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jan
31

It was worth a try

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Wow, it’s been so long since I’ve had the time and willpower to just sit and write.  Work was… busy.  We were pushing pretty hard to meet deadlines.  We had finally settled on our feature scope, had first-pass implementations of a good deal of systems, and, at least for the part of the project I was responsible, we had reached a point where we were iterating and making good strides toward creating a game that I could, for once, be proud of.

Then we got shut down.

As of tomorrow, the company into which I’ve spent all of the past year and two months pouring my efforts and ideas will cease to exist.  It’s the first company closure I’ve ever had to go through, and it really stings to know that the product of months upon months of hard work and late nights will never see the light of day.  We were in meetings this morning, just hours before we got the bad news.  The designers and I had just settled on how we can replace one of our characters’ more tepid abilities with one that posed a whole new dimension of interesting strategic decisions.  There were many other meetings like that, too, in recent months.  Things were coming together.

I have a lot of theories regarding our company’s failure.  If I had to lay blame, most of it w0uld be upon the upper echelons of the management hierarchy.  Maybe when the dust settles, I’ll talk more openly about it.  But right now, there’s no point in hurling accusations.  The fact of the matter is that we failed.

For whatever reason, we failed.

We were making a Flash strategy RPG.  On Facebook.  Sure, it’s a risk.  I knew that going in.  It’s not exactly the type of thing that hits it big with that audience, but we wanted to make a game that we wanted to play.  I was the first engineer on the project.  I fleshed out the prototype.  I was the one that first breathed life into what was up to that point only concept art.  I created an entire turn-based combat engine from scratch.  It was easily one of the most challenging and most satisfying accomplishments of my career to-date.

And the world will never see it.

It’s heart-wrenching to know that it never even got a chance to be something.  There would’ve been a sense of closure, at least, if the game launched and just performed poorly.  I could live with that.  Fortunately, I’ve already got another job lined up – this time at a purely mobile game company.  I’m sure there’ll be great creative opportunities there, too, but until I’ve gone independent, I don’t think I’ll ever quite be happy.

Date: January 31, 2012 11:46 PM
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sep
21

Microsoft’s douchebaggery

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I hate to interrupt my latest (not-so-)scheduled blog update failure extravaganza, but I feel like I have to speak up about Microsoft’s latest underhanded, under-the-radar tactic.  Now this may just be a case of me not reading some new terms-of-service agreement.  If so, then I’ll humbly take some of the blame.  Even so, it doesn’t excuse the fact that these terrible policies exist in the first place.  Really, though, I’m probably just more surprised that what I’m about to recount hasn’t incited a bigger, more mainstream backlash.

Some time ago, I tweeted about Microsoft changing Xbox Live Gold subscriptions to be auto-renewed.  (Not that anyone actually follows my Twitter.)  I don’t know when exactly this changeover happened, but it had to be sometime in the past year.  My 12-month Gold account was scheduled to end four days ago, and I got an email about a month ago notifying me of the auto-renewal.

Naturally, I logged onto the Xbox Live website to cancel the subscription.  I haven’t been using Gold much, and I don’t foresee using it again soon.  Despite there being all sorts of links on the website to “cancel your Xbox Live subscription,” it turns out that those links all tell you to call up customer service to cancel it.  That was warning sign number one.  Phone-only cancellation from a technologically-savvy company that is easily capable of implementing online cancellation?  That just screams corporate greed and total disregard for customer convenience.  In any case, I hate muscling my way through an automated phone system to get in contact with customer service reps, just to be put on hold for thirty minutes.  Time is valuable to me, as it is, I’m sure, to all of you.

So I did a little more digging into my account on their website.  It turned out that the service was set to auto-charge a credit card that my credit provider had cancelled months ago due to suspicious activity.  So, I figured, that was that.  The auto-renewal system would attempt to charge the card, fail authorization, and terminate my subscription.

Some days later, I went to play on my Xbox for the first time in a few weeks.  A notification popped up  telling me about the auto-renewal.  It asked me whether I wanted to turn auto-renewal off.  I said yes.  Done and done.  No customer service needed, right?

When the auto-renew date rolled around, lo and behold, I got an email notifying me that I had successfully renewed my Gold subscription.  I perused the Xbox Live website and ran into some account page that said I had a balance of $59.99, the renewal fee.  This obviously bothered me.  I finally got around to calling customer service tonight. (Yeah, it took me a few days.  Like I said, time is valuable, and I wasn’t ready to spend it on this crap.)

