Author: Sawdust

running in circles

Posted on by Sawdust

Continuing the legacy this generation of consoles seems to be laying, yet another product is being modified to emulate its competitor’s product, even though they’re not competitors.

News has been abounding about the add-on of a second circle pad for Nintendo’s 3DS platform. Nintendo, certainly, has been hyping it up a lot in the last couple weeks. This seems to be a particularly stupid idea, to me. And I’ll tell you why.
First off, the damn thing looks damn ridiculous. It not only adds bulk, but it throws off the balance of the unit, both in terms of mass and visual appearance. Now, when you close the top, that circle pad will be exposed regardless. I think I can safely predict many of these circle pads quickly becoming clogged with lint and the other types of filth gamers regularly ingest.
Second, this attachment, by definition, cannot be required for any games–or at least, any significant number of them. Not everyone will be gullible enough to buy it, and if it’s not required not every developer will feel the need to account for it. Games like Ocarina 3D manage just fine without a second stick; if a game is made right it shouldn’t be a problem. (Shouldn’t.) So if it’s not required, who is going to want to program for an attachment that not everyone will buy? This has proven to be a downward spiral in the last decade and a half of gaming peripherals.
The final nail in the coffin: juice. Not orange juice (which I desire now that I’ve typed that), but the sort that is provided by a battery. Being that this add-0n clips to the device proper, and sticks right to the bottom of it, you’d think Nintendo would have thought, “hm, maybe we should also make it an extended battery!” But no. Not only does it not provide any extra OJ, it actually requires its own battery. This is definitely not a product I will buy.
What’s more, some of the latest whispers making their way through the grapevine indicate that Nintendo is currently in the process of designing a new 3DS that will include dual circle pads. This is just what Nintendo should have done to start with, and doing it now only makes the 3DS add-on look obsolete even before it hits shelves.

depth reception

Posted on by Sawdust

Now that I’ve had a few weeks to enjoy my 3DS, I’m ready to give my thoughts and impressions to the four people who read this blog. Spoiler: I have mixed feelings. Mind you, this is purely my opinion, so if you don’t like the smell of bullshit, close this tab now.

The first thing that felt like a downgrade was the battery life. Now, I understand this is doing more work than the DSi I traded up from. The battery in the 3DS is a considerable 1300 mAh, compared to the DSi’s 840 mAh (and the DSi XL’s 1050 mAh). But the 3DS only gets, at most, 8 hours of battery life–and that’s playing an older DS game with brightness set to minimum and wireless disabled. Both DSi models easily surpass this without issue, unless their brightness is maxed. Hopefully in the next iteration of the 3DS, Nintendo will figure out a way to make the hardware more efficient.
The unit is almost exactly the same size and weight as the DSi, so it barely registered as a change in my mind, although the bottom screen is smaller than those on the former…it definitely feels smaller. I’m not a fan of this super-gloss revolution that has consumed the electronics world in the past decade–I very much enjoyed the matte finish of my DSi because it didn’t attract fingerprints or smudges. This, by comparison, makes me feel obsessive-compulsive, because if I don’t clean and wipe it constantly, its surface becomes almost slick, and not in that “blood on your sword” way that makes you feel manly and victorious. More in the “cooking grease on my damn controller” way. And what’s with the weird buttons-that-aren’t-buttons below the bottom screen? I wish they had put actually discrete buttons there, instead of…whatever these are. It’s difficult to use them by feel, and they’re sunken deep enough that I usually have to place the unit on something so I can exert enough force to trigger them.
One feature that seemed to take a backward step was the volume selector. On the original DS (and going back to the Game Boy Advance), this was a slider switch. I never had a good experience with this slider. Ever. On the DSi, this was graduated to + and – buttons that I found far more useful. Now, they’ve gone back to the slider, and though this is significantly better than the one I’ve used in the past, it’s tainted by those bad memories. It can be difficult to adjust the volume during gameplay this way, because of the way pressure has to be applied to the slider. In addition, the DSi buttons had the useful secondary function of quickly changing the brightness setting, which can’t be done now. This setting can be accessed via the home screen, but only while playing a 3DS game, which I’ll get into later.
The 3DS conveniently has a slider for the 3D screen function as well; the user can adjust the parallax barrier to suit their taste, or disable it entirely and play “flat.” What I’m not so big on is that the slider is designed to be operated from the side–that is to say, it’s possible to have the unit closed and one can still accidentally move the slider somehow, changing the depth setting and of course not realizing it until the next time it’s played. This gets annoying because I can never seem to get it quite back to where it was before.
Finally, the OS. It’s nice to see more progress in this area. The OS on the 3DS more closely resembles that of the Wii, most notably the “metabox” loading icon and the settings menus. Now, when the Home button is pressed during gameplay, the game is suspended while the user accesses their home screen, usually to change the brightness setting. But the OS can’t keep this game suspended beyond that–the user can’t go play another game (such as a downloaded DSiWare) and keep their first game suspended in the background. This would be a nice function to see, because sometimes you just need a break from futility to play something fun or use the browser. It doesn’t need to be able to hold more than one game, really…even entering system options requires that this game be ended, which kind of defeats the whole purpose.
One gripe I can’t get past is DS mode. DS games can’t be suspended via the Home button. The Home screen is not accessible at all without exiting the game entirely. Even the brightness settings cannot be changed, meaning once you start a DS game, you’re stuck unless you can save and quit. Why can’t even the Home screen be seen during DS games? Why did Ninendo go with a volume slider when the +/- buttons, such as on the DSi, could have resolved this issue with brightness settings? As usual, Nintendo threw in their odd design decisions, because their product wouldn’t be complete without them.
Final thought: The cameras. Get rid of them. Please. No one uses them. Taking 3D pictures is cool, but the quality is horrendous. Save a few bucks and some weight and just remove the cameras…really.

