Here's some talk of the Sims.




In 2002, The Sims was the best selling game of all time. This is followed shortly by The Sims 2. I could not find an end to the best ways to torture your Sims. I think the most shocking was the baby on the grill.

At any point in my life, I could pick up this game and love it. That’s my way of saying, that’s exactly what happened. It just communicates so many moods to me. I saw it for download on the XboxLive and I had to get it. I feel there are minor tweaks here and there but the original experience is kept intact. I’m actually more intrigued by the new stuff. It’s almost like a reimagining. My memory of the game is a little hazy. So subtle are the changes it makes me paranoid that I might be experiencing new content and not knowing/appreciating it. I know for a fact that in the prologue there was never an obvious detour to a room full of fancy stuff that Richter Belmont can’t even equip.



I’m always trying to relive my memory of the game. If I take one misstep or go the wrong direction at some point, I’m confronted with indecision. There are stops here and there to keep me from progressing too far out of order like in any good free form game. I will eventually revisit everything but the point is to relive the memory as it happened. Well, maybe not the point, but it is an experience. Like, if I go to a place where I know I had a certain item and I don’t, I backtrack.



If I’d played the game twice contiguously, I’d be searching for a new adventure and variety. I’ve never done this nor would I ever. Once is enough…for a few years. And then I come crawling back.

In Gamers Gone Wild, The Villain talked about the gamer creating something from nothing. Be it a plot from a plotless genre, a clear goal to an open world game or a fucking working computer from logs and valves. Here I want to address some of the wonderful things games came with innately or on accident but were “fixed” for the general user. The next three bugs I acquired from GameInformer, Issue 207:

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

“During Oblivon, our new Radiant AI system – which let all the NPCs in the world think and act on their own – led to some of the best bugs. My favorite was a quest where you had to talk to a prisoner in jail. Sometimes when playtesting, we would find him locked in his cell, dead. It took us forever to figure out why. Turns out, the guards in the jail could run out of food and get hungry. They would then don down and kill the prisoner to take his food. This all happened when the player wasn’t there. I still don’t remember how we figured it out. But the solution was easy: more guard food.”

This I feel is an outright lie when I look at the launched product. It was a world of blank faces, pointless meandering and three voice actors. This so called Radiant AI was so neutered upon release that I honestly think it did worse than a conventional AI. It’s sad too because it had all the elements of something great. I read of guards killing people’s dogs for the dog meat, and the owners, upset for their dead dog, attacking the guards. My feeling is, so what if the world is tearing itself apart because you made people too smart, if a bit short sighted. What do you think God has to live with? He sees this every day. If the game is so alive that it’s out of the developers control, than it’s something I want to be a part of as a player. That’s what I want to be a part of as a developer. Oblivion was delivered is such a shabby state, never to be repaired. The devs truly bit off more than they could chew

Terminus

“Way back in the day when Vicarious Visions was developing the PC game Terminus, we ran into some very strange bugs. In one case, every time you tried to fire a missile, your spaceship would spontaneously blow up. We had worked to model the game with incredible accuracy, and we could just not figure out the root cause – it turned out that the diameter of the missile was slightly larger than the weapons bay port it was getting shot out from, so every time it hit the port, it exploded and took the players ship with it. Also in Terminus, we had a particular ship that would fly out of the space dock and immediately all the controls would go dead. The joystick wouldn’t work, no keyboard input, etc. It turned out that we had modeled insufficient radiation shielding on the ship. So the moment the shop took off, the radiation from the engine’s core would kill the pilot.”

Both these bugs I feel are things the player should learn firsthand. Yeah, he should be warned that his missile will collide with his weapon’s bay port when fired, but not disallowed to combine the two 3rd party products. Sure the engine wasn’t meant to be used in such a small ship and yeah, the radiation will kill you as soon as it’s ignited, but that’s your lesson to learn. I think awesome fixes to these two bugs would be looking at it like a car designer. Maybe selling the ship with these weapons increases the buyer demand? If they don’t take the time to realize that a tiny weapon’s bay port is literally CRAMMED to the brim, before taking it off for their virgin test drive, that’s on them. They should have checked the specs on the radiation shielding on that engine versus the ship. Sure, it was spun that it offered unparallel power at an unbeatable price, not that it was fatal. Buyers beware, you know? I think it’d be on the developer to offer the options to inspect the ship in a way to KNOW this information and not just have to infer it from always exploding or dying. Here's a free download for the game



I’ve heard of people driving cars with insufficient firewall insulation and their feet feel like they are on fire. I own a Chevrolet 2000 S10 and it is impossible to change the spark plugs without removing the steering column. These design problems are not going away and nor should they. They add depth and interest to games. The chance to DO wrong is appreciated I think.