Luckily, I was able to get in touch with a representative without too much hassle.  But here are the infuriating things that she told me: first of all, Microsoft disabled the ability to turn auto-renewal off.  Yes, the word “disabled” was used.  This means that the ability once existed, but no longer does.  So apparently, my response to the notification that appeared on my console was completely ignored.  Secondly, from what I could gather, the renewal fee isn’t charged until a month after the subscription is renewed.  So even though the service was set to charge a completely invalid card, it went ahead with the renewal anyway.  Then the rep told me that, as a consequence of this, if the charge was attempted and failed, the balance would remain on my account, and I would be given four to six weeks to pay it with a valid payment source.  If I did not pay on time, my Xbox Live account would be suspended.  That’s right.  Instead of just terminating the subscription, they suspend your entire friggin’ account.  All because they choose to validate the payment source a month later than you’d expect.  Is that practice normal?  Maybe I’ve just been out of the whole subscription business model for too long, but that kind of policy seems… suboptimal, to say the least.

Fortunately, there’s some sort of refund program in place, where you can cancel the subscription within the first month for a full refund.  But again, this whole month-long payment delay rears its stupid head.  How can I get a refund if I haven’t even been charged yet?  I have no idea.  Do I wait until I’ve been charged a month after the subscription started- oh, that’s right, I can’t!  Because I have to cancel before the month is up to get my refund!  According to the service rep, she had to pull some accounting voodoo to process the charge, and then process a refund immediately after.  Even she was forced to admit it was ridiculous.  She apologized repeatedly for the inconvenience and talked about a similar situation she encountered not too long ago.  She noted that two of her supervisors up her chain of command conflicted on how to resolve that previous problem.

Finally, after some deliberation and failed attempts to contact her manager about my situation, she decided to just reset my balance and remove the invalid card from my account entirely, saving me the whole pointless charge-and-refund stupidity.  She wasn’t entirely sure it was what protocol called for, but I’m personally grateful to her for putting her neck on the line and taking care of the whole ordeal for me.

So there you go.  More dirty tactics by your favorite tech company.  At least they finally added a way to remove cards from your console through the website.  It only took them a few years to get a clue.  Go figure.  One step forward and two steps back?  You be the judge.

Date: September 21, 2011 11:05 PM
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jul
15

Some sort of update… yeah…

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Wow, it’s been a while.  As I’ve said before, there are three possible reasons for stalled updates – this time around, it’s a combination of two of them: first of all, since I last wrote a post, I’ve been extremely busy with work.  I’ve finally been moved full-time onto our company’s real game project.  (Did I mention that?)  And for the last month or two, I’ve been the only engineer allocated to it 100%.  That means I was tasked with the fun responsibility of architecting the core framework for some pretty beefy game systems.  This generally involved gutting our last project and starting from scratch for a lot of different things.  Of course I can’t go into details, but I will say I’m pretty proud of what I’ve accomplished in the little time I’ve had.  And let me tell you – that ish is genuine.  We ain’t in no Farmville anymore.

The new team is awesome – we’re unified, we’re focused, we’re driven, we’re inspired, and quite frankly, we want to be revolutionary.  I’m loving the ride, and assuming we can shoulder-butt our lofty ideals past the bottom-lining execs, we might actually have a real and enjoyable game on our hands.

Fingers crossed!

The other big news – my wife quit her job.  She’s a full-time stay-at-home mom, now.  This has been the best thing that’s happened to me since landing my current job.  We save on childcare costs, she gets to spend more time with our kid, she gets to work more on her various side projects for an alternative income stream, and most importantly, she relieves the stress of having to come home from work just to wage war against an ever-growing queue of unfinished household chores.  This whole thing was actually her idea – and I am so grateful for the way it’s turned out so far.  She’s been taking care of business like a champ.

Which brings me to the second reason for the dearth of updates: now that I’m not responsible for nearly as much of the housework as before, I’ve had a lot more free time, which, for me, means games.

Since I last wrote, I’ve started playing League of Legends.  ‘Bout time, yeah, I know.  I was running an interview for my company and the topic came up, and I felt ashamed for not being familiar enough with the title after countless recommendations from others.  So I figured it was time to see what all of the fuss was about.  It turns out – the game is actually awesome.  (Surprise surprise!)  While I don’t particularly like the length of LoL games (given my still mostly busy lifestyle), the gameplay is chill enough to deal with it.  I assumed it’d be as stressful as a Starcraft 2 match, but it’s ended up playing out at an enjoyable and mostly-stress-free pace.  I spent most of my first ten summoner levels just grinding it out in co-op vs. AI mode, but I recently took the dive into PvP.  The competitive barrier to entry is definitely manageable, unlike the DotA genre’s abusive RTS stepfather.  You know those morons in your WoW PUGs that never followed instructions and kept getting themselves killed before finally ragequitting amid a flurry of lame excuses?  You’ll see a lot of those in LoL – but at least there’s just as much chance of them being on your opponent‘s team as yours.  That’s how it is at my level of play, anyway.

