Problem Machine

I think sightlines longer than you can actually look are the big problem. Like, enemies won't see you if you're past that point, but it means you can't tell before running down that hallway if there's someone coming down it to meet you halfway. I think if they'd taken it as a level design principle never to have sightlines longer than 2 screens the game would have been stronger for it. Fortunately the levels that are longer than that are fairly uncommon and mostly loaded into the middle of the game.

I think the game bogs down around the middle where the military missions are at their thickest, but the missions get shorter and more focused (with fewer long sightlines) for the last couple acts. I feel like a lot more people judge HLM story for what it isn't than what it is. Like, I hear a lot of people who are down on it as a superficial critique of violence, when I don't think that's ever really what it was intended to be so much as just making a game themed around the violence that's core to its mechanics. Like, in that episode of the pod where Chris was talking about how if Max Payne was a real person he would have personally murdered more human beings than almost any other person who has ever lived, and how we would be a huge fucking deal on the news with world governments wanting to know where this living disaster was at all possible times, and Hotline Miami is just a story about when you take a bunch of Max Paynes and put them in the same city and it goes fucking insane because what else could possibly happen if you did that. It's weird to me that people think that idea is pretentious, when it's really just stripping away a lot of the pretense that other games put over their treatment of violence. Rape scene is weird, though. Weirdly leaving it in after the uproar almost seems more like a fuck you to the people who insisted that they leave it in than to the people who thought it was inappropriate, because within the story of the game the person who decides that its inclusion is 'necessary' is the pig butcher. Although, outside the immediate context of the game the person who makes that decision is the player, which is itself something one could interpret rather interestingly if one were so inclined, heh.

Oh yeah, regarding a keyboard, I have one and can play it semi-decently but find I mostly use it for brainstorming and do all of the actual composition by putting the notes I want into the sequencer -- I actually use a graphics tablet to do that since it's a little bit easier to pick out the specific notes I want on the piano roll with that than with the mouse, but that's obviously a matter of preference. I don't actually think it's as hard as all that to get a piano performance to sound real, mostly you just have to go in and tweak each note's velocity. Dequantizing the notes, so they're not all completely simultaneous, is sometimes helpful but actually most pianists have pretty good rhythm so usually doesn't add much. Reason does have some pretty good piano and orchestral libraries, though I'm not sure if all of the ones I use come with the standard edition, so that helps too. Anyway yeah, as Patrick says you probably don't want to get the cart before the horse here. Get a program and make sure you can use it well enough to do your part in any collaboration, dummy in what you want with a cheesy synth sax, and you'll have a much better idea of what exactly you need when it comes time to collect samples.

I don't play Sax so it's hard to articulate, but there's very subtle differences in the way a note can be voiced that are kind of unique to the musicianship of the person playing. Like, no matter how nice the sample, any one sample of a person singing a note will feel fake when it's used for them singing different notes: Even if you record them singing each individual note, playing those back from a sampler will still sound very different from the same person singing the same melody. The fact is, without creating a program specifically to model a human voice, a very detailed program, that sort of thing is just impossible to fully capture. The same is true of woodwinds, which capture some of the qualities of human voice. However, that's only a big problem if you need it to sound really authentic. Sometimes, a completely obviously fake sax is still really interesting and cool! Authenticity isn't everything, and each tool has its strengths and weaknesses. Electronic music will never make performers obsolete, it's just another way of making music. So, if authenticity is super important, find a saxophonist to collab with: If it's not, learn to either love or conceal the flaws in the instrument you have.

Sax is IMO a straight-up problem to sample/synthesize well, just because there tends to be a lot of nuance to how the notes get played which is really hard to capture into playback data. Your best bet is generally to record a performance by a musician and then sample that in directly, or chop up an existing performance to achieve the same effect. You can use existing sample instruments if there's a lot going on to cover up the choppiness or if you take a lot of care to get the right sample for each note and get into the nitty-gritty and modify each note velocity and modulation, but yeah it's definitely hard. The same is true of most woodwinds, as well as several brass and string instruments.

