Terminally Incoherent

Here is an interesting tidbit I stumbled upon when playing Red Faction: the game apparently has cheat codes. Or not cheat codes, but “cheats” nevertheless. This was something interesting, because cheats was something that faded away into obscurity in the recent years. When I was younger, most gaming magazines had a thick section in the middle devoted to listing “cheat codes” for various games. These were either actual codes (that you would type in during game-play) or sequences of movements (like the famous Konami Code). These codes usually made something awesome happen: gave you unlimited ammo, unlimited lives, infinite continues, unlocked all weapons and etc.

Eventually all the gaming publications in US figured out that you can quadruple your profits if you fire all the video game journalists and devote 100% of your pages to paid advertising. Cheat codes then moved to their own specialized publications, and migrated online. A lot of these portals still exist but they no longer contain much cheat codes. Instead of “up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a for infinite lives” they now list stuff like “beat the game seven times on hard to unlock the chicken suit”. Which is not a cheat code at all, but an unlockable perk.

Somewhere in the late 90’s or early 00’s the cheat codes started fading away, and getting replaced with bullshit like achievements, trophies and DLC’s. Very few games these days have anything even resembling cheats of the past decades. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Red Faction had a “cheats” menu hidden in it’s options screen that included features such as “super toughness”, “super sprinting” and “super jetpack”.

Red Faction Cheat Codes

That’s totally old school, and awesome as fuck, isn’t it?

Well, it turns out it isn’t. These cheats are not available by default. You actually have to “unlock” them by getting achievements. Which, I believe misses the entire point of cheat codes. But that’s not all. As soon as you try to enable one of those cheats, you get a lovely message that looks like this:

They missed the point entirely

Yep, that’s right – enabling cheats prevents you from saving the single player game. Why? Because fuck you, that’s why.

Honestly, I can understand disabling high score system or achievement system, but saves? Why do you care so much if I cheat? What is the point of adding this option into the game if I can’t even use it during normal game play? It’s not even like the Red Faction cheats are all that game breaking – they only make the game slightly easier, and a little bit more fun (mostly by making the foot travel much faster and hammer driven demolition slightly easier).

The great thing about old school cheat codes was that they were fully optional. Kinda like the developer console Bethesda puts in their games. If you wanted to experience the game the way it was designed, you just ignored the cheats. Then you used the cheat codes on your second or third run through the game, to speed things up or skip the boring newbie quests and get to the good stuff. At least that’s how I used to use them. For example, these days I usually crank up my walking speed in Morrowind via the console because I’m just to lazy to use the Boots of Blinding Speed exploit, and without it the game is just tortuously slow. Or sometimes I use them when the game is hard, annoying and stupid but I still want to know how it ends.

It seems that Red Faction developers acknowledged one use for cheats – a temporary GTA style insane mayhem mode where you stop questing and just go on a rampage, and then reload the game afterwards. Which is fine – this is one valid use for cheat codes – it is always fun to run wild and destroy things with super powers. But it is only one of many different uses of cheat codes.

Some players like to use them to get a little bit of an edge, or to make an aspect of the game that we dislike to go away, or at least become less annoying. For example I remember a cheat code in original Farcry which forced game to auto-save on the spot. It was technically a cheat because the game was checkpoint based. Without it, I would have quit the game after about two or three hours. Because of it, I actually managed to have some fun with that game.

Why did video game studios become so weird about cheating? It was always a fun part of the gaming hobby. The cheat codes used to be fun, useful and enjoyable Easter eggs and secrets. What happened? Did the gamers grow up and collectively decide cheating ain’t cool anymore? Or did the corporate bean-counters somehow decided it was not profitable?

Whats is your stance on cheat codes? Do you miss the good old days, or do you think we are better off without them?

