int64.org

I finally convinced Soul that Absolute Zero needs a website, and we’ve been spending the past couple days filling it with content. If you’ve been interested at all in my past posts on the Left 4 Dead campaign, the website will have a lot more stuff including inside information, concept art, screenshots, and a new HD video we shot to show the progress of the map. I should be writing there for the campaign pretty regularly, so check it out!

When I play Left 4 Dead I play versus — It’s just a lot more fun and challenging that way. Not enough players have the Absolute Zero campaign to get a challenging match going, so we made a video of it last night playing coop mode. It was the first time in a long while that I played coop, and I had a blast doing it thanks to the really fun map.

Our server normally takes away your medkits at the start of the match to make it more difficult, but after three tries on advanced we decided we needed them to complete the level. There was some room left so I included some amusing moments from our failed attempts at the end.

The map still isn’t finished yet, but it’s getting really close. A beta should be out very soon for everyone to play. As always, you can download the campaign from L4Dmaps.

A new pair of videos is out, this time showcasing an ancient tomb in Soul’s Absolute Zero campaign for Left 4 Dead. The area’s design draws from a lot of ancient civilizations to create a unique yet familiar look that makes you imagine what it was like in its original state. Even though it’s not done yet, the architecture still looks pretty awesome!

During the making of the video we couldn’t stop playing around as hunters. The area quickly reminded me of some of the freestyle trick maps for Quake where there is no particular goal, only at lot of stuff to play with. We began making tricks more and more complex and were having so much fun that I recorded a few of them for the start of the video. Despite consisting of a mere three pounces, the middle jump was by far the hardest to pull off, requiring snap aim, timing, and air control all within a quick few seconds.

Valve’s original idea for Left 4 Dead was to make it a game of who survived the longest, not who survived. They didn’t go through with that idea, but it’s one that we’ve always liked. One of the first decisions Soul made when creating this campaign is that it would be much harder than Valve’s campaigns. Even experienced teams shouldn’t expect to survive without some really excellent strategy and teamwork. I know a lot of players seem to think that fun means winning and winning means never dying and finishing with a score of 8000 to 300, so this map might not appeal to all crowds. For people who enjoy a real challenge, I think this campaign will have a lot to offer.

If any mappers, modelers, or texture artists are out there, Soul could use your help! He’s chosen such a different art design that most of Left 4 Dead’s pre-made stuff isn’t going to work.

The first level of the map can currently be downloaded from L4Dmaps. This second level is about 80% of the way toward a basic beta version.

Today’s the big launch day of Valve’s much anticipated Left 4 Dead update including the two-level campaign Crash Course… sigh.

I really wonder if Valve has a QA department. It seems to break in one of three ways — either it silently launches a local server (despite lobby settings), puts the server you connect to into a livelock requiring a manual restart, or makes each player connect to their own local IP. It’s not an isolated problem, with their forums being full of complaints. It makes me yearn for the days when patches weren’t forced down your throat by some crap like Steam.

It actually works in single-player, so I tried the new campaign there. It uses a Death Toll theme, looking a lot like the level where you start in the church. In what seems to be a storage area, you jump from room to room or walk down the alleys connecting the rooms. Each level is uninventive, looking like one big area instead of smaller ones that vary to keep it fresh. Every room and alley looks the same, just a random scattering of boxes and cars.

Really, there’s not much to left say about Crash Course. Given how short it is and how unfinished and monotonous it looks, I can’t imagine myself playing it much in versus. Much rather be playing Absolute Zero or Death Aboard. If versus actually worked, that is.

Over the past couple months, a friend of mine has been creating a fun Left 4 Dead campaign called Absolute Zero. The first map is done, and the second map is coming along nicely. We created some nice HD videos to show it off to everybody:

Map 1 — Military Base Walkthrough Part 1
Map 1 — Military Base Walkthrough Part 2
Map 2 — Ice Caverns Progress Update

If you want to playtest map 1 with us, download the beta and come join the campaign’s Steam group.

A month or so ago, I learned that an acquaintance of mine from a few years ago had got a job at TimeGate Studios making maps for their new title, Section 8. I missed the closed beta, but had enough fun with the open one to make me want to acquire the full game when it came out.