link to the future

Posted on by Sawdust

Nintendo recently knocked down the price of the 3DS to stimulate sales. While the device has great potential, it needs more AAA titles to entice buyers. Really the only front-line title it has on shelves is Ocarina 3D; a fifth of all 3DS owners in the UK own this game and it’s easy to imagine that even more in the US and Japan have it. But it’s another case of Nintendo resurrecting the horse only to beat it again.

Now there is a call to remake Majora’s Mask on the 3DS. This movement has a bit more merit to it–it would be nice to see this lesser-known, somewhat maligned title step up and be recognized by a new generation of gamers. The same strategy could be utilized as before; namely, that the game engine is already there and will make development much easier.

Nntendo should go one step further.

New, original Zelda games could be made using the now-finished Ocarina engine. This is essentially the same strategy Nintendo used during Majora‘s development; by reusing the Ocarina engine, development time was reduced to just one year (compare to the original development cycle of Ocarina, which was over four years long). Now that the 3D engine has been done and most of the necessary textures are already there, a new Zelda game could be whipped up in a matter of months.

More stories could be told exploring other splits of the Ocarina timeline, or entirely original, standalone stories could be told (vis a vis Link’s Awakening and Oracle of Ages/Seasons). Even a side story covering other parts of Hyrule not seen in Ocarina, or parts of Termina that weren’t featured in Majora (Termina would especially be nice to see, as we’ve already seen every square centimeter of Hyrule many times). But by now I am merely embellishing my point.

A whole new world of portable 3D gaming is out there, just waiting for Link.

fall-down comic

Posted on by Sawdust

Amid minor news frenzies regarding Sony’s planned invasion launch date for the next PlayStation, something else slipped under the radar: the announcement that the PSP digicomic service will be coming to an end.

Personally, I’m surprised it took them this long to kill it. I don’t know a single person, even the most hardcore of PSP fans, who actually uses the device to read anything besides the occasional webpage. This is a wide-format 4.3″ screen, after all–it’s not exactly an ereader, and neither should it be used as one. I’ve read a few comics on my PSP, all of them promos issued with games I bought. I was never able to read more than a few pages, as it’s easily the most inelegant software experience of my life.
The first problem is the screen itself. It’s designed for playing games and watching movies, not reading. The wide aspect ratio doesn’t lend itself to reading comics that are designed to be printed on an 8.5×11 page. To reach a point where text is readable, the image must be zoomed in considerably. At this level, it then becomes necessary to use the analog nub to scroll around and read the entire page. Think about it. Scroll right, then scroll back left and down, scroll right, then scroll back left and down–who wants to do this for more than a minute or two at a time? This can be avoided by fitting the page width to the screen width, and thus only needing to scroll vertically…if the comic’s resolution allows this, which isn’t likely.
But this is a minor gripe, really, as it leads to my next complaint…
The designers. Why? Why are the people making these comics designing them for the printed page and then awkwardly forcing readers to view them on a screen not meant for it? Why did Sony allow this to happen on a device that was so loudly trumpeted as a portable multimedia machine? Apparently it didn’t occur to anyone to produce the comics as a set of images sized to fit the screen as one or two panels at a time. This might actually lead to an improvement–the different aspect ratio allows for visual and cinematic effects that otherwise would not work on the conventional page.
All said, I won’t miss the comic service. I doubt anyone will. But who knows, they might relaunch it with the PS Vita. At least scrolling around a page with a touchpad is fairly intuitive, even if it is on the wrong side of the product.

