On Laziness: Why I haven't been gaming for 2 days!

Work... Classroom related stuff... Preparing for exams... Job Interviews...

Life sure does suck when you have to do stuff that takes time from other stuff I'd like to be doing.

*Waits patiently for the weekend*

On that note, what are all of you guys out there playing nowadays? I've found a link to the demo of Star Trek Adventures: Year One; looks like a classic point-'n-click game set in the Star Trek: The Original Series universe. Lemme know what you think about it!

On The End of The Semester and X3: Terran Conflict

With the end of the semester comes the crunch of exam time. Indeed, why did I start writing this blog in mid-April when I was fully aware that exams'd be hittin' in less than a month? Because I frankly can, to be honest. I find that I always have enough time to do all the studying I need to do and get in some internship hunting or gaming time. The Distant Worlds AAR I have been working on won't be effected so much, but I have installed a few oldies of mine lying around on my Steam account just for some extra funs.

Games like X3: Terran Conflict; a game I stopped playing because it 'felt' extremly buggy and am now giving another shot at thanks to all the new Steam achievements that was recently added to it, as well as and Mass Effect; already beaten it once, but do want to go through it again on Renegade (the Dark Side, whatever...) for even more funs! This blogthor is just getting warmed up.

Of course, work and researching comes first, so what little time I have to squeeze in for gaming (mostly during the weekends) will be posted up on this blog in some way, shape or form. For the most part, though, I'll be posting little updates like this here instead.

Yesterday, in X3: Terran Conflict (the ultimate space trade and combat simulator... well... maybe not as massive as Eve Online, but still pretty cool), I learned how to set up trade ships to do manual trade runs. I can now make money without doing it myself and waiting as my ship plods around the galaxy at a boring 75 m/s (x10 SETA compression comes out to an experienced velocity of 750 m/s; still fairly slow considering the 60+ km distances the ship sometimes has to go)! That's one thing I wish you could do in Eve Online; set up an NPC network that does the trading for you. Oh sure, you need to keep an eye on the routes and make sure that it maintains a good level of profitability (versus, say, hiring NPC pilots to do the work for you) as well as keep them secure as they fly through low-sec, but that would help take the tedium away!

I'll keep everyone updated on X3 as I go along, though it will more likely be "Oh my Gawd I didn't know you could do [insert useful ability] in this game!". Playing X3 heuristically is definitely my biggest challenge to date (though it comes very close to figuring out how to play Dwarf Fortress).

On Distant Worlds: #2. Kiadians don't see exploration as a 'bold' thing to do...

Though the Kiadians are technologically basic, they're doing much better than us humans are doing in the first decade of the 21st century; they have recently unveiled a line of FTL hyperdrive units capable of transporting metallic hulks (with people and goods in them, we should hope) across the stars.

What secrets will the universe unveil? I currently have a fleet heading to the 'west' to take care of some pesky pirate varmits! The first, and currently only, fleet of the Collective is already busy in the galaxy playing clean-up with the space monsters and pirate pests.

Not even 20% of the galaxy has been unraveled and the Kiadians have already made the greatest of discoveries; a Zenox historian aboard the Lonesome Victory, a run-down exploration ship, managed to reconstruct the records found in a temple located in the Rindula sector of an extremely powerful, if not diabolical, form of government!

The infamous Rindula system. The blue diamond is the position of the Lonesome Victory; currently performing sensor readings on a few other planets in the system to find precious resources for the Collective. The white triangles are abandoned ships from a previous era; a constructor will be sent there as soon as the space monsters are taken care of! The three white dots that form a triangle shows the position of an explored ruin...

The Galactopedia article for the Way of Darkness. To the left of the entry is the current location of the Temple of Doom©; a sinister and foreboding monument found on a volcanic planet in the Rindula system. It is here that this superior (in the Galactic Empire sort of superior) form of government was found.

