Plaidophile

So the recent release of the abysmally complex and un-fun DJ Hero inspired me to pull out my old Beatmania stuff and play it a bit more. It is still an excellent game. So I brought it to work and played it a bit during a break, and it was disappointing that everyone who walked by thought I was playing DJ Hero and wondered why the graphics "were so 8-bit." All modern rhythm games owe so much to Beatmania (it was the first to have the "notes falling toward a controller" layout, and the first to have a mock musical instrument for a controller, and so many aspects of its design and presentation are things that are copied pretty much exactly in the more "modern" rhythm games) and it's almost criminal that most hardcore rhythm game players don't even know that it exists.

Things I like about Beatmania:

• It has an incredible variety of music. When R343L came by she said, "Oh, it's like Rock Band but with techno," but she just happened to come by when I was playing a techno track. If she'd been there for the previous one she'd have heard some Motown-style funk, and the next one was new-wave fusion jazz. There's also classical and rock and pop and IDM and who knows what the hell else. Much of it is hard to classify, like most of my broad tastes in musical styles.
• You are actually playing the music. On most rhythm games you're just hitting buttons, and hitting the wrong button will make the overall pre-mixed track mute, or (on a good day) play some random jarring instrument noises. On Beatmania, though, you are actually playing a sampler keyboard, whose sample triggers are changing as part of the timeline. It is totally transparent to the player, BUT it means that if you mess up the timing or miss a note or play the wrong key, you actually get off-time or partially-missing or wrong samples. Another side-effect of this is that you really have to play with your ears as much as your eyes, and so it doesn't matter that there's no way to calibrate it for display lag because if you're looking at the event line, you're doing it wrong.
• Relatedly (and completely unlike DJ Hero), when you are scratching it is actually scratching. Okay, it's not speed- or direction-sensitive, and the metaphor of the turntable can vary often (sometimes it's a scratch, sometimes it's a spin, sometimes it's just another sample trigger) but when you're on a scratch-heavy track, every scratch you make produces a separate scratch sound. You have to be able to count small numbers very quickly, which is a lot harder than it sounds.
• You get a hell of a lot of music on each disc. Yeah, in the days before DLC, you had to buy additional CD-ROMs to get more songs. But each disc has about an hour's worth of songs. (Because the tracks are composed of samples, and often have the same samples used across songs, you easily get a CD's worth of music, sometimes more, even with all the audio tracks being separate.) Yeah, some of the later mixes have repeats from the previous discs, but so what? Each disc is a unique gaming experience.
• The visuals! Most rhythm games give you basically nothing interesting visually. Oh, yay, a band on stage, big deal. Beatmania gives you fun semi-interactive music videos that react to the song and to how you're doing. And the visuals are fun, with crayon scrawlings and tongue-in-cheek discotheque visuals and occasional IDM-ish weirdness.
• Winning doesn't involve just not failing, but ending on a high note. (Actually it's possible to completely bomb out at the beginning and then recover towards the end. Finishing strong is more important. Except in expert mode.)
• Even though it's over 12 years old it's still fun and challenging, and the later mixes took it a bit further and provided multiple difficulty levels and even multiple arrangements of the songs. Okay, sure, Guitar Hero and Rock Band have the multiple difficulty levels, but that's just adding more events you have to hit more or less on-cue to keep the same sounds going as always. On Beatmania, the fact you're playing the notes directly means the advanced difficulties actually start to fall apart in different ways, and you know it. And there's always new challenges, too — expert mode (where you have a budget for mistakes for an entire setlist), double mode (two controllers one gamer), special challenges (key randomization, hidden/sudden/extra-fast note markers), and probably lots of other stuff that isn't even occurring to me right now.

It is a shame it took Konami so long to release a version for the US. It is a shame that by the time they did, reviewers thought it was just a Guitar Hero ripoff. It is a shame that the US version also lost much of what made the game so much fun (the visuals were genuinely "serious," the song selection was oriented towards American pop and bland mainstream electronica, and the Konami original songs seemed to be selected based on fitting in with that rather than based on the fun factor). It's a shame that even with how abysmal DJ Hero is, people think DJ Hero is some sort of genre-defining thing. (Not even the mashup aspect of it is new — Beatmania has had several mashups in its oeuvre, albeit mashups of other Beatmania songs).

