Neurotech - the weblog of Luke Reeves

We went for dinner with a cousin of mine last night and he was half-bitching about how there’s been no “really new” games out recently (specifically for the PC since that’s what he has). At first I didn’t think much about it, but later I did put more consideration into the issue.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m not saying that new games suck. I happen to enjoy most of my last few years of purchases, but he’s right - none of them are new or innovative. Everything seems to be pretty evolutionary instead of revolutionary. Like even looking at the last few games we’ve bought:

• Guitar Hero - great, but totally derivative of every other beat- and music-game before it. It’s really really good though, but doesn’t really bring anything actually new to the table.
• Battlefield 2, Metal Gear Solid 3, Half Life 2, Civilization 4, Resident Evil 4, Gran Turismo 4, The Elder Scrolls 4 - anything with a number after it is almost always by definition not innovative. Granted I loved the shit out of most of these games (and I still play Battlefield quite a bit).
• Prey - now I just got this, but I’ve played the demo. It’s a hell of a lot of fun, but again nothing new. The lone badass in some s.f. environment killing aliens is a very old formula. The engine has neat “portal” technology so it does get points for that.
• Titan Quest - I’m enjoying this one, but Blizzard would probably win if they sued these guys for plagiarism. I’m only half serious.
• God of War - another PS2 one from last year. Really good action game, but beat-em-ups have been around forever.

So what recently have I played that’s fresh and innovative? Katamari Damacy comes immediately to mind (of course). Then the creators followed it up immediately with two sequels that while enjoyable added very little to the main idea.

There’s at least Spore in the future that’s pretty innovative. And the Nintendo DS has some games that are - off the top of my head I’d say Phoenix Wright and Trauma Center. And I’m not pining away for innovation and claiming things suck. I’m just wondering where it is right now.

Anyone have suggestions for games that are innovative and fun? Not just one or the other :-)

We’ve been promoted from being tentative science fiction television geeks to actual ones. Today we attended our first, ahem, s.f. convention (Toronto Trek). I have admit it was pretty awesome. The question and answer sessions were great, we got a bunch of autographs and posed with people and browsed collectibles and shit for hours. This feels like a confession!

Some of the people were (obviously) George Takei - who Chie bonded with via shared language - Michael Shanks, Lexa Doig, Garret Wang and Richard Hatch. They were all fairly normal (as far as we could tell). We’ll probably go next year too :-)

There’s now a Luke-sanctioned Insipid Firefox/Flock extension. It works well on the two systems I’ve used it on and seems to not format my system!

Just kidding, it’s quite good. The guy who wrote it, Danny Miles, contributed quite a bit of backend code as well to allow this extension (and future ones) to easily communicate with the Insipid code base.

I was going to start by posting some pictures of the first part of my “vacation” in Niagara Falls but I can’t find them. So I’ll skip right to Sault Ste. Marie and Iron Bridge.

This is a shot of coming in by the airport in the Sault:

One of the places we checked out in the Sault was an old park near the locks and the steel mill. The first shot is off the steel mill. The second here is a railroad bridge that used to rotate to allow trains to cross over the locks, and then rotate back to let the ships through. It’s been unused for quite some time, and apparently even the Canadian portion of the locks has been busted for about a year. All the ships have been using the American locks instead:

I missed pictures of this construction project though outside of the Sault - there’s a massive bypass being built north of the city so that highway 17 can skip the local traffic altogether.

Later on in Iron Bridge we took our boat and my uncle’s boat out on the river and checked some shit out. Look at this here nature!

You can actually see a family of ducks here:

We then murdered and devoured them. Just kidding.

This next photo is “the island”. This place was great. A bunch of us (teenagers) would get our parents to drop us off upriver in canoes and we’d just kinda float and paddle until here, set up camp and sorta party. It of course never got out of hand since several hours later we had to paddle our asses out of there:

On our way to the island we sometimes stopped at this very sandbar. I wanted to write SOS in stones but lacked the energy:

The next few are the Red Rock dam. We used to come out here as teenagers too to party. Once we locked ourselves out of the fucking car (in the winter) and none other than the great Roberto S. ran the several kilometers back to town to find the only locksmith:

Also there’s a bunch of other local pictures I took that I have to track down. I think Chie moved a batch to her computer already, but if I find them I’ll post them.

Oh and of course the most important part of the trip - the goddamned dog!:

It occured to me, after getting a bunch of longing text messages from Derek, that I barely told anyone that I was going on a vacation.  Chie, her parents and I went to Niagara Falls last week and Iron Bridge over this weekend and just arrived back tonight.  I’ll probably post a bunch of pictures from the trip.  Unless I get even more lazy than normal.

So in the last couple weeks I “picked up” both Half-Life 2: Episode One, and Sin Episode One: Emergence off of Steam. Both were under twenty bucks and it was seamless to download and play them. As much as I first disliked the idea of Steam I really, really dig it now. It’s a distribution system for games that seems actually done right.

Sin Epsiode One: Emergence

I’ve never actually played the first Sin, but after watching a bunch of preview gameplay movies for this I bought it. It was definitely worth it - the game itself for me lasted a good six hours or so in total. It uses the Source engine (hence the title for this entry) and looks very good.

There’s not much action in the screenshots since it’s hard to take a picture while actually playing those scenes :) One refreshing change in Sin was that it was hard - I fucking died like 30 times playing it. It has an adaptive difficulty system which makes the enemies harder depending on how easily you breeze through preceeding ones. It works really well (in an FPS that is - I still hate Oblivion’s levelling!)