Red Faction: Guerrilla is a remarkable game. I don’t think I have ever seen a product with so many good ideas, all of which are implemented poorly. And it is not that the implementation is buggy or half-assed. The game is simply broken by design. The good ideas are squandered via silly design choices. Let me explain…

The Story

The game has a simple and fairly decent premise. You arrive on Mars looking for work as a miner. You quickly learn that the local government is kinda corrupt and on an out-of-control totalitarian power trip. You witness your brother being brutally murdered by the local law enforcement on a suspicion of aiding the titular “Red Faction” – a Martian resistance movement seeking to overthrow the government and restore democracy. You end up hooking up with said organization and you become instrumental in the fight for free Mars.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this setup. This is some really good stuff. You have personal loss, revenge story, freedom fighting, etc… Sadly, the game fails to capitalize on it. Your brother dies in the first 5 minutes of the game. You only have a single conversation with him, you play a short tutorial mission and he is gone before you can form any sort of attachment to him. He is not even a fully fledged character – he is merely a plot hook.

30 seconds after he is dead, you are given a gun and told “You are Red Faction now, go do missions and shit…” What about revenge you ask? Well, you sort of already killed the murderers of your brother in the cut-scene so… We’re just not going to mention the revenge anymore. You will just have to be content to kill faceless mooks for the rest of the game.

I mean, this is not rocket science. This is sort of creative writing 101 type thing. First, you need to let the player get attached to the brother character. Make him cool, memorable and awesome. Have the player run few missions with him and make him do cool things. Then when you kill him, it will actually mean something. Secondly, don’t kill him by the way of disposable mook who dies 5 seconds later in the same cut-scene. This is your chance to introduce the big bad. Let’s say his name is General Whatshisface and he shoots your brother, execution style, then runs away. Now you have a mortal enemy you can look forward to fighting at the end of the game.

But no, the writers went for the “Btw, your brother got killed and that’s why you are in resistance movement… Now, go do sandbox stuff!”

Free Roaming Sandbox

The game is set up as a free roaming sandbox environment. It is actually pretty lenient about where you go, and lets you screw around quite a bit which is great. I really liked just running around and destroying governmental property for fun and profit. Unfortunately I kept running into invisible walls. This became especially annoying when I got the jetpack near the end of the game, and was tempted to take shortcuts through the mountains. Half the time I would run into an invisible wall, or unassailable, bottomless chasm or both.

Not to mention that it is not a true sandbox in the way say Skyrim is. You can’t just drive around the map, find a spot and decide to start questing there. The game has a very linear progression – you have to liberate each region in order to progress to the next one, and get level appropriate upgrades. How do you liberate a region? You grind.

No, seriously. This is not even an RPG but you are expected to grind the area, destroying EOF property until you fill a quota. Of course, that’s not enough. Believe me, I tried. I once destroyed every building and killed every EOF soldier in the region. But the game would not progress because I didn’t do any of the mini-quests and so none of the story-quests in the area were unlocked. The zone only becomes liberated after you complete a specific number of these story quests.

If you are a completionist and you sweep the zone clean before doing any quests, the game will happily spawn more enemies for you. I once had to break into an enemy base that I razed to the ground 15 minutes earlier, and destroy a building that was not there before. I was a bit annoyed. The game had a very GTA feel too it most of the time, and it was only really fun when it broke out of it and let you use it’s strong points (destructible environments) or just run wild.

How could they improved it? For starters they could remove all the invisible walls and terrain funnels and let you take shortcuts because that’s what being guerrilla should be all about. Making zones small but numerous, and marking them as “liberated” as soon as you destroy EOF presence there, and letting you grind any part of the huge map would go a long way of establishing a feeling of freedom. And of course, less GTA styled scripted missions have more open-world objectives you can accomplish in any order (there are some in the game – like destroying all the smoke-stacks in Oasis).

Fully Destructible Environment

Red Faction’s claim to fame are the fully destructible environments. All the buildings in the game can be demolished. I absolutely loved the fact I could take a shortcut through the building by making a hole in the wall with a hammer. Or that I could take out a sniper’s nest by sneaking up and deploying explosives on the bottom of the tower. This is an awesome mechanic, and I wish more games did this sort of thing with their environments.

