Coincidentally, my cold/flu/ugly fever seemed to break yesterday, the same day that PlanetSide was entering its last day of beta. I was able to somewhat crawl out of bed and enjoy the last few moments of precious gameplay. I won't be buying it. Not because of bugs or horrible experiences or what not, but because at launch they didn't have the features they planned on including pre-launch or any kind of varied gameplay. Important features, which will now not be put in place for another six months. You see, they have to slowly trickle out this new content in order to keep people interested (because it's not exactly an infinite supply of Coolness right from the beginning - much the opposite) over a long span of time. In about a year, PlanetSide will not only have what it should have had at launch, it'll also have a lot more stuff that should make it something more deserving of its inflated monthly fee. Maybe I'll check it out then.

While dancing ludely in the fever dreams of the flu, I had a couple of interesting game ideas. The first of which, the one that I've been thinking about the most, would mostly be a survey in gamer psychology. I don't think it would be enjoyable to play for more than a few hours, but it would show us how your average multiplayer FPS gamer operates.

Imagine this:

Two teams, each with a base and a flag and a large mass of space seperating the two said bases/flags. Standard Team Deathmatch setup, but each team has (10,000) points and, more importantly, nobody can get hurt or killed. You have two guns: A slow-firing pistol that is inaccurate at anything more than short range, a quick-firing rifle that is a bit more accurate at long ranges. When you shoot someone, you take points away from their team based on where you hit and with what weapon - the pistol has a 2x modifier while the rifle is 1x. Head shots get 40 points deducted, Torso gets 30, limbs get 20. The pistol would get 80, 60 and 40, respectively. If your flag is captured or your team hits 0 points, you lose. So your strategy would be to fight conservatively and intelligently. If your team is losing massive amounts of points in a battle, you need to pull back or do something different. You can't rush in, because you can't kill the enemy and take the field just by killing all of the opposition - you need to make them fall back by dropping their points, then you need to swoop in and take their flag. When the flag is taken, the enemy will need to do everything in their power to drop your team's points to 0 before the flag-carrier gets home. There is no way to get it back once it is in a player's possession, so the defense around a flag will be tight and nearly impossible to penetrate (I imagine ten players surrounding the flag so that nobody can squeeze between them and grab it).

But what if your team is running low on points? You can get more. By doing a Player Suicide, you will be taken out of battle for a minimum of 60 seconds and then be placed at a spawn point in the bowels of your base. For this, your team will get 250-500 points, but you have distanced yourself from the Battle and it may take a few minutes to get back to it - in that time, your team could lose more points than you gave back.

I think it would be interesting to see what happens when a game focuses strictly on strategy instead of "Die, Respawn, Fire, Repeat."


posted by AppleMask at 5/19/2003 06:05:00 PM

I was going to say something influential yesterday. And the day before. Maybe the day before that too, but I don't remember. I have contracted SARS. Actually, I've contracted a nasty cold, which is like SARS in that relatively few people who get the disease die from it, it's mentioned often by the press, and the two sound very much alike if you bite your tongue, tilt your head, imitate Carol Channing and have half of your brain removed in a traumatic life-saving surgery. Not the speech half, though, or you wouldn't be able to say much of anything.

So, media, if you're looking to interview a SARS victim, here I am.


posted by AppleMask at 5/14/2003 05:13:00 PM

Right, so here I am, as usual, surfing the shelves for any kind of interesting game. Nothing's out and nothing is coming out that pushes any kind of boundary or even attempts to be somewhat different. After over a decade of Shooters and Strategy games, isn't it time for something new? We've been reinventing and polishing the wheel for so long now that it's become quite tiresome. No amount of Great Stories or Interesting Gameplay Quirks will change the fact that the game itself is still based off of concepts that haven't changed in ten years. "More of a good thing" used to be good, now we're drowning in the things.

I eagerly await the next game that will revolutionize the industry and bring a new Era to gaming as we know it. I'll be waiting a long, long time.

