Titles are not my Strong Point

I was cruising TV Tropes pages to block out the siren call of WoW when I came across a Half Life Mod called Afraid of Monsters. Mildly interested I downloaded it and gave it a go.
It had all the traditional horror game elements: abandoned hospital, lack of adequate lighting, weak-ass melee weapon, limited ammunition which forces you to use the aforementioned melee weapon.
A lot of horror games like to start off with no enemies but keep giving you items so you are in a constant state of readiness nervousness; AoM looked at this idea and ran with it. For about twenty freaking minutes! If that wasn't bad enough, just before the zombies started kicking the crap out of me I had to pull a switch turning off the power. After 15 seconds of standing in pitch black darkness (instead of near pitch black darkness) I realised I'd done something wrong. Checking Youtube I found out that I had missed the flashlight; it was several floors away, in a random room, in the dark (even before I pulled the switch). How the hell was I supposed to have found that to begin with? It looked like just another piece of irrelevant scenery. That was the second last straw, the last being the freaking zombies. So I gave up on what was essentially Doom 3 on the Half Life 1 engine.
I personally enjoy the concept of horror in games. Just the concept. Games that actually try to apply this fail in my eyes, as they either just aren't that scary, or they cheat. When I say a game (or really any form of media) cheats to create horror and suspense what I mean is that the media in question uses rather cheap tactics for an equally cheap scary, such as:
-have something jumping right at your face suddenly, especially in a first person shooter,
-making everywhere so fucking dark,
-making everywhere so fucking dark (this is important enough to be said twice),
-using the game's difficulty as a means of scaring the player.
Because I've spent far too much time thinking about horror and why no one ever seems to get it just right I could go on for pages and pages so I'll just talk about one point that was present in Afraid of Monsters (and many other games i.e. Resident Evil, Silent Hill): high difficulty to create fear.
Now difficulty is important to creating atmosphere and tension. If you aren't being properly threatened then it doesn't matter if you are fighting eldritch abominations from the abyss because you can just curbstomp them and be on your way (perfect example: Ravenholm from Half Life 2; once you realise the zombies aren't that dangerous suddenly the whole area losses its intimidating atmosphere).

Obligatory picture. Apparently this is Shub-Niggurath

Raising the difficulty fixes this to an extent. Raise it further however and you get a worse problem; once the game gets too challenging the fear gets moved from the flesh eating monsters and to the game over screen. If you are on edge because one mistake and you lose all progress since the last save then the game isn't really scary, it's just punishingly hard.
The only thing worse than fake fear being created from difficulty is if the difficulty itself is also fake. All games have some fake difficulty in the sense that the first play through is harder because you don't know all tricks and tactics. What's bad form is when this prior knowledge of the game is almost vital to successful completion.
I could go on, but given the length already I think I'll end abruptly.

Bear Poking

It's night and there's nothing good on television; blogging time.
A few nights ago I had this (seemingly) brilliant idea to do a cross between a let's play and a review for Final Fantasy VII. It was the equivalent of watching a movie with friends and making jokes at the flaws except that I'd have to explain all the jokes. Not only was the basic idea flawed but it couldn't cater for a target audience as it would be far too short for people interested in a let's play, and far too long for anyone who wanted a review. Of course this second point is moot as no one reads my blog (by extension of this logic, if you are reading this, you're actually not and just delusional).

What can be salvaged by this less than face-meltingly awesome (this is the standard level of quality I aim for) idea are the underlying thought processes behind Final Fantasy 7's absurd popularity.
For those that have been living under whatever passes for as a rock on the internet, FF7 is a rather popular game. It's in that category of popularity like Harry Potter, Star Wars, Neon Genesis Evangelion or Metal Gear Solid; where the numerous rabid fans will eviscerate you for daring to suggest that the film/game/novel/etc in question isn't a deep, original piece of art that is flawless and possibly the second coming of Christ.
While I'm not going to say that this game has no redeeming qualities (I haven't finished it yet to be in a position to say that) I am going to say that it isn't deserving of the amount of praise it still receives.

