toblix

For some reason I keep getting stuff to give away on Steam. If anyone wants a copy of Civ V, let me know. It's not one of those fancy editions, I don't think.

So much of the side mission stuff is too repetitive. The jade statues are cool, since there aren't that many of them, and each one gives you a new combat move. The health shrines were pretty great too – clearly visible, none of them hidden in dumb places, and motivating you to fully explore the city. The cameras were completely unnecessary, and there were too many, too weirdly hidden lockboxes. The drug bust thing seemed at first like a cool concept, but then I realised they were all exactly the same, only with increasingly annoying accesibility. The whole thing where you point out the guy on the screen – obviously this is just an unfinished version of a potentially great idea. I wonder what happened there. All the races were too easy, I felt. If you just drove responsibly, your idiot competitors would just at some point form a pile of exploding cars and let you win easily. Oh, and I forgot to mention how great the radio stations were. They were pretty great. No doubt I'll for the rest of my life be able to hear any one of those songs and instantly be transported back to Hong Kong.

Finished it, and thought it was pretty good. Anyone else think the driving felt a bit off? For some reason, fine-steering was unpossible because of a huge joystick deadzone, so either you're not turning at all, or you're turning too much. I didn't find a way of changing it in the options, so I ended up doing a lot of juddery steering. Also, drifting physics was awful. The car drives just fine around turns until that magical point where it decides «FUCK YEA DRIFTIN TIME BITCHCHHH» and suddenly rotates your car 180 degrees into a bus stop. The main missions were pretty good and nicely paced. If the combat had been terrible I would've complained about too many kung fu fights, but thankfully the mano-a-mano is really good. If you're a good boy and collect enough jade statues, by the time you're fighting big groups you'll be a rapid-punching, swiftly-kicking death machine, throwing people over railings here, shoving them into ice crushers there. All in all, a decent GTA clone that did a lot of things worse (driving, side missions, feeling of "depth" to the world) and a lot of things better (hand-to-hand combat, Hong Kong simulation, Chinese radio.) Favourite "system-based game" parts: When racing, all the cars immediately runs over and kills the 3-2-1 lady. Standing in front of vendors, watching them awkwardly shuffle about, trying to pathfind their way back to their scripted spot. Performing serious, gritty jobs whilst driving a double-decker bus. Driving slowly down the pavement on my moped, watching pedestrians wildly switching between "almost killed panic" and "on my way to work" mode.

God.

Guys, I was kidding! Obviously I knew these things. I was just pulling your "legs"!

I backed it because I hope he can.

Okay, so I tried this. When I'm killed, I'm given a score and thrown back out in the menu, forced to restart with no real progress, which feels brutal. What, if there is any, is the progression in this game? Does it expect you to do all the challenges in one go without being killed? What am I missing? If there is a progression state I'm missing, is it per animal?

Yeah, I definitely see how it could be uncomfortable if you don't approach it in the g5mer mode. I even think I remember reading an interview where they discussed that, and how they had started to realise how more "serious" situations would arise in this seemingly humorous game. I guess how it turns out in the final game will depend on whether they'll be going the all-out hilarious Theme Park route, or something more serious altogether, or maybe do a complex work of interactive art in which they explicitly use the contrasting elements to comment on prisons, law, justice, free will, etc.

My great great granduncle died from retoracle. RIP Uncle Fjordvald

You don't get it man. It's 2D now. The stories in the 3D games were all terrible because they were all about polygons and texture mapping. 2D's gonna fix all those things and make everything all right again.

Backed! Or, you know ...

Happy birthday PiratePooAndHisBattleship!

In Police Quest 2, I think it was, there's a point early on where you have to >turn id card or something to find a code for a lock on the back. I remember just brute-forcing the code instead.