Sadly, most of the terrain in the game is non-destructible. The destruction prone structures are usually confined to sparse “decorative settlements” or enemy bases that you need to destroy to progress. The rest of the game world is just barren rock. What’s worse, some of the story-missions were set up as terrain funnels that forced you to progress down a linear corridor made out of indestructible rock, fighting your way through a heavily defended road blocks. Or escort missions. Or timed driving missions.

It is as if the designers made an extra effort to make sure you are not having too much fun with their unique gameplay mechanic, so they added mandatory missions in which you do don’t use it.

See, the most fun I had in this game was when I could jet-pack my way to a cool firing position on top of a mountain, and then take out entire buildings with 2-3 well placed shots with the nano-rifle. Whenever the game forced me to drive through a specific maze of pathways, or funneled me towards enemy not allowing me to flank, or be sneaky and evasive I got annoyed.

When you set out to build a game with a cool gimmick, why not go all out? Look at Portal for example. That’s a game that took a cool idea and built a game around it. Valve didn’t build Half Life 2 with a portal gun – they built something fun an unique. Red Faction could have been that – a game with 100% destructible sandbox levels allowing player unprecedented freedom and fueling creative, emergent gameplay. But instead they decided to keep the game as close to GTA model as possible, actually putting in a lot of effort to ensure the destructible buildings are spaced out sparsely enough so that can’t be creatively abused and that a game about wrecking shit with a sledgehammer has a disproportionate amount of mandatory driving in it.

Salvage and Crafting

At the beginning of the game you are told to collect salvage, because it can be used to craft new weapons and upgrades. I was very briefly excited that there will be a crafting system in the game. Of course I immediately realized that the “salvage” is essentially just cash you use to buy upgrades. Which I guess makes sense. I mean, the designers wanted to provide an incentive for you to wreck shit with a hammer and it would be kinda silly for destroyed buildings to “drop” gold coins for you to collect. So they instead “drop” pipes, plates and barrel like things that shine and glow – but still work as in-game cash you use to buy upgrades. And said upgrades only become available as you progress through the levels so there is never a time where you can actually “personalize” your load-out.

Imagine if they went one step further and took the idea of collecting “salvage” to its logical conclusion. You collect raw materials and machine parts to build weapons, upgrades or even vehicles “fallout 3” style. Wouldn’t it be more bad-ass for your character to raid an EOF factory specifically to steal jet-pack parts, rather than just to have it appear as an option when you liberate Oasis region about half way throughout the game?

Save Anywhere System

When I first launched the game, I kinda got excited to see the “Save Game” option available in the menu. You don’t see it often these days. A lot of games insist on using checkpoints for some strange reason. So I was really happy this one would let you save anywhere.

Then I discovered this feature becomes disabled as soon as you start a mission. Also, saves do not preserve your position in the world. When you load the game you automatically start from one of the safe houses. Which is monumentally stupid. But this is more of a personal pet peeve of mine. The save system is functional – just annoying to me.

Final Words

I don’t think I had such mixed feelings about a game in a while. Usually I either like a game or hate it. I just don’t know how I feel about this one. On one hand, it profoundly annoyed me. On the other, I really had a lot of fun with the destructible environments. It is just such a pity the designers desperately tried to keep this game as close to GTA model as possible. They had a really, really great idea: a free roaming sanbox with fully destructible environment. This game could have been phenomenal. It could have been a cult classic, which people would play over and over again just to do crazy shit. It could have supported emergent gameplay and creativity. But it was as if the designers either got scared of their own creation or were told to keep it simple and familiar by the publisher. They have put in a lot of effort into making the game a shitty GTA clone. And I mean a lot of effort. It is almost harder to build a sanbox that is this linear, and heavily funneled. You can actually tell the designers put a lot of time into spacing out the destructible objects so that they don’t overlap, or so that they support the scripted missions. Have a quests that involves taking out sniper nests? Glass walkways everywhere that shatter when shot so that they player can’t use them as firing platforms. Quest objective at the top of the mountain? Have player drive a tank up a windy non-destructible terrain funnel and fight his way through 17 enemy checkpoints and start him back at the bottom if the vehicle is destroyed. Why couldn’t they go all out? Why didn’t they design an environment in which the player could tunnel through mountains Minecraft style if he wished to do so.

