Oldskooler Ramblings

A lot of old gamers continue to beat the dead horse of “The games were better when I was a kid!”  While there are a ton of reasons why this is just nostalgia rearing its ugly head, there is one very strong reason this is true in some cases:  Since the graphics and sound of early home computers were so terrible compared to arcades of the day, game designers had to focus on actual game design and not just excuses to blow shit up.

I bring this up because my eight-year-old son Max and I just finished playing Archon for the last 90 minutes.  We didn’t even play it on one of the “cool” platforms, like NES or Amiga, but rather on one of the ugliest ports: The IBM PC.  Terrible sound, horrible graphics, and yet none of that mattered.  In 3 minutes I was able to explain the basics, and then 90 minutes later we were still laughing at each other for some crazy battle.  The entire time, I couldn’t get over how basic game design still reigns supreme, 25 years later.

I finished Half-Life 2 today for the first time (yes, I really did wait until the Orange Box until I bought and played Half-Life 2 — I’m a very patient man) and I have to say that was easily one of the top five games I’ve ever played.

I have a friend that didn’t like Half-Life 2 as much as the later Episodes 1 and 2 (which I have not started yet), and, if I remember his opinion correctly, it was because there was “no story”. I am assuming what he meant by that was that he didn’t feel there was enough explanation as to what was going on. I can see his point; there is no narration, and little dialog directly explains key elements. But I think the reason people like HL2 so much is because of what is not explicitly said — what you get between the lines.

There are lots of little things you can pick up if you listen to all of the dialog (4-speaker audio helps, so you can separate distant/soft dialog from environmental sound effects) and keep your eyes peeled, and while they may not offer direct answers, they give you something much more powerful: Empathy. Gordon Freeman is not Duke Nukem; he’s a scientist who has been thrust into a situation where he’s just as disoriented as everyone else. To the resistance, he’s almost mythical, able to survive and accomplish what no other person has done. Being confronted with that while at the same time being partially in the dark really gives you a sense of what he must be going through. He’s just as confused as everyone else, and only quick wits and the luck of having a hazard suit is what keeps him a hair away from death.

For example (spoiler alert), there’s one place you can look at before the bridge area where there is a series of oil tanks behind a chain link fence. There is a part of the fence that is damaged that you can climb over. There are no supplies, ammunition, or new weapons in this area; there is no reason to go to the trouble of entering it. But if you do, what you find is a person slumped in the corner, dead of a self-inflicted shot to the head, revolver still near his hand. Marked on the wall next to him are three side-view anatomy illustrations of the heads of a monkey, a human, and a human with a Combine soldier mask on. It is after a few seconds of looking at these that it dawns on you that the soldier is not merely wearing a mask, but that the mask is physically part of his anatomy, along with other subtle modifications. That completely changes the tone of the game: You are not only made aware of something insidious and quite disturbing, but worse, the people you meet later in the game don’t know this, and are assuming that the soldiers are simply “police”, or otherwise people on the wrong side of the conflict. They’re fighting what they think is some sort of a civil war, when you secretly know the truth. It’s those kinds of moments, extremely powerful moments through very subtle delivery, that immerse you in Gordon’s situation.

I became more emotionally involved in Half-Life 2 than I have any other game. I was (sometimes simultaneously) surprised, shocked, disgusted, anxious, angry, determined, vengeful, and awestruck. And, I’m not ashamed to admit, I got so worked up sometimes that two nights last week I had to go to bed early and sleep for 12 hours, having made myself quite sick through sheer concentration and stress while playing.

I’ve been a fan of Roger Ebert since the early 1980s, but he is truly mistaken when he has declared, several times, that video games are not art. I think just two hours with Half-Life 2, the same time he spends watching a movie, would change his mind.

To gear up for finally playing Half-Life 2 (and all the other goodies in the Orange Box), I’ve registered my original Half-Life with Steam and started playing through the original HL, moving on to Opposing Force, and finally Blue Shift. I wanted to get reacquainted with the setting and atmosphere before I took the plunge. Yes, I am that thorough. While such practices always result in much good-natured mocking from my friends, I doubt any of them are surprised.

To try to bone my skills back up to where they were a decade ago, I occasionally take a break and play Half-Life Deathmatch. It was during one of these sessions that Max, my 8-yr-old, saw me playing. After the requisite talk about “the blood and gibs aren’t real, it’s just a game, you would never do this in real life, right?” etc., he watched me get into a particularly hilarious crowbar fight with an evenly-matched opponent. We were both howling, and then he asked the inevitable question, “Can I play?”

Could he? It’s a mouse-and-keyboard FPS with an ESRB rating of “M”. The required skill level and content are years beyond him. And yet, he’s a pretty well-adjusted kid; whenever he sees something in a movie he can’t handle, he knows to close his eyes and/or cover his ears until it’s over. He knows when things are fake and when they’re real. He’s intellectually curious; all this last week I’ve been teaching him chess because he saw a set-up board somewhere and wanted to learn. Not bad for an eight-year-old.

