Grumbel's Random Thoughts

xboxdrv 0.8.4 released

2012-01-24T03:14:00.000-08:00

readded man-page that had gone missing
added documentation for --dbus and --ff-device
added --dbus option to switch between system and session bus
added sequence-key, same as cycle-key but doesn't wrap around
added workaround for libudev older then v150
added --ff-device DEV to select force-feedback device
fixed force feedback getting on the wrong evdev
fixed Xbox360 wireless LED not getting properly set on late plugin

Download: http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/xboxdrv/

Pingus 0.7.6 - Xmas 2011

2011-12-24T14:11:00.000-08:00

Pingus 0.7.6 is out, not much changes to the core game, but 10 brand new Xmas themed levels.

added new SVG icons for Pingus
added 10 new xmas themed levels
added ability to sort levelsets by priority

Download: http://pingus.seul.org

Landscape Generator

2011-12-13T12:37:00.000-08:00

Quick&Dirty Landscape Generator using HTML Canvas:

Source: https://github.com/Grumbel/landscape

Some fun with gamma and invert

2011-12-02T03:41:00.000-08:00

Take an image and invert every other pixel. The result you get will look like this:

Or up close like this:

Zooming in and out in the browser or scaling the image will reveal the image, as most image applications these days handle gamma incorrectly, they assume the image is encoded as a linear range, while it's actually encoded with a gamma value applied to it, that would need to be unapplied before doing the blending performed when scaling the image. This is also the reason why this little trick can't be pulled off in Gimp directly, as the build in invert doesn't handle gamma correctly either.

Little nice side effect: You can use images like this to see if the gamma on your monitor is properly calibrated, if the image doesn't look like a flat gray area, then your gamma is off.

Source Code: ditherinv.cpp

PS: Yes, this is totally not news, just fun to toy around with to see how different image applications react, read that Slashdot story for more background information.

Google Exact String Search

2011-12-02T03:24:00.000-08:00

Since a few weeks ago the old trick to get Google to search for an exact phrases no longer works, namely putting the word in quotes or adding a + in front of it, Google will auto-correct all search terms. The functionality is however still available:

Fixing volume control in XFCE4

2011-10-27T15:51:00.000-07:00

Volume control in XFCE4 worked fine with the volume control in the indicator-applet, but failed to work with the hotkeys on the keyboard, namely:

lowering the volume to minimum wouldn't mute
muting was possible with the keyboard, unmuting was not

Turns out the problem is caused by xfce4-volumed accessing my sound card directly, while the indicator-applet is using pulse audio. Pulseaudio mirrors the controls of the soundcard, but only partially so for some reason. Proper fix for me: Tell xfce4-volumed to use Pulseaudio, but there either isn't a GUI config for that or it's really well hidden. But there is luckily a command line workaround, use:

xfconf-query -c xfce4-mixer -l

to get a list of soundcards and then tell xfce4-mixer to use that

xfconf-query -c xfce4-mixer -p /active-card -s PlaybackInternalAudioAnalogStereoPulseAudioMixer

Now the volume controls seem to work proper.

Pingus 0.7.5 - Halloween 2011

2011-10-25T10:41:00.001-07:00

Pingus 0.7.5 is out, changes include among some fixes, 10 brand new Halloween levels. Linux and Windows versions are provided. No Mac version at this point, it might fallow later on.

fixed memory leak in OpenGL renderer
added support for Win32 cross-compilation with mingw32
added gamespeed adjustments via KPPlus, KPMinus, KPEnter
added single-stepping the game with 'S'
added better application icon
added access to all levelsets in developer-mode (Ctrl-m)
added 10 new Halloween levels

Download: http://pingus.seul.org/download.html

Back to Ubuntu: Xubuntu

2011-10-23T19:04:00.000-07:00

That short trip to Linux Mint Debian wasn't all to successful, as Debian unstable doesn't feature Gnome2 either and thus a dist-upgrade wreaked that install. Which of course also rules out Debian as alternative to Ubuntu. So what next? Back to Ubuntu, but this time a fresh install of Xubuntu, to work around any trouble that might have been caused by years old config files floating around on my old install. So impressions so far:

the installation looks rather unpolished and takes a bit longer then Mint
installation doesn't allow you to not install a boot manager, it will overwrite whatever you have
the install offers btrfs for root even so btrfs doesn't play nice with grub (error: sparse file not allowed)
once installed, Xubuntu looks good, extremely similar to Gnome2
most problems I had previously, like the broken volume applet are gone
amdcccle, the ATI control center, does not work in Xubuntu, it segfaults for some reason when trying to apply the config, the driver itself however works, so it helps having a finished config around
default greybird theme looks good, but misses the scroll-up/down buttons on the scrollbar and theme editing is currently not possible with XFCE
~~there doesn't seem to be a way to move the bluetooth applet~~ that's actually the notification area and there is a pixel or two to grab it at the side
trouble with graphics tablet in Gimp are a known bug, can apparently be fixed with packages from ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa, however that is risky, with xorg-edgers quiting Gimp kills my xserver
Gtk3 looks kind of crap, as it's not theme compatible with Gtk2 and I haven't yet found a Clearlooks equivalent
eog is broken, displays everything with a completely wrong gamma, i.e. makes everything pretty much a white page
Rhythmbox didn't detect MP3 player, needed to "apt-get install gnome" to fix that, not sure which component exactly did the trick
I can mute, but not unmute via keyboard, have to click unmute from the menu

Overall, so far so good, when nothing unexpected pops up, I'll probably stick with Xubuntu for now.

Linux Mint (Debian Edition) Impressions

2011-10-23T08:46:00.000-07:00

With Ubuntu kind of going downhill with no quick fix in sight I decided to try another distribution. Linux Mint looked like a decent choice, so here a few quick impressions:

Mint comes in three different versions, two of which are based on Ubuntu I guess and the other on Debian, as always, the differences and incompatibilites between these versions are never properly explained, so as a user one ends up rather confused
Mint Debian is, as the name suggested, a Debian plus some additional tweaks, it is based on testing and thus like testing gets regular updates
as usual for Debian testing packages break all the time, currently Blender isn't installable and there is no Wine in the testing repositories, also you will see a lot more useless questions on dist-upgrade then you see on Ubuntu, stuff like this was why I moved away from Debian in the first place many years ago and it doesn't seem to have improved
Mint Debian still has good old Gnome2 it works as expected and feels so much better then the incomplete garbage that is the gnome-fallback in the current Ubuntu
Mint Debian doesn't support installing on an LVM root, so better have a free regular partition handy, sad to see that LVM is still a niche oddity, not a standard feature of the Linux toolbox
Mint can be installed from a live system and the install is very fast, essentially just six clicks and you are done in 15min, tweaking it to your liking will of course take a lot longer then that
/etc/defaults/rcS has UTC=yes, this messes up the hardware clock as my Ubuntu is UTC=no
can't use my Rhythmbox database, as the Rhythmbox version on Mint is apperently older then the one on Ubuntu, looks like Ubuntu is running straight from the Git repo, as even the latest source release is to old
ATI driver performance with linux-image-3.0.0-686-pae is completely horrible, makes the system essentially unusable, linux-image-3.0.0-486 on the other side is fine for some reason
added now Debian unstable to sources.list, lets see how much that breaks, Blender and Wine seem installable with that
Debian unstable lead to the installation of Gnome3 and destruction of Gnome2, guess I am back at square one

Overall my impressions of Mint so far are quite good. It's nothing revolutionary and the brokeness of testing is annoying, but it provides a simple Gnome2 desktop that just works and that's really all I need. One remaining question of course is: Why Mint and not just Debian Testing directly? The changes so far seem all to be rather minimal.

XFCE4 Impressions

2011-10-14T23:23:00.000-07:00

looks very similar to Gnome2
doesn't seem to have a proper volume control applet
xfce4-mixer lets me mute, but not unmute
using keyboard shortcuts for lowering volume doesn't mute it at 0
no easy way to configure colors of window borders and GUI elements
launcher applet as trouble with custom icons, doesn't accept them, seems to be caused by reusing old .desktop files
there is a cpugraph applet, but no netgraph applet
GUI styles don't apply properly, some apps seems to get them, others not - caused by Gnome3, Gnome2 apps seem fine
problems with windows not maximizing on double-click where caused by to low doubleclick threshold
no easy way to lock the screen, one has to use command line tool xflock4 which in turn uses xscreensaver
installing xubuntu-desktop and using xubuntu session instead of just plain xfce4 might be a good idea, this fixes some issues with volume controls, among other things

Overall, I kind of like XFCE4, it however feels rather rough and buggy in some , so for the time being I switched back to the gnome-fallback, as it doesn't seem to have the problems with Gtk themes that XFCE4 has. If gnome-fallback will disappear I guess I'll switch to XFCE.

Ubuntu 11.10 impressions

2011-10-13T14:36:00.000-07:00

Quick impressions on Ubuntu 11.10, updates as it goes:

no more Gnome2, so if you are using Gnome2 right and have uninstalled Unity the upgrade will render your system kind of unusable
even manually installing ubuntu-desktop doesn't fix Unity not starting properly
manually installing Gnome3 works, but Gnome3 is junk
there is still a gnome-panel that can be manually installed and sort of looks like the old Gnome2 one, but it is rather crippled and under featured compared to what was in Gnome2 (no way to position icons, ~~no applet support as far as I can tell~~, ...)
that fallback gnome-panel is not quite as crippled as it first looks, Alt-rightclick instead of regular rightclick is needed to get to the Add-to-Panel menu, still no way to move icons around properly
under the fallback gnome-panel, there hides a Nautilus menu, what a mess
XFCE4 looks quite nice, it looks more like Gnome2 then current Gnome
old panel icons can be found in $HOME/.gnome2/panel2.d/default/launchers
something wrong with Gtk+ themes, some apps like Rhythmbox and gnome-terminal don't take them, gnome-tweak-tool doesn't seem to help
Gnome3 doesn't even start on my other computer
the new lightdm login manager can no longer be configured for autologin via the GUI
gphoto gvfs stuff is preventing Sansa Clip+ from being properly recognized again, deleting all gphoto related stuff in gvfs-backends should fix this
Rhythmbox is completley broken, for some reason it kills the Sansa Clip+ mount point and makes dmesg reports filesystem problems, even so the player mounts fine, fscks fine and can be access with command line tools without any issues, weird -> fixed by disabling the MTP player plugin
Rhythmbox has forgotten where to store music files, it's now trashing my $HOME -> location can be changed in the preferences, podcast has a separate location from the music library
Sansa Clip+ write speed is down to 300 kB/S, used to be around 7MB/s or something like that
in gnome-fallback the notify stuff currently goes crazy, using 100% CPU
halt no longer shuts the computer down?!
Firefox now crashes a lot
GDM doesn't start any more
notifications show up on the wrong screen
display of volume control doesn't work, wrong screen, wrong size, doesn't update as volume change
the Windows list applet crashes a lot on startup
Gimp now crashes, creates garbled lines with graphic tablet
file is broken, can't detect mp3 files
Rhythmbox converts MP3s to OGG when drag&dropping onto the player, even so it doesn't need to
...

So first impression so far: Stay the hell away from Ubuntu 11.10, if you have a usable Gnome2 desktop right now, Ubuntu 11.10 will trash it and won't give you any easy way to restore it. gnome-session-fallback allows to retain most of the Gnome2-look in Ubuntu 11.10 aside from a minor issue, but it requires a complete reconfiguration, at it won't take over any of the Gnome2 settings.

I am now on my way to install the Debian edition of Mint and see how that goes, at least the liveCD so far looked pretty good, containing good old Gnome2.

~~I might be able to warm up to Gnome3 if there is a way to get additional panels and a quickstart icons, but so far I haven't found one.~~ No minimize button in Gnome3, seriously?

Pingus 0.7.4

2011-10-10T09:30:00.000-07:00

At long last, Pingus 0.7.4 is out. This release does not yet continue the main story, but it contains all the little improvements and bug fixes that have been allocated over the last few years. As a bonus however this release contains two new levelsets with 27 new levels. This release is source only at the moment and will compile in Linux. Windows and MacOSX versions might follow at a later point. Some more things that have changed in this release are:

fixed game not starting when no soundcard is present
all halloween and tutorial levels have been converted to a minimum size of 1920x1200 so they can be played in fullscreen without letterboxing
new --userdir command line switch to set the directory where savegames are saved
menu getting confused by fast succedding clicks fixed
level-demo recording and playback are back (files not compatible between x86 and x86-64)
window resize support throughout the whole game
dirty-rectangles drawing for improved performance with software rendering
OpenGL rendering
new blackboard graphic
Unicode support
two new levelsets, "Desert" and "Factory Campaign", with 27 new levels
added a man-page
deadly fall height has been increased
support for prefab objects and groups in the editor
cleaned up digger, miner and basher paths
added an option menu
lots of minor bug fixes
bitmap fonts have been generated with anti-aliasing

Download: http://pingus.seul.org

Some notes on capturing video/audio with GLC

2011-08-31T17:00:00.001-07:00

Some notes on video/audio capturing with GLC:

it's much faster then recordmydesktop, but limited to OpenGL apps, can't capture random desktop regions
fast enough for 1280x720 capture on my old computer
front buffer capture doesn't work for me, as it includes window borders and distorts the picture, backbuffer capture with "-b back" works
audio capture is a bit problematic, installing libsdl1.2debian-alsa, forcing SDL to use alsa with "-j" and killing pulseaudio however seems to have fixed that
"-s" captures instantly, otherwise press Shift-F8 to start capture
"-i" shows an indicator in the top/left corner when recording, if not given, there is no sign if it's recording or not
use "glc-play -i 1 pingus3.glc" to inspect what streams are in a recorded file
there are some more options to tweak the compression in glc-capture that I haven't tried
gamma in the videos recorded by glc looks wrong, the resulting video is to dark

Complete capture line for Pingus looks like this:

glc-capture -l /dev/stdout -v 3 -i -j -o /tmp/pingus3.glc -b back build/pingus -r opengl -d data/ -g 1280x720

For converting the capture into a regular format one can follow the instructions from the GLC Wiki.

Final video looks like this:

OpenGL 2D Soft Shadows

2011-08-31T13:10:00.000-07:00

A quick little test of soft shadows in OpenGL. It's all just simple textures, no shaders.

frameborder="0" allowfullscreen>

The video captured with GLC:

glc-capture -f 25 -b back -o /tmp/video.glc -s ../../build/2dshadow

Pingus: Even more svn2git

2011-08-31T06:15:00.001-07:00

After Galapix and Windstille, Pingus is now the third project I converted from SVN to Git in short order. Pingus took noticeably longer to convert, even so the repository isn't much larger, but it contains more branches, tags and a bit more history. svn2git seems to have performed well again. There was a bit more cleanup I had to do this time around, as some of the resulting tags, going back to CVS days. Essentially there where two kinds of tags again:

foobar
foobar@234

In this case the 'foobar' tags would point to an empty commit created by cvs2svn that would branch of from the main tree, while the foobar@234 would point to the actual position in the main tree. A bit of "git tag -d foobar", "git tag foobar foobar@234" and "git tag -d foobar@234" fixed that easy enough.

Another problem that popped up during the conversion where old tags and branches that I want to keep for historic purpose, but that don't play any role in active development. In SVN one could simply delete those and it would be fine, as they would stay in the SVN history. With Git that is not possible, branches and tags are unversioned in Git and when one deletes them they are gone for good, including the source code to which they pointed. To work around that I converted the branches to tags:

git tag archive/branches/foobar foobar
git branch -d foobar

This way the code to which the branches pointed are still around and can be converted back to a branch via a simple checkout. The old stuff still shows up in "git tag", but as one uses that command a lot less then "git branch", it's not really a problem. The process for the obsolete tags was the same, I moved them to archive/tags/.

I also did a bit of normalization with the release tags, which game in numerous different forms, such as release_0_1_0 or pingus-0.7.2. I renamed them to the semantic versioning scheme, i.e. "v0.7.0".

Final repository is available at:

http://code.google.com/p/pingus/

The few subprojects floating around in the old SVN trunk/ will be converted in the coming days, some of them probably ending up on GitHub instead of in the Pingus repository, as they are not all that Pingus specific.

Windstille: Another round of svn2git

2011-08-27T08:16:00.000-07:00

Did another round of converting an SVN repository to Git yesterday, this time Windstille. Instead of going the manual route I used svn2git this time, which automates the renaming of remote branches/tags to local ones. I haven't verified in depth if everything worked out right, but it seems to have performed well enough. Even svn2git however leaves some traces of SVN behind that have to be cleaned up, namely a few svn remote repositories and a few entries in .git/config, but that is easy enough to fix. The final result can be found at:

http://code.google.com/p/windstille/

Why Google Code and not GitHub or something else? First of course the obvious, Google Code now supports Git, which it didn't some month ago. More importantly however Google Code has a 4GB space limit, while GitHub has a tiny 0.3GB space limit. Google Code also now finally has support for multiple Git repositories in a single project, so it's easy to break of all the subdirectories one might have had in SVN, without it getting to messy and without a need to stuck it all into a single Git repository.

Converting from SVN to Git

2011-08-17T13:52:00.000-07:00

I just converted Galapix from SVN to Git, so here a quick overview about the process.

First thing one wants to do is make a copy of the repository, as the conversion can take quite a bit of time and made require a few restarts to get every detail right. A copy of the repository can be done with svnsync:

svnadmin create /tmp/your_svn_repository
svnsync init file:///tmp/your_svn_repository http://www.googlecode/your_projects_svn_dir
svnsync sync file:///tmp/your_svn_repository

This creates a local repository and copies all the content from the remote, here googlecode, repository in it. One done with that one can start creating the git repository from it, for that there exist "git svn", which not only allows conversions of repository, but also checkins from the Git repository back into the SVN repository if desired, however we are not going to allow this. This is meant as a one way conversion from SVN to Git without a way back.

So next step is:

git svn clone file:///tmp/your_svn_repository/ your_project.git \
--trunk trunk/galapix/ \
--tags tags/ \
--branches branches/ \
-A /tmp/authors.txt \
--no-metadata

The --trunk, --tags and --branches do the obvious thing, they tell "git svn" where to look for your branches and tags, as they don't have a fixed locations in SVN. The authors.txt file is a simple text file mapping the SVN account to Git style names, it has the form of:

grumbel = Ingo Ruhnke <grumbel@gmail.com>

Where the left half is the SVN accountname and the right half the Git name.

Tho --no-metadata flag strips out meta data that "git svn" would normally insert into the commit messages to allow tracking the Git commits back to their SVN origin. This might have some use if you have references in documentation or bug reports to older revisions, but seems otherwise not be needed, so we strip it here.

The next step is a bit weird. With that "git svn clone" you now have a full functioning Git repository of your SVN content, but something is still wrong. All your SVN tags get converted to remote branches by "git svn", not tags and all the SVN branches are also remote branches, not local ones. I am not quite sure why that happens, part of the reason seems to be because SVN tags don't have to be constant, while Git tags have to be, but not really sure way then they are remote and not local ones.

Anyway, the conversion from remote branches to proper tags and local branches isn't that difficult, just a little ugly. To see everything "git svn" has produced use:

git branch -a -v

The interesting part are the remote branches, listable via:

git branch -r -v

Another way to inspect the repository situation is via:

git show-ref

Converting the branches to tags is a simple matter of doing something like this:

git tag galapix-0.1.0 tags/galapix-0.1.0

Converting the branches can be done with:

git branch local_branch_name remote_branch_name

Some branches and tags might be exist multiple times, once as tags/galapix-0.1.0 and once as something like tags/galapix-0.1.0@723. I assume that is the result of SVN "accidents", i.e. deleting a tag or branch and then recreating it or otherwise breaking clean continuity of the repository. The @{number} branches and tags seem to be the older one, so in case you know what you are doing, you can probably just delete them. There might also be a branch called trunk/, you can just delete that as it should be identical with the master branch you have.

Deleting the old now converted branches is a simple matter of:

git branch -d -r tags/galapix-0.1.0

The final step is cleaning up some remains of "git svn", in .git/config there is a section called [svn-remote] and [svn] that can be deleted and there is a subdirectory .git/svn/ which is no longer needed either.

If that last section sounded a bit messy, it's because it is. I couldn't really find any definitive documentation on how to do any of that the proper way, it all boilded down to some manual for-loop and grep'ing to manually translate the branches to local ones and tags.

Another issue which I haven't really looked deeper into is how the whole process reacts to less clean SVN repositories, i.e. repositories where the content of trunk/ might have been moved around to say trunk/{subproject} or where other accidents might have happened with the branches/ and tags/ directory.

I am also still a little clueless on why "git svn" creates everything as remote branches, not as regular local branches, its highly likely an artifact of "git svn" allowing commits back into the svn repository, but no idea why there isn't an easy way to disable that.

xboxdrv 0.8.2 released

2011-08-06T17:58:00.000-07:00

added click-press, click-release, click-both button filter
added delay button filter
added simple Python script for response curve generation
added PDF Afterglow AX.1 Xbox360 controller support
fixed swapped keys in KeyAxisEventHandler

Download: http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/xboxdrv/

Review: Descent 3: Mercenary (PC)

2011-08-01T17:00:00.000-07:00

Descent 3: Mercenary is a seven level expansion pack to Descent 3, it was released in 1999 six month after the original game. The games story takes place inbetween the end of Descent II and the first few missions of Descent 3. The player controls this time around not the Material Defender, like in other Descent parts, but a mercenary that is involved in attack and sabotage missions, some of those attacks triggering events happening in the original Descent 3 plot.

The core gameplay of Mercenary is identical to that of Descent 3, new weapons or game objects are not provided as far as I can tell, aside from a few new enemy types. Descent 3 problems are also untouched. The guide bot still moves rather erratically in large environments, which makes it extremely hard to follow, it can also still get lost from time to time and not find the way back, both problems didn't exist in Descent II. Weapon and enemy fire still lack a proper feel for impact, making it hard to judge if you hit something or got hit. Enemy design is also still rather problematic, with enemies shooting to many to fast moving projectiles that make it impossible to properly dodge them other then by wild circle strafing. The game also again contains plenty of unbalanced gameplay situations, where you run into spots one is attacked from multiple sides by multiple enemies, making it hard or impossible to find a save spot. Enemies also reduce your health rather quickly, sometimes in two hits, which often leads to random death before you even know what was going on.

The reset point system from Descent 3 is present again. It will respawn you with your weapons gone and placed on your death spot for recollection without reseting the game world, thus enemies will stay exactly where they where when you died. This keeps frustration rather low, even in unfair situations. The game does however have a few weird spots where you have to do something under a timelimit and failing to do so will result in a failure of the mission, with the player being reset to the start of the level. Thus saving before pressing a switch that might trigger a time limit is needed to avoid running into situations that force a replay of a level.

As with the original game, Descent 3: Mercenary is again rather heavy on the puzzles. A lot of times you will have to press a switch or perform other puzzly acts and not be much involved in combat. Combat takes more of a side role, it's there, but it often feels more like a small obstacle between the current puzzle and the next, not the core focus of the game. The reset system, which often lead to a simple death/retry loop further enhances that feeling, as being actually good in combat provides little if any benefit. The game also introduces a few weird "soccer puzzles", in which you have to push a ball around and navigate it to a specific target, those feel kind of even more out of place then the regular switches. One of those puzzles also felt rather broken, or well, maybe I just couldn't figure out the proper solution. All it involved was kicking a ball through a pipe, except that none of the weapons seemed to have any effect and the only way to push it was with the ship itself. Touching the ball however lead to instant death, no matter how slow and gentle. I solved the puzzle simply by crash, respawn, crash, etc. On the positive side of things I however found none of the puzzles to be as complicated and time consuming as some of the bad ones in the original Desecent 3.

Overall Descent 3: Mercenary is simply more Descent 3, with all the problems and issues still intact. The thing I like about Descent is the fast navigation through narrow tunnels and the way you can manoveur around enemy projectiles with the 6DOF control scheme. In Descent 3 and this add-on, however all the locations are large, making the navigation feel slow and boring and the number and speed of enemy projectiles makes them near impossible to dodge individually and you quickly resort to random circle strafing and random death. The focus on puzzles also just feels out of place. The last boss fight, in the tradition of the series, also feels incredible unfair again and the ending is, unlike the fully animated intro, just a disappointing still frame with a lazy "The End" text, the add-on doesn't even bother to scroll any credits. So while this isn't a bad game, it again fails to reach the real potential that I see in the Descent series.

Review: Descent II (PC)

2011-07-25T07:17:00.000-07:00

Descent II was released in 1996 and developed by Parallax Software. The game is the direct sequel to Descent which was released a year earlier and like its predecessor it is a six-degree-of-freedom flight combat game set in underground mines.

While on a quick look the game looks almost identical to its predecessor, differences in level design and a few new gadgets change the gameplay and flow a good bit. The first noticeable change are the new weapons, next to the basic laser, vulcan, spread, plasma and fusion weapons there are now essentially more powerful versions of each of those. The the gauss canon shoots explosive projectiles, the helix cannon has a bigger spread then the spread canon, the phoenix shoots reflect on walls and the omega weapon shoots kind of a lightning beam. The missiles got extended as well, next to the concussion, homing, smart and mega missiles are now flash missiles, which can blind players and enemies, guided missiles, which can be remote controlled by the player and earthshaker missiles, which provides a earth shaking explosion. The bombs get extended with super bombs, which explode into numerous projectiles.

The new non-weapon items include a set of headlights, that lights up the environment, but uses energy and an afterburner, that provides a quick boost for the players spaceship. The classic flares are still present. The most significant new item in Descent II is probably the guide bot, this little helper, which has to be found and freed at the start of each level, provides an invaluable navigation help. It is able to find energy centers, shield bonuses, hostages and mostly importantly the next needed key. The way it flies around and beeps gives it a very cutesy robot feel, somewhat similar to R2D2.

The enemies in the game are all new, but follow mostly similar design to what was present in the predecessor. The most notable change is that the enemies with homing missiles and vulcan cannons are now a good bit weaker, reducing the frustration they causes in the first Descent. The game however does add a few new annoying enemies types of its own, namely some of the bigger enemies break up into smaller ones on destruction, that are rather fast and hard to hit. The game also adds a special kind of enemy, the thief, this enemy is essentially an evil version of the guide bot. Like the guide bot it will follow you around the labyrinth like levels, but unlike the guide bot, it's not there to help you, but to steal items from you. The thief is extremely fast and will retret on an attack, thus he is extremely hard to hit and kill, which makes it all the more satisfying if one can lure him into a bomb trap.

The level design in Descent II is substantially more complex then in Descent, while the levels are still build up out of a series of deformed cubes, Descent II rarely uses just a single series of cubes to build a corridor, instead it frequently uses multiple cubes side by side to build a wider corridor with beveled edges. The levels are also a good bit more open and less claustrophobic. Descent II also adds some new elements to the level structure itself, while finding the blue, yellow and red keys still form the central part of a levels progression, the game adds plenty of switches, force fields and secret passages that are sometimes used to make progress, even with the help of the guide bot, a little less obvious. Light sources within a level are now destructible once shot.

The auto level functions continues to have the same problems as in the first Descent, namely it tries to align you to the walls of the cube you are in, not any kind of logical horizon of the room you are in. This in combination with the more complex room layout causes much more frustration then it did in the previous title as some rooms become essentially impossible to navigate properly as the ship will constantly try to rotate and thus it becomes more a fight with the controls then a fight with the enemies.

Overall Descent II is again, like its predecessor and its successor Descent 3, a bit of a mixed bag. The core gameplay is still as entertaining as ever and some of the new items make very welcome additions. The guide bot provides invaluable navigation help and makes traversing the levels much simpler without feeling like a cheap cheat and the afterburner makes an essential tool when it comes to dodging enemy homing missiles, as it allows you to cut them short and circle behind the enemies. The thief enemy also leads to some very exciting chases through the mazes and might require some planing and trap building to catch him. It is a type of enemy that I haven't really seen in any other games. Other additions like the new weapons however feel in large part kind of useless, as you simply end up with to many weapons and in turn don't bother to ever use most of them. The boss difficulty, again, is completely insane and the game also has more boss enemies then the previous part, leading to a lot of frustration and load and save cycles. The limited number of lives is still present, but like before won't really matter as load and save will keep take care of the retries.

Having more hidden things in levels is a welcome addition, but the puzzles that slow down the level progress can be a bit annoying, they are also largely build around trial and error, as the game doesn't really provide hints as to where a switch for a force field might be or what wall a switch might have opened up. The guide bot won't help in those situations, as he will simply respond with a "Can't reach XY" when a switch puzzle has to be solved before progressing. Switches are furthermore not marked on the auto-map, so finding them in the first place can often be a little tricky.

The more complex level design also isn't really a change for the better, as frequently they simply look a little ugly. The restriction to basic cubes in the first Descent meant that the levels could be navigated smoothly, the levels here often have you bump into corners and edges as the structure is less regular. Essentially the level end up feeling a little to random and don't really have the same flow as previously.

In the end the core problem with Descent II is that the longer you play it, the more annoying it gets. The first few levels are a ton of fun, but once you reached the last few you just want to get done with it, as the more difficult enemies and enemy placement spoils the flow of the game and leads to quicksaving at basically every corner.

As for what is the best game in the series, that's hard to tell, all of them have their great parts, but also their really frustrating ones. The first seven levels of the first Descent, the one from the shareware version, are probably the best Descent out there.

xboxdrv 0.8.1 released

2011-07-20T21:14:00.000-07:00

added const axis and button filter
added 'generic-usb' controller type for debugging
added cycle-key support to cycle through a sequence of buttons
added proper merging of multiple output events to the same target
added support for Street Fighter IV fightpad
added support for Tron Xbox 360 controller
added support for an unlimited number shift buttons
fixed axis-shift getting ignored when another button is pressed
fixed keys not getting pressed in --ui-axismap
fixed rumble messages getting delayed
reenabled --priority realtime

Download: http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/xboxdrv/

Review: Half Life 2: Episode Two (PC)

2011-07-18T12:00:00.001-07:00

Half Life: Episode Two was released in 2007, almost three years after the original Half Life 2 and marks the thus far last entry into the Half Life series and probably the end of Valves try to move the game into an episodic format. The gameplay is mostly the same as in the two previous entries in the series and continues to follow the route of the linear first person shooter.

After a short cutscene, giving an overview about what happened in the last game, Episode Two starts out exactly where the last game has ended. The big explosion has derailed and destroyed the train and the first job is to get out of the rubble once again. After reacquiring the gravity gun, Alyx and Gordon try to make their way to the rebel base. The story unlike the previous episodes, takes a few interesting twist and turns and has a greater sense of purpose and goals. Alyx is again the companion for most of the game, but a small part of the game a Vortigaunt will be there to help.

The scenarios in Episode Two also makes a change for the better, while the beginning will be spend in a rather ugly mine, much of the later parts plays completely outdoors in bright daylight. The vehicle sections also make a return, so much of the later game will be spend driving around in those lush outdoor forest environments.

Combat in Episode Two also feels quite different, as it is a lot more intense then the combat in Episode One. A lot of time will be spend fighting well equipped Combines instead of the rather slow and weak zombies of the previous game. The game also introduces a new enemy type, the Hunter, which are essentially mini-Strider that take a good many hits to take down. Fights against regular Striders and airships are present as well.

Overall I enjoyed Episode Two a lot more then Episode One. While the game is still mostly build around the exact same gameplay known from the original Half Life 2, by then three year old, it does at least provide new environments and a reasonable story to make the journey interesting, something completely absent in Episode One. The more intense and difficult fighting is a welcome change. In a few sections the game also goes over into a base defense game, which removes the simplicity and predictability of the otherwise linear combat. The game can at times get a little chaotic and frustrating, but it pays of in a much more entertaining experience.

That said, the game isn't without problems, three years after the original game one might expect a little more then just five hours of more of the same, but that's pretty much was this game provides. The story still doesn't really go anywhere and mostly just cleans up some stuff left open in the previous games. My personal pet peeves with the Half Life 2 series are also all still present. The headcrabs still look like roasted chicken and the zombies just look like dudes with a paper bag over their head, not something that is remotely scary, just something that looks funny and odd. Gordon still is a bodyless camera that doesn't interact with its environment and will for example glide straight through Alyx when he wants to get into the car from the wrong side. The NPCs are also all rather flat and one sided as they seem to be doing nothing beside admiring Gordon whenever he walks by.