The game starts with the dead-eyed gaze of a character from a fifth generation console, before dramatically zooming out to reveal the cyberpunk city of Midgar.

Not pictured: traditional fantasy

This intro was impressive both because it was the first Final Fantasy game to have such extreme science fiction elements, and it was visually impressive for its time. These two reasons are examples of two prevailing concepts, nostalgia and context, that I feel allow various franchises to be thought of so fondly.

It's sometimes said that hindsight has twenty-twenty vision. Personally I think this is not the case, as for things that are fondly remembered nostalgia vision kicks in and all the negatives seem to fade away while the positives come more into focus. While there's nothing wrong with remembering what you like more clearly than what you don't, it has the unfortunate effect of making it seem like there is a lot more good then bad.
In FF7's case, perhaps people's fondness of the characters and their relationships have overshadowed say....all the times when they wandered around aimlessly because the game didn't give them particularly clear instructions or sense of direction.

My other point, context refers to the excuse that something was really good 'in its time'. I admit it is a useful phrase that has it's place in certain arguments (such as comparing the effect the works had in their respective time periods). What I don't like is when it is used in more direct, less subjective instances (such as comparing actual gameplay of older and newer works). It doesn't matter that something was good in its time, cause that time has passed and things have changed.
A FF7 example would be the Materia management. Barring big important occasions, when someone temporarily leaves your party (generally without warning) they take all the attached Materia with them, and you're not going to get that back until they come back. In 1997 this was an acceptable gameplay flaw, but more then ten years later? Bad design. Games made these days would be marked down because of them but because FF7 is older it can get away with it? Fine, but can it be viewed as one of the greatest games ever? I hope not.

Now if there are insulted fans looking to tear into me with self-righteous fury, let me distract you with this:

Two for One

I have a love hate relationship with the genre of space westerns. On one hand there's the whole run-down future setting, which both is stylistically appealing and also can explain why some technology has advanced and some hasn't*. On the other hand there's all the elements from pure westerns that I hate: gruff silent protagonists, fairly dull plots, cowboys.

Why am I talking about this?


Cowboy Bebop is an anime series in the genre of, you guessed it...romantic comedy. The series follows the crew of the Bebop as they hunt bounties throughout the solar system. Each episode has a musical style (and thus mood) attached to it, and all the episodes manage to have some manner of an action scene in it.

The best way to review this series is to compare it to something I'm sure more people are familiar with: Firefly.
Same genre. Same setting. Both shows have the protagonists in a state of essentially perpetual poverty. They even ran for about the same amount of time, as Cowboy Bebop had 26 half hour episodes and a movie, and Firefly had 14 hour long episodes and a movie.

Despite these similarities I have bought the Cowboy Bebop boxset whereas having watched all of Firefly once, I'm content never to watch any of it again. And one major factor of this is the previously mentioned episode length, for it seems that about the same amount of stuff happens in an episode of Firefly as does in one of CB. Which makes me wonder, what the fuck happened in the other half hour? Since the show had only one season there wasn't time for any angst to set in, and since it's set in the future there was no opportunity for pop culture references. I didn't realise how much time was taken up with dry wit, foreign words and Inara being a waste of space. Whereas in an episode of CB, a target is introduced, things will be more than they seem, all the plot points manage to converge into one complex chase/fight scene, and there's plenty of structural damage by the end. All to a jazzy tune.

This was just going to be a review of Cowboy Bebop but since I've managed to say more about firefly than it, I may as well make it about both. In that case, I'll finish up by saying that the only element of Firefly that I particularly like (River Tam) is present in CB in both the characters Spike (kicks a lot of ass) and Ed (acrobatic and not really in touch with reality).

In conclusion, if you like Firefly then you will probably like Cowboy Bebop, assuming you aren't just anti-anime or pro-Joss Whedon. If you don't like Firefly them you still might like Cowboy Bebop. If you haven't seen Firefly then this comparison is obviously meaningless to you, so why are you reading this?

*This is a pet peeve of mine. I hate the way in most science fiction there'll be spaceships and lasers but then there'll be a bald guy reading a newspaper or something.

