Category: Uncategorized

I bought Bioshock Infinite yesterday. It’s a big budget game that looks intriguing, I enjoyed what I played of Bioshock, and I saw floating cities and thought it could be cool. I also like to ensure I’ve played a few AAA games now and then to remind me how they work :D

I’ve played about 2 hours of it, and it’s kinda cool, very ‘impressive’ and clearly cost a lot. I’m not sure it’s genuinely fun for a player like me, for various reasons. Firstly I’m not a chisel jawed wisecracking American who punches lift buttons with his fists, so I already feel like it’s not really me playing, by my voice and my actions. Secondly, everything seems to be glowing. Nice bloom effect, but give it a rest please. These are fairly minor things though, that I’d happily overlook to experience adventure in what is a very interesting world.

The problems that put me off are more fundamental. Firstly, I don’t really feel like any skill is involved. I picked medium difficulty, but I haven’t run out of ammo, salt or health once, and that’s with me bouncing around like a hyperactive squirrel spraying bullets everywhere. I think I died twice, but it really didn’t matter. As a result, I don’t feel scared, or excited. I basically can’t lose, and am not challenged. I can burst into peoples homes and rummage through their house for money without a second thought, and nobody I’ve encountered has posed any real threat whatsoever.

Maybe that’s fixed on higher difficulty, at least for shootouts, but it certainly doesn’t require any stealth in the way the old thief games (or even dishonored, to a very superficial extent) did.

More fundamentally, there is no real sense of sandbox or player control. They have created an amazing world, but they then wrote a movie script for it, gave me superficial control of a character at certain moments, and spun me around like a puppet on a scriptwriters strings for the majority of the predetermined story. I say things I wouldn’t say, do things I wouldn’t do, and spend a lot of the game running predictably forwards as things fall down just behind me, or to one side. I know I could go slower and it wouldn’t matter. I know the pillar that hits me as it falls is scripted to and I can’t avoid it. I may as well just hold down the W key with one hand and play the game blindfold.

I see games like this as a missed opportunity. I know they appeal to a certain crowd, and are very well made for it. I just wish they could take that same awesome world, awesome design and huge budget and make a free-form sandbox game where I could adventure in that world with entirely emergent gameplay. Apparently GTA games do a lot of it. Thief did it better. Just Cause 2 did it exceptionally well.

To me, this is a horribly expensive use of art assets to just wheel me past amazing vistas as they explode. I know it sells, I just wish we could have true, challenging sandbox games set in such a world. No quests. Just free-form experimentation within systems. basically i want ‘sir you are being hunted’ with Bioshock infinite’s budget.

I sell games to a lot of people with BIG monitors and desktop PCs. But then, a lot of people also play, and surf on smaller-screen laptops. Basically it is about time I stopped serving the exact same web page to everyone. So as of today, positech.co.uk is a little cleverer than before!

check it out, and try resizing the window if you have a big screen:

http://www.positech.co.uk/index.html

The bulk of the site is the same, but depending on screen width, you get 3,4 or 5 little images linking to other games under the big slider thing. I think this makes good use of 1920 res monitors without sticking horizontal scrollbars (ugh) on smaller browser windows. It’s easy to do as well…

You just need to use some CSS, and a few <div> sections here and there. if you name a <div>, you can adjust it’s width based on the browser window inside the css like this:

@media screen and (min-width: 1400px) and (max-width: 1648px)
{
  .gamesection {width: 1316px;}
}

That makes the gamesection div 1316px wide if the screen size is between those 2 values.