Despite the slow pace, though, LoL has already provided its fair share of ridiculously satisfying moments.  In the few PvP games I’ve played, a large fraction of them involved our team coming back from certain defeat to win the game.  And primarily playing a character that excels at pushing (Sivir), I’ve experienced no better feeling than to rally a coordinated, fatal charge into the opponent’s base.  In one game, a couple of my random teammates said I played the best Sivir they’d ever seen.  They clearly hadn’t been playing long.  But that didn’t make me beam any less at the compliment.

I was actually on the brink of doing a “Playing to Win” series of posts on learning to play competitive LoL, but after playing it a while, it just didn’t feel appropriate.  I was actually okay at the game.  I didn’t feel totally helpless playing it like I did with RTS games.  Also, at higher levels, I imagine much of a player’s success is going to depend on teamwork.  Unfortunately, I don’t have a regular group of friends that I can play and train with.  Besides, there’s no way I’d be able to coordinate sessions on a regular basis, given my hectic lifestyle, so trying to master the intricacies of team strategies is just not feasible at the moment.

So anyway, aside from that, let’s see… I participated in the Steam Summer Camp events that occurred over the past few weeks.  I also got sucked into buying a couple more games and playing some of the ones I bought during the winter sale.  I finally finished Portal 2 co-op with a buddy (stayed up into the wee hours of the night, in fact, so we could score one last summer camp ticket).  I started playing Magicka with that same buddy.  Hilarity ensued.  That game drops pop-culture references at  a blistering speed.  And we get killed in the most amusing ways.  Among other games I’ve started: Terraria, Fate of the World, Frozen Synapse, King Arthur – The Role-playing Wargame, and Rohrer’s Inside a Star-Filled Sky.

Oh, and I also managed to finished Zeno Clash – quite possibly the trippiest virtual world I’ve ever traversed.  There seemed like so much narrative potential.  The game had several intriguing characters, and there were ample opportunities to make the uninhibited Corwids into some strong metaphors, but in the end, I didn’t end up getting any sense of meaning.  The main storyline also falls flat.  The game leads up to a big reveal, but you could see the “secret” coming from a mile away, and it’s really not all that interesting.  To make things worse, there was little to no resolution to the whole story.  It just ends.  In any case, at least the melee combat was well done.

So that’s it for me and my update.  I hope to get back into my weekly stride.  Hold me to it.

Oh and I just remembered – Amazon discontinued their affiliate program in California because of some new, aggressive (read: stupid) tax laws, which means I have little reason to put those links at the bottom of my posts anymore.  Those’ll go away shortly.  Way to promote business in your already floundering state, California…

…I’m out!

Date: July 15, 2011 2:02 AM
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may
23

Toward a social gaming code of ethics

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It’s been almost six months since my foray into the social gaming software development world.  My company has soft-launched its first product on Facebook, and we’ve begun prototyping our second, more ambitious project.  With that, I’ve gotten around to thinking about the annoying things that have become established convention in this isolated gaming microcosm, and what I hope to do to break those precedents for the sake of a better gameplay experience.

I’ve boiled down the problems with social gaming to violations of what I believe should be two core tenets of social game development ethics:

  • Bit-twiddling is an unethical way to monetize. Paying X dollars to recharge a timer or to instant-complete a mission is ludic robbery.  Unfortunately, there is a prevalence in social games today of systems that give players shortcuts through a game at the cost of their hard-earned dollar.  If a game has compelling gameplay, then why offer a means by which a player can bypass it?  There is little more that a game can do to devalue its core experience than to allow players to pay their way around it.  Of course, my ever-business-minded wife would make the argument, “If someone wants to pay to do it, why not let them?”  Because ultimately, the practice reflects a game’s deeper lack of substance.  Think of it this way: what if, just as you were about to board a roller coaster cart, a theme park employee came up to you and made an offer: “For the low, low price of $5, you can skip this ride and go straight to the exit!”?  Why would you ever take that offer?  The only reason you could ever have is if the ride was terrible.  And this is exactly the situation you’re finding in social games today – players are paying good money to skip the bad parts that  social game product managers have intentionally woven into their wares.  Viewed like this, the practice is doubly underhanded, in that you’ve robbed players of both a good gameplay experience and their money.  Of course, all of the savvy gamers have settled on the smarter alternative – not to play at all.
  • Viral marketing is not social gameplay. The vast majority of games are, for the most part, products.  They need to make money.  It’s a fact, and I can live with that.  That does not make it appealing or even acceptable to remind me of that fact on a constant basis.  Social games carry the added burden of adhering to their namesake – by definition, they should be social in nature.  But instead of giving us truly social play, the so-called “social” games space has turned our social channels into marketing ones, and we are their dirt-cheap salesmen.  Facebook’s social channels in particular have become little more than tools for “re-engagement” and “virality” (pardon my buzzwords) – overt and extrinsic reminders to play the game and to tell your friends to play the game.  There’s little difference between this and the “exploitationware” described by Ian Bogost.