The gravity gun also still feels just the same, grabbing objects works reasonably fine, but having grabbed objects collide with the environment just feels glitchy. One could certainly do a better job then just having the physics engine glitch around in those situations. Another big, still unsolved issue, is that grabbing objects block your view, which makes aiming at enemies much harder then it should be and most of the time its a bit of a game of luck. A little change in perspective or how Gordon holds objects could go a long way.

Driving cars around also doesn't feel great. The steering is overly sensitive and it is way to easy to accidentally get off the road and ram into a tree or rubble pile at the side of the road that will make the car do all kinds of weird stuff. Driving is also badly adapted to the gamepad, as acceleration and steering will be done both with the left stick, instead of having acceleration on the triggers like in almost any other game. This adds some more wobbliness to the already not so great driving mechanics.

In the end, it is a fun game that provides more of the good parts of Half Life 2 in a new setting with a reasonably interesting story to take you along and in turn is much more enjoyable then Episode One. It doesn't reinvent the wheel and maybe at this time it should have tried a little harder do to something new, but it's still fun enough for what it is.

Review: Half Life 2: Episode One (PC)

2011-07-11T22:54:00.000-07:00

Half Life 2: Episode One was developed by Valve and released in 2006, around one and a half year after previous game Half Life 2. It was Valves failed attempt to turn the Half Life franchise into an episodic format, as only another episode would follow before the series went into hiatus in 2007. Episode One is like its predecessor a classic first person shooter, the gameplay is pretty much unchanged, while the graphics have gotten a little upgrade. The story picks up mere seconds after the inconclusive end of the previous game. The player plays again as mute scientist Gordon Freeman.

The game starts out with the big explosion at the Citadel in City 17, the Vortigaunts intervene and rescue Alyx and Gordon Freeman, who then try to make it back into the Citadel to stop its core from exploding. This part of the game plays very similar to the ending of the previous one. Gordon's gravity gun gets super charged again and much time in the Citadel is spending shooting energy orbs into receptacles to activate bridges and other machinery. Once out of the Citadel both Alyx and Gordon have to make it through a bunch of dark underground passages. In these passages there is essentially no light and the only source of illumination is Gordon's flashlight, which happens to be constantly short on battery power. Once out of the darkness the rest of the games takes place overground in City 17 where ultimately the city is abandoned and the remaining humans are trying to leave the city by train.

The core gameplay is taken essentially unchanged from its predecessor and contains all the old issues. Running around in the world still feels overly smooth, like gliding on ice, not like a realistic walking human. The player character still has no 3D model and is just a floating camera, which especially in a scene right at the beginning where he is sitting in a car just looks a little ridiculous. This also makes some of the jumping parts of the game a little more annoying then they should be, as its hard to judge how close the player is to an edge when there is neither feed nor shadow to provide any reference. Interaction with NPC is again non-existent. Alyx follows the player around through essentially the whole game this time and while she can die, in theory, in practice she is almost invulnerable and provides plenty of supporting firepower. New weapon are not provided as far as I can tell and the environments all look pretty much exactly the same as in the previous games. Aside from the mentioned 'energy orb into receptacle' puzzle, the game also has a few physic based puzzles again that have the player place stuff on or under a seesaw to be able to reach the other end. None of those however feel interesting or clever.

In terms of controls the game supports gamepads more or less out of the box, the support, while playable, feels however rather rough. The few tutorial messages on the HUD still mention the keyboard keys, not the gamepad buttons. The zoom is done by clicking and holding the right stick, which is extremely uncomfortable and should have been a toggle instead (can be worked around by using XPadder). The weapon switching feels extremely bugged, it comes in three forms, a HUD-less quick switch, a pie menu and a menu at the top of the screen. Switching between the quick select and the menu is possible via the option menu, which kind of menu the player gets however seemed rather random, one is intended for the gamepad and one for the keyboard, but a few times when configuring things I ended up with the keyboard one on the gamepad. The game also had a huge issue where not all of the weapons would be selectable via the dpad menu, instead I only could select weapons from the first four groups, with the rocket launcher and grenade, even so collected, not available in the menu at all. After the game crash and I had to restart it, Steam started to download a patch, and after that the problem was gone and the rocket launcher would be displayed in the dpad menu. Not sure if the patch or restarting the game was the cure and neither am I sure what kind of patch Steam even downloaded, as the copy of the game itself was just freshly downloaded itself and I would hope Steam would download the latest one, not an old unpatched one, but anyway, after being first rather confused why the rocket launcher would just disappear I could finish th game.

Overall it is a tolerable game, but it feels incredible boring and uninspired. Essentially everything the player has to do in the game, he has already seen in Half Life 2. All the puzzles feel recycled, the weapon are recycled and the environments are all recycled as well. There is literally nothing of interest here that one hasn't already seen in Half Life 2. And the only new thing are the dark sections of the game, however those are also the most annoying due to the tiny cone of light and limited battery and don't contain anything interesting other then being extremely dark. In terms of story the game is also rather mediocre, as hardly anything of interest happens. It's essentially just an act of running from the Citadel to the train station to then escape with a train. The ending is also just as inconclusive as the previous game, fading to the credits after the Citadel explodes. Level design stays extremely linear, leaving even less freedom then in the previous game. Vehicle sections are absent and the game can be finished in around five hours. Also didn't like the characterization of Alyx much, as she ended up looked more like a Gordon Freedom groupie then a colleague or friend.

It's essentially more Half Life 2, but without having the bonus of being something new and so everything ends up feeling recycled and a little tedious.

Forcing fullscreen in Linux for apps that don't support it properly, Part 3

2011-07-04T09:31:00.000-07:00

I switched the window capture tool described in the last blog post now to plain Xlib, this solves most of the issues I had with keyboard focus and makes the program mostly working. Haven't figured out how to properly pass events, such as key presses/releases I receive in the main window to the captured child window, I suppose XSendEvent() will do that and it works with a plain xev, but it fails for some other applications I have tried.

Source code for the tools is now available from:

https://github.com/Grumbel/fullscreen-tools

It's still all rough and experimental, so source customization might be needed to make use of some of those tools.

Forcing fullscreen in Linux for apps that don't support it properly, Part 2

2011-07-03T08:55:00.000-07:00

How to force a window into fullscreen mode via xrandr and override_redirect was explained somewhat in the last blog past. That method however has limitations, it expects the window to be of the right size and aspect ratio and that you actually can switch to a fitting resolution with xrandr. Not to big a problem with your average 800x600, but some uneven resolutions such as 960x600 (320x200 with a 3x scaler) can often give trouble, either not being supported at all or displayed incorrectly on a LCD.

How to fix the situation in theory is easy, you pick the closed resolution to the target, move the window into the center of the screen, instead of the the top left and just display a black border around the window to get a letter boxed view. Implementing that in practice is a little more complicated, as getting two windows above the panel and into the right order is a little ugly.

There is however a nice way to handle the situation, you can have one XWindow essentially swallow another XWindow. This works via XReparentWindow() or in PyGtk terms with gtk.gdk.window_foreign_new(), to get a GdkWindow from a WindowId, and then with a gdk.Window.reparent() call. That way one ends up with a window containing the other application and that window can be resized or fullscreen like a regular window, so it is very simple to get it where one wants it to have.

There are still some unsolved bits left: I haven't yet managed to give the swallowed window keyboard focus, in only receives mouse events. Not sure if that is something that can be fixed via PyGtk or if I have to switch to more low level Xlib coding.

Another more simple alternative solution that I haven't played with: One can launch a child Xwindow server, such as Xephyr, set a X11 background color, start the application in that. All that without a window manager, so one would just need to position the window properly in the server. That would however not be as flexible and Xephyr can't do window resize right now.

GtkPlug and GtkSocket are another alternative, they are, in theory, build to handle this window swallowing in a nice wrappered up GtkWidget form, but so far I didn't had much success in actually using them, as they fail for exactly the same reason as gdk_window_foreign_new() is causing trouble.

Review: Garshasp: The Monster Slayer (PC)

2011-07-02T10:00:00.000-07:00

Garshasp: The Monster Slayer was developed by Dead Mage Inc. and released in 2011. The game is notable for being developed by an Iranian development team using some Free Software such as Ogre or OpenAL. In the game, set in persian mythology, the player takes the role of Garshasp, a warrior who goes on a journey to take revenge for his fallen brother. The gameplay takes some strong influence from the God of War series and follows most of its basic game mechanics.

As in God of War the game is presented from a zoomed out third person camera view and the player has to hack its way through hoards of monsters and boss enemies. The camera is automatically controlled and the second analog stick is used for dodging. Light and heavy attacks are available and can be chained together or used to trigger special attacks. Certain types of enemies also require a finishing move that is done via a short quicktime sequence. Whenever there is an enemy encounters the environment will be closed up, either by doors or fire walls that block the player, defeating the enemies opens them up again. Pedestals are provided between every few fights to let the player refresh his health or collect experience points, which in turn unlock new special moves.

Progress through the levels is very linear and consists of mostly monster fighting, but is at times interrupted for a little switch puzzle or a short platform sequence. The game also contains a few race sequences where the hero slides down a wall and has to dodge obstacles along the way. Every now and then the game interrupts for a short little cutscene, those transitions between one scenario to the next, but do little to add much story. In essence the game really plays a lot like God of War, taking almost every mechanic straight from it. Some other reviews have compared it to Prince of Persia, but I really haven't seen any similarities with those, the hero looks a little like the prince in PoP: Warrior Within, but the game contains only very limited platforming that is pretty much exactly like God of War and nothing like the elaborate jumping sequences in a Prince of Persia game.

Graphically the game can't compete with modern blockbuster titles on a technical side of things, but looks none the less artistically quite nice, not to far away from the God of War it tries to imitate. It suffers however from a few technical issues, such as object and scenary pop-in or stuttering framerate when things get loaded from disk. While some animation look a little lacking or badly paced, such as the jumping and ladder climbing, and can make it a little tricky to get through the platforming sequences, the core of the game, the fighting, is animated extremely well, providing a wide varity of moves, combinations and different finishing moves for the different enemy types. The animations also deserve some praise for being very easy to read, thus blocking or dodging an incoming attack is very manageable.

One aspect that is rather lacking in the game is the tutorial, it lacks proper button prompts and only gives you the name of the action, which makes it hard to figure out which button on the gamepad to press. Explanation on the fighting is also lacking, while special moves are announced while unlocked, the tutorial doesn't explain much about the core fighting itself. It also doesn't explain very well how the upgrade system works, its mostly automatic anyway, so its not much of a practical, but it took a bit longer then I liked to figure out what all the bars in the HUD mean.

Overall I was pleasantly surprised by the game. While it is rather rough on the technical side of things, especially the loading hick ups where a bit annoying, it looks and plays surprisingly well. The enemy moves are easy to read and counter and all the boss enemies have some clear strategy to defeating them, thus combat wasn't just about button mashing, but actually figuring out proper strategies.

On the artistic side of things the game was a bit of a disappointment, while the scenarios, enemies and animations look nice, they also look a little generic, like a low budget western game, not something different with a lot of influence from a different culture. This is quite different then what you see from many Russian games for example, which, while also technically often riddled with issues, go frequently a very different directions when it comes to style and gameplay then the mainstream western games, which makes them much less accessible, but also much more interesting. Garshasp on the other side lacks those qualities and is really nothing more then a God of War clone, it is a quite solid one at that, but it really doesn't do anything extraordinary or noteworthy beside that. The story in the game is also rather flat, lacking a proper introduction of the characters or a real ending, it's essentially just a "brother gets killed, Garshasp goes for revenge, Garshasp succeeds with revenge, goes on to fight more stuff in cliffhanger ending opening potential for a sequel".

It's worth to note that the game is also unusually short, unlike other games in this genre that at least reach the 6 or 8 hour mark, Garshasp is just around 3.5 hours long, which given its low price point seems fine (as of this writing the game sells for $2.50 on Steam), but still gives the game, especially with its open ending, a bit of an episodic feel, without the game actually being planed or marketed as an episodic game.

Technical notes: The game complains about crashing Flashplayer installer on startup, I worked around that by replacing the Flash installer in its redist/ directory with a newer one. The game for me also crashed at startup, a problem I could solve by uninstalling the old PhysX I had on the system and using the one provided by the game instead.

Forcing fullscreen in Linux for apps that don't support it properly

2011-06-29T09:33:00.000-07:00

Following situation: You have an application or game in Linux that you want to run in fullscreen, but the app doesn't support it or not with the flexibility you want.

Simple Case

In the simple case you will have the problem with an application that allows window resize, if that's the case, the solution is a simple:

wmctrl -r ":ACTIVE:" -b toggle,fullscreen

Which will put the currently focused window into fullscreen, i.e. maximize it and get rid of the window borders and title.

Complicated Case

There are of course also applications that don't do window resize properly or not at all, for those the solution is a bit more complicated. First thing we have to do is get rid of the window borders on move the window to 0,0. As the Gnome panel doesn't allow that, just removing the decorations, which can be done with wmctrl, isn't enough, we have to set override redirect, which will take the window out of the window managers hand and thus allow us to position it above the Gnome panel at the top/left of the screen. So how do we do that? A bit of Python and Gtk (raw X11 would of course do as will, but Gtk makes things a little easier):

#! /usr/bin/python
from gtk.gdk import *
import gtk.gdk
import time
import sys

if len(sys.argv) == 2:
w = window_foreign_new(int(sys.argv[1], 16))
else:
w = window_foreign_new((get_default_root_window().property_get("_NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW")[2][0]))

w.set_keep_above(True) # to raise it over the panel
w.set_decorations(0)
w.set_override_redirect(True)
window_process_all_updates()
gtk.gdk.flush()
w.move(0, 0)
gtk.gdk.flush()

This script will either take the currently focused window or a window given on the command line and put it in override redirect mode, as well as position it at 0,0. There is also a keep_above() in there so that the panel won't end up behind the Gnome panel.

The script isn't pretty, bug free or finished, it's actually kind of a mess. The flush() stuff is trying to work around the image move() command getting ignored, but doesn't really fix it. And I am not sure why the set_decorations(0) is needed in addition when doing a set_override_redirect(True). But whatever, it kind of works and if it doesn't just run it twice. Once run the currently focused window should be hanging at the top/left of your screen.

Switching the resolution

A window at the top/left screen is of course by itself not very attractive, so the next step is to switch the resolution, that can either be done manually via the XRandr GUI tools or via shell with something like:

xrandr --output DFP2 --mode "640x480"

Exact commands will of course vary from system to system. The fun part is that this also allows multi-monitor setups:

xrandr \
--output DFP2 \
--mode "640x480" \
--panning "640x480+1280+0/0x0+0+0" \
--output CRT1 \
--mode "1280x1024" \
--panning "1280x1024+0+0/0x0+0+0"

This would put the right monitor into 640x480, while keeping the left monitor at its native resolution, thus you can browse the web while playing an old game in Dosbox or whatever.

Other solutions and remaining issues

Another solution to the fullscreen problem is to run a separate Xserver for the game with the right resolution and without a window manager, this allows clean switching between game and desktop, but doesn't allow multi monitor use.

Mouse/keyboard grab is another problem that might be worth some further exploration, some games depend on it, so it might be worthwhile to force it, while other don't let you ungrab the mouse without exiting the game. I haven't really looked into either, but at least for the more popular things like Dosbox, there is generally a keyboard combination to break it (Ctrl-F10). Another problem with grab is that it is often to tight, i.e. commands like Volume Up/Down will get eaten by the app and not make it to the window manager which is quite annoying.

It might also be worth to cleanup the above script into a proper wrapper that can be used around the game executable to make the whole process of override redirect and resolution switch fully automatic. Integration into the window manager would also be nice, to make it a more standard part of the Linux desktop experience, not an dirty hack.

Review: Descent 3 (PC)

2011-06-25T12:09:00.000-07:00

Descent 3 was developed by Outrage Entertainment and released in 1999. The game follows the same base gameplay that the previous two games in the series did. The player is in control of a small spacecraft that is used to navigate through underground mines, caves and similar structures. Descent allows full six degrees of freedom controls in those environments, thus flying through a hole in the roof or diving through a hole in the ground are very common occasions.

The graphics in Descent 3 stay relatively close to those of the predecessor games, but thanks to Direct3D or OpenGL now allow much higher resolutions and texture filtering. Even so the polygon count is higher however the graphics are largely unspectacular and can look rather block in spots, the one exception being the light effects. The game now as a nice little glow effect around light sources and missiles and laser fire, as in the previous games, continue to light up the environment. Thus firing a missile through a dark cave will give a nice illumination of the cave as the missile flies along. The game also allows the player to fire flares or use headlights on his spaceship to light up dark caves. While all those effects might technically not be all that impressive by today's standards, I haven't really seen any game that really replicated them this well either.

On the control side Descent 3 offers a wide variety of configuration options and allows to map essentially every of the six axis it needs to either a button or joystick axis, thus is works quite fine even with modern day gamepads. An auto-leveling function is available when one doesn't have enough controls available to control the roll of the ship comfortably and while this function works for most part quite fine, I found it a little odd that it often leaves one off by a few degrees, instead of given a perfect horizontal level orientation. Another odd thing with the controls are some of the key mappings, unlike the main vehicle functions, which are completely configurable, some auxiliary functions are not and mapped to weird key combinations. Saving is mapped to Alt-F2 and viewing the log messages is mapped to Alt-F8 and releasing the guide bot is mapped to F4, what makes this weird is that those are all functions one regularly uses in the game, essentially the only function for which one needs the keyboard, so having them mapping to key-combination is rather uncomfortable. Viewing the log messages with Shift-F8 furthermore doesn't pause the game, so it can get really awkward when one gets surprised by an enemy while reading the log.

The control scheme I used for ship control was left-stick for horizontal-strafe and forward/backward, right stick for pitch and yaw and LB/RB for vertical-strafe. I mapped roll to dpad left/right, but didn't use that much in actual gameplay.

The game provides the player with three types of weapons, a gun for firing lasers and other small projectiles, a missile launcher and the ability to drop mines. Upgrades to those weapons are spread throughout the levels or dropped by killed enemies. I found the mines, from which there are even different types, to be rather useless throughout the single player campaign, one acquires them to rarely and the fighting is to hectically to really allow strategic placement of them, they seem to be build for multiplayer use. Same is true for some of the missile types, which while extremely powerful, are so rare that one never really has the change to use them in a good spot. Furthermore the game is rather bad when it comes to weapon, whenever the current weapon runs out of ammunition, the most powerful one will be selected, the problem is that this often results in weapons getting selected that should be reserved for special purposes and fired by accident. Thus one not only wasted a special weapon, but often even dies as result, as their damage radius is to large for them to be used in normal combat.

Aside from the combat mechanics, a central part of Descent is the guide bot. This little bot, whose beeping noises are reminiscent of R2-D2's in Star Wars, is a fundamental helper in guiding the player through the complicated levels. It keeps track of the next mission objective and will show the player the way to the target. It will also light the way by shooting flares into walls and occasionally shoot one into the players windshield by accident. When the players ship catches fire he will also act as fire extinguisher and put the fire out. The guide bot adds a great amount of personality to the game, as it is a small little dependable helper, that helps you through his actions, not by dialog and seeing it flying around the ship trying to get the player to follow him is jut cute. It's implementation has a few small issues, sometimes it will get left behind and not find the way back to the player on his own and in large open areas he seems to fly around a bit randomly and untargeted, marking it hard to follow him, but especially in the more tighter parts of a level the bot is a great orientation help and does this job in a much more interesting and charming way then the anonymous navigation lines and arrows used in modern games.

The enemies in Descent 3 are yet again a whole bunch of industrial robots that have gone aggressive due to a virus, there is a wide variety of enemies, with unique looks and weapons. However where the game falls flat is in how it uses those enemies, far to often it just pushes the player against an overly large number of enemies, making the combat chaotic and random. Frequently one simply gets overpowered by enemies and dies before even realizing what was going on. The enemies also all act with the same six degrees of freedom as the player does, this sadly removes the opportunity of a tactical approaching to exploit the enemies weak spots, instead most of the time one just circle strafes a lot and fires whatever weapons one has left. This is also true for the few boss enemies in the game, which really don't seem to allow any kind of tactical approach other then just shooting a lot at it. Enemies also have a noticeably lack of hit feedback, so it is often not clear if one is even doing any damage.

The way the game handles death and respawn is rather interesting, similar to Bioshock's Vita Chambers, the game will reset the player when he dies, but won't reset the rest of game world. The players collected weapons will however remain at his position of death and have to be required. While this removes a lot of the frustration one might have in the game, it removes any challenge, especially when it comes to boss fights, one simply fires what one has, dies, respawn and fires again. This makes the fights tedious and uninteresting. Furthermore one sometimes loses all the weapons in the process, as fighting the boss doesn't leave time to recollect the lost weapons and the next level might trigger before one has managed to do so. However I only ran into that issue once in the game. On normal levels the guide bot has the ability to search for the lost items so that they can be recollected even when one doesn't remember where one lost them.

As far as story and setting go, Descent 3 is a weird mix. Intro and outro cutscenes, while technically primitive, are quite well done and have a bigger emotional impact then one would expect from this type of game. However they don't really factor into the gameplay itself. There are some rare voice communications that inform the player of the mission goals, but it is so rare and limited to the start of a level, that at the end of it, one regularly forgets why one is even there. The mission briefings at the start of a mission don't really help much either. Essentially without the guide bot remembering what one has to do next, one could easily get completely lost. The setting of the game have however a good amount of variety, one isn't limited to caves and mines, one also goes flying through subway stations, invades factories and goes flying on the surfaces of Venus and Mercury, but again, the story just enough to turn all of that into a larger connected experience. It all feels a little random and is rather hard to follow. The game also throws in a few puzzle sequences here and there which feel a bit out of place, after all flying in a spaceship isn't the best place to push switches.

Overall I am rather split on Descent 3, while I still love the core six-degree-of-freedom gameplay, the guide bot and the creative enemy design, the game build around it just feels rough and unbalanced. Some of the boss enemies, especially the last one, essentially felt completely impossible to beat in any sane manner and beating them by abusing the respawn mechanics didn't felt very satisfactory either. Regular enemies don't far much better, to often one is just overpowered by them with no real way to fight back. Tactical fighting almost never works and it all becomes a hectic circle strafe fest that isn't much fun. The game also features a few points where enemies can endlessly respawn, which seem to serve no other purpose then annoy and frustrate the player and especially late in the game those things can become a huge problem those spots are combined with time consuming switch puzzles one has to do while being attacked by enemies. Often even without proper hints of what one needs to do. Especially later in the game it became just more frustration then it was fun.

Technical notes: Playing the game in Wine in Linux didn't work for me. First stopping point was the video-tab in the setup dialog that freezes. This could be worked around with a regedit hack. Once past that the graphics themselves worked fine and where fluid, the sound however was completely broken. I ended up playing the game in Vista. To map the Xbox360 gamepad triggers to missiles and laser shots I had to use XPadder, as the game didn't allow doing that with its internal configuration.

xboxdrv 0.8.0 released

2011-05-25T18:06:00.000-07:00

added --no-dbus option
added ABS/axis support to macros
added Street Fighter Fightpad support
added example config for Microsoft Ergonomic 4000 zoom wheel
added example config for Star Wars: Tie Fighter
added rel-repeat value of -1 for sending an event only once
added support for chatpad on bcdVersion 1.14 controller
added support for relative filenames for macros
fixed daemon mode
fixed deadzone filter issues with MIN:MAX:SMOOTH
fixed endian issues in Xbox360 and Xbox360 wireless controller
fixed wireless controller not getting reset to neutral position on disconnected
changed the meaning of --timeout 0
removed boost::thread dependency
switched from threads to asynchronous USB handling and glib

This releases contains a large scale switch to asynchronous USB communication, so expect some bugs to pop up. Daemon mode is working again. Bug reports are welcome.

Download: http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/xboxdrv/

Review: Dead Space (PC)

2011-05-17T08:11:00.000-07:00

Dead Space is a sci-fi survival horror game developed by Electronic Arts and released in 2008. In the game the player takes control of engineer Isaac Clarke, who battles himself through hordes of mutated creatures on the spaceship USG Ishimura. The setting takes quite some inspiration from movies like Event Horizon, while the gameplay is very similar to that of Resident Evil 4.

As far as story is concerned there really isn't much positive to say about Dead Space. A few moments after arriving on the deserted USG Ishimura with his team essentially all hell breaks lose and Isaac is separated from the rest of his surviving team. They continue to stay around to give new objectives via video chat, but one never directly interacts with them or anybody else for that matter over the coures of the game. A further frustration is that many of the story sequences are implemented as essentially a cutscenes behind a window, which stops you from interacting with the events unfolding and makes you a passive observer. Dead Space isn't the first game to use this cheap trick, but it uses it in almost every single character interaction which makes it feel incredible fake and forced. Every now and then the game will also have you run into an audio-log, but those rarely contain anything to interesting. On top of that the few regular text-logs that the game provides feel like they should have been audio-log, as they slow the game down unnecessarily.

The story follows essentially all the stupid genre cliches, everybody except the player character will die and there is some obvious betrayal down the line. Most of the objectives also feel rather tedious, as Isaac is essentially send from one section of the ship to the next to fix something, only to have another thing break a few moments later to turn into his next objective. This makes the whole plot feel unfocused and improved, as there really isn't much of a real build up or senes of accomplishment. The bit of backtracking that this causes is however not really an issue, as it is quite rare and most of the game is very linear.

The gameplay is easily strongest part of Dead Space. While it does take many obvious inspirations from Resident Evil 4 it goes a different route with the monster killing, as it doesn't just matter how many times you shoot an enemy, but it becomes more important of where you shoot them. Limbs can be shoot of and in turn will slow an enemy down and they take much more health then a regular body hit. Most enemies will also die after a specific number of limbs have been detached. A limited stasis power can be used to freeze enemies on the spot to give more time for aiming at the limbs. This mechanic of dismemberment is quite fun for most part, as it requires a more thoughtful approach to put down enemies then just the regular spraying of bullets. The weapon design is also special, as it doesn't follow the regular pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, etc. design, but instead each weapon, maskeraded by the game as an engineering tool, has a unique feel to it, thus you have cutting weapons that are either optimal for many short range cuts or weapons that excel at precision cuts in the distance, while a flamethrower will help to get rid of swarms of small enemies. Weapon upgrades are done via power nodes that can be collected throughout the game or bought from the shop, upgrade itself happens on a benches that are again scattered throughout the game.

Aside from the weopons and the statis power the game also provides you with a kinesis power, that works somewhat similar to the gravity gun in Half Life 2. It is hovever only used for very simple tasks such moving a piece of machinery from one location to the other or launching an explosive container against an enemy, elaborate physics puzzles aren't provided and in general the game doesn't really have any real puzzles, just a few switches to press to make machinery go.

The inventory management, along with a shop and storage system, also takes quite some inspirations from Resident Evil 4, but feels a little misplaced in this game. You never have to pick up puzzle relevant objects, thus your whole inventory is only used for ammunition, health packs and a few other items, but unlike Resident Evil, the inventory here feels huge, it can hold all the health packs you want along with more ammunition then you will ever need, thus there never is much of a trade off to make on what you want to take with you, you simply take all of it. Weapons are placed outside of the inventory and you can always carry four with you. You might still run out of inventory space every now and then in the beginning of the game, but that's just because you get overfull with ammunition and health packs and haven't run past a store to drop it off. Later in the game suit upgrades will increase your inventory space even more, so that you will essentially never run out of space again. A little annoyance however in the rare instance when you do run out of space is that the game won't let you use things in place, so instead just using a health pack, you have to first put it in your inventory, which means when that is full that you first have to drop an item, pick up the health pack, use it, the repickup the item you dropped. Not much of a practical problem, but a really cumbersome and ugly way to do such a basic task.

While Dead Space obviously tries to go for horror, I found the horror aspects to be pretty much non-existant, yes, it is a dark game, sometimes only illuminated by some flashing lights, has all the monster growling filling the audio channel and the occasional try at a jump scare, but it all feels extremely formulaic and predictable. The heavy use of monster closets and the overuse of monster types doesn't help either. You simply get used to it all very quickly and the worst the game will do to you is give you a headache, as the contrast between dark environment and flashing lights can get a little annoying. The moments where the game gets atmospheric are the rare moments where it breaks away from the cliche monster growling and lets the player go into a vacuum, in those moments the background sound fades away and you can't hear much more then your breathing and your food steps, everything else is completely muted away, which not only gives everything a nice space atmosphere, it also makes monster harder to spot, as you can no longer hear them.

On the technical side of things Dead Space is very solid, the graphics look very detailed and run fluidly on max settings without a problem on a ATI HD5670. However the games art direction looks a little boring, as you run mostly through the same looking dark corridors over and over again. The game never really gives you a very good sense of scale for the spaceship you are on, even the rare moments where you actually go out into space feel very corridor like and you almost never really have an open window or something along the lines to look out onto the rest of the ship.

On the control side the game supports the Xbox360 controller out of the box. One issue I first had with that control scheme however was the way it handles turning on the right analog stick. The game employs a huge deadzone followed by a fast character rotation, which makes it hard to do small turns. This issue was made much worse due to the heavy delay that was caused by Vsync, switching Vsync off however fixed that. The problem with small turns still existed, but one gets used to it quite quickly, especially as it only exists in walking mode, not when aiming, thus it becomes actually useful, as it allows quick 180° turns while still allowing precise aiming. A quick 180° like Resident Evil has isn't present in this game.

The way the game handles the HUD is interesting, aside from the main menu, it doesn't use any actually HUD on the screen, instead it sticks everything in the game world, be it ammunition, health or even inventory and the game map. While that works well for health, ammunition and especially the way points, it is a bit more troublesome for the inventory, map and other normal GUI elements, as those will be displayed as a hologram floating in front of your character, which works fine in normal situation, but when in a tight corner or when an object is in the way it can cause the camera to tilt in such a way that you can't actually see the inventory screen properly or fonts you want to read can become to small as the camera might be to far out.

The physics engine also has a few issues, the main one is simply that all the dead bodies in the world are physically interactive, that by itself wouldn't be that bad, the problem is that they have no weight to them, thus everything you run into will go flying through the room in a highly unrealistic manner. In some instances this will even cause some actual gameplay confusion, as you can't really tell if the monster twitching on the ground is still alive or if it is just the physic engine that hasn't yet stopped jiggling the body around. In one instance I also had the physics engine fail on a puzzle that required me to push a battery into a slot, the battery would just fall out of the slot again and not register as properly inserted.

The save system is also of questionable quality, while the game is filled with reset points throughout the game, regular save points are much more rare, you only come across them every 10 or so minutes. The save dialog also misses a way to directly save to the next free slot, thus you have to always scroll through the list of all your past saves to make it to a free slot, this pulls you out of the game on as it makes saving much more cumbersome then it should be. The save system also has the problem that it keeps stores, upgrade benches and savepoint separate, thus you will often encounter one without the other, which can require some backtracking as you might want to buy a few power nodes to upgrade your weapon before using a bench.

Overall Dead Space is a technically solid game with some good gameplay concepts, that however aren't enough to carry a full game with such a forgettable cliched story. Especially the end game was rather disappointing as the game doesn't get more interesting with time, it simply throws more and faster versions of the same enemies at you. This also makes the formerly thoughtful enemy dismemberment overly chaotic and luck based. The overall difficulty however is rather mild on medium setting, as even when you die you always have a checkpoint very close and most monsters can be defeated without a problem when they don't catch you by supprise. I never found ammunition to be a problem, one might run out of ammunition for the favorite gun every now and then, but one generally has plenty of stuff left for the other weapons. The story goes nowhere and it just becomes tedious to go fix one issue after another without seeing much new. NewGame+ in Dead Space is also heavily flawed as it only allows you to reply the game with all the collected weapons on the same difficulty, changing it is not allowed, this makes NewGame+ sadly ridiculously easy and steels the fun of playing the game on a harder difficulty with a fully equipped character. The game is around 12 hours long or around 9 hours when you don't count the death and retries.

Some more faces for Naev

2011-05-16T12:46:00.000-07:00

Some more character graphics for Naev:

Full resolution graphics are available via git and licensed under GPLv3 and CC-by-sa-3.0:

git clone http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/vegastrike.git/

Review: Hydrophobia: Prophecy (PC)

2011-05-14T06:24:00.000-07:00

Hydrophobia is an episodic action/adventure developed by Dark Energy Digital, in late 2010 for the Xbox360, with a PC version followed in mid 2011 released on Steam and a PS3 version later that same year. The game is set in the near future and puts you in the role of Kate Wilson, a systems engineer on the city-sized ship 'Queen of the World', who after a terrorist attack has to fight for her survival and stop the terrorists.