Now that I've gotten PlanetSide out of my system, I can get back to doing the thing that are truly important, such as "nothing," as well as updating this now and again. There was much rejoicing.


posted by AppleMask at 5/08/2003 05:17:00 AM

Horrible spelling and horrible grammar are destroying my sanity. Damn it, people, if you "can't be bothered" to type in proper English or even understandable english, don't even think about touching your keyboard. You are scum and you should be killed with a spork and butter knife as quickly as possible. If English isn't your primary language and you're not completely fluent, I apologize and I ask that you continue learning as best you can; I know how difficult it must be for you in this almost entirely-English environment that is the internet. If you are fluent, please refer to my previous statement about you being scum and all. The same goes for you 1337-speakers and even those of you who fling around the "n00b" term like it makes you "cool," "hip" or "unique." It doesn't.

"omg wher eis teh baes??"
No.

"lol omg wtf r u talking aoubut??"
No.

"n00b j00 did n07 h4ck 73h b453"
No.

In the time it took you to write that bloody nonsense, I wrote something twice as long with proper spelling and punctuation to boot.

The whole of the internet needs to be wiped clean of you people. With anthrax, or perhaps SARS. Your stomachs will roast in hell, hopefully a little sooner than the rest of us.


posted by AppleMask at 4/28/2003 03:14:00 PM

Over the last few days I've been absorbing myself in the futuristic MMOFPS PlanetSide. Rather than explain the Awesomeness of it, I will recall one of my most memorable experiences so far.

The squad I was a part of consisted of six troops; The Pilot, who was the leader. The Engineer. The Hacker. The Medic. The cover fire, a troop specializing in the bulky 'MAX' armor with its large mounted weapons. And me, the Infiltrator, with the Cloak/Stealth suit. We quietly introduced ourselved and stepped into the large Galaxy aircraft. The plan was this: Fly to a base occupied by the enemy. Get inside, hack the Control Console and take over the base. Obviously, there was going to be some resistance.

The Galaxy was slow-moving. It seemed like an eternity passed before Pilot started shouting "Go go go!" We were hovering directly over the base. Automated enemy fire was going to take us down any moment.

We ejected.

We fell through the air, some sort of shielding slowing our falls so we could land safely. The last I saw of the Galaxy, it was crashing to a distant mountain with Pilot still inside. No matter; I pulled out my pistol and set my sights on the nearest bogies. The compound was littered with corpses and coffins from previous battles, but one enemy still wandered outside looking for trouble. I followed him behind the base's Vehicle Shed and unloaded a clip into his back. I would have to keep moving; his clone would come back with reinforcements.

I slid along the outside wall towards the side entrance. I hadn't seen any of the other members of my squad since the eject, but here I found MAX dealing with minor resistance while Hacker hacked the door controls. The corpses of foes hit the ground as the doors finally slid open.

Minor conflict after minor conflict hit us as we battled through to the Control Center. We were forced to take cover in the Generator room as missiles pounded at us from all sides. I still had not heard from Engineer, Medic or Pilot, and now it appeared that we wouldn't reach the Control Center. We were blocked in.

Two enemy MAX units stepped into the doorway. One of them knowingly activated his Darklight Implant, allowing him to see me cloaked. He fired several missiles towards me.

He didn't realize I was next to the generator.

His shots missed. I ran as fast as I could away from the generator as it went down. The power was out in the facility - nobody could spawn from the cloning facility, the weapon terminals were dead, the medical terminals useless.

Suddenly, the two MAXes dropped dead. Medic stepped through the doorway, rocket launcher at his side. He tended to our minor wounds as we fought our way out and, finally, into the small Control Center. The Hacker got to work. It would be a 3-minute hack job and it would alert every enemy in the area. Medic and MAX took up positions at the two opposite doorways. I went to the cargo hold outside and silently watched for intruders. Strangely, none came.