I feel like the vast majority of social games in existence at this moment egregiously violate one or both of these tenets.  By introducing experiences that systematically eliminate such violations that have become the mainstay of the social gaming space, one can really improve social games for the better.  Of course, like all codes of ethics, one must accept the aforementioned axioms as truth before one can apply them.  If you manage to continue talking yourself into these ideas with the same, tired business-centric mumbo-jumbo, then there’s little more that I can say here.  Go on your merry way and keep churning out those turds you call “games,” and keep hoping that your exploited audience can swallow just enough crap for you to get your next payday.

Are you still with me?  Good.  Now consider the following design proposals that arise when you attempt to adhere to the two tenets I’ve established, and, in doing so, start treating your audience with the respect that they deserve:

  • Axe neighbor gating. “Neighbor gating” is the term for when a game impedes progress until you have a certain number of friends that also play the game.  It seems like this is becoming an antiquated design among more recent titles, but I know there are still games out there that rely heavily on it.  Don’t prevent us from playing your game because we haven’t sold enough of your wares.  If we like the game, we’ll get the word out.  And it won’t be done begrudgingly.
  • …hell, axe the energy economy while you’re at it. In fact, I proposed this change in one of our design meetings for our next game.  No one likes having to stop playing a game because they’re out of some arbitrary “energy” quantity.  While many social game companies enjoy a small portion of income from selling these energy refills, it turns out that another big reason for the energy economy is actually just to slow the player’s consumption of content.  It’s a shame, but it really highlights fundamental flaws in the design of these games – many of them consist of an extrinsic reward framework built atop a shaky foundation of terrible gameplay.  In all honesty, it’s very similar to the traditional JRPG model, in which the narrative is the centerpiece, and the typically “meh” combat and character progression is simply a pacing mechanism.  Of course, all of this wouldn’t be nearly as big of a problem if the gameplay itself was intrinsically compelling and the design encouraged replay and mastery.
  • Move toward a DLC model of monetization. This is the most tangible way that players can feel they got their money’s worth that doesn’t involve cheap bit twiddling.  Note that this doesn’t preclude the premium items that have become popular fare among most games based on a free-to-play business model – with the caveat that those premium items don’t give significant gameplay advantages (if any at all); otherwise, you risk giving the perception that people can pay their way through the game.
  • Use social channels in interesting ways. I think there’s a lot of room for novel and compelling mechanics that stimulate social engagement.  Instead of blindly tacking on the established “share a bonus” or “give a gift” mechanisms to a game, why not intertwine the viral channel more tightly into core gameplay?  I also happen to have a dozen ideas involving interesting uses of the social graph – some of which I’m hoping I can convince my company to employ.

So what do you say?  Do we “core gamers” stand a chance of shaking up the social games industry?  Sure, I’m just a lowly dev with lofty ideals, but the revolution’s gotta start somewhere.

Update: Gamasutra just posted a fantastic article by Greg Costikyan (of Death to the Games Industry and Manifesto Games fame) that basically revolves around my second tenet of introducing truly social gameplay to social gaming.  It’s got a comprehensive list of social dynamics that could easily serve as a reference for social game designers everywhere.  Give it a read!

Date: May 23, 2011 11:12 PM
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may
02

(Bi-)weekly update: PATA-PATA-Portal 2

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When the frequency of my updates plummets, one of three things must be true: 1) I’ve been sick, 2) I’ve been busy with work, or 3) I’ve been busy with games.  I think I can claim a little bit of all three.  My commuter gaming has primarily consisted of Patapon 3.  Lots of it.  That game is brutal.  Not only does it feel like it requires ridiculous amounts of grind, but there are so many situations in which one mistake or one instance of bad luck leads to a total wipe of your team.  The experience is very… Japanese.  I can pinpoint at least two things that are responsible for a lot of frustration.  First of all, the mission-critical flag-bearer Hatapon’s life is solely dependent on the survival of a shield-class patapon, whose role is primarily to tank damage like no one’s business.  If your tank happens to die, you can almost guarantee you’re gonna fail the level.  Unfortunately, the tank is soaking up the brunt of the enemy damage, so it’s a very delicate balance between survival and failure.  This problem was probably exacerbated by my choice of hero – that is to say, I did not choose the shield-class hero.  If I did, I bet my failures would be a lot less sudden and unexpected.  This also means that grinding levels for alternate shield-bearing classes is a pain, since they just die the moment you throw them into higher-level areas.  Secondly, the don-don “summon” chant is extremely misleading.  It revives all of your incapacitated members, heals about half of everyone’s lifebar (post-revival), and gives you some awesome damage or power to boot.  Why wouldn’t you use it in a critical situation, right?  Well, the fact is that you very often shouldn’t.  The reason is that you lose total control over your party for the duration of the “ad-lib” section of the chant, which lasts some 10-20 seconds, giving the enemy enough time to dish out its best attacks on your party while you sit there and take it with no means of defense or evasion.  I haven’t looked around for info on it, but as far as I know, there’s no way to cancel the chant once it’s initiated, and no other chants seem to register.  So what ends up happening a lot of the time (until you wise up, of course) is that your shield-bearer dies during some heated battle, you summon a djinn, your shield-bearer comes back with half-life, and then you watch helplessly as the enemy you were fighting winds up and releases an attack that kills your shield bearer again and the rest of your party along with him.  Yeah, like I said – it’s brutal.  My wife already quit once.  Personally, I’m strongly considering switching my commute game to Valkyria Chronicles 2 for a week or two to give myself a breather.