Hell, he’s the son of the co-founder of MobyGames. Why not?

I installed Steam on his machine and registered my copy of Blue Shift to his account; like Half-Life, everything popped up as being registered and in ten minutes he was going through the Hazard Training Course. 20 minutes after that, we were playing HL Deathmatch against each other, in a private local LAN server hosted on his machine. And about 30 minutes after that, he pulled something so clever and so beyond his sum of experiences that it completely floored me. I’m still in awe over it. It’s why I’m posting this entry. See if you can follow along:

One of the sneakiest weapons in Half-Life Deathmatch are tripmines. You stick one to a surface (usually a wall), and a few seconds later a laser comes out of it, sensing the other side of the room. If anything crosses its path, the mine blows up, usually taking the offender with it. On our first map, I was cheerfully placing these all over the place, and he quickly learned what they are and how to use them.

That’s not the cool part. The cool part is, on the second map we played, there is a large area with munitions you can get to by swimming in a small canal with a very strong current. The water in the canal is murky and you can’t see into it until you’re actually down there swimming in the water. The current gets stronger along the way, to a point where you can’t fight it and are swept into the giant room with the munitions. About ten minutes after starting the map, I dove into the canal to get to the bigger room. I swam until the current started to sweep me towards the room… and it was at this point I saw a tripmine placed in the canal, unavoidably in my path. He had not only hidden a tripmine in murky water that you can’t see into until you’re already in it… but had placed it after the point where it still might have been possible to swim out of the way. I had about 1.5 seconds to take that in before it blew me to bits.

Let’s review: Eight-year-old, with no past history of playing any FPS, online or not, accomplishes in less than an hour something so sneaky and clever it takes most young adults a few days of playing, against many other people, to pick up.

I was pwned by my eight-year-old son. In a clever way, not a young-kid reflex twitch way. Holy mother of crap!

For the first time in as long as I can remember, I’ve played a game to completion.  While I’m 3 years late, I finally finished Project: Snowblind, the unofficial sequel to Deus Ex: Invisible War.  (Why unofficial?  Because when they saw the poor sales numbers of Deus Ex 2, they decided to “salvage” the project and change the assets to something generic to distance themselves from the property.)

If you’ve played the original Deus Ex but hated the sequel, you need to play Snowblind because it offers a glimpse into how the series could have dug itself out of a hole.  The first two Deus Ex games were mostly about avoiding combat; Snowblind promptly thrusts you into combat and never lets up.  Unlike the first two games, it is finally satisfying to enable invisibility, walk up to an enemy, and shotgun blast him into another timezone.

Snowblind is less than $10 for any of the three platforms it came out on; I recommend a console version because the PC version has some major glitches and no patches were ever released.

(This post is a week late, but posts are usually better late than never.) I went to GDC the first week of March, and although I was incredibly sick the entire time and missed 90% of the conference, I did manage the following highlights which made it all worthwhile:

• Finally met Mike Melanson, reverse-engineer virtuoso of video and audio codecs, because he lives in the area. Went to dinner with him and the local MobyGames crew (Flipkin, Ron, Tom Servo) and had great food in a great bar called The Chieftain. (Despite the name, it was an Irish/California-themed bar.)  I quickly lost my voice, but it was worth it.
• GDC awards ceremony. Graeme Devine presented a community award to The Fat Man; Lord British awarded lifetime achievement to Miyamoto, who accepted in person; some Sam & Max jokes; great fun. Presented by Tim Schaefer who cracked jokes. Excellent vibe. That was the only time I saw Simon Carless (on stage) as he was too busy to meet with anyone during the event. Our MobyGames intern rushed Miyamoto and shook his hand as he got off stage. Whore :-)
• Later that night, we went to a bar looking for food and I quite literally bumped into The Fat Man by accident and we talked for 10 minutes. He loves Moby; I love his music; it was something I always wish I could have done and now I have. That guy deserves more work.
• Thursday I met Chris Hargrove (Kiwidog / Hornet) and some other sceners. Chris was this chance thing — I literally screamed to him from the booth when I recognized him. Hadn’t seen him since he crashed at my place a decade ago. We talked about why Duke Nukem Forever has been delayed for so long; caught up on other stuff; he gave me the skinny on what finally happened to Tran. Nice catch-up.
• Thursday went to the programmer’s challenge and got a few right (to myself — the gameshow was for the super-talented panel) .  Some questions/answers were played for laughs. Some scary smart people on that panel…
• Friday participated in a game preservation roundtable sponsored by IGDA and am now a member of the group (!).
• Met Jeff Roberts of Rad Game Tools and expressed my appreciation of his Smacker video codec, a low-resource codec used in hundreds if not thousands of DOS games. Always wanted to do that.

