Monthly Archives: February 2009

Videogame Events, Videogame History, Videogames

GameCity Meeting – Connected Nottingham, National Videogame Archive and …Charades!

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Groan. Seed analogy for a company who is in Biosience.

Last Thursday evening I was able to attend some Gamecity things – firstly, the Connected Nottingham set of talks, which were from companies involved in the initiative and stating what they’ve done and are doing. See my gallery for some shots of this, the most groan-worthy one was the seed analogy on the right. It does seem there are some good active projects, and some totally business buzzword ones too.

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How Iain wanted everyone at GameCity to react

The most interesting one was Iain Simons putting forward his great plans for GameCity:

  • GameCity TV – Free, online, HD footage from the previous years and newly recorded footage.
  • OpenGameCity – An open platform for user generated content.
  • GameCitizens – A community site, feedback, forums and integration into existing sites like Facebook

He did also explain about the National Videogame Archive – they have an updated site, and the work done through Nottingham Trent University is going well.

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Iain and James (with their Wii avatars) discussing the archive

After this we went along to The Peacock to hear about the NVA from Dr. James Newman and Iain. It was going to be a curry at the Mogal, but this was called off due to a wedding 😉

The talk was enthusiastic, with a lot of great information on how the project was going and a lot on why it is going. The first thing they brought up was “Where’s Horace?” – the game Horace’s Ski Run was shown, and is a game that is unplayable today since no where sells it. Iain said he wanted to start the idea with James after reading James’ The Myth of the Ergodic Videogame. Iain wrote to James and got the idea rolling. They wrote the book 100 Videogames, where they found they could have put thousands of entries in – but the problem was, where do you find these old games to play?

Supersession was the main topic that came from that – the form of forced obsolescence (in software and hardware) and the nature of being dissatisfied with the current games, since magazines do so much previewing and everyone is putting out the idea that the next is always the best.

They set out the mission statement (below) but categorically stated that the archive is not to play the items, and it is different to a museum. The final main point was the archive had secured funding from the DCMS, and had visited the National Archives, so are setup to be a very permanent project.

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The archives mission statement

The talk was also a discussion too – people did shout suggestions and bring up topics or points to agree or disagree with James or Iain (some merged into the notes above). Horace was also spotted a few times for prizes 🙂 Interesting stuff! Some more pictures in my gallery too.

Next came, of all things, Game Charades. I made a video, which was is both of half-drunken quality and terrible sound (my camera keeps peaking and cutting out sound). You also can’t see much. For those brave of heart, or who want to hear how no one got Defender, go take a gander (it’s not on Youtube, it’s 12 minutes long so won’t go on. Thanks Google! 🙁 ).

The final thing was GameCity itself – Iain wanted to discuss the name – currently it was planned to be “GameCity [squared]” since it was fully going to be based around the main square (somehow, since I’m not sure how talks would do with trams running past!). Suggestions ranged from not using anything more then GameCity (my preference) or maybe having just a subtitle left out of the main logo, to some ideas like Game4City, GameCity 4, GameCity 2009, and others (many I can’t remember, I hope they wrote them down).

The other thing to take away from the event was it was advertised only on Twitter and Facebook – everyone I chatted to commented that Iain needed to send out a proper news announcement more then 2 days in advance 😉 but it was an interesting experiment.

I hope to see those GameCity sites go up soon 🙂 and also maybe see more NVA news which I am sure to report on Preservation SIG blog.

Fun, Interesting

There She Is!!

There She Is

The brilliant Korean animation by SamBakZa, started in 2003, has been recently finished. It’s a beautifully animated love story, with no dialogue – just set to music (Korean pop music usually). A nice mix of funny and sadness, and love of course (and is insanely cute and charming). With the work that was put into it (and watching them all at once shows how much the animator has improved), with such a long term project, shows he had a lot of love making it 🙂

For something so ambitious released for free I’m glad he finished it too. Worth watching them all, most easily done in English here – it will hardly take half an hour, so go watch!

Personal, Videogames

The Problem With Account Names

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Mini rant incoming! Microsoft are, quite frankly, pathetic. Unlike Steam, which allows you to set your friend name independent of your account name (which might as well be an email account, since it doesn’t automatically create any URL’s or display it anywhere), Microsoft’s Live system has the audacity to make the front end name displayed to people exactly the same as your login name.

Then charges 800 points, £6.85, to change it to something else.

