video games

Review of Beat Hazard

This review originally appeared on Steam. See more reviews by Dan.

Beat Hazard

Rating: 👍

Man, I play so much of this game. Whether you’ve got an hour to spare or just three minutes, there’s nothing like firing up Beat Hazard and blasting aliens to the sound of your favourite music, turned up nice and loud. And with the new DLC, Beat Hazard Ultra, it’s even more awesome (although the new points system takes some getting used to).

If Asteroids was invented today, by somebody who enjoyed Dance Dance Revolution, this would be it. Kick-ass.

On This Day In 2004

A little bit tongue-in-cheek, this one.

Looking Back

On this day in 2004, I’d just finished my first marathon session of playing Half-Life 2, a spectacular new video game that quickly became one of the best-selling computer games ever. Despite New Year celebrations and other distractions, I managed to sit and play the game for a couple of days and finished it very soon after.

The launch of the game was delayed – I’d pre-ordered it 17 months before it eventually got released – after being plagued with development difficulties. One of the many delays to it’s launch was blamed on the theft of part of the source code: I remember joking, after the thief had been caught, that now that they’d got the code back they’d be able to release the game, right?

Meanwhile, Paul swore that he would have nothing to do with the digital distribution platform – Steam – that remains the only way to get a legitimate copy of Half-Life 2. On his blog – then on LiveJournal – he listed all of the many problems that he saw with Steam, and I countered a few of them in an argument in the comments. For years to come, he’d go on to refuse to play some of the most fantastic computer games to be released on principle.

Looking Forward

Things change. I can’t remember the last time I saw Paul playing a video game that he didn’t buy on Steam, for one (except for a handful that he bought from Good Old Games – which is well worth visiting, if you haven’t already).

Some things stay the same: Half-Life 2 remains one of the best first-person shooters ever made, and has been followed by two spectacular sequels (Episode 1 and Episode 2) and a number of spin-offs (including the mind-blowingly awesome Portal, which stole my life for a while, although not for long enough to make my 2007 list of life-stealing games). We’re still all waiting on the much-delayed Episode 3, though…

This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on years gone by.

Curious Bug

I was playing the Chess game in Clubhouse Games on the Nintendo DS last night, and I’ve discovered a bug that can occur in a very unusual situation. Normally, the game quite rightly allows you to only make legal moves. For example, when in check, the only legal moves are those moves which get you out of check, either by (a) capturing the attacking piece, (b) blocking the attack or (c) moving the king in such a way that he is no longer in check.

However, it looks like the programmers of Clubhouse Games, when writing support for the en passant rule, gave en passant moves more importance than they should have, making them always valid moves (even when they shouldn’t be). Consider the scenario below:

Black moves his pawn two squares forward, putting white’s king in check through his bishop. At this point, the only valid moves for white should involve moving the king out of check. However, Clubhouse Games will also accept the white pawn capturing the black pawn en passant as valid.

Of course, being a bit of a geek, I felt compelled to do this (illegal) move, just to see how the game engine handled it. The result was that I was told that I had lost, and then the whole game crashed and locked up.

Sloppy coding there, guys, which could easily have been avoided by putting the valid move check after the special moves. I wonder if similar problems affect castling…

10 Computer Games That Stole My Life

I don’t actually play many computer games: I’m quite selective. Sure, I try out each and every “next big thing,” but in general, I’m left unimpressed. Sometimes, however, a computer game is released that actually steals my life for months or years – something I come back to time and time again. Something that actually makes me into an addict, if just for a while.

Here’s my roundup of the top 10 computer games that stole my life:

10. The (Even More) Incredible Machine

The Incredible Machine 3 I suppose I brought it upon myself. I’ve always been a fan of machines. When I was very young, kids TV programme Playschool used to have what they called the marble machine. It was dropped later, much to my disappointment. The marble machine resembled an upright pinball table, into which – at the end of every show – a bucket of marbles was deposited. The marbles would roll down through a series of see-saws and tunnels and tubes and rails and tracks, striking buzzers and bells and little things that would light up. It was spectacular. I tried to build something comparable with my marble run, but without success.

Two of my cousins used their expansive Lego sets to build a similarly complicated “Rube Goldberg machine,” once, and I was insanely jealous, mostly – I think – because I hadn’t thought of it first. The idea of these millions of moving parts, complex and un-necessary motion, and things that clicked and whirred… really appealed to me for the entirety of my childhood.

When The Incredible Machine was released in 1992, I persuaded my parents to buy it for me. No longer did I have to spend hours finding exactly the right-sized paperclip to slide down a string I’d set up in my room – I could do it all on my computer! In The Incredible Machine, players aim to solve puzzles by building and extending ludicrous machines. I eventually owned every release in the series. I’d use the freeform mode to build perpetual motion machines and to design mind-bending puzzles that I’d generally fail to persuade my friends to attempt. I’d play through the puzzles time and time again, trying to find marginally more efficient ways to solve them.

The Incredible Machine was probably the first computer game to genuinely “steal my life.” I dust off a copy of it or one of it’s sequels now and then and have a go, and I still adore it.

You can probably download a copy from some kind of abandonware site, but if you’re looking for a similar fix right now, I can recommend Armadillo Run.

9. NetHack

Since before I was born, people having been playing Rogue, the original top-down dungeon-crawling hack ‘n’ slash game. Rogue begat Hack, and Hack begat NetHack, which – miraculously – while I’d heard about, I didn’t end up playing for the first time until about 2002.

NetHack is free and open source. You could go download a copy right now and be playing it within a few minutes. But before you do that, read my warning: it will consume you. The first dozen times you play it, or thereabouts, you won’t have a clue what’s going on: you’ll have pressed a few buttons and gotten eaten by a grid bug or something. But then, usually after you’ve taken the time to read at least some of the manual, it’ll begin to click. You’ll have gotten the hang of it.

And it’s only then you’ll realise quite how huge the scope of the game is. Every time you play, the dungeon map is different. Potions, rings, wands and spellbooks – all carefully identified in your last games – will change their purpose. The only thing you’ll find in common is your own corpse, littering the dungeon, from your previous incursion.

