"Where are they now" of viral videos.
Honestly, I had forgotten half of these videos. Some of them I wish I could still forget. I mean... honestly, that resume video? When I first saw that I was CERTAIN it was intended as a parody. But according to this site, it was genuine. What sort of person produced that, looked back at it, and didn't honestly think "holy shit, I am a douche."
The one that makes me most happy in my pants? Afro-Ninja. Not only did it not adversely affect him TOO much (I don't count "not being in Rush Hour 3" as a bad thing, and I have a mancrush on Jackie Chan), but he's turned it around and made it into a decent thing.
While some people seem to think that enjoyment can only be found in viral videos if someone is only suffering negative effects from it, I enjoy it more when the person involved is enjoying it. Numa Numa guy was doing what he REALLY enjoyed doing, and still is. Go you fat bastard, dance your happy little legs off, dance the dance of FREEDOM. Chocolate Rain? That guy's taking someone he's known for and carving himself a life he can enjoy with it. I would shake his hand and congratulate him for being able to root out idiots paying him to do parodies.
And now Afro Ninja. Oh lord, Afro Ninja.
I salute you. I salute you with the fire of a thousand suns.
Go stunt, you awesome stunt man you.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Random Bag appendix
Short post, preparing for a celebration of drinking.
I'd let them EXTERMINATE me.
Greatest short story EVER. Unsurprisingly written by Asimov.
And finally, a statement of utter shame.
I am reading 4chan, and enjoying it. I even posted something, and was proud when it got alot of positive notice.
Well, enjoy.
I'd let them EXTERMINATE me.
Greatest short story EVER. Unsurprisingly written by Asimov.
And finally, a statement of utter shame.
I am reading 4chan, and enjoying it. I even posted something, and was proud when it got alot of positive notice.
Well, enjoy.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Internet epiphany
It's taken many years (although most of them don't count since I had no knowledge of the subject matter) but I've finally worked out why 4chan is so popular on the internet. As an estimate I'd be willing to say it's far less popular then believed, but it's notoriety is such that if you're a regular internet user and you don't know what 4chan is, you've at least felt the effects of it. Been rickroll'd or seen any of a dozen different memes (including the horrific shock sites) and yes, you've been 4chan'd.
Since learning about it I was heavily against 4chan. But having not visited it I was operating on hear-say, and as such believed them to be a bunch of creepy cultists operating from a mountain-side retreat attempting to cause suffering throughout the world for their own amusement and in the name of their unisex diety 'lulz', utilising a solely male membership in their domination plans with attempts to regress the world to a society from the 1950's, but much more open to porn. While very little of this has been disproven, I have had a startling insight.
4chan operates with a very, very simple premise in place. In some ways it is the ultimate meritocracy, but that I believe is overstating it since you require the 'merits' they believe to be an inherent good. How do they enforce such a meritocracy? Simple. The pure fact that probably 99% of all posts are done by "Anonymous".
One one hand this anonymity means that there is a great deal of stupidity present. People can post whatever they want and be as stupid as they want, and there's nothing but the uncaring nature of the people they're trolling to dissuade them. But dissuade them it does. Trolls are rated (usually quite poorly, working on the concept that the best trolling is the one where they don't realise they're being trolled), and people have more fun with them then the Troll did. But the stupidity is still there.
So what good factor does Anonymity bring in? Simple, there is no social 'clique' to get 'in' with. There are no leaders, since there's no way to identify who's leading and who's not. There is no way to grab attention since no one even KNOWS who is grabbing the attention. There is attention to grab, but it's like the person trying to step into the spotlight is invisible. This removes so much of the social drama that can exist in an internet based community.
And while it must be said this attitude does result in alot of poor taste humour and offensiveness, the fact that the entire group is founded on mutual amusement means that every now and then you just find... comedy gold.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Player vs Character skills
This post is inspired by a forum topic I saw recently, that can be found here.
This plays into a number of different factors in game design.
1. 100% completion requiring one good playthrough, or does it need more? (AKA. Characters who can do everything)
This is something I commonly contemplate. Take a game with RPG elements and alot of them will have skills such as "Conversation", "lockpick", "stealth", "pickpocket", etc etc. Just basic skills that open up new tricks in game. Now there are two ways to deal with this.
The first is that the skills only open up pointless side things that may have some degree of reward for doing so (extra money/experience/items, etc etc). The problem with this is that they then either feel useless (why bother getting them if you can spend that on more fighting instead, since there's so little bonus) or essential (I've got to get my proud knight 'Lockpick', so he can get his hands on that super sword early on). Of course, even if they aren't essential then you will still have to deal with people who want to be able to do everything in one playthrough trying to force the skills into a character not designed to deal with it.
