Terminally Incoherent

Hopefully this might be one of my last Half Life themed posts. If you are bored or annoyed by these, I apologize, but in the last few weeks I played Portal, Episode One and Episode Two straight through, back to back and now I’m impatiently waiting for Episode Three. So bear with me for a bit while I get this stuff out of my system.

Anyways, every single Half Life game involves a fair amount crawling through air ducts, or some other tight places. In fact, Valve even decided to make fun of their love for air-duct sequences, by having Alyx make references to Gordon’s formidable crawling skills in Episode One. At one point, when I was doing all the crawling it hit me. How the hell do you fit in these tight ducts with the HEV suit and all your weapons? I mean, let’s think about it - on your average day, Gordon can be seen carrying:

1. standard crowbar
2. USP Match Pistol, with around 8 spare magazines
3. .357 Magnum revolver with 12 spare rounds
4. MP7 Submachine gun with 5 spare ammo clips, and 3 grenades for the built in launcher
5. SPAS-12 pump action shotgun with around 30 spare cartridges
6. Overwatch Standard Issue Pulse Rifle with 60 spare rounds
7. mechanical crossbow with 10 bolts
8. AT4 Rocket Propelled Grenade Launcher (RPG) with 3 rockets
9. three fragmentation grenades
10. Zero Point Energy Field Manipulator (aka the Gravity Gun)

That’s two machine guns, a crossbow, a rocket launcher tube, a unwieldy crowbar and a very bulky and heavy gravity gun. Seriously, check out the scenes when it used by Alyx or Dr. Breen. It’s so heavy that they can hardly lift it into the upright firing position without the HEV suit. Actually, Alyx seems to be barely able to lift the damn thing at all.

Note that I’m not even mentioning the HEV suit itself here. Ok, so I just mentioned it. Look at it though. From the way it looks on concept art sketches, and that brief moment you see it in the game, it looks big and bulky. I think that it actually has rigid plate components that protect you from “blunt trauma”, a hardened collar and chest plate and etc. It’s not really a good outfit for ventilation duct crawling to begin with.

So next time you are crawling through an air duct in Half Life think about this: you are actually have a dozen bulky weapons strapped to your suit. How is it possible? Gordon Freeman is just that awesome. This is why Vortigaunts are always so nice to him! Cause, dude - if you can fit into a tiny duct in a big suit, with weapons strapped all over your body, you must be fucking unconsciously using vortesence to bend reality or something.

Quick note for those of you who use Gmail and rely on the comment subscription thingymajig to follow the discussions around here. There seems to be some weird bottleneck when relaying emails to gmail accounts, which seems to be affecting the comment subscription system. If you haven’t received any comment notifications today blame Dreamhogs. I was wondering why my email is being so quiet today. There was not a single notification message in my inbox today.

I sent Dreamhost an email, but they are pretty much like:

I don’t have a clue how long will this persist. I’m hoping it will get cleared by tomorrow, but who knows. I’ll keep you updated. If you are not using Gmail, you will probably be unaffected by this. If you are not on Gmail and you are not getting any notifications, let me know, and I’ll go and yell at Dremroast some more.

One of my users dropped off a WinXP desktop on my desk today, telling me that all his user accounts are gone and, the welcome screen is missing. Bit perplexed I hooked it up to a nearby monitor half expecting to face some odd registry corruption issue. Luckily I do have a Knoppix SDT with that nifty windows password blanking script in my bag. What I found however was even weirder. I was greeted with the “classic” windows logon (ie. the one where you actually have to type in the username and password).

I was able to successfully log in using the correct username and password which ruled out some registry hiccup. So I went straight to Control Panel, determined to switch on the fast user switching and the welcome screen via the Users applet. Unfortunately as soon as I clicked on the right option I got the following message:

A recently installed program has disabled the welcome screen and fast user switching. To restore these features you must uninstall the program. The following filename might help you identify the program that made the change: RtlGina2.dll.

Trojan? No, not really. Apparently RtlGina2.dll belongs to the Netgear WG111 network card driver installation package. For some unknown reason it replaces the default windows graphical logon MSGINA.dll with it’s own implementation, effectively disabling the nice logon features of windows XP.

Excuse me Netgear, but what the fuck are you doing? How the hell do you justify modifying the way user’s system logs in when all you are doing is installing networking drivers? Actually, fuck that. I don’t want to know. It’s unacceptable. There is no way in hell you could justify this sort of invasive bullshit to me. I’m going to advise all my users against your shitty products from now on.