I can then hide/show the ‘optional’ boxes with the extra images the same way, using named divs in the html:

@media screen and (min-width: 1400px) and (max-width: 1648px)
{
  #optionalbox { display: block; }
  #optionalbox2 { display: none; } /*hide 5th game box if screen is too short*/
}

I thought it was cool anyway :D

Today marks the official start of the 2013 SHOW ME THE SALES promotion. Woohoo! Let there be fireworks, cakes and champagne!* This is a different kind of sale than you are used to. It’s not a bundle, and it’s not being run by a portal like steam or gamers gate, or anyone like that. It’s being run entirely by indie developers who sell their games direct. The sales are direct on the developers website, all showmethegames does is just aggregate all the game information and provide discount links for you lucky people. It’s 100% indie. or maybe 200% indie, who really knows these days…

CHECK OUT THE GAMES HERE

This is a sale where there are no middlemen, or anyone taking a cut of any of the money other than the hard working pixel-bashers and code-wranglers who made the games. You buy whatever games you like, direct from the developers website. Showmethegames.com is a site owned and run by me! out of the goodness and generosity of my ferengi heart. The thing is, not taking a cut of the sales also means the ad budget is zero. Nada. Zip, nothing. So that means we appreciate people tweeting and blogging about the sale all that much more.

So please TWEET or BLOG or post about it, or upvote it somewhere so everybody gets to hear about it. We have games like Defcon, Revenge of the titans, Voxatron, Scoregasm and loads more. Plus even if you don’t like the games on sale, there are lots more on the www.showmethegames website. The sale runs from…

11th may to 18th may.

Tell your friends! Tell your enemies! Tell neutral countries!

*fireworks cake and champagne not included.

I have been doing uninteresting adminy stuff today. Hardly any exciting code. I may just have found a core simulation bug however. More interesting news to come…

In the meantime here is a man in his early forties remembering how much guitar strings hurt when you don’t play any more.

Ever since I bought my latest PC, it has been very rarely, but annoyingly susceptible to random power-shutdowns. The PC then reboots fine, although when it is in the mood to do so, it may then power off after a few seconds (or minutes), and basically be unusable until I get grumpy and leave it for a good few hours, or overnight. It’s very rare, but very frustrating when it happens, and I don’t like the worry that one day this could actually nuke the hard drives or graphics card.

(I’ve pretty much ruled out any other cause of the shutdowns also, it’s definitely hardware, and definitely inside the box)

The PC cost £1,000 mostly because I had a big RAID array and an SSD and a meaty video card put in there. It never occurred to me that the PSU might suck. It’s apparently a ‘powercool pc-650auba-m’, which doesn’t mean much to me, except that it’s a brand nobody has heard of, which is a bad sign.

I finally lost patience with it this morning and ordered a new corsair PSU, which I will bravely try and fit myself. I used to actually work as a PC hardware engineer, so you might imagine I wouldn’t give this a second thought, but that was long ago, when PCI was a fascinating new technology, and USB was still a cutting edge feature. PSU’s now look nothing like the ones I remember. That’s reason #1. Reason #2 is that inside the case it’s cable city Arizona, and fairly squashed. I’m probably going to have to work out how the SSD is attached to the case, and remove it in order to get the PSU out, and re-running the mess of cables will be a pain. I think I should use all new cables, so I can rule out that as a potential cause. (kinda scary because the SSD is the boot drive)

Theoretically, the whole PC is under warranty, but I’ve done the PC hardware job myself, and I don’t rate much the chances of them actually caring, or agreeing to swap it out, and certainly not swapping it out on site (even if I pay), because I can’t be without a PC for any period. Plus, they will likely only do a like-for-like swap with another cheap PSU anyway…

So right now I am staring at a depressing progress bar while an agonizingly slow backup copy of all my source code (to an external drive) takes place. I have it all backed up online anyway, but the art assets are only local (and with the artists as original files) and haven’t been fully backed up for a while, so I’m going the extra mile. Realistically, the chances of really screwing up a PSU swap-out are pretty minimal, but this is my work PC…

In future, I shall be buying PC’s with really good PSU’s. It’s a silly thing to skimp on, and given current PC prices, and positechs sales, it’s madness for me to think about economy when buying a PC for my job. You live and learn etc….