The second is to offer them as alternative pathways. This was done successfully in the Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines: When too many colons are never enough, PC game. Since there were nearly always alternative methods to most things, it meant that two playthroughs with characters of different strengths were nearly always very different. This in turn makes it a successful game in my view. The trouble is that there will always be things you need to fight your way out of, so if you play a heavy combat-only character then those fights go amazingly quickly and easily, and there's very little else you can do. Alternatively if you play a skill-heavy character, suddenly you find yourself in a fight you struggle heavily to come out ahead in.
That leads neatly into my next point.
2. Player ability compared to supposed character ability.
A game that best shows this off, for me, is "Sid Meyer's Pirates!", exclamation mark included. In that game when creating a character you get to choose one of many areas for your character to specialise in. Outside of buying special items, this is the only RPG element in the game, and the only advancement your character can get. The areas of specialisation as basically things like "Swordplay" (better at the swordfight minigame), "Charm" (better at the dancing minigame), etc etc. Most minigames had a specialisation attached.
The trouble is that this led to an interesting situation where the player was best off having their character specialising in an area they were genuinely bad at. The idea of having a specialisation in an area you're bad at just sounds amusing, even if it makes a degree of sense (using the mechanics to make up for a weakness), it just doesn't sound right.
And the concept of player capabilities against character capablilities struggles in a few other senses. If a character is meant to be an elite ranged soldiers (either because that's what the game represents, or it's an RPG where they specialised in that field) it just feels weird that they struggle to kill even basic enemies. But if you 'boost' them up with certain things (such as autotargetting, etc) then it doesn't feel like they're the ones who're expert marksmen.
3. Micromanagement of characters vs faith in computers ability to manage such things.
Moving onto RTS style games, this is something that has bugged me for a while. As someone who loves large scale combat in RTS', micomanagement bothers me. The smallest scale I enjoy is for a single hero in a fight (where he is the ONLY micromanagement I have to do), or readjusting the siege weaponry so they fire at the section of wall I want them to fire at. In a game like Warcraft 3 or Starcraft I have no enjoyment from watching micromanagement win the day over grand strategy.
In the thread linked to, it mentions things like "making specific units throw grenades", discussing if it should be a micromanaged thing, or entrusted to the AI. Personally I would prefer for the AI to use it responsibly then having to trigger it manually every single time I do it. This then raises the problem in that the AI in a vast majority of games is so thick you could favourably compare it with a whale's penis (also known as a Dork). An obvious solution would be to allow the players to set the ability to either be triggered by the player, or the AI.
What'd'ya know, there's a game that does that. Sins of a Solar Empire, one of my favourites.
This plays into a number of different factors in game design.
1. 100% completion requiring one good playthrough, or does it need more? (AKA. Characters who can do everything)
This is something I commonly contemplate. Take a game with RPG elements and alot of them will have skills such as "Conversation", "lockpick", "stealth", "pickpocket", etc etc. Just basic skills that open up new tricks in game. Now there are two ways to deal with this.
The first is that the skills only open up pointless side things that may have some degree of reward for doing so (extra money/experience/items, etc etc). The problem with this is that they then either feel useless (why bother getting them if you can spend that on more fighting instead, since there's so little bonus) or essential (I've got to get my proud knight 'Lockpick', so he can get his hands on that super sword early on). Of course, even if they aren't essential then you will still have to deal with people who want to be able to do everything in one playthrough trying to force the skills into a character not designed to deal with it.
The second is to offer them as alternative pathways. This was done successfully in the Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines: When too many colons are never enough, PC game. Since there were nearly always alternative methods to most things, it meant that two playthroughs with characters of different strengths were nearly always very different. This in turn makes it a successful game in my view. The trouble is that there will always be things you need to fight your way out of, so if you play a heavy combat-only character then those fights go amazingly quickly and easily, and there's very little else you can do. Alternatively if you play a skill-heavy character, suddenly you find yourself in a fight you struggle heavily to come out ahead in.
That leads neatly into my next point.
2. Player ability compared to supposed character ability.
A game that best shows this off, for me, is "Sid Meyer's Pirates!", exclamation mark included. In that game when creating a character you get to choose one of many areas for your character to specialise in. Outside of buying special items, this is the only RPG element in the game, and the only advancement your character can get. The areas of specialisation as basically things like "Swordplay" (better at the swordfight minigame), "Charm" (better at the dancing minigame), etc etc. Most minigames had a specialisation attached.
The trouble is that this led to an interesting situation where the player was best off having their character specialising in an area they were genuinely bad at. The idea of having a specialisation in an area you're bad at just sounds amusing, even if it makes a degree of sense (using the mechanics to make up for a weakness), it just doesn't sound right.
And the concept of player capabilities against character capablilities struggles in a few other senses. If a character is meant to be an elite ranged soldiers (either because that's what the game represents, or it's an RPG where they specialised in that field) it just feels weird that they struggle to kill even basic enemies. But if you 'boost' them up with certain things (such as autotargetting, etc) then it doesn't feel like they're the ones who're expert marksmen.
