All posts by Andrew Armstrong

Videogame Events

Eurogamer Expo Day #1

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Today I worked at the Eurogamer Expo helping on the Pixel Lab Indie Games Arcade (lots of Indie PC games), helping David there.

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David plays War Twat

A quick run through of the games in no particular order; War Twat was a unique, completely over the top “space war shooter”. Incredible stuff, insane how it was made in such a short amount of time too. Try it at least a few times, once you learn you can hold fire down. The top score was over 1700, with a lot of attempts (over 600…must have been more, but that was when the record was set I think). It was overlooked a lot of the time, no controls are listed on the start screen so we taped some down nearby in the late afternoon to help.

Braid, originally beta’ed on the PC I think, was there in it’s time manipulating with platform elements and some-kinda-crazy-story-I-guess glory. Of course, it’s hard to not play a great deal of it or get confused by the later levels if you haven’t played the earlier ones, but people did persevere in trying it.

World Of Goo is, of course, as at GDC, a lot of fun if you get it. I’m personally pretty terrible at “Lemmings” games, of which this is a toned down version of essentially – you get different goos, which stick together to get around obstacles. I know one guy completed two chapters in one go while there, that’s a lot of playing. I should try it myself some more.

Off Road Velociraptor Safari is crazy-silly. You can play it yourself too, so give it a try. It’s pretty silly 🙂 Did I say it was silly yet? 😀

Psychosomnium is, as it says on the tin, pretty psycho. As described on the card, it’s part of the Masocore games, and if people don’t get a few tips even the first few screens of the game are pretty daunting in a “think outside the norm” elements. Interesting to finish though (a great parody of some platformers and elements in them too), and recommended so highly by one of the other Pixel-Lab guys that he wants more, more! More grueling levels, anything, just more of it! Must be worth a try (I tried, and failed some bits without a guide a while back, hehe. I fail 🙂 ).

Multiwinia was there, LANed up too (and even got a visit by their now-2-strong PR department, I got a red Darwinian they left 😀 (see my pictures). The game itself is defiantly heavy on the micro in some respects, but does I am told afford some more higher level strategy. I’m not sure I’d cope with it to be honest, it seems a very hard core game overall but well suited to those who understand how to order the Darwinians around efficiently.

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Busy Plain Sight

Machinarium was, to put it bluntly, brilliant looking. It’s still in beta, so I forgive it, but the puzzles, while not unforgiving in a thinking capacity, hindered you a lot by not showing you what pieces were selectable or what actions were possible without anything but a cursor change. Plenty of “try every combination” gameplay (and carefully checking pixels at times too). It works pretty damn well though, I expect the final game to be much more expanded (there was 7 levels in this beta) and certainly more polished, so it should be good for adventure people (quite a few enjoyed the game despite getting stuck too, which is awesome).

Finally, Plain Sight needs an entry of it’s own. A 4 man team has made an impressive fighting game, which does keep you interested in playing more well beyond what I would have thought. They were looking for feedback before a public PC beta (sign up now!). I first heard about this at Alice’s Wonderland blog, and it looks even more awesome and impressive in real life. They were using Xbox 360 controllers to make it easier to manage, but informed me it was built as a PC game, so the mouse and keyboard work excellently, which is great! I’ll try the PC beta, hopefully once they sort out some of the niggling problems (telling apart the different players apart from their nicknames for starters, possibly by using colour coding instead of altering the colour for how much multiplier a player has built up, and having the colour get lighter with more points) it’ll be utterly unstoppable! The most popular thing since it of course had 5 player LAN multiplayer, and all the team were there helping people out with it.

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Spaf posing with Beret and Tattoos

There was some gubbins I got too – apart from a Darwinian, I got a Lionhead yoyo to keep me entertained while I didn’t play videogames, and others got some weird stuff – like Saints Row “fake tattoos” and a blue beret (I forget the game…) – see right! See my gallery for a few more pictures, mainly of people playing the indie games.

I need to check out the Expo tomorrow – Mirrors Edge (although I want to play it on PC, it just looks awesome to be honest, this being an EA game too so I’ve gotta be wary of DRM) and possibly Left-4-Dead (although I think it only is being shown on Xbox 360). I want to visit the career fair too, get some advice and see if any graduate programming jobs are available anywhere. We’ll see what tomorrow is like, just before GameCity starts, which also should be awesome!