The Way of Darkness, as it was once known, is a way of life centered around glorifying the military power of the state while placing the rights of the individual in last. This form of government, in terms of gameplay stats, is quite superior to a Monarchy (the previous form of government). As we speak, the Kiadian royal family has fled from Zenox Prime, though 'suppression' agents (the few Kiadians who were rejected from the Zenox Prime Scientific Academy) are already on the hunt. Such a brutal but efficient system!

Also in the Rindula system are a number of abandoned ships (the grey triangles) from a previous age. They appear quite technologically advanced though retrieval will be difficult since the system is rife with space monsters! As if the lack of habitable systems was bad enough...

The Kiadians grow restless for more living space. Thus far, the 6 exploration ships commissioned by the state to acquire more resources for the expected huge war bill have failed to find anything worth colonizing (alas, the Kiadians are sensitive to temperatures and will not bear the stinging cold of Ice Planets, nor the heat of Volcanic Planets. The Zenox, not surprisingly, are also picky about planetary conditions). A few gas planets here and there, a few resource rich nebulae sure, but they don't bring the tax money now do they?

The initial six scouts of the Kiadian Collective; none have fallen prey to space monsters yet!

And with that, you are now up to speed with this AAR. From now on, I'll be covering future developments as I actually play this darn game!

On Shortness: Max Payne for $2.50

Ahh shortness. You've probably noticed I use long sentences. People say it's because it makes me look smart. Others think it's because I just got so much to say in so little time. I think I do so because long sentences make the alpha male. Being alpha male all the time is tiring. I let someone else be alpha male for while so I can do whatever it is beta males do.

For this blog post, I will use short sentences for this one. See how it goes. Mebbe is easier to read. Remember, this blog is as much an attempt to convey awesomness of video games to you as it is a scratchpad for my own writing technique! Anyway...

Yesterday I bought Max Payne for $2.50. It was part of the Rockstar Week on Steam. I heard many great things about this game before, but never tried it till now (Whoops, a comma... double Whoops, a sentence in parentheses!). Game is fun. Bullet time is fun. Narrative is interesting thanks to interesting use of in-game scenes as well as comics. Levels feel way too linear and short though. If structure of levels were released today, might be comparable to how some Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 co-op levels feel like.

Rockstar is going with a 3 hour sales frenzy on Steam, where they dictate a game in their list, chop the price by 75% or so and give the user but 3 hours to scramble to purchase the game. I was reading through the GTA series forums and found a post of someone complaining that they weren't able to buy GTA IV because they were still at school. Given the rating of the game, I think Rockstar did a good job there. Business is business though.

Anyway, I got to get to class. Will have next Distant Worlds part up soon!

On Distant Worlds: #1. The Start of the Glorious Kiadian Collective!

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EDIT: Pictures too small? Clicky-clicky on them to make them bigger! (Warning: All Distant Worlds screenshots are in a 1920 x 1200 resolution; which translates to an average of just under 750 KB a screenshot. Those of us with limited bandwidth beware!)

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Looks like I WILL be doing a Distant Worlds AAR (After Action Report). Huzzah! Expect updates to come in haphazardly though, as real life continues to make blogging ever more difficult (especially with exam and research presentation time come next month). Humbug!

I have finally figured out how to take good screenshots in Distant Worlds without tabbing between the game and the GIMP. CodeForce was awesome enough to incorporate a simple screenshot function (without the mouse pointer getting in the way, too!) with the game; all you have to do is hit the 0 (zero) key on your Numpad. Note that this only works within a game and not with the menus, so I had to GIMP up most of the screenshots for this post.

The next few pictures will show what settings I used to generate my own tiny galaxy.

This first screen lets you play with the galaxy itself by using easy-to-understand to specify how large the galaxy should be (yes, the slider ranges from 100 stars to 1400 stars, where each star might have its own set of planets and anomalies; that be a lot of objects to play with), the developmental cycle of the galaxy and how well-structured it is (this also effects how well developed independent colonies are), the political 'tension' of the galaxy (this dictates how an AI will react when they first meet you; setting it like I have on 'Chaos' implies me and the other AI ain't gonna be the best of bosom buddies) as well as the existence of habitable worlds, pirates and space creatures! There's also a few preset types of galaxies available; I went with a ring structure because... well... umm... Oh I know! The other three, more epic rounds of Distant Worlds I'm playing are all of a Spiral galaxy shape and I wanted to try something different! It was most certainly NOT because I watched someone else play Halo 3 a lot recently... most certainly not!