The Hacker's job was finished. It would now be 10 minutes before the hack finished itself and the base was captured. Each minute seemed to take an eternity as we waited. Nobody came to fight us. It wasn't until 2 minutes before Base Capture that the Engineer finally crackled over the radio - he had been supporting us from outside, building Automated Spitfire Turrets and Motion Sensors.

"What can you do about the generator?" I asked.

"Not a thing. It's down until the hack is complete."

And so we waited. Unable to restock on ammo due to the downed Weapon Terminals, we used the little we had left to defend our position from the weak opposition that managed to get by the turret defense.

Then, finally, the alarms sounded and the lights went off. The base was ours. Engineer immediately went to work on the generator. We cheered and packed up; it was time to move on.

"Where's Pilot?" Hacker asked. The Pilot was our only way of moving out together, otherwise it would be a long hike to the next base and we would probably get split up.

"I'm on my way, I had to pick up another Galaxy. Wait there."

MAX fell over dead. Literally.

Three enemy infiltrators uncloaked and began throwing grenades. Two MAXes came in through the door. I don't know how many infantry units ran in and caught me with my cloak down, but I turned it back on and ran the other way. Hacker and Medic ran in different directions.

No one gave chase to me as I fled through the corridors; they couldn't see me as well as the Medic and the Hacker. I eventually found my way out of the maze and into the Weapon Terminal room.

"Generator up," Engineer said.

"Uh, we're being killed down here, didn't you notice?" I replied.

Two things happened at that moment. My display indicated Engineer had just been killed by gunfire, and indicators displayed that the base had just been hacked. It was going to be re-captured by the enemy.

I tried to activate the weapon console. I needed ammo if I was going to get out of here. It refused to activate; the hack was disrupting the system. I would need to hack it. I didn't carry a hacking tool even though I was a Certified Hacker, it took up too much valuable space. I called on the radio for Hacker to come help me out of the tight spot, and it wasn't long before he obliged. Unfortunately, he brought company.

Four men surrounded him as he came into the room, emptying several clips into him from all sides. They hit me several times in the process, but they didn't see me in the corner; they just left to secure the rest of the base. I still needed ammunition. I approached the corpse of the Hacker and prodded around his body, looking for the tool he used. I found it and I used it, and I effectively alerted the base to my presence.

I stocked up on ammo and I ran from the room. I would need to find a medical terminal next. I didn't want to risk running through enemy lines with only a fraction of life left in me. However, it turned out that I didn't need to. I tripped over the Medic's body, which had plenty of med kits and hyposprays inside.

As I looted his corpse, I could hear the familiar mechanical whirring of an approaching MAX. I was crouching behind a console just below the exit, and he was circling that console. I recognized him. He was a clone of the fellow with the Darklight. I was pretty much screwed, cloaked or not.

He looked right at me. I could see the sense of surprise, that half-second "oh crap" as he froze and jumped back a step. Seeing your sworn enemy three feet in front of you, deep inside your base, can do that to you. Just as he was about to fire, four rockets hit him from behind. Rather than deal with me, he decided it would be more strategically sound to turn around and face... the Pilot.

I was more than happy to take the opportunity to leave, even though the Pilot was as screwed as I was. He wasn't wearing any kind of armour.

I sped up the stairs, through the open doorway and into the forest beyond. I saw - on my display - as I was limping through trees that he had, indeed, died at the hand of the MAX. He and the rest of the team had been cloned at another (friendly) base, miles away. It would be a long walk.

Longer, because I didn't know that two Infiltrators were stalking me.


posted by AppleMask at 4/24/2003 03:08:00 PM

I just took one of those online IQ tests. My IQ is 142 according to this thing, yet clearly the numbers are wrong. Like other tests, the 'vocabulary' questions start off innocent enough but soon devolve into nothing more than "tell us the ending to this cliche phrase," and there are enough of these things that they make up a significant portion of the test. So, I'm an above-average thinker because I know a couple of tired phrases? Thanks, Hollywood.


posted by AppleMask at 4/20/2003 08:53:00 PM

Obviously, game prices have been on the rise for a while now. In 1998, a top game could be picked up for $29.99 (US) - if that same game went on shelves today (assuming it was up to the current tech standard), it would sell for $49.95 - $59.95. That's almost double the price - but why?