3. Micromanagement of characters vs faith in computers ability to manage such things.
Moving onto RTS style games, this is something that has bugged me for a while. As someone who loves large scale combat in RTS', micomanagement bothers me. The smallest scale I enjoy is for a single hero in a fight (where he is the ONLY micromanagement I have to do), or readjusting the siege weaponry so they fire at the section of wall I want them to fire at. In a game like Warcraft 3 or Starcraft I have no enjoyment from watching micromanagement win the day over grand strategy.
In the thread linked to, it mentions things like "making specific units throw grenades", discussing if it should be a micromanaged thing, or entrusted to the AI. Personally I would prefer for the AI to use it responsibly then having to trigger it manually every single time I do it. This then raises the problem in that the AI in a vast majority of games is so thick you could favourably compare it with a whale's penis (also known as a Dork). An obvious solution would be to allow the players to set the ability to either be triggered by the player, or the AI.
What'd'ya know, there's a game that does that. Sins of a Solar Empire, one of my favourites.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Writers in games
Read this. Then come back here.
Go on, it doesn't take long, I'll wait.
Read it? Good. When I showed that to a friend their reaction pretty much summarised my view.
"Accepting your flaws is a good thing. Embracing them is bad."
That's pretty much what the article is about. Yes, it is true that very, very few games have good stories. Halo's story was so laughable I had to treat it as a subtle parody just to play it. Half Life fans seem to have mistaken a 'complex' story with a 'good' one. There are many games that need to learn when to shut up and let us shoot space marines with our magical gun that fires cosmic paperclips. However the tone the (very short) article seemed to take seemed to me like the guy was saying "Well we can't do stories, so let's just keep rendering those three dimensional breasts and swords and cut one off with the other to our heart's content".
To that I say NO I RESPECTFULLY DISAGREE WITH YOUR OPINION IN A LOUD TONE OF VOICE.
One one hand I understand what is being said, people need to realise that a game is an interactive medium and so being treated to a visual book is no fun, but stating that developers should stop trying to tell grand stories in their games actually offends me. There are not many of them, but there are some GREAT games out there with great stories. Yes, they are the minority, but they are growing, and they show how possible it is with this medium to tell a grand tale.
You know what fills me with hope? When I hear of game studios hiring professional writers for their epic games. More often then not it doesn't happen, since the game will be the baby of the original head developer (who doesn't realise his story telling ability is often somewhere between an apple and an orange). However there are plenty of cases of games studios hiring writers. Often it seems the writer is hired just for small things (like randomly generated missions in MMOs), but there are also occasions of games with actual authors and professional writers attached.
That leads me neatly into a point I've wanted to bring up for a long time. A while back I stumbled across an epic arguement on a forum about the quality of the story behind the Halo games. One party claiming the writing could be disfavourably compared to being attacked and eaten by zombies, the other party claiming it was inspired by divine sources and milked from the nipple of Aphrodite herself.
Obviously I've already revealed my side in this arguement. The Halo story is as enthralling as a damp rag. The part that really made me laugh was when side one argued about how horrible the story was, side two replied with the following.
"If you read the novels you'll see why the halo story is so awesome."
I've never looked at the Halo novels, I don't know if they are well written, or what. But here we have the subtle collapse of the pro-halo-story arguement. The arguement is that the Halo story is horrifically bad, the Halo story is seperate to the novel. It's like someone saying the Spiderman movies are great because X happened in the comics (I know, not entirely metaphorically correct, but the point stands). The Halo novels are giving the setting and characters to an actual author and saying "What can you do with this, having been given this background information?". When arguing about the quality of a game's storyline, all you can utilise is the game itself.
Now, let's finish on something completely different.
Awwwwww..
Go on, it doesn't take long, I'll wait.
Read it? Good. When I showed that to a friend their reaction pretty much summarised my view.
"Accepting your flaws is a good thing. Embracing them is bad."
That's pretty much what the article is about. Yes, it is true that very, very few games have good stories. Halo's story was so laughable I had to treat it as a subtle parody just to play it. Half Life fans seem to have mistaken a 'complex' story with a 'good' one. There are many games that need to learn when to shut up and let us shoot space marines with our magical gun that fires cosmic paperclips. However the tone the (very short) article seemed to take seemed to me like the guy was saying "Well we can't do stories, so let's just keep rendering those three dimensional breasts and swords and cut one off with the other to our heart's content".
To that I say NO I RESPECTFULLY DISAGREE WITH YOUR OPINION IN A LOUD TONE OF VOICE.