And it’s clever, too. There’s a saying in NetHack player circles – the dev. team think of everything. I remember once, my character was trapped in a dangerous situation and surrounded by monsters. I was likely to die if I stayed put, so I scrambled through my inventory to try to find a clever combination of objects that might get me out of the mess I was in. Suddenly it hit me: I had a potion of levitation and a wand of digging: I could drink the potion, float up to the ceiling, and then aim the wand upwards to tunnel my way to the floor above and to safety! The plan worked, but sadly my newly-created hole appeared right underneath an altar on the floor above. The last thing I saw in that game was my gravestone, which read: “Here lies Scatman Dan the Samauri, killed by a falling altar.” Yes, that means that someone on the development team anticipated that one day somebody might dig underneath an alter, and ensured that the text was in there to accommodate. It’s insane.

NetHack stole months and months from my life, and – now and then – I still go back to play it. I’ve never won (“ascended”). Statistically speaking, based on the amount I play it, I never will. But sometimes I get a little bit closer. Perhaps it’s that that makes it so addictive.

8. Super Mario Kart

I wasn’t always such a Nintendo fanboy as I am now. In fact, before I really embraced Nintendo-fandom, I had to get hold of a second-hand SNES with Super Mario World and Yoshi’s Island and… Super Mario Kart.

Ah, the original Mario Kart. Zipping round pixelated tracks in stupid little buggies with frustrating computer opponents who cheated – cheated, damn it – by firing power-ups they hadn’t actually picked up. And the multi-player! Two players, head to head, taking on the pack and competing for the cup, or “bursting each other’s bubbles” in a one-on-one.

The rest of the franchise rocked, too – Mario Kart 64 for the N64 and Double Dash for theGameCube, as well as the Nintendo DS version – but it was the original Mario Kart that stole my heart (and countless hours of my teenage years). Perhaps it was the cutseyness, or the not-quite-a-game-of-skill (but close enough that I could, after a while, royally whip everybody I knew at it) quirkyness, or the instant “sit down and play”-ability of it… I don’t know… but Nintendo really hit this one on the head. Sneaky tricks such as saving your “feather” power-ups for the secret routes through the tracks and bunny-hopping to “snake” your way around rough ground really added an extra something to it, too, and the music gave each track an atmosphere all of it’s own, albeit one in bleepy 8-bit sound.

While I don’t play the original these days, I still enjoy an occasional blast on the sequels.

7. Ultima VII

Ultima VII: The Black Gate Nowadays, if you want to play a huge, open, expansive, deep roleplaying game, you install Morrowind or Oblivion. Oblivion comes on a DVD-ROM and it’s huge. But back in the early-mid nineties, when we wanted that kind of experience, we installed Ultima VII. Ultima VII came on only seven floppy disks (assuming that, like me, you bought the 3.5″ copy rather than the 5.25″one) but packed a ludicrous amount of compression onto them – so much so that I vividly recall spending almost an hour watching the installer and swapping disks when I first installed it on my 33MHz 386 with no maths co-processor.

It was all worth it, though. Ultima VII’s game world dwarfed anything that came before it. Sure, you could rush through the game, sticking to the well-trodden paths, and not taking any side quests and (if you were good enough to survive such an ordeal) complete the game within about 50 hours of playtime. Not including the expansion packs, of course. But that’s not what the game was about – it was about taking your party along, being distracted by something moving in the woods, following it, losing it, finding something else interesting, taking side quests, trying things out (there are a million and one easter eggs)… I particularly enjoyed injuring a monster I was previously unable to beat by having the strongest member of my party drop all his weapons so that he could carry a cannon all the way from Lord British‘s castle (with other members of the party carrying balls and powder) to the monster’s lair, firing it at the beast, handing him back his weapons, and getting on with the fight!

It’s deep and it’s clever and it’s spectacularly well-made. It was the first game to introduce the idea of “losing” things in your own backpack (chuck too much stuff in there, heaped on top of itself, and it’s very easy to misplace your lockpicks… and why were you carrying all these spellbooks, anyway?).

It was over a year between me first getting this game and first finishing it. And even now, thanks to a great community and emulators like Exult, it’s possible for me to play it again, and, 13 years on, I still see new things in it. It’s a masterpiece.

6. Dune 2

Dune 2 This list really couldn’t be complete without tipping my hat to Dune 2. Dune 2 is pretty much single-handedly responsible for inventing the modern real-time strategy genre (no, Stonkers doesn’t count).

I got Dune 2 in 1993, and found it infinitely more playable than Doom (which was still good fun, at least in multiplayer: my friends and I had endless games across null modem cables and via direct dial-up), which was released in that year. It was a strategy game with a heavy emphasis on war and scenarios, like Battle Isle, which I’d already fallen in love with, but it was run in real-time. Real-damnit! If you weren’t quick or smart enough, the enemy could quite rightly sneak up on you and trash your base (or, more annoyingly, your harvesters).

All the key elements that became the backbone of modern RTS games were there: a set of missions each with a video (well, animated to save space and processor cycles, of course) introduction, each introducing more and more technology, the capacity to build and upgrade buildings, harvest resources, and buy troops, and fast and furious combat in between short periods of “turtling” behind your walls and turrets. And it rocked: the three sides (Atredies, Ordos, and Harkonnen) were sufficiently different to make the game challenging whichever way you played it, the scenarios were different depending on which side you played (for example, the Sardaukar – the Emporer’s crack troops – always sided with one of the other two houses!), the missions were varied, the sandworms were vicious… and it had speech: speech in a computer game!

I played Dune 2 long before I read the Dune books, saw the film, or played the original Dune computer game (which shares a lot more in common with the stories than Dune 2 – which is just an abstract RTS game set in the “Dune” universe – but which I also adore), and I loved every minute of it. Eventually, my friends and I did battle through every one of the 13 levels as each of the three sides, and then we did it all over again with different strategies.

The only thing we could fault it on was the lack of a multiplayer mode. At that time, modern multiplayer games were just starting to appear (Doom’s multiplayer features, for example, were added as an afterthought; it was thought that only a few people would ever bother to use and enjoy them – but it was this action that eventually made it essential that all first person shooter games had a multiplayer mode), and I’d never seen or heard of a multiplayer real-time strategy game before. We played a lot of Dune 2, but our wishes for multiplayer were only realised in 1995, with the next item on this list.