A buddy of mine hooked me up with Portal 2 on Steam last week.  (Shoutout to cakebonvivant!)  I was on the fence about the game, to be honest.  I probably would’ve been fine buying it months from now when Valve randomly discounts it to 66% off or something.  I’m one of those guys that felt Portal didn’t need a sequel.  It stood on its own, and it had a satisfactory conclusion, leaving the legacy of Aperture Science to the player’s imagination.  I finished the single-player portion of Portal 2 just a few days ago, and my concerns were justified.  Portal 2 is wordy, obvious, over-produced, and more than a bit conflicted in its direction.  Portal 2 is to its predecessor what Android is to the iPhone – it’s got the horsepower, the checklist of features, the bells and whistles, but it lacks the minimalist elegance.  Was Portal 2 fun?  Yeah, it was definitely entertaining.  I got a few laughs along the way, and the experience was enjoyable overall.  Is it going to replace the original Portal in the canon of gaming?  No way in hell.  I got a sense that the new mechanics and the dialogue were being forced – that it was just trying too hard to live up to the expectations placed on it.  I’d describe my thoughts in more detail, but my buddy hasn’t played the single-player campaign yet, so I’d rather not divulge any spoilers.

But what my buddy has been doing is the co-op campaign.  He and I went through the first three collections of chambers so far, and I feel that at least on a mechanical level, introducing the cooperative element and having four simultaneous portals open was a step in the right direction.  It just feels more like what Portal 2 was meant to be – more so than what the single-player campaign offered.

Also of note: while I purchased it a while ago, I’m only starting to get into Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP.  I’ll let you know more about that when I make some more progress in it.

 

 

Date: May 2, 2011 12:39 AM
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apr
19

Weekly update: PATA-PATA-PATA-PON

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I won’t lie – despite all the other games in my backlog, Patapon 3′s been my primary for the past week.  I’ve always loved the franchise and its unique tactical rhythm gameplay, so hearing those familiar beats drew me right back in.  I wouldn’t say that it’s a superb improvement over its predecessors.  It feels like it lost a lot of its original personality and charm, though I have to wonder if that’s just the fact that the novelty is well worn.  At the very least, the experience is definitely more streamlined.  You go into a mission, pick up your loot, go home and equip/sell/hoard the loot, and repeat.  All of that is occasionally interspersed with a greatly simplified equipment upgrade system.  No more of those rhythm minigames that were great the first few times and quickly became monotonous.  I’m liking the new class progression system and its more forgiving grind (compared to Patapon 2, anyway, where troops could actually die permanently).  Unfortunately, that grind is still present and is as intense as ever.  It feels like I’m unlocking new levels at a much slower pace than in previous games.  To the game’s credit, though, there are new head-to-head game types scattered throughout the levels that keep the experience diverse and interesting.

And then there’s the online multiplayer, which is much more fully fleshed out than in previous iterations.  In fact, it seems to be one of the newest game’s central features.  Unfortunately, though, I don’t think there are that many people playing, so despite the inclusion of infrastructure multiplayer, your best bet will probably be to meet up with a buddy and go ad-hoc.  Which is a shame, because it seems like there might be some neat stuff to do in multiplayer.  Anyway, I’ll keep trying it out once I’ve gotten a little farther in the campaign.

Speaking of ad-hoc multiplayer, I’ve had the chance during a few of my lunch breaks to play some Monster Hunter Freedom Unite with a coworker.  He’s brand new to the franchise, but he seems to be enjoying it, so I hope that’ll continue for a while.  I just crafted a new longsword – the first thing I’ve crafted in that game for maybe a year.

I’ve also spent a significant amount of time partaking of a closed beta which shall go unnamed.  Sorry!  NDA and stuff… you know the drill.

Aside from that, I’ve gotten a couple of new iOS games, thanks to the iTunes gift card my sister gave me as a super belated birthday present.  I’ll probably make mention of those games next time.  I’ve been extraordinarily busy with my job, and I’m pretty pooped, so I’m keeping this update short.