It's also a shame it's so hard on my wrists because holy cow did I miss playing this wonderful game.

I have basically every worthwhile mix for the PS1 (except Sound of Tokyo, which I should be receiving soon, having finally sourced a copy on eBay), and the first Gameboy mix, which is basically a "best of" for the first few PS1 mixes, in chiptune form, and the chiptunes are exceptionally well-done. Right now I'm considering also getting either an import or modded PS2 so I can start building a IIDX collection, even though IIDX didn't really seem so much fun (since it seemed to be all about the difficulty instead of the fun). It's just too bad I didn't get back into this stuff a few years ago when it was still easy to source a PS2 modchip. (Maybe not so bad for my wrists though.)

Was it really a cost-cutting measure that kept a camera out of the iPod Touch to keep it as cheap of a gaming platform as possible? That doesn't seem very likely to me. Cameras are very useful for gaming (which has been recently rediscovered by Microsoft and Sony, but was previously known by Treo owners), and if they really do want the Touch to be an ubiquitous gaming platform, not making quite as much profit on one would be more than balanced out by the large numbers of games being sold for it, right?

Also, "8GB of storage for free" is a bit disingenuous when it only applies to an iPod Nano which doesn't actually have any music loaded on it.

On that note, I also found Phil Schiller's comments about gaming to be a bit off-kilter. Yeah, there are a lot more games for the iPod than for the PSP or DS, but how many third-rate Same Game knockoffs does a platform need, anyway? Also, his mention of the "purchase experience" being bad on the PSP and DS because of the supposed lack of an app store is just an outright lie. (Okay, the iPhone App Store is admittedly a somewhat nicer experience than the PSP's, but he made it sound like the PSP could only play UMDs.)

If you like kinda-difficult abstract-art shooter games with blippy music, you might like to know that I did the music and sound design for Broken Garden. Enjoy!

I wanted to play Neill's Metroid hack but there's no binaries available of FCEUX for Mac OS X. So I had to build it myself. It wasn't too difficult, but there's definitely some barriers for people who don't know their way around the OS X toolchain very much.

These instructions are based on Fink (and obviously you need XCode installed). For Darwinports/Macports/whatever it's probably similar. Whatever you do, I really don't recommend trying to hand-manage the dependencies.

For build-dependencies, it's just fink install scons sdl zenity lua51-dev, and to build fceux it's just CFLAGS=-I/sw/include LDFLAGS=-L/sw/lib scons; sudo cp bin/* /usr/local/bin

gfceux doesn't seem to work (even after getting PYTHONPATH set up, pygtk doesn't appear to be available), but I'm fine with the commandline (to play Neill's hack it's just fceux --loadlua metroid.lua metroid.nes, assuming fceux is in your $PATH and metroid.nes/metroid.lua are in the current directory). At least, I assume this works - I still need to acquire the ROM (I'm sure I have it on a hard drive somewhere but I'm lazy). I tried a couple of homebrew demo ROMs and fceux worked just fine, aside from the usual SDL-on-OSX gimpiness anyway. (UPDATE: the Lua stuff doesn't seem to work. So I'm just using the Windows build under VMWare anyway. Meh.)

Also, I highly recommend running fceux with the following command line options at least once: --inputcfg gamepad1 --xscale 4 --yscale 4 --opengl 1. Fortunately it saves the last command line options in ~/.fceux/fceux.cfg so you don't have to do that every time.

Yet another hand-wavey "cloud" video game console, like the Phantom except this one doesn't even have any game processing in the console itself — supposedly it'll somehow have all the games playing on a remote server farm and have the video streamed in realtime to the console. Call me skeptical.

Also, money quote, from "Sid:"

Can you imagine living in a futuristic society where men don't need PS3s and Xboxes to play insanely gorgeous games? Someone pinch me, I feel like I'm living in a George Orwell book.

I don't think Sid has actually read any George Orwell.

