J-Space.dk

After messing around with MySQLdb for Python for a night and a half, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong since I couldn’t connect to the remote server, I started wondering why “‘localhost” worked while running the script on the remote server and “<server-ip>” didn’t. Well, hardly for me to know, but it seems the default configuration of MySQL on some systems restrict connections to local ones.

Imagine that.

With that fixed I’ve come upon a couple of IDE’s I’ll put to the test. A current conundrum is laziness. I’m not in the mood to sit down with squared paper and calculate the intricate details of a perfected GUI design. I like the notion of wxPython’s FlexGridSizer which I’ll mess around with. I haven’t found a proper GUI designer I could easily get into (wxGlade seems like a hassle to work with, the Python-specific IDE’s each use some annoyingly specific bindings and IronPython can’t directly imported C extension modules), so I’ll go with that for the time being. Well, either that or implement it entirely through the functioning console. This hurts my head as well, though. I’ve never made a full-blown text app, and I’m not liable to complete the CLI any time soon.

Work is progressing smoothly, money is being saved as I garner more achievements in old games (working up a few New Game plus saves in Mass Effect, finishing off the last in Mirror’s Edge, Arkham Asylum and Fallout 3), and everything is just… so smooth.

Except for an annoying case of sinusitis. Then again, of all the bitter things that could hit me, I’ll take this as a blessing

Take care.

~T

Completed God of War 3 on the second-hardest setting this weekend (hardest setting unlocks after game completion) – completed my second run of inFamous yesterday (hardest setting).

I stand by my previously unuttered standpoint. God of War 3 strikes me as hugely overrated. From the top of my head: sporadic load times, fps slowdowns, pixelated shadows (painfully, painfully obvious on some very large models they use several places – think pixels the size of Kratos’ fist), lackluster animations and player forethought and (this is my greatest grievance) downright unfair boss encounters. I’ll just speed through them quickly with a tip of the hat to inFamous of 2008, a game that managed to dodge several of these caveats. I’ll admit that the game didn’t have quite the action appeal of GoW3 nor the basic graphical horse power, but while the first is definitely an individual perspective the graphics should always play out according to the designers’ vision (in short, screw high-polys if you’re actually going for blocky, fuck high-res textures if you’re going cartoon and cel).

Load times

To be fair, all games have load times, be they barely recognizable (small-size PSN and Xbox Live games get in here) or spread far enough to not really be a nuisance. GoW3, however, is a linear game, so much so that content can be predictably pre-cached before reaching it while freeing up used assets. Even the single levels foster this approach, as several places force you forward with no return path. Often I think the game actually does do this (a lot of the first parts of the game worked smoothly like this), but for some reason they failed to see it through. In the final climactic battle I was forced to watch a rotating GoW logo mid-cutscene. What the hell?

inFamous, an open-world game where movement is unpredictable and necessary loading is determined only during transitional transport and cutscenes, you are offered less than 15 seconds of loading at game startup and at large plot developments. That’s it. Done.

FPS slowdowns

FPS slowdowns or choppy imagery is something that should never be allowed on consoles. The world of PC’s is so diverse that if the user is unable to correctly set up the game the user suffers by the own hand. However, consoles are, almost by definition, a static piece of hardware. You know at all times what the users’ specs are going to look like. Consequently, you can mould the game to suit, you should mould the game to suit. Again a game as linear as GoW fails to take that into account. You can sense throughout the game’s design that the encounters are, if nothing else, carefully tailored in resistance and intent. For some reason, however, this still causes slowdowns. I fail to see how a game like GoW, with a massive budget, hype to match and a developer team that makes a music festival look like a house party, can not take linear, predictable cases into account.

By contrast, inFamous will offer no slowdowns during the regular course of the game. To be fair, you can cause the game to slow down if you cause a massive amount of screen clutter (shoot of lots and lots of grenades and missiles is an easy example), but it clears up quickly. Open world, a magnitude of increases cases, still outperforms.

Pixelated shadows

I’ll just make this mention short, because that one place it happens makes it so obvious. Two eagle statues on the way up to the top of Olympus – huge statues. There are very few models on screen in that scene (bit of background, a huge chain, Kratos), and still the shadows on these things are almost the size of their eyes. Dudes?! You made huge lighting improvements from demo to release in so many areas, but you couldn’t find the time to fix one single 10 second scene?!