Hm, it's hard to give recommendations -- I think many people, as you say, just pick a program and end up running with it. Personally I use Reason: All of the sound devices are presented as actual boxes on a rack, which is unnecessary but is a helpful learning metaphor for people who are used to more traditional rack setups. I actually use a pretty old version at this point, since I bought it back when I had an actual job and money, so I don't have much idea what the newer versions have to offer. The version I have now isn't good at any sort of recording or direct waveform manipulation, but gives you tons of control over how the synths and samples are played. I think Reason also used to be what Danny B used for Super Meat Boy and Binding of Isaac, but I think he may have switched to a more full-on DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) type setup since. I think that in all likelihood you'll probably be able to do most of what you want with any of the major programs floating around, so it's probably mostly a matter of taste and what you can learn most easily. If you end up using Reason I don't mind answering any questions you might have, but again I'm like 3 major versions behind so probably wouldn't be able to answer much for the devices added since then. Anyway, uh. Reason is rad, probably other tools are also rad, but the most important part I think is finding one which is fundamentally intriguing to learn and fun to use. TBH I might recommend just acquiring a few to play with via extralegal means, seeing which one you like best, and then buying that one if you want to be on the up-and-up.

Hm I never really felt like that. I mean, there were parts of levels like that, but it felt like just as often there were parts that were total softballs because of my character, which is pretty much what you'd expect. I did end up doing the last normal gangster level with brass knuckles though, which got pretty interesting later on...

Oh my god a Hotline Miami version of A Christmas Carol would be amazing "Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only? Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead, but if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!"

Army levels were a weak point IMO, primarily because their sightlines were too damn long (I didn't mind the weapon setup since I tend to play like 95% melee anyway). I occasionally got stuck enemies but only once or twice did they cause me to die, and that's not much in a game like HLM. Never had any trouble progressing, though sometimes it wasn't clear where the actual exit I was supposed to use was since it would have arrows pointing back to the way I came from, which was confusing sometimes. My biggest criticism of that sort is that it's not always obvious what's full cover, what's movement-blocking non-cover, and what's open ground. There's also generally quite a bit more clutter than in HLM1 which can make movement annoying sometimes.

I'm pretty sure I liked Hotline Miami 2 a lot. If so then I am atypical, in that I liked the plot of the first and like the second very much. I think it's fine that it's different, and it makes the first game feel more intimately tied to Jacket's personal reality which is something I liked about it anyway. I like that each character feels a bit different, both in the way their weird nightmares manifest and in the way they play. I do think I would have preferred it as like each act split into a $2-3 DLC pack though, in like an episodic kind of thing. It would have made the difficulty curve make a bit more sense, and tie in well with the fragmented multiple-perspective plot. Oh well! Currently wondering if there was supposed to be a direct causal link between the actions of the protagonists and the events of the ending. Hm.

I guess I may have been careless in my terminology. Specifically what I wanted to convey is that saying "this is too long a string of events to be probable to occur if the odds didn't demand it" doesn't follow since astronomically improbable things happen all the time, and all a long string of improbable events can be viewed equivalently as one long, specific, and highly improbable prolonged event. This is very similar to the watchmaker argument for intelligent creation, stating that because things arrived in this highly specific way something must be influencing them to happen this way -- it just doesn't necessarily follow, because things could have happened in any number of very specific ways, and none of them necessarily more or less guided than this particular outcome, whether by odds or by design. In other words, I find the argument of a general trend towards progress to be unconvincing both because it relies highly on the examples set by a few cultures even though those cultures may be themselves short-lived outliers, and because it's based on an assumption that very unlikely things never happen. ... but this is like super off-topic. Dangit.

Isn't probability pretty much always approximation? Is there something I'm missing here?

One complex event vs many simple events is just a different way of representing the same data. It's not important whether getting heads 100 times in a row is regarded as a single 1:2^99 event or 99 1:2 events. Statistically improbable things happen all the time, and just because something is unlikely is hardly a guarantee that it's not the way things are. Plus, even now, there are plenty of dictatorships, and no guarantee that they'll be shorter-lived than our 'progressive' countries. Anyway we're going rather far afield here, if we want to continue this it should probably be in a different topic or something.