The game currently exists under three names, "Hydrophobia", "Hydrophobia: Pure" and "Hydrophobia: Prophecy". The first one was the original Xbox360 release, Pure was the name of large patch for the Xbox360 version that fixed not only a few bugs, but also reworked large parts of the game, such as the controls, while Prophecy is the name of the PC and PS3 versions, which are mostly identical to the Pure version, but contain additional tweaks, a new short section after where the Xbox360 version ended and completely recast and revoiced one of the main roles.

The core exploration gameplay of Hydrophobia is very similar to that of Tomb Raider, with all the jumping, climbing and swimming that that implies. The shooting on the other side follows the direction of modern cover-based shooter. What makes Hydrophobia special are its water physics, which unlike other games aren't build on pre-scripted events, but follow actual physics, thus if you have a room filled with water and open up a door into an empty room, water will flow from one room to the other and the created waves will splash you around. This is essentially the first game to ever try that.

The story of the game is mainly delievered through constant voice communication with your operator, who provides you with information on what to do next and what the terrorist are currently doing. Where needed the game also falls back to classical cutscenes.

The gameplay follows mostly a linear structure, but containts a bit of backtracking and gives you the option to hide the objectives marker, which forces you into a more exploratory style of play. This works reasonably well, as a lot of times you can navigate the world simply by hints from the voice communication. If needed the game also provides a map
and a log of your next objective. The game also provides a way to remote control CCTV cameras or remotly open doors, which is used for a few puzzles, but otherwise not all that impactful on the game overall.

Overall I very much enjoyed Hydrophobia. It is by no means a perfect game, as there are still quite a few bugs left, which the developers are currently working on with a new patch on an almost daily basis and the performance of the game isn't so great. But the water physics of Hydrophobia are pretty much unmatched, they essentially put an advanced form of what Wave Race did with water physics into a Tomb Raider-like world. Making the whole world feel much more dynamic and interactive then your regular static game world, as opening a door or shooting a glass panel can flood the room and completely change the way you have to fight.

The biggest problem I have with Hydrophobia right now is that it still feels kind of like an incomplete game, it is planed to be episodic in nature and the 4-5 hours it takes to complete it seem appropriate, but it doesn't really feel that way, it feels more like the first third or so of a regular full game and thus the story ends rather abruptly with not much of a conclusion. There are also numerous gameplay elements that are under used. You for example have numerous types of ammunition, but the basic sonic rounds, of which you have an unlimited supply, work the best most of the time, leaving little need to ever switch to anything else. A few subplots are also not only go without conclusion, but really never even fully opened up, they are kind of hinted at, but then never go anywhere.

Aside from the performance issues the game also has some trouble with the audio, which currently seems very chaotic and badly mixed. The dialog between characters comes out fine, but for example the sound of enemies shooting at you is often muted away by background sounds, making it hard to spot and react to enemies.

In the end, even with those issues in mind, it is however still a fantastic game that leaves you simply wanting more. It is one of those rare games that moves the gaming world a step forward and provides you with a way to interact with the game world you haven't seen before.

How to use the GOGDownloader in Linux

2011-05-10T03:41:00.000-07:00

The GOGDownloader is a small little tool used by GOG.com (Good Old Games) to download their games and while running it under Wine works fine, it doesn't integrate into Firefox and thus clicking the "Add to GOGDownloader" link responds with a useless:

"Firefox doesn't know how to open this address, because the protocol (gogdownloader) isn't associated with any program."

Integration however is reasonably simple and can be done with two lines of gconftool:

$ gconftool-2 -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/gogdownloader/command '/home/juser/bin/gogdownloader %s' --type String
$ gconftool-2 -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/gogdownloader/enabled --type Boolean true

Where gogdownloader is the full path to a script that runs the GOGDownloader, as I use a separate WINEPREFIX for every Wine app that looks something like this:

#!/bin/sh

set -e

export WINEPREFIX=/home/ingo/games/gogdownloader
cd "/home/juser/games/gogdownloader/drive_c/Program Files/"
wine GOGDownloader.exe "$@"

# EOF #

Flattr News

2011-05-06T05:16:00.000-07:00

Three interesting Flattr news bits that you might have missed:

you can now have Flattr buttons without paying the previously mandatory 2€ minimum donation per month, so Flattr is now free to try, hopefully that will increase its adoption outside of Germany
you can now directly donate money to another person via Flattr without using the whole cake-slice per month method, it is still anonymous and thus not suited for buying things
you can now flattr a person via their Twitter account, even without that person having a Flattr account, people flattered in this way can then claim that money by registering with Flattr

For those that don't know, Flattr is a micro-donation service that allows you to give very small amounts of money to projects you like. The recent re:publica talk of Peter Sunde contains some more updates, along with a short intro video for those that don't know what Flattr is.

Review: Dark Void (PC)

2011-05-05T14:36:00.000-07:00

Dark Void was released in 2010 and developed by Airtight Games. The game mixes regular third person shooting with Crimson Skies like air combat, a previous game form Airtight Games. The story focuses around a cargo pilot that while traveling through the bermuda triangle got catapulted into a another world where he has to fight of on alien invasion that targets earth.

The game starts out with a ridicoulus long installation routine, that for some reason took two hours here. Not sure what went wrong there, it might have been a broken DVD, but I could copy data from the DVD normaly just fine, only the installation worked at a snails pace. Once the installation was done the game however ran without any issues.

The story of Dark Void makes a rather rushed and unfinished impression, as it wastes basically no time in actually introducing the setting or characters and instead has you pretty much fighting right from the start. Even throughout the later parts of the game that initial confusion doesn't really clear up, as character are barely ever properly introduced and the motivations for the next mission barely ever properly explained. In addition to that everybody seems kind of unsuprised at what is happening. Aliens in the bermuda triangle? Apperantly nothing to unusual in Dark Voids universe.

Most of the story is told through regular non-interactive cutscenes and while those cutscenes themselves are fine with good graphics and solid voice work, there just aren't enough of them to really piece together a coorent story. In a few rare spots the game also uses dialog between characters to tell parts of the plot, but those parts feel rather awkward, as you have to simply run behind another character while the non-interactive dialog plays, which turns it into more of a chore then an interesting way to deliver a story.

The fighting is split into air combat and third person ground combat. While there are a few sections where both can be used together, a very large part of the game is spend either completely on ground or completely in the air. The split between both air and ground combat is around 40/60.

Ground combat follows mostly just regular third person shooter conventions. You can take cover, blind fire, etc. Melee attacks are possible, but I found them hard to pull of, the game seems to require you to stand in an exact position relative to the enemy or else it just won't register your button press. A special feature of Dark Void is the vertical cover that allows you not only to take cover behind the regular boxes, but on the ledge of a platform, to either fire up or down. Enemies themselves have the same ability and thus a small part of the game is spend climbing up towers or other vertical structure while fighting enemies along the way. However the vertical cover doesn't really change much of the core gameplay, as it plays pretty much like regular cover, only the camera, which in those modes looks straight up or down causes a bit of initial confusion as you enter or leave vertical cover. Climbing between platforms happens via canned animations that leap you from one platform to the next, Tomb Raider-like climbing mechanics aren't present in this game.

When in the air the game uses pretty standard air combat controls, you can brake, you have a boost and a gun. A press of the A button will switch you to hover mode. The second analog is used to trigger special maneuvers such as 180° turns or dodging. Enemy planes can be captured via a short quick time event sequence, once captured they provide a bit of additional firepower and production. When hovering the camera still tries to stay in the over the shoulder perspective, will can get quite a annoying as it makes it impossible to see your feed and thus judge distance when landing. A further zoomed out camera would have been prefered.

The game features six weapons that can be upgraded over the course of the game, however as the money you need to collect is hard to come by, you will only ever manage to fully upgrade two of them and pretty much ignore the rest. The game also gives you little reason to ever switch weapons, as all of them pretty much feel equally ineffective against enemies. Most enemies can take a full magazine before going down and there don't seem to be any discernable special hitzones to speed it up. This makes combat often very tedious.

The graphics are pretty good overall and run quite fluid on the PC. They also feature some nice looking crepuscular rays on the higher settings. Character art leaves something to be desired, as the faces look kind of weird. In some interior sections the graphics can however get quite dark, making it hard to really see anything, even with a maxed out brightness setting.

Overall this games leaves a rather mediocre impression. The few moments where you can freely switch between air and ground combat and use each of them to your strategic advantage can be good fun and in those sections the game manages an impressive sense of scale. But far to much time in the game is spend in regular third person combat that simply feels boring and unexciting. The number of different enemies is extremely limited and doesn't really change much over the course of the game. The few quick time events that the game uses to take over an enemy aircraft can also get repetative very quickly as there is only really a single of those sequences that is always the same. In general the game just lacks variation.

The recharging health is also rather troublesome, as it is hard to really get a proper idea of how much health you have left and recharging takes a little long, so you die quite a bit by simply being inpatient. Reset points can also be a little to far apart and uneven, as sometimes you don't get any after a cutscene, while othertimes a reset point will put you past the enemy you where just fighting. Air combat also has its issues, as it never gets very creative, most of the time you spend hunting down the exact same enemy planes and while there are a few nice sections where you have to fight bigger battleships by landing on them, those sections are however very rare.

The setting is certainly interesting and some of the set pieces look quite nice, but the story is completely underdeveloped and gives you very little sense of what you are fighting against or why. The game also overuses waypoints a lot, so instead of figuring out where you have to go next on your own, you are guided by a bright yellow dot. Exploration is pretty much non-existent and the whole experience feels extremely linear.

It is not an awful game by any means, but given the interesting premise it could have been so much more. As is, it is a rather boring third person shooter with some fun, but not really outstanding, flying action. Given that the game sells for $5 these days I would still recommend it, as there just aren't very many games that have you flying around with a jetpack, just don't expect anything to special. It is fun for the good 7 hours it lasts, but doesn't really do anything that you haven't already seen done better in other games.

Getting a Gnome Panel on a second monitor

2011-05-03T05:08:00.000-07:00

Gnome panels can be created and attached to one of the four sides of your desktop in the Panel Properties (right click on panel), the Panels Properties however lack any way to move a panel over to a second monitor when you use a setup with multiple monitors, so it looks like the functionality is missing. Except it is not. Gnome panels can be moved to a second monitor by holding the Alt key (or Super or something else depending on your configuration) and then click & dragging the panel around.

That's not all, the Window List applet is even clever enough to show only those windows in its list that are actually on the current screen. But again, that functionality isn't even hinted at when looking at the Window List Preferences and only comes into play when you create two Window List applets, one for each of the screen. If you only have one applet it will show all the windows from all screen. If you have two, the first will switch to show only windows from your first screen, while the second will only show windows from the second screen. If you add a third it will continue to show things from the second screen (assuming adding a third screen would change that).

So, long story short, looks like Gnomes multi-monitor support is actually a bit better then expected, but the Property dialogs do little to make those capabilities obvious.

First impression of Gnome3

2011-04-30T10:43:00.000-07:00

Just like Unity, Gnome3 is on a trip to reinvent the wheel. So here a few quick first impressions. Note that Gnome3 doesn't come with Ubuntu 11.04, but it can be installed via packages from the PPA.

no UI elements that pop in and out of existence, good
no minimize button and no minimize functionality, so the desktops clutter up fast
no maximize button either, but functionality is still there by dragging the window to the top of the screen
dragging a window to the left/right edge makes it fill half the screen, looks useful, but only really helps you with two windows, can't handle three
concepts used don't seem to work well together with multi-monitor setups, as it makes a lot of use of screen corners
the application "menu" got turned into a fullscreen thing, provides a desktop switcher, the application menu, along with search and a dock, when in the application screen all windows are visible as thumbnails
application menu can be activated via moving the mouse into the corner, no clicking required
the dock is only in the application screen
dock behaves like MacOSX, allowing only a single program instance to be started
moving windows between desktops is quite easy, when all desktops are used, Gnome automatically adds a new one
the application list is straight forward, not split up into installed, frequently used, etc. like Unity, makes it much easier to browse
no panel applet support
only a fixed top panel that can't be configured
the Gnome3 panel has a unique look that differs from regular Gtk, makes it look inconsistent
current Gnome3 PPA packages are incompatible with Unity and Gnome2, installing them will render both of the other unusable
no global menubar
seems to be incompatible with Gimp, as Gnome3 ignores Gimps additional windows, thus making it impossible to use Gimp on another workspace
gconf got replaced with dconf, which looks pretty much the same as before from a users point of view, except that you now have to search for your configuration options in two different registry editors

Overall my first impression of Gnome3 is much more positive then that of Unity, idiotic things like the overlay scrollbar are missing, the dock doesn't fold its icon and the whole user experience seems much more well thought out. The way it handles moving windows around to different workspaces is quite nice.

However it still feels like a toy interface with little reconfigurability, missing minimize/maximize buttons, no applets, bad compatibility, etc. It is also very application driven, making the file manager feel like an afterthought. I wouldn't want to use it, but in a few years when some of the missing features are added back in, it could turn out to be a usable system. That said, it is sad that they as well go the "invent the wheel" route instead of simply improving the Gnome that we already have, none of the changes are so fundamental that they couldn't be handled with a few small improvements and a new applet here and there.

Also whats with the requirement of OpenGL that both Unity and Gnome3 have? Did all OpenGL driver issues magically got solved when I wasn't looking? I don't think so. On basically every single dist-upgrade over the last few years I ran into either Nvidia or ATI drivers going nuts on me and it taking multiple weeks to get it fixed. And of course we still get complains about SuperTux going OpenGL.

Why the overlay scrollbar is crap

2011-04-30T05:31:00.000-07:00

The overlay scrollbar is one of those crazy wheel reinventions for no reason in the new Ubuntu, here a few basic reasons why it sucks:

it's inconsistent, when windows are maximuzed or close to the screen border it will pop up on the right, otherwise it will pop up on the left
it's inconsistent as it is hardly used by anything, even among Gtk+ applications only a tiny fractions make use of it and there is no chance that any of the non Gtk applications will ever make use of it
it's invisible and thus much harder to hit then a visible scrollbar
it's impossible to hit in a single straight line when approaching a window from the right, it will only pop up once inside the window, but when that happens it will pop up on the outside of the window, so you have to move your mouse close, stop, then move back to click it
selections have the same color as the scrollbar, thus when a widget has a selection that goes till the edge it will blend into the scrollbar, making it not only look weird, but in the worst case completely invisible when scrollbar and selecting merge into one
it's much smaller then a classic scrollbar, real scrollbars fill the whole height of the window, overlay only fills the tiny portion that is the visible part of a document, thus you have a much smaller area to click on for page-up/down events
it doesn't pop up under the mouse, but a few pixels to the right, this makes it incredible frustrating to use, as the regular pattern of "graphical reaction -> I am hovering over the item" becomes untrue
the thing you want least in your GUI is randomly blinking stuff, yet overlay does exactly that, whenever you move your mouse around the screen overlay scrollbars pops up and fades out
if you are off by a single pixel to the right it will disappear instantly, forcing you not only to travel that pixel back, but to travel all the way to the left to make it reappear and then back to the right to actually click it, making it not only hard to hit, but actually punishment, as you get reset to an earlier stage then where you failed
buttons that are clickable and dragable at the same time without clear visual indication that they are special
it's extremely tiny, yeah the point is to save "screen real estate", but seriously, a scrollbar is worth more then four pixels that look more like a graphic glitch then a user element
it violates Fitt's law on maximized windows

To sum things up, the overlay scrollbar is baffling. It is not just a cosmetic change or a small tweak, but a drastic change in usability for the worst while providing no new features of its own. The way it punishes the user for slipping a few pixels off to the right makes it fell more like a frustrating and badly designed maze game where you are not allowed to hit the walls then an actual user interface element.

The only good part about the overlay scrollbar is that one can still purge it from existence:

sudo apt-get purge liboverlay-scrollbar.*

PS: I am using a trackball without the luxury of a separate scroll-wheel. I can certainly see how having a scrollwheel might make it more tolerable, but that doesn't change the fact that its completely awful for actual point&click interaction.

Review: Star Wars: Tie Fighter (PC)

2011-04-25T10:58:00.001-07:00

Star Wars: Tie Fighter was developed by LucasArts and originally released in 1994 for DOS on floppy. A year later it was rereleased as an enhanced CD edition featuring additional missions and full voice overs, which this review will focus on. The game is the sequel to Star Wars: X-Wing and just like it precesessor it focuses on building a complex simulation of the spaceships of the Star Wars universe instead of just an arcade shooter. The story focuses on the imperial side in this game and is told in the form in the form of some short cutscenes and the missions briefings you get to hear before each missions, but it stays very impersonal overall, neither your own character nor any of the wingmen are established as characters, only a few commanding admirals get that handling in the cutscenes.

The games main menu comes in the form of a space station, after giving your pilot a name you have the choice between either flying one of numerous training missions, watching a few technical details of the spaceships, watching recorded mission playback or starting one of the thirteen battles that form the core of the game. Each of those battles contains around five to seven missions, putting the total mission count, including the training missions, of the Tie Fighter CD edition somewhere at around one hundred.

Before playing a mission the game will show a little briefing of what is about to follow and what the players role in the battle will be. A flight officer will provide additional tips and a member of the Imperators secret orders will provide you with information on bonus objective in the mission. All of those are fully voiced. One weird aspect of the mission briefing is that they loop, without a clear indication of where the end was. The spaceships weapon loadout can be configured before a mission as well. The spaceship itself however is predefined for the given mission. While early in the game focus will be on the unshielded Tie Fighter, Tie Bomber and Tie Interceptor, later on the will switch focus to the faster and better protected Tie Advance, Tie Defender, Gunboat and Missleboat.

Once the mission launches the player will be put into his ship and launched into space. The games controls are quite complex, featuring numerous command to target specific ships or even specific parts of those ship, redirect energy from the change engines to the weapons or shields, switch weapons or change between couple or individual fire, give commands to wingmen and so on. Some missions also include transporters from which you can request resupply and repair of your ship in the mid of the mission.

If the players ship is hit, his shields will reduce, if the shields are completely down, the hull will get damages, this not only can temporally knock out ship systems, but also visually destroy elements of your cockpit, thus making some game tasks substantially harder when for example your radar monitor gets destroyed. This mechanic however doesn't come into play very often, as your ship can only take a few hits without shields, thus you will rarely end in a situation where you survived an attack and be left with a heavily damage ship and instead simply be destroyed in the attack.

The mission design itself focuses on three main goals, either you have to protect specific ships from destruction, inspect the cargo of other ships by flying near them or destroy specific ships. Frequently those goals are combined, so for example a typical mission might have you inspect multiple ships to find the one carrying the valuable cargo and then have a transporter which you have protect dock to that ship to gain control over it. Navigation points to which you have to jump to get to the next sub part of the mission like in Wing Commander, are not present in Tie Fighter, a single mission will focus on a single sector of space, both friend and foe will however jump in and out of hyperspace over the course of the mission and thus either provide valuable support or try to escape. The length of a the individual missions varies from five minutes up to half an hour. Mid-mission checkpoints or the ability to save the game within a mission are not provided. You can however do a full recording of a mission that you can use for later analysis.

Graphics in the game come in good old 320x200 VGA for the menu and cutscenes, when flying a ship one can also chose a hires mode that runs in 640x480, but I found that to slow when running under DOSBox to be usable. Ships are untextured and only have gouraud shading on them, for small ships that is not a practical problem, but for the Stardestroy size ships the lack of texture can make it really hard to judge distance when you are close and as result you might sometimes crash right into them. A later rerelease apparently contains textured ships, but I haven't played that. Cutscenes are presented as a mix of still images with a bit of animation mixed in and voice overs.

The music comes in a form of a MIDI track, while that might not sound so great by todays standards, it is actually a dynamic track that reacts to the arrival of new enemies, completed mission objectives and other events, thus it becomes not just background music, but an actual part of the gameplay that informs you of important events.

The thing that makes Star Wars: Tie Fighter an impressive experience is how all its parts end up working together. Instead of simplistic arcade battles the games tries to portrait large scale space battles and successes at that extremely well. The success in a mission rarely depends on raw reflexes and is most of the time much more dependent on understanding the structure of the mission, whom you have to protect, which enemies you have to attack first and how to make best use of the limited resources you have.

What the game manages like few other is that you actually get to see a lot of what is going on, when an enemy group tries to attack one of the ships you should protect it can happen quite frequently that you actually witness first hand how that group approaches and fires the last devastating torpedo at their target. Even in such a situation last minute rescues is possible, as torpedo can be intercepted by a precise, but difficult to pull of laser shot. Interception of enemy groups also turns regularly into a game of chicken, with both fighters going on a head on collision course, a few well aimed laser beams in that situation can destroy the enemy craft, but just as easily a devastating collision might occur, so its a gamble that should not be taken lightly. When a friendly shuttle is docking with another ship the game also leaves enough time to fly close and wideness the event.

The game also make a good point of letting your wingmen and other flight crews matter, in quite a few missions they not only provide support, but are essential for the completion of the mission, as you might fly support for a few bombers without carrying any bombs yourself. And taking down a larger spaceship without support is basically an exercises in futility. In the later parts of the game however there is a little to much reliance on the players fighting skills, as you will only rarely get wingmens under your command and have to do most of the job yourself.

In terms of difficulty the game falls on the thought side, just randomly shooting won't get you far and trying to figure out the best approach to complete the missions objectives might take a few times. But the game manages to stay completely fair through most of it and you never really end up blaming the game, as when stuff goes wrong, there is almost always a clear mistake done by the player. In case the difficulty gets overwhelming the game allows you to switch between one of three difficulties and additionally enable invulnerability and unlimited ammunition, not via a cheat, but straight from the option menu. While success on the mission requires your survival, it doesn't actually require the survival of your spaceship, so as long as you eject and get not captured by the rebels, you can still complete the mission. Dieing in the game is actually incredible rare, it only happens to me once over the course the 40 hour campaign, all the other times I got auto ejected and most of the time rescued by the Imperial side. Dieing itself doesn't lead to any kind of punishment, your pilot will simply be reset to what he was before the mission.

On the technical side I had quite a few issues with the joystick calibration. The game requires you to recalibrate the joystick on each startup, however when you do that the calibration still ends up completely wrong when actually flying a spaceship, thus you have to recalibrate when actually getting into the ship (Alt-C). I am not sure if that is an issue with Dosbox or with the game itself, but I faintly remember having similar issues with X-Wing on a real DOS PC. I solved the problem with a simple joystick macro that would automatically perform the calibration procedure, that didn't fix the problem, but might quick recalibration possible.

One positive surprise was that the games commands, pretty much all of them, fit nicely on an Xbox360 controller, thus making the game playable without touching the keyboard. A proper configuration however requires mapping most buttons with two layers of shifting, which can be a bit confusing at times, but still allowed a very comfortable play.

There are of course also a few things in the game that could have been improved. The destructible cockpit never really becomes a real part of the game, it happens to rarely and when it happens it is extremely hard to recover from, as your ship doesn't provide secondary instruments, thus damage to your targeting computer makes it almost impossible to actually find out where you need to go. A set of secondary instruments that make the tasks at hand harder instead of pretty much impossible would have been welcome, just as a to damage the cockpit without losing the whole ship in the process.

Targeting of individual ship parts also gets only relevant in a tiny few situations. Destroying the missile launcher of a big ship can be quite an advantage for example, but trying to go after the laser canons is often futile, as they are to hard to hit. Targeting the shield generators also seems to have no noticeable effect, even when done the enemies ships shields stay up.

While the game actually does provide a bit of meaning to the eject function, in that it allows you to succeed a mission even if you ejected, it doesn't go far enough with that mechanic. You will be ejected almost always automatically and almost never have time to eject manually, as destruction will come far to quickly. Shifting the balance and making manual eject more useful, while making the automatic eject less dependable, would have been a nice addition.

Last not least, the final thing I found lacking are landings. You can end a mission via three ways, eject, going into hyperspace or landing on a nearby friendly ship, but landing doesn't actually require any talent, it just means getting close enough to a ship and hitting Space, you do not actual perform the landing. Same goes for hyperspace, triggering it starts an automatic that leaves you with nothing to do. A bit more user interaction would have been welcome.

Overall Star Wars: Tie Fighter still holds up extremely well. The lack of detail on the bigger ships might be a bit annoying, as you essentially end up having just a handful of flat polygons on your screen, but the actual space battles are as thrilling and clever as ever. The brilliance of the mission design is simply that there is always stuff happening and all of that is actually meaningful. When you then fly along and actually see that docking maneuver that you heard about in the mission briefing, it just gives a great sense of immersion, lacking in most more modern flight combat games. The story could certainly be more character driven, as that is an area where it is really lacking, close to the point of being non-existent, but it is good enough to give you plausible reasons for your missions. In the end it is simply an incredible well put together game that really managed to capture the size and thrill of Star Wars space battles, in some sense even batter then the actual movies.

Some more faces for Naev

2011-04-18T14:57:00.000-07:00

Did a few more character graphics for Naev over the weekend, some recycled with some modifications, some completely new:

Full resolution graphics are available at (licensed under GPLv3 and CC-by-sa-3.0):

git clone http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/vegastrike.git/

Some notes on Ubuntu 11.04

2011-04-15T13:26:00.000-07:00

Unity flat out doesn't work, full of graphic bugs and glitches
Unity doubly doesn't work with a multi-monitor setup (GUI all stretched out, while mouse input is not, making it impossible to click anything)
Unity is pretty much unusable on a regular desktop, designed for tiny screens and running only a few applications
remove Unity via: apt-get purge unity ubuntu-netbook.*
GUI customization didn't survive the upgrade
restore proper window icon order with:
gconftool --type string --set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout close,menu:minimize,maximize
console and grub run at a higher resolution by default, to disable that set GRUB_TERMINAL=console in /etc/default/grub
they reinvent the scrollbar (called overlay scrollbar), it now hides itself when not moused over and other weird stuff, very annoying, hard to hit a target with the mouse that you can't see, new scrollbar is only in a few apps, not in all Gtk stuff
fix scrollbar with: sudo apt-get purge overlay-scrollbar.*
new default music player seems to be Banshee and no longer Rhythmbox (no obvious import/export to transfer media)
it takes way longer then before from the time the mouse is visible to when the Gnome panels show up on boot
XVideo and OpenGL on ATI is broken, the video always gets displayed on top, even if the window is in the background
Firefox constantly resets my "middleclick paste" setting to false

Overall this upgrade so far looks pretty horrid, some of the changes might make sense on a touchscreen device, but none of the interface changes really make any sense on a big desktop screen, this is doubly bad considering that the new interface is what you get on a regular dist-upgrade, not something you have to manually enable. Good news however that all changes so far seem to be revertible.

C64: How to get BASIC programs into Vice/x64

2011-04-03T02:10:00.000-07:00

One issue one will encounter when trying to develop C64 applications is the problem of getting BASIC programs into Vice. Vice support direct loading of PRG files, which are in essence BASIC programs, but those are the tokenized in-memory representation of BASIC files, not raw ASCII text files. On Windows there is an easy workaround, one can just copy&paste the BASIC source into the Vice interpreter, on Linux there doesn't seem to be a way to copy&paste text between Vice and the regular Linux userland.

The solution however is easy, "petcat" which comes with Vice is a BASIC tokenizer that will convert a ASCII text BASIC file into a PRG that can be read by the emulator. So to create a first simple BASIC program one uses a file with the content of:

10 print "hello world"
20 goto 10

And then the command:

$ petcat -w2 -o outfile.prg infile.bas

The "-w2" switch marks the program as V2 BASIC, the default that comes with the C64. Once the PRG is generated one can start it with:

$ x64 outfile.prg

It can also be saved with the usual:

SAVE "FILENAME", 8

inside Vice when an empty disk image (can be created from within the emulator) is attached.

A little warning: Upper/lowercase do matter a lot here, all the BASIC commands have to be written in lowercase, if they are written in uppercase they will be confused for other commands, this is due to the C64 BASIC's uses some uppercase characters (which are not really upper case characters, special symbols in PETSCII) as shorthand for the full text commands.

PS: For full disk image creation from Linux there is the program "c1541", again part of Vice.

C64: How to build a colored hires sprite

2011-04-02T10:15:00.000-07:00

The sprites on the C64 come in two modes, single colored 12x21 (stretched to 24x21) and multicolored 24x21, a simple trick to get a sprite that has both a resolution of 24x21 and contains color is to split it up. One sprite gets the hires details and the other one gets the lowres color. When using those two sprites in a game one simply has to place them at the same coordinates:

C64 Graphics: Dissecting Creatures

2011-04-01T04:05:00.000-07:00

The images below shows some of the tricks used in the C64 game Creatures to achieve the illusion of more colors. The games uses a horizontal scrolling playfield in multicolor character mode. The main trick used is to have the shared colors be light and dark midtones, while using the unique tile color to either add a shadow or a highlight to the tile. When you look closely, you'll see that a highlight and a shadow never occur on the same tile.

Another interesting game is Stormlord, with that one there is however the catch that I have absolutely no idea how it managed to do so many colors. It is again a horizontal scrolling title, but unlike Creatures it doesn't seem to use any obvious scanline palette switches, instead it actually uses more then four colors on a single scanline, like in multicolor bitmap mode, but that normally doesn't go together with scrolling. My current assumption would be a multicolor bitmap mode with custom blitting code and VIC bank switching to a second buffer, so that screen redraws can happen in the background and the buffer get flipped each eight pixels when the scroll-offset reaches its edge:

PS: All this analysis was done by looking at a screenshot, not by actually observing the C64's memory, so there will be bugs.

C64's Graphical Capabilities

2011-03-31T08:22:00.000-07:00

Like many older computers the C64's graphic capabilites are a little more complex then the simple random-access framebuffer you get today, so just saying it has 320x200 at 16 color doesn't quite capture it, as there are numerous limits one has to deal with and tricks one can use to get around some of those limitations.

Resolution and Colors

At its core the screen of the C64 has a resolution of 384x272, however only the central 320x200 pixels of that area are usable in the normal sense, the rest is a colored border, which color one can change, but that otherwise remains fixed. The central 320x200 area is where the action happens. This area can be switched to five modes:

* Standard Character Mode
* Multicolor Character Mode
* Extended Background Color Mode
* Hires Bitmap Mode
* Multicolor Bitmap Mode

The first three are character modes, that are used for either the regular text output or tile based games. Each of the 256 characters in those modes is either a single color 1-bit 8x8 bitmap or a four 2-bit 4x8 bitmap (which gets scaled to 8x8 for display). The color of the character isn't determined by the character bitmap itself, but by a separate color map that allows to assign a different color to each 8x8 area of the screen. In the 1-bit hires mode one unique color is allowed and an additional one that is shared across the screen. In the multicolor mode one unique colors and three shared ones are allowed, as an additional complication that unique color is limited to only the first 7 of the C64's 16 colors, the remaining bit is used to decide if the character is in hires or multicolor mode. This little trick allows mixing hires tiles with multicolored ones on the same screen, which many games make use of. In Extended Background Color Mode the individual colors disappear and instead one can set four colors that are shared across the whole screen.

As one can see, the limitations of the character mode essentially break the 320x200 screen with 16 colors down to a 160x200 screen with four colors, in reality things aren't quite that bad, as some trickery and clever use of the palette can be used to overcome some of those limitations.

The bitmap modes of the C64 gets rid of the character based display and instead allow to address each pixel individually. Similar limitations as in character mode apply, i.e. only four colors in each 8x8 block are allowed or only two colors in hires mode. Unlike character mode however one has free choice of three colors per 8x8 block, instead of just one, and there is only one color remaining that has to be shared across the screen. Unlike a regular linear framebuffer, the memory layout of the C64 however is a little more complicated, as it doesn't store all pixel one after each other, but instead stores them in 8x8 blocks, so the math to find where exactly a pixel is stored becomes a bit more complicated.

Sprites

The C64 also has the ability to handle eight hardware sprites. The sprites work independed of the graphics mode chosen for the main screen and are 24x21 pixels large. They again provide hires and multicolor modes, selectable for each sprite individually, and as with the regular screen the horizontal resolution goes in half when choosing multicolor mode. Sprites have one unique color each, two shared across all sprites and the final color acts as transparency.

Sprites can be scaled in horizontal or vertical direction by a factor of two. Ordering can also be adjusted via a priority bit, which can also be used to put them behind portions of the background screen.