If you have a cool gimmick, use it. Make it the core of your game. Make the game be all about it. Red Faction took a good idea and haphazardly strapped it into a crappy GTA clone. It was a safe choice, but you don’t make it big by making safe choices. The thing about GTA style sandbox games is that everyone does them, and some people do them very well. It’s kinda sad when you think about it, but Just Cause 2 has about as much total destructible buildings as Red Faction – only they are scattered across a vastly larger map. Oh, and that game lets you hijack plains in mid flight… So if you really wanted to play a GTA clone where you can blow up smoke-stacks and statues for in-game points you might as well play Just Cause 2 instead of Red Faction.

So I just remembered I have enabled the “Ask Me Anything” feature over at my little tumbleblog. For some reason I have never really paid close attention to Tumblr notifications, so I was kinda surprised to see that a few questions queued up in there for some undefined amount of time. One of them especially struck a chord with me. Cptacek asked:

I was wondering if you had ever discussed how you keep your projects, bugs, enhancements, etc., organized and how you are able to keep your high priority things high priority. I have used sticky notes, spreadsheets, email, etc., and it all takes a lot of manual intervention. There should be a better way to do things! Have you found a better way?

This is a great question because organization is something I struggle with quite often. I guess we all do – some of us are more organized than others. I happen to be n outlier on spectrum, always teetering on the very edge of complete chaos. Half the time I’m completely unorganized, I forget things daily and I’m constantly chasing some new idea, only to forget it and move on to the next one. Writing things down, and trying to organize them is basically the only way for me to get things done once the momentary flight of fancy wears off. I have tried a number of tools to help me with this, but I have not found the silver bullet yet.

I guess it is important to mention that for me this question as three distinctive parts:

1. Keeping track of bugs and feature requests/ideas in my programming projects
2. Keeping track of ideas for the blog
3. Organizing and prioritizing other projects, ideas and assignments

At least this is how it breaks down in my mind. I’m actually pretty good at the first two parts, and consistently horrible at the last one. So let me explain how I do things in each of these categories.

Bug Tracking / New Features

This is actually pretty easy – I use bug trackers. If it is a Github project, I use the built-in github one. If it’s not, I use something else like Lightouse. If you visit my public projects, you will see that 90% of the bugs and feature requests are submitted by me. Why? Well, that’s my way of tracking this stuff. When I find a bug in my own software and don’t have time to fix it on the spot, I put a brief note in the bug tracker for that project. This is more of a “note to self” kind of a thing – I usually don’t go to much detail, and don’t include stack traces or screenshots because I have the code, and I can reproduce the bug easily. It is more of a matter of me remembering that there is a bug that needs fixing out there. Same with feature ideas. Whenever I go “oh, this would be a cool thing for project XYZ”, I go and make a note of it in the bug tracker.

Why don’t I just write it down on my to-do list? Well, keep on reading. I find that keeping this stuff attached to the project and hosted on the cloud is the only way to prevent it from being lost and forgotten.

Why do I make this stuff public? Well, why not? It helps to show my projects are active and it gives me extra incentive to try and fix these bugs. I know it looks bad when I have a year old critical bug in there, which was submitted by me so I usually try not to let it get that way. It doesn’t always work, but it helps.

Blog Ideas

For the blog post ideas, I use a similar methodology. When the inspiration strikes, but I don’t have time to write I just log into WordPress and create a draft. Sometimes it is just a subject line. Other times it is a short outline. I think I mentioned this before but I consistently tend to have 90+ drafts in my WordPress queue. Only a small fraction survive to see the light of day. The entire thing is self-organizing too. The most recent stuff is on top, and when I go back and add to a previous draft (for example revise my outline) WordPress floats it to the top of the list.