One one hand I understand what is being said, people need to realise that a game is an interactive medium and so being treated to a visual book is no fun, but stating that developers should stop trying to tell grand stories in their games actually offends me. There are not many of them, but there are some GREAT games out there with great stories. Yes, they are the minority, but they are growing, and they show how possible it is with this medium to tell a grand tale.
You know what fills me with hope? When I hear of game studios hiring professional writers for their epic games. More often then not it doesn't happen, since the game will be the baby of the original head developer (who doesn't realise his story telling ability is often somewhere between an apple and an orange). However there are plenty of cases of games studios hiring writers. Often it seems the writer is hired just for small things (like randomly generated missions in MMOs), but there are also occasions of games with actual authors and professional writers attached.
That leads me neatly into a point I've wanted to bring up for a long time. A while back I stumbled across an epic arguement on a forum about the quality of the story behind the Halo games. One party claiming the writing could be disfavourably compared to being attacked and eaten by zombies, the other party claiming it was inspired by divine sources and milked from the nipple of Aphrodite herself.
Obviously I've already revealed my side in this arguement. The Halo story is as enthralling as a damp rag. The part that really made me laugh was when side one argued about how horrible the story was, side two replied with the following.
"If you read the novels you'll see why the halo story is so awesome."
I've never looked at the Halo novels, I don't know if they are well written, or what. But here we have the subtle collapse of the pro-halo-story arguement. The arguement is that the Halo story is horrifically bad, the Halo story is seperate to the novel. It's like someone saying the Spiderman movies are great because X happened in the comics (I know, not entirely metaphorically correct, but the point stands). The Halo novels are giving the setting and characters to an actual author and saying "What can you do with this, having been given this background information?". When arguing about the quality of a game's storyline, all you can utilise is the game itself.
Now, let's finish on something completely different.
Awwwwww..
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Giant robots represented as @
Edit: Fixed the link.
Holy crap, nearly up to post 200. Only 20 to go, which should only take me a month and a half.
Any of you know what a Rogue-like game is?
Rogue was a game back when graphics were for PANSIES and real men used screens with black backgrounds and a blinking tile showing you where the cursor was. If you needed a mouse you were a WUSS. In that game, your character is represented by a coloured @, your enemies are represented by appropriate letters all the colours of the rainbow (capital letters if they're a -real threat-), and you kill them by moving around with the up, down, left and right keys, then attempting to move into the square the enemies are in. It's like the ultimate in minimalistic gameplay. The true genius of this? Since the gameplay coding can be done predominantly in a VERY short time, that leaves the creators the chance to work on some very, VERY in depth background coding.
With that in mind I would like to introduce you to a friend of mine. Gearhead. Say hello Gearhead.
Gearhead: Hello.
Thank you. Now what impresses me about Gearhead? Let's ignore for the moment that it's a quite strategic RPG with both personal scale and giant-robot scale combat, or that it's got giant robots in it, or that it's a quite in depth open ended RPG sandbox game. What does it have?
One simple phrase: Every. Play-through. Is. Different.
I don't mean in the sense "Well I used the plasma rifle to kill the bad guy THIS time" sense. I mean in the sense that it randomly generates an overall plot for your character at each juncture. Granted these randomly generated plots may not have as much depth as specifically written ones, but it works. It works REALLY WELL.
Give Gearhead a try. I've attempted number 2, but I actually prefer the Rogue-like system over the poor graphics, personally.
Holy crap, nearly up to post 200. Only 20 to go, which should only take me a month and a half.
Any of you know what a Rogue-like game is?
Rogue was a game back when graphics were for PANSIES and real men used screens with black backgrounds and a blinking tile showing you where the cursor was. If you needed a mouse you were a WUSS. In that game, your character is represented by a coloured @, your enemies are represented by appropriate letters all the colours of the rainbow (capital letters if they're a -real threat-), and you kill them by moving around with the up, down, left and right keys, then attempting to move into the square the enemies are in. It's like the ultimate in minimalistic gameplay. The true genius of this? Since the gameplay coding can be done predominantly in a VERY short time, that leaves the creators the chance to work on some very, VERY in depth background coding.
With that in mind I would like to introduce you to a friend of mine. Gearhead. Say hello Gearhead.
Gearhead: Hello.
Thank you. Now what impresses me about Gearhead? Let's ignore for the moment that it's a quite strategic RPG with both personal scale and giant-robot scale combat, or that it's got giant robots in it, or that it's a quite in depth open ended RPG sandbox game. What does it have?
One simple phrase: Every. Play-through. Is. Different.
I don't mean in the sense "Well I used the plasma rifle to kill the bad guy THIS time" sense. I mean in the sense that it randomly generates an overall plot for your character at each juncture. Granted these randomly generated plots may not have as much depth as specifically written ones, but it works. It works REALLY WELL.
Give Gearhead a try. I've attempted number 2, but I actually prefer the Rogue-like system over the poor graphics, personally.
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