The C64 also comes with build in sprite collision detection that will inform you when two sprites have collided.

Build in Palette

The C64 provides a set of 16 colors, these colors are fixed and can't be altered and as mentioned you only can chose o few of those for your image. While this looks quite limited at first, the palette is cleverly choosen so that so that one can build numerous color gradients out of a combination of a light color, a dark color and an intermediate grey value. This image demonstrates some of the possibilities.

Smooth Scrolling

Pixel by pixel smooth scrolling is possible on the C64 when using character mode. With the help of a scroll offset the screen can be moved by up to 7x7 pixels away from its regular position without touching the screen data itself, once that position is reached, the actual screen content has to be updated manually. Which in characte mode means copying 40x25 (1000) bytes around.

In bitmap mode that offset is available as well, but not really useful for scrolling, as the C64 isn't fast enough to copy the 10.000 bytes around that form the framebuffer and the color maps.

Parallax scrolling isn't possible on the C64 by normal means, as it can only do a single layer of graphics. Tricks with sprites or animated character graphics can however be used to get a bit of a parallax effect.

Sprites are not influenced by the scrolling registers, they have to be moved along manually.

Raster Interrupt

So far all the capabilities presented still have some problematic limits. If you wanna display a HUD along with a scrolling playfield, you can't really do that, as the HUD would move along with your playfield. Sprites also wouldn't be of much use, as you'd want to use those for the game itself, not waste them on the interface. The raster interrupt comes to the rescue, it allows to execute code on essentially each scanline. This can be used for a multitude of clever tricks, such as switching the screen mode or scroll offset while the screen is getting drawing to the TV. This thus allows to have a HUD that stays fixed at the bottom of the screen, while the playfield above scrolls around, you simply change the scroll offset at a scanline. That interrupt can also be used to allow two player split screen or to change the color palette on the fly to make more use of the limited amount of color the C64 provides. It can of course also be used by simple special effects, such as a water effect.

Example

And here a little example of a multicolor bitmap mode image running on the emulator Vice (example code and explanation how that image was created might follow later):

Review: Outlaws (PC)

2011-03-25T02:56:00.000-07:00

Outlaws is a wild west first person shooter released in 1997 by LucasArts. It uses the Darkforces engine, one of the last Doom-like engines, meaning it doesn't allow full 3D scenarios, but supports slopes, limited looking up and down as well as buildings with multiple stories and simplistic polygon objects. Enemies continue however to be represented by simple 2D sprites.

The game starts with an elaborate hand animated seven minute intro that portraits the death of James Anderson's wife and the kidnapping of his daughter, which in turn send him, the player's character, onto a tour of revenge and a search for his daughter. While the intro implies a strong focus on story, the game doesn't really follow up on that promise. Further cutscenes follow, but they are much smaller in scope and limited for most part to the final last words of the last boss enemy you fought. Transition from level to level in turn feel a little rough, as they are only sometimes outlined in the cutscenes and hardly ever explained by any kind of real story. Never the less, the cutscenes are well animated and do a good job of setting up the atmosphere and setting.

The music in the game comes in the form of 15 fully orchestral Audio CD tracks, spanning two CD. Just like the intro, the music is one of the strongest points of the game and does a great job of underlining the western atmosphere.

Mechanically the game follows for most part the traditions of Doom. The player is confronted with plenty of enemies which he has to fight over the course of the level. Like Doom, the levels rarely have a clear linear structure and instead are pretty open and require the search for keys and items which in turn unlock doors and allow further progress. While the game features an actual inventory for items, most of them serve the same purpose as the keys, a crowbar will open a stuck door and a shovel will allow you to dig into the ground in special places and give access to a new area that way. Truly creative use of the inventory items however doesn't really happen and thus most puzzles don't require much thinking, but only finding the right item to open up the next area. This can frequently turn into tedium, as the game only rarely gives a hint of where the next item might found or where you even have to go. In a few instances you can figure things out by looking at the level structure, but that happens far to seldom. The final goal in each level is a boss, which is marked on the auto-map, but that hint doesn't really help much in practice as levels are constructed in multiple floors, thus the actual direction to the boss might be completely different from what the auto-map suggests.

The action in the game on the other side works quite well. The ability to duck allows to take cover behind tables and objects and jumping allows creative level design that requires jumping to rooftops or perform other acrobatic acts. Enemy design is rather limited and only includes a few different kind of cowboys that mainly differ in weapons they posses. The game also features numerous special boss characters, but while they differ in design and health from the regular enemies, they don't really stand out and frequently you might end up killing a boss before even realizing that you where fighting one, as the boss fights do not take place in special areas, but just in normal parts of the level. AI in the game, while overall nothing special, is clever enough to occasionally take cover. The ten weapons in the game are a bit limited, even so knifes, dynamite and three kinds of shoot guns are offered, one spends the most of the time with the pistol and rifle, as they are the most effective, especially on long range. The three different forms of shotguns just feel redundant.

Aside from the nine levels that form the main story campaign, which take around six hours to complete an the easy difficulty, the game also features five historical missions that are supposed to take part before the main story and detail James Anderson work as Marshall. However as those levels don't follow any kind of story, don't provide cutscenes and can be accessed in any order and thus end up feeling a bit disjoint. There also exist an patch for the game, still downloadable from the LucasArts page, that adds another four missions. All that additional single player content combined takes pretty much as long as the games main campaign.

Overall I enjoyed Outlaws, especially given its western setting which isn't touched by first person shooters very often, but it is not without its short comings. Its story is a bit lacking, the atmosphere and music are however both very good and still hold up, the action is also very well done, big innovations are however missing. The non-linear level structure is a very welcome diversion to the more linear level structure of modern games. The hunt for missing items, keys and switches is by far the weakest point of the game, what might look like an opportunity for fun puzzles on the surface turns frequently into pure tedium and disrupts the games otherwise fast flow quite a bit. A walkthrough can help reduce that tedium a good bit, so I would recommend using one when needed.

Technical notes: Outlaws runs without problems in Windows Vista when using the software renderer, which goes up to 800x600. The Direct3D renderer, provided by an official patch, allows basically any 4:3 resolution, but failed to work properly and resulted in graphical glitches that made the game unplayable for me. The blur caused by the filtering also didn't really suit the games comic style, so the software renderer is the prefered choice. Sometimes, when switching back to the desktop, the games color palette will glitch out, simply going to the load/save screen will however fix that. Under Linux in Wine the game functions properly, but only until one enters the menu for the first time, after that the sound will simply stop and I haven't found a way to start it back up, thus I wouldn't consider the game playable in Wine, even so the graphics and controls itself work fine.

xboxdrv 0.7.3 released

2011-03-16T04:48:00.000-07:00

fixed installation of xboxdrvctl
added special REL repeat value '-1' to avoid jaggy mouse emulation movement
added "rel-repeat:" axis-event for better scroll wheel emulation
added --no-dbus, to disable D-Bus support
added xbmc.xboxdrv, a config fine tuned for XBMC
added zsnes.xboxdrv, a config file for ZSNES
reenabled USBReadThread to work around ignored input events
'--daemon' is broken in this release

This release should fix the issue with buttons getting stuck and events getting lost of previous 0.7.x releases and bring it on par with 0.6.6, '--daemon' mode however is now broken and will require a larger code restructuring to get fixed.

Download: http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/xboxdrv/

Data extractor for The Void

2011-02-27T10:31:00.000-08:00

And another data extractor script, this time for The Void, available again from Github:

https://github.com/Grumbel/thevoid-extractor

Music and voice clips are again in .ogg format, textures in DDS, the game comes with plenty of XML files that store properties and seems to support overlay directories (i.e. just have a director Properties/ next to Properties.vfs and it will use files from that directory instead of the .vfs).

Data extractor for Goin' Downtown and Everlight

2011-02-25T21:20:00.000-08:00

I hacked together a quick little script that lets one extract the data files (music, sound, textures, etc.) of the games Goin' Downtown and Everlight. Available via Git from:

https://github.com/Grumbel/downtown-extractor

The data structure in both these games is very simple, resources.meta is an sqlite3 database containing offset, size and resource file index end resources.* contain then the real data. Data in the game itself is the usual stuff, but quite heavy on Open Source components, DDS for textures, Ogg for music and voice, Python for game scripting and they seem to have used Swig for engine bindings, animation stuff is Granny, there are a few Ogg Theora videos and GUI seems to be done in XUL.

Review: Infinite Space (NintendoDS)

2011-02-21T14:59:00.000-08:00

Infinite Space is a science fiction RPG/visual-novel developed by Platinum Games and released 2010 for the Nintendo DS. In the game the player takes control of Yuri, a 16 year old boy who wants to become an adventurer exploring the galaxy.

The game starts out with an anime intro that is based on a few anime short movies created for advertisement purpose for the game. This by itself would be nothing special, but in the case of Infinite Space this causes some initial confusion as the intro doesn't present the beginning of the game, but the first hour or so of the regular gameplay and thus shows things that your game character has not yet done. Worse yet, the events portrait in the anime shorts all differ quite a bit from what actually happens in the game, so it ends up being confusion instead of helpful. So its probably best to just skip past that.

The premise of the game, with the boy being 16 year old and buying his own space ship is also a bit weird and hard to believe, but given that this is Japanese, it is probably to be expected, the game however doesn't really continue much with this plot line and basically just uses it as a starting point to get you into the role of an inexperienced spaceship captain.

The gameplay in Infinite Space follows a very simple overall structure, as the focus of the game isn't in providing a freely explorable universe, but on telling a mostly linear story, thus the game is split up into mainly four parts navigation, ship-to-ship battles, upgrade management and talk with other characters. The talking follows normal Japanese visual-novel conventions and works similarly to what can be seen in other DS games such as Trauma Center or the like, meaning it works by presenting an static 2D image of the character over a static background and the text he is saying. Choice from the player is very limited in those discussion, as the discussions for most part run linearly, only rarely is there a bit of choice intermixed and in those cases its mostly about "Yes/No" kind of choices, not selection of a topic or sentence as in western adventures. Interacting with a character multiple times is often necessary to get all the dialog, which can however lead to a bit of an annoyancy as used dialog options don't get removed.

The ship-to-ship battles also follow a very simple scheme, instead of complex strategic elements, the player is limited to five base actions "Dodge", "Barrage", "Normal", "Forward" and "Backward". The forward/backward commands let the player move closer or further away from the enemies, which is used to get into or out of weapon range. The normal attack fires a regular shoot, while the barrage command fires a more powerful one. The dodge move can be used to evade barrage attacks, but cannot be used to evaded normal attacks. Battles always take place between two parties, each consisting of up to five ships, however the ships can't be controlled individually, they act as a single group and commands apply to all of them. The multiple ships are mostly used just for cover, as ships in the front lines will be easier to hit then ships in the back. Rearanging ships is only possible outside of battles, not within them. The battles are presented in full 3D, but camera movement is restricted and the ships only move on a straight line, so you will be looking at them basically from an isometric persective the whole time.

Upgrading the ships is possible when docking to a planet and works by either chosing the weapons to use or by installing modules into the ship. Each ship has a fixed amount of room for modules and modules come in the form of Tetris-like blocks that you have to arrange manuall to make the best use of the available space. Modules increase your stats such as health, number of crew members and so on. The game doesn't require any form of micromanagment, as docking to a planet will automatically fully repair your ships and restock crew or fighters that might have lost in a battle at no cost.

The navigation part of the game is what holds the other parts together, it allows you to navigate on a 3D star map, which is presented as a multi-layered 2D map (i.e. like multiple SuperMarioBros3 worldmaps stacked on top of each other). Each node on the map presents a planet to which you can dock and while traveling between planets you can be attacked by pirates that come in the form of random encounters. When docked to a planet one can either upgrade the ship or visit locations to talk to other characters, all of this happens via a simple menu interface, an abilty to walk freely around with your character isn't given.

One nice difference of the game compared to other jRPGs is that it is very fast to navigate. Regular random encounters can almost always simply be skipped at the press of a button, so if you don't want to do them, you don't have to (however as they are the main source of income in the game, skipping them all is probably not a good idea). Furthermore the ship-to-ship battle sequences contain some rather elaborate and slow firing sequences, but again, with the press of the button one can easily skip them, so they don't annoy. Dialogs and navigation also follow a similar scheme, while it will happen frequently that you talk again to a character only to discover that he doesn't have anything new to say, you can just hold L and you will fast-forward through the dialog. All of these small tweak take away a lot of the annoyance that is normally present in this type of game.

Saving in the game is limited to planets. The game provides five save slots and an additional slot for automatic saves, which when enabled will save on every departure from a planet. The game is however very forgiving, allowing you to almost always travel back to a planet after a single fight. So when you encounter multiple ships on the way to a boss battle, you can just turn around and save. There are a tiny few exceptions to this later on in the game, but I never ran into a single situation where I had to replay a longer segment.

The user interface in Infinite Space is almost exclusively touch screen based, some smaller functions such as camera rotation or fast forward have to be done with the dpad or via the L button, but main menu navigation can only be done with the touchscreen.

Where the game stumbles a bit is in the story progression and keeping track of tasks, as the game lacks a quest log, it is sometimes hard to keep track of where one has to go or to which character one has to talk to. Sometimes those hints are also a bit vague, so even if you do keep manually track of them by writing them down, the game can force you to do a bit more trial&error traveling around then it should.

Where it however really gets interesting is in its story itself. While the premise is a bit ridiculous, the game doesn't bother much with it and soon has you free your sister from the hands of pirates, wipe out pirate homebases and later on has you trying to get whole nations united again to fight an even bigger enemy. Along the way you meet a ton of different characters and different factions, many of which will join your crew and in the background there are some alien artifacts whose purpose you try to uncover. At the mid point the game even has a big cut, moving the game story forward for 10 years and then continuing from there. The game does a decent job of not letting it all fall into simplistic categories of good vs evil and even has some of your crew join the opposing factions later on, putting all your doing into question.

Overall as a game Infinite Space certainly has some issues, mainly its simplicity. While there is a never ending supply of upgrades and ships available, I managed to pull through the first half the game pretty much with a simple tactic of moving into attack range, firing, then moving out of it to have my weapons recharge. In the second half of the game it gets even more easy, as by that point the game makes aircraft carriers available, which without much if any risks for your own fleet can easily wipe out everything else, as enemies very rarely carry anti-aircraft weapons with them. However this simplicity didn't bother me, quite the opposite, it allow to get through the story without much if any grind or frustration. The game however does a bad job at explaining things, that the icons at the bottom screen signal attack range isn't exactly clear at the beginning and that assigning crew members to the second in command allows you to use their special power in battles (such as healing the fleet or attacking the enemy ships in the back of the formation, without loss of precision) is also rather important, but again, never really explained.

To progress through the story and work around the lack of a quest log I used a walkthrough, that not only took all the trial and error out of the game, but also provided hints to a few story threads that one might otherwise easily miss. Even with that help this is however not a short game, quite the opposite, it clocks in at around 50 hours, even more when not played with the help of a walkthrough. Given the cut the game has in the middle, this makes the game feel almost like two full length game in one, something I haven't really seen before.

While the story is overall quite interesting and has an enourmus cast of characters, my biggest issue with the game would probably be the ending, which after some 50 hours of preparation, simply comes far to quickly and felt rushed. That whole endgame plot really should have started quite a few hours earlier or just left out completely for a sequel.

As somebody who generally dislikes jRPGs, I enjoyed Infinite Space quite a bit, all the normally annoying parts of that genre take a backseat in this game and the story is really the focus, not the leveling up of your characters or ship, those just happen in the background or provide a little diversion every few hours. So for people looking for a portable story driven space opera, I can definitively recomment this game, there really isn't much else like it out there.

Review: Alpha Protocol (PC)

2011-02-20T20:49:00.000-08:00

Alpha Protocol is a RPG/stealth/shooter mix developed by Obsidian Entertainment and released in 2010. The game takes a lot of inspiration from Biowares Mass Effect, using a similar mix of third person shooter elements along with a dialog driven story. Unlike Mass Effect the game doesn't take place in a Sci-Fi universe, but instead in contemporary times, putting you into the role of the special agent Michael Thorton, who went rogue after an incident on his first mission and is now fighting against his organization Alpha Protocol.

The game starts of with the regular character creation screen, but unlike other RPGs, you are restricted to just a single character, whose hair, facial hair and accessories you can however customize. One neat thing is that the game allows you to customize your character even after the initial creation, a feature that many other RPGs still miss. The character stats are separated into stealth, sabotage, technical aptitude, toughness, martial arts along with specialization in one of the four weapons. Dumping points into a category improves your abilities as well as gives you additional special powers that you can activate in combat, such as the ability to fire multiple shots in a row or become invisible for a short time.

The main game world is separated into three main locations, Rome, Taipei and Moscow, along with separate sections for the start and endgame. Each of these locations contains numerous sub missions, which once unlocked, you can be played in any order or sometimes even skipped completely. The three main locations also don't have a fixed order and thus also allow to be played in an arbitary order. The base of operations in each of those locations is a safe house that allows you to watch news (which however repeat frequently), read email, buy weapon upgrades or change your inventory. An overworld that can be freely navigated is not provided, instead all the mission selections is handled via a simple menu. Unlike Mass Effect you never actually walk up to an NPC and hit a talk button, instead dialog is either triggered events in the missions itself or by missions that consist of nothing else but meeting with another character. The safehouse is thus devoid of any other characters and chat with other members of your team is limited to what happens before or while on a mission. And speaking about what happens before the missions, one weird part of Alpha Protocol is that you can reach the menu to select your next mission by exiting the safehouse, but starting a mission will catapult you back in front of your TV in your safehouse, as that is where you will communicate with your handler about the next mission. Its a small detail, but it kind of disrupts the pacing a bit, it would have made more sense to have a direct connection to the handler or a radio and use that instead of the door to reach the menu.

The core gameplay of Alpha Protocol follows mostly conventional modern cover based third person shooter design, with some light elements from Splinter Cell mixed in for the stealth aspects of the game. Special abilities, ammunition or items are activated via a Mass Effect like power-wheel, but Alpha Protocols version happens to be a bit more cumbersome to use, as it requires to assign an action to a button and doesn't allow direct activation from the menu. In addition to that the game only has a single button for special abilities, thus activated multiple at once requires entering and exiting the menu multiple times. Control for the party is not provided, as in Alpha Protocol you act mostly alone and your handler is only available in the form of voice via radio. Just like Mass Effect the game uses three short mini-games when it comes to unlocking safes, doors or hacking into computers.

The shooting in Alpha Protocol is based on your character stats, thus when a weapon ability hasn't been leveled up it will be substantially weaker then when fully leveled up. The game also makes heavy use of delayed aiming, thus the longer you aim at something, the more precise your shoot will become. Both of these have earned heavy critism in the gaming press, which I have however a hard time to follow, as the mechanics are really simple to understand and Alpha Protocol isn't exactly the first game that allows you to increase your precision by holding an aim longer.

The special abilities of your character are in Alpha Protocol not so much based on reality, but more on what works for the game, thus it might feel a bit gamey at times, but works very well in the context of the game. A special stealth ability for example allows you to become completely invisible for enemies, a special pistol ability allows you to fire multiple shoots instantly at different targets (the game goes in slow motion to allow you to select the targets) and a special assault rifle ability gives you basically an aimbot that instantly locks your aim to the nearest enemy.

One of the most outstanding parts of Alpha Protocol is its dialog system and its dynamic story. While the dialog system is similar to Mass Effect, it is really much closer to that of Fahrenheit, as it requires you to select one of usually four dialog options under a time constraint. Dialogs don't follow the "pick every option till the dialog tree has been exhausted", but instead basically require a decision at every turn. Unlike Mass Effect however those decision are however not split into simplistic black/white or good/evil categories, but instead follow mostly adjectives such as "suave", "professional" or "aggressive", depending on the context. The choices can have rather small effects such as increasing the trust an NPC has into your character, but also can have drastic consequences, such as completely killing of one of the main character or severing the connection you have to one of the factions. Unlike most other games which offer those moral choices, Alpha Protocol never feels cheap, as there is never a clear good or bad path to follow, it is always very grayish and mostly about which factions you want to work together with. While the overall missions you will have to play can't really be changed by the dialog choices, the fate of characters and who will help you can change dramatically, something few, if any, games have managed before. My only gripe with the dialog system would be that it gives a default choice, which unless select another, will be auto selected when the time runs out. It helps to keep the cutscene from stopping, but I would have preferred a completely default-less dialog system.

The save system is a bit contrived, as it doesn't allow you to save everywhere, but instead only copies your last checkpoint. While this works fine for the main game, it can lead to a few weird situation in the safehouse, as you can't for example read a few email, upgrade your weapons, save and then come back later, as your last checkpoint would be entering the safehouse and all your doing would be forgotten. The game however makes this pretty clear and handles saves otherwise quite well, by not only providing an autosave of your last checkpoint, but also an autosave for your last safehouse visit in case you might want to start a different mission instead or restart with different equipment.

Another annoyance is that the game doesn't allow you to change the difficulty mid-game, you are locked into the choice you made at the very beginning.

On the technical side, the game has full Xbox360 controller support on the PC, which I used to play the game. Graphically it looks very solid, nothing outstanding, but not much to complain about either. The only graphical issues I had where a bit of Z-fighting on my ATI HD5670 with character accessories (hats mostly) when they where standing far away from the camera and a few polishing issues such as palms clipping through near walls or shadows being visible through the roof, but both of these are hardly noticeable on a regular playthrough. In terms of bugs I expected far worse, but didn't really run into any practical problems, throughout my two playthrough I fell through the ground twice and the game seems to have issues with Alt-Tab, which either works really slow or just not at all.

Given the large amount of criticism the game has received on released I was actually surprised how good it really is. I basically had no issues with the combat at all, it worked perfectly well the way it was designed. Headshots where easy to perform, if distance was required the assault rifle did a good job and the occasional melee combat provided some variety. When playing with a solider character the stealth kills turned out not worth the effort, on the other side they become rather fundamental when playing with a stealth based character. My biggest complaint would be that it was all a little to easy, playing as a soldier character you didn't really need to bother with stealth and could shoot your way through anything and with a stealth character you could render yourself invisible for half a minute, running around and killing guards without much issue. A few situations where staying completely undetected would have been required would have been nice and a little less health couldn't have hurt either, as the game was rather forgiving when you screwed up your stealth as you can shoot your way out of most situations without to much trouble.

The stat system felt a bit limited, as you are never given enough points to level up in many different categories, so instead it is easiest to concentrate on basically just three core abilities, which in turn limits the amount you can do in the game. As soldier or stealth characters I almost never touched any of the gadgets the game provided, as there was just no point in using something my character wasn't specialized in. Grinding experience points is impossible in Alpha Protocol, as you don't really have any side missions you can work on, everything you can do connects back to the main plot. Weapon upgrades had a similar issue, as there isn't much money available and neither much stuff you can buy, thus instead of doing constant upgrades throughout the game you basically just end up doing a single big one for your weapons and another one for your armor in the whole game when enough money has allocated over quite a few hours of gameplay. However neither of these issues is much of a practical problem, as you simply work with the tools you have and can make it through the game just fine, it is just that a bit more freedom could have added more variety to the game. And speaking about weapons, it would have been nice if the game would have allow the free use of sniper rifles, but instead sniper rifles are only available in a very few selected spots and can't be carried around.

The boss design in the game certainly felt really old school, as it does have the boss characters, full with health bar and everything, run around pretty crazily while you shoot at them. But that boss design didn't really bother me, it could have been handled more intelligently, but one can have some fun with trying to exploit their behaviors.

The story in the game overall was a bit generic, following the frequently used current day scenarios of secret government organizations, terrorists and the military-industrial complex. It also was at times a bit hard to follow, as it wasn't always so clear whom you where fighting against or why, as quite a few of the contacts you make happen and missions you get come from pre-existing intelligence knowledge or information from other contacts, not actions the player himself performs. However what it lacks in general story the game makes up for with interesting characters, most of them falling straight into the cheesy category, and interesting location, as unlike your average military shooter Alpha Protocol doesn't restrict itself to some far away desert, but you have to fight in villas, museums and other interesting locations. I would have however welcomed a bit more player driven navigation through those locations, far to often one just follows the marker on the HUD, instead of navigating the virtual world by landmarks.

Overall I really don't get the heavy criticism the game has received at all. Yes, there are a few minor issues and the combat might not feel as impact full as in a modern FPS, but for a game that doesn't want to be a FPS, but a spy RPG that style of combat makes perfect sense and really doesn't feel all that different to what you would do in a Splinter Cell or similar game. I didn't encounter anything that I would consider anywhere near game breaking throughout my two playthrough, quite the opposite, I had a ton of fun with what the game had to offer and enjoyed every minute of the around 15 hours that a single playthrough takes. As far as dynamic story lines go, Alpha Protocol is easily among, if not the best out there and for people that enjoyed Deus Ex, Mass Effect or Splinter Cell Alpha Protocol really should be considered a must-play.

Graphic Card Upgrade

2011-02-06T12:54:00.000-08:00

My old Geforce 7600LE card was good enough for playing Mass Effect in the lowest resolution and in the lowest detail settings, but not much good for many other modern games, so I went out in search for a new card. After quite some month of search I finally settled on a Sapphire ATI Radeon HD5670 512MB. Here some of the issues I encountered along the way:

Powersupply

Almost all modern PCIe graphic cards not only need a powerful powersupply, but also a separate power connection that gets plugged into the card. My computer has neither and the powersupply is a 350W one and doesn't have the needed power connection. What is worse is that most reviews or product descriptions don't bother to mention that fact, so it took quite some search to find that this is an issue to begin with and then some more search to find out how to solve it.

The ATI Raedon HD5670 seems to be the most powerful card that fitted the powersupply I had and didn't require a separate power connection. It was still a bit on the edge, recommending a 400W powersupply in the product description, but search around the net indicated that this wasn't really necessary and a good 350W or even a 300W one might be fine. To be a bit more on the safe side I ripped out a small additional HDD that I had in that case and moved its data to an USB one.

One Slot vs Two Slots

The old Geforce 7600LE was a single slot card with only passive cooling, almost all modern cards on the other side are two slots wide, this basically meant I had to scarify the only PCIe x1 I had on the motherboard along with the card that was currently plugged into that slot. Wasn't to much of a problem for me, as that card didn't had Linux drivers to begin with, so it was just hanging around unused anyway and saving whatever power it used couldn't hurt either.

Model Numbers

Digging through all those model numbers of graphics card is insane. Even if you have settled on a model of a card, you still have multiple manufacturers and multiple variations of the card to chose from. Reading through a whole bunch of reviews indicated that the Sapphire one would be decent and that the HD5670 wouldn't profit much from a 1GB of memory. The 512MB variant also happened to be quite a bit cheaper.

With the manufacturer and card model set, there where still some model number variations to chose from, namely:

11168-01-20R
11168-02-20R
11168-06-20R
11168-07-20R

Finding out that the 01 and 07 cards had a display port instead of the VGA one that the 02 and the 06 one had to offer was the easy part. The exact difference between 01 and the 07 or respectively the 02 and 06 one however still puzzles me. The product matrix at Sapphire list one as "Hyper Memory Enabled" and the others as not, however only in the cards name, not in the tech specs, other information on the net however indicates that basically all ATI cards have hyper memory support. A question send to their support indicated that both cards are to their best knowledge completely identical and there wasn't much logic to begin with behind those SKU numbers to begin with.

I finally ended up getting a 01 card, as I was getting really tired of looking through product charts and there didn't seem to be any more information on the net regarding those product numbers. While I can't tell if it is technically any different from a 07 card, I can say that it does look different from all those official product photos of the Sapphire ATI Radeon HD5670 that I could find on the net. As unlike in those photos, my card has two slot blends, not just a single one. Maybe thats the defining difference between 01 and 07?

Adapters from the DVI output to VGA and from the HDMI output to DVI come in the box.

Windows

Windows driver installation was easy. I just download the Catalyst driver from the ATI page and the thing is ready to go. One mistake I however did was uninstalling everything that had Nvidia in its name, bad idea, seems that Nvidia Physix is something that is actually required by some games even when you use an ATI card and those games (Alpha Protocol) won't properly function after an uninstall of that. Had to reinstall the game to get it back up and running.

Linux

Like most graphics card, especially when a few month old, the HD5670 does have solid Linux support, both in the form of Open Source as well as proprietary drivers. At the moment I am running the proprietary ones, as the Open Source ones that came with Ubuntu didn't have 3D acceleration and I didn't want to bother with recompiling stuff right now.

And while the installation went smoothly in the end, there was one big showstopper when it come to installing the drivers that took quite a while to figure out: ATI drivers and Nvidia drivers are incompatible. You can't have both on your system at the same time, as somewhere down in the virtual dependencies or alternatives or whatever there will be silent conflicts which cause the drivers to not function properly and crash the system. After purging everything Nvidia and everything ATI and quite a few reboots and crashes later, I however managed to install the driver properly and so far it has been working smoothly ever since.

One subjective thing I couldn't yet really confirm however: 2D performance seems sluggish. Scrolling in Emacs has always been mind boggling slow with anti-aliased fonts, but now it seems to be even slower. Not sure whats up with that and if its a real thing or just imagination.

Configuring multi-display support is very simple in Linux, just a few button clicks in the ATI configuration tool. The card seems to have three XVideo "ports", allowing you to watch three videos at the same time. Adjusting contrast and brightness in XVideo also works, which didn't with my earlier NVidia card.

Conclusion

With the Sapphire ATI HD5670 512MB I can now play almost all games I have tested in with at 1680x1050 in high details, Crysis is one of the few exception, that is only usable at medium details. Overall this is quite respectable for an otherwise four year old PC. The power supply seems to hold up fine, no crashes or any other issues so far.

The annoying part with PC upgrades really isn't the cost, as that card doesn't cost all that much, but the amount of information you have to wade through to make an informed decision on your purchase. That information is also often hard to find, especially with OEM hardware. For example benchmark information for my 7600LE is basically non-existent, the documentation for my motherboard is not available from the manufacturer of that board as it is an OEM and information of how much power your power supply should have is vague at best. So it becomes really hard to tell if a new card will fit the system and what advantages it will have over the old one.

I didn't even look at all information out there, the Nvidia GT 240 seems to be comparable to the HD5670 and there is an endless numbers of models for that, some cheaper, some more expensive then the HD5670, I didn't even bother to look through much of that and if I would, I would probably still digging through it. After finding out that it is probably close enough to not matter much in practice was enough for me to just ignore it.

If it wouldn't have been for all that crap I had to wade through I might have already bought a new card a year or two ago, but back then I always ended up reaching a point where I just had enough of it and stuck with the old card. No surprise in that situation really that consoles are taking the market share away from the PC.

xboxdrv 0.7.1 released

2011-01-31T10:08:00.000-08:00

added --match-group
added --on-connect and --on-disconnect to xboxdrv --daemon
added --usb-debug
added --no-extra-events
added support for Playstation button names (triangle, circle, square, cross, L1, L2, L3, R1, R2, R3)
added ability to set LED per controller slot
added [controller0/config0/modifier] style sections to the ini file
added new match rules: usbserial=SERIAL, vendor=VENDOR, product=PRODUCT and property=PROPERTY:VALUE
added some example configurations to examples/
fixed issues with older libudev versions
fixed LED not getting switched off on shutdown
fixed some missing #include directives
fixed axis inversion issue in --axismap
fixed assertion in relative axis filter
fixed --dpad-as-button
fixed --dpad-only
fixed --mimic-xpad
fixed issue with using --trigger-as-zaxis in combination with axisfilter
man-page updates and cleanup
new version of runxboxdrv

Download: http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/xboxdrv/

xboxdrv 0.7.0 released

2011-01-27T16:54:00.001-08:00

switched to libusb-1.0
-D, --daemon replaces xboxdrv-daemon
--daemon supports hotpluging via libudev, even in applications that don't support it themselves
cleaned up axis/button modifier some more
startup output got cleaned up
fixed double Ctrl-c issue
added --modifier MODIFIER,...
configuration toggle button now works with modifiers too
renamed --ui-new to --next-config
renamed --ui-toggle to --toggle
fixed incorrect endpoint detection for Xbox1 controller
native Playstation 3 USB controller support
added axis rotation modifier
renamed A, B, X, Y axis to BTN_A, BTN_B, BTN_X, BTN_Y to avoid confusion with X1, Y1
added --list-all, --list-key, -list-rel, ... to display all available symbolic name
changed device_id syntax from 1-BTN_A to now BTN_A@1

Download: http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/xboxdrv/

Fun with HTML mail and word wrap

2011-01-13T09:23:00.000-08:00

One would think that standard email is a pretty much solved problem these days. Some recent events showed me otherwise:

take Thunderbird and set it to HTML mail
receive a regular text mail
forward said email as HTML mail
receive that forwarded mail with Outlook
try to print it

What happens is this: Thunderbird sticks the original mail into a <pre> tag and when Outlook then receives it, it interprets it properly as HTML, except of course that it follows the spec a little to closely. <pre> tags don't word wrap in your browser and Outlook replicates that behavior exactly, thus if that original mail contained a few long lines, Outlook will display them as a single long line without word wrap, leading to a huge horizontal scroll bar when viewing and a plain cut-off of the text when trying to print it.

xboxdrv 0.6.3 released

2011-01-11T07:19:00.000-08:00

chatpad support (still rough), special thanks to Jani Virta, Andy Kirkham, dwomac and GAFBlizzard who helped make it possible
added --chatpad, --chatpad-no-init and --chatpad-debug
added --headset, --headset-dump FILE and --headset-play FILE, for experimentation only
added optional abs:/rel:/key: prefixes to --ui-axismap
added input filters for --axismap and --buttonmap
fixed multiple bugs that made it impossible to assign events to specific devices
fixed axis getting stuck when using a shift key
fixed incorrect error handling on fork()/exec()

Download: http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/xboxdrv/

Review: Goin' Downtown (PC)

2011-01-11T07:11:00.000-08:00

Goin' Downtown was released in 2008 by Silver Style Entertainment. It is a classic 2D point&click adventure set in the New York of the year 2072. The story focuses around the depressed police officer Jake McCorly who investigates the suicide of a prostitute. The game only seems to be released in Germany with German language.

