SuperPope: ex Cathedra

Hey. I went to Japan.

I pretty much never, ever use this blog anymore (blogging is so 2005), but some folks do come here to check on me on occasion, so I thought I ought to mention that Erin and I finally went to Japan this past October.  It was a fantastic 10 day trip, and I kept an overly detailed blog of it, which you can read here.  I also took way too many photos, which can be viewed here.

SuperPope Animation / My Life Update 1-4-06

  In SuperPope Episode II news, I’ve been animating on it the past few months when I have the chance (*cough* not playing games *cough cough*).  Here are a couple teaser screenshots.  The title is either going to be “Jaded!” or “Fistful of Demons”, and the plot will endeavor to answer the oft asked question, “Why does God let bad things happen to good people?”  Of course, the short answer is, “There’s no such thing as a good person when compared to a perfect God,” but I’ll try and make a more uplifting point than that.  And rest assured that plenty of demon blood will be spilt in the process.

For my friends and the voyeuristically curious, let me give you an update on what’s been happening in my life lately.

I was sucked into City of Heroes back in September when a free 21 day trial came with my PC Gamer magazine.  No, I have not been playing it to an addictive degree, but I do have a Level 28 Illusion/Radiation Controller named “7-Year Cicada”.  My son and I also got City of  Villains for Christmas.  He mainly loves the character creation utility, and frequently asks me to fire it up just so he can create a new character.  I like how quickly I can get in the game, get on a team, tear through a mission, and log off again.  I have a family, after all.

In other news, I made the mistake of reorganizing my console game collection and putting all of the “Games I Intend to Finish When I Have the Time” on one shelf.  There are more than 45 games sitting there, mocking me.  I need to swear off new games until I get these finished (and I need to swear off of them until I get SuperPope Episode 2 finished, I know!).  On several games I’m very close to the ending (Star Ocean, Paper Mario 2, etc.), but Dragon Quest VIII is awfully hard to put down…

For Christmas I got Sid a few cool things.  He’s really been wanting an original Soundwave toy, but they go for crazy amounts on eBay.  Well, I finally discovered that they created a reissue of him in Japan recently, in black and silver with a remodeled cassette door that holds two tapes at once.  It also includes Buzzsaw and Ravage cassettes.  He was appropriately excited about it.

Sid is infatuated with video game controllers in general, and also loves the little blue slimes from Dragon Quest.  Could I give a more perfect gift, then, than a controller made to look like a Dragon Quest slime?  I submit that I could not.  He was equally pleased with this.

Review: Resident Evil 4 (Gamecube)

I finished Resident Evil 4 quite a while back, but – in case you haven’t heard -- I’m lazy.  I figure I’d better write a review of it before I forget the details.  No matter how much time passes, though, I’m not in any danger of forgetting how unbelievably good this game was.

When this game was under development, Capcom seemed to take great pride in teasing us with the fact that it would have “no zombies” in it.  Instead, as it turns out, this installment stars Spanish villagers “possessed” by parasitic creatures known as “Las Plagas”.  Same diff, you say?  Not in the least.  Rather than mindlessly lurching towards you and trying to bite your neck off, these enemies will charge at you, dodge your bullets, shout curses in Spanish, and work as a team.

You play as Leon Kennedy from Resident Evil 2, now out of the police business and working as a secret service agent.  The President’s daughter has gone missing, and you’re off to agrarian European locales to search for her.  That’s when everything goes predictable nuts as usual, sans the requisite T-Virus outbreak and Umbrella Corporation secret base crawling.

But who really cares about the plot when the game is this fun to play?  Think of any aspect of Resident Evil 0, 1, 2, 3, or Code Veronica that just flat out annoyed you.  You know, all of the things that have traditionally defined “Survival Horror” as a genre.  Let’s go down the list and see how Resident Evil 4 blows away the stereotypes:

Survival Horror Cliche' No. 1:  Tiny Inventory Capacity

How many times in a Resident Evil game have you had to decide what useful item you should drop in order to pick up a necessary item, such as a miniscule key?  Well, worry no longer:  Capcom finally wised up.  Items such as keys and mandatory puzzle-solving items do not take up any space in your inventory, saving that space for ammo, weapons, and healing items.  This also means no more annoying “This key is no longer needed.  Want to drop it?” dialogs.