waking

Posted on by Sawdust
I’ve been playing some Alan Wake lately. I’m inclined to say that, yes, it is a very good game. The horror aspect is normally something I’m not into, but in this case it is exceptionally well-executed. Making the game dark and shadowy binds the player to the flashlight and makes it a lifeline both in and out of combat. In true horror fashion, the game is more about the fear of physical harm than the physical harm itself. As I wandered through a forest, fighting occasional Taken, I saw the bright light of a safe haven in the distance. I proceeded to move at a crawl through the next 200 feet of forest, constantly turning in circles to check around me in what was now a hard-coded paranoid habit. When I reached the haven without encountering a single Taken, I had the distinct feeling that I had just been trolled by the developers.

One problem I have with the game is its camera placement. I realize this is a third person shooter, but damn. The camera floats around a point that looks to be almost five feet away from Wake, making aiming a bit skewed. Walking around imparts a feeling like peering through a fisheye lens, because everything is at such a high angle to the camera. It looks as if Wake is going to fall over at any moment, or perhaps the Earth will suddenly fling itself out of its orbit.

The autoaim is graciously forgiving, which is a definite bonus considering the skewed angle. More than once, I’ve managed to die particularly gruesome deaths in combat because I couldn’t get the angle of my shot right, and was somehow managing to miss constantly. The shotgun, of course, remedies this well, but shells are preciously few and far between.

There is one thing that annoys me too much to look past: the tearing. Apparently the game isn’t properly v-synced, which is something I’ve noticed of late in console games. It doesn’t make sense to me, as TVs pretty much all have the same refresh rate (can you say “NTSC“?). Granted, the move to LCDs kind of throws a wrench in this as LCDs don’t have a “refresh rate” in the conventional sense, but sticking to 60Hz shouldn’t create any issues regardless.

This is an issue I see with PC games almost all the time, as well. Most any PC game features a v-sync option in its video settings, but this option is apparently a placebo, because it has absolutely no effect. It’s because of this that I have v-sync forced on at all times via my nVidia drivers. I don’t know why the games themselves can’t do it, but it seems to me something that should have been worked out many years ago.

out of control

Posted on by Sawdust

Several months ago I bought Darksiders on Steam during a sale. Upon first launching the game, however, I noticed a problem: the camera was pointed at the ground, and I couldn’t get it to budge from that orientation. Neither my keyboard/mouse nor my controller seemed to work properly. It wasn’t just the camera, either–it seemed like controls were mapped randomly, sprinkled like dust in the wind to land in patterns governed only by nature. I tried to force the game to comply with my wishes, to no avail. After some lookups, I discovered the game was designed specifically to use the Xbox 360 PC controller. So specifically, that it was programmed not to make use of any other controller.

This is a massive failure of programming. I’m not even sure this is a failure, per se. This is something that takes actual effort to do. One has to actually program the game to refuse other controllers for this tactic to work. I imagine the effort involved to enable general support would be significantly less than that which was consumed to make it only use the X360 controller. I found numerous solutions for using my controller, most of which invoked the dark magics of custom firmware and the unreadable tomes of custom-written executables. None of these I was comfortable using.
Eventually I gave up and steamed over the loss of my money for an unplayable game.