The game is presented in a comic book like style with cell shaded 3D characters and hand painted backgrounds, somewhat similar to Runaway, it even provides an option to display the subtitles as comic book speech bubbles. Aside from a few particle effects and minor animations backgrounds are mostly static. Wide screen support is provided and the resolution can be freely configured. The cell shaded characters faces can look a little awkward at times and animation and lip syncing are as usual for current day point&click adventures not all that great, but nothing to bad that one doesn't get used to quickly. That aside the graphics look pretty good, especially the frequent switches in camera angles during interaction are nice and break the traditionally very static nature of 2D adventures.

The interface follows regular adventure traditions, interaction works via a simple two button interface, left for interaction, right click for looking. There are however hardly any situations where the right click is needed, so it feels more like a single click interface for most part. Running works via double click, which however feels a little slow and floaty, quick travel is also provided by the double click and via an always accessible city map that guides you to the next location. The inventory comes in the form of an automatically hiding bar at the bottom of the screen. The game provides a detailed quest logs that keeps track of tasks that have to be done, integrated in that quest log is a three level hint system, similar to UHS. All interactive objects in a scene can be highlighted by pressing "H".

The dialog system goes back to the root of the adventure genre, using classical dialog trees instead of the nowadays more common topic based discussion systems. Aside from a few exceptions the dialog trees however stay shallow throughout most of the game. A little nod to Monkey Island is provided in the form of discussion tree based fist fighting later in the game.

An unusual feature in the game are the night and day cycles, these follow neither the story nor a fixed timer, instead they can be triggered via a simple press of a button, turning the whole word from night to day. The difference between night and day is mostly limited to the availability of NPCs, as some only work at day, while others work at night, but otherwise it is basically meaningless, as the game neither keep track of time nor really factors these changes into its puzzle design.

Music comes in the form of some nice synthesizer tracks, that however get a bit repetitive over the course of the game. The voice work is as usual for German games, overall solid, but nothing remarkable.

The puzzle design is overall solid and logical, but falls on the easy side as most things are not that hard to figure out even without using the hint system. Locations are generally very small and simple, so there is no way to get lost and it is nearly impossible to miss a needed item. One big issue however is that many puzzles feel a little arbitrary, being there just to have puzzles and don't integrate all that great into the overall games story.

In the most extreme case for example of weird logic your character wants to gain access to a locked facility, both your boss and your college do have access to that facility, your boss even gives you his half of the key. But instead of just asking your college to provide you access, the game forces you to copy her id-chip, which in turn requires a rare chip copy machine that you have to get from the Chinese Mafia. Stealing that machine, requires breaking into their facility and killing four guards in the process in an stealth action sequence, the only one of its kind in the whole game. Most other puzzles in the game are not that weird, but it shows that the game sometimes goes a rather unusual route to accomplish otherwise simple tasks. The whole killing in that scene also felt completely unnecessary and unmotivated, as you never actually have any problems with the Mafia, you just go their to steal the machine and otherwise never have anything to do with the Mafia in the whole game.

That above incident aside, the story also gets quite dark in general in the game, much more then the graphic style would make you guess. Dealing with police corruption, prostitution, rape and a whole lot of murder. The games style and tone however doesn't feel like it is quite up on par to deal with those issues and also all of your colleagues in the game don't really seem to take the situation as serious as they should.

Overall Goin' Downtown is a game that starts great, delves into a lot of interesting topics and feature quite a few interesting Sci-Fi ideas, but then never really has to time to really do anything with them, as the game is already over after just barely six hours of gameplay. In that time it answers most major plot points and doesn't end in a cliffhanger, but the plot still feels rushed and the ending just comes a little to easy. Most of the side characters, which seem like they might have a larger part later on, never get their turn and just stay decoration throughout the game, instead of becoming active part of the main plot. The main villain's motivation is also never really explored in depth, five minutes after you find out who it is and basically a minute after you see him for the first time in the whole game the credits already roll.

Goin' Downtown is simply one of those games that does a lot of stuff right, doesn't have any major faults and is quite a lot of fun while it lasts, but then simply fails to provide enough of what it does. I wouldn't mind seeing a sequel of this one, as that universe certainly has potential for more.

Review: Phantasmogaria (PC)

2011-01-08T09:52:00.000-08:00

Phantasmagoria was released in 1995 for the PC and developed by Sierra On-Line. Roberta Williams was responsible for game design and story. The game is a third person FMV based point and click adventure game, similar to Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within released by the same company the same year. In the game the player takes control of Adrienne Delaney, who together with her husband Donald Gordon, just moved into an old mansion previously owned by a famous 19th-century magician, who meddled around with occult magic rituals and unleashed a demon in the process.

The game doesn't start out with any direct objective or task for the player to solve, instead Adrienne basically just explores the house and its surrounding and thus slovly uncoveres the houses backstory and the story behind its previous owner. The games progress is heavily driven by its story and FMV sequences that slowly unravels as you interact with objects in the house or othe characters. Puzzles play only a very minor role in this game, so much that they are almost non-existant. The biggest difficulty in the game is generally finding the person or object that moves the story forward. Missing something important can happen at times as the house is rather large and navigation through it can be a bit troublesome at times as the game violates the 180° rule in almost every room. The game however does provide a build in hint system in the form of a skull in the bottom left corner of the screen that will tell you where you have to go next, so that endless searches throughout the same rooms can generally be avoided.

Mechanically the game uses a simple one-click interface for interaction with the environment, a traditional inventory is also provided and objects in the inventory can also be viewed up close in a 360° view that allows interaction with the object up close, but that ability is only really needed in two points in whole the game. Dialog trees are not provided and interaction between characters will follow a linear script. Interacting with a character multiple times in a row can often provide additional information. While the game is presented out of a classical third person view, the ability to freely walk around isn't provided, instead the character will stand on a fixed spot and only start walking when interacting with an object and in those cases you only really take a single step before the camera cuts away to a FMV closeup of the object interaction.

Graphically this game is a weird mix. All the backgrounds are completly computer generated with only the main actors being real and filmed in front of a bluescreen. This is quite unlike Gabriel Knight 2 which used either real sets or photos for backgrounds. However while the 3D background graphics certainly show their age, they still do a good job in helping setting up the atmosphere.

The savegame system in Phantasmagoria is a bit messed up. Instead allowing you multiple savegames, the game limits you to a single one. This makes going back to earlier chapters impossible, unless you kept a copy of an earlier save. You can however create multiple profiles, so that multiple people can play the game.

Overall I found Phantasmagoria to be an enjoyable horror adventure game, that however was rather short. On a regular first playthrough the game only takes a little over six hours to complete and while the story that you unravel is certainly interesting, it never really lives up to its potential as it comes to the finale far to quickly instead of getting more involved with the side characters. I also found that the game really overdid it a bit with its blood and gore, while the main game itself is very harmless, mostly involving just casual exploration of the mansion and the nearby town with a few rare and mild jump scares mixed in, the flashbacks to the magican and later murders in the game are really rather gruesome.

The last chapter of the game diverts a bit from the regular exploration, as it involves a lot of time based chase sequences and thus a lot of untimely deaths. The game however does give a you checkpoint at basically every step of the way, so the frustration never becomes to much and the hint guide will still provide some tips. I however would have liked a little more logic in the puzzles in that section, as it is often impossible to tell what will kill you and what won't until after you tried it. On the positve side of things however the chase seuqence is quite spectacular to watch and does a good job at creating urgency with the new much more nervose idle animations. Those that expect a happy end should however be warned, this game doesn't really provide one.

Compared to Gabriel Knight 2 Phantasmagoria comes out short in almost every way, while the FMV charm is still there, the story is less complex, the puzzles less interesting and overall its just less of game. However that said, while it lasts, Phantasmagoria is a good amount of fun and exploring a hunted house is definitively interesting. The game doesn't really have any big faults other then the lack of complexity and length.

Using Logitech MX500 and MarbleMouse under Vista

2011-01-05T08:42:00.000-08:00

I own an old Logitech MX500 and a Logitech MarbleMouse trackball. Under Linux those work fine and I configure them independently with xinput and remap buttons as I wish. In Windows Vista on the other side things are a bit more tricky. One key issue is that Windows can't even swap left and right mouse buttons throughout the OS with the default Windows tools. If I try that via the control panel it will switch it for the GUI, but not for games. To switch buttons in games I need the Logitech driver. The next issue is that the MX500 doesn't have Vista drivers, Logitech refuses to support its older hardware. And the next issue is that the MX500 driver won't install when SetPoint, the driver for the MarbleMouse trackball is already installed. Solution to make both of them work in Windows Vista:

Uninstall any mouse drivers
Download setpoint620.exe (MarbleMouse Vista driver) and mw9791.exe (MX500 XP driver)
Install mw9791.exe with XP compatibility mode enabled
Install setpoint620.exe as usual
Optional: Install the PS/2 support in the SetPoint control panel if you want to use the MarbleMouse on the PS/2 port

Installing things in this order will by pass the check on the MX500 driver and allow both drivers to co-exist in Windows Vista.

xboxdrv 0.6.2 released

2010-12-31T13:17:00.001-08:00

merged Xbox360 guitar handling into the regular Xbox360 controller handling, use --guitar to get the old mapping back
added generic event filter framework
added toggle button filter
added invert button filter
added auto fire button filter
added log filter for button and axis
added invert axis filter
added sensitivity axis filter
added relative axis filter
added response curve axis filter
added deadzone axis filter
added calibration axis filter
added ability to send different events depending on how long a button was pressed
added ability to launch a program on button press
added ability to replay a macro on a button press
added ability to launch a child program from within xboxdrv, making wrapper scripts easier to write without race conditions
added --option NAME=VALUE to allow INI-style config options from command line
added --evdev-debug to print out all received events from evdev
added --evdev-no-grab to avoid a full grab on the event device
unified ini and command line parsing some more
Mad Catz Xbox controller - MW2 controller support added
added support for Xbox1 analog buttons, use --ui-axismap with A, B, X, Y, black, white
give proper error message when the Play&Charge kit is used

Download: http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/xboxdrv/

Review: The Void (PC)

2010-12-27T07:56:00.000-08:00

The Void was developed by Ice-Pick Lodge and originally released 2008 in Russia followed by an international release in 2009. The game is probably best described as an resource management action-adventure with a heavy focus on artistic expression. While the game shares elements with games like Myst or Flower, it really is quite a different beast.

The game puts the player into a role of a lost soul that hangs somewhere between life and death in a place called the Void. The players tasks is it to collect color that grows the Void and then use it to fight enemies or unlock further areas with the ultimate goal to escape the Void.

Game Mechanics

The game is split into two parts. One is an overworld map on which one travels from realm to realm, this is somewhat reminiscent of games such as Super Mario Bros 3. The other part are the realms themselves, these are small self containing locations through which one navigates in first person view with regular first person controls. Gameplay in those areas is mostly focused on exploration and collecting colors, while enemies are sometimes present in those areas, they aren't the core focus and for most part it is best to simply avoid them instead of fighting. What makes The Void "special" is the way in which color is handled. Color is neither an ever growing resource or a collectible, instead it is a very rare resource that has to be managed by the player with care and that is required for all basic actions in the game. Color builds both the basis for the players survival, as it becomes essentially your lifebar as well as your ammunition when it comes to fighting enemies. Color comes in two forms, the unprocessed Lympha that one can carry around or use in ones hearts to keep one alive and the processes Nerva that is used as fuel for your glyph drawing. Nerva in the hearts get automatically converted into Lympha when on the worldmap, which has the side effect of constantly draining your life energy. Keeping a healthy balance between Lympha and Nerva is one of the core aspects of the game. By filling trees with color the player is able to grow the amount of color available, but as trees only return color at the end of an cycle, the player thus risks running short of color in the meantime.

The world of The Void also contains two faction of inhabitants, the brothers and the sisters. The brothers will wander around on the worldmap and try to steal color from the players garden when they can, but they are not a direct enemy, they see the player as their apprentice and will give him tasks and comment on his actions. Some will gain mistrust later in the game and challenge the player for a fight, while others will become a mentor. The sisters each have an area of their own on the worldmap, neighboring areas will stay locked until a sister heart has been filled with enough color. This happens in two stages, the first heart will unlock the regular realms next to her, while the second heart will unlock the path to the next sister, thus unlocking all of the worldmap over the course of the game.

The goal of the game is to harvest enough color to either free oneself from the Void, free a sister or join the brothers. While one is free to chose which route to take and which sister to free, the game only allows a limited amount of actual freedom as progress throughout the game is tied to specific the cycle, of which there are 35 in the game. A cycle is a unit of time that passes while on the worldmap, inside the realms themselves time is halted and doesn't progress. While waiting for the next story event to happen the player has to collect enough color to survive and prepare for that event.

Collectible color in the realms of the Void comes in multiple forms. The most simple one are small plans scattered throughout the world, these can be harvested with a simple mouse click. Another way to harvest color is by catching small creatures crawling around on the ground, these creatures will run away when one gets to close, but one can lure them in by dropping a bit of color onto the ground. Both of those are the main way to get color at the beginning of the game. Later on the main way to get color is to give color to a tree. A tree that has been filled with color will blossom with color in the next cycle and a few cycles after that, providing you with a return on your investment.

Interaction with the game world happens via mouse gestures. By holding down Ctrl the game will open up a palette of color and allow to draw strokes to the screen. Simple random strokes can be used to throw a blow at an enemy or to activate an object or character. Gestured, called glyphs here and acquired by collecting the 21 hearts in the game, allow to provide more powerful special attacks or to cast shields for protection. The by far most frequently used glyph in the game is the donor glyph, basically the shape of an alpha, that will allow the player to drop color to the ground to lure little creatures, give color to one of the sisters or give color to a tree. Most of the other glyphs stay unused throughout most of the game and only get important in the fights against the brothers. The color that is chosen from the palette only matters when giving color to a sister, a tree or fighting one of the brothers, for regular enemies the color used for a stroke doesn't seem to make a difference.

Where the color of the Nerva however matters is in the hearts. Filling the hearts with green will give better protection in fights, filling it with purple will allow to fill a tree using less color and gold will reduce the amount of color needed to give to a sister. As colors in the hearts get converted to Lympha and thus can no longer be used in the hearts, it is important to properly manage which color is in the heart and which is stored away in the normal containers.

The game does allow to save anywhere and anytime on the worldmap, but doesn't allow to save within a realm. Quicksave and quickload are provided as well.

Artistry

Where The Void really shines is in its artistry. The game is beautiful in basically every way. Starting from the main menu down to the tiniest corner of a realm. The interaction and contrast between the dark and moody backgrounds with the colorful Nerva is fantastic and seeing a once lifeless garden blossom with color is just beautiful to look at. The game doesn't constrain itself to a consistent world, instead each of the realms follows its own surrealistic theme, going anywhere from dark caves to abandoned houses. The background music and atmospheric effects underline the moody atmosphere of the game and help to give each of the realms depth. This is also one of those rare cases where the voice acting isn't just competent, but genuinely great across the board, putting a lot of the bigger budget titles to shame and again underlining the dreamy and moody atmosphere that the game creates.

Problems

The biggest issue with The Void is that it is borderline unplayable, not in a buggy or technical sense, I didn't run into any critical bugs and technically the fantastic graphics work smoothly even on older hardware. No, where The Void fails is in its punishing game mechanics. These days we are used to have games that tutor us into every detail, making it impossible to fail or do something wrong and even when one screws up one always has a reset point just a few meters away. The Void is different. While its game mechanics are not that complex, the game often only gives vague hints as to how one has to use them, thus making important details easy to miss and it doesn't shy away from letting the player just flat out run into an unsolvable dead end that might require to replay multiple hours of previous gameplay.

I went into The Void essentially expecting a Myst like adventure game and played it that way for the first hour. In that first hour I didn't run into any issues at all. The game didn't feel hard or complicated. I collected a bit of color here, planted a bit of color there and everything seemed fine and dandy. I excepted the game to slowly coach me into the details of its mechanics, except that didn't happen, instead I died without even a hint at what was going on. One moment I was walking around on the worldmap, the next the Game Over sequence played before my eyes. So I reloaded from an earlier save and tried again and died again. Still rather clueless as to what the hell was going on. I don't think I have ever seen a single game let you run so blindly into your death.

Reading through the 30 page manual and through this walkthrough cleared things up a bit. What had happened was that I ran out of Nerva in my hearts. The color you collect isn't automatically transferred to your hearts, thus you have to take extra care of managing that there is always some color in there. What makes this especially problematic is that you run out of color in your hearts extremely quickly. When you are in a realm everything is fine, the color in your heart becomes a regular energy bar that only goes down when enemies attack you and there aren't many in the first hour of the game, but on the worldmap time ticks away and with each seconds on the worldmap Nerva will get converted to Lympha, thus essentially reducing your lifebar. This process goes so far that just standing around on the worldmap without doing anything will kill you in just a minute.

Another big issue is that the game doesn't tell you what a color does until after it is already to late. If you want to give color to a tree you have to have purple in your hearts or else you will waste a lot of color. Same when you give color to a sisters, if you don't have gold in your heart you will waste color. The game does tell you that, but only after you already wasted a lot of color. The game also doesn't give you a second chance, if you don't fill a tree full with all the color you can on the first try, the game won't give you another chance to fill the tree for another few cycles and a cycle can easily be an hour of gameplay. Thus it is extremely easy to navigate into a position where there is simply have no color left to harvest in the world, no garden with unused trees where one can grow more color and facing a fight against a brother for which one need all the color you can get.

This is basically what happened on my second try, I restarted from scratch and followed the advice from the walkthrough and the manual, filled trees properly with colors, kept a more close eye on my hearts and managed everything a little better. This again worked just fine for some four hours of gameplay, until I failed to fulfill a task one of the brothers had given me. I didn't realize that the task the brothers give you aren't optional, at least not at this point in the game, so due to not fulfilling the task I had to fight that brother, which at this point was simply impossible to accomplish. I didn't have remotely enough color to do that and there was no way to acquire it in time. The only way to fix that situation was to go back to an earlier savegame and change the way I collected color. At this point I was really close to just give up on the game.

What changed my mind was for one simply the great atmosphere of the game, at this point I only saw a small fraction of the game and I wanted to see more. I also wasn't exactly alone in suffering through those issues and somebody already created an Easy Patch (Easy) for that game, which I promptly installed. Technical note: Users of non-English versions of the game need to delete the Properties/Strings/ subdirectory of the patch or else it will screw up the subtitles and dialog timing.

So with the Easy Patch installed I went back to an earlier savegame and continued from there. With that patch installed the game became much more manageable, but it didn't actually become easy, as all the micromanagement of colors in the hearts was still there. The patch also didn't give endless amounts of colors, I still was short of color basically throughout most of the game, but there was always enough to get the next task done and with the patch and the knowledge gained till then I didn't ran into any more dead ends.

I think the by far biggest issue of the game is the way the worldmap is handled. Playing in the realms itself is actually quite fine, in there you don't have a time limit to worry about and you can simply go along at your own pace. In those places the game can feel quite similar to Flower, as it is about the collection and spread of color, not about the fight against monsters. But on the worldmap you are under constant time pressure, so much in fact that even with the easy patch I would call the game flat out impossible to play in a regular manner.

The way I ended up playing was basically like this: Whenever I left a realm and got back to the worldmap I instantly hit the quicksave button, trying to not even waste a single second. Once saved, I went around in the world, looking for places where there was color to collect (displayed when you hover over a realm with your mouse) or where there was a sister to which I could go to unlock further parts of the worldmap. Once I figured out what I wanted to do I hit restored the earlier save and only then actually executed what I wanted to do, as quickly as possible. The reason for this is that every second on the worldmap counts, it is not only that the energy bar goes down quickly, but the main issue is that new colors only comes into the world only when a new cycle starts. This means that one can easily miss a whole cycle when one doesn't manage to fill a garden with color before the end of a cycle and that lack of color might prove fatal in a later fight. There are also only 35 cycles throughout the whole game, so wasting a single one of those can already get problematic.

Conclusion

Overall I don't think I have ever played a game that was so beautiful and yet so frustrating at the same time. Even after I was past the point of initial confusion and understood how the game was supposed to be played, it still felt like the game mechanics where just to messed up, not by technical inadequacies or lack of development time, but by design. Forcing the player on a strict time limit and only giving him small amounts of resources, that when mismanaged can screw him up hours later on in the game can be highly frustrating. What makes the matters worse in this game, then say a regular RTS, is that the effects here are not local to your current mission, they are global to the whole game. Small mistakes in the beginning can screw you up really bad later on and you won't even get a hint that you did something wrong unless its to late. What is especially problematic here is that the game never fells hard. There wasn't a single situation in the whole game that I would have considered hard in the classical sense, in fact most of it is rather relaxing, trying to lure the little creatures in with a bit of color can be a lot of fun and dodging bigger enemies is never very difficult. What makes the game hard is that you can easily run into dead ends with no way out. Color is your only way to fight enemies and when you run out of color while in a fight against a brother you simply will die, as there is no way out of that situation, no way to harvest more color and basically nothing one can do. Those fights don't just become hard, they become impossible when you don't have enough color.

Far to often the game basically expects you to prepare for an event that will only happen a few cycles down the road, without even giving you a hint that you need to prepare. I frequently found myself just fast-forwarding through the cycles to find out what will happen, only to then go back to an earlier save to prepare for that future event. A walkthrough will help here a bit, but as the game contains quite a number of randomized events it can't really tell you exactly what you will need to do. The Easy Patch will make it easier to get yourself prepared for a fight, but it still requires you to take care of the micromanagement of your colors.

Another issue with the game is that becomes quite repetitive later on. Seeing a garden blossom the first time around is beautiful, seeing it the tens time it becomes kind of routine. Some of the gardens also seem to be copy&paste of earlier gardens in the game with only minor variations. And the whole collection of color kind of becomes a grind, as one will have seen everything there is to see in the game quite a few cycles before the end.

In terms of story the game always stays rather abstract and always limited to the Void, so one never really learns what is really going on or how one got there in the first place. The ending is basically exactly what one expects it to be without any big surprise or grand finale. One thing I found a bit of puzzling are the sequences where one chase a ghost girl around rooftops. These sequences happen at specific points in time in the game, without any triggering action from the players side. One can't really get or learn anything in those sequences and stylistically they look a good bit more realistic then the rest of the game. The identity or purpose of that ghost girl is never revealed and it doesn't really integrate much with the rest of the story, which happens to be mostly about the conflict and power struggle between the brothers and sisters in the Void.

For anybody willing to try the game I would strongly recommend to study the manual, read a walkthrough and to go with the easy patch. Those won't remove some trial and error, but they should keep the game manageable and enjoyable. One can even go a step further and outright cheat by using the build in console, while I didn't found that to be necessary, it should allow to skip some of the grinding later on in the end and allow to escape some dead ends.

In the end this is a great game, a deeply flawed one, but a flawed one that still managed to pull me in with its atmosphere and beauty. The game took me around 28 hours to complete, I applied the easy patch around five hours in and restarted twice. Even when you are past the initial hurdles and understand how you are supposed to play the game, it still doesn't fully click as the quickload/quicksave on the worldmap and the grind is certainly annoying. The game also doesn't really offer a lot new stuff later on in the game. But even with those faults, the atmosphere in this game is simply fantastic and the game is definitively worth a look, but it is also a game that one has to be approached with care.

xboxdrv 0.6.0 released

2010-12-22T03:03:00.000-08:00

support for reading from evdev, this allows the use of regular regular PC joysticks or the Playstation 3 controllers with xboxdrv, useful if you need configurability or joy2key-like functionality, but don't have a Xbox360 gamepad
added KEY_#num, ABS_#num and REL_#num to allow refering to events by number instead of name
support for reading configuration from a INI configuration file
cleaned up uinput mapping, --dpad-as-button, --dpad-only, etc. are now simple mappings instead of special case hackery
--ui-axismap and --ui-buttonmap now work with all axis and button
smooth deadzone handling without jumps
added --detach-kernel-driver
automatically insert dummy events to make input device register as joystick
added ability to have multiple configs running at the same time with --ui-new
added shifting to --ui-axismap, allows sending of different events when a shift button is pressed
Saitek Cyborg Rumble Pad support added
Gamestop Xbox 360 Controller support added

Download: http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/xboxdrv/

Review: Perry Rhodan: The Adventure (PC)

2010-12-20T19:08:00.000-08:00

"Perry Rhodan: The Adventure", known in other regions as "The Immortals of Terra" or "Rhodan: Myth of the Illochim", is a 2D point&click adventure for the PC, released in 2008. The game is based on the Perry Rhodan science fiction novel series which has been running in Germany since 1961, knowledge of that series is however not required as the game will provide plenty of background information on the characters and the universe. The game puts the player into the role of Perry Rhodan, who after an attack on the Terran headquarter finds out that his close college Mondra Diamond has been kidnapped and thus goes on a journey to free his friend and unravel the reason behind the kidnapping and thus later on unraveling the mystery behind the ancient race of the Illochim.

Mechanically the game follows closely in the footsteps of other modern point&click adventures. The game uses a single-action interface, where a click on an object will automatically do the right thing. A separate action to look at an object is not provided, except for objects in the inventory, where a right click will bring up a short description. Running is done with a double-click, while quick-travel to another room is accomplished by clicking the right mouse button, made even easier by the small thumbnail that will be shown of the next room when the mouse hovers over an exist. The inventory is presented as a list of items at the bottom of the screen, unless other adventures however here the inventory does not only contains collected objects, but also collected knowledge such as other characters or locations in the game. This little tweak allows the game to work without having a separate dialog interface, as discussions are simply done by using an items of the inventory with another character and thus triggering a short dialog sequence. Dialog can be skipped by sentence by pressing 'space'.

The game does keep track of tasks that need to be completed and general story progress in a very simple but effective log book where each task is summarized by a short sentence or two.

The save system works as usual, but is limited to only seven slots with one additional slot for quick-saves and another one for autosave, while not a big practical problem these days games really should allow an unlimited number of saves.

One mechanical issue with the game is that it doesn't display the name of the object under the mouse cursor, it only changes the mouse cursor to a generic one that indicates interactibility. In addition the game frequently places objects very close together and has hitboxes that sometimes seem overly large, which makes it hard to tell if the game will handle a larger collection as one logical game item or handle each of those objects as a separate item without clicking each of them. A pressing on 'S' will however mark all usable objects in the current scene and thus clear up most of the confusion.

Graphically the adventure is a mix of pre-rendered backgrounds and real-time characters. The backgrounds, especially in the later parts of the game, look extremely pretty. They suffer at times a little from a lack of animation, as only some particle effects and minor things like small rows flying cars are animated, while even things that should be animated, like water, stay completely static. The characters in the game also look very good and are quite a bit more detailed then many other adventure games, featuring good lighting effects and dynamic shadows. In terms of animation however the characters suffer from the same issues as most other adventures these days. The number of animation is very limited and most object interaction is done by generic animation that fails to properly connect to the object. Not much of an issue, as you pretty much get used to it, but some older games such as Broken Sword did a much better job at animation, even so they where hand animated, not 3D characters. The game also lacks a few transition animation when changing rooms. For example entering and starting an elevator just leads to a fade to black, instead of an animation of the elevator accelerating. In terms of art direction the game comes of a little sterile in the beginning, but gets better later on in the game.

The puzzle design in the game is overall very solid. There are a few instances where solving a puzzle will trigger a story event that advances the game, without having the puzzle and the continuation of the story have any direct connection, but those aren't that big of a practical problem. The few cases where an objects is small enough to be easily over looked can be solved by pressing 'S'. The only real issue I had with the puzzles in the game was when Perry Rhodan has to investigate an exhibition about the Illochim at the mid point of the game, that section doesn't really give much of a guidance as to what needs to be done, so there was to much trial&error for my taste. Everything before that section and after it however was lots of fun.

In terms of characters the game feels a little impersonal and distant at times. For example Mondra Diamond, the women that got kidnapped at the beginning of the game, and Perry Rhodan never exchange a single line of dialog with each other throughout the whole game. It is hard to feel for a character whom you don't even really know, except through some text descriptions. Perry Rhodan himself also feels a little cold and uninterested in the things happening around him, maybe that's to be expected from somebody who is 3000 years old, but a little more emotional involvement would have been welcome. Where the game however really shines is in its universe. There are plenty of interesting places to visit, races to talk to and items to interact with. The game is filled with little details and plenty of backstory on the characters. The game never takes itself to serious and while the humor come of as a little wooden, there is certainly some fun to be had. The science fiction in this game doesn't aim for realism, but goes straight into the pulp direction and it also happens to be filled with shear endless amounts of techobabble.

Overall this is a great adventure game. It is technically and mechanically very solid and whatever small issues it might have in its puzzle design and story are easily overcome by the detail filled universe. The wooden humor and technobabble might certainly not be everybody taste, but I had good fun with it. I found the 12 hours it took me to finish the game highly enjoyable. The one small gripe I might have with the game is the ending, while everything that leads up to it is perfectly fine, I kind of missed a longer epilogue. Going out with just a short cutscene doesn't feel right after a long adventure and an important discovery.

Review: Overclocked: A History of Violence (PC)

2010-12-14T04:58:00.000-08:00

Overclocked was released in 2007 by the now defunct German developer House of Tales for the PC. This review focuses on the German language version. The point&click psycho thriller adventure puts the player into the role of David McNamara, an ex-army psychiatrist, who is tasked with finding out what happened to five college-aged teens that showed up armed, disoriented, confused and without memory in the New York. The memory of the patient is explored in the game in reverse chronological order, with the player backtracking through scenes from their escape to the cause of their current condition, while David McNamara has to fight with marriage issues and other troubles in the present.

Mechanically the game follows classic point&click adventure mechanics, instead of the nowadays popular single-click interface, a simple pie menu is used that allows you to perform different actions on an object. Usable objects can be highlighted with a press on the space key and the double-click for running and quick-travel is present as well. The discussion system follows a topic based approach. One annoying issue with the dialogs is that there is no way to skip individual sentences, the player can only skip whole dialogs/cutscenes by pressing Escape twice.

The game is presented with a mix of real-time rendered characters and fully animated 2D pre-rendered backgrounds. It also throws in a few camera movements here and there, which isn't seen often in a mixed real-time/pre-rendered presentation. Split screens are used frequently by the game in phone conversations or when McNamara is interrogating one of his patients. The game also makes use of a physics engine and real-time lighting of the pre-rendered backgrounds, however these technical gimmicks, while neat, are used only in two short situations throughout the whole game and one has to wonder why they even bothered with them. The graphics themselves are a bit mixed, while the pre-rendered backgrounds look impressive and show some great looking weather effects, the real-time rendered characters leave a lot to be desired. Especially David McNamara, the main character, looks a little off and some more work in terms of character design and animation would have been welcome. Lip syncing is solid, but given the low detail on the characters, that doesn't really help all that much. The German voice work is overall very good.