Survival Horror Cliche' No. 2: Clunky Controls

A scary game should not be scary simply because the controls are so bad that you’re afraid you won’t be able to turn quickly enough to attack your assailant.  Thankfully, the control scheme has been completely reworked.  You can reload on the fly, and always have an over-the-shoulder view with a handy laser sight on all of your guns.  Switching to your knife requires simply holding down a shoulder button so you can smash barrels and slice enemies quickly without wasting precious bullets.  Context sensitive use of the A button will allow you to kick a stunned opponent, dive through windows, or perform other actions when they are available to you.  Intuitive controls in a survival horror game?  Yes, seriously!

Survival Horror Cliche' No. 3: Limited Saves

Ugh.  Whoever came up with the idea of having to collect ink ribbons (and using up precious inventory space) in order to save your game was a sadist.  RE4 still uses typewriters for the method of saving, but thankfully you can save as often as you like without the need for ink ribbons.

Survival Horror Cliche' No. 4: Unlimited enemies, limited bullets.

Backtrack through areas in an earlier RE game and you will often find them re-populated with zombies you have previously expended valuable ammo to clear out.  Of course, the ammo and medical supplies would not be replenished, just the baddies.  Not so in RE4.  Ammo and healing items can be found on defeated enemies, and areas usually do not spawn new villains after you’ve been through once.

Survival Horror Cliche' No. 5: Bad Voice Acting

Okay, so the dialogue is still goofy but the lines for the most part are spoken very well.  Don’t be picky…in RE 1 the voice actors couldn’t even pull off lines like “Don’t OPEN that DOOR!” with believable inflection.

Survival Horror Cliche' No. 6: Monotonous Backtracking

Unlike previous installments, RE4 doesn’t attempt to make up for the lack of locales by forcing you to walk back and forth through them.  Instead, they *gasp* actually made the game world HUGE.  I was shocked at how much ground I had covered while playing, and then realized I hadn’t even finished with disc 1.

The bottom line is that this game is fantastic in just about every way you’d hope it to be.  There are tons of unlockables that add to the replay value (new weapons to buy from the merchant, a shooting gallery with collectible bottle caps, even an additional story to play through), and it’s worth playing through more than once.

And that’s a big testament to the quality of this game.  Nowadays I have so many games backed up that I rarely even get to finish them.  This one I played through twice, which is something I haven’t done in a long while.

If you have a PS2, this game will be available to you soon.  The graphics obviously won’t be quite as good, but it will include some extra bonuses and, of course, still be a joy to play.  Be sure to check it out.

Review: Metal Gear Solid 3 - Snake Eater (PS2)

Remember Metal Gear on the NES?  We’ve come a long way since Snake uttered the words, “UH OH THE TRUCK HAVE STARTED TO MOVE!!”

Metal Gear Solid 1 for the PlayStation was a great game.  It really kicked off the whole “sneaking mission” genre.  It was a little heavy on lengthy radio discussions, but you could forgive it because the story and gameplay were so fresh and enjoyable.

”Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of liberty” on the PlayStation 2 was also a great game, but – strangely enough -- it failed to live up to the expectations created by its demo.  As it turned out, the area presented in the demo was by far the most enjoyable part of the game, after which you took the role of a whiny kid named Raiden who is involved in the silliest, most far-fetched conspiracy I’ve ever played through.  The graphics and game engine were incredibly polished, but the setting they dropped you in was a dull hexagonal oil rig.  Combine that with even more lengthy radio conversations and the almost non-existence of Solid Snake himself and you’ve got a game that you probably won’t want to play through more than once.

So how is “Metal Gear Solid 3:  Snake Eater?”  I was surprised to find myself really enjoying it. Set in the early 1960s instead of the present or near future, it is unique in that you play as the man who Solid Snake from the other Metal Gear games is a clone of, and who later becomes the elusive villain, "Big Boss."  MGS3 also has the distinction of being the only game I know of to actually have Lyndon B. Johnson as a character.  I don’t know if that’s necessarily a positive, but it is interesting nonetheless.  It’s a story full of intrigue, Russian defectors, an expectedly crazy cast of villains and allies, and as the name implies, the consumption of reptiles.