Apparently about half of their dev team are hardcore Tribes players, and to a degree it shows. The maps, while not as big as the ones in Tribes, are vast and open compared to most modern games. Players are able to customize their soldier with two guns, two secondary utilities, and ten points to distribute across a number of passive powerups. Players also get a shield, a jet pack, super-sprinting, and lock-on.

Section 8 is a capture-the-point game with a twist — as players start to earn points for various achievements, the game automatically starts up mini-objectives to complete. This turns out to be a great way to keep things challenging and fresh, while giving players a good reason to come out of their bases. If you turtle in a base and don’t complete your objectives, the other team will win. This gives the game a higher learning curve than most other games, but most should only take a few days to get it down.

Section 8 is a multiplayer game, so I’d caution you against buying it if you’re expecting a good single-player story. Some sites mentions that it has a single-player campaign, but it really only consists of multiplayer with bots tied together in an hour long tutorial story where an unseen general is yelling reasons to complete all the objectives you’d normally complete in multiplayer. But that’s okay — the real fun is in the multiplayer.

Spawning is a unique experience in this game. You get hurled out of ships in orbit and are able to break mid-air to adjust your landing position. With a bit of skill and luck, you can actually land on enemies for a very satisfying instant kill. To combat you landing in enemy territory, anti-air comes standard in all bases and players can deploy more if they choose. Anti-air becomes crucial to gameplay — if yours gets taken down, the enemies will start to swarm in right on top of you. Players dropping down within an anti-air radius will either be shot down or take heavy damage before ever seeing another player.

The maps will remind you a lot of Tribes. They are big and open, with 2-4 bases scattered around them. They all feature dead zones defining their boundaries, which can change depending on the maximum number of players. The bases are pretty good, with an intricate futuristic design. Despite the large maps, the area in between the bases are for the most part also well very detailed. The mini-objectives will usually take place in these areas, so you may end up spending more time outside of a base than in one.

Character customization is one of the crucial areas of the game. You get ten points to spread across various passive power-ups modifying your armor, shield, attack strength, lock-on duration and resistance, accuracy, and a lot of other things. This is probably the biggest area to master — even after three weeks playing (two in the beta, one in final), I am still tweaking my passives to better support my play style. Several of them are very obvious in their usefulness, but others take a bit of play time to fully grasp.

Part of your load-out is two weapons. Unlike most games, Section 8 makes no distinction between primary and secondary weapons — it lets you choose whatever combination you want, be it a pistol and knife or a machine gun and missile launcher. There are several weapons to choose from, but unfortunately there isn’t much diversity between them. If there is one area this game doesn’t shine in, it’s this. What we have now are basically all your boring standard bullet-based futuristic army weapons. Each varies in accuracy, shield piercing ability, and armor damage, but they’re all just boring stuff we’ve seen a thousand times before. I would have liked to have seen some Tribes-inspired energy weapons.

One thing the game’s weaponry took from Tribes is the projectile-based guns, compared to games like Quake where the shotgun was hitscan (instant-hit). Ask any Quake Custom-TF player, and they will confirm the $25 shotgun can often be formidable against the $3000 rocket launcher if the wielder has good enough aim. In Section 8, all of the bullets fired are actual projectile tracer rounds that take some small time to reach their target. This is one of my favorite features, and I’m often disappointed that more games don’t use it. Forcing players to lead their shots introduces a whole new dimension of skill to the game.

The two utilities you pick for your class are also pretty important. These include grenades, mortars, sensors, repair kits, and some others. Some of these provide a service to your whole team, so with some good organization you could get a really unstoppable squad. The grenades are basically proxy mines that you throw. They stick to walls, vehicles, and blow up if they get near an enemy. The mortars are like precision MIRVs, letting you drop concentrated groups of explosions that are great against pretty much everything.

There are a few things all players get. The first is a super-sprint, letting you fairly quickly travel the long distances of the map. You can use it to ram enemies, taking off their shield. The second is a jet pack with about five seconds of use before recharging. It is basically only useful for jumping small hurdles, or a quick large jump onto buildings in conjunction with sprint.

The third is probably the most controversial feature of the game: lock-on. While many multiplayer games have aim-bot cheats made for them, it’s actually built into Section 8 as a slow charging 5-10 second lock-on ability. I’ve noticed a lot of mediocre players have grown to depend on it, and all the good players take advantage of this by developing strategies to make others waste their lock-on before jumping in with a good aim. They deserve some major props for creating a well balanced aim-bot that doesn’t feel totally lame.