Date: April 19, 2011 9:56 PM
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apr
16

StreetPass Visitors

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…shoutouts to you!  My Mii Plaza’s now at a whopping population of 13(-ish)!  In case you’re wondering, you probably found me walking somewhere between the SF Caltrain stop and the SoMa/South Beach area where I work.  You might be working in the same area, taking the same train – or maybe you were just going to the Giants game.  In any case, I hope we meet again – and often! (Virtually, anyway.)  I need you guys to kill some ghosts for me.

And double-shoutouts to the IGN peeps working very close by.  Keep those 3DS’s on.  I have a feeling you’ll be a fantastic source of StreetPass data in the years to come.  Mwahaha!

Date: April 16, 2011 10:45 PM
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apr
12

Updatin’: potent portables

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Wow, has it been three weeks already?!  I wanted to update last week – I really did.  But it turns out my son gave me hand foot and mouth disease, which basically incapacitated me for all of the past week and had me playing a game I did not want to play – a game of pain management.  HFMD first made me bedridden for an entire day with a really high fever – I couldn’t measure exactly how high because we accidentally left our thermometer with our babysitter, but it was high enough to dizzy me to the point of feeling out-of-body.  I’d never felt anything so disorienting before.  I thought my hands and fingers had grown four times as large.  I was dangerously close to taking a trip to the ER, but I was lucky that the over-the-counter ibuprofen brought me down to earth long enough for the fever to break sometime in the middle of the night.  After that, I woke up with what I thought was just another customary bout of sore throat.  Turns out HFMD causes rash spots to break out, of all places, on the hands and feet and inside the mouth.  So what I thought was just a sore throat turned out the be the early stage of a mouth rash that was poised to begin a week of torment.  See, those mouth spots ended up opening into ulcers – little canker sores that hurt like hell.  Imagine about a dozen of those around the back of the mouth where food enters the throat.  There was even a huge one right in the middle of my uvula.  So, basically, anything entering my throat would brush past those suckers like coarse sandpaper – food, water, even air.

Naturally, I went to the doctor.  At the time, I was convinced it was strep and that just a few doses of antibiotics would make things all better.  I wasn’t so lucky.  HFMD is viral, and so all I could really do was wait it out.  I was given some prescription-sized doses of ibuprofen, but I was limited to three a day.  Seeing as how each of those doses only lasts about six hours, I was left with an entire six or so hours in the day without the relief of painkillers.  Furthermore, ibuprofen needs to be taken with food so as not to cause stomach bleeding, so you can imagine the hellish game I’ve been playing for the past week, pushing myself to the threshold of tolerable pain for those six unaccounted hours so I could spend the rest of the day covered by medicated relief.  And I couldn’t push myself too far, or I wouldn’t be able to force the prerequisite food down my throat to prevent that stomach bleeding.  All this while trying to get some semblance of work done.  My concentration had to be split between the job at hand and just handling the pain.  Eventually, the painkillers just stopped having any significant effect, and I began growing increasingly dependent on cough drops and the analgesic in them.  It is recommended that they be taken every two hours, but I was popping a couple of them an hour at times.  It’s seriously just been hell in my mouth, and I’ve barely recovered to the point where I can eat without feeling an intense burning sensation the entire time.

Gotta love children.

Anyway, when I wasn’t wishing for a quick death, I got to tinker around with my shiny new 3DS.  I’ll post some detailed impressions of the thing in the near future.  In a nutshell, though, the technology is pretty neat, even though the battery life is pathetic.  Unfortunately, I had a hardware incident where there was a 3D “dead zone” of sorts – a vertical line where 3D just didn’t appear to work.  I think it might’ve been caused by some slight pressure while it was in my pocket, but the stress was definitely nothing out-of-the-ordinary.  It was like this for a couple of days, but after some ever-so-slight bending of the screen, I was able to get it to disappear entirely.  Now the screen works normally, but I’m very afraid of the issue occurring again.  Hopefully it’ll still be under warranty if it does.  It’s very unusual for Nintendo hardware to show its faults so early.  My DS Lite easily endured hundreds upon hundreds of hours of brutal play before having problems.

I wasn’t really too interested in the launch titles – the console was mainly to serve as my future-proof DS replacement.  But since Amazon offered a discount on the launch lineup with the 3DS preorder, I decided to get what many are calling the best of the bunch – Super Street Fighter IV 3D.  While it actually boasts a richer feature set than the original home console versions, I can’t stand the controls.  Maybe pad players are more accustomed to it, but I’ve just grown too fond of my arcade stick.  There’s basically no way I can see anyone playing the game at a high level without needing something macro’ed on the touch screen, and to me, that just feels weird.  Anyway, that won’t stop me from picking up and playing it every so often.  I gotta collect those figures, after all.  I’m a collection nut.  Also, I swear that the port is a bit flawed.  Maybe I just haven’t played lately enough, but it feels like some of the hitboxes or move ranges are slightly off.  For instance, I was doing what I thought I remembered to be a pretty standard Guile block string to throw mixup, but my throw was whiffing.  It’s the same thing with some of the Abel tornado throw setups I commonly use on the console version.  There are a couple of other small things I noticed. I guess I was a bit naive to expect a perfect port.  As long as I don’t take the game too seriously, it’s fairly enjoyable.  I can see it being what Mario Kart was for my DS – it’s something I’d play if other people had it and wanted to play with me.