This is by no means perfect, but it works for me. The ideas, templates and outlines live in the same place I work on “real” posts and unfinished ones so it is easy for me to scroll through the list when I’m out of ideas. It also helps that this blog has no real deadlines or topic restrictions. There is no real reason to prioritize my drafts because what I post is completely dependent on my mood and what I’m currently thinking about of working on.

Projects and Other Stuff

This is where it gets hairy. I’m not very good at organizing things in the big picture scope. Once I drill down to individual projects (like this blog, or my various programming adventures) I can keep them more or less organized. But daily tasks, assignments and projects… Let’s say that I’m less organized at this level.

I have tried a lot of different tools, but I have yet to find a silver bullet. And it is really not the tools at fault here, but me. Organization at this level is all about self discipline. If you are determined to do so, you can organize yourself using sticky notes glued to your monitor. As long as you make a commitment to it, and keep doing it you’ll be fine. My problem is that every time I make an attempt to organize my shit, it is not because I really want to do it, but because I found a neat tool that I want to test. Invariably, after a month or two I get bored with the tool and it all goes to hell. At least until a new tool comes around.

I have tried various things – including stuff like Remember the Milk or Google Tasks or Reminders in iOS 5. They are all fine, it’s just that I never really seem to use them…

Actually, no they are not fine.

Ok, here is how it goes: most of these productivity / organization tools are “todo lists” of sorts. I find lists rather limiting. It is really hard to prioritize a lot of different projects and tasks on a singular list. Chances are that you have a lot of high priority tasks lined up that will dominate the top of your list even if (or especially if) you can’t actively do anything about them because you are waiting on someone eases input for example. So what do you do? Do you bump the priority down? What if it is a critical, “drop everything and do this but not until Bob signs off on it” item and Bob is taking a month and a half to review it?

Linear lists have problems – they tend to be very, very vertical:

Lists Suck

Whenever I make lists on paper, I tend to annotate, or doodle in the wide right margin because what the fuck else am I going to put there. Virtual lists often won’t even let you do that. You get a skinny little single column, and every line item must be clicked and expanded to add notes, even if there is a river of white on the right.

Not so long ago, I have discovered a concept of Kanban which I found to be much better for organizing thoughts, projects and ideas. The way you make an old-school Kanban is to take a whiteboard (or cork board) and divide it into vertical sections kinda like this:

Kanban Example

You can see that in this example the leftmost column is for random low priority ideas. The second one is for current assignments that you are working on right now. The two rightmost columns are for high priority tasks and revisions which will usually take priority over everything else. Most tasks start on the bottom left, and gravitate towards upper right corner. You work the other way. Or not. I mean, it is up to you – you can reverse the flow for example. Or organize your list in a different way. For example left side might be for finished projects, and right might be for upcoming ones with the middle reserved to current stuff. Or maybe has a “Bob Sucks” column for projects that are currently on hold because Bob is taking an eternity and a half to give you feedback. It is a flexible system, which acknowledges the fact that you might have a lot of stuff going on with a lot of different priorities. So you set up multiple parallel pipelines and manage them.

Oh, and you would usually use sticky notes, so that you can move the tasks around easily. The idea is that you should be able to walk into the room, and see your status at a glance. You know what you going to be working on today. You know what’s projects are in the pipeline. You see your high priority stuff.

If you want a virtual, free software Kanban to play with Trello has a really good implementation. It gives you a nice flexible board you can organize, an ability to share it with others and to assign people to your tasks, reminders and etc. I have used it extensively for a few months before I got bored with it and fell back into disorganized chaos as I usually do.

So I guess this is my advice: Kanbans are better than linear lists. Use Trello if you need a neat tool to play with. But above else, no tool can help you get organized. It is all on you. Whatever tool you choose, you have to commit yourself to it and keep doing it even after it becomes a chore.