As you complete objectives, frag enemies, and capture points, you will be awarded with money to spend on deployables. You can buy supply depots, turrets, mechs, tanks, and anti-air. All of these are very effective in their own ways, but for some reason many players seem to forget to deploy anything until the match is almost over.

The game does have some flaws that will hopefully be patched soon. Like several Games For Windows Live games before it, Section 8 has plenty of people unable to launch it due to outdated GFWL installs. The game pulls down servers from the master list very slowly over an XBox-encrypted link. The in-game voice chat doesn’t feature automatic gain, making most voices get drowned out by the action. The persistent stats system looks pretty cool but has been plagued with issues since the launch. Servers seem to be infrequently unstable, sometimes crashing or booting players. A few of the servers I’ve connected to seemed to lose sync, causing jumps as everything corrected itself every few seconds. Oddly enough none of these flaws existed in the open beta, making me wonder if the GFWL integration, which wasn’t in the beta, had anything to do with it.

Flaws aside, I’m very happy with this game. There’s a lot of fun to be had, and it delivers one of things I want most in a game: a large scale of skill that isn’t reachable after only a few weeks of playing. Is it worth $50? I’m not sure there’s enough content — 8 maps — for me to say so. Maybe wait until it’s $30 or $40. I’m hoping they release the map editor and enable mods. It’s got a lot of potential for some good player-made content.

With over 40,000 people in the Left 4 Dead 2 boycott group, there are bound to be a lot of varying reasons for why they’re there. The popular one is about past promises unfulfilled, which I agree with wholeheartedly. I’ve also got issues with the general quality of support we’ve got from Valve.

Lack of content

One major nitpick I have with most of the boycott community is that a lot of people consider new content to be “free updates”. A lot of us paid $50 for a game with very little content with the expectation, due to explicit statements from Valve, that we would be getting more. To me, this means I have already paid for this new content with my initial $50 — it is not a free update. Consider it a pre-order.

Calling it free just gives the impression that any new content is a gift of good will from Valve, which makes a lot of people sound like whiners with silly expectations of getting everything for free. This is supported by the way the media has been reporting it — nearly all mentions of the boycott has attributed it to whiny kids wanting stuff for free.

So far, two minor updates have come out.

In the first update, we got the two old campaigns released for versus multiplayer. This amounted to adding invisible walls, very slightly restructuring some areas to be more balanced, and adding some climb spots for infected. The second update, called the “Survival pack”, added a Survival mode where you see how long you can last against hoards of enemies. This added a new survival-only map and again very slightly modified all the old ones. Unfortunately most of us have found Survival to be a remarkable failure with very monotonous gameplay, a very quick curve to master, and virtually no replayability.

How much new content is enough content to fulfill the obligation from those promises? This is another point where people have differing ideas. I could personally care less about new characters, stories, or achievements. New weapons can be cool to degree, but they would need to be a real game-changer, like the gravity gun was in Half-Life 2, for me to care much. For new content in Left 4 Dead, I was mainly expecting my $50 to pay for another two or three full-sized, full-featured campaigns.

Valve recently announced a “Crash Course” campaign for Left 4 Dead. I’m really hoping they designed it with all the experiences and flaws of the current maps in mind. One interesting quote:

…the primary goal of “Crash” is to deliver a complete Versus mode experience in just 30 minutes, resulting in a streamlined version of the game’s existing Versus campaigns.

I can’t help but feel this is marketing-speak that means “We wanted to spend as little money as possible considering we’ve got a sequel about to come out, so we built a small campaign that should release us from our obligations of more content”. Sigh.

Lack of support

Anyone who plays Left 4 Dead will be able to tell you how riddled with bugs it is, and how slow Valve is to fix them. The issue is compounded by Valve’s veil of secrecy around development, because players don’t know if Valve is working on a fix or has even acknowledged something is happening. With how little support the game has got to fix its flaws, I can’t really feel comfortable thinking Valve will be any more competent with Left 4 Dead 2.