5. Command & Conquer

C&C. A cut scene featuring the Ion Cannon. Now here was a game that you could get into. Command & Conquer, released by Westwood Studios – who’d already stunned us with Dune 2 – in 1995 made real-time strategy into a real art form. While on it’s surface just a re-write of Dune 2 (Arrakis is replaced by Earth, the Atreides and Harkonnen are replaced by the GDI and the Brotherhood of Nod, Melange is replaced by Tiberium, and so on) it added so much more.

For a start, it added real live action videos with hammy acting, blended right into the game. It also added a real sense of attitude: everybody who played through the GDI campaign remembers the first mission where you have to play “Commando,” the ass-kicking sniper with a stack of C4 (the level itself isn’t terribly challenging, and mostly consists of remembering to do all the actions in the right order, a-la Rick Dangerous, but it’s the attitude that made it stand out). The music has attitude. The FMV actors have attitude. The military hardware has attitude. The whole game reeked of it. You genuinely felt like some kind of general, sending his troops to the front line.

Even the installer had attitude: animations, speech, and a stereotypical movie “military supercomputer” user interface. The installer was simplified for the later Windows 95 Compatible (basically the game with a few patches on it) release of the game, and I resented them for it: that installer was still one of the coolest I’ve ever used.

It added lots of clever new features to the genre, too: transports that could have troops loaded into them, well-balanced superweapons, and the “right-click default action” idea that because so popular for so many games for so long to come.

What really made it stand out to my friends and I, though, was the multiplayer features. By this point, we’d gotten the hang of setting up LAN parties at short notice. We had stacks of null modem cables and even a few old network cards, scavenged from parts bins, and we knew IPX/SPX inside out (skills that would come in very useful when Duke Nukem 3D, one of the best multiplayer shoot-em-ups ever, would come out the following year).

So we played two player battles (by modem and null modem). And we played four-player battles (over networks of various kinds). And we modded the game (we made levels, we made new weapons). And we got better at it. The potential for the game was limitless. Every weekend for several months the attic at my dad’s house became our warzone: battle after battle with different strategies every time. I favoured engineer swamping and fast strikes at ill-defended construction yards. One friend preferred to tank rush. Another friend liked to turtle. A further friend enjoyed the frowned-upon habit of harvester-baiting. We all had our own strategies, our own alliances, and our own favourite maps. And we played it to death.

4. (Open) Transport Tycoon (Deluxe)

Transport Tycoon I’d played Railroad Tycoon, of course, because everybody who was anybody had played that. And I’d played A-Train, which was a lot more obscure and with good reason – it wasn’t really very good. But I’d never really been bitten by the transport simulation game until my dad – a transport consultant – bought me Transport Tycoon as an (unexpected) Christmas present.

I was sceptical. How much fun could it really be? Laying roads and rails, sponsoring schemes in towns, and building a network of trains, buses, lorries, planes and ships sounded – thanks to my understanding of “what daddy did” – a lot like work, rather than fun!

I played it non-stop. Despite it’s faults (stupid computer players, shaky pathfinding, etc.) it was a marvel: a clever, easy-to-learn, fun transport sim that you could play on many different levels. At it’s simplest, you can lay point-to-point track and run trains around, making “choo choo” noises all the way. At it’s most complex, you can set up clever track combinations to make efficient use of stations, provide passing points on single-track, flood valleys to use as canals, chain together stations to move cargo in a “leapfrog” method with greatest efficiency, and choose the best combination of locomotives to prioritise your passengers over your freight.

Then came Transport Tycoon Deluxe, an “enhanced” re-release. At a glance it just provides some silly theming, but looking a little deeper you soon discover how much bigger the game world just became: one-way signals – such a simple concept – enable the construction of far more advanced track configurations. The extra themes aren’t just themes; they provide whole different experiences (such as having to deliver fresh water to towns in deserts in the “tropical” theme to allow them to grow).

I was still playing the occasional game of Transport Tycoon Deluxe in the early 2000s, when OpenTTD started to appear on the scene. OpenTTD is an open-source remake of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, but, over the last few years, it’s exploded in size and now offers a lot more than official releases ever did: enter/exit signal “blocks” allow for complex station approach/exit designs, a (brilliant) improved pathfinding algorithm makes it possible to design very advanced track/road layouts and still have vehicles reach their destinations, electrified track is improved, stations can be “chained” together into larger stations, vehicles can “share” orders (like a symlink!), there’s a load of new kinds of airport and heliport, and, perhaps most exciting of all – it’s possible to extend the game even further with “NewGRF” add-on packs. In particular, I like the one which provides “realistic” British rail stock, including trucks with speed limits, believable diesel acceleration, and more.

And it’s still being developed: now and then I compile the bleeding-edge version from the repository, and it blows my mind. Trams are on the cards for a near future version, by the look of things, as is the ability to customise the colours on individual subclasses of vehicle. Very new is the ability to build “on-road” bus stations, which is nice, and to have the game automatically pause itself when it first starts (a popular option amongst micromanagers like myself!).

It’s thirteen years since the original Transport Tycoon was released, and I still regularly play the games derived from it. This is truly a “computer game that stole my life.”

3. Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth Of Worlds

Ultima Underworld 2 Most of the games in this list stole my life simply because I kept coming back to them time and time again, even years after I’d finished them or thought I’d seen everything there was to see in them. A couple of the games in this list stole my life because it took me so long to explore them fully – to do everything there was to do in them, to complete them on the hardest difficulty level, etc.

Ultima Underworld II stole my life on both counts, but especially on the latter. It’s a real-time first-person roleplaying game; something that – before Ultima Underworld – hadn’t been fully realised before (okay, okay, there was Dungeon Master…). In any case – what it provides is an immersive 3D dungeon experience with dynamic lighting, bridges, moving floors and walls, secret doors, switches and triggered interactivity, the ability to “look” up and down, and other fantastic graphical and gameplay engine improvements that wouldn’t be seen in the first-person-shooter genre until two years later, with the release of Rise of the Triad (and then, it could be argued, not quite so beautifully).

It’s a non-linear, slightly combat-heavy RPG with lots and lots of character… and lots and lots of characters, too. It’s got a complex magic system, a surprisingly deep combat system, bartering, the need to eat and drink and sleep, swimming… and lots of “the dev team thought of everything” moments when you, for example, weigh up your options in any particular subquest: “There’s a Despoiler Demon guarding that key I need… I could fight him; wonder if I’ve got any potions that could help with that? Maybe I could steal the key and try to run away? How good is a Despoiler’s eyesight? And can he swim?”