Some Jokes Never Get Old

Metal Gear?!

In Memory of a Failed Post

There was going to be a different post here, but I chose to delete it. The post would explained some of the fundamentals of this blog and my writing style.
It was also going to address the unsatisfying lack of humour in previous articles but it lacked humour which was unsatisfying. But not ironic.

Strikebreaker Arc Finale

I've been putting off this post for several days now as I've come to realise that what's left to say about the Strikebreaker isn't particularly interesting to anyone but me (because this blog is all about pleasing everyone else). My obsessive completionist nature however makes me want to prattle on about minor technicalities regardless of the entertainment value said technicalities would have (hint: fairly little). Plus I said I was going to do this anyway. So now that I've wasted an entire paragraph on what is essentially filler let's begin.

Last post I talked about awkwardly elaborate ranged attack on my special infected. This time I shall discuss that melee attack and the infected's aesthetics. That's right, I spent time thinking about the aesthetics of non-existent videogame enemies.

Before I had come up with a ranged attack that left me satisfied, I had the idea of having a special melee attack in addition to a ranged one, because as everyone should know: overly complex concept A + thematically similar but mechanically different, over complex concept B = elegantly simple solution.
So having clearly succeeded in both maths and logic I decided to once more think about sticking it to the corner-camping, melee-spamming survivors. The initial idea was that the melee attack would have a lunge if you were running forward that would knock any survivors it hit on their ass. This idea died the second I realised that a slightly clever player could just lunge a survivor (or group of overlapping survivors), take a few steps back, and repeat till death/rage quit.
Next came the idea that the melee attack would be a generic claw swipe unless the target was meleeing, in which case they would be knocked over (the idea being that the survivors need to brace themselves against the Strikebreaker's unbalancing attack and if they are swinging their gun they are unable to do so). This concept lasted until I became satisfied with the ranged attack at which point I realised this goofy attack was completely unnecessary.
Also, who else is sick of the word 'attack'. Even after trying to limit its usage I'm still annoyed with it frequency.

I initially started thinking of what the Strikebreaker would stylistically be like when I came up with the barb preparation, decided that the infected would make distinct gagging noises as it brought a barb up from its stomach to its throat. Since a projectile-based attacker is still rather threatening and potentially overpowered in Left 4 Dead the infected needed to make a distinctive warning noise constantly. Noises already taken: coughing, crying, feral screams, 'throaty' grunts, belching. It had to be clearly different from the other special infected and preferably unnerving. The answer: laughter, or rather insane giggling.
Leading off this feature, and the fact there's a lot more male than female characters, I figured the infected should be female. To add to its disturbing nature and be visually different pigtails and a (tasteful) dress seemed like a good idea for its appearance. To (hopefully) avoid making something that fits into people's sexual fetishes, the infected nature of the Strikebreaker would obviously have to visibly apparent: a emaciated but lanky form, spines emerging from the arms and back, black bubbling spit oozing out of the mouth etc. Sadly, this would only make it become more of a fetish for some, sigh.

Having now spent time typing up these ideas of mine I've come to realise that at the time I first came up with the Strikebreaker I had probably been playing too much of this:

Which unfortunately just reinforces my fear of creepy fetishes.

Open Beta Ultimate

Previously: "...from past experience I know that creating another special infected without overlapping or obsoleting existing ones is hard..."

That's right, less than ten posts in and we've started getting flashbacks! Soon there's going to alternate continuities and retcons (if there aren't already; after all I can just go and edit previous posts like some sort of small scale blogging George Lucas, only without all the money, fans etc).

Back on topic I'll be explaining that thought process of my failed attempt to create a clever, useful, and fundamentally different special infected for Left 4 Dead.

The 'Strikebreaker' (as I came to think of it) was birthed from two grievances in Left 4 Dead coming together:

-when the winning team would hide in a corner, overlapping and meleeing, which made it virtually impossible for the losing team, which naturally I was apart of, to harm them;

-general boredom at playing the same three classes of infected and a desire for a new playstyle.

The combined conclusion I came to was an idea that no doubt other Left 4 Dead players have had cross their minds: a ranged infected.