Screen #2: On who and how awesome your empire'll be! You can specify where your empire will be located in the galaxy (based on the Ring galaxy selected from the last screen, you can choose whether your homeworld will appear in the center or on the outer rim), your empire's flag colors and symbol, the size of your empire (I chose the smallest here, though if you're not a fan of exploration you can always try putting it to the maximum setting!) as well as its tech level. Finally, you can choose your system of government as well as your race and give 'em all a good awesome name! For this game, I selected the ultra-trustworthy humanoid Kiadian who benefit from a very high research bonus and a moderate ship maintenance bonus.

But wait, you cry out, why are you picking a brainy race for a small galaxy where superior firepower will determine the victor? Because... I can! And because losing is fun! ... Sometimes.

Anyway...

Screen #3: Choose your Opponent(s). You can either tell Distant Worlds to generate up to twenty opponents for your to fight against (would be a bit messy for a small galaxy) or specify their characteristics themselves. The options here are quite similar to your own empire's screen and you can even specify how far (or close) you want the aliens to be from your own empire. What would Star Wars have been like if the tiny Rebel Alliance had been parked right next to the monstrously huge and technologically superior (sans the unshielded Tie Fighters, of course) Galactic Empire? In Distant Worlds, you can 'simulate' that!

Screen #4: The only winning move is to keep one of these checkboxes marked. Of course, winning in any 4X game is usually determined by the player, and Distant Worlds is awesome enough such that, even if you win or lose, you can keep on playing the game (or until your entire empire goes *poof*, though I have yet to fail that miserably).

A quick note about this screen, the victory function for all the options is a bit funky in that it looks at how you're doing versus all other empires as opposed to the galaxy as a whole. Not sure what I mean? Well, suppose we left the territory requirement to 75%. In a game with 100 habitable systems, you'd imagine that means the first to 75 planets (by colonization or conquest) wins the game, right? Not quite... In Distant Worlds, the game calculates this number based on the current number of colonized systems.

Let's continue this example by looking at the current game; me versus one other empire. Suppose at the start we own one planet (the homeworld) each. The number of colonized systems is simply two. I own one of those planets. That means I (and, by symmetry, my opponent) have a territory rating of 50%! Not quite the same thing eh? I can win the game by colonizing 2 more planets before my opponent can grab any as I would own three out of the four total planets which is 75%! Pretty lame, eh?

Clearly this system hands out victories based on short-term noise (colonizing one or two planets at the get-go should NOT be a clear win; this isn't Starcraft!). If only we can take advantage of the Law of Large Numbers...

But, what's this on the 4th screen? The last option allows the player to delay when victory conditions take effect by a user-defined number of years. Here, I put 20 years (though I'm not sure the game will take that long); more then enough time for me and my opponent to grab most of the galaxy, at which time the game will actually base the victory calculations on my own ability to capture planets from my foe.

Enough stats talk! I'll wrap up this AAR with a screenshot of my homeworld after a few months into the game (taken at the same time where I introduced Distant Worlds to this blog).

Lots of activity on Zenox Prime. You'll notice a few constructor ships (the large crab-looking ships; one of which is flying to the planet from the top-left) placing some orbital defense platforms in anticipation of first contact with the still-unknown enemy. A few resource transports (part of my Private sector that helps maintain a sound economy for my empire, though they are out of my direct control) are milling about as they wait for my gas collectors within the system to mine enough resources to warrant a freight run.

My early aggressive exploration policy has paid off; one of my scouts discovered a cruiser (the long ship below the south-east-most orbital platform) abandoned from a long-forgotten conflict that contained knowledge of the Way of Darkness (an ancient form of government only found in exploration that gives high bonuses to attributes that best suit a militaristic state, like mine!). Additionally, the cruiser has a lot of high tech on board, which I could allow my researchers to dissect for a tech gain. However, as the Kiadian's are already good at research, I opt to keep the ship around for guard duty instead.

