, and enjoy watching your friend getting freaked out as he or she's stalked by those frogmen things.
Now, four iterations down the line, all that has changed. First of all, it's much more action-orientated. 95% of what you're doing is shooting stuff. This gets dull, and it's also not scary at all - you know there's going to be something around the next corner because there's always something around the next corner. The story and scriptwriting is APPALLING - you couldn't do worse if you tried. The puzzles are also moronically simplistic - the instructions and hints are all in Japanese and I've spent less than ten minutes on any one. There's also something fundamentally irritating about the setup. In RE1, I think you're a cop sent to investigate some strange goings-on, and then get trapped inside the creepy house which is by now surrounded by zombies and your radio doesn't work. Fair enough. In 2, you're a cop working late, and when you try to leave work everyone's turned into a zombie. Ok, hackneyed and derivative yes, but at no point can you say 'why don't you just run away' or 'why aren't there any reinforcements'. In RE4, the President's daughter has been kidnapped, and you've been sent in as the ultra-tough special-operative one-man-army. With one crappy pistol and a knife. Come on people, tools for the job. The zombies and mutants being far-fetched doesn't matter - the problem is that even in the game's world, they'd send in a bit more than one bloke for the rescue mission. I've died countless times, no matter how close I get the daughter keeps getting (re-)kidnapped, and I can't help thinking - where's my backup? Where's my crack team of special forces commando types, kitted out in kevlar body armour and heavy assault rifles - if I had them this would be over in twenty minutes.
The thing is, you have to give the player the tools to do the job. All this one-man-against-all-the-odds stuff is crap and boring. The reason there's so much of it is that designing co-op is hard - creating AI squad members that will help the player and respond intelligently to his or her orders is difficult to do and very difficult to do well. A zombie just needs to lurch towards you and attack when it gets close. You can write code that does that in an hour. A squad member needs to follow the player, open doors, not get lost, respond to orders, decide whether to shoot or run, duck or cover, flick switches, pick up items - you name it. You've also got to be a bit clever with your level design - you want there to be multiple paths and interesting logic problems for the player (along the line of the puzzle where you have to get the fox, chicken and grain across the river), and multiple ways of doing them too. This is potentially weeks or even months of work - and you still need to write the zombie code. However, there are a load of things in RE4 that I think they could easily have done without. There's this whole system of quick-reaction tests, where a certain (scripted) event happens (eg a column falling down, a sniper's bullet), and you have to press a certain combination of buttons to avoid being hit by column/bullet, (and if you mess up, getting the game over screen, waiting for the game to load exactly the same room that it was just using, and then trying again with the clairvoyant-like knowledge of what's about to happen). This would have required a lot of work too - new input handling code, timing stuff, loads of special-case art assets and movies which are only used once in the whole game, potentially weeks or even months of work. They really don't add anything to the game - they irritated me, and even to people who quite liked them, they're still just a gimmick really. It doesn't add any interesting abilities or choices to the player, it doesn't enhance the gameplay or widen the possibility space or anything, it's just a showy set-piece. + 5 - 5 | § ¶A New Language
Guest Device: iBookG4 (aka Mum's laptop, akpa (also known privately as) Silly single-buttoned Fisher-Price My First Laptop)
Just finished day 4 of my new job. I'm now a Software Engineer (seeeeexy) at Ideaworks3D, and am working on the mobile version of Metal Gear Solid (!), which is pretty cool actually - at least it's something that people will have heard of, and not something crap like poker. It's hard and quite a steep learning curve, but I'm keeping up. There's not much of a formal process for new people, and so far it's been (in a nice way): 'Er, well here's the engine, there are some examples in this directory, have a tinker and try and get your head around it.' Anyway, today I've now got the actualy game source and will be working from that, so it all feels a bit more legit. The other people are nice - far less geeky than some of the places I interviewed at. So far I've been pretty quiet, which feels a bit like a step back after the larger-than-lifeness of being a JET, but you can't exactly go strolling into a new office full of people you don't know and say in a loud and booming voice 'I am Nick from England! Let's play... Grandmother's Footsteps!'