Now it’s a few months later. I recently finished my playthrough of Batman: Arkham Asylum, although I will probably go back and do the challenges and find the rest of the riddles and all the completionist nerd stuff. ANYWAY, after finishing Arkham, I was a little listless, unsure of which game to play through next. I randomly decided to give Darksiders another go. Experience expand.
This time when I launched the game, by chance my controller wasn’t plugged in. The game loaded up, I skipped to the murdering and desecration courtesy of my spacebar, and…it worked. It just worked. I could run around and fight via the WASD/Mouse control scheme. It was as if there had never been a problem whatsoever. To say the least, I was a little confused. I did some forum searches and came up with this post. I was even more confused now. How could the mere presence of a controller, even a disabled controller, affect how a game interprets input commands? This is asinine.
Having a discussion with a friend over this, I was told that the PC version of the original Halo suffered from a similar retardation. Apparently the game does not interpret joystick inputs as analog commands, but digital ones. What does this mean? The effect of tilting the joystick foward a millimeter, or tilting it to its full extent, is exactly the same. The character moves at the same speed. It’s just like pressing the W key. Why could Gearbox not have programmed the game to actually make use of the joysticks? It’s not like they were exceptionally rare at the time the game was made. While I hear arguments of “programming for controllers is difficult because they’re all different”, I don’t buy that. They may have different layouts, but there are only a handful of individual layouts used for controllers nowadays, and in the case of joysticks–they’re joysticks. There’s no reason why they can’t be accomodated for in the programming.
In another related rant, there is Magicka. Great game. Absolutely fun. And ridiculous. In more ways than one. When the game is launched, you are asked to configure your controller. This is done in a surprisingly intuitive manner. However, you can’t not map commands to the controller. That is to say, if you’re out of buttons and/or you reach a command you will rarely use, you can’t choose to map it to the keyboard or not at all. You have to map every command it asks you to. There is no way around this. I don’t know if it detects controllers and configures itself based on what it detects, but it so happened that the number of commands exactly matched the number of buttons on my controller. This is a problem for me, as the lower shoulder buttons are mapped, via the Logitech driver, as dedicated screenshot and recording functions. You never know when you might want to grab a screenie, and when you miss the moment, you regret it forever. So, I have two leftover functions I have to map to the keys already reserved. While Arrowhead has mostly done a superb job with Magicka, this is one minor detail that is a big annoyance.
And for my conclusion: Braid. You can’t use a controller at all for this game. Why not? It’s a fucking platformer!

warranty disservice

Posted on by Sawdust

Around April 10th, my motherboard crapped out on me due to minor power issues at my apartment. Shit happens. Oh well. It was a week out of NewEgg’s return policy, but well within Asus’ warranty period. These circumstances clearly dictated my course of action.

I filed for an RMA, and after waiting three days, got my approval. Why I had to wait that long during the business week is beyond me, Gigabyte had my approval back by the end of the same day. A few days later I walked into my local UPS Store and had it sent out. It arrived at Asus’ repair facility in Indiana on the 20th, and I recieved confirmation the next day that they had the product.
April 25th: An email appeared on my browser that stated the repair was finished. While the email stressed that it was not in any way a confirmation that the product had been shipped out, it did say that it had left their warehouse and was on its way.
Today is May 10th. It has been fifteen days. I was not given a tracking number with which to verify the progress of the package (Asus states they use Fedex for their return service). When I ventured to Asus’ support site to file a complaint, I encountered another layer of stupidity.
The page to file includes fields for the following:
Email
Name
Product Model
Serial Number
Revision
BIOS Revision
Video Card Make
Video Card Model
Video Card Chipset
Video Card Driver
CPU Make
CPU Model
CPU Speed
Memory Make
Memory Model
Memory Capacity
HDD Make
HDD Model
HDD Capacity
All of these fields are required before the form can be submitted.
Asus, what the fuck does all this matter? Your motherboard crapped out on me, it’s under your warranty, and you should at least be able to fix it, return it to me in a reasonable period, and provide me some way of tracking the progress of the repair and the return package (they at least got the former tracking right, something Gigabyte didn’t do). You’ve already determined that it is fully covered by warranty or you would not have carried out the warranty service on it.
My next motherboard is going to be a Gigabyte. At least, unless Asus spontaneously overhauls their RMA experience.

undroid

Posted on by Sawdust

Just yesterday I grabbed Google Listen for my phone and subscribed to a few podcasts. There aren’t enough of these for Listen, which leads me to think there should be a standard format, and a standard database of some kind to link all these so any podcast program can find them and keep updated. But I digress.

A bigger issue challenging Android is the open-source paradox. In theory, Android is open source. It is free to use. Its SDK can be downloaded and used by anyone (given they have the training and experience). Anyone can make apps and post them to the Android Market for use, and these apps do virtually everything imaginable.

But it’s not all open. Google has already determined that the source code of Honeycomb, version 3.0 for tablets, has not and will not be released. This stems from their fork strategy: version 3.0 is tablet-specific, because according to Google, it was too difficult to build a version that could function both on smartphones and the larger tablets with simple reconfigurations. Thus, Honeycomb could be considered a fork of the smartphone variant of Android. Hopefully in the future, these two forks will reconverge after Google works out some of the kinks, but who knows.

Google says the holding back of Honeycomb’s source code is to prevent mediocre apps from permeating the tablet market, and I guess they have a good point there. But I don’t see too many bad apps on the phones–it’s generally a straightforward process when searching to avoid the ones that don’t look so good–and either way, this still goes against the concept of Android being “open.”