Events, Travel, Videogame Events, Videogame Music

Video Games Live Was Great!

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The show!

Video Games Live was fun stuff. For the day, we visited first Funland arcade in the city centre then went off to the show. There were some Guitar Hero: World Tour bits going on before it began, too.

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The awesome Martin Leung

The show itself was great. All console music, basically, but quite well done mixtures of tracks and video accompaniment. There were also some special bits – Martin Leung (who didn’t really talk 🙁 ), did first a set of Final Fantasy tunes and then his famous Mario and Tetris tracks on the piano. There was audience interaction too – someone who played Tetris by being the gun at the bottom, although it didn’t work to well 🙁 – and also a Guitar Hero: Areosmith track, accompanied by Tommy Tallarico.

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Tommy getting a world record

Tommy Tallarico hosted it, and even got a Guinness World Record for the most games worked on by a single person during the show. Jack Wall was the conductor, who has created some great music before, conducting his own Mass Effect music during the show too.

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Fanart in the video for “One Winged Angel”

A few oddities though – there was no Square Enix videogame footage, substituting Disney movie footage for Kingdom Hearts, and fanart for the Final Fantasy “One Winged Angel” piece. Odd that. Also, there was a distinct lack of PC videogame music – no Red Alert, Civilization, Half-Life or anything else (but there was the ubiquitous World of Warcraft, and for some reason Everquest II. There was also Diablo III – they need to update the video which was all concept art though 🙂 ).

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The videogame historian in me wanted to know what it was like up in the old Sony arcade…

I also got the CD, which is pretty good (if only I still did my radio show!) – I love the Civilization 4 rendition, which is one of my favourite tracks. The line to get it singed was a wee bit big, but oh well, I’ll try and get it signed some other time 🙂

I hope they can get around to doing a Phoenix Write melody at the show, if so, I’ll definitely go again 🙂 – there’s my full gallery of pictures of the event. I also had some videos; which are pretty cool:

atypicalgamer also has a report on the event, with some better pictures too 🙂

Programming, Site

Recompressing my Zip/RAR files with 7zip En Masse

I decided to relearn some batch file basics (since I hadn’t got anything else handy) to recompress a ton of ZIP and RAR files into 7zip format. I didn’t find a good example of this, so made it into my own little tutorial (given I don’t have any other place to stick the page yet anyway) if I ever have to learn the stuff again 🙂 Might be useful for anyone else recompressing things though or learning some batch file basics maybe. No doubt could be easily altered for other compression programs or other types of 7zip compression anyway, so I should find use for it in the future 🙂

I also altered my sidebar layout – no more subpages will be there, but they’ll pop out if you click on the category. One thing I can’t fix on this site is the WPG-2 stuff, gallery links should be to /gallery, but /gallery-2 keeps on being used for the thumbnail links, sigh. Will have to fix that one day and integrate my gallery better. 🙂

Events, Videogame Events, Videogame Music, Videogames

Video Games Live!

Going to Video Games Live tomorrow in London, should be a good event – I missed an opportunity to see it in San Francisco last February, and so I made my mind to go to this whatever. My grounding from my radio show should put me in good stead, no doubt a lot of tracks will be console games 😉 Going with some friends too, and should be visiting some arcades and shops beforehand. Hopefully the weather isn’t too bad is the only thing! Travelling in London is not fun at the best of times, heh.

Next week are some other things, like the London Games Festival and GameCity which I’ll post about at the weekend, then share my thoughts on next week. Citizen journalism here I come! 🙂

PC Videogames, Videogame AI, Videogames

Max Payne

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Best way to improve Max’s psyche is to frame him for murder!

Dun-dun…dun-dun…dun-dun…dun-dun…

I’ve just finished (for the third time?) Max Payne, released in 2001. It is kind of one-of-a-kind in videogames, using a mix of graphic novel and in-game cutscene work. It’s also a damn difficult game, even with the main feature – bullet time – which can slow down time for a limited amount allowing the player to aim in real time.