So, LBP remakes of other games generally feel like steam-powered puppets, and of course Sackboy is also a puppet made of scraps. So, could we call its style "stitchpunk" and get that out of the way?

Today I decided to restart MGS4, and in 3 hours I passed through act 1, finally. Then in another hour or so I finally got through all the long-ass cutscenes before act 2.

What the hell, Kojima.

So, the inspiration for the Wii Fit comic is that, after about a week of daily weigh-ins, I started to feel like Garfield in his Sisyphean struggles against the talking bathroom scale. I have a feeling that Nintendo's designers really weren't thinking things through when they designed the daily body test component.

The big problem with it stems from that it uses BMI's ridiculous classification system (which is good for a casual statistical clustering of body types but is not in and of itself a useful diagnostic tool), and that it disregards progress and only tells you how you're doing based on where you are in the BMI.

So, my copy of Wii Fit arrived today.

So, my latest foray in entertainment-based weight loss has shipped from Amazon (I was smart enough to preorder it a month ago). In a few days I'm sure I'll be all "oh wow this is so much fun!" and then within a week I'll have stopped doing it regularly, just like what happened with DDR after I finally invested $600 in a pair of Cobalt Flux pads. (At least Wii Fit is only $80 though, and has a lot more variety. I stopped playing DDR just because it got so boring.)

On the other hand, people have already been reporting success with it, so maybe this time will work out better for me too.

Last night I played a bunch of TF2. Then I played a bunch of Portal's advanced maps. Then I went to bed, and in something like a Tetris effect, I couldn't get certain imagery out of my mind: two pyros (one red, one blue) running around various Portal maps, with a flamethrower and a portal gun.

It seemed like a lot of fun.

I was feeling depressed and irritated at work today (gah stupid proprietary remote debugging crap), but when I got home I found that two overpriced online purchases arrived! First was the pair of Weighted Companion Cubes. Next was the Alesis ControlPad drum controller which I got so I could record "live" drums again without needing a huge amount of space.

It's a bit distressing that buying things makes me feel better.

The other day, the Orange Box patch for PS3 finally went out. Now loads are much faster! This makes everything a lot less annoying.

Of course it's annoying that the game shipped in a less-than-optimal capacity, BUT it had been delayed quite a lot as it is, and I'm glad we got to start playing it a few months ago instead of having to wait until now.

Well, I was going to spend the night finally playing the PC version of TF2 (which I bought a week ago or so), but instead my copy of Smash Bros Brawl arrived! So I will be playing that instead.

First gripe: It doesn't say which buttons to push to continue on the initial startup screens. The A button doesn't work. Turns out you have to press +. Weird. Actually a lot of the stuff in the UI is pretty whack.

Second gripe: Too many friends codes. I really must do something about that. Anyway, mine is 1032-0942-8357.

So, my copy finally arrived today. I had a few hours to play it tonight, so I did.

Portal is a lot of fun. Half-Life 2 is also pretty good though it's making me a bit motion sick. The controls are definitely the best console FPS controls I've ever had... unlike, say, The Darkness, the controls on this actually feel natural and responsive. Not quite as good as keyboard+mouse, of course, but they did a good job of at least making moving and aiming feel somewhat natural.

HL-2 suffers from feeling very linear but also very "find the one little tiny clue needed to go forward" which is a bit annoying. Hopefully it'll get better soon. (I'm only to the part where you're trying to escape the city after the transporter fails to work right.)

Unfortunately, I have to go to bed early for an all-day "cultural training" thing down in San Jose tomorrow. Ugh.

So, I've been playing Metroid Prime 3 in fits and spurts. I play games because I want to be entertained and because I like solving puzzles and generally being challenged. I do not play games to be utterly frustrated by the challenges involving a long series of miniboss battles with no save points in between them only to culminate in an action-puzzle sequence where you have to pull four levers while fighting off bad guys who can also fly quickly and undo the lever pulling, and the bad guys respawn too quickly for you to just go around and pull all the levers before they come back.

It's not like I want it to be trivially-simple or anything, but fucking HELL at least make it POSSIBLE. STOP MAKING ME THROW MY CONTROLLER. (Especially since on the Wii you have to go to a pretty big effort to throw it down in disgust, what with the wrist strap and so forth.)