One example that I see in nearly every single game is 1-4 players are kicked from a game within a few minutes of starting, getting a “No steam logon” error that no doubt has to do with poorly implemented DRM. This is a pretty glaring bug that has been around since the initial release, with no fix in sight. Another is that games tend to get “lost” in Valve’s master servers. In pretty much every game, new players will randomly stop coming in to replace old ones. Sometimes it recovers in 10-15min, but usually it doesn’t.

A lot of maps have serious exploits. There are several areas that, with a little skill (or luck), an infected player can instantly kill a survivor. There are ways for survivors to skip or out-run crescendo events, which are supposed to be a major gameplay element introducing a temporary chaotic challenge. In areas you can’t outright skip, there is almost always a spot where survivors can sit that makes it all but impossible for infected to deal any damage.

Left 4 Dead is incredibly sensitive to lag. Unlike most modern games, and even old ones such as the nearly 13 year old Quakeworld, Left 4 Dead has no sense of lag compensation. When pouncing a survivor, you need to actually make sure you land a little ahead of the player. Landing on the player will just result in you sliding off as your client catches up to reveal you didn’t actually hit your target. Other players will just see some stupid hunter landing 10 feet off his mark. This isn’t just something that affects those of 200+ pings, either — it is still stressful at pings lower than 100.

There are some general flaws with gameplay too. “Ragequitting” was certainly not invented with Left 4 Dead, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it become such a common phrase. Losing in Left 4 Dead can be a very frustrating experience, but there is nothing to balance that out to keep people having fun. Because there is no incentive to stay, the great majority of people will quit at the first sign of a loss. Sometimes they will even “grief” the game by killing themselves or their teammates. Most days it takes two or three games of everyone quitting before I find a decent one. Even then, the only prize for winning is often the enemy team quitting right before you get to play your fun infected finale round.

This could be partially solved by a better matchmaking system. The current one, when it actually works, makes no distinctions between skilled and new players, good sports and quitters, and full experienced teams and random people. Valve has been promising a new matchmaking system that solves at least that last point for a while now, but keeps pushing it back. Even then, it wouldn’t solve the problem that the game just doesn’t offer any reason for a losing team to stick around.

I spent all day Saturday in the San Diego Convention Center, attending Comic-Con with my brother. Once again, an amazing experience.

The first thing we did was make a bee line to the SAE/FSM booth, where I picked up a copy of the Battlestar Galactica Season 4 soundtrack. After that was done, we took a quick walk around the rest of the exhibit hall. This is a pretty damned big exhibit hall, spanning the entire bottom floor of the convention center. With all the people there to push through, it takes about 10 minutes to walk from one end to the other.

While walking around the hall I happened to find Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game, with cover art done by friend Cyril Van Der Haegen. I mentioned this to the guy behind the counter, but he just feigned interest hoping I would buy it! Oh well.

After that I went looking for the Oni Press booth, where I bought my brother the first Scott Pilgrim book. He finished reading it before we left (he was not so interested in Ray Bradbury) so we went down to the floor again and he bought himself the next few books in the series. With any luck, I’ll have got my brother hooked on graphic novels! I also went to the Top Shelf booth hoping to pick up a copy of Blankets but they were all out.

The first panel we attended was for Dune, with Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. They were discussing their latest novel The Winds of Dune and commenting on the process of making a new book every year. I must admit, I have read many of the new Dune books and although they aren’t Frank Herbert material, I have enjoyed most of them (Sandworms of Dune being a notable exception for having a very shallow plot and invoking several dei ex machinis).

After that we headed back over to the SAE/FSM booth to get the CDs signed by Bear McCreary. We were first in line! At the same time, Bryan Lee O’Malley (author of Scott Pilgrim) was signing at the Oni Press booth — we went over there afterward but the line was so long that we didn’t care to try for it.

The Bioshock 2 booth was small — basically a small veiled closet with a gameplay trailer playing for 5-6 people at a time. But that trailer made the game out to look pretty awesome. You play the first big daddy, the only one with free will. You can take airlocks to go outside of Rapture into the ocean. You now make the choice to either harvest or adopt little sisters. Adopting them seems to store them inside your suit somewhere, it wasn’t too clear on that. You can take them out to have them harvest adam from certain bodies. While harvesting, you need to guard them from hoards of splicers. Then comes something new — your little sister says “Uh oh, I don’t think big sis wants me to play with you anymore”, and in comes the big sister — these are very quick, super-agile enemies that possess telekinesis.