Much of your time in this game is spent sneaking through the jungle and changing your camouflage to blend in with different environments, all the while killing animals and harvesting plants to maintain your stamina as you subdue or outmaneuver guards.  Become injured and you have to use your medical supplies to treat the wound (disinfectants, splints, suture, etc.).  It’s all a lot more fun than it may sound.

Every aspect of the MGS game play has been improved, but the happiest improvement for me is the sheer volume of incredibly beautiful game-engine cinematic storytelling (as opposed to text spoken over the radio).  There’s never a dull moment, and there are often multiple ways to achieve a goal.

Boss fights are clever rather than especially difficult, which is a plus.  One fight is a sniping duel that can take a very long time to complete and requires skill and patience.  Other sections have you performing unique tasks such as gunning down enemies as you ride in a motorcycle sidecar in a dramatic escape from a pursuing nuclear tank.

The bottom line:  If you loved MGS1 but were left a little sour after playing MGS2, don’t count this one out.  It nicely ties up the Metal Gear story by explaining a bit of its origin (including a young Revolver Ocelot) and even making MGS2 seem a bit less confusing in the process.

Review: Katamari Damacy (PS2)

I love Japanese pop culture. The weirder and less comprehensible by rational human beings it is, the better. That’s why Katamari Damacy for the PS2 has such a special place in my heart. This game is closer to the absurdity of a real life “Mr. Sparkle” ad than anything I’ve ever seen. That, and it’s a lot of fun to play.

You’re the 2cm tall prince of all creation. Your father is the incredibly huge King of all creation. He got drunk, fell asleep, or something (he never admits exactly what happened), and accidentally destroyed every star in the sky. Now it’s your job to visit Earth and roll stuff up on your katamari – a ball that literally anything sticks to – and then return it to your father so that he can make stars or constellations out of all the stuff. The quality of the result is dependent on the size of your katamari and the time you took to make it.

The controls are simple: In army tank style, you use both analog sticks to steer your katamari around the world. You can roll up anything smaller than the ball’s circumference. In the beginning you roll around on a tabletop, picking up tacks, erasers, soy sauce packets, etc. Quickly you move to mice, cell phones, cassette tapes, and so on. Later you can venture outside picking up people, pets, signs, fences, you name it. By the end of the game you are rolling around the ocean picking up islands, ocean-liners, amusement parks, and basically anything else you bump into. The seamless way that the game scales down the environment as your katamari grows larger is quite impressive.

Back on the prince’s tiny planet you keep a log of every one of the hundreds of different types of items you have collected. They are sorted either by type or by size. Some are labeled rare, and others have proper names (certain people you were lucky enough to roll up, for example).

Most stages have a time limit to create a katamari of a certain size, but other stages have specific goals for creating a constellation. For example, to create the constellation Cancer you must roll up as many crabs as you can. To create Virgo you must roll up pretty girls. Cygnus requires swans. You get the picture.

The excellent Japanese soundtrack has remained completely intact in the American version, and is pretty diverse. Once you finish the game you can access a menu that allows you to hear all of the music and watch all of the cut scenes at your leisure, which is cool.

Interspersed between stages are short hand painted animations that unveil a nonsensical story featuring two Japanese kids traveling with their mother to watch their father take off in a rocket to the moon. Whether intentional or not, these are hilarious.

This game was released in the US at an amazingly low $19.95 price point. If you own a PS2 and are even slightly intrigued by what you’ve read here, I highly recommend you pick it up.

Review: Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (GameCube)

The Metroid series has always held a special place in my heart. When I was a 7th grader I spent months fantasizing about what the game would be like based on one or two black and white screenshots featured in “Nintendo Fun Club News” and the J.C. Penny catalog. To this day I can literally play through the entire game in my head. Were you aware that I’m an uber-dork? Just checking.

As much as I loved the original, I was prepared to hate Metroid Prime for the Gamecube since it wasn’t made by Nintendo in Japan, but by some upstart company based in Texas called “Retro Studios”. Not only that, but they were making it into a first-person 3D game. I was certain that my memories would be destroyed by the result.

To my surprise, Metroid Prime was incredible. I couldn’t believe how well the series had been translated into 3D. And now, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is basically more of the same, which to me is a good thing.

