The Gaming Grid

This week’s title is Gravity Bone, and I’m afraid it’s another artsy fling; if intriguing narrative techniques and funky bloom lighting don’t float your boat, you might consider giving this particular vessel a pass. The game (built in a modified Quake 2 engine) was designed in the free time of Brendon Chung, a part-time hipster and full-time level designer at Pandemic Studios. Most of what makes this game so interesting to share is tied up in how it tells a story, so while I’ll try and write around the details those interested in remaining absolutely spoiler-free are encouraged to download and play it rather than read my shameless shill. The game takes about fifteen minutes to play from start to finish, perfect for a lazy Friday afternoon.

A spiritual successor to a handful of Quake 2 custom maps Chung designed years ago, Gravity Bone grants a brief respite from the trials of a typical workday by placing players squarely behind the blockish features of a dark and mysterious operative. Where previous highlights (Fallout and Deus Ex, for example) have reveled in dank dystopian futurescapes, Gravity Bone celebrates its simulated world with bright colors, over-the-top lighting effects and endearingly nonsensical dialogue. Chung (an unabashed movie fanatic) pulls no punches in laying out lavish setpieces for the protagonist to wander through, easily accomplished through a series of unobtrusive and startlingly illogical information placards which lead the player effortlessly through each story (a helpful sign near the washroom reads: “Safety First: Press Space to Jump.”)

The game reminds me of the recent PS3 release Prince of Persia, if only because it’s so damn easy. Levels are small and directions plentiful, with one obvious route to your destination available at all times. Fail states are difficult to achieve, and require almost willful disregard for digital life and limb; even the jumping puzzle is deceptively forgiving, highlighting the protagonist’s catlike reflexes and apparent disdain for the laws of physics. Potential players might be put off by this simplification, but is it really so terrible to streamline an experience in the name of delivering an interesting story? Challenging games like Left4Dead will always be treasured for their tendency to elicit cathartic responses, but occasionally it’s equally enjoyable to relax and enjoy digging into a fresh new world without worrying about getting your knuckles obligatorily rapped in the process. Gravity Bone offers a tantalizing glimpse at such a world, and I’ve done my best to recommend it without ruining the surprise. The game is beautiful, engaging and brief; most importantly, it’s free. Give it a shot.

Before this game came out, Dave and I were very excited. We watched all the trailers, and videos that we could find.  When it was release in January of 2007, I jumped all over this game. Unfortunately I did not have Xbox Live at that time, so I could only play the single player game. No I was only able to play the first 6 missions of the game. I got pissed off at the the enemies and AI.  Sometimes, I think games developers make a very stupid mistake and kind of break the 4th wall. Its the game wins AI, where all enemies only come after you, because if they kill you, the game wins.

Now if you know nothing about the game, you should know that there are big bugs on the planet that like to kill humans. There are also humans on the planet who like to kill other humans. Even with as far as i have gotten in the game, I have no idea what faction im apart of but all other humans want to kill me. In the second run through of the level where you first encounter the giant ice worm, you will run into some other large, very nasty bugs. Soon you will find your self facing way to many bugs and you need to get your butt out of there. So you will see about just going to your objective and bypassing all of them. No this sounds like a good deal at first but then you realize the humans will kill you too. So you might think hey I could get them to attack each other.

Now, that would be good thinking, but as I’m running backwards away from the enemies, I’m shooting at both humans and bugs. Not only are they both attacking me, they are pushing the others out of the way to get to me. So its obvious that the enemies AI is not really aware of others around it, just you. That is probably one of my biggest deals, the other is the Thermal Energy. Now your character will use Thermal Energy to stay alive, when you run out, you will slowly die. Also when you are out, you can no longer pilot a VS which is needed sometimes. When you finish one mission you usually do so with a surplus of energy. On the next mission however you will only start off with the same amount every time.