Better than that, it’s surprisingly big. About 8 hours into your first attempt at the game… and that’s a very variable amount of time, because there’s a lot to do and try if you want to, being a non-linear game… just when you’ll be starting to think that you’ve gotten the hang of everything, you’ll come across a portal and you’ll find that the game is nine times larger than you’d been lead to believe. The fun will be only just beginning.

The plot is complex and coherent, and you can genuinely feel like you’re “getting somewhere” if you need to. There’ll be monsters you can’t face but that you can come back later and attack, puzzles that you can’t solve until you’ve found clues elsewhere, and a storyline that’ll make you laugh, and cry, and think.

It’s also the first game I ever played that made me physically jump with fright (it was the first time I found a highly-poisonous, dog-sized monster called a Dread Spider… little did I know I’d blundered into a lair full of them…).

Ultima IV and Ultima VII (the later of which is also on this list) will always been my favourite Ultima games, but Ultima Underworld II did a better job of stealing my life. About two years passed between first playing it and first finishing it (although I’d had a few “breaks” from playing it), and I still sometimes go back and play as an unusual character class, or with a more or less heavy-handed approach. And it still pleases me.

2. Quake

Quake I bought Quake on the day of it’s release: June 22nd, 1996. It didn’t matter to me that I was on holiday at the time and wouldn’t be anywhere near my computer for another four days: I had to have it then and there, just so I could enjoy the smell of the manual or something.

I’d been involved with the beta test for almost six months, and it’s chugginess had been instrumental in my insistence that I be allowed to upgrade my PC. I got it home and played it non-stop until I’d finished all four campaigns on hard difficulty, and started on nightmare.

If this were any other game, that’s where the story would end. But Quake was special. After seeing how people had received Doom all those years ago, iD Games had put a lot of careful thought into how Quake should work. Within weeks, I was playing multiplayer deathmatches and co-operative monster hunts with my friends. The following year, still playing it, my college buddies and I would take control of the computer labs in order to have huge blast-fests with mods like Team Fortress installed.

I made maps. I’d done this before in Doom and in Duke Nukem 3D, but Quake – with it’s actual 3D-ness – made the whole process exciting again. I learnt enough C to write mods, and distributed them on the internet (one of my weapons, the Orgeslayer, a rotating-barrelled shotgun, still occasionally appears in mod packs, and it surprises me to see my handle still floating around with it, complete with obsolete e-mail address).

And every week we’d get together and play the maps I’d created. Times changed, and new mods appeared, and we played them too. Quake Soccer was a classic, kicking each other’s disembodied heads around a pitch. Rocket Area was a plain old blast-em-up distraction. Superheroes was a very cleverly-made adaptation. We played them all, and we played them to death.

I played through Quake 2 and Quake 3, and quite a bit of multiplayer of both, when I was at University, but the appeal was never quite the same – by this time, the Unreal Tournament series had stolen my interest. Now and then I still play a quick game of Quake, though.

1. Civilization

Civilization 4 And so we come to the number one life-stealing game for me, perhaps forever: Civilization (and it’s many sequels).

Let’s start by looking how I got into Civ (as it’s known to us veterans), though, because I’m in the unusual position of having a perfect memory of the first ever time I played it.

Back in 1991, my mum was subscribed to some kind of software club – you know, like those book clubs – that would send us a catalogue every month. In this particular month, they were raving about Civilization, a new strategy/wargame (yes, that’s how they chose to describe it). Sounds interesting, so she bought it. This was the original, v1.0.0.0, proper boxes set of Civilization. It came with a many-hundred page manual that just about squeezed into it’s big box, and four 5.25″ floppy (yes, actually “floppy”) disks. It could be run from the disks, and we didn’t have a hard drive at the time (just a CGA [four colour] old 286) with 480K of RAM, so that’s how I’d have to play it – switching disks to watch the introduction or to load up the help (Civilopedia).

The first time I ever played, it took me awhile to “get it.” I played as the Americans, and I had three cities that were doing okay when the Zulu first invaded my territory, bringing with them three or four units phalanx. I managed to fight them off, and continued to develop my technology and economy, eventually building myself an army of three knights! They set out, and immediately ran into the new Zulu army and their shiny new tanks.

And so, they kicked my arse. But I’m not so easily put down, and within a few weeks I’d gotten the hang of kicking arses and getting the occasional space race victory too. Not bad for a 10-year-old.

I played Civilization consistently for several years, and, when Civilization II came out in 1996, pounced on a copy of that too. Civilization II made a huge difference to the game: more technologies, more units, larger maps, more complex diplomacy, more wonders, stronger espionage, and, thanks to the extra storage space offered by compact discs, FMV clips of advisers, wonders, and other special content. This game was spectacular, and I played it at every opportunity for years to come. That it was released between my mock and final GCSE exams might have something to do with my grade drop between the two.

Civilization II didn’t support multiplayer gaming (at least, not in it’s initial release – the later Multiplayer Gold Edition did, which I also bought) so I bought a copy of CivNet. CivNet is a Windows-based remake of the original Civilization with multiplayer options, including an innovative “simultaneous moves” option which drastically changes the way the game is played. Along with Quake, CivNet became a staple of my college gaming group.

Civilization III, which was a bit of a disappointment to many long-term Civ fans, impressed me more than most when it was released in 2001, but it wasn’t until Civilization IV‘s release in 2005 that I found the game series truly stealing my life once again. Civilization IV’s development saw active contribution from Sid Meier, and it shows in just how well-designed the game is, and how well-balanced it is. I continue to play several hours in a typical week, and every time that begins to wane, a new add-on pack is released, giving me more things to explore and to get addicted to all over again.

Civilization games are deep, complex strategy games with a huge focus on resource management and empire building, and a not insignificant amount of war and diplomacy. The AI is typically brutal enough to make single-player games almost as fun as (and quite a lot faster than) multiplayer ones, and the game is designed well enough to cater for casual players (who will happily turn on the Governor options, automate production, etc.) and for micromanagers like me (who can tweak every little aspect of the way their cities operate, view reports on spending, and customise to their heart’s content). Civ 2 and (particularly) Civ 4 are easy to mod, too, and I’ve played a variety of custom scenarios, alternative rulesets, and other modifications to the core game over the years.