Clicking on the planet, I note a sizable population of Zenox, intelligent and happy rodent/feline (don't ask) like creatures on my homeworld! It seems that my Kiadian subjects have a symbiotic relationship with the furry Zenox; the Kiadian's long hours of research benefits the State while the Zenox keep them entertained (not so much 'entertained' as kept from being outraged by the massacres and alien genocide that will characterize the soon-to-be-epic war with my mysterious foe) with glorious tales about th' galactic yore o' old. So deep is this mutualism that the Zenox have managed to flourish; there are two Kiadians to each Zenox on my homeworld, for a total of 4.75 billion inhabitants in all.

Kiadians and Zenox sitting in a tree! G-e-t-t-i-n-g r-i-d-i-c-u-l-o-u-s-l-y b-u-s-y!

A true Collective this is, indeed! Next time, I'll show you what secrets my scouts have discovered to date.

EDIT: Pictures too small? Clicky-clicky on them to make them bigger! (Warning: All Distant Worlds screenshots are in a 1920 x 1200 resolution; which translates to an average of just under 750 KB a screenshot. Those of us with limited bandwidth beware!)

On the Dangers of Heuristic Thinking

Another human psychological post? In mah gaming blog? But... Well, why not? I gotta satisfy the higher tiers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, ya know!

Anyway, if you remember from yesterday's blog post, I had talked extensively about the idea of heuristic gaming (i.e. a fancy way of saying "playing by just doing it and not reading the manual") and even gave a few examples in PC gaming history. This blog post, however, will focus on the dangers of this type of thinking. Well, "dangers" is such a harsh word and probably not that appropriate considering the context of how terrible real life can be sometimes... Let's say we'll be focusing on the "disadvantages" instead!

Remember the non-gamer example we talked about before? You know, the guy who doesn't play video games that often, and how we're talking about the scenario where you try and entice the guy to play this great new video game because you need him for your awesome gaming group (like, say, for a survivor team in L4D or L4D2)? As we established, the non-gamer is not interested in learning about the intricacies of the game, nor figuring out the best way to optimize his playing such that he does well; all he cares about is having fun! This, of course, is the very crux of gaming... Why play a game if you don't have fun? Why play a game if you can't jump into it immediately and figure things out as you go?

Thus is the first disadvantage to heuristic thinking. When game developers need to appease to this form of thinking (in order to boost their sales by enticing both the gamer and non-gamer to purchase their product), they can approach this dilemna in one of two ways. The first and easiest choice is to dumb down the gameplay such that the game can be quickly learned; pretty good for movie-to-video-game tie ins as well as console ports (Splinter Cell: Conviction, while a very cool game to watch, does feel a little drier in the stealth department than previous games from the Splinter Cell series). The second, and considerably more difficult, choice is to ease the learning curve for the player by creating a quick tutorial or forming a single player campaign to ease the player into new gaming concepts. This can be done while still keeping the game complex and hard to master.

A great example of this is CCP's MMO Eve Online (the only MMO I ever liked playing!), which is the pinnacle of complex gaming thanks to its fairly convoluted gaming systems. Optimizing the training of skills; something which every Eve Online player has to deal with, has its own forum section! Wow! However, to keep the learning curve on the down-low, CCP has been pretty hard at work to make the tutorial and the UI a little more accessible to the masses and to hopefully entice more newbies into the game.

Let's get back on topic! As you can see, a society that prefers to adapt an after-the-fact style of learning as opposed to a RTFM (read the freakin' manual) style of learning can potentially result in a general dumbing down of certain products. At a corporate level, the desire to take risks in video game design and create a complicated (though possibly fantastic) new game is just not there thanks to our preference for heuristicism! That sentence, that right there, is the SECOND disadvantage to this sort of thinking; a loss of innovation in the available products of play.