Half Life 2: Episode One

This one was a hell of a lot more anticipated than Sin, by me and everyone else on the Internet. It too was worth the wait. It’s a great game - er, episode. It picks up exactly where the last game left off and it’s just as polished as the full Half Life 2 was. It looks fantastic - there’s a lot of liberal use of HDR that really works well. The first chunk takes place in City 17’s citadel which is a massive, semi-open structure and the dynamic lighting blew me away there.

Alyx’s AI should get awards too for being the first escort NPC in a game that I didn’t immediately want to kill. Most situations like that are just awful, with the NPC dying all the time, getting in your way, and so on. Not with Alyx - she follows you as opposed to leading you, and never really blocks your path. She can die though (that surprised me at first), but it only happens if you fuck up.

Here’s a batch of shots. I think it looks pretty good on my old(ish) system, with HDR and filtering and what not (although I think FRAPS takes screenshots without the card’s anti-aliasing visible):

There’s also a ton of commentary where the developers talk about everything - covering engine implementation details, level design, sequence scripting and all sorts of things:

The commentary first appeared in the Lost Coast tech demo, and I hope they keep it in all their future releases.

Comparison

While I enjoyed both of these episodes I definitely had more fun playing Sin. Blasphemous, I know. Half Life was more polished, thought out and so forth but Sin had a lot going for it. I mean, you can literally blow people’s brains out. And the breast physics are unmatched.

Seriously though, Sin gave me about three times the amount of play than HL2E1. I don’t regret either purchases, I just hope that Valve makes the next one a bit longer.

So I switched this stupid thing over to Wordpress finally. Movable Type (the old system) was just so shitty at dealing with comment spam that I couldn’t take it any longer. Hopefully this system will block that a little more - just having a moderation queue before comments are posted helps a lot.

Anyways, random picture - we (Victor and I) saw this on the way home today. We both laughed:

And this is what was waiting next to the car in the lot yesterday:

I’d write some more, but I gotta get back to the new Half Life 2 episode.

Well, I went down to PC Village after work and grabbed a new power supply (Antec TruePower2 430w) and chassis fan and everything appears to be working just fine. The CPU and case temperature seem to be actually in line now with what they should be, as opposed like 12 degrees hotter. And I also found a replacement Microsoft Natural Keyboard for the one I broke on the weekend. Score!

Hey remember on the weekend when I was talking about how happy I was that my aging gaming PC was still good enough to run Oblivion? Well tonight it just committed suicide. James was here when it happened, so I partially blame him… but we suspect that it’s either just the power supply or just the CPU. Tomorrow I’m going to grab a new PSU and drop it in - if that doesn’t fix it, I’ll have to replace a lot more. My CPU is a Socket A, which like nobody sells anymore. So I’ll have to get a new motherboard and CPU. Oh, and my 9800 Pro is AGP, which they barely make anymore so I’d have to get a new video card (or be stuck with AGP for even longer).

So basically it’s a win/win situation - either it can be remedied with a simple fix or I get a new, smokin’ machine!

For a while now I’ve been playing through Morrowind and it’s expansions. It’s been a pretty decent game so far. The thing is though, I’ve also had Oblivion sitting here for like a month - but I was sure that it wouldn’t run well at all on my machine. So today I got frustrated during a quest in Morrowind and decided to test out the sequel and see how bad it actually runs on my aging “gaming machine”.

It turns out that it runs pretty well! When the game auto-configured, it set everything to medium. I double checked the resolution and it had decided to set my screen to 640×480. That gave me pause - but I said fuck it, set it to 1024×768 and upgraded a couple of the recommendations and it looks pretty good. The engine sadly performs better than it’s predecesser (and that’s even with the Morrowind FPS Optimizer). I played through the introductory dungeon in probably 10 minutes, just testing the waters. I reached the outside environment and man, are the visuals nice.

The only time I’ve seen a poor framerate really was when I entered a room and spontaneously 10 NPCs decided to get up and walk around. There had to have been a bug there, since it looked absolutely stupid.

The game itself, on first impression obviously, seems just as good as the reviews. The loading times are remarkably short when they do occur, which is the opposite of what I expected. The quests seem to have more thought put into them than Morrowind, and the world seems a lot more real. It’s nice to see trees for example. And good God the facial animations are fantastic.

The only two things that jumped out at me were the fact that you can’t make notes on your map anymore, and you can’t name your savegames. I would guess those are going to be filed into the “dumbing a game down for consoles” category by a ton of people, but I’m filing it under “you lazy bastards”. In a game world the size of Morrowind or Oblivion the notes were pretty crucial. In the last game I used to mark any dungeons that I’ve been through as cleared, or marking the NPCs on the open map and so forth. And I mean seriously, “Savegame 1″, “Savegame 2″, and so on? That’s pretty ridiculous. There’s already third-party savegame manager for the PC version.

Having said all this, there’s now one thing preventing me from playing:

Someday she might start doing quests, but for now Chie seems content in stealing everything in the Imperial City that isn’t nailed down and then selling it in the markets.

Edit: And for the record I bought the game. I got a used copy of the Collector’s Edition for the PC, it came to 63 dollars after tax. Someone bought it and returned it an hour later since their computer couldn’t run it (a laptop).