The game comes in a 4:3 aspect ratio, without a way to switch to 16:9 or 16:10 modes, unless of course you can live with horrible distortion. This is not unusual for adventure games, but is something that could have been easily avoided here, as the game comes with an unusually huge inventory bar at the bottom of the screen and a large black bar, used for subtitles, at the top, areas that could have been easily dynamically resized to allow play in proper wide-screen aspect ratios.

The camera placement in Overclocked suffers from the same issues as House of Tales previous game, The Moment of Silence, namely the game tries to hard to present a full 3d environment with interesting objects in every direction and this forces the game to violate the 180 degree rule of film making in almost every room. This leaves the player often a bit disoriented even in seemingly trivially small locations. The game doesn't have any maze like structures, so this doesn't ever become much of a practical problem, but its an issue that could have been easily avoided with a little more care done on the location planing.

The load/save interface also tries to be more clever then it should be, presenting the save games as a single photograph where one has to flip via forward and back buttons to reach older saves, an ability to view a list of all saves at once isn't available.

The puzzles in this game are for most part logical and easy to do, as the game focuses on the linear storytelling a lot more then on the free form exploration. Large locations with free form exploration basically don't exist in the game as the player is restricted to only those small parts that belong to the currently discussed repressed memory. The game however has issues with making it clear what the player is tasked to do next. Communication with patient works throughout the game by a simple technique, each discussion with a patient is recorded, a recording of one patient can be played back for another and provides hints for him to further explore his memory, thus providing yet another recording that can be used on yet another patient and thus slowly unraveling the whole story by having discussions with each patient. Which recording one has to play to which patient is however frequently not very clear and it is very easy to lose track of the people that interacted with each other in the memory scene. What makes this situation worse is that going through the routine of going to each patient room and playing back all the recordings made takes a lot of time, thus trial and error isn't really an option. Every now and then the game also requires the player to do something in the hospital before further interaction with a patient is possible, but again it is not always made very clear. At the very end the game also throws a basic code input puzzle at the player, while not difficult in principle, the player has at this point no longer access to the hint giving object and is thus forced to load an earlier save to retrieve the hint if he can't remember it.

Overall Overclocked is easily one of the most exciting adventure games I have played in years. Its unusual focus on a mostly static location for both the main character and the patients and the reverse chronological unraveling of the backstory works extremely well. The issues with losing track of what to do next are certainly annoying and probably the biggest issue I had with the game, but they can easily be worked around with a quick peek at a walkthrough. The games linearity might put off some people, but it didn't bother me at all. The game, talking around eight hours, is also not the longest, but given the tight and focused story that is not really a problem here. The few polishing issue that the game has don't really interfere with the main story telling, as you simply get used to them rather quickly. The games ending is also decent, something not exactly a given when it comes to unraveling mysteries. It is however not perfect, as I would have preferred it to go into a little more detail, instead of solving major plot points with a quick cinematic, but all the major plot points get answered. In the end this simply is a very well done gripping take on interactive storytelling.

Review: Memento Mori (PC)

2010-12-12T12:26:00.001-08:00

Memento Mori was released in 2008 for the PC and is a classic point&click adventure. The game puts the player into the roles of Larisa Svetlova, an Interpol art theft specialist, and Maxime Durand, an art forger who was caught, but set free in exchange for offering his talents to the police. The two work together and try to solve the mysterious theft of some paintings and a connections of that theft with an ancient religious cult. This review was done based on the German language version, an additional English language version is not provided on the disc.

The game is presented in full real-time 3D with the gameplay itself following classic 2D point&click conventions. The 3D nature of the graphics is only used for a small handful of puzzles and sometimes to provide a split-screen close up of what the character is currently doing, but stays otherwise completely in the background, with mostly static cameras or only very limited panning movements. The graphics themselves are fine for most part, nothing spectacular, but nothing to ugly either. The characters however could have used a little more detail, they lack in polygons and animation and lip syncing is also basically non-existent. Even in the few pre-rendered cutscenes that the game provides the character models don't look much better. Demand on the graphics card is relatively heavy given the relative simplicity of the graphics, but nothing that a bit of tweaking in the graphics setting couldn't fix.

The controls are typical for today's modern adventure games, a left click will do an context sensitive action (use, pick up, talk to, etc.) while a right click will cause the character to look at an object. A double click will cause the character to run or quick-travel between rooms. Pressing the Tab key will highlight all usable objects in the current room. An unusual addition to the formula is that objects can only be looked at once, after that the object marker disappears and the object becomes a part of the background. This doesn't change the gameplay as important objects can be used multiple times as usual, it simply avoids the repeated phrases that one has already heard.

Object in the inventory and sometimes objects in the environment can be inspected up close in a 3D view. That 3D view can be rotated to uncover things hidden on the backside of an object, in a similar fashion as the first Resident Evil game did.

The dialog interface is one of the weirds parts of this game, instead of the regular dialog trees or topic based discussion, the interface is always limited to three choices "positive", "negative" and "question". While this might sound similar to the moral choice systems presented in modern RPG games, the game hardly ever goes in that direction, most dialog in the game is the usual stuff and often neither of the three choices really makes much sense in the context of the game. Additionally it is also not very clear what the choices actually mean, in some situation they are used as "yes/no" style answers, but in many other they seem to reflect the emotional stance of the character or simply have no real understandable meaning at all. The dialog choice is also bound to a time limit, like in other games such as Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy, but that time limit feels meaningless, as it is to long to even matter with only three choices and one is hardly ever presented with a dialog that would require time to put thought into the choice.

The voice work in the game is competent overall, with well known professional speakers, but in large parts a bit flat and emotionless. One noticeable issue is that the voice work lacks any kind of dialect, which given that the game takes place in quite a few different countries across Europe, feels out of place.

The puzzles in the game are pretty much all on the easy side, even without using the Tab key to show hotspots I didn't had any issues getting through the game. In addition a large part of the game isn't so much driven by actual puzzles and exploration one the players side, but by phone calls and email conversations. This can sometimes be a bit confusing as every now and then the player is left without a clear task in already explored terrain only to then receive a phone call in the next room that drives the story forward. Some of the puzzles are also a little uncreative, feeling more like something you would encounter at work then in a game.

The story in Memento Mori feels a bit uneven. It starts out with the characters doing basically their routine every day jobs, which is fine for an introduction, but then fails to really accelerate, as it continues to just plot along without anything to exiting happening. The cutscenes that the game inserts between chapters are also a little weird, as they try to go for a spooky horror feel and manage that for most part reasonably well, but then that feel isn't actually mirrored by the actual game itself, which feels more like your typical lighthearted adventure stuff, except without any attempt at jokes. This only really changes right at the end, where a sudden plot twist mixes things up and lets the story take a more dramatic route, but at that point you are just a few minutes away from seeing the credits role and that just isn't enough for a 10 hour game. The twist at the end, even so obviously derivative, is however well done and helps to give a few weird moments previously in the game some meaning.

The game bolsters itself on the box with providing a dynamic story and eight different endings, but you don't really see much of that in the actual game, as it moves along like your regular linear adventure game. There seem to be two main endings with the rest just being alterations of text and voice overs and which of those you get is decided on your performance on a few puzzles in the game and other things you did or didn't do in the game. However the game doesn't really make clear what is a critical decision and what is not and neither of those seems alter the actual route the story takes, so they don't really add replayability.

Overall Memento Mori is a competent, but in large part unremarkable adventure game. I enjoyed the ending, but too much that came before it was just not very interesting and instead of slowly uncovering a mystery, the game basically uncovered it all at once for you right at the end. Too much of the game felt like filler that really didn't have any meaning for the core story that it tried to tell. Also the game remains in large part very stationary, having the player revisiting old locations again and again, without ever really getting anywhere. The typical adventure feel of going around the world and traveling to interesting locations is mostly missing, even so the story would have given plenty of excuse for doing that.

Review: Myst: Masterpiece Edition (PC)

2010-12-10T04:56:00.000-08:00

Myst was released back in 1993 and one of the first games to make use of the CD-ROM, featuring pre-rendered backgrounds and video sequences. It turned out to be one the best selling PC game of it time. The Myst: Masterpiece Edition was released seven years later in 2000, upgrading the graphics from 256 to 24-bit and adding hint system, but leaving the game otherwise unchanged. Another version of the game was released the same year called realMyst, featuring a fully realtime environment instead of pre-rendered graphics. This review is about the Myst: Masterpiece Edition.

The game starts out without a big introduction. The player is dropped on the island called Myst, without an explanation, task or goal. A bit exploration will lead to a short speech from Atrus, a person with the ability to create portals into other worlds in the form of books. The player then learns that something went wrong and that the books have been hidden around the island in save places. Some further hints on the location of said books can be gathered in the central library of Myst and the books themselves are hidden in structures around the island, including a spaceship, a regular ship, a large set of gears and a clock tower. The island itself is rather small, featuring not much more then these structures. The players task is now to unlock each book and travel to the world they are connected to. In these worlds, which themselves are of a similar size to Myst itself, the player has to collect pages which are needed to complete books in the library and thus will unlock the final puzzle.

Graphically the game is presented from a first person perspective. Featuring mostly static backgrounds with very little or no animation. While the graphics certainly show their age, they still manage to create a decent atmosphere thanks to the nice wind and water ambient sounds in the backgrounds. Navigation in the world can however at times be a bit confusing, as the game doesn't provide a proper map or compass and lacks transition animations. Often it isn't very clear if a turn to the left will turn you around 180 degrees are just 90 and thus it is not unusual to step past something or miss a turn.

The interface of the game is extremely minimalistic, all the interaction and navigation in the world happens via the mouse, they keyboard stays unused. The mouse cursor doesn't change when an item is usable and an inventory is not present in this game. The few times where you have to pick up an item and use it, it is handled by changing your mouse cursor to that item. Without the ability drop or store those items it however becomes quite confusing as to what happens when you have grab multiple items at once. One noteworthy tweak to the regular pointing and clicking presented in the adventure genre is that in Myst you are not limited to only clicking things, if you want to pull a leaver you have to click and drag it into the appropriate direction. It is a nice little touch that increases the immersion a good bit.

The save system in Myst is a bit weird, as it doesn't save your exact location, but always drops you back at the start of the given world. Accomplishments in the world are preserved, but one has to walk back to the point from where one left. This isn't much of an issue, as one can quickly travel around in Myst and be back to where one left in often just a few seconds, but it is an irritating thing non the less.

The puzzle design in Myst is often not that great, as the puzzles aren't build around logic or item combination, but instead focus on observation. A typical puzzle in Myst is one where you pull a leaver or push a button and then have to figure out the effect that it had on the world. Cause and effect are often times a few rooms apart, so it can get a little tedious at times to figure out what happened. Puzzles furthermore often come in the form of very basic key/door patterns, you see a code or pattern in one place and have to enter it in another to unlock a door or mechanism. Entering those codes can be a bit tedious and also feels uninspired, as none of the mechanisms in the world really has a purpose other then acting as an convoluted input mechanism for said code. Another annoying issue is that the library you visit in the very beginning of the game contains important hints for puzzles you will see only much later in the game and without an inventory to put those books in, you have to basically transcribe those hints yourself, as you can't reach the library easily when you need to.

The thing that saves puzzle design in the Myst: Masterpiece Edition however is its great hint system. A click at the bottom of the screen will give you access to a map of the island and location specific hints in three levels, going from vague suggestions to basically detailed solution. The hints are written in the style of a person accompanying you on your journey, so they integrate very smoothly into the whole experience without feeling out of place. This removes a lot of the tedious trial and error from the game and make the game easily finishable without falling back to third party walkthroughs. The hint system also provides some of the needed track keeping that the game otherwise fails to provide.

Overall Myst is still a decent game, especially taking its age into account. The Masterpiece Edition, while technically being not much of an improvement over the original, is a much more enjoyable experience then the original due to its hint system. The often lacking feedback on actions and basically non-existent track keeping of the tasks you have already accomplished however pulls the game down quite noticeably. So does the almost non-existent story. While the few bits of dialog you get are nicely delivered, they just aren't enough to give your journey much of a meaning and the ending is kind of a let down. You get another piece of dialog and then just get send back to the island of Myst for some free exploration, which however is pointless at that point, as you have already seen anything of that island already. A proper ending cinematic or even a simple credit roll is missing, giving the ending a very inconclusive feel.

Technical notes: The game frequently crashes when showing the transition animations between the different worlds when playing it in Windows 98. This was solvable by uninstalling QuickTime and then reinstalling the version from the Myst CD.

The Masterpiece Edition also contains a glaring bug: In a note for the final puzzle the word "on" got changed to "off", making the note confusing and unusable, the text provided by the hint system however provides the correct answer.

Review: Geheimakte: Tunguska (PC)

2010-11-20T08:52:00.000-08:00

Geheimakte: Tunguska (engl. Secret Files: Tunguska) is a classical point&click adventure released in 2006 for the PC, with later ports to the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS. The story of the game is centered around the explosion of an unknown object over Tunguska in 1908. The player takes control Nina Kalenkov who is investigating the disappearance of her father, who lead an expedition into the Tunguska incident a few decades earlier. Max Gruber, a colleague of her father, also becomes a playable character for a small portion in later parts of the game.

Graphically the game follows into the footsteps of previous modern point&click adventure games, using a combination of pre-rendered backgrounds and 3D animated characters. While the backgrounds themselves look nice, the character animation leaves a lot to be desired, lacking custom animation for actions and instead falling back to generic animations for object use and pick up, so they never really connect properly with the object you are interacting with. It doesn't distract much from the game, as most other adventure games before and after it suffer from the exact same issue, but it shows a lack of polish in the genre, that you don't really see in more mainstream games.

The German voice acting is overall well done, but not really outstanding. The only annoying part is that a few of the character voices sound a little bit to familiar from other games and movies, which can distract a bit from the experience.

Mechanically the game follows modern simplified point&click conventions. A large vocabulary of verbs is missing and instead the player is limited to a 'look at' action on the right mouse button and a context sensitive 'use/pick up/talk' action on the left mouse button. The inventory is presented at a simple list at the bottom of the screen and thus easily available at all times. The mouse pointer changes shape to indicate which items can be used and which items can be combined, this removes the typical "I can't use these things together" voice bits, but it also removes potential for interesting comments. The game avoids pixel hunting by providing a simple function that will highlight objects that can be interacted with. While this function is a welcome addition, one ends up relying on it a little to much for comfort, as objects frequently don't really stand out of the background on their own. Talking in the game follows a topic based approach where the player only selects the rough topic and leaves the individual sentences to the game character.

The puzzle design in the game is a bit convoluted, often requiring rather outrageous things. For example at one point in the game you need a lemon. To obtain it you don't go any direct route, instead you cover up a road sign which in turn will course the lemon transporter to nearly crash and lose a box with lemons in the process. The game is full of puzzles requiring such weird solutions, which especially giving its more realistic tone, doesn't feel quite right. The game however does do an extremely good job at guiding the player into those convoluted solution, so you hardly ever will have trouble finding the solution, as talk with NPCs or the environment will give you plenty of hints.

Overall the game provides good solid adventure fun for the almost 10h that it lasted, but it fails to reach the greater games in its genre. The story presented is good enough to keep the player interested through the game, but it doesn't really leave much of a lasting impression once its over. The ending also felt a little cheap, leaving a few of the finer points of the story unexplored. The jokes that the game tries to pull of come across as a bit wooden and most of the NPCs are little more then cliche comic reliefs. The best part of the game is probably the flow that it manages to keep up throughout the game, the puzzles are always manageable and enjoyable, but never so easy that you feel like playing on auto-pilot.

Porting Windstille to Windows via MinGW cross compiler

2010-10-27T08:32:00.000-07:00

Once done with porting Windstille over to MacOSX I switched to porting it over to Windows:

Windows doesn't seem to have a clear MacPort alternative, so I went with compiling most libraries myself
SDL comes in precompiled binary form that is usable with MinGW
C++ libraries are incompatible between MinGW and Microsoft Visual C++, C libraries are often compatible, but not always, so building things yourself or downloading the MinGW specific binaries might be required
as the whole Windows FOSS landscape ended up looking a little to confusing for my taste, I switched over from native Windows to cross compiling from Linux, which also allowed me to use Linux tools in the build process and not having to worry about building them for Windows
Ubuntu comes with a ready to use cross compiler in the package gcc-mingw32
cross compiling standard autotools packages works with:
./configure --prefix=/home/ingo/projects/mingw32/run/ --host=i586-mingw32msvc --build=i686-linux-gnu
GLEW binaries didn't work and GLEW doesn't support cross compiling, using the Makefile.mingw and changing the compiler, linker, etc. names in it manually (g++ -> i586-mingw32msvc-c++) however did work
boost cross compile is a bit tricky, but well documented, make sure you only build the boost libraries you need, not everything, as that will cut down the build time from a few hours to a few minutes
Freetype, Ogg, JPEG and Vorbis compile smoothly
libpng and the required zlib do not cross compile smoothly, hacking the build scripts and hardcoding the compiler, linker, etc. names again did the trick
Gtk+ comes in a binary distribution that is usable in MinGW, but as it contains hardcoded path names in its pkg-config files some changes are needed (adjust to your build location as needed):
sed -i "s/c:\/devel\/target\/.*/\/home\/ingo\/projects\/mingw32\/run\/opt\/gtk
/" *.pc
Gtkmm and GtkGLExt are not part of that binary distribution and have to be build manually
with the Gtk+ binaries building Gtkmm wasn't all that hard, just a bit labor intensive due to the many dependencies
GtkGLExt is the most problematic and so far I didn't manage to create a working version, as the last release is incompatible with current Gtk+ and the latest development version of GtkGLExt is incompatible with GtkGLExtmm, I managed to produce compilable results by changing the latest release to handle newer Gtk+ versions (just a few macro changes), but the resulting application, while runable was not usable as the OpenGL widget leaked into other GUI elements and redraw behavior was completly broken
DLLs have to be in the current path for Wine to find them (still searching for a proper workaround for that)
OpenGL libraries have again other names, here its -lopengl32, this same naming convention is also used for GLEW and OpenAL
the gcc that comes with MinGW seems to be a lot more picky about the order of static libraries then the Linux gcc, had to reorder the libraries in my SCons file to make things build and fix undefined references
Free Software solutions for building Windows installers are: Inno Setup, NSIS and WiX
NSIS has the nice advantage that it comes as a Ubuntu package and thus is well suited for a cross-compiling environment, its config file syntax however seems a bit ugly and seems to require a good bit of manual book keeping to make proper uninstall, it also doesn't support .msi install files, only old style .exe

Overall compiling in native Windows seems kind of a mess, as you end up grabbing software from many different places and can never really be sure that they all will work properly together. Setting up a cross compile environment on the other side was reasonably simple, just a lot of manual compiling required and a few hacks here and there to get some libraries through, Wine seems to help a good bit to make most configure checks, that might try to run a .exe, work without hacks. Basic Gtk+ seems to be simpler to get up and running then on MacOSX, as it comes in a nice binary distribution with all the required libraries, lack of a working GtkGLExtmm however prevented the Windstille Editor from being usable.

Porting Windstille to MacOSX

2010-10-22T06:49:00.000-07:00

Some notes on porting Windstille to MacOSX:

PPC iBooks don't support booting from USB, good luck reinstalling a OS when your internal drive breaks
everything earlier then MacOSX 10.4 Tiger seems completely unusable by now, as almost all software won't run on it, no support for building universal binaries either, OSX seems to go obsolete a lot faster then Windows
MacPorts provides a good and up to date selection of software, you can almost find anything that you might need to build your software there, but MacPorts requires to compile everything from source, so installing a full build environment can take quite a few hours
Flink provides binaries, but is outdated enough to be of not much use
some include directives need changes, for example GL/gl.h to OpenGL/gl.h, AL/al.h to OpenAL/al.h
native MacOSX libraries come in the form of frameworks, which bypass the usual -I, -l and -L flags and use a "-framework SDL" flag for gcc
SDL comes as a native precompiled OSX framework library
using the SDL framework requires to hardcode the include path or doing #ifdef's, as there is no sdl-config and the way frameworks requires you to include SDL_image with , which is incompatible with the way things are done in Linux
using g++ with -isystem DIR instead of -IDIR results in "error: template with C linkage", so don't do that on older MacOSXs
otool is the equivalent of ldd on MacOSX
building a standard MacOSX software bundle requires some fudging with the hard compiled path variables
Gtk+ is by far the most troublesome piece of software to get up and running, it doesn't come in binary form but only in a fragile jhbuild
MacOSX specific code can be isolated with a #ifdef __APPLE__ or on the Python side with a sys.platform == "darwin"

Overall porting Windstille to MacOSX went far smoother then expected, at least as far as Windstille itself is concerned, at first I struggled a bit with manually building many software packages, but once I learned about MacPorts, I switched over to that and had a smooth ride after that. SDL comes as standard MacOSX framework and most of the other dependencies I could grab directly from MacPorts. xcftools was the only exception and that had to be build manually. The Windstille SCons build scripts however need some bigger changes to handle the different naming of some libraries on MacOSX. Building the Windstille Editor is a different story, so far I haven't managed to do that, as that depends on Gtk+, Gtkmm and GtkGLExtmm and all of those depend on dozens of other libraries themselves. I think the Gtk+ libraries in MacPorts all depend on X11 and aren't native, but so far I haven't tried them.

PS: While porting Windstille over to MacOSX I also fixed a few issues with the render path for older hardware, so it should be able to run (or crawl) again on Geforce2MX style hardware.

Windstille Lensflare Test

2010-10-09T17:22:00.000-07:00

Quick little test for a lenseflare effect for use in Windstille, still needs some graphical improvements, but the occlusion queries to hide the flare work fine:

Review: Metroid Prime Hunters (Nintendo DS)

2010-10-03T11:07:00.001-07:00

Metroid Prime Hunters was released in 2006 for the Nintendo DS and is a spin-off of the Metroid Prime series for the Gamecube and the Wii. The game takes place after the first Metroid Prime game, but as the story doesn't have any connection with the other games that hardly matters. The game features both a single player adventure mode as well as online multiplayer, I however haven't played the multiplayer, so I will focus on the single player.

The game starts with receiving a cryptic message about some 'ultimate power' with hints at its locations. Following that Samus Aran and six other bounty hunters start the search for that power to gain control over it. Reaching the 'ultimate power' requires the collection of eight Octolith, which in turn unlock the location of the 'ultimate power' and result in the final boss battle.

Unlike other entries in the series Metroid Prime Hunters follows a more linear approach, that is somewhat similar to Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Instead of one huge world to travel around in, the game is separated into four locations, the Celestial Archives, Alinos, Arcterra and the Vesper Defense Outpost. Each of these locations contains a boss at the end that will provide you with one of the required Octolith. Once each location has been visited and beaten, new areas in each location will become accessible and the player has to revisit them again to fight a second boss and gain another Octolith in each location. Travel between locations is possible at any time by using the space ship, travel on food between locations is not possible.

The space ship also acts as the only type savepoint in the game, regular savepoints are not provided. To reduce the amount of backtracking the game however does include teleporter, conveniently placed before each boss fight that will bring you back to your ship, to allowing saving the game and replenishing the ammunition. Those teleporter also allow you quick travel back to the boss area itself once activated. The game also features a checkpoint system, checkpoints are automatically activated and save your current health and ammo, when you die you can restart at the checkpoint with the old health and ammo count. As the game doesn't give any active indication when a checkpoint is activated this can lead to a few annoying situation where a checkpoint gets saved when one is low on health.

The overall structure of the levels is always the same, the player starts at his ship and then has to travel deeper down into the map. Three artifacts are needed to unlock the teleporter to the level boss, these artifacts themselves are protected by a force field and disabling the force field requires collecting a force field key by solving some more or less complicated puzzles. The puzzles in this game however lack any of the good design seen in the other Metroid Prime games, instead they feel like a throw back to gaming a decade or two ago. The problem with the puzzles is that they are hardly ever based in the location or environment around you, instead the puzzles often come in the form of a series of switches that have to be activated and these switches happen to be placed completely randomly all over the map, without any clear rhyme or reason, so you will frequently find yourself looking into each and every corner of the map in the search for a switch. Other times the force field key appear after defeating all the enemies in a room or after going through a morph ball passage on a time limit, again with little hint or reason behind it and it is never really clear which key unlocks which force field.

Unlike in other games in the series Metroid Prime Hunters is also very low on upgrades. Samus Aran starts out with the morph ball, bombs, missiles and a charge beam. The only upgrades available throughout the game are six new weapons that have to be obtained from the other bounty hunters. The bounty hunters happen to be randomly scattered throughout the maps and act as sort of a mini-boss. They however don't really follow a classic boss pattern that has to be learned, instead they just run around randomly really fast, making them hard to hit. The main bosses in this game come only in two forms that are each repeated four times throughout the game, with some minor variation in the attack pattern.

Just as in other Metroid games, the new weapon can be used to unlock doors that are marked with the color of the weapon. In addition to the normal doors the weapons can also be used to deactivate special force feels, with these force fields there is however the additional problem that, unlike the doors, they are not marked on the map screen, thus it can become hard to remember where a special force feel was. Another issue is that the color coding is to similar, especially on the small Nintendo DS screen. Weapons come in green, blue, purple, yellow, orange and red and telling the different between those can be tricky. This becomes especially a problem on the last boss fight where the color coding plays a crucial part of the strategy to defeat the boss.

The game comes with the same scanning ability as seen in other Metroid Prime games, but unlike in other games the logbook is not available via the pause menu, but only from inside your ship. The logbook interface is also really cumbersome, the text is limited to just three lines and a very small window and lengthy animations make it really slow to switch between entries. The entries themselves also happen to be rather uninteresting and, aside from the final boss, are hardly ever useful.

The demo version of the game, Metroid Prime Hunters: First Hunt, that shipped with early Nintendo DS units, used to feature a simply top-down map on the bottom of the screen, in the final game this map is gone and replaced by a basic and mostly useless radar screen. The level map itself has been moved to the pause menu and works much like the map in the bigger Metroid Prime games. Due to the small resolution and the level design which features many small, potentially overlapping, corridors however the map is much harder to read then on a big TV screen. And as mentioned the force fields aren't marked on the map, only the doors, so it can at times get really tricky to figure out where to go next. The simplified map in the demo version did look a good bit more helpful, especially since that one was always available without pausing the game.

The controls in Metroid Prime: Hunters differ noticeably from the other games in the series, the lock on function is completely gone, instead the game follows more traditional first person shooter controls. The dpad is used for running and strafing, while the touch screen is used to rotate the view around or look up and down. The main weapon is fired by pressing the L shoulder button, which will when held down, produces three normal shots before going into charge mode. These three shots allow rapid fire without a very high frequency of presses on the button. The morph ball, the scan visor, as well as the weapon switching are handled with areas on the touch screen that can be clicked. Jumping is accomplished by tapping the touch screen twice in short order. Zooming on the map screen and using the boost ball ability are done with the R button, which is rather awkward, as that button is rather hard to reach when holding a stylus.

The graphics in this game fail to impress, while they do try to get close to the other Metroid Prime games and even succeed in some areas, they only really look good on screenshots. In the game itself they are simply impractical, the high level of texture detail makes it very hard to properly distinguish enemies from the background, so that one frequently ends up shooting blindly when chasing a hunter or another enemy, instead of doing proper aim. The graphics also lack any kind of light effects, so they feel very static and artificial. On top of that the Nintendo DS hardware just isn't very good at 3D graphics, so all the textures look pixelated and the enemy meshes are very basic. I would have welcome an artistic direction that is build more around the limitations of the hardware, then one that tries to emulate what was accomplished on much better hardware.

Overall the game disappoints on many levels. The level design itself feels basic and random, none of the puzzles really make any sense in terms of the environment and are just typical switch/door situations of the cheapest kind. The separation into four planets furthermore gives the game a linear feel, lacking the exploration of the other Metroid Prime games. Instead of proper free exploration, you spend most of your time looking for the next randomly placed switch or dry to decipher the hard to read map. The other bounty hunters make very weak enemies, as you just end up spamming them with missiles while they run around super fast. The game is also full of doors that are locked till you kill all the enemies in the room and other cheap tricks to artificially lengthen the game. The recycling of the main bosses further makes this game fill really cheap and the fast paced first person shooter gameplay just feels out of place in a Metroid game. Atmosphere in this game is basically non-existent, neither the location nor music invoke any and even if they would, that would quickly be destroyed by the gamey nature of puzzles and enemies. Enemies also only come in a few different forms, so they repeat a lot.

The controls in this game are simply atrocious, while they do work perfectly fine from a technological point of view, they are a complete nightmare in terms of ergonomics. Navigating with the dpad while holding the Nintendo DS and scrubbing around on the touch screen with the stylus just doesn't work in any way, shape or form. What makes the situation even worse is that the game is every fast paced at times, so it will give you hand cramps frequently and it is overall just painful to play.

In the end there really isn't much positive I can say about this game. The checkpoints are certainly a welcome addition and reduce the frustration a good bit and it can be a bit of fun when you finally have figured out a boss tactic that worked. But none of that really saves the game in the end or makes the around ten hours that it will take you to beat it fun. Metroid Prime Hunters feels like a mix of Quake with a Metroid Prime look slapped on, but at the same time it completely fails to actually create a proper Metroid atmosphere. Even taken as an action game it just fails, for that there are to many annoying puzzles in the way and the game is just not straight forward enough to enjoy that way. This game is certainly the low point in the Metroid series and doesn't contribute anything noteworthy.

Review: Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (Wii)

2010-10-02T07:49:00.000-07:00

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption was released in 2007 and marks the third and final entry in the Metroid Prime series (ignoring the Nintendo DS spin offs Metroid Prime: Hunters and Metroid Prime Pinball). Unlike its two predecesors this game didn't came out on the GameCube, but on its successor, the Nintendo Wii and large parts of the game design reflect this change in being build specifically around the Wiimote controller and its pointing and motion detection capabilities. The game also takes a more much story driven approach then its predecessor.

The game starts out with a short sequence showing the rebirth(?) of Dark Samus and switches then to to the regular Samus Aran waking up in her space ship on her route to the planet Norion. At this point the player takes control of Samus and can, via the Wii Remote, look around in the cockpit and interact with a few buttons and gadgets, allowing him to deploy a shield, engage the weapons or look at some game statistics. The game then requires the player to input a code via a virtual keypad and engage the docking sequence. After a short cutscene showing the docking with the G.F.S. Olympus, a Galactic Federation spaceship, Samus leaves her spaceship and the player takes control of her with the regular first person shooter controls.

On the G.F.S. Olympus the player can walk around and talk to crew members and have a sentence or two with them. Samus stays however complete silent in these situations, as she will for the rest of the game, but the NPCs are fully voiced. The dialog however still is based in its text origins and the player has to acknowledge each sentence spoken by pressing the A button. The dialog also doesn't go very deep and most talk is either about where you have to go or empty phrases like "I am on duty, I can't talk now". Overall the beginning of the game feels extremely similar to that of Doom 3, not only in the way one can interact with the crew, but also in a short scanning procedure that follows later on.

Once past the initial introductions, which also provided a few tutorial like opportunities to get familiar with the Wiimote controls, the game puts the player into a briefing room where he learns that an Aurora Unit has been stolen from the G.F.S Valhalla and used to hack into the federations network. The Aurora Units are large brain-like super computers that resemble the Mother Brain from the first Metroid and act as control units throughout Galactic Federation facilities. The job of the player and three other bounty hunters that join the fight is to clean the Aurora units of their infection. The briefing however is soon interrupted by a pirate attack after which the player has to fight his way back to his ship and land on the planet Norion to support the ground troops there.

On Norion the player learns that a Leviathan, a Phazon invested asteroid, is on collision course with the planet and in turn has to activate a few power generators to fire an orbital canon to destroy the Leviathan. This leads to a few encounters with the other bounty hunters and to one of the highlights of the game, where Samus fights against Ridley while falling down a generator shaft, being saved by one of the other bounty hunters in the end. With all the generators back online all bounty hunter head to the canon that shall destroy the Leviathan, but they all get knocked out by a surprise attack of Dark Samus. Samus manages to still activate the canon and destroy the Leviathan before falling unconscious.