What is more of a problem is the fact that it’s so open to start with–here’s the paradox. Everything is available to everyone, more or less. But most of the Android phone manufacturers aren’t content to just put out a phone with Android. That just won’t do. HTC invented Sense. Samsung made TouchWiz. And Motorola has MOTOBLUR. In some cases, these interfaces have just made things clunky and diluted the Android experience. But that’s just it. In the words of the guys at Android Central, they’re not selling Android, they’re selling the experience.

This also goes against the philosophy of Android, if you ask me–not just because I prefer the vanilla experience, but because these interfaces can’t be disabled or removed by normal means. Even if they are removed, in most cases it has been shown to destabilize the system; at this point it would just be better to root and install a custom ROM. On top of this the manufacturers are violating one of the founding precepts of open software and are making these (considerable) changes to the core of Android without making the changes public or returning them to the source project. This throws the whole concept into disarray, but the worst part of it is that this is happening almost entirely at the manufacturers’ discretion, taking advantage of Google making their source available openly.

</diatribe>

control fantasy: the buttons within

Posted on by Sawdust

I recently resumed my playthrough of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King. Besides the name being long in the tooth (not that that’s unusual for Japanese games), it has some of the typical issues with Wii games, those being developers not properly considering the implications of the hardware and its use.

First, a primer. MLaaK is a city-building sim game, in which you play the leader of a kingdom that was destroyed in the first Crystal Chronicles game, who is attempting to refound his father’s realm. In a third-person over-the-head perspective, you run around deciding where to place buildings such as homes, which then allow families to move in and in turn make adventurers available for you to send into the wilderness to bring back loot and riches.
The first failing of this game’s design is that the Wiimote’s forward sensor is unused. When you’re running around with a camera hovering over your back, the precision of that sensor is pretty much mandatory. But no. You simply use the D-pad to move about your town, and even that isn’t as precise as it should be–the King turns at nearly right angles, meaning if you’re not aligned with a street’s length you end up making an awkward zigzag to keep from bashing your head into buildings. Thank Romero the game doesn’t have character collision, or it would be a nightmare just to go for a stroll.
Apparently wanting to add to the inelegance, the Wiimote is used in its “normal” orientation, that is you hold it lengthwise, with the D-pad under your thumb. Why? If you’re not going to use the motion sensor, why not have it turned into “retro” orientation and make use of the extra buttons in a much more comfortable way? Many Wii game designers don’t seem to realize what they’re making can use other modes than what you see in the advertisements.
Another case in point: Metal Slug Anthology. It’s your typical sidescrolling platformer game (well, a colection of games), and smartly makes use of the Wiimote’s retro configuration. Okay, not so smartly. The game has no totally retro control scheme. In its simplest setting, it’s played much like it was an NES game, with one very annoying exception–throwing grenades requires the Wiimote be snapped quickly with the wrist. Obviously this makes gameplay extremely difficult, as moving the controller this way means you either can’t move or can’t shoot, and doing neither for even a second in a game like Metal Slug means death. Meanwhile, the “B” trigger is entirely unused. Why is the grenade function not mapped to this button?
Is this intentional? If so, why do developers feel the need to do this? It only makes gameplay awkward, at best, and in the case of Metal Slug‘s grenades, painful after a time. The game dev’s aim is to make it comfortable to play; otherwise there is little incentive to play. Not every unique feature of the Wii hardware needs to be exploited for every game–conversely, useful design mechanics should never be ignored when they will complement gameplay.
Or, at very least, games should allow full freedom of customization when it comes to command mapping. Personally, this is my preferred solution, but I can see reasons why it would be problematic for some developers.

blown away

Posted on by Sawdust

Just finished the last part of the Space Oddity story arc in Deadpool #33-35. While I was amused by the parallel with the characters of the sentient moons Id and Ego, I’m left wondering why there was no Superego. Seems like Marvel missed out on an opportunity to make a much more expansive story arc.

In awesomer news, Moon Knight is getting a relaunch, and PunisherMax has been resurrected. This gives me a slight modicum of faith in the Disney-Marvel relationship, that maybe they will see what their great products are (of which PunMax was one) and stick with them.
And on an aside, playing through Spirit Tracks I’ve just picked up the Whirlwind, similar to the Gust Jar and a couple other mechanics from previous games. To use the Whirlwind, one blows into the mic to generate wind and blow things away. While this is inventive, I wish there was an alternate-use option, as just the first boss battle left me short of breath.