How to fix this mess? It’s relatively simple. You just need to dive into registry and remove the references to RtlGina2.dll - most importantly from:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER/SOFTWARE/MICROSOFT/WINDOWSNT/WINLOGON

Or, if you are lazy you can grab a tool designed especially for this problem. It was written by Doug Knox who is an MVP, and a Microsoft Expert Zone Associate Expert (oh, hey, redundant redundancy!). Apparently he is to busy writing registry hacks to actually update his circa 1991 website layout and design, which initially made me suspicious of his legitimacy. But his credentials do check out and the tool works (I tested it), so feel free to use it. All you need to do is download it, and run it and it does the rest.

I have mixed feelings about episodic video games. So far, I think the only company that successfully exploited the episodic content idea is Valve with it’s Half Life 2 series. I think that there were other attempts from other companies, but most of them sailed past below my radar. The only one I can actually think off from the top of my head is the Sam & Max series. Unfortunately I never got into that one, because I was such a huge fan of the original Sam & Max game. The idea of playing a “talkie” version with 3d graphics scared me - I just didn’t want to tarnish my memories of pure Sam & Max awesomeness with some newfangled sequel series. Anyone played these? Are they worth checking out?

But I digress. I think most of other episodic ventures have failed miserably, and this is why I can’t remember them. Can you? Valve has shown us that it can work, but you do need a strong brand to get it started. It can be worth while for a game publisher to invest in something like this, but is it a good idea from the point of view of a customer? Let’s look at some pros and cons. I like episodic content because:

1. I get a new game faster - instead of waiting few years between sequels, I only need to wait few months
2. The episodic games are delivered in bite sized chunks that I can play from begging to end in few evenings. This is actually not a flaw - for someone with no attention span, being able to finish a game without getting sick of it, is an accomplishment.
3. The game is more compact - since the overall length of the game is shorter, plot expositions will likely be packed more densely. For example, Half Life 2 had stretches of protracted combat that took longer to finish than both Episode One and Two put together. The episodes on the other hand offer you short bursts of intense combat, punctuated by puzzles and plot exposition elements. Of course this might just be Valve refining their packing storytelling skill in the new installments.
4. Minimum requirements creep is not so intense. Since all episodes will be using the same engine, you should be able to run them on the same computer. This is usually not true for sequels, which usually get shiny new graphics and ramp up minimum hardware requirements considerably.

What are the reasons to hate episodic content?

1. Glorified expansion packs. While this is not true for HL2 series, some publishers may use this strategy to simply sell you expansion packs with few bonus maps, and a lame, tacked on story arc.
2. Episodic content promotes lame, open ended writing. Just like TV series writers, game publishers may not want to resolve any of the in game story arcs because that would mean the end of the series. What you get in the end is a meandering story that is going nowhere. Of course this is not always the case. For example the Season 1 of Hereos is a self contained story with a satisfying resolution. Despite that, the show did not end, and instead delivered a successful second season. Also, this hardly applies to Valve since it seems that Episode Three will be the last one of the series, and it’s unlikely that we will get any answers from that one either.
3. Pricing sucks - you get a 5-6 hour long game with only some minor tweaks to the engine, but you still have to pay $30-40 bucks for it. Still, this depends. For example, Valve did discount Episode One down to $9 after releasing Episode Two.
4. Finally, you never know if the game will be successful until it hits the store shelves. At this point, Valve can pretty much do no wrong. Any Half Life related title is almost guaranteed colossal sales. But if you are setting out to produce a game series, you don’t know if there will ever be episode two, if episode one is not a huge success. This means that fans of the game may get left stranded after playing just the first chapter of the planned story. If this was a full game release, gamers would at least get the whole story instead of some half-assed game without an ending.

All in all, I loved both Episode One and Two and I think that I wouldn’t mind playing few more episodes before HL3. And while I’m not really sure the episodic paradigm will ever work for the gaming industry as a whole, I think Valve found the perfect formula. What do you think? Can you think of any episodic game series that were successful?

Would you like to see more episodes of Half Life, or is 3 more than enough?

I noticed that a lot of people has this odd idea in their heads that the technology moves so fast we can barely keep up. The other day I was talking to someone who told me that he would never go into computer science because “In the time it takes you to get your degree, everything you have learned is already obsolete.” Wow, really? I mean, yes - the laptop you buy as a freshman, may be becoming obsolete when you graduate (but only if you use it for gaming), but the knowledge?