So Civilization, and it’s children, sits right at the top of the list of “computer games that stole my life.” For sixteen years I’ve been playing it, and I still haven’t beaten any of them on the highest difficulty levels or achieved every victory type with every race in any of them except the first. Here’s to you, Civilization. You stole my life.

Diplomacy, Parcels, and WW2 RTS Games

What have I been up to of late? Well, as you ask…

Diplomacy

Ruth‘s game of Diplomacy got off to a fine start, and the backstabbing began soon afterwards. I’m not so keen on the engine, for reasons I’ll discuss later. Here’s how the map looks right now.

I’m the red guys down at the bottom who are getting their arses kicked by the purple and brown guys. Very sweetly, JTA (leader of Russia) sent me an e-mail to apologise a little (and gloat a lot) about his recent pillaging of my lands, and congratulate me on trying to set him and Andy (Germany) against one another. It’s kind-of sweet, as I said, but really un-necessary: breaking alliances is what the game is all about.

Plus, it’s not like I didn’t see it coming. My alliance with Russia as a show from the start, but I didn’t realise that Russia planned to attack me so soon (I’d just issued attack orders against him). My mistake was that I didn’t anticipate that Germany side with Russia and backstab me. Memo to self: assassinate leader of Germany.

Sadly, the Diplomacy engine we’re using – phpDiplomacy – has a few interesting bugs that make it hard to work out who’s actually on your side. Here’s an example situation:

The screenshot is faked, but the situation is plausible – the engine doesn’t accomodate for this. In this situation, the red player has been successfully attacked by the brown player, displacing their army (according to the message from 10:36pm). It’s not possible that the brown player did this alone, in this situation: they must have had help from at least one of – the green army in Piedmont, the green fleet in Venice, the purple army in Vienna, possibly a purple army from the region above (not shown), or perhaps even from the red fleet in Trieste (an unusual strategy, but not unheard of in some unusual circumstances, is to support the enemy against your own units).

But the engine gives no indication which this is. In this situation, the red player does not know which – green or purple – supported the attack. If the red player had alliances with the two of them, they would not know which one had betrayed them, for example. Whoops!

This could make it an interesting (or a frustrating) game. I’m certain that in the near future we’ll see players strategically helping one another perform attacks, without revealing that it was them that supported it.

A Strange Parcel

This morning, I received a strange parcel from Matt in the Hat, addressed to “Jen, Paul, Dan & Claire”. The contents, as pictured, seem to be two Guinness glasses and three cartons of organic fruit juice. I’m not sure which bits are for whom – or even why we’ve been sent this package at all – but I’m sure Matt will enlighten me soon.

Update: I’ve spoken to Matt on Jabber, and apparently the Guinness glasses box does not contain Guinness glasses. And I’m to make sure that Jen gets one of the cartons of juice.

Basically, Matt’s lost the plot. However, he still managed, through his insanity, to pick a selection of objects who’s size ratios made packing them easy.

Company of Heroes

I’ve been playing a lot of Company of Heroes these last couple of days: it’s a spectacular game. It’s been a long time since a real-time strategy game has amused me so much (since, perhaps Red Alert 2, seven years ago). It’s yet-another-world-war-2 game, as if we haven’t seen enough of them of late, but it’s a battle-level strategic game, rather than a first-person shooter, and it does a wonderful job of what it does.

Tanks roll through deformable terrain. Infantry hide in the craters your artillery has blown out. And the whole thing looks and sounds beautiful, from the hushed descent of paratroopers into a muddy field (reflections and all) to the flashes and blasts of a distant battle (complete with radio chatter, or plain old voices if you’re looking directly at the speaker). You can build sandbag walls and minefields, and blow them down just as easily. Don’t want to risk your men down a long, sniper-infested street? Steal some German artillery pieces and blow your way though the walls, then – the whole map is completely reshapable. The AI’s not to be sniffed at, either (although it’s a bit fiddly when it comes to multi-selecting and moving a group of vehicles together and they all crumple into each other when they reach a chicane, rather than taking turns).

It needs a beefy machine to do it justice, which is why I got it – to push my new gaming rig to the limits – but it’s more than just a graphics-fest: it’s also a very clever and gritty game.

So, who’s for a co-op?

Writing Comedy

And, of course, the other thing that’s been occupying my time has been writing stuff to say on Sunday’s Gorillamania event. But I’ve already said enough about that recently, so I’ll shut up and get on with some work.

Fun With A Nintendo DS

This post starts very geeky, but becomes about computer games later on. Feel free to scroll down three paragraphs if you like computer games but don’t like computer hardware hacking.
My M3 Perfect and some related hardware arrived today. Basically, it’s a SD card reader that plugs into a Game Boy Advance slot (which are found on not only the Game Boy Advance series but also the Nintendo DS). By itself, it allows a Nintendo DS (or a DS Lite, as my new toy is) to play music, videos, etc. But combined with an Passcard (also arrived this morning), it allows backup games and homebrew software to be easily loaded onto the device.

Within minutes, I had DSLinux, a Linux distribution for the Nintendo DS, working. It felt immensely cool to be typing at a Bash shell using my DS stylus. I couldn’t get the wireless internet connection working, though – the drivers kept failing to load, which is probably either a result of (a) the DS Lite possibly having different firmware for interfacing with the network subsystem or (b) the M3 Perfect I got is the SD card edition, rather than the CF edition, which is better supported by DSLinux. I chose the SD card edition despite it being a few pounds more expensive because it’s slightly smaller (and therefore doesn’t stick out of the side of my handheld in such an unslightly way as the CF one would have) and because I can potentially fit more onto a SD card (although the only SD card I own is 1Gb, the same size as the largest CF card the M3 can take). In any case, both possibilities sound equally unlikely: further investigation will ensure.

The ultimate aim of this little project is to get a graphical VNC client for the DS (take a look at that screenshot!) running, or some other remote control, so I can take full control of my desktop PC, wirelessly, from, like, my bed. Or from the couch. Or from and wireless internet hotspot anywhere that somebody hasn’t secured properly. Toy.