It does, unless I'm grossly misunderstanding your point. Our current society, such as it is, is just as likely to be a statistical anomaly as an inevitable outcome. Certainly we as a species are wired for some degree of cooperation, but it's an article of faith to say that this is inherently inclusive of diversity or inevitably associated with justice. Cooperation is something that can just as easily be harnessed towards fascism or mob brutality as towards justice. Besides, only in the last 70 years or so have we really gained the power to initiate a global extinction, and we've come really close a number of times, and in fact may still be in the process of doing so slowly with global warming, so I don't take this as nearly the encouraging sign that you do.

Just because a coin comes up heads 10 times in a row doesn't mean it will an 11th, and just because we're writing this at a comparatively free and progressive time and place doesn't mean that that's an inevitable evolution. Plenty of enlightened and egalitarian countries have fallen into dictatorships, and the Library of Alexandria burned down. Knowledge is not always accumulated, slaves aren't always freed, respect isn't always given. If things are going to get better, it's going to be because we make them better, not because of some inevitable and unnameable force of nature.

Lottery winners get, like, what, 100 million for a big jackpot? Notch has 2.5 billion dollars. He could give everyone in Sweden $100 and still have more than $1.5 billion left. Would even most charities know what to do with that much money if they suddenly got it, or would undermine their entire fiscal structure? My point is just, like, yeah it's a shitload of money, and he's obviously not making especially good use of it at the moment, but how would you actually prefer that played out? Would you rather Microsoft still had the money and bought the company for less than it was worth? It's easy to criticize him for not doing enough with what is obviously an immense power, but how could he even spend that money in an intelligent and generous way without making a full-time job out of it? I don't see any reason why he should be more scrutinized than people who invest their money into trying to make more money, and so on, forever, which is largely accurate description of other immensely wealthy people.

I mean, do they though? If we're talking about the long run, the forces of entropy win out. So somewhere in between now and then good wins? Temporarily? I dunno, sorry to be a downer, but that whole moral arc of the universe bending towards justice thing is primarily just a thing that feels nice to say, not something that actually means anything in particular. The fact is, if we want 'good' to win, we have to make it happen. The universe is not on our side here, and failure is definitely a possibility. That's why it's a fight, not a nap.

I don't think it's easy to get rid of a lot of money. If you just carelessly dump it somewhere it could easily do more harm than good. I mean, how would you get rid of 2 billion dollars? Like actually get rid of it?

Nachimir I get that this is a shitty situation but I don't think you're lashing out at the right people here. Maybe you should take a break, if you can?

This also makes it easier, for me at least, to understand what you're getting at, which I was having a hard time parsing before

I've always thought that Owen seemed more the misguided sad sack and Aurini the frustrated incompetent supervillain, and what I've been hearing about this breakup only reinforces that interpretation. Seriously I think this dude would fit right into an episode of Venture Bros.

Isn't that basically what happened to the last police force Darren Wilson was on though?

I hadn't heard of Katherine Cross before the whole GG shitshow and gaining that familiarity is one of the few good things to come out of GG for me. So often I'll be just touching on an idea and starting to articulate it in my own mind only to find that she's just written an article meticulously exploring the subject.

Well but I think that's exactly what it is, recognizing that Wu isn't 'us' just another person who we will sometimes agree and/or disagree with, and who absolutely doesn't deserve any of the shit flung her way. The thing is, it has to be taken one step further, and we have to recognize that's true of all players in this debacle. As often and as strongly as I agree with Zoe Quinn, she too is just a person, and elevating her to some symbolic side of a war between heaven and hell is both rhetorically lazy and demeaning to her as a human being.

Finished February's track at the last minute. A lot of my earlier sketches didn't work out, so I ended up doing this pretty much entirely in the last 5 days of the month. Hopefully next month's piece is a bit more forthcoming. The Past is a Ghost and the Future is a Monster