At first, you are in a lot of snow levels, so I can understand that you are going to need thermal energy to stay alive. Later missions however take place in or near a volcano. Why do you need thermal energy at this point. You as standing ten feet from a volcano there is not need for excess thermal energy. Or you could have it recharge your thermal energy, but no you will run out eventually and freeze to death…. next to lava… on the ground. There are a few other bad things about this game. Your character is strangely impervious. When engaging multiple enemies, you will be hit with a wide range of weapons. Missiles, lasers, grenades, and other energy weapons will cause you to fall to the ground. Now you should be dead because you just took a missile to the chest,  but your fine.

The fun thing is the animation when getting up. This is probably one of my biggest pet peves in games. I think people should be exicuted for horrible game animation. By the time your character stands back up, he will be talking to the next missle that will nock him back on his ass. This process will repeat itself for the next 2 minutes, untill you die or they run out of amno. This game does look great but when you get passed the pretties of the game, you see its really not that great. From the success of the game, Im sure they will produce a sequle. We shall see how that one turns out.

This is going to be a multi-part subject and hopefully the information here will help those of you who are curious as to what type of hardware you need and why it matters for gaming. I’ll touch the basic concepts really quick and go more in depth in later posts.

Todays computer games are becoming huge in size. Not just in scale, but in hard drive occupancy. Getting a bigger HDD isn’t too complicated really, but other hardware isn’t as easy as you might think.

The hardware basics:
-  CPU and Motherboard
-  HDD (hard drive disk)
-  Video Card
-  Sound Card
-  RAM (Memory)
-  Optical Drives (CD- and DVD-ROM)
-  Computer Case

So that’s the general list of what makes up a computer. We aren’t going to care about add-ons such as card readers or fan controllers or anything like that. I’ll go into the specifics of each category and also make some sample builds of parts you can buy now as well as make performance tiers.

Questions are welcomed throughout this write up and I’ll answer everything I can. I’ll put a Q&A at the bottom of each post with the questions pertaining to that category.

Okay, so this isn’t really about games or anything, especially since I’m talking about Macs in the first place, but I wanted to point out another difference in Macs and PCs.

One thing first: All computers are PCs. I don’t get why people keep calling Macs something different. “PC” stands for “Personal Computer”. Using this, Macs must not be personal computers. Those stupid commercials about Mac and PC are just that: stupid. What they’re really saying is OSX and Windows. Stupid crap happens on both OSes, so one’s not really better than the other. Before people start flaming me, I use both extensively.

Getting back to the point… We have a couple G5’s here. A couple weeks ago, one just decided not to work. Could’ve been a power surge that took it out or some other oddity. In any case, the video wasn’t working. The computer came on though as if nothing was wrong. After changing the video card, it still didn’t work. Since I know nothing about Mac hardware, as all 3 of the G5’s we have look totally different from one another inside, I had to schedule an appointment at the Apple store.

The tech looks at it and does everything that I already did to try and fix it. He then says that it’s probably the motherboard. In my head, I’m think that shouldn’t be all that much since it’s a desktop and a Windows equivalent at the most expensive is a little over $300. Well, he says that they’d also change one of the CPUs. Uh… There’s 2 CPUs in there and you’d only change 1? Don’t really know why they would do that in the first place. The next thing he tells me is crazy.

It was going to to cost $1875 to replace just those 2 things. He then said that a whole new computer was $2400, which had everything in it. So now that my mind is blown by the astronomically high repair prices, I decide then and there, I will never own one of these computers. You can’t buy replacement parts for the things ANYWHERE because Apple has to do it. Since it’s exclusive to Apple themselves, they can charge you out the ass for fixing their own crap.

Well, another case happened while I was there. A girl and her boyfriend and his friend were waiting to see if her laptop could get fixed. Mind you, this thing probably cost her $1200-1300. Don’t really know what the problem was, but the tech told them that it’d cost $875 to fix it. Her boyfriend was just as blown away as I was when I heard it. I could buy 2-3 Windows machines for that price.