There are several explanations, but these have always been the top three:

3) Crappy Economy
2) Bloody Piracy
1) Damn Development Costs have gone up

The economy isn't all that bad, but the other two have always been bullshit and nothing but. Well, alright, they have a small bit of weight to them. They're somewhat true. Piracy has always been an issue, and it has been getting considerably worse over the last five years - almost double what it was before. Strangely enough, the 'pirates' blame this on the soaring prices. So do I; I've been known to pirate from time to time, too. The last thing I want to do is spend all of my hard-earned money on a game not even worth half of its pricetag. We're caught in a 'vicious cycle': Piracy has gotten worse because the pricing has gotten worse, the pricing has gotten worse because the piracy has gotten worse.

Development costs are high, yeah. A few years ago an engine and a game to go with it would cost less than 8 million US dollars. We laughed at folks like ION Storm's former boss, John Romero, who had a budget of 26 million to basically modify a Quake engine for the game 'Daikatana' (and clearly the money doesn't show, but let's move on). Now, a 26 million-dollar budget isn't quite as funny as it used to be. 20 million is becoming the average budget, because technology has progressed and that technology is expensive as hell.

But that doesn't quite explain why games are becoming more expensive. Even with excessive budgets, most games still bring back a healthy profit - average game sales have been going up at a fairly decent pace, not down. We all have probably heard of Vice City's astonishing 220 million-dollar sales, which goes to show that if you make an above-average game, you're going to bring in above-average profits. I like to think of it as, if you make a game worth making, you're going to get a nice bag of money as your return.

Back almost 20 years ago, the gaming industry crashed because lots of crappy games hit the market. People wouldn't buy every single game on the shelf - they'd buy only the ones that appealed to them or whatever their strange cave-dwelling pre-modern instincts told them to buy. Not enough money was being pulled in from any one title and the games stopped being made entirely. It looks like we're headed in that direction again; we have more crappy unoriginal, uninteresting games like 'Devastation' hitting the market than we previously thought was possible, and most people don't want to buy them. Between the crappy games and the crappy pricing, the industry's going to go down, down, down. Very soon.

Unless, of course, the investors take their grubby greedy hands out of the developers orifices and let things go their own way.


posted by AppleMask at 4/20/2003 04:16:00 PM

For several years, I have adamantly displayed my prowess with a trackball. It was a beautiful Logitech thing, shining grey and red as most Logitech products do, with several buttons and a shape that made my hand convulse with pleasure. With that ball under my fingertips I could point and click with the best of them. Sadly, those wonderous days came to an end this morning.

I won't go into the details of my beloved device's demise, but needless to say I was forced to go back to the mouse. No longer can I dominate the playing fields with instant 360s, as like the rest of you poor mouse dwellers I must now lift-and-replace every 6-8 inches of glide. At the very least, it's a Logitech mouse and an optical one at that. It performs very well. I'm almost afraid to say that, perhaps, I will never return to the ways of the trackball - even if the opportunity presents itself. I'm... addicted to this thing. I have officially made the switch back.

There have been reports that the XBox is getting yet another price cut. Starting in Europe, a similar cut is eventually going to be made in the US as well. This terrifies me, because it tells us where the already-insane pricing of gaming is going to go in the next few months.

If you're not in the know already, industry insiders announced prior to the initial XBox release that, due to the high costs of building the console, it would take four to five years for Microsoft to begin making a profit from the system. This was when it went for $299 (US). After the price cut to $199 (US), you can guess that the estimate jumped even higher - particularly because Microsoft had not yet sold half of the number of systems they expected to sell. The next cut should bring it to $149 here in the States, and that just leaves us wondering: What will Microsoft do to make up for almost a decade of projected loss?