This is the most addictive platformer I've ever played. Holy cow. It's also pretty funny, and the voice acting is great, and the graphics are amazing (the only I you can really tell the difference between the realtime game engine and the FMVs is the FMVs have a lower framerate and a little bit of visible artifacting, though some of the lighting/fur/etc. effects are a bit better in the FMVs too). The difficulty level seems to be just right for me, and the storyline is pretty interesting even though I never got through the original Ratchet and Clank (and never played any of the sequels).

Some of the non-mainline gameplay bits are a bit fiddly and obnoxious (like, the Starfox-esque rails-shooter segments could be a bit better), but so far I'm very impressed with this game. I totally recommend getting it, and a PS3 to play it on if you don't already have one. (Which you probably don't.)

I dreamt I was living in a piece of "edutainment" software. My job was to help the two young goldfish (who were living in a deep river) keep their ecosystem in balance. Apparently they liked burying the Chaos Emeralds (which they stole from Sonic the Hedgehog) under giant planks of plywood which they couldn't lift and so I had to solve their dumb puzzles to know where to position this specialized plywood-sheet-lifter. Also I lost the clues for how to unlock the padlocks they put on the last plank, but fortunately the locks were cheap and/or there was a bug in the game so I could force them open by just putting the key into the second hole first.

Apparently, when goldfish get all seven Chaos Emeralds, they are rewarded with electric guitars. Their electric guitars are tiny and hard to play and have built-in cheap reverbs which you can't turn off.

• The PS3 really likes being on a lot. It'd be nice if you could turn it off (well, to a power-saving mode, obviously) and have it still finish up background downloading
• It's way too easy to accidentally turn on while moving the box, and then you can't turn it off until it finishes booting
• It'd be nice if you could turn the console off from the controller (like on the Wii) Oh, okay, you just hold down the PS button for a few seconds and it prompts you.
• It'd be nice if the controller were to turn off automatically after a period of inactivity (like on the Wii)
• In PS2 mode it always tells the game that you have a 16:9 screen, which would be fine, except the few games on the PS2 which pay attention to that do the totally wrong thing; for example, Beyond Good & Evil letterboxes it on a 4:3 frame. This wouldn't be so bad except that in upconvert mode this means I always have a border around it (just like on a mis-encoded DVD), and while I can get my full screen used by just turning off upconverting, then it looks even worse than on a real PS2
• Also, Beyond Good & Evil seems to have some framerate and shader problems, and occasional timing weirdnesses. (Yes, on the 1.90 firmware.)
• Okay, you know how the Wii's games are mostly the same gesture-based minigames with different skins? The PS3's downloadable games are mostly just Robotron with occasional tilt controls.

I am not a hardcore gamer. I also don't play many console FPSes, because the controls tend to suck. FPS controls don't have to suck; look at Metroid Prime, for example. Metroid Prime has great controls on a controller which essentially only has six buttons and one analog stick, as far as the game is concerned. It also ramps up in difficulty as you progress and familiarize yourself with those controls.

Even if you insist on having controls which are basically a direct port of WASD and a mouse to two analog sticks, please don't make the tutorial impossibly difficult. Good games ramp you up in difficulty, especially when the controls are a bit tricky. Tutorial segments in particular should be fairly easy to get through, since the whole point to them is to learn the controls. Additionally, tutorial segments more than any other should be free of sequence bugs (like being able to fall off an elevator which you can't recall), and if you're going to make deaths restart at the most recent checkpoint, it sure would be nice if there were checkpoints other than the very beginning of the tutorial.

While you're at it, if you're going to put such a focus on dialog and close shots on characters' faces while they're talking, you should try to make their mouths move at least remotely convincingly. It would also be nice if the characters had motions other than "talk while gesticulating wildly" and "die." (For bonus points, learn to write dialog which is intense without relying on every other word being a profanity. Yes, I realize they're mobsters, but I'm not exactly Miss Manners but pretty much every line in the intro made me blush. Consider the concept of dynamic range.)

I was really looking forward to your game but now I'm thinking I wasted $60.

Love,
fluffy