There seems to be this crazy notion floating around that the technology in 10-20 years, will be so crazy awesome that all our current knowledge will be useless against the brand new super science powering all the flying cars and bionic computers. Cause, you know - slow-tards don’t know about quantum computing, so the next best thing is like bio-engineering and shit. Have you ever experienced this? Cause it happens every time I try to talk about future advancements in technology. There is always someone saying - hey, the technology is moving so fast, that you never know what we will be using 20 years from now.

Unless we do reach singularity before that 20 year mark, I can tell you exactly what we are going to be using. Same old shit, only on faster hardware. For example, we will still be sorting shit using Quicksort because that’s pretty much the best thing we got. And guess what, Quicksort has been developped in 1960!

This may shock some of my non-technologically inclined readers (although I can’t imagine why would they keep reading me, since I keep offending them every chance I get) but a 47 year old algorithm is still the fastest and most efficient, way to sort shit.

Dear boys and girls, the valid and proven concepts and ideas never get old. The tools and languages we use to express these concepts with, may become obsolete and fade out of use, but the concepts themselves are pretty much constant. They are the base on which we build all the new software. Computer science is just like any other science - progress is achieved by building on top of existing body of knowledge. Not by rejecting everything and building shit from scratch like some people may think.

So 20 years from now, we will still be using the same algorithms and the same design patterns, in object oriented programing languages, and connecting to relational databases. And you know what, C, C++ will still be dominant fucking languages. Java still be everywhere, and I will still be browsing the web using Firefox under Ubuntu. And Microsoft will still be a pain in the ass monopolist. The only difference is that we will all probably be running on 64 bit architecture, with more than 4GB of RAM.

Here is another pet peeve of mine: artificially created ammunition scarcity in FPS games. It is a gameplay element a bit similar to the insurmountable waist height fence syndrome with respect to prevalence, annoyance factor and overall goal. What am I talking about?

Recall the last FPS game you have played. I’m going to use Half Life 2: Episode Two as an example here because that happens to be the game that I just finished. Try to remember what happens when you find a large weapons and ammo cache. In most cases you will load up on ammo clips until you can’t carry any more. For example, you can only carry 300 rounds of ammo for your machine gun. Then you find a shotgun, and you can only carry 60 rounds of ammo for it. Then you find a rocket launcher and you can only carry 3 rockets. Why is that? How come the amount of ammunition I can carry is limited by some arbitrary number, and not by say weight? Why can’t I drop the machine gun and it’s ammo to carry more rockets?

In real life, if I knew I was going to face bunch of Striders (or tanks, or airships or whatever your game uses) I would empty out my backpack, and stuff it with rockets. I would also stuff rockets down my pants, then take some string and make rocket belts. But most games only let you take 3 or 4. Half Life uses this ammo scarcity to tell you where to fight striders and airships. Since you can’t hoard rockets, you must face them near the infinite ammo crates, conveniently located in the middle of carefully designed area with scarce, easily destructible cover. This way, every 2 or 3 shots, you have to pause, and then duck and run through open ground to reload. It makes for more intense, and difficult battles, but it does hurt immersion a little bit.

This is even worse in one of the final scenes of Episode two. You need to face wave after wave of walkers, and your only weapons is some sort of sticky bomb that needs to be tossed using the gravity gun. You can only carry a single bomb at a time, and your car has a rack, that takes exactly… One bomb, despite the fact, you could easily fit at least 3 of them there. Oh, did I mention the fact that if the bomb carried in front of you via the gravity gun gets as much nicked by enemy fire, it is rendered useless? So while the combat area is so vast that you really need the car to get around, you are really forced to find around the few bomb disposal units. I fought the whole encounter dangerously close to the base I was supposed to defend because that was the only place on the map with 3 dispensers in walking distance, and enough friendly firepower to at least provide some diversion to the enemy as I was screwing around with the bombs.

Almost every single game does this to some degree. In fact, this has become one of the staple features of the genre and no one seems to be noticing it anymore. How about this though: let’s introduce weight based ammunition management instead. It doesn’t necessarily need to be more complicated. You simply don’t tell the player about weight of each ammo type - you do that internally. All the player needs to know is that if he drops 8 machine gun ammo clips he can take one extra rocket or something like that. This also nicely limits the amount of weapons you can be toting around. Halo’s 2 weapon limit was as ridiculous as the ammo scarcity, but a weight/size based system would really solve the issue. If you want to carry the rocket launcher, you will probably need to drop one of the machine guns. And if the player drops the wrong weapon at the wrong time, you can always just conveniently place the right weapon right where it is needed. In fact most games actually do just that right now anyway so I don’t see a problem here.