Since I'm deathly afraid of having to go chase achievements and collectibles after having finished the game, I always go straight for them and ignore the main story for as long as I can. Whenever there's something I can do that's not progressing the main story, I do that instead. So immediately after being introduced to the story and the characters and taking the first criminal baby steps I turn into this weird guy who's just a thug and a nobody but wears the most fine, expensive attires and spends hours driving back and forth across town in his incredibly expensive, incredibly powerful sports car that he paid for in cash, doing favours for all sorts of people, becoming a deadly kung fu master and expert marksman. Also, a weird bug caused me to get access to a swanky luxury apartment early on. So I do all this, and have all this expensive shit and all this money and then when I've done all that I return to the main story and am treated like just a thug and a nobody, which is weird. I sort of wish they limited my progression more, so that I couldn't do this to myself.

If they decide to go with the tried and true formula, I'm not going to be surprised, and I'll definitely play it, and probably love it. Rumour has it you'll be playing as a former criminal, which probably means it'll probably be yet another story of being dragged into crime and then up through the ranks with an explosive finale. That's fine. If it has more of the big, beautiful, detailed environments with a thousand million little details, I'll be a happy camper, and I'll do every side mission and get every achievement. Still, it would be interesting if they decided to take things in a different direction. Oh, and rumour also has it it'll have a more involved multiplayer, with persistent elements, etc.

Are you doing the thing where you go «WHY DIDN'T I GET THE JOB???» I hear that's a good idea.

Playing Sleeping Dogs, I started thinking about how much Rockstar are going to change the formula for GTA V. This is almost a genre at this point, right? If you compare Sleeping Dogs and GTA IV, they're almost completely similar, down to some very key details. Add a bit of comedy, and Sleeping Dogs is basically GTA Hong Kong, right? As far as I know, the GTA games haven't changed much since they turned 3D; mostly they're better looking and more detailed. All the major, and most of the minor, game mechanics have been left relatively unchanged for years. Being at the end of the console cycle, it'll definitely look better than GTA IV; probably on par with Sleeping Dogs – is it likely they'll do much with the formula this time around, to separate it from Saint's Row, Sleeping Dogs and Mafia, or are they just going to make another one, only bigger and better? Also, I wonder if the multiplayer will be better, and if it'll lead to another wave of awesome thumb multiplayer sessions.

Yeah, even the most vibrantly living, breathing worlds are pretty similar to the Virtual Theatre of Lure of the Temptress. Lots of identical people walking identically around static, solid environments, rotating and snapping into transition poses and saying the same things with the same voice. It's a thing we're used to and it doesn't really strike us as strange, but think of how much could be done here if the technology allowed it! I think there's much more interesting stuff still undiscovered between the layers of abstraction games use today and a perfect simulation, than what has been done in video games. And that's, of course, only considering the obvious and probably rather misguided goal of more realism in games. Think of the things no-one has thought of! Sure it would be sweet if driving a Porca into a tree in some future GTA game fractured and deformed everything super-realistically, and affected all the local businesses and onlookers and a million bazillion FLOPS propagated the consequences of my actions throughout a detailed, complex simulation of a virtual city, but when that stuff is possible and expected and available as affordable middleware, think of what truly brilliant minds can come up with! Maybe Milo could be a reality!

I think there's still lots of mindblowing stuff that only more powerful graphics technology will allow. I bet there are thousands of truly revolutionary ideas that have been impossible to implement just because the graphics hardware can't handle it. Without any deep understanding or knowledge of the technology, I often feel like the evolution of game visuals is being pushed really hard at some points by faster graphics cards, higher resolution textures and sweet shaders, but at the same time being really held back by the limitations of other hardware. I bet, if video game graphics people could magically make some technological change happen overnight, it wouldn't be even more on-board graphics memory or more GPUs, but something more fundamental and harder to change, having to do with core architecture stuff. As an example, it often feels like asset loading/streaming is a huge limitation, even in the most high-tech of games.

