All posts by lstolmaker

ABZÛ – Review

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I’d just finished Far Cry 3 and was looking for a less…murderous game to play next when I stumbled upon Abzu in my steam library. My new projector had just arrived too, so I was hankering to try it out on something beautiful. I was originally planning to watch a movie, but I’d heard Abzu was a movie-length game and decided to give it a go instead.

Truly an awesome decision, me. I’d never played Journey because I’ve never owned a console, but I was really bummed about it. It’s exactly the sort of game that I think is awesome and underrepresented; simple and beautiful and engaging. I don’t always want to think or kill as much as games tend to ask me to.

Abzu is full of little mechanics that reinforce the point of the game through how they feel. The core experience here is “What would it be like to explore ancient underwater runes surrounded by beautiful ocean creatures?” and boy does it deliver.

There are these ‘meditation points’, which are your typical ‘spot with a view’ checkpoints, and once you unlock them you are able to travel to them at any time to just sit and watch the fish. Is this something I ever see myself doing? Probably not, but it was still fun to collect them, and to take a moment and experience each as I did so. Especially on the projector, it’s like a giant aquarium fish tank in my living room.

This fish tank is interactive too! You can ride bigger animals, both to get around quickly and because it’s awesome. You can unlock new creatures for your “aquarium” by finding them in these little holes around the world.

One of the highlights in terms of gameplay is these tunnel sequences, where you are hurtled from point A to point B. You have limited control, but can try to swim through schools of fish. If you miss them, no big deal; your journey continues. If you swim through them, you’re rewarded with a sweet visual and sound effect and the fish all start to follow you and MAN it’s satisfying. The music carries a lot of weight here as well, flowing along with you to guide your sense of wonder.

The audio and visuals are both excellent, which really sells the whole experience. It’s a game that hinges on that sense of awe that comes with exploring another world, and the fidelity with which they’ve created it is top tier. I highly recommend this great GDC talk on how they managed it all.

Bits of story and characters weave their way into this fabric too. You pick up these helpful robot friends along the way, who you can beep patterns at and who respond in kind. Subtle, but brilliant. There’s even a shark who you form a bond with, and all this story is told through clever interactions that keep you invested.

Some of these are simple puzzles, which mostly act as a catalyst for the player to experience more of the beautiful world. The variety is appreciated though — little twists like bombs that you can’t swim too close too or they zap you add a sense of danger to an otherwise serene landscape. Avoiding these bombs can be trickier than you’d expect thanks to the slightly awkward swimming controls. In a few places, you have to navigate into a narrow passage and I just kept missing the entrance and hitting the wall.

Thankfully, Abzu isn’t the sort of game to punish the player for such clumsiness. If you feel at home in this deep ocean world, the game will reward your mastery and add extra sparkles to your experience. If not, you can just keep on exploring at whatever pace feels right for you. In a game that’s very much not about mechanical mastery, this was a good choice.

The thing is, they do want you to feel at home down there–eventually. The controls are just awkward enough that you get the hang of swimming over time, and the developers give you some awesome opportunities at the end to flex that growth. Of course, if you’re still terrible at swimming anyway like I was, there are easier paths then too.

All in all, it took me about 2 hours to play through and I was enthralled the whole time. I love snorkeling and appreciate this kind of simplistic game, so I’m very much the target audience. Still, with a game this short and cheap, you owe it to yourself to at least get your feet wet.

Far Cry 3 – Review

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I’ve been thinking lately about high agency level design and I remembered hearing that Far Cry 3’s outposts were really well done, so it’s been on my list for a while. Since I’ve been working on a game that might use a similar style of levels, I decided it was a good time to give it a go. There are spoilers in here because the story isn’t really the important part of this game. I also assume some familiarity with the genre, so I apologize if you’ve never played any of the sort.

For some reason, I never quite picked up that Far Cry 3 was such an Ubisoft Formula game. It became clear rather quickly though that the game was basically Assassin’s Creed (which I haven’t played, but have watched) with higher powered guns. I do not mind this. Despite the objective flow feeling exactly how you’d expect from what it is, they use the formula because it feels good to play.

