L4D2

February 8th, 2010
L4D2 Cover

I got the right image this time! Yay!

I am not very big on of competitive multiplayer games. It probably has something to do with my complete lack of hand-eye coordination. I usually don’t play video games for the challenge. I don’t really find much enjoyment in grinding the same level for days, until I can do it in my sleep. That is not to say that I want my video games to be a cakewalk. A certain degree of difficulty is actually what makes it fun – it gets the adrenaline pumping. To much of it however is a turnoff. When I play a game I want to be immersed in it’s world and it’s story. If I die every five minutes, this immersion is broken. So online FPS games are not exactly my cup of tea. That said, I do enjoy them from time to time. For example, I fondly remember my high school years where when I played Blood, and Quake Team Fortress mod at lan parties till the wee hours of the night.

Until I found L4D2 my FPS poison of choice was Team Fortress. But I have not touched it since L4D2 launched. I admit that I bought it mainly because of the hype and memetic potential of the original. I mean, I have never played the first iteration of this game, but I do know that Francis hates everything except vests for example. Everyone seemed to love the game, but I was skeptical whether or not it can actually deliver $40 of entertainment to me. I got TF2 as part of the Orange Box, which I bought specifically to get my hands HL2 episodes and Portal. A nice, silly online game was just a bonus.

When Valve released the demo for L4D2 I decided to try it out, and see whether or not it was worth the investment. It turned out that I liked the game so much that I preordered it on the spot, and then got to join an angry mob of Valve customers ranting about the L4D2 release fail on twitter.

For those of you who were not paying attention on the release night – Valve was late with the PC release. The customers who bought the Xbox version got to play the game at midnight. PC users on the other hand had to wait until 3am while Valve team was doing some last minute testing. Of course to us, it looked like they were just playing the game themselves and forgot to unlock it on steam. Needless to say, the fans were not pleased.

I noticed that two months have passed since then, and I haven’t really mentioned the game at all. It’s not because I haven’t been playing it though. I’ve been killing zombies on and off ever since I got it, unless I was playing another game in between (Dragon Age for example). So I figured I might as well say a few words about it now.

I still love it, and I personally think it is one of the most fun online FPS games I have played in years. Yes, I’ve been actually having more fun in L4d2 than in TF2. Go figure. There is just something about this game that draws me in. And I’m pretty sure its not just zombies. Then again, maybe it’s because it’s newer, and I haven’t gotten bored with it yet.

One thing has to be said: the characters in the sequel don’t seem to be as iconic as the ones from the original. Ellis seems to be the fan favorite, with his questionable redneck charm. The character models are very well done, and quite distinctive. I really like how they are all slightly different sizes, and sport different postures so you can easily recognize which character you are looking at, even if all you see is a silhouette. Their voice acting is pretty good too, and they are not bad characters. They just not as good as Francis, Luis or Zoey and Bill. You can see this reflected on the interwebs. The original cast is featured in motivational posters, memes, skits and videos. The new survivors on the other hand have yet to make their mark out there. That’s basically my only complaint about this game. Everything else, I pretty much like or approve of.

I like these poster type level intros

Here is an admission – I hardly ever play the game in standard campain mode. My favorite is Versus and I play it almost to the exclusion of everything else. I tried all the other modes, but I keep cumming back to the PvP combat mode all the time. Perhaps it is because it lets me play against real human beings rather than the shifty AI Director. This means that both failures and successes are far more spectacular. When you are playing against a well organized team of infected getting wiped out is usually both painful and hilarious. Not to mention that playing as infected is actually great deal of fun.

Actually scratch that. The best thing about Versus mode is that there is no grind. When you play a straight campaign, wiping out means that you need to start the level over. When you wipe twice in a row, people get cranky, rage quit or start kicking people off the server out of spite. But on Versus, wiping out as Survivors means that you now get to play as infected, and get a chance to avenge your deaths. Not only that, you can lose every round and still progress through the levels. There is just no downtime, and no repetition – no matter what happens, you get to do something different next round. You are either settling a score, forging ahead or trying to catch up points wise.

It’s also the best way to get to get to know the game. Infected get access to many areas the survivors can’t go, they can climb buildings, set ambushes on the roofs and etc. The best way to find all the tricky spots where special infected may hide is to play them yourself. It also gives you a very good feel for the extent of powers these beasts posses – for example, how far can a smoker smoke, or what is the radius of explosion of a dying boomer.

How about you? What is your favorite game mode and why?

How about campaigns? Which one do you like the best? I personally like Dead Center, Parish and Dark Carnival in precisely that order. I really like fueling Jimmy Gibs’ car in the Dead Center finale. It is possibly one of the more interesting and challenging stages in the game. Winning that level as survivors really takes quite a bit of coordination. A common impulse of many players is to split up and try to grab as many gas cans as possible really fast. Unfortunately this allows infected to pick them out quite easily. A lot of people like to form two teams of two (one on the ground level, and one scavenging for cans upstairs) but that is risky – especially on Versus. Most of the successful play-troughs have the team staying together all the time, even if it means taking more time and taking on more hordes of undead.

Also, any Terminalists who play L4D2, please post your steam account name in the comments or friend me – I’m Tuxmentat. I’ve seen k00pa and Gothmog around but they are rarely online when I am. I tend to play late at night and I’m in the EST time zone.

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Posted in games | 3 Comments »

Name That Game: Nostalgia Strikes Back

February 5th, 2010

We did this last week and it was so much fun, I decided to do this again. This time the list of pictured games was provided by my brother Ark. We grew up playing the same Amiga games and this is pretty much a list of our favorites (sans the stuff I posted last week). I actually think this is harder than last week, because a few of these games might have been Amiga exclusives and thus might be unknown to the PC crowd. Anyway, let’s see if you can get all of them.