What do you think?

The last few days I have been playing Half Life: Episode Two. I already briefly mentioned it before, but I wanted to do a more in depth review now that I finished it. I have to say one thing - I want to play HL2: Episode Three right away. I can’t wait!

Please note that I will be dropping spoilers throughout this post without warning. In other words, this is your warning. If you haven’t played it yet, avert your eyes and stop reading now.

Vortigaunts - you will see lots of them in this game

First off, I have to mention Hunters. The way Valve introduced these guys was masterful. By the time I actually got to fight them, I as already shitting my pants. The first time you encounter them, you just see glimpses of it running around and hiding. Next thing you know, you are buried in a pile of rubble and Alyx is bleeding out on the ground. Holy shit! You immediately gain respect for these things. But you don’t get to fight them yet. In fact, you don’t get to fight them for a long time.

There is couple of instances that you see the damn things in a distance, and most of the time you just run away. And the fact that they are so elusive makes you fear them even more. At the same time, you just know that some tieme soon you will need to finally face them, and it won’t be pretty.

Then when you least expect it, they pop up. You are in a building and you can hear them outside. You see them peeking through windows and holes in the roof. They know where you are, and they have you cornered. You know this is it. Alyx freaks out and ducks behind a table trying to hide, hoping they will go away. You do the same thing, but you know it’s futile. Then they burst through the door and you are forced to fight. But can you even kill them? Striders are invulnerable to anything but rockets, and you have none. “Ohshitshitshitshit!” In an act of desperation you start pumping shotgun rounds into them. And they do take damage! They can be killed with normal weapons!

Fuck yeah! Take this bitches! This is for hurting Alyx!

Epic win. The buildup was intense, and the way the new enemy was introduced was flawless. Well done Valve.

They are actually not that though, but they do take quite a few rounds to put down. Paired with Striders they make a very formidable force. I found the defense of White Forest base to be a the most challenging combat scene in the whole HL2 series. The only way to take out Striders at that point is to use the sticky bomb that needs to be fired off the gravity gun, and then shot with a normal weapon to explode. Hunters make the sticky bombs their primary target. As soon as they see you carrying one, they will try to hit it with their flechette guns making it explode prematurely. Also, if you nail a strider with one of them, and a hunter is nearby it will knock it down.

So you are really forced to take out hunters before you tackle the strider. The problem is, ammunition is scarce and scattered all over the place. Also the sticky bombs are dispensed out with a delay, so if you miss the shot, you usually have to wait a second or two for another one. The ally soldiers are not much help either. The lightly armed troops just charge the hunters and get obliterated in seconds providing almost no diversion at all. The ones armed with rocket launchers keep targeting striders even though they cannot be hurt by rockets in this stage. They would be much more useful if they were targeting hunters instead helping me to conserve ammo.

My strategy was to stockpile bombs into on piles on the ground for quick access. Then I would run/drive ahead and pick out the hunters. Then I would race back and try quickly take out the big guys before they destroy the rockets. It was very frustrating, and that final bit alone took me like 3 days to finish, because after I watched the rocket explode 20 times in a row I had to stop playing since it was getting on my nerves.

I also noticed that valve is getting better at giving the player subtle hints that nudge him in the right direction. In the past games I would sometimes wonder around a cleared area without a clue of what to do next. In Episode One Alyx would usually point you in the right direction. Still, I got lost in one of the “flashlight” levels because I failed to notice a fairly obvious hole in the wall. So I spent 15 minutes back tracking and examining every inch of every single wall until I found it.

In Episode Two valve gives you hints. For example, if you need to use the flatbed truck to climb on the roof and then go through the window, there will be some supply crates on the truck, and also one mysteriously seen on the roof. When you are in the antlion colony, the glowing grubs are used to indicate the tunnels you want to take. You want to step on them because they drop some health. They also mark ammo caches. In the 2nd silo, you can find your way by following the flares left by combine soldiers. In the driving levels, you just follow the road, or the trail of blue traffic cones. I was never really lost.