It's good to be working again though - all the job hunting stuff was quite exciting in a way, but I still spent way too much time with not quite enough to do, which in turn makes just pottering around somehow rather unsatisfying. And it's nice that I can still sort of cut it here, without my JET rock-star status. One of the things that never stopped being tiring was that even towards the end of JET, I still couldn't read anything official or documented, and so even though the office was meant to be run in English, we still got lesson plans through in Japanese as well as all the old books, and I'd still have to ask Arai-sensei to help me. Now of course, being back in England, I get to work with perfectly readable things, like this:
// create scale vector, apply to scene node and also add it to SPhysicsTerrain
vector3df terrainScale(10.0f, 1.0f, 10.0f);
terrainNode->setScale(terrainScale);
// create SPhysicsTerrain
SPhysicsTerrain terrain;
terrain.terrainNode = terrainNode;
terrain.terrainScale = terrainScale;
// create Terrain entity
IPhysicsEntity* terrainEntity = physics.addEntity(&terrain);
while(device->run())
{
driver->beginScene(true, true, SColor(0,100,100,100));
smgr->drawAll();
driver->endScene();
// worry about accurate timing later
physics.update(100.0f);
}
Hmmm...
Computer is dead again, so I'm now writing this on my whizzy new mobile. I'm trying to make myself do good Sunday things like cook or play my guitar, but I can't quite relax because tomorrow I start my new job. I'm half wildly excited and half bricking it, to be honest.
+ 3 - 6 | § ¶Whose games are these?I went to the London Games Festival last week. I was volunteering, which was great, because it meant I could go to the careers fair that I was going to go to anyway but also get into the Game Developers Conference, which is the main European conference for games. The other perk was that at the careers fair, all the other candidates, in addition to being generally mumbling and unwashed, had crappy green tags on which they'd (often atrociously) handwritten their names. I, by contrast, had a blue tag, with my name printed on it, and big letters saying "CONFERENCE STAFF". Mwahahaha. Anyway, I must admit to being more than a little underwhelmed by the kind of things that most of the people were talking about.
The central focus of the conference was next-gen - fair enough with XBox360 out already, Wii due out before Christmas, and PS3 "soon" (whenever Sony actually manage to fix blu-ray). However, all anyone seemed excited about was how to make everything bigger and more technically advanced than before, and I'm sure in some cases better, but not different. Case in point: Evolution Software (they all have silly testosterone-fuelled names, this is one of the milder examples) gave a presentation of their super-next-gen racing title, Motorstorm. Motorstorm's unique, revolutionary idea is that your buggy/bike/pickup makes deep ruts in the mud that covers every course. These mud ruts then harden, with the physics engine calculating a new surface on the course, so that on the next lap there are deep tracks in the mud which makes driving more of a challenge. For those of you whose eyes are already starting to glaze over, that's a pretty appropriate reaction - that is really quite hard to do. All that plus the innate difficulties of developing for a brand new system. But, seriously, who cares? I just don't see how that makes the game better. It certainly doesn't make me want to buy it, and I'm a game-playing type. I'm into it, and I can't be arsed. Is that going to attract new people? Is Martin going to buy that? Kat? Fat chance. Another podcast I was listening to had a developer talking about the new trees in his company's next-gen racing game. Trees, which are really central to a racing game. I despair. What am I getting myself into? Oh and another thing, and I know this is a little bit I'm-so-windswept-and-interesting, but no-one asked me about Japan. What are Japanese kids like? What games do they play? How do you think they compare with British kids? Seriously, I've spent the last two years pretty dammned focussed on kids that make up a sizeable percentage of their target audiences, learning all about what they like, how they live and how they learn, and I'm also looking for a job so I'm going to be eager to chat and I'll tell you anything I know. Nothing. Bugger all. I'd ask.
Anyway, I've got an interview on friday with a game developer who are based in Oxford. They make fairly gory blowing-lots-of-stuff-up-with-big-guns games, but you've got to start somewhere. Maybe they've been thinking the same things as me and are hatching secret plans to make interesting, sophisticated, highbrow interactive entertainment for people who read the guardian, go to art galleries and write with fountain pens. Who knows. It'll be interesting to see what they ask and how it goes and everything, but I don't think I'll get it.