Tag Archives: Video Games

Nov 10 2008
Life in general

On Second Thought…

Mad sackboy

So yesterday I posted about the latest addition to my list of all-time favorite games, LittleBigPlanet. After posting that post, I began to brainstorm the game’s possible flaws, and I came up with a few things.

First of all, in the level creator, the first time you try to use a new category of objects (materials, switches, eyes, vehicles, etc.), you are forced to watch a tutorial on how to use it. This would be tolerable if the tutorials were skippable, but they aren’t. At least, not all of them are. The tutorials are really unnecessary, and seem extremely out-of-place in such an intuitive and easy-to-understand game. Forcing users to complete tutorials before allowing them to proceed is one of the biggest problems in modern games, which usually include a ridiculously long tutorial level (usually unskippable, as well) at the beginning of the game, which you are forced to play through every time you play the game. For example, the first half-hour in Kingdom Hearts 2 (Twilight Town) is basically a glorified tutorial level, and the opening level of Knights of the Old Republc 2 was just as bad.

Secondly, and this is not a flaw as much as a trivial gripe, the clothes are not as customizable as I would like. Basically, colors. Some clothes allow you to modify their color, but there is only one color setting for your entire avatar, meaning every customizable article of clothing, and all menus, must be the same color. Certainly not a showstopper, but a complaint nonetheless.

Neither of these complaints were enough to merit posting about, in my opinion. However, then I read about MediaMolecule (the company that created LBP) and Sony “moderating” fan-made levels.

Now, don’t get me wrong here, I can understand the need for some level of censorship on their part, they obviously are going to have to delete anything obscene, and anything illegal. But the amount of level-deleting (and it is just that, permanent deletion of so-called “moderated” levels) that has been happening in the past few days is ridiculous. MediaMolecule is removing levels that could infringe on copyrights, so levels that reference other video games, music, people, movies, etc. are all being removed, irrevocably. This is really bad, a lot of my favorite levels (the Mirror’s Edge levels, as well as Tetris, Galaga, etc) are all being removed. They were really the best levels online, being so ingeniously re-created from the tools offered in the game. I must say, I’m very disappointed in MediaMolecule for being such cowards.

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Nov 08 2008
Life in general

LittleBigPlanet

It’s pretty rare for me to really like a video game, or at least it’s rare for me to like it enough to actually want to play the game all the time. I usually only discover such an addictive game about once a year. The last time that it happened was with Rock Band back in the spring, Kingdom Hearts a few years that, and way back when, the Myst series.

However, last friday (Halloween), one of my friends lent me LittleBigPlanet for the week, and I’ve been been spending most of my free time since then playing the amazing thing (I actually gave my friend back his copy on thursday, and went out yesterday to purchase my own). The game is beautiful, creative, addictive, unique, intuitive, and above all else, fun. Of course, I’ve known about LittleBigPlanet for more than a year. The trailers and gameplay videos for it during the summer of 2007 were big factors in my purchasing of a Playstation 3 in the first place, so one could say I actually spend $500 to play this game (or, if you consider the fact that I bought my HDTV to go with the PS3 around the same time, one could actually say that I spent over $1000 to play it).

Sackboy

In LittleBigPlanet, you play as Sackboy (above), a character made out of cloth (hence his name), and run around LittleBigPlanet (a physical manifestation of all of the dreams and imaginative energies of the people of Earth), exploring and collecting items. Items include stickers (which can be stuck anywhere in the game, even on other characters), decorations (which are like 3-dimensional stickers, and can also be stuck on anything in the game), and costumes, among other things. The costumes are a very fun part of the game, because you can really customize your Sackboy a lot using them (see below).

Customized sackpeople

Besides the story mode (the main levels of the game, tied together into some sort of loose, disjointed story), there’s also the “MyMoon” area, where you can create your own levels. As you play through the official levels of LittleBigPlanet, you collect the objects from the official levels as items, allowing you to (in theory) re-create the official levels entirely, or build your own worlds. When you’ve created a level that you like, you can publish it, so other people can download and play in it themselves. You can also download and play levels that other people have made, some of which are really amazing.

Building a level

Perhaps one of the best features of this already amazing game is the multiplayer gameplay. Up to 4 people can play at the same time, working cooperatively to finish the levels together. In my opinion, this is the best form of multiplayer gameplay (that is, 4 people in the same room working together, while the second best is online cooperative, then real-life competitive, and online competitive being the worst form of multiplayer), because it really feels like a group effort, and you’re playing with people you really know, and having fun together. LittleBigPlanet is a very social game, it’s actually impossible to complete it 100% on your own, there are a lot of two-player puzzles to get secret items and such.