I also liked that the the story is progressing. Still, playing HL2 games is like watching Lost - you get a tiny bit of information, wrapped up a pile of mystery. For each answered question, there are 7 new ones. I do appreciate the little touches though. For example I lol’d when Elli suggested that Gordon and Alyx make him some grandchildren. Too bad the old man kicked the bucket before he could tell us more about his dealings with the G-Man, or about the cargo of Borealis. God damned advisors. Perhaps in Episode Three we will actually get to shoot these damn things. You’ll probably need to take them down from a distance with the crossbow. They disarmed and immobilized you so easily from up close that allowing you just to march right up to them and spray them with the machine gun would be a copout.

Speaking of Borealis - ZOMG, Aperture Science! After seeing this, I’m now convinced that Episode Three will almost certainly feature the portal gun. And considering how twisted portal was, the contents of Borealis may be tons of fun. Then again, we don’t know where it went. Perhaps there is something scary and mysterious lurking aboard - as in Event Horizon. Either way, I can’t wait to play it.

My brother Ark owns bunch of Nerf guns that we occasionally use for an all out nerf war. His arsenal includes several Mavericks, a Longshot and a funky crossbow that I can’t find anywhere online. Since we are both Warhammer 40k nuts we always joke around how the Mavericks look a bit like Bolt Pistols. I mean look at them:

The longshot in its short retracted state looks a little bit like a regular bolter. We even talked about painting them up to make them look like the authentic things. All you would really need to give it a nice paint job and then attach the distinctive curved magazine clips to them. Ark actually wanted to use them as part of some elaborate Halloween costume but that never happened. Imagine my surprise when I found that we were not the first people to come up with this idea. Apparently, there is some guy who paints Nerf guns and sells them on ebay and his work seems to be heavily influenced by 40k artwork. Just check out his Maverick:

It really does look like a bolt pistol. It’s just missing the magazine. Also check out the Longshot:

I’d be afraid to use these as it would probably ruin the paint job real quick. But this just shows that this sort of thing is possible given enough time and patience. Ark will probably be furious that someone has beat him to the punch and made these.

Anyway, if you don’t know what Warhammer 40k is, and you don’t find Nerf guns fun, just ignore this post. We will resume posting the regular content that you came to expect from this place tomorrow.

I said it before, and I’ll say it again. MySpace is the new Geocities. It’s the place where everyone takes their first steps in web design, creating very shitty looking pages. The default layout is a revolting abomination built with few dozen levels of improperly nested tables. I once plugged it into the W3C HTML validator, and I shit you not, it punched me in the face for sending it such mangled code. To add insult to injury the popular thing nowadays is for users to inject malformed CSS into the body of their profile producing the ugliest shit on earth. It seems that chief MySpace design rule is: if you can read the text without highlighting it, it’s not done yet.

For some inexplicable reason most MySpace users absolutely love, ugly, cluttered, unreadable profiles. You can whine and complain but they are not going to listen. Ugly ass myspace pages that hurt your eyes, and provoke cause nausea and are here to stay. But there is a solution. There is a way to browse myspace without subjecting yourself to the shitty layouts and musing. There are two things you need to accomplish this:

1. Firefox
2. Greasemonkey

One thing that I hate more than the shitty page layouts is shitty music blaring at me from a page with a shitty layout. Auto-play is fucking inconsiderate, annoying and evil. And of course it is the default for MySpace media player. This is why I use the Automatic MySpace Media Remover script. It disables the flash media player by default, and replaces it with a placeholder. You can bring it back by clicking on it.

Then there is the matter of ugly ass layouts. We can make them go away with greasemonkey as well. Personally, I use the Custom Layout Dis/Enable which actually gives you a button in the upper right corner that you can hit to strip the site out of layout. If you don’t like it, there are several other similar scripts like this one, or even this one.

Now, if I could only have a Stupidity Filter script or plugin, MySpace would actually be a nice website to visit.

This really cracked me up. Apparently someone got fed up with asshole neighbors leaching off their wireless connection. So they did the only thing they could possibly do:

I really find it incredible that this person had enough know-how to actually go in and change their SSID, but not enough to actually click on the security tab and set up some sort of encryption. Seriously, how does that happen? This is so monumentally stupid that I’m actually suspecting it might be a honeypot.

I mean, if I decided to set a trap to pwn Wi-Fi leachers I would probably call it something like that. Either way, it’s amusing. Credit for finding this gem goes to passiveagressivenotes.com.