Animations and depth

I’ll strike up the previous issue between realism and designer’s vision. God of War has always seemed to aim for the fantastical made real. Although the things happening in the game are far beyond realistic, they aim to make it believable within our frame of realism. A high-res texture with human features (beauty spots, wrinkles and all) is worth close to nothing when the animations are slightly stiff and unpolished. This is my perception of the state of GoW. Often I had the feeling of watching plastic mannequins. But polished animation’s a tricky thing, so let’s just leave that in favour of something worse. Incomplete animation sets. Spoiler, GoW sports four different standard weapons (and a few extra used in different situations, but let’s just look away from them). For some reason, the developers neglected to making throwing animations for all but one. I can easily accept the boss-killing quick-time events using very specific weapons tailored by the director of the cutscene, this is story-telling. But when Kratos in a flash (glitch-flash, as in no animation, just “whoa, now he’s got something else in his hands”) switches from a pair of cesti the size of beach balls to his old-timer chained blades for 3 seconds while you toss an enemy, and then back again, you can’t help but feel that the developer’s just started cutting corners because they didn’t care.

inFamous, in contrast, has a very large set of procedural animations and seems to fail where almost any game will (clipping in unexpected AI path finding situations, exact collisions). The main character Cole moves with an organic grace within a frame of slightly overdone animations in its comic home. What really sets this one ahead is the fact that you can combine the powers you obtain in so many fascinating ways. You can fly and shoot at the same time (alright, that doesn’t sound big, but the controls overlap and still function perfectly), you can use the block action with almost every other non-offensive power. Maybe the point just is that the game had so much more to lose than GoW and was pressured to perform. And indeed it did.

Encounter design and mechanics

I’ll make a short mention of inFamous first before the closing rant: inFamous’ boss encounters were by-the-book arcade designs like you see them in, to name a still-recent example, World of Warcraft. There’s a simple approach to the bosses, they have mechanics that can be learned within a few tries, defeated thereafter, mastered if you so desire.

God of War, on the other hand, places you not in the company of insurmountable odds, but downright unpleasant game design. I like to play on hard settings for the challenge, and I did so with GoW knowing that damage taken and given is modified tremendously. My grief with the game is not the fact that bosses now hit you for twice as much damage and you for a third less. It is the fact that because of the nature of the mechanics, your survival is based too much on random numbers. I’ll give a plain example:

A mini-boss fight (not even that, I’d figure) pits you against a three-phased cerberus with three abilities; it spawns exploding hounds, calls down an unavoidable AoE attack (well, it’s avoidable, but only by luck, not by action) and the occasional melee attack. Easy enough, dodge the hounds or throw them back for a bit of damage, dodge or block the melee attacks and pray at the AoE. Acceptable. But then they start tossing in satyrs. The annoying sort. They block your attacks unless you time it right after one of theirs or make sure to block their attacks. You can’t take the time to do that, however, because of the aforementioned three-headed horror. You can make a relatively quick take-down of the satyrs if you grapple with them. This is almost impossible, though, because you aren’t shielded from the other enemies while you do this.

So this leaves you with a cerberus that is only moderately difficult by itself and one or two satyrs that you’re basically forced to deal with until after the fight. This has you dodging their attacks (and the dodge mechanic itself is flaky at best) while getting one or two hits in on the cerberus before you have to start dodging hounds and AoE attacks.

I shit you not, I spent two hours, if not more, on that one encounter. Survivability was random, determined by the whims of the satyrs during the fight. Terrible, terrible encounter design. And it doesn’t stop there. The final, climactic battle has two viable targets of attack, one seems to have no effect (but is actually the one you should attack), the other recharges your health (but is not what you should be attacking).

I have no idea what the reviewers were thinking when going through this game, but I’m struck with the notion that all the overhyped fanboys were given the review copies and just went with those. Bad karma, dude. Always have critical eyes on the product. According to Metacritic the game got top scores (10/10, 100%, 6 starts – whatever) from several reviewers. How, I ask you?! Given the many faults and caveats of the game it could to my mind never deserve a perfect score. There is no justifiable reason to award the game those merits. High scores, yes, by all means it’s a game of high production value and budget, but it simple fails on so many basic principles that a perfect score says more about the reviewer than the game.

They were blinded by tits (bit more than halfway through, repeatable softcore sex minigame). That is all.