Another thing I witnessed was a girl with a 1st gen iPhone. Apparently, the thing can’t hook itself up to a computer, or if it can, the tech sure as hell wasn’t going to let her do it just to save her phone numbers. The tech told the girl that if her numbers weren’t backed up, they’d be lost when they fixed it. She had to write them all down on a piece of paper. Awesome hospitality!

I know there are a lot of people out there that swear Macs (or I should just say, OSX) are the greatest things since sliced bread, but they never mention how much they cost to repair. Their retort to such a statement would probably be something along the lines of them never crashing as much as Windows. I see Windows as being more versatile and compatible with a boatload more apps and hardware than OSX. I damaged a thumb drive because I didn’t “eject” the damn thing. It’s called “plug-n-play”, not “plug-n-play-then eject before you corrupt all your data removing it from the USB port like you normally would”.

I’m not saying that Windows doesn’t have it’s share of problems, but at least when 1 piece of hardware fails, I can spend $100 and replace it without a hitch. Sorry, Apple. I’m never going to buy one of your computers as I can make a better machine with the same amount of money and with better components. If something goes out, I’ll replace that piece. It’ll be a helluva lot easier to get to it in my case than yours because you have everything so packed in there with aluminum and heatsinks the size of Godzilla wedged in there. Trying to go with “silent” operation, so you make the case weigh about 50 lbs. to do so.

Also, watch out for the unintelligent “Geniuses” they have there. One girl was explaining how to use the photo program in OSX and totally blew this old couple away. I found it funny that she told them to save a photo as a PDF then open that up and THEN save it as a TIFF because it would be a picture file then. That’s just too moronic in my book. Also, how do you save it as a PDF without Acrobat Pro? Did Apple take something from Adobe that I’m not aware of? Regardless of that, the girl is still a moron for telling these people to save it out as 2 different files. Very sad…

Those who like OSX, that’s great. Just hope nothing hardware-wise breaks as it’ll cost you an assload to fix it. I’ll stick with Windows and the lower cost of hardware.

This last week I was stuck at home. I could do anything but play video games, not a bad deal. I had just picked up Mass Effect from game stop for 15$. I never played it before, and was a little interested. I know that it is similar to Knights of the old republic. I really enjoyed KtoR 1, and figured to give this a shot. Now from playing a long line of BioWare games, I know that you usually level up, and so do your encounters. This has been my running problem with their games so far.

Now im not going to tell you how awesome the game is, or the plot. I really enjoyed the game, and its worth checking out. My only problem is with the enemy AI. My first run through was on veteran. You have to unlock hardcore and insane. When I finished the majority of subplots and the game itself I was level 45. Using the pre made character that they have for you. I had best armor and weapons on my characters, and I learned one thing. more enemies do not make encounters harder, they just make things annoying. That and when all the enemies don’t want to shoot at you, they just run up and knock you on your ass.

If they were going to make everyone run up to you, why did they not make melee a bigger part of the game. it kind of suck in combat, when your knocked down, and then five baddies run up to you shooting you. Whats even worse is your allies will fire at someone else across the screen instead of the guys shooting you. now I can understand ramp up the enemies as your character progresses, but fighting five rocket guys is not really that fun. they should either make it one mini boss equivalent guy, with henchmen level support. or match up the enemies, like put some sniper rifles and shot gun guys in there. I know rocket launchers will kill you in one hit, but its easy as hell to dodge them. More doesn’t make it fun, more just makes it annoying.

If I had to dodge behind cover from the snipers, and then the rocket guy blew up my cover, that would be cool. it would keep you moving and be fun level of difficult. One thing that would be cool, is kind of an AI director like in left 4 dead. except it watches how you do against certain types of foes. It will then make each encounter to your weaknesses, and thus changing up the game. Some times at the end of a game, you realize all the fights are just the same as the first fights. Lets add some flavor to the game.

I’m goning to play through again, this time as a biotic, I want to see how the game is played out.