Sick, sick, and more sick, had three fevers, just now this week getting over it. Because of fever I was in the hotel room half the time, only saw Miyamoto at the awards and missed his keynote. I also had to leave Friday afternoon and missed the demoscene party that Pyro throws every year after the event… Still, I’ll never forget it and am glad I went.

In all my days of computing, the software that has impressed me the most has been software that pushes a machine seemingly beyond its limits, making it do things that it was never meant to do. One such piece of software was ICON: The Quest For The Ring. It tweaked CGA to within an inch of its life, displaying 16-color graphics on a video card only meant for four ugly colors in graphics mode.

I’m a software collector. I collect vintage retail packages of software as a hobby. (I’m comfortable enough with my nerditude to admit this, so go ahead and mock me — I don’t mind.) So imagine the nerdly dance of joy I did when I found that ICON was up for auction, bid on it, and won! The package I’d been searching for for over two decades, the game that had inspired me to learn assembler and graphics tweaking, the game that shaped my hobbyist world, would finally be mine!

That’s where the governmental workers come into the story. It seems that they were in need of a football to relieve the overwhelming tension and stress of delivering packages, so what I actually received was this:

If you’re not familiar with the hobby of software collecting, I can sum it up in five words: The Value Is The Box. 90% of a software collectable’s value is in how good a condition the box is, then the printed materials inside it, then the diskette labels, then finally the actual software code itself. (Why? Because most software has been pirated already… and most people throw away the box and lose the manuals.)

My twenty-year dream quite literally crushed, I decided to visit my local US Postal Services office to file the claim for the $50 I had paid for it. And this is where we again meet our lovable and cute governmental workers, for here is what I learned today about insuring packages:

1. You have to provide proof of the item’s value. So if the USPS determines that your item is worth less than what you insured it for, and you cannot provide any “documented proof” (the validity of which is at the government worker’s discretion, of course) that it is worth more, you get what they are willing to give you, not what it is actually worth. This is how they justify giving you less money than the value you wrote down on the form when requesting insurance.
2. You cannot insure something for more than what you paid for it. See #1 for rationale. So if you completely luck out and find an Akalabeth with a Buy It Now of $4, the most you can insure it for is $4 even though its value is anywhere from 10 to 150 times that value.
3. If your item is only slightly damaged, and you want to keep it, you can’t. You must completely give over every single thing you are filing a claim for, never to be seen again. This means that there is no protection against *partial* damage — if it’s partially damaged, bend over, since you can’t get partial money for it.

See, all this time I was under the silly impression that, if you insured something for a certain dollar value, that was the value they were going to give you when you showed them it was damaged. Or that maybe, just maybe, you were insuring it against partial damage — like depreciation or something. How wrong I was: Insurance is only protection against complete and total destruction of property and/or complete and total loss of delivery. If it *arrives*, and is only *somewhat* damaged, you’re shit out of luck! How glad I am to be educated! (although I could have done without the “bending over the table” portion of my education)

So what did I do? I made the obvious determination that something I had been searching two decades to locate — in *any* condition — was worth more than the $15 or so they were going to give me for it. So I tore up the claim form, took back the item, and left. Since then, I have been researching cardbox box reconstruction techniques, for I am not only a nerd, but a stubborn nerd.

About the only satisfaction I got from today’s visit was the audible popping noise the government worker’s synapses made snapping apart into individual neurons as I tried to explain that, yes Daisy Mae, the value really was the BOX itself and not the contents inside it. The complete and total lack of understanding confused her to such a degree that she was unable to blink her eyes in unison for at least 10 minutes after I stopped talking. I could have done without the drool, though.

I never said I was a patient man. As a young teen, I would cheat on book reports by reading the Cliff notes or watching the movie. I would rush to the 7-eleven directly after school on Fridays to grab the latest comic books (this is before all the comic shops standardized on Wednesdays, obviously). I loaded COMMAND.COM into a RAMDISK so I wouldn't have to keep replacing the floppy boot disk after I ran large programs. That sort of thing. Well, I squeaked through high school. I eventually gave up reading and collecting comics. I got a hard drive in 1990 and stopped booting off of floppies. A lot of my issues corrected themselves as I got older.

Except Hack.

In January of 1985, the very first game I played on the family 8088 was Hack. It was given to me by a friend of my brother's, and it was yet another life-defining moment; the good kind, where it shapes you positively while you're not paying attention. Being the first PC game I had access to (my prior pirating experience was Apple II), I was determined to give it a shot. Ironically, getting Hack up and running involved some hacking in and of itself: You had to alter config.sys to add ansi.sys; you had to alter hack.cnf to define how many drives you had, or a hard disk; you had to learn several bizarre movement keys like K for up, J for down, and other stuff that didn't make any sense. It almost wasn't worth the trouble for a young PC user.