The gaming industry is heading towards a crash that has only been heard of in Legend and Fairytale (as well as 70s newspapers). It may not be during the time of the XBox or the PS2, but it's coming. The prices of games go higher and the systems they run on go lower. Soon, we'll be paying more for a game than what we play it on. I don't know about anyone else, but I find that thought disturbing. People will stop paying entirely, and there will be nothing left to do but watch as the industry crumbles and is rebuilt anew. We'll continue the cycle, again and again and again, until Commercialism takes the hint and a step back from our beloved pastime.

I'm going to have nightmares tonight.


posted by AppleMask at 4/20/2003 12:07:00 AM

I'd like to start off my first posting with a public apology to anyone who has conducted an audio interview with me over the last few years.

I'm so, so very sorry.

I just finished up an interview with a fellow over some strangely arcane chat program. I've done this several times in the past, but this one was different because I had the chance to record it for future unedited listening. If your readership significantly dropped after those 45-some minutes of my flat monotone voice babbling about something vaguely related to the subject, I can only beg for your forgiveness. How could I have possibly known that I was so boring? I never got that particular memo. Crap.

Right, so after I recovered from the small shock of knowing my entire array of beliefs was a terrible lie, I got back to work on my game design. Actually I didn't, because I am in a terrible design/writer's block at the moment. My time was spent discussing games, and whether or not they actually qualify as art.

This incredibly important issue has but two sides: Games are a work of art, or the other side that claims video games are nothing of the sort. I've always pushed for the former. When people think of art, they generally think of a painting on a wall. You think about the "greats," such as Picasso or da Vinci or whoever else public schooling pounded into your head. A smaller percentage of those people think about books or films, of Terry Pratchett and Alexander Payne respectively, though most will often accept all of these things as art and artists.

However, very few people will recognize a game as a form of art. Despite that a game can and does include other recognized forms of art - paintings, books, movies - it will never be recognized by a large majority as the art that it truly is. Maybe it takes a degree in design to see the gentle ebb and flow of this form of interactive entertainment. You can't put a label on what makes art or what defines it, but my personal belief has always been that if something can make you smile or teach you an important lesson, or inspire you to do things (be they great or small), or give you an answer to a question, or simple make you sit back and say "wow," it's art.

To get away from the mushy crap, art is what you make it. I don't think a pure red canvas is art, but apparently the schmucks who paid several million dollars for the thing would say otherwise. That doesn't stop me from questioning your sanity when you claim a video game isn't art, though, after you've been shown a beautifully rendered cityscape flush with bustling traffic, NPCs who react brilliantly, emergent interaction with a nearly infinite number of possibilities, as well as a lot of polygons and technical mumbo jumbo that would leave me giggling with glee for hours on end.


posted by AppleMask at 4/18/2003 05:35:00 PM

Introductions. I hate them. They never go right. But we have to start somewhere.

Hi, I'm AppleMask. You probably don't know me. You think you do, but you're probably thinking of someone else. Chances are, you've read other "blogs" (crap, that sounds like a noise my cat makes), and they always begin with someone spouting off how nervous they are and how they never thought they'd do one of these. Yeah, neither did I. I laughed at and I still laugh at the majority of you people who believe in publishing your personal lives for the rest of us to see. But then, I'm here right now, so that certainly says something about my character.

Let me tell you who I am, and dagnabbit, I'm only going to say this once. I'm in my twenties and I am an 'amateur' video game designer. I write, I sing, I program, I click buttons on a mouse to create nifty 3d spaces and then I do more singing. But don't let that period fool you; I actually do a lot more. I also breathe and consume a fairly small amount of space. I sleep at least 8 hours of the day.

Actually, I don't do a helluva lot now that I think about it.

Anyway, next stop. What you'll see here: Ranting. Raving. Ignorance. More Ranting, perhaps mixed with more ignorance. Thankfully, you will not see me giggling over my newest girl or how SO, like, totally inconsiderate that dude was when he like pulled out in front of me, man. I hope not, anyway.

So yeah, there'll be more to come after this. Stay tuned.


posted by AppleMask at 4/18/2003 03:36:00 AM