"But Lysander-you-brilliant-and-handsome-individual in your infinite wisdom you forgot about the smoker's tongue and the boomer's vomit," points out sycophantic reader number one.
"And the tank's rock throw," adds adequate reader number two.
"Yeah," chimes in redundant reader number three.

While it is true that all of the playable infected bar one do have some form of ranged attack there is a catch in all of them. The boomer's vomit is more of an AoE spray, which is rather buggy (or I'm just really bad at it (or both)) and the tank's rock throw is a secondary ability that is there for when the primary means of attack (punching people till they disconnect) is ineffective. This still leaves the the smoker's tongue which (while it is a primary ranged attack) functions more along the lines as a hunter on a string as opposed to direct projectile.

And so direct projectiles were the Strikebreaker's primary attack. Balancing this was where everything turned overly elaborate. Since a good team can theoretically defend against special infected without getting harmed there had to be something that prevented undefendable projectile spamming. Apart from an obvious cooldown of a few seconds, the spit attack (by the way the projectile is poisonous spit) did temporary damage which the survivor's will slowly recover from (essentially the complete opposite of temporary health from pain pills). To further combat spamming and to find the happy medium between 'too weak to be useful' and 'gamebreakingly powerful' I decided that the spit would build up in time, so the higher the charge the more (temporary) damage and the greater range (it's a parabola projectile). So essentially , the less frequently you fired, the more potent the attack.

Awkward to explain, less awkward in practice. Too bad that's not it. You could also hold down the fire button to prepare a barb. While the barb is being charged up the Strikebreaker makes a distinctive sound, moves at a decreased rate and can't jump. If you fire prematurely the barb is lost and the attack is just a (relatively) regular spit shot. If you do however finish preparing the barb you would get a damaging, almost linear projectile, plus all the spit that has managed to build up as well.
While the barb would do some actual permanent damage, its main feature would be the capability to pin a survivor to either the wall behind them or possibly the ground beneath. This would immobilise the victim until the the barb was removed by another teammate or by the survivor them self at the cost of some more health.

Here's roughly what the ranged attack interface would have to look like:


Bear in mind that all other infected are simple enough to have a single circle.

Since this post has already become a daunting mass of text, I'll leave the rest (yes there's more) for a later date.

Ironic Title

Well after having no internet for a week I returned to my blog to find no one has commented in that time so clearly my loyal and devoted audience are just mute with anticipation for another post. And who could say no to such a touching response.

During the Dark Week of Netlessness I had a good......adequate idea for a post, but as the past tense has indicated, this is no longer the case and it has the gone the way of my frequently surreal dreams, and the six years of high school education: forgotten.

So instead I'm just going post some random stuff that I've thought of but can't find a appropriate context to use.

1) The unsatisfying nature of the 'linear warrior quadratic wizard' issue with older versions of D&D:


All I can say is that using Paint takes much longer than drawing something by hand and the quality is lower (though my hand drawn stuff is still pretty bad).

2) Time-freezing speech in anime:

Ok I get that in manga (comics too) that you have characters say several paragraphs of angst or heroic resolve whilst in mid-punch. This is something that should not be transferred over into anime at all yet seems to always happen. A perfect example is in Gantz, where the various aliens seem to always have to periodically pause to allow the characters to struggle with inner turmoil/state the bleeding obvious/remember they have freaking guns.

3) French Foreign Policy:

No opinion.

4) Half-Life 2 getting overrated:

I'm seriously getting sick of HL2 getting so much acclaim over its clever avoidance of cutscenes. Instead of a cutscene you get the fun of being locked in a room while the various NPCs info-dump. There's only so many times you can throw a book at Alyx's head before you realise all that's happening is a cutscene.....which you cannot skip. Go innovation.

I'm rather tired now (it's 11:30 for those playing at home) so I'm going to leave this for now and continue tomorrow, or maybe the next day....definitely sometime this week.
Alright, night.
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Back.

5)......christ I've forgotten what I had next.

Bugger it. I don't care that much and I doubt anyone is reading this why bother continue this filler level of quality post.