The Maw

“One of our achievements hinged on the player feeding the Maw every single creature in the game. As we got close to the end of development, it seemed like we were running into all these cases where we couldn’t find the last creature or two in a level even though we visited all their locations. It soon became apparent that the Yums were disappearing somehow. We were at a loss. Finally, by chance one of us happened to be passing by one of the territorial Gastros as it defended its zone against a Yum. It grabbed the Yum in its mouth, shook it vigorously, and tossed it at a mountain. The Yum hit it and then suddenly went rocketing into the air like a Smash Bros. character. It turned out that if a creature was small enough and got shoved too far into an indention in the terrain, our physics library helpfully resolved the situation by firing the creature into the air at near-infinite velocity. I thought it’d be fine to just tell players to wait a couple days for the Yums to fall back to the ground, but the designers made us fix the bug instead.”

From the perspective of the developer, it sounds like everything is working fine. I’d fix the “bug” by putting a cap on how high things can fly.

We debate my review, my review system and my view of things. And Madden.

Here is an ardent Madden fan and I debating about Madden. Check it out.

I've nothing to play this week. Castlevania: Harmony of Despair is only fun with two or more players; otherwise it's an empty romp, just like every MMO ever. I beat LIMBO and it was a game good only when you don't know what's going to happen. I don't feel the compulsion to grind on Monkey Island 2 even though I know I will enjoy it. Mass Effect 2's time has passed, which is a shame. Planescape: Torment I'm keeping alive through sheer force of will and rehearsal exercises.



So what does that leave me? Madden 2011? Don't make me laugh. I just watched a review on it at GameTrailers. I tuned out all the nonsensical glowing remarks about all the great improvements. I also filtered the scowling chides for the clean and crisp logic of my camp's (the dissenter's) choice to abstain. Those ate up most of the review except for mention marginal graphical improvements, improved ease of use, shorter game length, fixing of the junky controls and added features. In my mind, that's constitutes "just another update." The review's main selling point is that this is the best year to buy the game. If you've never owned a Madden game before and are a fan of football, sure, I can see no problems with that. But if you’ve bought each succession of the game each year, I don’t know; it’s still probably important to you. Just don’t ever expect me to not make fun of how ridiculous it seems to pay good money each year for an update. I bought Diablo 2, just once, back in the year 2000. My Lord of Destruction disc is so worn down that I was barely able to pull a usuable image off before it crumbled. The last huge content improving patch, of which there has been a constant stream, was in March of this year (2010). That’s ten years of free support. The only reason it has now stopped is because Diablo 3 is preparing to launch.



Another popular launch is Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty? I’m not really a fan of the genre because I suck at it. I know I would enjoy the story and maybe the single player, but I always have to cheat at those games to win. Either that or learn it and perfect it to such a level that I can no longer enjoy it and this is in earlier stages on easy difficulty. I’m just not good at it.

Dragon Age: Origins, The Witcher and Final Fantasy XIII? I just don’t have the time this week for these non-causal investments.

First off, I don’t like American football and any of its variants or virtual spinoffs. So Madden is one of those things that I don’t like. I want to see it fail. I will kick the idea of Madden every time it exposes a weakness or failing. Here are my initial impressions:

My roommate first input his pre-order GameStop code that gave him 20,000 coins, whatever that means (they’re probably worth a Schrute-Buck or two). As soon as the game started the song “Crazy Train” by Ozzy Osborn started playing and my roommate checked out what these coins could buy. Three problems immediately arose, all funny to me.



Firstly, that’s such a terrible song to play the very first time someone starts something they’ve been anticipating for all year. I’m not speaking ill of Ozzy or this tired song, but of whoever would chose this song at all in the lineup is making the statement, “I don’t care.” It’s saying, we couldn’t be bothered to find new and interesting music to get you pumped this year, like we have in the years past. It’s saying, we don’t even need to deliver a complete package anymore, just the next iteration of this franchise and all you football fans will gobble it up. That’s inferring a lot I know. Madden 2009 had several bands listed that were good that we’ve never heard of that needed further investigation. So seriously though, Crazy Train? If it wasn’t still played on the radio every twenty minutes, it’d be a song worth hearing but still not in this context. Why didn’t they just play “Low Rider” by George Lopez follow by “Jump on it” by Sir Mix-A-Lot. They’re all just as fresh and relevant to football as Crazy Train. What a phone-in.

Next my roommate was checking what he could buy; each tabbed text window took about ten seconds to load. And if you went to a different tab, that took another ten seconds. And then when you return to the first, it had to reload again. This is all a text based nested tab with no more than fifteen entries, and about three lines of test per entry (it can’t be more than ten kilobytes) takes that long to retrieve from the Madden servers each time you view it. Why couldn’t they just cache it?