With Metroid Prime 2, the series has finally reached a point where the developers feel comfortable straying a bit from the tried-and-true plot formula. Instead of trying to thwart a new Metroid threat that ends with the destruction of an entire planet, this story finds Samus answering a distress call from space marines on the planet Aether, crashing her ship while responding to it, and uncovering a mysterious world that has been split into two dimensions: light and dark. Metroids do come into play, but only as minor enemies brought to the planet to supply power for Space Pirate technology.

This time Samus has her abilities stolen from her by the shadowy Ing creatures, but she actually manages to retain several that you have always had to collect in previous games (charge beam, morph ball, and the varia suit).

In a concept borrowed from Zelda III: A Link to the Past, you must travel between dimensions to solve puzzles and reach secluded areas. The light and dark sides are identical spacially and mostly identical geographically, but Dark Aether has a poisonous atmosphere and generally more dangerous enemies. And herein lies one of the cooler innovations in the game: Just being in the atmosphere of Dark Aether drains your life away. Because of this, the Luminoth (the good guys from Light Aether) have strategically placed light crystals in the Ing dimension which generate domes of light you can use as a refuge before trekking out into the palpable darkness. Creatures will attack you from outside the safe areas. The feeling is successfully claustrophobic until later in the game when you acquire different suits that minimize or remove the damage caused by Dark Aether’s atmosphere.

Each of your stolen powers is possessed by an Ing boss who is utilizing it with great effectiveness within the dark dimension. In standard Metroid fashion you obtain each of these abilities in turn which then provide a way to reach some new area or an item in an old area that you then have to backtrack to. And yes, there is a LOT of backtracking.

Aside from the standard quest for your items, you are also tasked with finding the keys to open the doors to three temples in Dark Aether, entering the temples, defeating the bosses, taking their power sources and returning them to the temples’ counterparts on Light Aether. When all of the power is successfully restored, Dark Aether will crumble and the surviving Luminoths will be free to awaken from stasis to a peaceful world.

Two new weapons add another new dimension to this game: The dark and light beams. Unlike every other beam weapon Samus has used in the past, these beams require ammo. Defeating a monster with the light beam generates dark ammo and vice versa.

Just as the planet Aether has a dark opposite, you soon discover that Samus has an evil doppelganger in the form of Dark Samus. She is comprised completely of phazon energy, and shows up to challenge you several times throughout the game.

The graphics are incredible. There aren’t as many visor tricks as in the first Prime (steam fogging up your visor, bug splatters, reflections of your own face), but one unique enemy does hit you with a computer virus that crashes your suit. System data and garbled text fill your field of view and your vision becomes a grainy black and white with a horrible frame rate. You have to press a certain button combination (a la ctrl+alt+delete) to reset your suit, after which you must wait helplessly while your weapon and targeting systems come back online.

The plot is pretty predictable fare, some sections are monotonous, and some bosses are annoyingly difficult to defeat, given the length of the battles against them. Like some other games (Metal Gear Solid 2 and Mario Sunshine come to mind), the developers have built some great play mechanics with a lot of possibilities, and then given you a less than adequate world to fully explore those possibilities in. Many of Samus acquired abilities (to ride beams of light, the Riddick-style sonic visor, the Screw Attack and grapple beam) have almost no use in the game. It seems they had to artificially generate places to use them, and it shows.

Still, it has a greater overall quality than most games, as is to be expected from Nintendo. Although the plot feels more like a side story in the life of Samus than a major mission, it is a very fun ride and one of the few “first person adventure” games out there.

Review: Halflife 2 (PC)

As you may have heard, the source code for Halflife 2 was stolen sometime last year. Its developer, Valve, has been mired in a lawsuit with Vivendi Universal (once known as Sierra On-Line). The game’s release was delayed for over a year beyond its supposedly firm release date. Usually this sort of story ends with a crushing review of a much anticipated game that should have never been released by moral human beings at all (Daikatana, Superman 64, etc.).

Thankfully in this case, just the opposite is true. I completed Halflife 2 on Sunday night, November 28. I’m happy to report that the game is not only great, but it is so great that it makes Halflife 1 look like somebody’s high school class project.