Part of that formula involves a lot of side objectives. There are animal hunting ones which I did because they unlock some handy upgrades and are fun little side excursions. There were these racing ones that I didn’t care for (The game very much wants you to drive around in cars, but I always just drove into a river so I mostly ended up sprinting everywhere). There were also some story ones that I probably missed because you had to talk to random people to get them. In the end, I probably only did ¼ of the possible side missions.

Other than those, you are clearing outposts, climbing towers, or doing the main story quests. I honestly loved the tower climbing parts. They’re very simple climbing puzzles, trivially so, but they do an excellent job of breaking up the action with some some more relaxing “stop and remember how pretty this game is” gameplay. Same for hang-gliding around, which was awesome but I wished I could’ve done more of. Gliding is one of my favorite modes of transport in games; controlling a glider has its own satisfying minigame and gives players agency over how they travel while still having enough interesting limitations to be balancable.

The outposts are the main highlight, and are just dynamic enough to keep things interesting for the game’s dozen hour runtime. I do wish the ‘reinforcements’ timer were a bit longer so that I could feasibly rambo the camp before they arrived, but it still acts as a good incentive to disable the alarm stealthily first if you can. Each one is its own fun puzzle where the player gets to choose their approach. I especially liked the binocular mechanic, which lets you scout and mark players ahead of time in what is maybe my favorite implementation of that mechanic. I talked about this a while back in my post on detective mode and love to see the evolution there.

There’s also a skill tree system, which I felt had enough compelling options to stay interesting, but all the best ones are all gated behind story quests. I know this is common and it’s a fine way to ensure players don’t get caught up grinding sidequests forever, but I wished the gated abilities felt more impactful. It took me most of the game to unlock the faster sprint, but did it really need to? Is that too powerful for me to have early on? It took me enough of the game to unlock my fun tools that I didn’t get as much time with them as I would have liked. It’s a nice touch how your unlocked skills add to your tattoo though; it’s an awesome little immersion bit.

Far Cry 3 was interesting from that perspective. You play as Jason, a seemingly doucheyboy who is out partying with his friends when you’re all captured by a psycho gang of criminals. I appreciated what they were doing with the characters initially–it was compelling to see a character put into a crazy situation and freaking out about it appropriately.

Before long though, Jason gets oh so very much into killing and stimming and causing mayhem (which he–that is to say, you–are also unreasonably good at). I did find this a bit unsettling at first, but once you accept that the game is just an action movie power fantasy, it’s…fine.

Vaas is also a great villain, and you immediately believe that he’s both crazy enough to kill you, and to give you that small chance to escape which the story hinges on. For some reason though, you kill him ⅔ of the way through the game and then have to deal with his boss for the rest of the game, and he’s just an all around less interesting character.

On the whole, the story missions were engaging enough that I found myself invested in them. They make frequent use of these dream sequences where you mostly just walk slowly through and I thought they worked well, both as a gameplay pacing tool and a storytelling tool. While the missions do tend to involve outpost clearing in addition to their main objective (or at least, you probably want to clear the outpost near your mission first), there are some fun ones that mix up gameplay. One issue I ran into there is that, while much of the game encourages stealthy gameplay, some of the story missions are definitely designed for you to go in guns blazing. The thing is, you don’t know this until you are doing them and I sometimes found myself unsure of whether the game wanted me to be stealthy or start chucking molotovs. Games like Dishonored are able to make both options viable, but here it seemed like you were supposed to do one or the other and I had to guess which.

On my playthrough I decided to be Oliver Queen (it fits the game really well!), so I used my bow and knife was much as possible.

For some missions though, especially ones where you have to protect allies from enemies, you really need to be using guns, mines, and so on. I appreciated how these missions mixed up the gameplay, but they also took me the most attempts and caused me the most frustration. The combination of “I can’t control this npc at all so it’s obnoxious when they die” and the missions being very difficult on a first attempt felt at odds with the free-flowing “choose your power fantasy” nature of the rest of the game.

Until you know where the enemies are going to come from and which waves have heavies and so forth, you’re probably going to die a few times. That’s not always bad, but FC3 is generally very good about offering the player the information they need to make interesting decisions (for instance, you can always scout outposts ahead of time), so I found myself feeling suddenly much more helpless in these missions. Maybe that was the intent, but again, I’m not sure it fits the fantasy.

