Terminally Incoherent

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.