The second panel we attended was that of Ray Bradbury. He talked of his fascination of space exploration and walking on the moon for the first time. Perhaps most interestingly, he claimed to have total recall of his entire life. He said he was a 10 month baby, and developed hearing and sight within the womb. He claims his memories go back to being in the womb and after birth.

The final panel was for Human Target, the new TV series from Fox. In the show, our main hero (Christopher Chance) gets hired by rich people to solve any problems or threats against them. He is a very intelligent detective, impersonator, and all-around bodyguard. It stars Mark Valley as Christopher Chance, Jackie Earle Haley as Guerrero, and Chi McBride as Winston, with the score done by Bear McCreary. We got to screen the pilot before a short Q&A with the stars and producers.

Human Target has some pretty awesome action scenes, pretty similar to the Bourne series. It is some of the best action I’ve seen on TV for as long as I can remember. The acting is stellar, and the score sounds somewhere between Caprica and The Sarah Connor Chronicles. The characters have a light quirkiness similar to Pushing Daisies. The show is being billed as a procedural with a light sprinkling of serial, which is pretty typical for Fox. They want to give you a new action movie every week. Unfortunately, the pilot had a lot of faults that I hope they steer clear of in the series.

For one thing, the characters are too flawless. The main characters — all antiheroes it seems — always know exactly what to say, have a perfect plan, and immediately know exactly what to do to keep the plan on track (pun!) from any curveballs. Not once did it show an imperfection, and I had a hard time believing or relating to them because of it.

Another problem I saw was with Guerrero — he had no introduction, and just sort of imposed himself on the story. He is a computer hacker, but it never really showed that process. Most of his scenes were just quick cuts to him revealing some new information that he hacked off screen.

I had planned to meet some friends while I was there, but that was a pretty big failure all around. One didn’t pick up his phone. Another didn’t wake up until really late and my phone died in the middle of a conversation with him. The one guy I was able to meet I didn’t do anything with because he spent the whole day playing D&D.

The BBC America booth featured a lot of Doctor Who trinkets and apparel, with lots of advertising for the new Torchwood mini-season Children of Earth (which is pretty good, by the way — go watch it!). There was an awesome life-sized Dalek on display.

We spent the two hour ride home listening to the Battlestar CD, and it didn’t disappoint!

Street Fighter IV came out a few days after I left to visit family and I’ve been chomping at the bit to play it ever since. I came back home yesterday, and it was the second thing I did after stepping off the plane (the first being grabbing some fish tacos at El Siete Mares).

Having played the arcade and 360 versions, I knew what to expect. You get a lot of your favorite old characters, including all the originals from Street Fighter II and introducing four new to this game. Gameplay is a lot like Street Fighter III, with a big focus on strategy and the ability to pull off devastating but finger-twisting combos. A new feature I really like is a challenge mode that teaches you the special moves and combos your character can do, which really helps when you’re trying to learn how to use one of the new characters or just refreshing yourself on an old one.

The only part still missing is the World Tour mode of the home editions of Street Fighter Alpha 3. As you fought through the roster, the points you get would let you level up. This let you upgrade your character to shift between a focus of power or defense, and let you select power-ups that let you do longer and more complex combos. It created a more unfair form of gameplay compared to Arcade mode and probably would have been too unbalanced for competitive gameplay, but it was still a lot of fun and would have been great to have in IV.

One thing I was worried about was how good the game would run on my system — from past experience, games ported from console to PC tend to run amazingly sluggish. With a sigh of relief, I put those worries to rest when I saw the game not skip a beat when run with all the settings maxed out. The game even has a special PC-specific settings screen with loads of rendering tweaks including the new Ink, Watercolor, and Posterize visual styles.

I’ve been having a lot of fun in IV between all the various modes of play. It doesn’t top Alpha 3 as my favorite of the Street Fighter series, but it’s up above everything else!

Last night seemed a fitting time to pick up one of my favorite old games, Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker.

The gameplay itself is nothing special (typical isometric beat-em-up), but the graphics, sounds, and (unintentional?) innuendo is hilarious. Play this with a group of friends and you’ll all be busting up through the entire thing.