Once fired up, Hack treated me to a complex dungeon where almost anything could happen: Shoot a bolt of fire, have it bounce off a wall, and ricochet back to hit you and catch your scrolls on fire; or kill an animal that turns people to stone, put on some gloves, and then use the dead carcass to turn enemy monsters into stone; etc. It was complex, it was deep, and it was wonderful.

It was also harder than a motherfucker. Hack, and its descendant Nethack, are some of the less forgiving members of the Roguelike family. It was relatively easy to go from king of the world to king of the dead in as little as a three moves. Every new machine I bought or built would get Hack installed as a nice little "initiation", and every time I wouldn't finish. I'd fire it up a few months later, 5 or 10 times a year, still wouldn't finish. I'd cheat terribly, even finally finding the Amulet of Yendor, and the game would catch me cheating and write "You escaped with a CHEAP PLASTIC IMITATION of the Amulet" to the high score file. The screams of frustration were audible for several city blocks.

I got better. I found all sorts of things totally by accident. Eat a floating eye and you get sick, but if something later blinds you (like a flash of yellow light, or a potion of blindness), you can suddenly see ALL of the monsters in the level. Get drunk and read a teleportation scroll, and instead of teleporting somewhere else in the level, you teleport to a different level entirely. The more I played, the more I discovered. (I also discovered later in life that hack had prepared me for Unix administration, since the movement and option setting keys are identical to the "VI" file editor.) Yet I still didn't finish.

Two weeks ago, I decided to play Hack on my 8088. I had forgotten how slow it played; the more monsters that were roaming the level you were on, the slower it took to respond. And it was then that I realized I could use that artifact of processing speed to my advantage. Most of the time that I had died, it was through some incredibly stupid event, like a dragon turning the corner and frying me with a bolt of fire, or not knowing that an umber hulk was in the same darkened room as I was, making me confused. When a level went from fast response to slow, it meant that a large amount of monsters had suddenly materialized. I would immediately check myself and carefully consider each decision. With this newfound realization, I played with hyperfocusing intensity over the course of several days.

Today, twenty-one years after I first got Hack working on my 8088, we come full circle, back to the 8088, to what I think are the two most lovely text screens I have ever seen on any CGA monitor:

I never said I was a patient man… but I guess I am :-)

I was talking to a demoscene aquaintance via IM tonight, and asked him what his avatar picture was. He said it was from Hat Trick Hero / Football Champ (Taito, 1990)… and also casually dropped the info that he was the world champion of that game, by a large margin. Which reminded me of my “World Champion” theory: I believe that everyone, everywhere, is World Champion of something, although they may never find out what in their lifetime. There are people who work very hard at something and achieve it, like Lance Armstrong, or are born with good genes and figure out the best way to exploit them through incredible practice and work, like Arnold Schwartzegger.

But what about the unknowns? Like the housewife who accompanies her husband to a shooting range and, on a complete whim, squeezes off a few shots and to everyone’s amazment she’s a crack shot with perfect aim… or like Jimi Hendrix, who did crazy unconventional stuff that the world may have never known if he hadn’t picked up a guitar. That’s the kind of stuff that fascinates me, and my friend was lucky enough to figure out what he was World Champion of. Bastard :-)

Being a programmer for two decades has given me a special insight into video games; because I know how the majority of them are programmed, hardly any of them feel foreign to me. I may not be a master at any one particular game, but I can definitely pick them up quickly.

This has led to some chuckles along the way. Two games popular around the house lately have been Need For Speed Underground 2 and Ratchet: Deadlocked. In NFSU2, you can use a simulated GPS to continuously point an arrow to your destination so you can find it easier. When you first select the destination, it pauses for a few seconds with the text “Searching Connection: Unable to contact Satellite”. Sounds like a cute simulation, yes? Because I’m a programmer, I know what’s actually happening: The pathfinding algorithm is slow and taking a few seconds to plot the quickest path to the destination. The programmers of NFSU2 masked that pause with the “Searching Connection” message so the user wouldn’t see it as a flaw.

As for Ratchet: Deadlocked, there is a 2-player cooperative mode where you can play through the game with a friend. If the two of you get too far away from each other while playing, the game threatens to blow the both of you up if you don’t get closer to each other again. While this looks intentional, I have a very strong suspicion that it is there to mask a limitation of the game engine — such as, if both players are too far away from each other, that’s too much geometry for the engine to cache and fling around.

I’d be curious if anyone else notices things like this…

Okay, once and for all: No, I did not intentionally name my children Sam and Max after Steve Purcell’s excellent comic series (or the Lucasarts game). But I am glad it worked out that way :-)

In a few years, they’ll be old enough to play it — I can hardly wait!