I've always felt the link between my Windows Live account and my Xbox gamer tag has been flimsy, but now it seems it has finally broken. I tried logging on to live.xbox.com today, which (naturally) takes me to the live.com login page. I log in with my username, which ends in @gmail.com, and I'm told I have to change the name to something ending in @live.no. So I do that, and suddenly my gamer tag is this SqualidCougar09. I start to panic, thinking Microsoft has overwritten my hundreds of points with this lame new thing, and I log out and try to log in with my old @gmail account. No dice. Log in again with @live.no, and SqualidCougar09 it is. I turn on the Xbox and see that my gamer tag is still connected to my @gmail.com account, but I can't change it, because it won't accept my password. I curse on Twitter and then ask @XboxSupport for help. They answer after three minutes, which I guess is impressive, but by then I've already sort of fixed it. I think. I can't recall the exact steps I took, but it was something to do with clicking the "I forgot my password" button and entering my old account name. Anyway, the moral is: don't fucking touch your Xbox account data or anything connected to it. If you do, maybe SqualidCougar10 will be you!

Yeah, I totally hope Half-Life 3 is more of a pure FPS. But that's coming from the part of my that always want sequels to games I love. Valve will probably make a better decision with regard to any Half-Life sequel than I would be able to. As for sweet-looking games: yeah. I'm playing Sleeping Dogs, a game that, if I were to show a screenshot from to myself ten years ago, would cause a rip in the space-time continuum because I would no longer exist because I died ten years ago from my head exploding, and I appreciate that it looks fucking amazine, but I'm not as excited about it as I probably should be. It probably has to do with h4rd k0re gamerz being so attuned to video game graphics that we start to ignore the obvious advances that are being made in areas like texture resolution and sweet full-screen lighting blooming effects wizardry and crave only the truly revolutionary stuff. I remember playing the Mardi Gras level in Hitman without having heard anything about it before; I wonder if any video game graphics will ever give me that kind of amazing «holy shit this is the future!» rush.

I just realised I'm going to have to go through this again when reinstalling Windows 8. Account merging is some seriously scary shit, especially when its tied up to your credit card, and especially especially when its tied up to your gamer5 sc4re. I'm having an almost similar situtation with my iPhone – I have an account with my @gmail.com address that I use for the iTunes store, and has all my purchases associated with it. Then I have the @me.com address that I use for iCloud synchronisation. Oh, and I also ran into the fucking incredible thing that Amazon does, that never fails to amaze people when they first hear: they allow duplicate accounts with the same email, but with different passwords. That's right, asshole. You can actually get the error message: «You have already logged in with an account with this name, but with a different password. Click on this button to switch accounts, and maybe try to merge them, and we'll fuck up all your Kindle books and your order history, and you'll never be able to use Amazon again.»

I guess everyone heard the latest rumours about Half-Life 3 being reinvented as an open world RPG. It's on this Google translated page, so it must be true! Though my initial, but brief, gut reaction was the «You guys are breaking my game!» nerd rage, I still trust Valve to know what they're doing – even if what they're doing is not making a Half-Life 3 at all. For a while I was uncertain about whether they were interested in doing single player games at all, but Portal 2 proved they still are, and they're still great at it, and my fears that Valve has turned into some twisted, multiplayer-only, micro-transaction thing are almost completely gone.

I wouldn't say the videos are spoiler-free, though I guess it depends on how you define spoiler. They've said what the premise of the game is, and we've seen a lot of art and some specific scenes from the game. If you're hyper allergic to knowing anything about the game, you probably shouldn't watch the videos. But they're great, so you should watch them.

If I understand you correctly, and I'm known not to, you're sort of implying that all players have to switch to this specific other mode to play the game the «right» way, or enjoy it the most or whatever. With your Guild Wars 2 example, obviously they made this early, major decision to very explicitly move players around the world and through the game by way of empty checkboxes on the map and always showing you your completion stats in percent of the current area. If you're able to play it and enjoy it in this alternative renegade way, that's awesome, but I wouldn't describe that as the only case in which the game succeeds.