After this point, that happens at around an hour or two of gameplay, the games story makes a sharp cut and jumps one month forward. Samus Aran wakes up in a medical bay and learns that she has been infected with Phazon. This infection in turn was utilized by the scientists to build a Phazon Enhancement Device device that allows Samus to shot a very powerful Phazon beam for a short amount of time, called Hypermode. Furthermore she learns that multiple Leviathans have hit other planets in the system. All the other bounty hunters, who also have been equipped with P.E.D., have already woken up earlier and send on a mission to destroy each of the Leviathans, but contact was lost shorty afterward. Samus mission now is to find out what happened to the other bounty hunter and to destroy the Leviathans. At this point the game turns from its heavily scripted gameplay of the first part of the game, that in part bear a close resemblance to the beginning of Halo: Combat Evolved, back to more traditional Metroid Prime style gameplay. A few cutscenes with dialog will still happen after this point, but they will be mostly limited to boss fights and dialogs with an Aurora Unit that gives hints on where the player has to go next.

The story thus continues with Samus Aran traveling to the planet Bryyo, an abandoned planet filled with lava and industrial constructions use to produce fuel. Here she has to deactivate a Space Pirate shield generator that protects the Leviathan and following that attack the and destroy the Leviathan from the inside by fighting the corrupted golem Mogenar. After clearing Bryyo the journey continues to the planet Elysia, a floating city in the sky previously inhabited by the Chozo, but now abandoned, leaving only a few robotic maintenance droids. The way to destroy the protective shields of the Leviathan on Elysia turns out to be the building of a nuclear bomb. After being done with Elysia the journey continues to the Pirate Homeworld, where the last Leviathan is destroyed by a united attack of Samus and a group of Galactic Federation Marines. The Leviathans guardian turns out to be Ridley. After short departure to the remains of the lost ship G.F.S Valhalla, where a few command codes to control a Leviathan are recovered, Samus along with a fleet of Galactic Federation ships makes it to the homeworld of Phazon, called Phaaze. Here the confronts Dark Samus again and finally destroys the planet.

The cutscenes in Metroid Prime 3: Corrupted, while more plentiful then in the previous two games, are not still fully convincingly implemented. The animation timing always looks incorrect with none of the presented movement ever looking realistic and even seeing Samus Aran's spaceships flying around seems to lack proper weight and acceleration. Some of the cutscenes are also just badly written. For example there is one where you enter a room, see a few space marines being attacked and two of them killed, before a third one activates his P.E.D. device to kill the pirates with a powerful blast. This cutscenes serves only to demonstrate to the player the effects of the P.E.D. device, before the player obtains it himself, while at the same time braking the immersion, as Samus is just stands around doing nothing while the pirates and marines fight. Another general issue is that after every fight sequence the marines will go to a 'stand against the wall' position, they look like your standard bored military guard, not like somebody that is right now actively involved in defending the base. It just looks ridiculous.

The games structures differs from other Metroid Prime games in that one is no longer limited to a single planet, instead the player can, via his ship, travel to different locations in the solar system or to different landing spots on the same planet. This freedom is almost unrestricted, with Norion, Elysia and Bryyo being accessible right from the start. This new freedom however comes at a price, the world in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption feels much more linear and less interconnected then in previous games. There are even quite a few points in the game where traveling to another point on the same planet via the ship is required. Thus instead of just having the ship as a faster way to get back to a previous location, it becomes a questionable item to let the player jump from one location to another, without providing a direct connection.

Just like in the previous two titles, this game also again features an item collection at the very end of the game that requires you to backtrack through previous locations. This backtracking comes in the form of energy cells that are needed to unlock pathways on the G.F.S. Vallhalla. Hints for the locations for the energy cells are again provided in the logbook, but unlike before one shouldn't have to much problems collecting all the required energy cells on a regular playthrough, so that backtracking is hardly ever necessary. The only exception to this is the G.F.S. Vallhalla itself, it is not immediately obvious that the ship only really becomes important at the very end up the game, so one will probably have visited it a few times before, just to run into a dead end.

The controls in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption differ noticeably from those in previous titles. The left analog stick is no longer used to turn the character, instead it is used in the classic WASD-style to strafe. Turning is handled by moving the Wiimote cursor to the edge of the screen, while moving the cursor around the center allows to aim. The threshold at which point your character goes from free aim to turning can be configured in three steps, with the largest one requiring almost to put the cursor out of the screen to begin turning. The lock on feature is still present in this game and can be used in combination with the aiming of the cursor to shoot enemies at specific spots, instead of just the center. This new ability is reflected in most of the enemy and especially the boss design, which always features a collection of weak spots, while the plain center remains invulnerable.

Jumping and shooting is handled just as before with the A and B button, while morphball and lockon is done via the C and Z keys on the nunchuck. The visor selection has been moved from the dpad to a pie-menu that can be triggered by holding the minus button. The visors present in this game are reduced to the regular scan visor, an x-ray visor, that works much the same as before, and a new ship visor, that however doesn't really visualize anything, instead it is just used a few times to call your ship to specific landing spots or call in air strikes. The plus button acts to activate the hypermode. With the plus and minus buttons already being used, access to the map, logbook and option menu has to be placed on the hard to reach 1 button. Pressing the 2 button will display a context sensitive help. Missiles are now shot by pressing down on the dpad, while the other directions on the dpad remain without functions. A weapon select is not present in this game, as the weapons no longer have different abilities, a weapon upgrade will simply replace the previous weapon and act for most part simply as a stronger version of what the previous weapon did. The ability to freeze enemies has been moved to an ice missile, just like in Metroid Fusion.

The map system in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption continues to have the same issue as in previous games, namely that different areas on the map will overlap in the 3D view, making it hard to decipher the map. A more structured 2D map view or better hints on the map are still missing, however due to the simplified level design these issues don't become as annoying as they did in the previous titles. The logbook is now back to a regular menu, leaving the misguided rotational menu of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes behind. Another welcome addition is the larger text area and the ability to smooth scroll through the text, instead of being limited to page flips. The ability to view the 3D models of creatures however seems to have disappeared.

Aside from the regular button based controls, the game also features some motion controls. The most basic one would be the jumping in morphball mode that is triggered by jamming the Wiimote upwards. Another motion control comes in the form of the grapple lasso, that is triggered by locking on a target jamming the nunchuk forward or, when already connected to a target, by pulling it backward. The grapple lasso is used to move items around or to rip shields or armor from enemies. While all of these motion controls have the typical issue of a rather large delay between the motion and the action on the screen, they mostly work with acceptable accuracy.

Where the motion controls however fail is in the minigames. These minigames are used to activate controls, open doors or to solve other minor puzzles and involve some simple sequences of actions such as pushing the Wiimote to the screen, rotating it and then pulling it back. The rotation is detected by the accelerometers and accurate. The push and pull however is done via the IR sensor on the Wiimote, and while that sensor is precise when it comes to pointing, it is much less precise when it comes to detecting distance. On top of that it is not immediately obviously that the push and pull actions require that the Wiimote is pointed precisely at the screen, thus it can often happen that a move won't be properly registered. This issue becomes even more problematic as the normal way of holding a Wiimote never leaves enough room for doing a push or pull that is large enough to properly register.

The game is however very forgiving in those minigames, never requires them to be done under time pressure and guided enough that things will often snap into place randomly before even having executed a gesture properly, so that it never becomes an issue of frustration. It however feels awkward when such a minigame pretty much solves itself, without the action on the screen really reflecting much of what the player did. In one minigame, near the end of the game which is used to activate a train, where one simply has to pull a lever up and then back down, the issue become so bad that I would go as far as to say that that minigame is just flat out broken. Not once did I managed to have the actions on the screen mirror of what happened with the Wiimote, random wiggle always seems to have just as much chance of success, which is weird as detecting the tilt of the Wiimote is something that actually should work technically just fine.

From a technical point of view, the graphics in this game are very similar to those in the previous games. The main difference being that they are now full 16:9 instead of 4:3 and that they have a glow filter applied to them. Where they however differ a good bit is in the use of color. While Metroid Prime 2: Echoes was mostly grays and a bit purple, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption is full colors, even the suit got an colorful remake. Sometimes this amount of color gets a little to much, as the Wiimote cursor can become hard to see, but overall it is a nice game to look at and the frame rate remains high throughout the game. Aside from the improvements the new graphics however also have a downside. In the previous two games you had light effects on your beam and missiles, shooting a missile through a dark hallway would light it up in those parts where the projectile was traveling through. In this game those effects seem to be completely gone, the hallway stays dark. There are still light effects left when rolling around in the morphball however, but for missile and power beam they are gone.

Another big graphical difference with this game is that it is now full of open rooms. While the room like level design itself persists and your freedom is still just as limited as before, you have frequently a large panorama in the background that gives a good sense of scale. It also helps that those panoramas no longer suffer from the low texture resolution that they had in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes.

Water sections in this game are completely absent, same goes for nature sections in general. The scenarios in this game are limited to a federation base, a federation spaceship, a pirate base, a sky city, an old lava filled temple and a small Phazon section. So you spend a lot of time in buildings and only very little time in natural caves.

One new feature in this game is how the unlocking of artworks, instead of having the galleries locked to things like finishing the game with 100% items or finishing it on a specific difficulty setting, you earn points throughout the game that act as currency with which you can unlock galleries. The earning of points is similar to the Xbox 360 achievement system, some points get earned by doing special things, other by regular game progression. Where that system however fails is with the 'friend vouchers', these are points that you can't use by itself, but that you have to exchange, via the network, with another person owning the game. What makes this problematic is that the game as no multilayer component, thus the only reason to go through all this 'friend' stuff is to unlock the vouchers, it really serves no other purpose at all. What makes this especially problematic is that you actually need those special friend vouchers to unlock a very large portion of the artworks, so no matter how many other points you collected, they stay completely useless unless you go through the friend setup and exchange procedure.

Another disappointing thing is that the game is still limited to three save games, on the Wii with more then plenty of internal storage thus an artificial limitation really shouldn't exists.

In terms of length the game is a bit shorter then the previous two Metroid Prime games, clocking in around 14 hours on a normal playthrough.

Overall it is a good game, but not a great one. The game certainly tries to make most of the Wiimote with its plenty of mini-games, but in the end, none of those really contribute much meaningful substance to the game and most of them barely function. The ability to enter your spaceship is a nice addition, but again it stays meaningless, as you really can't do anything inside your ship. The only motion control that actually works reasonably well is probably the grapple lasso, it works well enough to not malfunction all the time and does its job to get you a little more involved in the game.

The pointer based controls on the other side work reasonably well, especially with most of the games enemies build around the new precision aiming they are fun to play. I however wouldn't say that they work much better then a classic dual analog setup, having turning and aiming done via the same cursor just feels a little to awkward. And there are moments in the game where you go from a dialog scene back to the game just to find your character spinning around like crazy, as your cursor, invisible through the dialog, might no longer point at the center of the screen. This issue of course gets more problematic the more sensitive you configure your controls.

The story in this game mostly disappoints, while it certainly tries in terms of presentation, it never really delivers in terms of actual content. None of what happens elevates beyond bare bones video game story telling. And some issues such as killing the three other bounty hunters that you befriended at the beginning of the game are just completely glossed over.

The level design also feels like a bit of a downgrade from previous games, it is to linear and simplified, lacking the heavy interconnected nature that made Metroid Prime 2: Echoes so interesting. The addition of the spaceship doesn't help much either, as it breaks the game into even more non-connected pieces.

Where the game however wins is in accessibility, the addition of reset points before boss fights and a general downgrade in terms of difficulty, makes this an easily enjoyable game. It might not have the depths of its predecessors, but neither does it have the heavy potential to frustrate. It is simply a more streamlined experience overall, for all the good and bad that this brings.

Review: Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (Gamecube)

2010-09-27T05:43:00.000-07:00

Metroid Prime 2: Echoes was released in 2004 and is the sequel to the 2002 game Metroid Prime. The game follows directly into its predecessors footsteps, telling another tale in the Metroid Prime triology.

The game takes place on the planet Aether, just like in the first game, a Phazon poisoned asteroid has crashed on the planet, devastating it and this time splitting the planet into two phases, a dark world and the regular light world. Samus Aran arrives at the planet after a emmergency call from a Galactic Federation trooper squad. Once she enters the atmosphere, her ship is hit by lightning and she crashlands. While exploring she encounters Dark Samus, a mutated Phazon copy of herself and follows her into the dark world. In the dark world she is attacked by creatures and robbed of all her power-ups, she barely makes it back to the light world. She soon finds out that the troopers are all dead and that the planet is overrun by creatures called the Ign, violent creatures living in the dark world. A Luminoth, a member of the native inhabitants of the planet, that Samus then meets later on explains her the situation and gives her the task to collect the planets energy from three energy collectors in the dark world and bringing it back to the normal world.

The core gameplay follows the same structure of the first Metroid Prime, focusing on exploration and item collection. The world structure however is more organized then in the first one. The Luminoth that gives you the tasks is located in a central temple from which three elevators branch of which in turn bring you to the three main sections of the world, Torus Bog, Argon Wastes and the Sanctuary Fortress. The whole world exists in a light and dark phase and portals that are scattered around the map allow you to travel between them. In each section of the dark world you have to collect three keys which will open up access to the dark template, which holds the energy you have to collect and bring back to that sections energy collector in the light world. Once you have collected completed all the three main sections of the game, you are required to collect nine keys that will unlock the last level, the Sky Temple, and bring you to the final boss fight. These nine keys are scattered through the regions you already explored and their location hinted at by a few Luminoth logs you scanned as well as some info that the living Luminoth provides.

Your path is regularly blocked by obstacles that require a specific power-up to overcome, power-ups include the regular Metroid items such as morphball, bombs, spiderball and missiles, as well as a few new abilities such as a light beam, a dark beam and an annihilation beam. You also gain the ability to shoot multiple missiles at once per lock on. New visor modes are present as well, including a dark visor and an echo visor. The dark visor serves a similar purpose to the x-ray visor in the first game, showing you invisible objects and hidden triggers, while the echo beam shows you sound waves and is mainly used to unlock specific doors, somewhat similar to the thermal visor in the previous game. One new ability in this game, taken from the 2D Metroid games, is the screw attack, it is triggered automatically when you triple jump and shows you from a third person perspective. It allows you to jump over very large jump gaps as well as to perform a wall jump. It however is only obtained very late in the game, only useful in a few specific spots and allows you very little control. Compared to the previous game, Echoes features a much more interconnected world, where you often have many possible routes to reach a target, in the first Metroid Prime on the other side you would often be forced to backtrack through the exact same path.

The graphics of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes look overall very much the same as the first game. All visor effects are still present and the world is still separated into rather small rooms. The graphics here however are a bit more detailed and the textures look a little sharper. Where it diverts however is in the locations, while Metroid Prime featured lush natural environments, including ice, lava and jungle themes, Echoes mostly features just an rather monotone industrial gray wasteland. Only the Sanctuary Fortress section of the game diverts a bit form that, featuring a high tech, almost Tron like, look, but even here it is mostly just gray, with very little color. In a few places Echoes tries to break free from the closed room structure, presenting open rooms with a sky or a horizon in the distance, but those backgrounds are very low resolution and while providing a nice addition, fail to really make the world feel like a larger place.

The enemies in this game also follow directly into Metroid Primes footsteps. While all the enemies feature a new look, many of them are clearly derived from enemies in the previous games, just with a few tweaks in behavior and a look that fits the new setting. The only real exception are probably the Ing creatures, which come in multiple forms and can basically liquefy themselves and then crawling along the rooms walls. Space pirates, while still present in this game, have a rather minor role and basically are just a third party, most focus is given to the Ing.

The gameplay in the dark world differs quite a bit from the light world. Not only is the dark world filled with Ing, but your health constantly drains while you are there. To solve this issue the Luminoth places crystals in there that create bubbles of light. In those bubbles not only does the energy drain stop, they also replenish your health, but only slowly. Some of these bubbles are only temporary and have to be activated by shooting against the crystal, which can also be used against some enemies, as many of them will take damage when coming in contact with those bubbles of light. A few hours into the game a suit upgrade will lower the energy drain a good bit, so this game mechanic loses a bit of its impact, but it basically stays to be part of the game till the end.

The scanning of objects is present in Echoes as well, providing you with enemy tactics and backstory of the world. In Echoes scanable objects are highlighted as a whole, instead of just with a small icon, making them much easier to spot and much easier to keep track of. The user interface for reading the scanned logs however still has the same issues as before, namely featuring a far to small text area to make reading comfortable. The game also switched to a rather unusual menu design, where you rotate the menu items around a sphere, allowing you to click the one that is in the front. While it looks pretty, it serves very little purpose and makes navigation of the menus substantially harder, as menu items often overlap and are thus hard to read. Menu items also lose any sense of order this way, making it tricky to read the scanned logs in the right order. One nice feature of the game however is that you can now view all enemies in a fullscreen 3D viewer, in the previous game that ability was limited to Samus alone.

Metroid Prime 2: Echoes also uses a good bit more cutscenes to tell its story then Metroid Prime did. While the story is still mostly told via the scanning an the logs, a few short cutscenes, such as a flashback to the troopers getting attack or encounters with Dark Samus, somewhat reminiscence to the SA-X encounters in Metroid Fusion, provide a welcome addition. The task giving Luminoth also has a proper dialog with Samus this time around. Samus herself however stays silent and the Luminoths speech is only represented by text dialog, not voice acting.

Savepoints in Echoes feel more fairly placed then in the first game, I didn't encounter many situation where there wasn't a savepoint near by and most boss fights also had a close savepoint. Checkpoints are however still missing, so the savepoints are your only reset points. There where however two exceptions to the overall well placed savepoints, one was in Torus Bog, where your checkpoint is rendered unreachable, by unlocking the mechanism that opens the path to the boss, requiring a little round trip through the level each time you die at the boss for no good reason. Another case is when you fight the Spiderball Guardian, there you have to visit the temple and learn a new ability before you can fight the boss, with no savepoint between and the path back to an older savepoint blocked. While both of these cases are rather horrible level design, neither of which is an actual challenge to the player, they just waste a bit of your time.

Overall I enjoyed Metroid Prime 2: Echoes a good bit more then the first Metroid Prime game. While the locations are overall more boring due to their constant grayish look, the dark world with its light bubbles provides a great game mechanic, constantly having you to run or jump to the next bubble and providing you with a sense of urgency. The heavily interconnected world of Echoes also makes travel a good bit more pleasant, as you no longer have to always travel through the exact same pathways. While the story still isn't great or even good by any stretch of imagination, it at least provides basic video game plausibility, something the first game failed rather miserably at. Echoes is also much less focused on combat and more focused on puzzles then the first one. Backtracking through old location is only rarely interrupted by a pirated encounter and you can walk past most enemies without to much trouble, this is quite different then in the first game, where you where constantly interrupted by annoying Chozo ghost or pirate encounters, that served no other reason then to annoy you. The bigger pirates encounters that Echoes has, are scripted events, that don't repeat each time you reenter the room.

I also had to rely a lot less on the hints for the next item that the game provides you with, most of the time you can figure out where you have to go without to much trouble. The only part where this got a bit annoying was with the search for the Sky Temple keys, here you have to read through you logs and then find rooms that match the given description. This isn't hard, as it is just a matter of finding a room name that matches the given one, but due to the slow and uncomfortable menu navigation in the logbook, it becomes chore switching from the map to the logbook and back. I had to resort to pen&paper and just write all the hints down, to bypass the slow menu. Another issue with those hints is, that the game doesn't really introduce you to that mechanic, it is just this one point near the end where looking at the logbook becomes important for the core gameplay, for all the rest of the game, the logbook just provides backstory that isn't really needed for the game itself. The game also has a few weird spots where you are required to interrupt your key search and backtrack over half the map to obtain a new power-up, these could have been much better integrated without the backtracking, but at least the map hints made those things obvious.

So while Metroid Prime 2: Echoes won't win a price for originality, taking most of its mechanics and even enemies, with only small changes, form the first game, it does improve in many key areas, leading to an overall much more enjoyable and less frustrating experience. It is not a perfect game by any means, for that the story is just to uninteresting and the combat still to much an annoyance instead of being something that engages, but the puzzles and exploration can be quite fun at times.

Slideshow Generator

2010-09-20T14:03:00.000-07:00

Over the last few days I hacked together a little slide show generator that was inspired by still2dv, but as still2dv was a little to slow to be usable for me, I hacked together my own that can render in realtime using OpenGL. It also supports offline rendering to JPEG files which can then be further processed with mencoder/ffmpeg.

The slideshow generator works by supplying a bunch of JPEG files and a control file, the control file defines what path the camera shall take, how long fadeovers should last and things like that. The control file looks like this:

set fade 2.0
set dt 10.0

fade $fade

image test/screenshot5.jpg
pos center center
zoom fill

duration $dt

pos 60% center
zoom 1.5
end

fade $fade

image test/screenshot6.jpg
pos 60% center
zoom 1.5

duration $dt

zoom fill
end

fade $fade

image test/screenshot7.jpg
zoom fill

duration $dt

pos 40% center
zoom 1.5
end

[...]

An example video produced with the slideshow generator would look like this:

The code for the thing is floating around in the Windstille SVN repository in the directory extra/slideshow/. It is not separated from the whole thing, so you have to grab everything to build it:

svn co svn://svn.berlios.de/windstille/trunk/windstille

Review: Metroid Prime (Gamecube)

2010-09-20T08:34:00.000-07:00

Metroid Prime was released back in 2002 for the Nintendo GameCube and marks the first try in moving the Metroid series from 2D beginnings into a more modern 3D game. Instead of going with a third person perspective, the first person perspective was choosen. The gameplay however doesn't follow modern first person shooter controls as established by Halo, but uses its own unique control scheme and gameplay style.

Movement in Metroid Prime follows classical Doom-like controls, where the left/right controls, turn you to the left or the right instead of letting you strafe into those directions. Strafing is accompilshed by holding down the L button. The second analog stick is also not used for looking up and down, but is used here to switch between different weapons. Looking around is only possible by holding down the R button, thus making it impossible to aim and move at the same time. To cope with these restrictions the game provides an lock on system that is triggred by pressing the L button. This will keep your view centered on the nearest enemy and allow you to circle strafe around it as long as the button is held pressed.

The game structure also diverts from the more story driven nature seen in other FPS games, instead Metroid Prime follows classical Metroid roots. You are thrown into a freely explorable world that requires the collection of special abilities to continue. Missiles or special beams can be used to unlock doors, bombs can be used to trigger switches or clear rubble out of the way and the classic Morphball is used to get through small passages. The Morphball is special in that it switches the game to a third person perspective and when going through small passages it switches to an almost 2D side view. Missile and energie contain are hidden around the world as well and allow you to increase the capacity of live energie and missiles that you can carrie. The next goal to which you have to go will be marked with a question mark on your map screen, these question marks however don't pop up instantly once a goal is fullfilled, but only after a time of free exploration.

Saving in Metroid Prime works similarly to previous 2D Metroids, special save rooms are provided that allow you to save your current progress. In Metroid Prime those room also refill your health completly, they however do not refill your missile or power bomb amount. Those items have to be either collected from destroyed enemies or refilled in special locations, such as one of the rare missile refill stations or your space ship, which will repelish everything.

Graphically the game still olds up rather well. The game features a smooth framerate that almost never drops. One unique feature of Metroid Prime is that it shows the outline of the helmet of your character. So the game tries to not only portrait a view into the world, but the actual view through the eyes of your character. Energiebar and missile count are thus also presented as HUD elements on the helmets display, not just on your screen. The game also includes numerous effects in which the visor of your helmet might be obscured, this can be things like rain falling on it, steam condensating on it or water running of from it. A bright lightsource in the environment, such as an exploting missile or charge beam, might also cause a reflection of your characters face to become visible in your visor. The game also features a set of idle animation, that either let your character perform some minor maintanance on her weapons or look around suptly in the environment. All those little detail do a good job at increasing the immersion.

The environments in Metroid Prime are lush and well executed, weather and fog effects give the world a life like appearance. In industrial areas plenty of smoke and steam effects will make the world seems like a working environment and underwater small flocks of fish will keep things interesting. The game also features nice light effects that will cause the environment to light up whenever a charged beam is shooting through it or one of the rare light emitting creatures flies through it. The temperature and x-ray visors that you get later in the game and that you need to see specific enemies or secrets are also well implemented and look good.

Some of the textures in the game tend to be a bit blury and some environments could need a few more polygons to look a little less blocky, but other then that the graphics hold up quite well, even by todays standards.

The music is for most part very good, giving each area a distinct theme, underlining the often spooky athmosphere.

The level design on the other side feels often flat and unrealistic. While each room by itself looks quite nice, the world as a whole feels artifical and gamey, not like a living breathing world. This is in large part caused by the world not being one seamless place, but by being split into small rooms that are connected by doors. While this might make some sense for an underground mine, it really doesn't make any sense at all for the more organic environments on the planet surface. Furthermore this restriction into rooms robs the game of any view into the distance. The next view blocking wall is always just a few meters away, thus you never get any foreshadowing of where you will be going and you never really get a sense of space. You basically will never feel like you are entering a building or a cave as you are always trapped in the never changing structure of the rooms, never outside of them.

Just like most of the later 2D Metroids, Metroid Prime also features a map system. The map system is available either by looking at the top right corner of the screen, where there is an always present minimap or by pressing the Z button, which will zoom that minimap into a full screen view. On the map screen the game allows you to rotate, pan and zoom the map completly freely, while the minimap always is in an unchangable default view. This in turn makes the minimap pretty much useless, as it is so small that it is hard to make anything out of it and you are forced to watch it in the default isometric view, instead of a simplified top down view. These issues even cause trouble on the full screen map, as while you can zoom and rotate that freely, you will often run into issues where a closer part of the map is covering up something further way, with no way to properly hide parts of the map, you are forced to rotate the map around frequently to make out what the geometry of a room looks like and while you can rotate the view into a top down view, this top down view provides only limited usefulness as well. Doors are hard to see in that top down view and some sections of the map actually consists of multiple layers of rooms on top of each other, making the top down view completly useless in those cases.

Doors on the map are marked with special colors that indicate which weapons you need to open them up, however the game won't do the same for other blocking objects that might inhebit further progress into that directions, such as rubble that might requier a powerbomb to clear. This will in turn lead to quite a few unneeded trips around the world, as what looks like unexplored terrain, is really just blocked by an object that didn't show up on the map. The map system also has the disadvantage of hidding doors that are not in the currently selected room, thus the search for an unopened door can turn into a chore, as you have to pretty much select each room individually. The map also fails to clearly indicate where an elevator will go, while each room has a name and thus provides some hint as to where the elevator will end up, a way to quickly navigate to the target of that elevator isn't available and you have to fall back to manual search. While the map does display savepoints and missile refill stations, it doesn't keep track of special items or other places of special interest, neither does it keep a count of the already collected items in an area. These are all features that have been present in Metroid Fusion and greatly eased the frustration when exploring an area, but in Metroid Prime they are completly missisng. Only a single item count is provided for the whole world, but without being limited to an area, that is mostly useless.

One feature that would have benefited the game a lot would have been a way to mark points on the map. GTA DS for example allows you to mark a target location which then in turn will cause a navigation system to plot a course for you, you then simply have to follow that course. Metroid Prime provides nothing of that sort, not even a basic compass on the HUD, thus it makes it very easy to take the wrong door out of a room and get lost on larger trips, requiring frustrating back tracking.

An important new game mechanic in Metroid Prime is the ability to scan objects. This will provide you with detail information on enemies and objects, weak points on boss fights or bits of background story. The way scanning is implemented can however be a bit annoying, as scanning will always take a second or so to actually complete the scan and present the new knowledge, this second by itself wouldn't be that bad, but if you have half a dozen objects in a room to scan, it quickly adds up and turns into an annoyancy. A further issue is that the informational text is presented in a very tiny window on your HUD, this window often doesn't even have enough room for a single sentence and doesn't allow smooth scrolling, thus making reading longer text on it a chore. The scanned information can also be looked up in a database and there the text are is a bit larger and thus easier to read, but it still suffers from lack of smooth scrolling and from still having to small a width to properly fit for the given text.

The story in Metroid Prime happens to be almost exclusivly told through the scanning of special objects. Cutscenes that further the story are pretty much completly missing, you might see a boss explode after a fight, but you won't really see anything that would deepen the story itself. The scanned objects sadly don't really do much to deepen the story futher either. They provide a few bits of unimportant back story on the Chozos and the Space Pirates, but hardly anything that could be classified as story.

One big issue with Metroid Prime is simply that it lacks characters, not just some, but any at all. The scans could be losely compared to say the audio logs you collect in Bioshock, but while those in Bioshock give you insight into important characters of the world, the scans in Metroid Prime just give you general unpersonal talk about the races involved. You will here a bit about "the Chozo" and "the Space Pirates", but there is never a single identifiable character in either group, it is just general talk about the group as a whole. It really is a rather awkward way to tell a story. Now given the previous 2D Metroids weren't rich on story either, but in a 2D game that is simply much more acceptable then it is in a 3D game, as in a 2D game this is kind of the norm, while in a 3D game it just stands out. Also the 2D Metroids at least had the whole Baby Metroid plot going from Metroid 2, over to Super Metroid and then Metroid Fusion, Metroid Prime is missing anything that would leave a lasting impression.

Another thing with the story of Metroid Prime is that it simply doesn't even make much sense even given the mechanics of the game. The story basically goes like this: A meteroid crashes down on the planet, poising its inhabitant, the Chozo, and the wild life on it with the Phazon in it. The Chozo die out slowly, failing to do anything about the Phazon polution, so they create artifacts that lock a teleporter to the impact crater. The Space Pirates then come much later and use the Phazon to create basically super soldiers. The game time itself is spend first collecting weapnos and items that give you access to other areas and then finally collecting the artifacts that unlock the teleporter to the impact crater. Once at the crater there is a Metroid Prime that you defeat and the game then ends after that. What the Metroid Prime has to do with anything, I don't know, it just happens to be the last boss. I don't think it was ever mentioned in any of the scans I read. Neither do I think anything of what you do in the game did much to defeat the Space Pirates or restore the planets health. I couldn't even say what was accomplished by fininshing the game. The more I think about the story, the less sense it makes. So it goes well beyond just being a boring story, as it basically is a non-story.

The story also has the problem of just being really badly paced. For example you will learn about the Chozo artifacts very early in the game, but you won't be able to actually collect them until much later. Many are specifically placed in locations so that you can't reach them unless you have all the weapons. So they force you to backtrack, even so you might have discovered their location much earlier on. The game also does an early sequence in which it hints at Ridley, but it doesn't show him again for another 12 hours or so, by which time you probablly already have long forgotten that sequnce.

Fighting against enemies in Metroid Prime differs greatly from more traditional first person shooters. Due to the lock on mechanic you lose precision in aiming, this means that enemies don't have different hit zones, so you won't see any headshots here, instead it is just lock on and shoot. Dodging happens for most part via the ciricle strafing that the lock on allows you to do, which however happens to not work all that well. Many enemies that run at you will hit you even when you try to dodge them, it seems kind of random when you are able to dodge and when not. Further some enemies require that you hit them from behind, but as the enemies will automatically turn into your direction, getting behind them can turn out rather problematic. So basically you spend a lot of time circle strafing and jumping around to get a proper aim at an enemy, which is basically just annoying and not fun at all. What makes this especially frustrating is that you don't really see much when circle strafing, you don't see what it left and right from you, instead you always look straight forward. In some boss fights this might result in you falling into lava or poison water.

Another issue with the fighting in Metroid Prime is that basically every enemy is a bullet sponge. You can defeat a few of the smaller enemies with a single shot, but all the larger ones take lots and lots of shooting. The scheme to defeat a Space Pirate is basically: charge up your beam, stun enemy with it, charge up again to kill it. You spend a lot of time in cover to do the charging, then just hop out, make a single shoot, then back to recharge some more. It never feels like any of your weapons have much of an effect and when you try to defeat a Space Pirates with a normal shot, it takes you easily 30 or even 50, it simply takes forever. Even your missiles don't really feel very impact full.

And as if the fighting in the game would already be annoying enough as it is, the game also features respawning enenmies. Whenever you move two rooms away, everything in the old rooms respawns. All the old enenmies are back and even objects that you might have destroyed earlier return. The only exceptions are boss enemies and special objects that are used to lock an area. This respawing makes it basically impossible to do strategic combat, as you can't clear a room, backtrack to refill your health and then continue fighting, as by then everything will be reset to zero.