Hanging onto a cloud

LittleBigPlanet is definitely my favorite PS3 game thus far. I would strongly recommend it to anybody and everybody.

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Sep 04 2008
22 Comments
Life in general

Uru: Complete Chronicles on a Mac!

About a month ago, I decided (most likely thanks to Jevasi, DanTheMystFan, and all the other great people I was talking to at Mysterium this year) to get back into the world of Writing (the process of creating a custom Age for Uru), after a year-long hiatus. I returned to find the community in good health, happily churning out very high-quality ages one after another. The tool used for Writing, pyPRP (which is actually just a plugin for Blender) had improved and advanced tenfold since I last used it, now supporting animated textures, custom cameras, and something called ‘AlcScript’, which allows for simple actions to be scripted, making it easier to Write dynamic ages (my only finished age, Galamay, has no interactivity whatsoever, because when I Wrote it years ago, you had to actually write code to do that stuff…). The Guild of Writers Wiki, with its big list of tutorials, was endlessly helpful as I re-learned the little I remembered, and quickly advanced to new levels of ability.

The only problem with this Age Writing is the fact that I use a Mac, and Uru is built for Windows. The classic problem. My first solution was Dropbox, an easy file-syncing program that automatically copies files to every computer you’ve registered, every time the files are modified. This worked well enough, but I still had to wait on my network to move the files, and then move them to the Uru directory on my PC once they were synced. It worked, but it was definitely flawed.

So I began to think about another option. What if I could run Uru on my Mac? That would solve my problems, because then I could Write and test on the same machine. But how would I do it? My first thought was Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion, which both run Windows on top of OS X, meaning that the game would definitely run exactly as it would on a PC. However, a virtual machine would only cause more problems, such as the time it takes to load a virtual machine, or the lag that would be produced by running 2 operating systems. I thought about the latter problem for about two seconds before the answer hit me:

Wine. A self-referencing acronym standing for Wine Is Not an Emulator, Wine allows users of non-Windows operating systems to run .exe files meant specifically for Windows. The great thing is that it does this without having to run the entire Windows OS, just the specific parts that it needs to make the program work. This means that there’s no added lag, and programs really do run as if they were native to your own OS (in my case, Mac OS X, but it is available for Linux, OpenBSD, Solaris, and any platform you can build it on really, since it’s an open-source project).

The first thing I tried was DarWINE, a Wine project dedicated to getting Wine to work on OS X. Using the installer on the Uru Disk, I got through all of the initial installation before it gave me a strange error (Cannot find string ERROR_CANNOTLOAD), and crashed.

Next, I tried CrossOver Games, a commercial version of Wine dedicated to making Windows games work on Mac OS X and Linux. This behaved exactly as DarWINE did when I gave it the CD with the installer.

Frustrated, I thought more about my past experiences with Uru. I have found in the past that you don’t actually have to install Uru: all the installer does is unpack the data from the CDs to the hard drive. If you can get the files from another source (such as a past installation), you can simply run it without any other modifications. Perhaps the installer makes some registry changes, but they aren’t necessary for the game to run. Following this line of thought, I copied the files from my Uru install to my Mac, and tried opening UruExplorer.exe with CrossOver Games.

Loading...

Ta da!

Presto! Flawless Uru, running directly on my Mac. Everything that worked on my PC works on my Mac, and given the fact that my PC doesn’t have speakers, the Mac can actually run Uru better than my PC!

Here’s how to do it:

  • Install URU:Complete Chronicles on a PC.
  • Install Drizzle, and get the No-Disc patch, flymode, OfflineKI, whatever add-ons you want. Drizzle is natively Mac-compatible, so you can always modify these settings later on.
  • Make sure all of that stuff works on your PC.
  • Copy all the files in your Uru directory (C:/Program Files/Ubisoft/Cyan Worlds/Myst Uru: Complete Chronicles by default) to somewhere on your Mac.
  • Get CrossOver Games if you don’t already have it. The link is a trial, the full version costs $39.95 unfortunately…
    Based on various reports, it seems like Crossover Games 8.0.0 works the best for Uru, newer versions can have some odd issues. You can download the trial for that here.
  • Create a WinXP bottle in Crossover (“Manage Bottles” from the Configure menu).
  • Programs > Run Command…
  • Hit browse and locate UruExplorer.exe on your hard drive
  • Save the command, to make it easier to launch again later
  • Hit Run, and Uru will launch. You can ignore the error message that might pop up, Uru will launch a moment later.