Instead, I’ve spent most of my time on the 3DS playing Pokemon Black.  Even though it’s still Pokemon through-and-through, they’ve added enough novelties to make it feel fresh again.  The presentation, though still dated, is a drastic improvement over its predecessor.  There are actually team battle modes now (*gasp!*).  Pokemon now have these innate passive abilities, and it seems like items play a much bigger role in this new generation (or maybe I just forgot about their role in Diamond/Pearl).  I’ve yet to experience the multiplayer bits, but they sound interesting enough.  I’ve read that the PokeRadar is now gone, which makes me sad, since that was the only way I was able to obtain shinies in Diamond/Pearl.  With a 1-in-8000ish chance of naturally finding one in the wild or in an egg, there’s no way I’ll be getting more of those anytime soon.

Despite the arrival of the new Nintendo toy, my PSP continues to get love.  I managed to convince a coworker to play Monster Hunter with me, so we’re trying to make that a lunchtime thing. I’ve also been playing a lot of Gods Eater Burst.  I feel like I’m nearing the end of the story, which, contrived though it is, acts as a pretty good force for progression through the game.  Gods Eater is my primary PSP game at the moment, but I definitely plan on returning my attention to Valkyria Chronicles 2 and Dissidia Duodecim soon.  And Patapon 3.  That’s coming out in a few hours.  In fact, I’m gonna go check right now to see if PSN has it up yet, just so I can have it loaded and ready to go when I board my train tomorrow morning for my first day back at work in a week.  Lates.

Date: April 12, 2011 12:39 AM
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mar
22

Weekly update: PSP?!

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Of all the things I’ve been playing as of late, the PSP has not been one of them.  Until a couple of days ago.  I dusted the sucker off, charged it, updated the firmware – the whole shebang.  I already had a small list of games I’d wanted to play on it and I was itching for something more involved for the daily commute.  I immediately purchased Valkyria Chronicles 2 because I thought the first one was a pretty refreshing spin on the SRPG genre, and I liked its narrative approach.

I also debated for some time and finally gave in to buying Gods Eater Burst for my portable Monster-Hunter-esque fix.  After all, I’d been doing some grinding lately on a few freemium iOS games (DJ Rivals, StarDunk, and Gun Bros, if you must know…), so I wasn’t daunted by the criticisms of the game’s repetitiveness.  If I’m gonna grind, I may as well do it with an engaging combat system in tow.  Just about a couple hours into the game, and I think I can say it’s about what I expected of it so far.  I really like the pacing of combat more than Monster Hunter’s, but from what I can tell, Monster Hunter’s got a lot more interesting things to do outside of combat.  That, and Monster Hunter’s combat really seems drastically different across the various weapon types, whereas it feels like Gods Eater’s combat only requires minor adjustments between, say, a short blade and a buster blade.  I could be totally wrong.  I’ve only played a couple of hours of it, after all.

Speaking of Monster Hunter, I decided to browse the Playstation Store’s PSP section while I was there.  What I saw made my jaw drop.  It turns out just about EVERYTHING has been made into a downloadable title.  I looked for all of the titles I already own on UMD and found most of them there – like the DJ Max titles, the Loco Roco series, the Patapon series, the Dissidia Final Fantasy series, and, most importantly, Monster Hunter Freedom Unite.  I thought I read somewhere that Monster Hunter would never go UMD-less?  Well, it did.  Actually, there were a couple of popular games that were noticeably absent – Final Fantasy VII Crisis Core and any of the Lumines titles.  But still, I have to say, there must be a very large percentage of the PSP’s library now available for download.  When did they do that?!  Last I remember, everyone was lambasting the platform as a failure, but they still managed to go all stealth-like and sneak most of their good stuff out on PSN (presumably for the PSP Go adopters).  Seriously, if the whole UMD travesty wasn’t such a glaring eyesore in consumers’ collective hindsight, I’d think that the PSP, the Go, and the rest of its download-only progeny might just turn out all right.  I’m seriously thinking of just re-purchasing Monster Hunter to rid myself of that particular UMD dependence.  As a side bonus, I might also be able to pawn the UMD off on a certain cousin who could then possibly serve as a useful teammate in some good-spirited slaying quest later on.