The story really stands out as something unique. Totally over the top (it’d be over the top as a graphic novel to be honest!), and entirely apt for the strange situation the game puts the protagonist Max Payne in. He’s constantly spouting off cliché lines and over the top vocabulary, parodied in one of his dream sequences, although this is all in his mind; it fits beautifully, filling the narrative with actually quite sane things considering the insane situation. A man must cope, and Max sure finds his way.

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This is not a game for kids. Some very unsavoury characters in the game…

The actual plot could be considered bare-bones. It’s got it’s own minor complexities, and it all fits together well enough once the pieces are arranged. Most of the plot points are excuses to shoot more bad guys, to be honest, and it’s entirely fair that most of the time Max points this out. I won’t spoil anything here though.

The game also parodies itself, twice. Take that! The humour is spliced throughout – gangsters and enemies do small, pop-culture heavy conversations before Max shoots them dead. There are homages to The Matrix (noting the game was in development before the film was released, although the main feature was renamed Bullet Time to match the film, it wasn’t the initial inspiration), and other films in several scenes. Most of Max’s own dialogue is darkly funny, considering what’s going on. There are also a few (Lords and Ladies, and Mystery Unknown) TV shows (which are used to better effect in Max Payne 2), with soap-opera style acting and parodying Max’s own situation.

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Vinnie Gognitti returns in Max Payne 2, here he’s not happy to see Max…

The gameplay is tough – tough, and quite quite unfair. The game’s own designers have said there is no difficulty slider – the games lowest difficulty is meant to alter the AI’s accuracy and health automatically if the player does badly, but in truth this just meant after the first few enemies it went from “Not quite so tough” to “insanely tough”, while the other difficulty levels just automatically set it to “insanely tough”. If you can persevere and learn your way around the controls and weapons, it works quite well, although too many times a freak grenade or a close range shotgun blast ends the game early. Keep your hand hovered over F5 to quicksave (which, nicely done, has 2 slots incase one really puts you in a worse position!).

There are some nice setpiece parts though – such as getting through some Gangsters to a weapons cache basically unarmed, larger battles in mansions, on boats and in banks, and when an entire restaurant is blowing up and you have to get out. There’s little “key finding” to open doors, so it’s almost always a linear game, which as long as you don’t pay too much attention doesn’t matter as much as you might think (seeing where I was previously after 15 minutes annoyed me a bit).

The AI, since I’m interested in it, is basically non-existent to be honest. There are times it even gets stuck in the most simple situations. It’s entirely scripted in a nice cinematic way – to a fault usually – so a replay needs to be spread out by a few years, like I have, since otherwise you remember exactly what will happen next. The AI generally ducks and aims for where you’ll be, and might take a second or so to turn if you run past them, which is of course to allow bullet time to actually work. While they don’t run out of the way of grenades, they do realise someone’s attacking them at least if they see one. Basic, but acceptable. Any harder, and the game might become unwinnable. For comparisons sake, Max Payne 2 lowers the toughness of enemies and gives them generally a bigger AI boost (with more open areas and suchlike), which makes it more run-and-gun, where as this game, AI flaws are sometimes the only way of getting past a situation 🙂

On the technical side, the graphic novel side still looks great today (and this is with the Remedy game team doing all the acting), and the game engine itself can hold up still for the most part. The sounds still works fine, and seems to cope somewhat well with surround sound. The freaky dream sequences are frankly, quite scary – the sounds are the worst part. I’ll say it holds it’s own compared to some 2001 titles – shame it doesn’t support widescreen though, and there is no lip synced models. Max Payne 2 likely will hold up better over a longer time, since it improves the visual quality a fair amount, but this game isn’t too bad for the time.

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“Congratulations!” – I almost half-expected it to be spelt incorrectly 🙂

Well worth another play though, and it’ll be much more fun then watching the film version I bet, which according to the Max-Payne stylee graphic novel video, looks to be almost, but not quite completely unlike it. Oh well! Check out my screenshot gallery if you have no qualms about spoilers – although I tell you, capturing any action shots in this game is massively difficult. I must move my screenshot key somewhere different 🙂 If you want to see the game’s intro, check the Internet Archive where I put a copy of it.