After specific points in the story the rooms might also fill with new enemies, most importantly probally the Chozo ghost which will pop up in many places in the Chozo ruins, but also a few new Space Pirates might pop up in old places. What makes this annoying is that it doesn't really make the game harder or more interesting, it just slows you down on your backtracking.

The savepoint placment in Metroid Prime is also of questionable quality. Quite a few times you will have a puzzle right before a boss fight, but no save point after the puzzle. So you either have to backtrack or to run into the potential danger of having to resolve the puzzle after failing the boss fight. The game lacks any kind of reset points other then the save points and after you die all your progress and collected items and such get reset to exactly what you had back when you did save. The boss rooms are also not clearly marked from the outside, so you might trip into a room not knowing that a fight will follow that locks the doors.

The game features one situation where this savepoint placement is basically elevated to game breaking qualities. When entering the Phazon Mines for the first times, you have a savepoint right at the start of them, but then when you go deeper down that route you will have to fight your way through multiple waves of space pirates, a room with jumping platforms that require activation, a laser canon that needs to be positioned, a room with a large cylinder that needs to be rotated multiple times to create a Spider Ball path, a Elite Space Pirate mini boss, a room that floods with poison gass, an an invisible control droid mini-boss and a Morph Ball labyrinth, all of that without a single savepoint inbetween. So basically you can lose well over half an hour of gameplay when you die on your first try. What makes the situation even worse is that you don't even find anything to repelish your health inbetween, so you basically slowly drain your health and then might make it to the save point with a few points left. It is not even that anything in that list is especially hard, but it simply takes a lot of time and resolving a puzzle again just happens to be no fun at all. I ended up being stuck in that situation on both my first and second play through.

As a special unlockable the game contains the Fusion suit from Metroid Fusion, but given that you don't see your character a lot in the game, that isn't all to useful. A more useful extra is the original NES Metroid game in emulated form. It features a automatic password save function, so you don't have to write the passwords down.

Metroid Prime is around 16 hours long, however the core game is probablly just around 12 hours, as you will spend a lot of time backtracking through old locations collecting the Chozo artifacts.

Overall I would describe Metroid Prime as "less then the sum of its parts". There is a ton of cool things in the game, the way your visor interacts with the environment looks great, the jumping works very well for a FPS, the enivornment look often great and graphic and music are perfectly fine. Every now and then when the game lets you explore freely it can be quite a lot of fun at those moments. Where the game fails is in the combat and story. The combat is pretty much always annoying. It is already annoying enough when you have to fight Space Pirates for the first time, it is absolutely no fun to fight respawned pirates for the fifth time, same goes for the Chozo ghost, it just takes forever without adding anything meaningful to the game. Same goes for the boss fights, there is always a ton of headache inducing strafe jumping going on and they also take forever. Shooting the same boss for five or ten minutes just seizes to be interesting very quickly. The story also goes way beyond just being a let down. It is not just basic, but pretty much activly stupid. It makes not much sense on its own and even less so when seen in the context of the game.

It is sad that Metroid Prime in the end just doesn't come together, it can be fun at times, but when that time is regularly intermixed with controller tossing awefulness it just spoils the whole package. I'd say they successfully translated the exploration aspects from the 2D Metroids into 3D, but they completly failed at doing the same with the combat. In the 2D Metroids combat always has been a fun thing to do, in the 3D incarnation it just fails on so many levels, which it wouldn't need to, as many other first person shooter manage to handle combat just fine.

Review: Metroid II: Return of Samus (GB)

2010-09-11T02:10:00.001-07:00

Metroid II was released back in 1991 for the original Game Boy. The game was the first one after the original NES Metroid game and introduces many new elements, game mechanics and a graphic style that have defined the series since then. The game however does also divert from other parts in the series. Most notably is this in the story. Samus is given the task to destroy all Metroids on the planet SR388. Ridley, Mother Brain or other classic Metroid enemies don't have part in this game. The game also follows a much more linear path, you start at the entrance to a cave and then basically work your way through an underground maze exterminating Metroids in the process.

After selecting one of the three available save slots, the game starts you next to your landed space ship, similar to Super Metroid and the games that followed. Samus starts out with the Morph Ball and a supply of 30 rockets, while other abilites and upgrades need to be collected in normal Metroid style. A counter at the lower right of your screen tells you that there are 39 Metroids that you need to kill, pressing Start will show you how many Metroids are in the current level. Unlike other Metroid games, in this one there are no boss enenmies, aside from the final Queen Metroid, instead each of the 39 Metroids acts as sort of a mini boss.

The level design in Metroid II diverts from other games in the series. Instead of one huge world with frequent backtracking, the world is separated into levels that are linked together in a linear fashion. Each level contains a fixed number of Metroids that need to be killed and progress into the next area is blocked by a wall that won't disappear till an earth quake, triggered by the last Metroid killed, will remove it and allow progress to the next level. The levels themselves however don't follow a linear structure and are basically smaller side caves that allow non-linear exploration. Backtracking through all the levels back to the top is possible, but is never needed or encouraged in the game. Backtracking however is frequent on a per level basis and once you unlocked the next level you have to often leave the cave back the way you came in. The levels themselves are also filled with dead ends, so you often have situations where a Metroid is in a side cave, which you then enter to kill the Metroid and then leave it the way you game. The game does wrap itself back to your ship once the final Queen Metroid is defeated in traditional Metroid fashion. Another noticable divergence from classic Metroid formular is that the game does not have doors in the normal levels, you switch rooms by simply walking to the edge of the screen. It is only the Chozos chamber that contian weapon upgrades that are locked by missile doors.

Unlike later games in the series, Metroid II is still a map-less game, relying on the players memory, a handdrawn map or a walkthrough. The game also provides little to no hint as to where an earthquake has opened up a new area. It does show the count of Metroids still alive in this area and the earthquake is a strong graphical clue, but there is no directional hint given.

In terms of game mechanics, the game feels a lot closer to the later Super Metroid then it does to the NES original. The game introduces the ability to shoot downwards and the ability to duck. The the ability to shoot diagonal is still missing however.

The game introduces the Spider Ball, the ability to turn the Morph Ball into a sticky form that will attach to walls and allow you to roll up vertical walls or even roll around the ceiling. The Spider Ball made a reappearence in the Metroid Prime series, but so far Metroid II is the only one of the 2D Metroid games that provided this ability. The controls of the Spider Ball are a bit trouble some, as it will only work when you press into the proper direction, which when you ball is right at the corner of a wall becomes trouble some, as it is hard to tell if it is already on the vertical part of the corner or still on the horizontal one. The Spider Ball also rolls around a little slowly, which given that you sometimes have to travel quite long distances with it, can get a little annoying.

The Metroids in this game not only come in their common jellyfish form, but in different stages of their lifecycle namely Alpha, Gamma, Zeta, Omega. Each of which presents basically a harder form that is more difficult to fight. While those other lifecycles make a short guest appearence in Metroid Fusion, Metroid II so far is the only game in which the different stages of the Metroid lifecycle played a major role.

One of the weird parts of this game is how it handles enemy activation, while it is normal for console games to only activate enemies that are close to the screen, here only enemies are activated that are fully on the screen. In the Metroid fights this has the effect that you often have the Metroid almost outside, but still visible on the screen, yet he will not be activated and stand still. This basically becomes a boss tactic, you try to keep the Metroid outside the screen, then jump into its direction at the right high fireing a missile, then back out again to freeze the Metroid with the help of the screen border. This limitation to the screen area also comes into play with destructible sand tiles, that respawn instantly when out of screen, which feels a little weird, as it often happens by accident, blocking a just cleared area.

The game features savepoints similar to the later games in the series, but due to the layout of the levels you don't come across them often enough, forcing you sometimes to backtrack to an earlier savepoint to save. Savepoints in this game also don't replenish you health, so you have to rely on health and missile refill points, which however are very sparingly as well or you have to shoot enemies, which while working, can be rather time consuming.

The graphics are for the technical capabilities of the Game Boy quite nice, featuring a much more zoomed in view with very large sprites compared to the NES Metroid game. This zoomed in view however comes at a price, as it provides much less overview over the current room, making it sometimes hard to orientate oneself. The graphics are however mostly limited to cave tiles, while there are different kinds of cave tiles provided, the more industrial design of later Metroid games is mostly missing, making the game lacking in noteworthy locations. The lack of color or good animation also makes it nearly impossible to distingish lava from water in this game, but that never really becomes much of an issue. Playing the game on the Game Boy Player will give the game a custom palette, providing Samus with proper coloring and breaking the regular four color limit on the original Game Boy.

The music in Metroid differs from the other games, but is overall quite nice and different tunes for different areas keep the music from getting to repetitively

Overall Metroid II is still a very fun game, but just like the original, it suffers form the lack of a map screen. The game also suffers from a general slowness, not only is the jumping a little slow, but especially the spider ball just moves to slowly. The story, presented completly without cutscenes, on the other side is rather nice, even so it is very simple, as it moves the Metroid series away from the normal boss fights, giving the mission a clear purpose and adds some moral ambiguity in the end, when you destroy the last Metroid and then a newly hatched baby Metroid follows you peachfully, even helping you, for the rest of the way back to your ship. A classic countdown is missing in that sequence.

The game is around four hours long when played casually with a map. The classic Metroid special ending is unlocked when finishing the game in under three hours. A counter for how many items one has collected is missing, so one doesn't get anything extra when collecting 100% items.

PS: There is a fan made remake of the game in works, using what looks like mostly recycled Metroid: Zero Mission graphics.

Record your Linux desktop with sound

2010-09-10T12:02:00.000-07:00

Record your Linux desktop with proper sound:

apt-get install gtk-recordmydesktop pavucontrol
launch pavucontrol
pavucontrol: go to the "Input Devices" tab
pavucontrol: select "Show: All Input Devices"
pavucontrol: select "Monitor of Internal Audio Analog Stero"
launch gtk-recordMyDesktop
gtk-recordMyDesktop: mark the checkbox at "Sound Quality"
gtk-recordMyDesktop: chose a window by clicking "Select Window"
gtk-recordMyDesktop: chose a location for the video via "Save As"
gtk-recordMyDesktop: press Record
gtk-recordMyDesktop: you can stop the via the icon in your systray
gtk-recordMyDesktop: if you use "Encode on the Fly" the resulting .ogv will be somewhat broken, to fix that use:
ffmpeg -i input.ogv output.ogv -vcodec copy -acodec copy

Tips:

gtk-recordMyDesktop: "Encode on the Fly" can help keep the file size small on long recordings
gtk-recordMyDesktop: to select an arbitrary area take an application (for example xzoom), position that window where you want to record, "Select Window" that window, close your application or move it out of the way, the selected area will not follow your application
pavucontrol: the Ubuntu sound control does not allow you to select the internal audio, it only allows you to record from microphones, that is why pavucontro is needed
gtk-recordMyDesktop: recordmydesktop can be used from command line without the gtk interface
recordMyDesktop: xwininfo can be used to get geometry informations of windows
gtk-recordMyDesktop: some applications require "Full shot at every frame"
OpenGL recording will not work very well with recordMyDesktop, try GLC instead

Review: Metroid (NES)

2010-09-09T11:33:00.000-07:00

Metroid on the NES is the game that started the Metroid series back then in 1986 and then was remade in 2004 with the game Metroid: Zero Mission on the GBA. I played the original NES version that comes as unlockable with Metroid: Zero Mission. Changes to the original NES version include graphics that are being a little squished to fit the GBAs lower screen resolution and the ability to save the password, so that one doesn't have to reenter it. To get a little closer to the original experience I tried to play it without referencing a walkthrough and instead draw my own map of the game.

Graphically Metroid definitively shows it age and even for a NES game it is rather basic, featuring no backgrounds and almost monochrome foreground tiles. The engine is also unable to handle multidimensional scrolling, so you are limited to horizontal- and vertical scrolling sectors, which are separated by doors. Different sectors do contain different looks, so there is at least a bit of variety to be had. One big disadvantage of this game however has is that it is full of recycled rooms, there are literally sections where each of four door ends you in the exact same looking room. This makes it basically impossible to navigate the game without a map, as you can't really tell where you are with so many rooms not only looking similar, but being pixel exact copies of each other.

Sound and music to a good job at creating the atmosphere and already feature the tunes that where recycled and remixed in later Metroid games.

The game features the same open world exploration as later games in the series, but it does not feature an automatic map system or hints on where to go. In this game you are basically completely on your own without any help. The gameplay is also noticeably different, most importantly in that you can't shoot down and in that you can't duck. These limitations allow enemies that are half the size that you can't easily hit with your normal weapon, forcing you to either use the morph ball bomb or the environment to properly align your shoot. This makes the combat a good bit more interesting then in later games, as you have to figure out proper ways to work around enemies and can't just shoot everything on screen with ease. The small sprites help to give you an overview over a large game space. The weapon upgrades then do a very good job in lifting some of the limitations. The ice beam allows you to freeze enemies in place, making it easier to dodge fast moving enemies and removing a need to fight them, while the wave beam allows you to shoot enemies that are half your size. Unlike in later Metroids the weapon upgrades don't stack, so you can have either the wave beam or the ice beam, but not a wavey ice beam. In the end fight against Mother Brain this lack of stacking forces you to go back to recollect the ice beam. Another thing mission from later games is the bomb jump, placing a bomb on the ground, then standing up, catapults you into the air, allowing you to perform a higher then regular jump. While the game does locks you out of some areas when you haven't collected a specific item, this is used much less then in later games, allowing you to basically explore the whole map once you have the bomb and missile, which you get early in the game.

Collecting weapon upgrades and suit upgrades in this game is as important as it is in the later games, but unlike later games, here the items are placed much less logically. A lot of items and areas are hidden behind seemingly normal walls that you have to blow away, giving you little to no hint to do so. The game even goes as far as hidden secret passages behind lava, which you normally try to avoid, but here you have to jump into to get critical items.

This basically brought my playthrough without a walkthrough to halt, as it is very easy to miss an important item, which in turn makes the game incredible frustrating. In my case I ended up defeating Kraid and then being in Ridley's lair, but missed screw attack, Varia suit and the wave beam along the way. What made the situation worse is how the password system works in Metroid works. The game doesn't feature save rooms, but instead gives you a password whenever you die. This password saves the sector you are in, your suit upgrades, your missile count and your energy tanks. What that password however doesn't save is the energy count, meaning you always start out with 30 health, even when you have health tanks that would give room for 500 health points. This means that in the later parts your character can take two hits before dieing. You can collect health points just as in later games by destroying enemies, but those enemies that are in location where you can easily harvest only give you 5 health points, making refilling your health an incredible tedious thing.

Being stuck in Ridley's lair, I chose to peak at a walkthrough instead of trying to refill up my energy manually. Knowing the locations of the new upgrades made things a lot easier, as it turned aimless exploration into a targeted treasure hunt. With the new items collected the game also become a hell of lot easier, as now not only you got twice the health from enemies, but the weapon upgrades also allowed to basically clean each screen, giving you much more opportunity to collect health. I'd go so far as to say that the game got a little to easy, as it went from basically 'impossible' to 'easily manageable'.

Kraid, Ridley and Mother Brain are the only boss fights in the game. Unlike in later game both Kraid and Ridley are here barely larger then a normal enemy, instead of screen filling. Kraid turned out to be rather tricky, not following an easy dodgeable pattern, but having full health helped to defeat him without to much trouble. Ridley on the other side was trivial, just as in all the other Metroid you could just spam him with missiles and be done with it. The projectiles he shoot were trivial to dodge. Mother Brain didn't provide all that much challenge either, as there only a few slow moving projectiles floating around, no fast targeted attacks. After the last fight against Mother Brain Metroid typical countdown follows, but it is rather large and the escape path is very short.

Overall this is still a very fun game after all those years, playing it without a walkthrough however turned out to be not the best way to enjoy the game. The same looking rooms make the navigation by memory extremely hard and even with a hand drawn map, it is just to easy to miss critical items, turning the game into an near impossible to solve chore. With a walkthrough on the other side the experience is completely different. You no longer need to just randomly walk through same looking room, instead you focus more on your next goal, this also leads to a steady stream of new upgrades, thus making the game much easier.

That you only start with 30 health points, instead with full energy is probably the by far biggest fault of the game, as it adds a lot of unnecessary tedium and renders the energy containers mostly useless, as you almost never will find the time or motivation to actually fill them early in the game. The base difficulty of the game on the other side is very welcome, as it forces you to be careful and figure out proper strategies and patterns against enemies. Early in the game you are also forced to dodge enemies instead of defeating them, something not seen in many games these days.

PS: Source code for the NES version of Metroid is floating around on the net, it is not the original code, but a disassembled ROM that is heavily commented.

Breathing life into an old laptop

2010-09-08T06:21:00.000-07:00

I have been toying around with an old 600Mhz Intel Celeron 64MB over the last few days, trying to find some use for it. In terms of actual speed it is pretty impressive with WindowsME it boots up in 40sec and the overall experience there is perfectly fine, but of course WindowsME isn't support any more and you can't find new software for it.

So next step was to look into Linux, browsing around the Ubuntu page gave me the impression that below 256MB that wouldn't be any fun, so I didn't bother to try it and went directly to Debian, which should have lower system requirements. That however didn't work to well either. First of Debian Stable didn't want to run Xorg, due to some graphics driver misshape, after that was fixed with a dist-upgrade, the thing however just was to slow to be of much use. Memory usage of the normal Debian Stable was always around 55MB when Xorg and LXDE was running, with basically nothing else. So it already was right at the max before doing anything demanding. I didn't bother to figure out, who exactly is wasting the memory, but gave Damn Small Linux a try instead.

Damn Small Linux is pretty impressive. It comes on as a small LiveCD and manages to boot into Linux with Xorg and Dillo as a webbrowser running without problems, just using around 20MB doing that. Installing Damn Small Linux to the HD also went smoothly. The thing neither looks as good nor is quite as responsive as WindowsME, but it is a perfectly usable Linux from what I could tell.

Overall I am still not quite sure what that laptop is still good for, the 64MB RAM is kind of a show stopper, the 5GB HD is also rather small and only having a single USB slot doesn't help much either. But Damn Small Linux works and that WindowsME might be good enough for some older games and watching DVDs.

Update: I now also gave Puppy Linux 5.1.1 a try. The LiveCD is a lot more demanding on the RAM then DSL, with 64MB already being already little to low, killing the X server and dropping to console to add a swapfile however fixed that. Installation was also a bit problematic, as Puppy Linux doesn't format the partition, you have to do that manually, else Puppy Linux will just install its files over what is already there, possibly getting confused in the process (installing over DSL Linux resulted in an unbootable system). Once past that trouble, it somewhat runs, but the RAM is still pretty maxed out, so your not wanna try to start any heavy apps, I guess thats the price you pay for having a more pretty looking GUI.

Review: Super Metroid (SNES)

2010-09-08T00:41:00.000-07:00

The first thing one notices when launching Super Metroid is that it is unusually option heavy for an Nintendo game. Not only can one configure the button layout, but also a few other things such as "moon walk" (walking backward when holding the shoot button) and icon cancel (automatically deselects icon on room change). The default control scheme is also pretty unusual in using X for shoot and A for jump, instead of the normal Y and B combination. That aside the control scheme also feels a little cumbersome, to select a weapon you have to toggle through a list of all those items by pressing select. In Metroid Fusion this was much more smoothly handled by having a modifier key that would turn your normal bomb into a super bomb or normal shot into a missile, thus making them easier available in combat without having to go through a list.

Another weird thing with the game is the way in which it handles translations, unlike other games, the normal text here is not translated, instead the game features subtitles below the normal English text. This doesn't really have much impact on the game, as you won't be seeing much text beside the intro, but it is a rather unusual thing to see in an non-FMV game.

Once past the option menu and into the actual game, it looks a bit disappointing at first. The graphics are rather basic and especially the backgrounds are often very blunt, giving it the look of a very early 16bit area title instead of one of the later ones. However that first impression doesn't last for long, as what the graphics lack in detail they make up in atmosphere. Especially later in the game there are some nice scenarios, such as when one walks through the ruins of an abandoned spaceship or when you are deep underground and have earthquakes shaking. The music, while basic, does a really good job supporting that atmosphere.

The games map lacks a few features one might have learned to love from Metroid Fusion, such as the ability to see doors. In Super Metroid you only see the rooms outline, but not if it has a door or which kind of door, thus it becomes much trickier to find unexplored areas. The map also doesn't keep track of items you have collected, it only keeps track of "points of interest", but that can be anything from an already collected energy tank to a missile refill station. The map also doesn't provide you a pointer as to where you have to go next, thus it becomes easy to walk off aimlessly into the wrong direction. What the map however shows are the boss locations, so you always have a final goal, but without information where to collect the next item that might not be all that helpful, especially given that many critical items are very well hidden behind seemingly normal walls.

In terms of items the game features missiles, super missiles, super bomb, grappling beam or x-ray. The last two have been missing from Metroid Zero Mission and Metroid Fusion and provide a nice addition that adds a bit more complexity to the game then you see in the 2D Metroids that followed. The spiderball from Metroid II however is missing. Super Metroid also allows you to customize your suit, you can switch on and off collected abilities at will, something that didn't make it into later games either.

Compared to the later games the gameplay of Super Metroid also feels a little stiff, you walk and jump rather slowly. Some of that is helped once you notice that you actually have a separate run button in this game, instead of the auto-running of the GBA, but a little sluggishness in the controls remains.

The save points in the game are for most part placed well enough, but sometimes rather well hidden behind a wall or another obstacle and thus not instantly obvious. There is also one savepoint in the wreaked ship that is activated only after you defeated the boss, not before. While justifiable from a story point of view, it is a rather mean trick, especially given that the boss is one of the harder ones in the game. Another extremely problematic save point is the last one, as that savepoint is a non-obvious point of no return, once you have saved there you can not go back and collect remaining items, you are stuck in the Mother Brain lair forever, essentially making your current savegame useless and not giving you a way to refresh your super missiles. Super Metroid is neither the first nor last game to pull such a misshape, but it is especially annoying here as collecting items after defeating the last boss is kind of half the fun.

In terms of story the game keeps it really basic, you get an intro and an ending, which not much inbetween, but the game does manage to keep things interesting with a few scripted in-game events (such as a bird creature teaching you the speedboost jump for example) and also the intro does do a good job recapping previous games events, which makes the ending a lot more meaningful. The short introductory space station mission is also extremely well done.

Overall it is a very good SNES game, probably my second favorite in the Metroid series behind Metroid Fusion. In terms of length it is a little longer then the GBA games, clocking in at around six hours on a normal play through. A few interface goofs spoil the fun a bit, but one gets used to most of that after a while and for the lack of proper map screen one has the Internet these days as replacement. The story is simple, but it does a great job in connecting all the 2D games in the Metroid series. The one thing that was a huge bummer was the point-of-no-return save point, a game in which collecting stuff is a large part of the experience should never have such a point, especially when completely unnecessary.

Review: Metroid Zero Mission (GBA)

2010-09-08T00:40:00.000-07:00

Metroid Zero Mission is a remake of the original Metroid from the NES that was released some years after Metroid Fusion. Aside from the first few rooms and the boss fight against Mother Brain however, there really isn't all that much noticable reassemblence to the original NES Metroid. This is especially true since you are given almost all the weapons from Super Metroid, which in turn change the flow of the game quite a bit compared to the NES original.

In terms of overall game mechanics it basically follows traditional Metroid conventions and plays for most part rather similar to Metroid Fusion, where it diverts however is in its story telling or lack there off. While Fusion could get a little to talky at times, Zero Mission is almost void of any dialog. For storytelling the game features a series of cutscenes that work with images instead of in-game graphics. While this sounds fine in theory, these cutscenes however lack any kind atmosphere and the editing is rather terrible, thus doing far more harm then good to the overall game. The art style also diverts from more traditional pixel art, to what looks more like a comicbook style, that seems unfit for the atmosphere of a traditional Metroid game. This graphic style is not only used for the cutscenes, but also to a lesser extend visible in game. Comparable suspensful in-game sequences to Metroid Fusions SR-X encounters are missing in this game, even so there would have been plenty of opportunities to integrate similar stuff.

Instead of dialog sequences that guide you through Metroid Fusion, this game guides you mostly by statues that highlight a point on your map where you have to go to. This leads to a much more fluent open game experince, then Metroid Fusion as you are not constantly stopped for the next briefing, it however also means you don't really have any context as to why you should go to that point.

The game contains some technical improvements over Metroid Fusion, such as a new graphical effect with which tilemaps will fade away when you go below them. It is a neat little effect that is used cleverly in a few places to hide items and other mechanisms. The map screen now gives you an overview map over all the sectors and lets you switch between sectors without having you standing in them first, this saves a bit of useless running around. The game also by default shows you the items you have collected per sector, so it is easy to see where you have overlooked stuff and even without a walkthrough it is not that hard to collect most items.

Boss fights in this game are rarer then in Metroid Fusion and also less interesting. Basically the game contains just Mother Brain, Kraid, Ridley, Acid Worm and a Ridley robot. Ridley is just as in Metroid Fusion trivial to defeat with spamming it with missles, while Kraid looks almost exactly like the SNES version. The remaining ones aren't all that interesting to fight or look at either.

The most interesting and also the most broken part of the game is the zero suit section. This section takes place after you defeated Mother Brain and thus after the end of the orignial NES game. In that section you are attacked after take off and crashland back on the planet, with your suit destroyed. This means you have to fight your way through a whole bunch of space pirates, armed with only a small freeze gun, before you can get your suit back. In theory that sounds like an interesting and suspenseful change of pace for the game, in practice however the results are rather disappointing. The most confusing part about this section is that it in large part looks like a Metal Gear'ish type of gameplay where you have to sneak past the space pirates without being noticed, mechanically the elements are even there, you got alarms that get triggered and spots for hiding. What destroys this section is that you are very frequently forced to trigger the alarm without any way around it. Thus instead of a clever game of hide&seak, it just boils down to running real fast to the next hiding spot to escape your followers. The gun you have is only good for stunning enemies, so you can't actually defeat them. What makes this section so frustrating is that you have no other choice as to painstakinly remember the path, as almost every unplaned enenmy encounter can and will result in your death. On hard mode the game even goes so far as to intentionally blocking a few savepoints in this section, making it even more frustrating.

In terms of length the game is very similar to Metroid Fusion, around four hours for the core game and then another few to collect every item. The game also includes next to the remake, the original NES version scaled down to GBA resolutions. The NES game automatically stores the password, so you don't have to write it down to save you state.

Overall I didn't enjoy this as much as Metroid Fusion, while the added freedom is a nice change, the game just lacks purpose and feels rather blunt. In Metroid Fusion each sector had a clear purpose and theme, while here it all just feels more random. It also just doesn't look as good and the suspenseful athmosphere and the intensity of the gameplay is mostly gone. The zero suit mission just feels like one huge missed oportunity and thus feels simply out of place.

In the end it is still a solid Metroid adventure, but my least favorite one of all the 2D ones, it feels to much like a step backward in some areas while not really offering anything new. As a remake of the original NES game it also fails, as it neither does a good job of capturing its atmosphere nor does it contain many recognizable parts and those that it does, where also remade for Super Metroid, so thats nothing new either.

Metroid Zero Mission for me marks the starting point where the series took the wrong turn. The first four parts build up a nice little storyline, where one part basically follows directly after the other, this remake of the first however doesn't add anything interesting of its own, but clobbers the story with some useless and unneeded pieces of Samus Arans backstory. It also introduced the zero suit and the overall new look of Samus, which seems to be a pointless depature from the more realstic and gritty lock before (as far as pixel art goes anyway).

Ubuntu 10.10 (maverick) Upgrade

2010-09-04T14:41:00.000-07:00

Just upgraded to the latest Ubuntu 10.10 beta, so far everything seems to have went smooth, except the Nvidia drivers again, which already failed on the last few dist-upgrades. After the dist-upgrade gdm won't start, but it is easy to fix, make sure nvidia-current is installed and just add the following line to the ServerLayout section in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Option "IgnoreABI" "True"

In terms of new features I haven't noticed much so far, the volume control now includes controls for Rhythmbox, which is a little weird, given that I already have those controls in the Rhythmbox icon right next to it and Firefox has a new set of icons.

Today, when booting up the machine, Ubuntu started to display some three month old identi.ca messages in its notification area, not sure what's up with that.

The new cryptsetup is currently incompatible with the old one from the previous Ubuntu, making encrypted mounts fail without a meaningful error message, one has to add a few additional options to make it work.

Emacs23 with a anti-aliased font is extremely slow when it comes to scrolling.

Review: Metroid Fusion (GBA)

2010-09-02T02:13:00.001-07:00

I recently replayed Metroid Fusion for the Game Boy Advance. In terms of graphics the game still holds up nicely, it doesn't look quite as good as say a Castlevania on the NintendoDS, but as far as the GBA is concerned it is definitely one of the better looking games. Sound and music are also pretty good. The controls are a bit overloaded due to the lack of buttons on the DS, but work overall quite nicely. The L button lets you aim up or down in a 45 degree angle, holding R lets you shoot missiles or charge missiles and A and B let you shoot and jump. Pressing start will show you a map of the explored area.

Like previous Metroid games this one also provides a chain of of collectable extras that give you new abilities, you get those collectables after basically every boss fight. It is the standard stuff for most part, morph ball, bombs, high jump, screw attack, etc. The one new thing is that you now got an chargeable ice missile instead of a regular ice shoot, but it serves much the same purpose as before.

One nice new core game mechanic is the way how you refresh your energy. Like in previous games enemies that have been killed will leave collectibles that will refresh you missiles or energy, but in Metroid Fusions those collectibles are actually viruses that will, if not collected quickly, respawn into a new enemy. It is also possible to kill two smaller enemies and then have their viruses respawn together as a single bigger enemy. This mechanic gives the game a great sense of speed and urgency as you end up constantly hopping around and collecting things.

Unlike Super Metroid however, this one is a lot more talky. The game is separated into 7 sectors and at the entrance to each sector you will have a short dialog with an AI computer. While every now and then this provides interesting story bits, it sometimes feels a little to much as all you get is another objective to collect this or that item. The story driven nature of this game also adds a bunch of linearity to the game. You always have a next objective to fulfill and there is very little room or reason to go exploring and due to the way many secrets are only accessible with newer power ups that you might not yet have. The one point where you can freely explore is right before the very last boss fight and while it is fun to revisit old locations and explore every spot of the map, it is also rather pointless, as at that point you simply do not need any of the extras any more. Unlike the Metroid Prime series, collectable items will be marked on a map, this makes it much easier to keep track of what got collected.

The one area where the story telling in Metroid Fusion really shines are the encounters with SA-X. SA-X is an fully powered up Samus clone in the Super Metroid suit that you will run across multiple times in the game. It is undefeatable, thus your only job is to survive the encounters. This can be accomplished by either freezing it with ice missiles or hiding. The music, pacing and the fact that they all play out through normal gameplay makes those encounters extremely suspendsful. SA-X and other boss enemies will will also from time to time leave a trail of destruction behind them, thus blocking previously accessible path and forcing you to find another way around.

The difficult of the game is pretty well balanced, providing a decent challenge, without ever getting to hard. The once exception is the Nightmare boss, that one is by far the hardest boss in the game and takes by far the longest to defeat compared to other bosses. The game also has a few situations where it is not all that obvious you have to do. In one instance a locked door will only open up, after you defeated some enemies that only appear after two viruses combined. While having doors open up when all enemies are defeated is not a new mechanic in games in general, it is used only exactly once in the whole game and there really isn't any reason given why that happens. In those cases you are mostly looked up into a rather tiny environment, so there isn't all that much chance that you wander off into a completly wrong direction, but in those few cases where this becomes an issue a few additional hints would have been welcome.

In terms of length the game is not the longest, but fine for a handheld game, an average play through will probably take you around five hours, collecting all the items might almost double.

Overall this is probably my favorite Game Boy Advance game. While the way the story adds linearity and slows things down can be annoying, the story itself is perfectly fine for a handheld game and serves well in giving you points to go to and explanations for new game mechanics. Some non-linearity would however have been welcome instead of giving the player a completely guided experience. There is still a bit of exploration to be done, as your objectives might not give you an exact room to go to or tell you how to get there, but you don't really get to do exploration on a larger scale till the very end. The nice thing about the exploration however is that you will learn a few new moves that you likely never used in the normal game, so while the new energy tanks might be rather useless, you actually do see a few new and interesting things and some items provide a good challenge to figure out.