Next was something I’m not certain about, but what people could spend real money on, not Madden coins, was stat improvements, picks, drafts and accelerators for what I assume are meant for the online matches. So it becomes what was once a competitive online sport now is now who ever pays the most money will have the best advantage. I can’t see any reason why someone would pay real money for these advantages in any other situation so I’ll assume that’s what they for. This brought dread to my roommate because he knew exactly what I knew.

I left and came back about twenty minutes later to different Ozzy song playing. My roommate was updating the roster to the correct lineup, something the developers would eventually patch. “It usually within a few days, they update the rosters,” says my roommate. All I can think is, “what have the developers been doing while the game has been shipping and waiting in the backs of stores for the last few weeks that they can’t have it ready, updated and good to go the day of its release?” The fan base is so fanatical for their product that the fans are personally updating this on their own and this is something the developers choose to abuse? This sounds rifer with hubris than Apple. And then Ozzy came on again with Crazy Train again. It was as if there were only five songs, two of which were Ozzy, on a loop. I came back a little bit later about to leave for work and I notice my roommate restarting his Playstation. He said, “Yeah it froze. I had to go back to the start screen.” I was thinking things couldn’t get any better for me.



He was messing with his roster and commented on his players “OldSpice Swagger” stat. Yes, that’s right, each player has an amount OldSpice Swagger alongside other physical attributes like, height, weight, age and speed. What, a player’s Swagger does other than advertise a smell, is a mystery.

So as far as gameplay, that’s up for review. But first impressions count and this gave me a great one. If you hate Madden games, this get’s two thumbs way up. If you are a Madden fan, I’m sure it’s not all bad.

I mentioned before about the power of integrating humans into clusters to solve complex problems. Since then it’s been scientifically proven as an exploitable resource. You just need to dress it up as a game. Foldit is the example and in the link they mention that human intuition can still outpace the rigorous teraflops of the most advance supercomputers.

”Analysis shows that players bested the computers on problems that required radical moves, risks and long-term vision -- the kinds of qualities that computers do not possess.”

Is this not exactly what I was talking about? I love scientific validation.

”’It's a new kind of collective intelligence, as opposed to individual intelligence, that we want to study,"Popović said. "We're opening eyes in terms of how people think about human intelligence and group intelligence, and what the possibilities are when you get huge numbers of people together to solve a very hard problem’”

I think the most entertaining use for collective intelligence is cracking DRM (Digital Rights Management). Huge monolithic corporations spend millions on these ultra-complex methods to prevent people from stealing their software. The rebellious youth take this as a challenge and form collective communities that whittle away all these barriers. The real surprise is not that a cluster of likely self educated teenagers are undoing the Gordian Knots of world class programmers, but how ridiculously fast it happens! I personally saw Half Life 2 available to torrent about a week after it dropped. Mass Effect took about ten days. Spore dropped even quicker.



The latter two are from the publisher Electronic Arts, the most ardent and extreme enforcers of DRM. It seemed they were getting cracked even quicker simply because the amount of effort they put into it. Cracking DRM is like rebellion mixed with a puzzle that you get to accomplish with like minded people and at the end you get a free game out of it.

Since the new Dregs Blog is still a work in progress and since my brain won't ever let me stop, this will just have to be where I dump-on in the meanwhile. Enjoy.

I wrote a while back about the “Dyson Effect” long before my blogs and scribbles were amassed on a contiguous series of websites. In short, it’s the why of the noticed word of mouth given to the greatness of The Dyson Vacuum cleaners. I admit I fell prey to it. The commercials were classy and they were priced for a premium. People were saying, not for you benefit but their own, about how great these vacuums are. I got the vacuum home and after having to run the vacuum over a single scrap of paper several times, my conviction didn’t falter, it hardened. Something about having paid all they money and it was still no better than the average vacuum…changes you. The deep shame that you can’t even feel becomes rationalized and denied. People want to feel like they weren’t cheated by hyping the vacuum cleaner. The effect is that people were promoting a shoddy product to validate their choice. People hear this from their friends and they find themselves also buying these vacuum cleaners. It perpetuates like a virus. This social dynamic couldn’t have been predicted.



By the way, I’m not saying Dyson Vacuums are terrible. I’m saying they’re just okay and no better than any other vacuum at four-fold the price.



Now consider what people say about Final Fantasy XIII: The general consensus is that they game doesn’t get “good” until thirty hours in. That’s a ridiculous sum of time. Since the price is no higher than any other game, can the Dyson Effect be applied to the time invested?