Sucks if you want clan names. Also it’s limited to 13 characters (what an arbitrary amount). My Steam account name “Finaldeath” is taken, so fair enough, I’m now Awesomestrong on that, and stuck as it, unless I want to pony up cash to change it. Shame I never joined the service however many years ago when it started, so I could choose my normal nickname or a decent variant on it.

I wonder how many original non-postfix-number names are out there. 13 character’s isn’t a lot to work with. I just think they’re idiots for not allowing you to change your friend’s name frankly, it’s such a small thing and yet they really annoyed me doing it this way.

PC Videogames, Videogame Design, Videogames

Oh, Assassins Creed, How I Loath To Replay You

Lazyest Gallery cannot access Gallery/Videogames/Assassins_Creed/

With my PC reinstall, which is pretty much done except for me losing a odd few programs’ settings (where my Filezilla settings disappeared to I have no idea, sigh), I’ve started reinstalling games. Assassins Creed I decided might be worth replaying – I got installed, patched, and copied my old save into the bizarre place they put saves (It’s in a folder named “Ubisoft” in the Application Data folder in your Documents and Settings/Users folder).

Then I tried playing it. I realised, while I had enjoy the game, it was only when I had played it for long amounts of time and for the first time. Mandatory logo screens on boot up, slow progress through menus to get anywhere, and unskippable cutscenes (fine the first time, horrible any other time). Luckily I know the exit shortcut of Alt-F4 – exiting manually takes an amazing amount of effort (several menus to find “Exit” – it was made for the Xbox primarily, and it shows).

The game also forces 16:9 widescreen (hilarious if you’re on 4:3, and just annoying on 16:10 – the Steam overlay stays on screen in those black bars. Sigh).

The killing blow, I think, to me fully getting around to replaying the game is the insistence on only allowing me to reply entire chapters from the beginning…so I have to do all the minigames (although hopefully not explore the city fully), sort the civilians and so forth, before doing an assassinsation – the one part of the game which was awesome, and which I wanted to replay.

Poor decisions from the Ubisoft team on this. Lazyness is all I can account for the decisions (especially the insistence on unskippable cutscenes and 16:9 resolution), since they seem relatively easy things to solve – let me start at save point X, where I can immediately start an Assassination, just like how the game allows you to replay from that point if you die.

I wish I had made backups before each assassination now. If only I had known in advance 🙁 It seems I’ll be forced to do the bare minimum of minigames for each one, and go through a good 15-25 minutes of cutscenes per assassination, to have the 5-10 minutes of fun doing the actual task. I do like the game, as I’ve said before (beautiful looking, the character is cool, assassinations great, exploration relatively fun), it’s just painful to replay any part of it. This has been said before, but it’s worth saying again. 🙂

Computers

A Forced Reinstalled

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My XP installation went up in smoke, well, a “user32.dll not found” BSOD on boot error at least. At least my reinstallation was partially planned.

Just to note in case I ever come across the error again (it BSOD’ed after the scrolling loading bar of windows, but before the login screen appeared) there are a variety of probable reasons the BOSD occured – all of them pretty unrecoverable. Hive registry corruption, files being missing or corrupted from the system32 folder, driver problems or hardware problems. Notably checkdsk performed fine off a PE disk, there are no viruses, and the only hardware problem I did know of was an external HDD (a older Maxtor one) noting a missing driver for installing it’s front button.

It’s a toss up between a “as good as reinstalled” fresh registry, meaning nothing appears as installed, and many programs break (gee, thanks Microsoft. I love single points of failure), and reinstalling. The latter option at least means I can install newer drivers, and get it fresh – and more importantly, sort my RAID config out.

Interestingly, I couldn’t do RAID1 with more then 2 drives, or RAID5 with more then 3. Funny motherboard support for software RAID to be honest. RAID10 (1+0) on 4 HDD’s is good enough for my OS and data – so cut back on the data a bit. RAID0 on 2 HDD’s for my games, for speed, and since I wouldn’t miss the installations as much as the data.

This is one reason I’m effectively offline though. I only just got things installed yesterday (nLite is brilliant in most respects for creating a good boot CD, just takes a while going through all the tweaks 🙂 ). I did get all my data off before deleting my RAID config, well, I hope everything important.