Give the game a shot if you ever see it cheap, I think it’s worth persevering through. 😀

General

Planning My OS Reinstall

So, it’s time to reinstall my PC I think. There’s a few reasons for me to do this massive task:

  • I currently run 3 sets of 2 drives in RAID-0. *wince* (yes, it gave me around 1.5TB of workable space, but man, if one drive goes, all 600GB in that set goes)
  • I have got my Academic MSDN copies of Vista and XP to use, which yes, I meant to do before I strictly left university.
  • My start menu is useless. I’ve almost run out of space for games on the 600GB I’ve dedicated to them :/

Hopefully, it’ll be pretty painless, because I’m preparing it. Firstly, I’ve finished today downloading all of my software I’ll need, with the latest versions. I’ll do another post sometime about what things I’ve got and why, I guess, mainly so I can keep track of it myself somewhere, and why not here? 🙂

I’ve also downloaded all my drivers afresh, to basically make sure I had a Vista x64 copy of everything – I’m going to dive in with the x64 version to get the maximum performance. As the rumours go, I’ll need every bit I can squeeze if I keep the installation as default.

Secondly, I’ll be using nLite and vLite to configure my OS images before installing. For XP, this means I can remove a lot of components I never use (components are things like Zipfiles, the “Teletubbies” themes, the old drives included in the system files, and many other bits and pieces). This cuts down a lot of the space and time needed to install. For Vista, for the service pack to work this seems to be not allowed, since the service pack requires everything. I can live with that, since it’s my first Vista install and I’d rather have everything available anyway. Both can include service packs and hotfixes, which really really cuts down update time.

I’ll alter my RAID setup and go with a slightly different way:

  • Disks 1 – 4 will be put in RAID-1, mirrored so if one drive fails I can insert another one. This is a total of 596GB available space.
    • Partition for primary drive (C):
      • 60GB for XP (NB: Current install uses only 35GB. That is, 35GB out of 600GB I had for “OS’s” I never used)
      • 80GB for Vista (a tad more, for various reasons, the main thing is 10GB or more alone…)
      • ~56GB for Linux (This includes the swap partition). Linux will come later, last time I tried Kubuntu, it didn’t even detect my RAID setup :/
    • Partition for Data drive (E):
      • 400 GB for data (was 600GB before, I’ll live since now it’ll be redundant!)
  • Disks 5 – 6 will be RAID-0 for speed and space, so again 596GB total, but I won’t put anything I don’t want to seriously lose (and don’t have backed up) on this drive.
    • All one partition Games drive (D):
      • 596GB for games, patches, and things that need hard drive speed (generally games, but also video editing work).

So, now I have a few final steps to do:

  • Backup everything. Twice. I’ve only reinstalled XP on the same system once, and that was when I had a few gigabytes of data, not a few hundred.
  • Save my game saves, profiles, and whatnot.
  • Run vLite and nLite to sort my install disks.

It’s a great opportunity to sort my hard drive files too, a lot of them I should have backed up or moved ages ago. It’s a time sink, but well worth it. I’ve not got many games I’m currently playing (probably number less then 6 or so, and Steam makes reinstalling a few of those a bit easier). I can reinstall them as they come – if I want them to work from one install directory, I hope it won’t “go wrong” with Vista and XP sharing the same data location and My Documents folder – I can always work around this of course, and will probably keep a handy “Games Vista” folder around for the purpose – but it’s one thing I want to see if I can get working.

I’ll be sticking to XP for the major amount of time, although almost all my programs are guaranteed to work in Vista, I need to find a good theme and work out all it’s kinks before I get used to it.

Well, there we go. I’ll see how it goes over the next few weeks, it’ll take a while to backup things. The sharing-game-directory part will be interesting though 🙂 Might have to make up an app to move/rename config and folders so the games that have different settings for each OS alter themselves. Any tips for Vista are appreciated too, especially ones to do with games – hopefully Vista 64 won’t be too much trouble.

PC Videogames, Recently I've Been Playing, Videogames, Xbox 360 Videogames

This Week, I Have Been Mostly Playing…

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This week I have been mostly playing…

I’ve obviously played a lot since my last post, Red Alert and Deus Ex (which is still in progress) for instance, but also I have played Halo 3‘s campaign in Co-op, and the Half Life 2 engine mod Age of Chivalry and Half Life: Decay (read on for more). Continue reading This Week, I Have Been Mostly Playing… →