Now, there's nothing to be said about making more money from appealing to more people. It's a fantastic business strategy and one that can keep a company's bottom line well in the black. However, being TOO accessible takes the risk of alienating the more hardcore of players, which can be a loss in terms of a company's video game production credibility (then again, I know a lot of hardcore players who'd prefer to pirate video games than actually pay for them... meh...).

The third "disadvantage" of heuristic thinking? Using the word heuristic too much when trying to anticipate other people's behavior.

On Gaming Heuristics

A human psychological post? In mah gaming blog? But of course!

The idea of 'challenging' gaming is essentially a simplified version of human learning; a process that is based on the concept of heuristics (we'll define that properly in a bit). Indeed, the smart gamer could try and read up on a video game through, say, a strategy guide, or an online FAQ or walkthrough. The more daring of us, though, will want to boot up the game and drive (EDIT: Yes, you literally drive right into a stone wall with complicated racing games. Never mind that the right word for this idiom is "dive") right in. Video gamers who prefer to do so expose themselves to the fun, and dangers, of heuristically-based thinking.

Before we continue, let's define what the word "heuristic" means. This definition is from the Merriam Webster dictionary:

Main Entry: ¹heu·ris·tic

Pronunciation: \hyu̇-ˈris-tik\

Function: adjective

Etymology: German heuristisch, from New Latin heuristicus, from Greek heuriskein to discover; akin to Old Irish fo-fúair he found

Date: 1821

: involving or serving as an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving by experimental and especially trial-and-error methods ; also : of or relating to exploratory problem-solving techniques that utilize self-educating techniques (as the evaluation of feedback) to improve performance.

And, of course, the Wikipedia link for even greater detail into the subject.


As you can see, the short version is that heuristics is all about learning how to do something through doing it and most definitely continuously failing and retrying. Think of your favorite PC or console platformer / adventure game. Now think of all the times you ran through a section of the game, got hit by some unknown trap or a vicious monster who attacks from an angle-not-initially-seen or died from failing to jump across a perilous gap at the right time. What would do in this situation? Why, you'd simply reload the game from the closest autosave point and try it again, learning from your mistake (hopefully) and completing the challenge successfully before being hit by the next killer move.

Now, let's expand this idea to the entire spectrum of the genre of video games. There are a few FPS games where you've no doubt died from turning a corner into a bunch of angry enemies, or maybe you launched your rocket launcher in an area that turned out to be not as expansive as before. Or maybe there's a scripted event which results in a truck falling on your head unless you strafe out of the way from the get-go of the autosave point.

Strategy games? Tower Defense games are ripe with this sort of heuristically-based thinking (the fantastic Defense Grid: The Awakening's auto-load from a point midway through a particular mission is a prime example), while single-player campaigns in certain RTSs or turn-based games may encourage a continuous save/load experience (the Commandos series is notorious for this, especially when the Commandos 3 series reminds you on multiple occasions to save your game regularly!). Of course, any form of multiplayer gaming is fairly difficult to correct from the get-go, though practice does make perfect!

Ran out of resources? Aliens got through with a core? Got the wrong tower up for a particular wave? No worries! Just hit the Backspace key and try again! Defense Grid: The Awakening is the prime example of heuristic gaming; a very fun example, though!

Now think of the first time you tried to show a non-gamer a particular new video game (say, you were looking for a few more buddies to add to your L4D team). He doesn't care about reading lengthy manuals or learning the ins-and-outs of a video game such as being able to melee and reload at the same time in the L4D series. He doesn't care about learning all the different keys he has to press. All he wants to do is be able to extract a good amount of fun by making the game progress sufficiently for his own tastes.

My own brother, for example, does not like RPGs whatsoever; too much detail and nitpicking over something extremely short. Not even Mass Effect 2, a very streamlined approach to the RPG genre that presents a fantastic story ever really appealed to him. He's much more the FPSer (whenever he gets a chance to play, that is) and you'd more likely see him shooting up other players in Halo 3 then pondering through a game of L4D. Honestly though, I haven't tried as well as I should have...

Let me know what YOU think about heuristic thinking. I'll write up my next blog post on the dangers of continuously applying heuristic thinking to real life (it's somewhat of a form of laziness, when you think about it...).