Name that Game: Nostalgia Edition 2

As usual, post your guesses in comments. For full effect, don’t read any comments first and try to guess on your own. Then read the comments and see if you failed to recognize some games that you played but did not recognize from the screen shot.

Enjoy!

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Posted in games | 19 Comments »

Lyx – Easy LaTex without Spell Check

February 4th, 2010

I am a vocal WYSIWYG hater. I have my reasons, but I will not repeat them here for the sake of brevity. If you are interested, you can take a look in the archives to see why I feel the way I do. In fact, let me give you couple of links to start you off. It is a deeply flawed paradigm and a UI dead end as far as I’m concerned. WYSIWYG will always be quirky, annoying and frustrating by design. WYSIWYG editors try to do the impossible – to create marked up text while hiding the markup from the user. It works for simple documents, but as soon as you try to use it for something substantial (for example 100 page research paper) it falls apart. Not only that, but it teaches users bad habits. Just look in the links above for various examples of this.

This is why I use LaTex for most of the formal document writing needs. Actually that’s half the reason. The other half is that LaTex formatted documents just look so damn good. They stand out, in a good way – they are crisp, and professional looking. It has a powerful engine for generating complex mathematical formulas that far surpass what is offered by MS office out of the box, it is much better at managing figures, tables of contents and bibliographies, and unlike most word processing tools maintains separation between display and content. It’s an incredibly powerful system, but also a very complex one. Using latex is very much like programming – you learn the syntax first, then you find out about useful packages that do things for you, then you learn how to redefine and overload basic functions, later you find out about style files and eventually you can create your own. It’s a learning process.

Of course some people just don’t like to learn, and this is why we have Lyx – an editor that gives you a lot of the nice features of LaTex without any of the hassle. Every time I post something even remotely Tex related, someone invariably brings it up. So I decided I might as well try it and see what the fuss is all about.

Lyx combines the visual approach of WYSIWYG with a a more structured and pragmatic organization of content. In essence they try to convey markup by using various visual indicators. The website claims it is a WYSIWYM editor (which stands for What You See Is What Your Mom Said or something like that). The point is that it works better than a regular word processor. Not to mention that it also gives you access to the powerful LaTex typesetting engine and math formula functions. So you can totally just launch it, type in bunch of garbage, hit a button and get a pretty, nicely formatted PDF.

I could probably describe the user interface here but that would probably add another 1k words to this post. So I will cheat and just show you a picture and since 1 pic == 1k words the content should not suffer that much. Here is how Lyx looks (alliteration was literally unintentional):

Meet Lyx - LaTex Editor For Lazy People

I have used this toy to author a few documents and I must admit it is not half bad. You type in words, press some buttons and things happen. Unlike a WYSIWYG garbage-tron Lyx won’t just let you press enter a million times in lieu of proper vertical white space management. If you want to have vertical separation you need to break up your text into paragraphs, sections or insert special vertical space markers (as shown above). The environment gives you access to most of the popular commands you can pick from the drop down menus. It also ships with bunch of style templates you can load up and use. I don’t think you can directly import packages into your documents, but I guess the point of this tool is to keep things simple and easy.

What’s a bit peculiar is that Lyx seems to be on the fence on whether or not to use the LaTex nomenclature and function names. They try to avoid using the raw Tex commands verbatim, but they do show up here and there. So if you are a stranger to the Tex way of doing things, Lyx will probably be quite confusing at first. In fact, if you are looking for an easy way to start learning Tex, Lyx is probably the last thing you want to use. It hides enough to prevent you from learning anything useful, but not enough to avoid confusion. So essentially it is not really a drop in WYSIWYG replacement but rather a tool for people who kinda-sorta know their way around Tex but just want to type up a quick document without worrying about and/or being distracted by colorful markup everywhere.

In fact, I’d actually consider using it for that very purpose – it would be a perfect tool to type up a quick letter, memo or maybe even a short manual for some crappy code that I just vomited upon the internet. Unfortunately, Lyx continues the age old tradition of Open Source LaTex related products by not including an inline spell check function. In other words, no red squiggly lines under misspelled words. Some people may view this as a minor nuisance, but for me this is a deal breaker.

Let me put it this way: what would you use a Tex like tool for? I would use it for writing papers. Letters, memos, articles, homeworks – whatever. All these things require proper spelling and grammar. Not including an inline spell checking function is a rather odd choice. I understand that some people do not like that feature, but many do and offering it as an option would be a very logical choice. Especially since every other word processing tool has it. Hell, most LaTex IDE tools like TexMaker or TexnicCenter have it. Not only that, but the inline spell checking feature is also present in every modern web browser.

Yes a web browser. Do you know what web browsers are for? Most people use them for posting “u guise r fags LOL!!1″ type comments on youtube. There is really no need to have an inline spell check in a browser, but we have it because it is a nice feature. It helps! Not including it in Lyx is… Well, odd.

It seems that the developers are on the fence about the feature. On one hand, users have been begging for it to be implemented at least since 2007 if not earlier. On the other hand, half the devs seems to hate the very idea of inline spellcheck, while the other half does not care either way. It seems that they are have been willing to include it in the future releases since 2007 if someone implements it, but they are not going to waste time working on it themselves. I’d jump in and help out, but frankly I don’t actually care enough.

It turns out that I was wrong. It appears that inline spellchecking was very recently implemented by Abdelrazak Younes. So if all goes well this feature will be available in Lyx 2.0. Big thanks to Brunda for pointing it out in the comments.

While I would consider using this tool, I’m really better off using TexMaker or something similar that includes inline spell check feature for now. Once 2.0 is released though, I think we will have a quite formidable alternative to both WYSIWYG editors and straight LaTex IDE’s.

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