on the new zeldavideogames
July 20, 2017
Videogame Nerdery Ahoy! (Got a lot more long-winded than I planned) I'm trying to figure out if I should stick with the new Zelda, if it's a good investment of time for me. It's high quality in many ways, but the cooking/crafting doesn't grab me, the endless treadmill of "get a weapon, wear out a weapon" rankles (especially with the limited inventory slots that cost a lot to improve), and in general I'm not as engaged as I would have hoped. While in some ways the game has that "more than one way to solve a problem" approach, 90% of those feel like something clever the programmers thought of first and then coded in, rather than an organic, player-driven combination of basic interactive elements. They give you a cool "magnet" tractor beam power that you can only use in carefully defined areas, magic bombs that can't really aim and take forever to damage anything anyway, a "freeze time" thing that A. is misnamed (it's more about messing with certain object's kinetic energy, but I guess they thought "kinetic energy" that was too fancy a term) and B. also only works hardly anywhere...
I guess the game doesn't resonate for me in two critical directions; one is the world-building. "Far Cry"s, which feels like such a big influence, do a much better job of painting "living breathing" worlds that mask the fact that they exist only as a place for the player's story to take place in. Vs Zeldas: Link, is (spoiler alert?) the knight errant destined to come back and fix everything in Hyrule, and by the way here are all these precious little mini-dungeons scattered about to test his mettle and build him up gradually for doing so.
Which leads to the second game theme Zelda does, one I respect intellectually but don't find deeply engaging: the classic "from zero to hero" journey, the grind up of gathering intrinsic strength and various add-ons that lets the player slowly grow into the role destiny (or rather, the game designer) has laid out for them. I know in the real world I have a blind-spot for personal growth; people seem to be about the same to me on the inside throughout their lives (Hmm, this is probably why preschooler's incompetence so startles me... Like, "C'mon, color in the lines! Focus! I can talk with you, you have the raw physical control here, why can't you do this?") It's troublesome for me in life- I tend to feel like I can gain knowledge of how to do things, but the process of "growing" a skillset per se seems.... I don't know, unlikely. I assume at some point quantitative skill improvement can become qualitative ability increase, but I never really *feel* it. (Similarly, even in a game, "practicing and getting better" is sometimes indistinguishable from "try and try again until I get lucky and can move on"...)
It's why I feel Mario games have more in common with Grand Theft Auto than they do with Zelda games or Metroid games. Mario is the same guy, with about the same skillset, at the start of the game as he is at the end, there's no "take away all your skills at the game start so you can grow 'em back", and so is the protagonist of a GTA game, he just has more access to vehicles and money and weapons. (Conversely, Mario games have even more of that "this world exists only for the player to experience" than even the Zelda games, but still).
Also, now that I think about it, the physics of this latest Zelda are all too down-to-earth. Link jumps about as well as I do, more or less. He's a much better wall climber, but that's a plodding straining process. He's got a glider, but that's only a slow parachute with a bit of horizontal movement. He can do some tractor-beam/grav-gun manipulations, but only in certain designated areas and times. Compared to a later Saints Row and those games' joyful leaping, bounding, running up the side of buildings, magic grabbing and blasting nearly anything, or Just Cause's kinetic soaring and goofy playground of "link two things together with a wire and see what happens"... those games have more of what I come to video games for, superhuman empowerment fantasies set with visuals and interactions convincing enough to be viscerally enjoyable. (and while Zelda has plenty of mooks to dispatch for its adolescent empowerment fantasy, other games serve 'em up and knock 'em down wholesale -- sword combat is still pretty much a one-on-one, retail experience in Zelda....)
This went on much further than I expected. I'd love to hear from folks who dig the game what works for them, hopefully I've done a good enough job couching my critique as highly subjective, as I puzzle out (so to speak) why a game that is clearly so good in so many ways is on the bubble for me making time to play through...
DON'T TRUST WHAT THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA SAYS ABOUT CERSEI LANNISTER
Trump thinks health insurance is priced like life insurance. This makes Bush Sr's "amazement" about the supermarket checkout scanner (grossly exaggerated, tbh) makes him look like Joe Sixpack, relative to Trump. He truly has no idea, but claims everything is easy.
July 19, 2017
from Art of the Poster 1880-1918:
In no particular order, things I want to invest my "free", non-work time in...
-coding up a sheet music library tool
-coding up a "timeline" app
-being a good boyfriend for Melissa
-keeping up my regimen of band practices and gigs
-writing new music arrangements for my band
-keeping my family connections healthy and vibrant
-keeping up my reading
-playing zelda and see if i still like games
-watching good movies and shows with Melissa
-keeping up with game of thrones
-keeping an eye open for interesting stuff in social media etc
Also in general I want to be a good employee at my job that I dig.
There's also a second tier of things, from drafting an expansion of my death comic to doing another virtual advent calendar.
Yeesh.
July 18, 2017
YeehawFor my geek peeps: thinking about xml vs json
Reminder: Trump says we'll '"let" Obabamacare fail.' That's bull. It is in part death by slow poisoning. They own that.
And here's some of why
July 17, 2017
--Found online, a great take on Metroid...
July 16, 2017
Man, do I love this.Real Time: Schiphol Clock from Maarten Baas on Vimeo.
Thomas Bergeron and Atlantic Brass Quintet did a Brass Mob Somerville playing the kind of minmalist experiment piece In C
"Remember in one of the debates when Trump and Clinton were asked to say something nice about the other, and Clinton said Trump's children prove his character? It took 10 months for that burn to manifest but the payoff was worth it."