But the other benefit of this little purchase is the ability to, how shall we say, “try before I buy” Nintendo DS games. I’ve spent quite some time today playing the stunning Trauma Center: Under The Knife. It hasn’t been since Half-Life 2 that I’ve played a computer game that genuinely made me jump with fright.

This isn’t Theme Hospital. This is Life and Death (for those of you too young to remember, this was a stunning late-80s “Sim Surgeon”). Starting as a junior surgeon, you’ll remove benign tumours, treat laceration injuries, and laser off polyps. The whole things starts with a very “hold your hand” approach, but the learning curve is steep. Within 25 minutes of play you’ll be performing surgery within the chest cavity of car crash victims when something goes wrong (their heart stops, or their symptoms severely exacerbate, or it turns out there’s something more seriously wrong with them) and you’ve got nobody there to help you: you have to work alone.

It’s dark and cold and hard. Very hard. I struggled to keep up with the pace and had to re-attempt some of the levels (such as the brutal on early in the second chapter in which I had to remove aneurisms from the arteries of the intestines, and they just kept exploding on me, showering blood everywhere and destabilising the patient’s condition) several times. Nonetheless, I had great fun watching Claire replay those levels, on the edge of my seat whenever I knew something was about to go terribly wrong. Contrary to the image Nintendo sometimes convey: this is not a game for kids.
Another game I’ve enjoyed trying out is Mario & Luigi: Partners In Time, which plays a lot like Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, but with semi-independent simultaneous control over up to four (Mario, Luigi, Mario’s younger self, Luigi’s younger self) different characters. Yes, at the same time. Yes, that fucks with your head. Quite quickly.

Then there’s Super Princess Peach, a platform game in which Peach uses the power of mood swings (I kid you not – she fluctuates between singing, crying, and breathing fire, just like a real woman) in order to get her way. And Super Monkey Ball Touch & Roll, more stupid puzzle game fun…
It’s not all piracy (although at least a little bit ethically – we’ll buy legitimate copies of the good stuff, almost certainly including Trauma Center) of stuff I could have bought at my local Game: I’ve also had a great deal of fun with Electroplankton, for which a release outside of Japan is still promised, but sadly absent. Electroplankton is a software toy in the truest sense of the word. The player manipulates the movement of musical plankton in order to generate what can just about be described as music. I came home and hooked it up to the stereo and Claire and I had great fun for some time, playing with the different plankton and trying to discover how they all “worked”. And I’m also looking forward to giving some of the Naruto games (which’ll probably never be released outside of Japan) a go.

“Wii!” Shout Sony

Heh. Had to happen. Sony have developed a new controller for the PS3 which sounds remarkably similar to that of the Nintendo Wii – a tilt-sensing remote control.

This picture, sent to me by Jon, says it all.

Vespers

Some time ago, I recommended Photopia as a great text-based adventure for both beginners and veterans: with a great, sweet story (with a slightly depressing ending) and a short play time, it’s just great to show people why text-based adventures are fun.

Here’s my latest recommendation: Vespers. It’s dark, cold, and disturbing – insanity, bubonic plague, and temptation in the face of heaven and hell… and a cool mix of biblical prophecy and murder mystery in a quarantined monastary.

Download the Windows installer
Download the Z-Code file (to play in your own Z-Code interpreter, e.g. on non-Windows platforms)

There’s about 2 hours playtime in it for an experienced adventurer, but it’s got SAVE and RESTORE commands so you don’t have to do it in a single sitting. And of course I’ll be available for hints if you get stuck!

How To Repair A Nintendo GameCube

For the last few months, Claire and my GameCube has been broken. It broke at one point, which I attributed to the drive motor being jammed up with dust and hair and crap, so I opened the lid and wiggled a knife-blade around inside it for awhile, which seemed to fix it… but a couple of weeks later, it was dead again. I decided to have another look into this, yesterday, and a little bit of research online revealed that the problem was probably that the strength of the laser had degraded, rendering it unable to read any discs. This is, apparently, one of the most common causes of death for the GameCube (and I’ve seen a good number of ‘cubes go on eBay which would appear to have exactly this problem). Thankfully, there’s a really well-written guide on lens calibration for the gamecube, which helped a lot. However, the thing that’s lacking online is a photographic guide: so, as part of this ‘blog entry, I’ve written one.

Usual disclaimer: following this guide will void your warranty. Plus, if you do it the way I did it, you risk electrocution, exposure to laser radiation, and worse yet, you may break your GameCube beyond repair.

I recommend that you read the guide to lens calibration for the gamecube – it’s far more in-depth than this blog entry. However, this blog entry has prettier pictures.

Symptoms

GameCube fails to load games – it claims that the disc is missing or unreadable, and will only load up as far as the “configuration cube” screen with the funky ambient noises.
Open the lid and detach the clips under the lid to release the circular plastic Nintendo-branded thing that sits on top of the lid: this will allow you to watch the disc spinning while the ‘Cube is running, even with the lid closed. Try again – the disc will start to spin (so, it’s not a broken drive motor) but then stop (when the system finds it can’t read the disc).

Problem

The power output of the laser which is used to read the surface of the disc has reduced with age. This is a common problem in GameCubes, apparently, between two and five years old. It can be repaired by a Nintendo engineer, but the price is prohibitive (you might as well buy a working second-hand one). However, we can fix it ourselves. [if you can’t see the rest of this article, read it here]

Tools

I didn’t have all the tools to hand that the author of the guide I followed had, but I made do. Here are my tools:

Screwdriver – this is a standard “size 0” (small, but not really small) Phillips-head screwdriver. This particular one cost me 45p from my local hardware store.
Ball-point pen – mine was a WHSmiths-branded one with blue ink.

Method

First step is to prepare the tools as you’ll need them. The four main case screws that prevent you from taking a GameCube apart are a strange custom design deeply recessed within deep holes on the underside of the device. You can apparently buy a specialist tool for manipulating these screws, but I couldn’t be bothered, so I made one: remove the ink tube and nib from the pen, so you’re left with a long plastic tube. Then, using a hot flame (I used a gas ring) melt/ignite the end of the tube you’d normally write with (where the nib was, before you removed it). It will probably catch fire, but just blow it out while trying not to breathe in too much of the toxic black smoke you’re producing. It needs to be molten enough to be malleable. Then, once it’s hot, put it down into one of the four deep holes on the underside of your upside-down GameCube.