I mean that in no way as an insult to the original. At the time, Halflife (which I initially thought was going to be Sierra’s lame attempt at cashing in on the Quake craze) handily blew away everything else. I even bought a new video card (Voodoo 2) just so it would look good.

Lately I’ve noticed that a good test of a game is to let my 3 year old son mess around with it. Sid has had a lot of fun picking up items and making them interact with each other in the HL2 world. Drop a cinder block on a box full of bottles and the bottles will break. Pick up shipping crates with an industrial magnet crane and swing them around, strewing their contents onto the beach. Throw a baby doll at a swing and it will realistically react. Heck, the baby doll might land on the see-saw and adjust its balance. The physics are that detailed.

All of the original Halflife fun is here: Lots of semi-intelligent goons to kill, headcrabs to club, and plenty of creepy, claustrophobic environments to explore all by your lonesome. But Halflife 2 adds to that dynamic with a boat and a car to drive (complete with mounted weaponry), “Tremors” style sequences where you have to build pathways across the desert to keep from disturbing the ant lions lying just below the surface, later leading ant lions as you ambush a facility and watch them rip apart your enemies, and of course the clever “gravity gun”. With this tool you can pick up items and fire them at enemies, or even zap wrecked cars to clear the road.

The graphics/physics engine is flawless. The gameplay is completely immersive and never annoying. But hey, it’s me. I can still manage to find a few things to complain about.

The game seems a bit short. Maybe it’s just because I’ve played 6 years worth of Halflife clones since HL1 came out, but I remember the Black Mesa research facility seeming huge compared to the areas I traversed in HL2.

Later in the game, you come into command of people you run across. While they can follow simple directions (“go to where I’m pointing” or “come here”) and don’t often run in front of you while you’re shooting or shoot through you towards the enemy, they generally just follow you around like a puppy, stand too close, and hem you in on stairwells so you can’t easily get around them.

There were aspects of the game in pre-release videos that seem to be non-existent in the final game. For example, I remember seeing screenshots and video of a translucent blue tentacle skewering a guy and dragging him underwater. I never saw a creature like that. Also, combat with the giant, lumbering Striders does take place in the game, but not quite in the way it was demonstrated at E3. I’m sure a lot of that was just proof of concept, though.

While I won’t spoil the ending, I will say that the game asks more questions than it answers (if it answers any at all) and leaves you begging for a quick sequel. Hopefully a full sequel will be the first add-on pack, as I really don’t see how this game would lend itself to the “different viewpoint of the same event” concept that every add-on to the original HL utilized.

So the game is great, and is a fine way to test your relatively new video card in ways it has never been tested before. If you loved the original, it might even be worth buying a new computer/video card that will let you experience Halflife 2 to its fullest.

My Team Fortress Classic map

About 5 years ago I created a “Capture the Flag” map for Team Fortress Classic. It was a failed attempt at winning a contest, but it was a big success for the guys at the office. We stayed after work playing TFC basically every day, and we spent a lot of time playing on my map. I’d like to think my coworkers weren’t just humoring me…I know that I at least had a lot of fun.

The map consisted of two cathedral-style churches that faced each other across a small courtyard. The flag was at the back of your opponent’s sanctuary and had to be planted in the bell tower of your own. There were secret passages, doors, traps, a holy water pool, and a lot of places to snipe people. So even though I lost the contest (I don’t even remember what the prize would have been), I still felt like my efforts had been a success.

As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t get the word out about my map very well. A few websites carried it, but I never found anybody playing it besides our group at work.

Well, the other day, I accidentally stumbled across it on GameSpy’s FilePlanet server, available for download. It has been downloaded from there 165 times. There’s even a nice little synopsis provided: “Atmospheric ctf map for tfc with impressive gothic architecture. Spies will love this one.”

So I at least have the satisfaction of knowing that it was submitted to a file server by somebody besides myself and download by a couple hundred people, which means somebody somewhere might have had a little fun playing it.

If you want to check out my TFC map, Crusade, click here to download it from FilePlanet. You of course have to have Halflife and the free Team Fortress Classic add-on installed.