You can also just find UruExplorer.exe in Finder and double-click it, Uru should launch just the same.

More pictures:

Everything works, even complicated stuff like Er'cana and Ahnonay.

Even flymode works!

Custom ages function great!

If you love Uru, but are tired of exploring by yourself, you should install Myst Online: Uru Live Again on your Mac and come play online!

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Jul 19 2008
2 Comments
Life in general

E3 2008

Well that was disappointing! What did we get out of the Electronic Entertainment Expo this year, boys and girls? Let’s see. Microsoft unveiled their best-kept-secret-ever, the clearance of 20gb 360s to make way for 60gb 360s, as well as the motion-sensitive…microphone controller?

I mean, we’ve been hearing rumors about a motion-sensitive 360 controller (to compete with Sony’s SIXAXIS and more importantly, Nintendo’s Wiimote) for months now, and I have to say, I’m disappointed. A karaoke microphone? That’s…um…that’s great, Microsoft. Thanks a bunch. Other than that, there was the Dashboard redesign, and the news that Final Fantasy XIII is being made for the 360 as well as the PS3. Whoop-dee-doo.

What did Sony have for us? Let’s see. Well, there was that neat little presentation of their fiscal year using LittleBigPlanet, that was cool I guess…Not really news, but hey, it’s LittleBigPlanet. I’m not complaining. There was the launch of the video store, about freakin’ time, Sony…And now you can use one login for the PSN across all your machines, as opposed to one account for each. Again, this should not be something that’s happening more than a year after the PS3’s launch. All in all, no news from Sony.

Well how about Nintendo? Oh yes, Nintendo gave us a game, a toy, and two peripherals. Hooray, big news day from Nintendo, right? You might think that. The game? Animal Crossing City Folk, which is basically Animal Crossing Wild World (the DS iteration of the series), except with a city area (accessible by everybody), and a few graphics updates to bring it in line with the Gamecube version of the series. In other words, it’s basically a port of the older game. In other words, it barely counts as its own game.

Next up, Nintendo’s Wii Music. This is the “toy” I mentioned earlier. I call it a toy because it isn’t a game, even Miyamoto has said that it is not a game. It is a non-game, with no plot, no back-story, no characters, no objective. I call that a toy, not a game. Also, the thing isn’t news, because it has been demoed in some form at every E3 since the announcement of the Wii. The “news” is the ability to use the Wii Fit, Nintendo’s balance board in addition to the Wiimote to basically just make music. Think of it like Rock Band, but without real songs or objectives.

Finally, the two peripherals. First off is Wii Speak, a multi-directional microphone that sits on top of the Wii Sensor Bar and allows for audio chatting in online games. This, not unlike the PSN’s video store, should not be something new after more than a year on the market with online services. The second peripheral, the MotionPlus, is just as ridiculous. It is a little knob that plugs into the bottom of the Wiimote, and according to Nintendo, improves the motion-detecting of the Wiimote to make on-screen movements match more closely to the actual movement of the player’s hand or arm. Now I don’t know about you, but it seems to me like this peripheral does…what Nintendo originally promised the Wiimote would be able to do. That seems more than a little lame to me, but hey- it comes with a free game: similarly to the Wii coming with Wii Sports, and the Wiimote coming with Wii Play, the MotionPlus ships with Wii Sports Resort.

So yeah, disappointing compared to previous E3s, but it seems like every year the convention is getting more and more pitiful and less appealing. Oh well, we still have Leipzig and PAX to look forward to!

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May 31 2008
Uncategorized

Cosmic Osmo's Hex Isle


Cosmic Osmo's Hex Isle

I just received Cosmic Osmo’s Hex Isle, the latest game from Myst creator Cyan Worlds. It has a very different feel than the Myst games, a lot more dialogue and bright colors and a lot less exploration and puzzle-solving. The game is very pretty, using the newest version of Cyan’s Plasma engine, and (unsurprisingly, due to a faster dual-core processor and four times the memory) runs better on my Mac than on my PC.

The gameplay is much more similar to a ‘casual’ game than a normal video game, in that the story is extremely simple, and the game mechanic is very straightforward. Touch all 6 blue ‘hexes’ (hexagonal tiles) to complete the level. Of course, it gets more complicated as the levels go on, with moving hexes, hexes that disappear after you step on them, etc.

The game is very fun, and for a game of its caliber, it’s very pretty. Unfortunately, the only website it’s available from is Fanista, which I think is possibly the worst online retailer I have ever had the misfortune to be forced to use. Maybe you can find it on eBay?