Upside-down GameCube with holes highlighted

Push it down firmly but evenly so that it points directly up, and hold it there for a minute or so while it begins to take shape. What you’re doing is moulding the shape of the screw head into the molten plastic of the pen, so that when the plastic sets you will have a tool that exactly fits them. Of course, if then pen snaps, you’ve buggered any chance you had of ever getting into your GameCube, so be careful! Once it’s standing upright by itself, leave it for four or five minutes to finish cooling. Now’s a good opportunity to read the rest of this guide, if you haven’t already.

The strange-headed screws that you need to remove

You should now be able to use your new tool to unscrew the four screws that hold your GameCube together. That’s the hard bit over with. Flip your GameCube the right way up again, put your hands on it’s sides, and pull upwards to remove the cover. If there isn’t one already, put a GameCube disc onto the spindle. This will serve two purposes: it will allow you to test the GameCube without reassembling it, later, but more importantly it will help to protect the laser lens from damage when you turn the drive mechanism upside-down, later. Next you need to remove the front and rear panels. These are attached by small plastic clips in the corners of the cube, as shown below.

Howo to remove the front panel from a GameCube

Be careful not to detach the cables that connect the front panel to the rest of the GameCube, as these ribbon cables are very difficult to re-attach without damaging them! Now you’re ready to start removing the chassis screws (which are holding the fan in place and preventing you from getting at the underside of the disc drive. There are 14 screws to remove, in the areas shown below, but 3 of these are concealed underneath the fan and the 2 holding the fan in place will need to be removed to reveal them. Why did Nintendo see fit to use 14 screws where 6 would have done is beyond me.

By now you should have something that looks a lot like this:

A GameCube with the top, sides, and fan laid bare, and the screws removed from the main chassis. Now’d be a good time to have a closer look at what goes on when your ‘Cube turns on. This is optional, but I think it’s interesting. If you look near the back of the GameCube, on the right-hand side, you’ll see two plastic forks. This is the switch that detects whether or not the lid is closed (as a safety precaution, the disc will not spin and the laser will not turn on if the lid is opened).

The switch that makes the lid work

Danger: laser radiation – do not do this! Connect the GameCube’s power (it connects to the back of the fan module) and output (where it normally is, albeit without the faceplace), to test it. Hold the “lid switch” (above) backwards to tell the GameCube that the lid is closed and press the power switch (it’s on the fan module). You should see the following happen:

The power LED will turn on.
The disc will start to spin.
The laser, under the disc, will turn on. You should be able to see it shining through the disc. Now stop looking at it; you’re irradiating your eyes.
The laser will move back and forth to try to “read” the disc.
At this point, the laser will probably turn off and the disc will stop spinning – this is because the GameCube you’re using is broken. If it was working, the game would load. You can use this test later on to see if you’ve successfully fixed the device without having to re-assemble the entire thing!
Don’t leave it running too long, because by this point the fan will be in the wrong place to help cool the unit.

Next, you need to remove the four long screws behind the ports (above the memory card slots).

This will also release two strange bits of metal which are held in place by these screws. I don’t know what they do, but I’m sure they’re probably important, so make sure you put them back after you’re done! Right; time to detach the disc drive. Lift the entire upper part of the system up and away from the base: there’ll be a little resistance as a plug becomes detached, but if you find you’re having to pull hard, you’ve probably left a screw in somewhere. The whole metal plate with the drive on top will come away in one piece. This is the bit we’ll be working with. Flip it over. Now, you’ve got to remove six small screws, highlighted in red on the photo below. I’ve also highlighted (in blue) the connector that links the drive to the bottom half of the console.

Removing the screws allows you to detach the metal plate and gain access to the circuitboard underneath. This is what we’re looking for. Again, I’ve highlighted the connector port in blue to help you navigate.

What you need to do is to turn the screw (highlighted in red) about 3 or 4 degrees anti-clockwise. This will increase the power given to the laser and fix your problem. If you turn it too much, your laser will overheat and burn out. If you turn it too little, the problem won’t be fixed. I recommend that you turn it a little at a time to find how short a distance you can turn it (anti-clockwise) to have the console begin to work again (i.e. so it “barely” works)… then turn it an extra 2 degrees or so to be sure. Be gentle!!! When you’ve made the adjustments you want to, re-assemble the thing so far as you need to to test it. You don’t need to put any screws in or even put the fan or panels back on – just hook it up to the TV and try not to look directly at the laser lens. If it still doesn’t work, go back and turn the screw a little more anti-clockwise (to boost the power some more). Hope that helps you get your GameCube back up-and-running again: it did mine! Feedback is welcome, but if you need more information I still highly recommend Lens Calibration For The Nintendo GameCube, which also has pointers on some of the other things that could be wrong (if this fix fails), what tools you need to do it without melting pens, and tips from somebody more-experienced on how far to turn the circuitboard screw. Good luck!

More Madness From Super Bust-A-Move

I don’t get it. To prove to myself I could complete Super Bust-A-Move in Classic Mode, I did it again, by a slightly different route (you have some degree of choice over the levels you do as you progress through the game). I finished on a different level set, and got this final screen.

It’s not as weird as the last one I saw, but I’m still finding these at least a little confusing.

Claire and I are moving tomorrow, so if you can help out, please do! We’ll be kicking off at about 9am at The Flat and going on for most of the day. Drop in to The Flat or The Sharp at any point during the day, or give us a call, and we’ll give you a job to do. Thanks in advance!

Super Bust-A-What-The-Fuck?

Just completed Super Bust-A-Move in Classic Mode. When you win, you’re presented with the following screen (the text slowly fades in a line at a time):

What the fuck?

Claire’s Birthday, and Preston

Well, Claire and I are in Preston. We travelled up here last night (after a few false starts, including getting to Mach before realising we’d left the Green Day tickets blu-tacked to the wall “so we don’t forget them” in Aber and having to turn back). Claire’s been made out to be a bookworm again, with a heap of new reading material to keep her occupied for the coming year.

Visited my mum’s house. My sisters are typically hilarious. They’ve got a new chicken (after the last ones were eaten by foxes) + chicks, and a new guinea pig (called Pork Chop, which I think is a fantastic name for a guinea pig), and the puppies have grown up so it’s complete mayhem of the excitable 3-month-old doggy variety. They’d decorated a cake for Claire’s birthday, which read “Happy Birfday [sic] Mini Melton” and had an (anatomically correct) picture of her, with an arrow and the word “You” pointing to it.