Stories from Computing History Ch. 4

Chapter 4: Modems and Bulletin Boards

Before about 1994, the general public didn’t know anything about “The Internet” or “World Wide Web”. The most techno-savvy among us had a 28.8k modem and made physical phone calls to computer systems known as Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes for short). These were isolated computers in homes and businesses around the world that were made available for the purpose of conversing, sharing files, and playing turn-based games. These systems were not graphic-based. You navigated via a command line interface, browsed directories, and downloaded files to your computer. Any graphics you saw were generated with primitive ANSI code.

When modems first came around in the early 80s they consisted of two little rubber cuffs that you slipped your phone’s handset onto. Your phone sent and received organized noise (modulated/demodulated = modem) to communicate.

I had a 300 baud modem on my Commodore 64. It was so slow that you had to wait for text to appear on the screen. From there, the modem speeds increased as technology improved like this: 1200, 2400, 9600, 14.4k, 28k, 56k. The signal limitations of POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) lines prohibited advancements further than this for standard modem communication.

You could buy magazines (basically BBS yellow pages) that were full of different BBSes you could call. Most numbers didn’t work, and when you did get a bite you could look forward to waiting 10 minutes to download a low resolution graphic of the USS Enterprise to show off to all your friends.

BBSes were virtually unmonitored and operated outside the law, unlike the Internet. For example, I knew of one BBS in Florida that would allow you to download freshly pirated games for a month in exchange for a $20 bill mailed inside a blank greeting card. Not that I ever did such a thing…

The first massively multiplayer online RPG I ever played was not Ultima Online or Everquest. It was called “Club Caribe”: A LucasArts game for the Commodore 64. Built on a modified “Maniac Mansion” engine, you walked around this virtual world and interacted with other players. It was extremely expensive to play in a small town like Ada, Oklahoma, since you had to dial a long distance phone number in addition to paying the game’s monthly fee. My friend James had it, but we didn’t get to play it much. The concept, however, really blew me away. This wasn’t a leveling treadmill or an endless dungeon crawl. You talked to people and maybe played an occasional game of checkers. The simple novelty of interaction via computer was enough to keep people fixated.

Review: Burnout 3 Takedown (PS2 and Xbox)

I’m not a driving game fan. I enjoy Gran Turismo games because of their realism and depth, but beyond that, I generally steer clear. Burnout 3, however, has proven to be another exception to the rule.

The premise is simple: You drive down the road at blistering speed (amateur driver, open course) and try to cause as many accidents as possible. Steer, gas, brake, boost. It’s a simple concept that is amazingly fun and addictive.

There are several modes of play beyond the standard races and grand prix events you’d expect. Some of the most fun events are “Road Rage”, which has you trying to wreck as many of your opponents as you can before your own car gets totaled, and “crash” events in which your objective is to drive into a busy intersection and attempt to instigate the biggest pileup possible (after which the property damage is added up to determine your score). It’s like a controlled environment for conducting physics experiments that only a true idiot would ever attempt in real life.

While every part of this game oozes quality (an incredible sense of speed, massive detail with no slowdown, etc.), I think it’s the little touches that make it really shine. When you ram someone off the road or into an oncoming vehicle, time slows down and the camera pans to the car as it careens through the air. Then, moments later, it swings back to show you barreling down the road at an even faster rate of speed fueled by the nitro boost you received for the takedown.

When your own vehicle crashes, you can cause the game to switch into slow motion, as well. Using the control stick in slow-mo allows you to steer your car through the air in an attempt to position yourself for “aftertouch takedowns” – subsequent wrecks caused by your own flaming hulk. Points are tallied in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater style at the bottom of the screen as you crash (Into Bus + 2.3 Second Air + Barrel Roll x3 + 326 ft Sunroof Skid + Into Van + Explosion).

Another addictive quality is that you seem to earn some new race, crash, vehicle, “signature takedown” snapshot, trophy, or other award after just about every race, win or lose. One of my favorite perks is earning newspaper headlines featuring the catastrophe you caused when you do enough damage in a crash event.

Burnout 3 apparently has fun on-line play, too, but I really don’t mess with that stuff. It would be too much trouble to run the DSL to the front of the house.

I really dig this game, and I think pretty much anybody would. You don’t even have to be a good driver, since it rewards you for doing the thing that most racing game penalize you for: crashing.