Having played Cosmic Osmo’s Hex Isle, the only remaining Cyan game I have not played yet is the original Cosmic Osmo, which will be on Gametap next month. Can’t wait!



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May 26 2008
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On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode 1 (Demo)


I downloaded and played through the demo of Penny Arcade‘s new game, On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode 1. It’s pretty fun, and easy to get into. It has the comedy of a Penny Arcade comic, and the look of one, too. The graphics are not impressive, but they work. They’re very similar to the Sam and Max games, if anyone has played them.

The gameplay is very easy to understand. The exploring portion is point-and-click, while the battle screens work by selecting your attack and then the enemy to attack. Sounds simple, but it’s real-time. You have to manage up to 4 characters at once (maybe more?), while the enemy is also attacking you. It can get pretty hectic, but it wasn’t bad.

I would recommend downloading the demo to anybody, and buying the game if you like it, since it’s only $20 and available for Mac, Windows, and Linux, as well as on the Xbox Live Marketplace.

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May 12 2008
2 Comments
Life in general

Spore/MassEffect to Use SecuROM DRM Scheme, EA Descends to Ninth Level of Hell

Apparently, Electronic Arts is planning on releasing two of their biggest PC titles this year, MassEffect and Spore, with the SecuROM DRM Scheme. For those of you who don’t know, the SecuROM DRM was included with BioShock, gave owners of the game living hell. For example, should you have to reinstall the game, you would have to call SecuROM to get a new registration code. There was also a lot of fear that it was installing a RootKit on systems (which would allow it to execute commands under the root, or administrator, user account without requiring any passwords or notifications).

Obviously, the announcement that SecuROM was once again going to be used as the copyright protection in popular pc games sparked an outcry from pc gamers. Originally, EA said that SecuROM would check with its servers every 10 days to re-authenticate the game, but they recently took back that statement, and are now saying that it will only re-authenticate the game when you download additional content off the internet, meaning fewer unwanted internet connections.

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Apr 26 2008
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Fan Ages and Drizzle

Fan ages – that is, custom-made, unofficial ages for Uru – have certainly progressed a long way. From my first age, Galamay:

To the Fan City of Ahra Pahts:

And now, Eh’ko and the Book of D’eux:

The two ages seen here, Eh’ko and The Remote Age Viewer, look absolutely stunning. They really are Cyan-quality work, and incredibly impressive.

Also, the Drizzle Project is a pretty impressive feat of fan work. Some hackers have managed to decrypt the MO:UL age files, and re-encrypt them using the old Uru encryption methods, meaning that we can put the ages that were once exclusively for MO:UL into URU:CC. I tried it out myself, and after one failure the first time, I got it working completely the second time around. It’s very fun to link to the ages and mess around with the settings just by tapping keys on the keyboard (such as swap the winter Delin for the summer one by pressing Q or W, or make animals appear in Negilahn), plus it includes the flymode patch, which means you can use flymode in these ages and see everything from any angle. It’s very fun, and I’d recommend it to anyone with Uru:CC and the MO:UL files.

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Apr 25 2008
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Echochrome Demo

I just downloaded the demo of Echochrome on the new Playstation Store. It’s pretty awesome, and I’ll probably buy the full version when it comes out. It’s very cool, using cool perspective tricks to solve puzzles. There are 5 laws of perspective (these can all be seen at the beginning of the trailer, below):

  • Perspective Traveling – If two paths appear connected, they are.
  • Perspective Landing – If one path appears to be above another, it is.
  • Perspective Existence – When a gap is blocked from view, making two paths appear to be connected, they are.
  • Perspective Absence – When a hole is blocked from view, it does not exist.
  • Perspective Jumping – If you jump, you will land on whatever appears to be beneath you.

    • Using those 5 laws, you rotate the camera angle to guide the avatar from ‘echo’ to ‘echo’. These ‘echos’ serve as checkpoints, in case you fall through a hole or jump into nothing. It’s pretty easy to get the hang of, but I find that the camera doesn’t rotate fast enough, and the motion sensor mode is too jumpy to be useful. Hopefully that will be fixed up by the final release, but I really like the demo. Check out the trailer below:

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    Apr 09 2008
    Life in general

    Uru's Final Day

    Well, this is it. The final day of Myst Online: Uru Live. Tonight, at midnight (mountain time), Cyan Worlds and Gametap will pull the plugs on the game servers, shutting down the game for the foreseeable future. I plan to be online up until the very last moment, should anyone care to join me. Also planning on video recording the last 5 minutes or so, for the memories. You can expect that to be up sometime tomorrow.

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