This evening, we’re off to see Feeder and R.E.M. at the Old Trafford Cricket Ground, which’ll be fab, and then tomorrow, we’re travelling down to Milton Keynes to see Green Day (& friends), then we’ll spend Sunday in London before returning to Aber. This puts Troma Night in the hands of those of you still in Aber. Bryn has a key to the flat, and I’ve changed my password on Duality to something you’ll be able to guess: to determine it, look at the large yellow sign in the kitchen – there is a mis-spelling on it, and there is a number on it. Type the mis-spelled word (in lowercase) as it appears on the sign, followed by the number. If you have any trouble, text me. And if somebody could record/download the Dr. Who episode (as Claire and I will miss it), that’d be great.

I mentioned to my family that the computer game that’s occupied me most of late is Microsoft Train Simulator. My dad seemed pleased, but the rest of my family seem to want to award me an anorak. Once she’d checked to see that I wasn’t joking, the dialogue with Becky went as follows:

Bex: Microsoft Train Simulator?
Dan: Yup.
Bex: Trains?
Dan: Uh-huh.
Bex: So… what? You plan train routes, manage finances, that kind of thing…
Dan: No, it’s not like Transport Tycoon. You drive trains.
Bex: You… drive trains.
Dan: Yeah; you drive different kinds of trains along real-world routes to a schedule.
Bex: So… do you like; earn money and you can buy better trains? Or unlock secret areas?
Dan: No.
Bex: Wh… bu… <disapproving silence>

Well; I’m guessing she won’t be wanting a copy, then.

Finished Psychonauts

I’ve just finished Psychonauts, so I can have my life back. It’s a surprisingly good third-person platform/shooter/RPG from for the X-Box and PC, from some of the minds of people who made Full Throttle and Grim Fandango.

Taken at it’s simplest level, it’s a jolly 3D romp through twisted landscapes in the style of American McGee’s Alice, but it’s a particularly well-balanced one: a wide variety of “psychic powers” – levitation, psychic blast, invisibility, psychokinesis, and pyrokinesis, to name a few – ensure that there are always a variety of ways to solve any given puzzle (climb the ropes, or bounce up using levitation, or float down from elsewhere on the map, or find another way to get the object you need…). Sadly, it suffers in many of the ways that console games – and many modern games – do in that the scope for adventuring is still somewhat limited: there are no puzzles, for example, based on persuasion of the NPCs, or on solving mazes, or on finding unusual uses for objects or combining objects. What puzzles exist are typically of the “find item”, “take key to door”, “deduce riddle” and “spot pattern” varieties.

But on another level, the game takes a deep (and, sometimes, dark) look into the human psyche, in a way that’s sometimes as funny as the political mentalities of Beneath A Steel Sky, and sometimes as chilling and disturbing as Eternal Darkness. You play a young psy-cadet at a psychonaut training summer camp (the psychonauts, it is barely explained, are mentalist crimefighters). At the start of the game you find yourself running around the real world, but as the game goes on you begin to spend an increasing amount of time in the “mental realm” (inside people’s heads), and that’s where it starts to become a little more clever.

Early in the game, during an exploration of your characters’ own repressed memories, you encounter ‘interference’ from another psychic, and there’s an interesting intermingling of character presences which isn’t fully explained until far later on, resulting in strange, dreamlike, fractured scenes. Later, you find yourself inside the head of a conspiracy theorist who’s driven himself mad with his incessant paranoia: in his mind, running through his subconscious, you find yourself surrounded by objects that seem to be watching or photographing you, and agents in disguise track your every move. In another mental realm – the mindsphere of a manic-depressive actress, you witness her life re-enacted on a stage, where the changing lighting reflects the mood swings through which the pictures of her history are repeated. In one scene, turning the lights to the “happy” side reveals the freedom the young actress felt at being able to leave home and do her own thing: turning the lights to the “depressed” side shows the suicide of her mother, throwing herself from a tall building… and later, as you’re clambering through her memories and fears, if you fall from a particularly treacherous ledge – if your volume is high enough – you hear her “depressed” voice mutter, “Just like mother.”

It’s sweet, and funny, and dark, and it plays like a dog on all but the beefiest of PCs. But it’s a wonderful little jaunt and a fun little adventure, despite it’s somewhat linear storyline and slightly repetitive puzzles. It’s got reasonable replay value, too, as there’s always the option to go back and “do things better”, although this doesn’t help relieve the game of it’s image as just another console platform game (which are infamous for trying to increase gametime by encouraging the player to redo things “for a better score”).

Photopia, Again

I wrote the other day about Photopia, one of the most brilliant and unusual pieces of interactive fiction I’ve ever experienced. Finally, JTA gave it a go, and loved it too – and he and I have been spending the last few days discussing some of the really, really clever bits and putting our own explanations to them. There are so many questions left unanswered, even after having completed the story, and I’m sure we’ll both be going back and playing it again.

Why hasn’t anybody else played yet? Well; it’s possible I just didn’t make it quite accessible enough. So I’ve packaged Photopia into a single-file executable. Just download and run it, and you’ll have it installed on your system. It takes up less than a megabyte of space and it’s brilliant not only as entertainment but also as a work of fiction.

Download Photopia – it’s self-extracting, self-installing. All you have to do it play it. Windows only. Click here and give it a go.

Photopia

Ever played a text-based adventure (interactive fiction) before? If so, this is a must-see. If not, now’s the time to start. I’ve just finished playing a short IF called Photopia, which won two prestigious (in IF circles) XYZZYnews awards back in 1998.

It’s not… great as an adventure game, but it’s amazing as a story. It’s… so amazingly clever and well thought-out. If you’re an experienced text-adventurer, you’ll be able to see it all in under an hour (and there is, of course, a SAVE and LOAD function). Wow. Just… just go play it. Go on.

Two good ways to get it:

Option 1: Download photo201.zip, packaged for Windows – download, extract to a folder, run the batch file (“play_the_game”, or something) – do this if you’re not experienced with setting up your IF enviroment.
Option 2: Get Photopia 2.01 (Glulx Edition) and a Glulx interpreter for your favourite operating system. You’ll work out the rest.