This also gives me a chance to try some new firewall/AV stuff. I’m trying ESET security (nod32) on trial – not too impressed so far (the firewall seems a bit cumbersome to edit, AV a bit uncustomisable), but the memory/CPU front seems lower then my past firewalls or AV’s. Once the trial is over I’ll decide whether to keep or try Comodo’s (which firewall I used before, and was okay), or some other – suggestions welcome, and AV isn’t entirely necessary (not many seem to integrate well with Thunderbird, sigh), to be honest – but a decent firewall is paramount (stopping outgoing things, and opening incoming ports, for a variety of reasons – especially when I am up to trying some networking stuff).

Quickly before I continue though, I won’t be using AVG or Avira, since they’re okay but pretty hefty. McAfee isn’t very good generally, Kapersky is not great in any respect (totally unusable, unbearably slow). Avast and Sophos are pretty unweildy (and not free). Don’t even get me started on Samantec/Norton, the bane of all problems on a PC (it’s almost true, if there are viruses it’s not detected or can’t remove, they’re less of a problem then Symantec itself. Shame people pay for it).

Since starting work I’ve also decided system restory at a low % of my drive space (80GB OS partition) is a good idea for the OS. At least it’ll give me a chance to get back in easily if the registry corrupts. some other things I usually remove I’ve left running too, a bit more typical setup – for the minor problems I sometimes had before, because I have 3GB of RAM now.

Videogames

The Fun of Playing Multiplayer

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My slightly guilty domination of other WDG members in a fun match. At one point it was all but 2 of their players

Just a quick thought; for competitive multiplayer games (where you play against other humans doing something, and is generally equal sided – so, RTS, FPS, etc. games), it always seems to be a nagging feeling of it being a problem when I’m enjoy a game because I am [i]beating friends at it[/i].

Generally these games work better when you fight unknowns. Generally. Sure it’s fun playing against (and usually with) friends, but I certainly feel if I am beating someone at something drastically, it’s a little less fun – after all, they can’t be enjoying it as much as me.

This is an even greater problem in some games when you are playing to win and actively taking something from the enemy when you do – respawn times (especially in round base games like Counterstrike), or games which you loot your enemies in (some MMO’s) always are a bit poor in this regard. Most of the time you don’t know the people involved, but it sucks if you do.

There’s little to get around the problem. Co-op in some games is a solution – you will score more in Guitar Hero in two player if you are better then your friend, so the co-op is great, since it allows you to choose difficulties independently, and still play together. This won’t work for competitive games though. When winning is the main route to fun, it seems a tough thing to get around.

Not to say that only winning will be fun in these games – the pressured defeat, the close loss, the great effort involved in almost being as good is sometimes more fun then an easy victory, a walkover or winning with one hand tied behind your back. Generally having a staged set of objectives both teams can complete is nice (so there are mini-objectives to the grand one of ultimate victory) – this has occurred in FPS, RTS and TBS games (such as Team Fortress 2, Age of Empires and Civilization). Mini battles which are constant in some games, help it out. The tipping point is usually crushing though – the inevitable defeat, the mass of troops waiting to storm the castle, or the sheer dominance of your best teammates or troops by the enemy.

MMO’s luckily can get around the problems of defeat (since there is always someone better then you out there) by either allowing the organisation of larger more powerful player run bodies (guilds, etc.), allowing Player versus Player combat only by consent, or having no looting of players or camping of respawn areas. It’s more difficult to apply measures like this in other game types though.

Maybe I just shouldn’t care so much, and go with the flow 🙂

Personal, Travel

First Day of Work In Snow

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What I saw at 7AM, eek!

Fun and games today – freezing cold now. It didn’t help my return journey despite getting to my first day of work (which will be frontline IS support for students at Nottingham University) on time. My return journey took 3 hours or so, for a trip which is meant to be around an hour to and hour and a half. I spent half an hour waiting for a bus (luckily, near the front of the queue).

At least while on the bus I started Time Hollow – rather frustratingly a “try everything” game (ala Phoenix Wright in some ways) but a nice premise and good visuals, with no a bad bit of dialogue. Time travel always ticks some good boxes for me if done well, and so far it seems to be okay.

Tomorrow I’m thinking Wellington boots. I just don’t want to have wet feet for walking around at work! At least it looks nice, except when cars crash into next door’s bins after sliding down the hill. Steep roads were closed off, the salt and gritters were pretty overwhelmed I guess today – should be okay by Wednesday for Nottingham at least despite whatever snowfall occurs (as long as the gritters have done the roads), since there has never been big an issue with snow here.