Category Archives: Videogames

“videogames” “video games” “digital games” – whatever your term, this broad category means any discussion by me or others on games.

Videogame AI, Videogame Conferences, Videogames

GDC 2009 – Monday and Tuesday AI Summit

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The GDC AI summit was pretty good. A wide range of topics covered – although as someone noted almost all of it for bipedal creatures, usually humans specifically – so it didn’t have as much on strategic AI or for other areas like space/flying – things with 3 dimensional movement.

A good highlight was a great demo by Damian Isla that showed an AI searching for a player, getting confused when the AI didn’t see the player where it last thought it was, then exploring further afield as necessary. The small amount of behaviour gave some pretty nice stuff – a problem being that showing that behaviour to the player is very difficult, and the technical aspects of dividing up spaces to search can get pretty complex. The use of emotions like that though is immensely fun.

I must admit I am more into the behavioural and design side of AI then the technical implementations – I have my notes up from the days, but the notes for the technical sessions might not be as good. These will be up shortly – they’ll take a little time to edit, and I’ll add them here and make a post (this weekend perhaps) when I’ve sorted them.

As for slides – the locations of them will vary. GDC is locking down their public access to slides, and the AI Guild is going to be member access only to “people who have shipped one game” and are an AI programmer. Therefore I’ll probably have a look around for some slides I want to re-read from the author’s own sites.

Videogame History, Videogames

Byte Back 2009

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The memories!

On the 8th and 9th of March I attended Byte Back, a small retro game convention hosted near Stoke-on-Trent, UK. I should really have taken more notes from the event, but honestly it was just a good time for me to get out and actually play some of the videogame history I keep writing about.

It was great to meet some other great people involved in videogame preservation or history – some I still need to contact (I’ll do so after GDC 🙂 ). I had a long chat with Andy Spencer of the Retro Computer Museum – he’s looking for a place to actually display the material he’s collecting, and is looking into making the organisation (which is very new) much more official. Some great systems he had on display, and he’s been getting a lot of good volunteer help and donations.

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The pinball machine was popular

I caught up with Steve Webley, who’s really looking to work in the area of videogame history a lot more. Should be good seeing what he comes up with even if he is super busy doing tons of other cool things! 🙂

Dave Moore from Stairway to Hell was also a great insight into the UK game history scene, especially emulation. I’ll be in contact with him more I hope, certainly since I intend to research the webpages dedicated to systems and gather the webpages own histories. I also chatted very briefly with Weekend Gamer’s Sir Clive, who I should have done a more in depth chat with to see where they’re taking their series (which I brought both DVD’s of – should be a good watch!).

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The second room

There were some good people (who only briefly chatted with) from the Retro Gamer forums, where I need to join up really. So many forums to join up to!

I didn’t do much journalism as such – I hope to get some of the footage recorded by some people onto the Internet Archive if possible, a service sadly not many people know about. I should have done some more prepared interviews, but without a real aim – since I haven’t got down even what information I want to write about the museums and archives, not even getting onto collectors, enthusiasts and private groups! I need to get more involved – or at least do some coverage of – the UK videogame history area.

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A working copy of the Doomsday project! wow!

However, I do have some highlights from the event. At the charity auction (in fact all the money was going to charity, awesome!), I managed to bid for the books The Ultimate History of Videogames, by Steven L. Kent, and Game On From Pong to Oblivion The 50 Greatest Video Games Of All Time, by Simon Byron, Ste Curran, David McCarthy. The former is meant to be a great read – the latter very much a more popular look at good videogames, but I think should be a fun read in any case despite what the One Life Left guys say themselves about it on their show 🙂

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Ocean Reunited

The Ocean Reunion was a little strange – various reminiscent, rants and good stories from the old company. There’s a video of the event on youtube, which is worth a watch (I wish it was on the archive though 🙂 ).

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Jon Hare

I missed Jon Hare, which would have been good to see, but did manage to get involved in the first round of the fighting tournament – I fought a girl from the Retro Gamer forums, and while I managed to win at Soul Calibur, I did really poorly at Street Fighter and finally lost playing the decided in King of Fighters, which I had honestly barely played (although it was pretty close considering). The winner was pretty damn good, I just got roped into it as literally the last contestant, so there we go, my adventures as a pro gamer cut short 😉

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Tony Temple, Jon Stoodley and Paul Drury

Lastly, Paul Drury’s Q&A with Jon Stoodley and Tony Temple was amazing – it explained the phenomenon of high scores, the techniques and games they played (Pacman and Missile Command respectively), the other high scoring players, and some amazing and funny anecdotes (especially relating to Tony Temples strange “opponent” Roy Shildt). This is another area which isn’t really being preserved apart from those dedicated organisations who record the scores, and the odd news or magazine article (sometimes written by the people themselves!). There are the odd few documentary though too – King of Kong (which I still need to watch) and some others I have forgotten about, doh. I’ll put this onto my growing “to investigate” list 🙂

All in all a good weekend, I’ll definitely come to the next one. I’ve also brought a ticket to the Retro Computer Museum open event on May 31st, should be good!

Gallery of pictures, can anyone name every system and game (if they are visible, I need to get a better camera):

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PC Videogames, Recently I've Been Playing, Videogames

This Week I’ve Mostly Playing…Indie Demo Goodness

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This week I have been mostly playing…

I have been playing other things since my previous “This week”. A lot of things in fact, all full of numbers – Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, Civilization 4, Dawn of War 2, and other sequels like Pokemon Mystery Dungeon 2, Empire: Total War and Max Payne 2…but enough of all those. I’ve got various posts in the works for most of them. 🙂

I’d like to otherwise briefly look at two indie games I’ve played the past week – Depths of Peril and Mount&Blade – both demos at the moment, my time before GDC is so limited I’d not have time for the full games yet! Continue reading This Week I’ve Mostly Playing…Indie Demo Goodness →

Videogame History, Videogames

My Profile as a Videogame Historian

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I’m currently putting forward some help for the Home of the Underdogs revival project. Adding my profile to the volunteers list, I added “very amateur historian”. This fits the bill quite well – my work in the IGDA’s Game Preservation SIG is pretty much based on the gathering of knowledge around actual preservation work, rather then actively doing any myself. I have however helped on the nearly finished white paper, and have done a little worthwhile work at the National Museum of Computing.

Hopefully, certainly once there are resources in the UK available for researchers to play old games so I can research them more, I can move up the ladder. It will be self-taught, but I do hope to contribute authoritatively by research (rather then anecdote) to different areas – web or otherwise (I hope to get oral interviews done at some point in my life). At least this can be in the way of recording how a game works, which anyone can do but really not enough is done to help.

I also hope my project work in the SIG can help further some aspects of preserving videogame history. I am still working bit by bit on the plans for the Digital Game Canon website, and maybe with that I’ll work on a standard for metadata/data fields in the SIG. All my work in this area will be hopefully entirely public domain or as close to it as possible, as long as we can get it that way – this might mean contributions are tough to come by (but links will be a mainsay of this area anywhere with so much information being around the web and offline), although this is fine with me. 🙂

We’ll see how far I level up my historian skill this year I guess. 😀

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.

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. 🙂

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 🙂