For now, though, I’m just counting the hours before I can download Dissidia Duodecim.  Yes, that would make three PSP titles I’d be playing on the train for the foreseeable future.  I don’t see any shame in wielding the increasingly obsolete device in public.  In fact, I saw someone else on the train playing one just last week.  After all, a good game is a good game, and the PSP has its exclusive share of them.  I think that when you ditch the ridiculous UMD access times (not to mention its disgusting physical proportions), the device is actually very competent.  And god, do I miss pressing actual buttons.

As a bonus, I also downloaded and played Slam Bolt Scrappers over the weekend.  It’s a fascinating mishmash of beat-em-up, puzzle, and strategy genres – and oddly enough, the idea brings to mind a design I’ve imagined before.  Which is why I didn’t even bother waiting for reviews before purchasing the title.  Experiencing such an insane mixture is just bound to instill some sort of inspiration for future titles in the same vein.

Okay, I’m out. The family’s asleep.  Time to get ma PSP awn.

Date: March 22, 2011 12:27 AM
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mar
14

(Bi-)weekly update: flu, GDC, IGF, iOS, 3DS, and other three-character things?

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Late post again.  Last two weeks did not treat me well.  I came down with a sudden and painful case of the flu.  Even now, I’m still on the verge of coughing a lung out.  It also didn’t help that my wife had to go on a business trip last week for a couple of nights, leaving me alone with the little guy (or, as I sometimes find myself calling him, my “dark passenger” – bonus points if you know the reference) at the height of my infirmity.

GDC… happened.  Despite the fact that I work in San Francisco, I didn’t go.  I’ve never gone before – probably more due to lack of time than anything else.  My other engineering colleagues in the industry also generally agree that there’s often very little practical takeaway from it.  Besides, I got the gist of the more interesting high-level design-and-direction talks from the various synopses littered about the interwebs.

So from a development standpoint, GDC had little impact on my day-to-day.  But from a gamer‘s perspective, GDC brought with it some swell stuff.  I think a lot of companies tried to promote their iOS titles by timing an app store update to coincide with the event.  I was pleasantly surprised to find some new stuff for Dungeon Defenders and the huge content update for Infinity Blade that Chair promised, among other things.  I tore my way pretty quickly through the “Deathless Kings” content, since my character was already pretty much maxed out pre-update, and I’m currently on my “New Game Plus” attempt.  It’s gotten really tough now that I’ve been forced to start out with the weak equipment again.

Also, due to its performance at the Independent Games Festival, I finally decided to download Helsing’s Fire (which, by the way, also just recently got an update that included an entirely new campaign).  I was starting to get sick of iOS puzzle games, but it’s definitely a refreshing and fast-paced title.  It’s got a pretty clever mechanic, and most levels can be completed within a minute or two.  Level configurations are randomly generated each game, too, so no two games are ever really the same.  As an engineer, I can deduce how they managed to execute the random puzzle generation, so there’s also that level of appreciation.  Furthermore, the game actually has some real-time shooter mechanics built into it, where you have to dodge shots while performing the solution to a puzzle.  It was very Knights in the Nightmare-ish, though it was much simpler.

Speaking of that title, the 3DS is coming at the end of this month, I think.  I’m pretty excited about it, especially after hearing that Nyko will be releasing a replacement battery that nearly doubles the built-in battery life.  To be honest, though, I’ve hardly read a single thing on the 3DS itself.  It’s the next-gen Nintendo portable.  It does 3D. But all I really need to know at the moment is that it plays original DS games.  My DS Lite’s touchscreen is totally bonkers, and I’ve been meaning to replace it for over a year now.  Now I can get a hardware upgrade at the same time.  I’m a little uneasy with the dissatisfied reports on the 3DS’s backward compatibility – the largest concern is that the higher screen resolution causes upscaled edges to look jagged, and playing in native resolution makes the playable area significantly smaller.  Oh well.  Can’t have everything perfect, can we?  I think I can live with those issues.

I’ve got a pretty big backlog of DS games to get through, including the aforementioned Nights in the Knightmare (which is literally a nightmare to play on a perpetually miscalibrated screen) and Puzzle Quest 2 (in which I keep moving the wrong gems because of my accursed touchscreen).  I haven’t even started Dragon Quest IX, which my wife purchased a while back.  And then there’s the new games I haven’t even purchased yet, like the new racially infused Pokemon, the (not-so-new) Professor Layton and the Unwound Future, Ghost Trick, and 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors (an interactive story I heard good things about).  So yeah.  I think I can put a 3DS to good use.  Oh, and there are also the actual 3DS games, like… I don’t even know.  I’ll worry about that later.

I’m also looking at booting up my dusty PSP again.  It’s been a while, but with the new Dissidia and Patapon arriving within the next month or so, it just might be time to revisit the thing.  And I heard that Tactics Ogre is good?  So much to play.  I wish I wasn’t so diseased.

Date: March 14, 2011 12:04 AM
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