--brainstatic
July 15, 2017
the robotic ruler of the river of no returnvideogames
July 14, 2017
River Raid was one of the finest games produced for the Atari 2600. One of the first vertically scrolling shooters, this game was remarkably well designed. While the enemies (copters and boats and later small jets) could only threaten the player with menacing kamikaze moves upon approach, the constantly diminishing fuel supply would lead the player to recklessly hightail it down the "River of No Return" to pass over replenishing fuel depots, a tension-provoking detail most other games of the era couldn't match. And I am going to introduce you to the games indisputable conqueror.First, a note about the game's author, Carol Shaw- the first professional female video game designer. This game is her singular masterpiece (I don't think many people really look back that fondly on "3-D Tic Tac Toe", and the 1-on-1 Pong-like action of her "Polo" tie-in game never saw the light of day...) This interview has her talking about her experience. But her peers thought she was great, designer Mike Albaugh said
I would have to include Carol Shaw, who was simply the best programmer of the 6502 and probably one of the best programmers period....in particular, [she] did the [2600] kernels, the tricky bit that actually gets the picture on the screen for a number of games that she didn't fully do the games for. She was the go-to gal for that sort of stuff.As a guy who wrote an original Atari 2600 from scratch in assembly , I know how tricky that kernel stuff is... (and true confession, my game ended up having its kernel tweaked by genius Paul Slocum anyway.)
One of the cleverest bits of River Raid is its use of pseudorandom number generators to generate section after section of the river - this let the game pack in a consistent, huge game playing field even though the whole cartridge was only 4K bytes of ROM. The levels alternated between straight sections and split sections and went on practically forever.
Over a decade ago I got to wondering about how far the river went, and got so far as having B. Watson generate this image of the first 4 sections, guaranteed to bring a bit of nostalgia to the 80's gamer heart:
For starters, here's Lord Tom's map of the first 600 river sections...
And how does Lord Tom know what the first 600 sections look like? I contacted him at AtariAge (such a damn fine resource!) and he said
To make the map, I wrote a Lua script for use in the BizHawk emulator that essentially cheated through the game with the plane offscreen somewhere, taking screen-shots of each enemy/terrain slot along the way (32 per map section). I assembled these into the big map with a simple Java app.But that wasn't enough for Lord Tom. He's a member of the "TAS Community" - Tool Assisted Speedruns, folks who learn how to let machines help them drive through to the ending of games faster than any human ever could. They don't cheat - the actual code of the game is sacrosanct - but by abusing every input available to them they're like the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar getting ready to dive back into the Matrix, mastering the code behind the world that lets, say, Mario move like a crazy drug-fueld Ninja, or in Lord Tom's case, to build a frickin' robot to play the game better than any human (or 'bot) in history ever has. Specifically, to get the maximum possible score of 1,000,000 (or in Activision speak, !!!!!!) That looks like this:
To give that robot a script, he built a replica of River Raid in Java, one that could reproduce all the twists and turns and boats and helicopters and fuel tanks that that little cartridge's algorithm could churn out with incredible precision, and then used it to power something like the "Many Worlds Interpretation" of Quantum Physics, plotting out a millions of possible futures for each frame, then pruning and working the best 150,000 or so, until he got a damn near optimal path. (And to give you an idea of this robot's skill about this, not only does this well-nigh perfect path take an hour twenty to get to that million points, Activision would send you a patch designating you a "River Raider" if you sent in a photograph showing that you got 15,000!)
So, in his own words:
Yes, due to the technique I used for solving the game, I had to write a Java simulator, which I think ended up being something like 10,000 times faster than trying to do the bot computations through the emulator. And I only simulated the game's logic/state; I didn't actually output a display or sound, though in the grand scheme of things that would have been easy enough to do.You can read even more details at his TASVideos Submission Page, but I think you get the idea here.
The solving algorithm focused heavily on fuel and (of course) score. Since fuel is consumed at the same rate regardless of speed, it's best to almost always go full throttle. There are a few terrain exceptions, and the other main exceptions are slow-downs to get extra fuel or manipulate which enemies move/don't move to make them easier to kill.
For fuel, I basically looked at the map and plotted out how far I'd get for each life (once fuel becomes rare, it's better score-wise to die for a full tank than to keep slowing down to milk depots). Then for various points along the route (e.g. section 5, 10th enemy) I'd specify a minimum fuel to have -- any solution paths with less fuel would be killed.
The only non-survivable states in the game relate to fuel, and then very limited times when e.g. you can't slow down fast enough to clear terrain, or avoid an enemy that's about to hit you.
Other than that, it was pure heuristic; 30 times a second it would simulate paths with each possible input, eliminate duplicates and deaths, and periodically score them and keep the best several thousand. To handle islands, I stipulated that a certain # of paths would always be kept alive on each side of the screen. As I recall, the algorithm would score and cull several times each section; it never really "looked ahead" at all, just periodically compared outcomes for 500,000 or so input possibilities and kept the best ones.
I think all in all, I calculate the bot simulated over 2 trillion game states to complete the game.
Amazing. I've done Atari coding and even some Java-based "tool assistants" (to get photorealistic images into the long-lost site pixeltime, or to remove the scrolling credits from still backdrops) but nothing that comes ANYWHERE NEAR what Lord Tom (or Carol Shaw, for that matter) has done.