On the whole, I truly enjoyed Far Cry 3. It’s not anything groundbreaking, but it executes well on what it’s trying to do and is definitely good fun if you’re into the fantasy it’s selling. I’m not sure when I’ll next pick up the series, but I expect it’ll be a decent time when I do.

Cooking: The Game

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As someone raised in a very food-centric home, I’m always baffled by how many people I meet just have no idea how to cook. It’s too bad, and not just for all of the normal reasons. Sure, folks should learn to feed themselves, it can save them money, yadda yadda. Beyond that, it’s sad because these people are missing out on one of the best games out there.

First off, cooking has a great learning curve, with a low barrier to entry and an impossibly high skill ceiling if you want to chase it. If you’re just starting out, there are still thousands of simple recipes that you can follow to make something delicious. Messed something up, despite following a recipe? That’s ok, cooking is extremely forgiving for most mistakes. Accidentally add too much of an ingredient? It usually won’t matter much! Your results might not be perfect every time, but it’s pretty rare that anything comes out inedible. You still get to eat, and hopefully you learned something too.

Of course, those are the negative scenarios.  Most of the time, you’ll follow the instructions just fine, and then you get to EAT SOMETHING DELICIOUS! That may not be great motivation for everyone, but most humans love food rewards. Even if you yourself aren’t that into food, cooking for a few people is often easier than cooking for yourself. That means you can cook for your friends and family, reaping those sweet, sweet social rewards too!

Ah, you like progression systems in your game to keep you playing? How about an almost infinite library of mostly skill-based recipes for you to learn? They vary in difficulty from toddler to superintelligent octopus, whatever your individual level may be. This skill tree is also incredibly flexible, allowing you to progress on your terms, choose what disciplines to pursue, cuisines to learn, and so on.

Each of those paths has its own set of fun discoveries along the way. Sometimes a new cuisine can be so much to learn, but they tend to have a core structure around which they are built. I like to taste new ingredients (within reason…) as I discover them, and it’s fascinating to find new flavors and see how different cultures use them as building blocks for all sorts of dishes. All of these pieces come together to make you a better cook, in addition to unlocking varieties of new recipes.

What about the actual act of cooking? It’s just a series of execution puzzles and you can approach them however you’d like! Go nuts and wing it, timing everything by the seat of your pants! If you’re more strategic, maybe you’d like to measure all your ingredients out first? Maybe you’re a mix like me, and like to optimize for fewest dishes dirtied, but not at the expensive of too much added complexity. You can experiment to find a ‘playstyle’ that feels best to you.

Still, not everyone is into that kind of experimentation. Good news, then! Cooking is one of the most explored bodies of knowledge humanity has. We’ve been cooking food for almost as long as we’ve existed, and there’s no shortage of techniques, tips, and tutorials for anyone who wants to learn theory before jumping in. Whether you’re into demo videos, prefer to learn the science behind flavor first, or just want to read about you really should put butter in everything, you can bet there are (often free!) resources out there for you.

So much of life is perspective, and it’s easy to feel like cooking is this annoying obstacle in the way of eating which pops up throughout the day and must be vanquished. Hell, I often feel that way myself, and I love both food and cooking. Still, I find that when I cook for myself, even if I’m not super excited about what I made, it feels like time well spent. Not everything in life is easy to treat as a game, but it’s such a tiny leap for cooking that we can do a better job of leaning into that.

And look, I know everyone is going to come after me and say that I didn’t address the elephant in the room: dishes. You’re right, dishes suck. I got nothin. Try to make those ‘friends and family’ that you cooked for do them so that you don’t have to. Or live somewhere with a dishwasher.

Darksiders – Review

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To be honest, I’ve been dreading the Darksiders post a bit. It’s because I think I might kinda hate Darksiders, but there are also so many factors that play into this hatred that I knew I’d end up writing for ages. Of course, the game also has some great parts, so I’ll do my best to touch on those too.

In fact, I want to start with some of the good here, because part of what bothers me about Darksiders is that when I first started playing, I was pretty into it. The combat is juicy and responsive. The animations are solid, both in terms of War’s attacks and the enemies reactions. The enemies and the world have good visual variety and distinctive environments. There are a lot of good ideas and systems, they just don’t always feel right for the game.

Darksiders has pretty standard console action combat, based around timing combos and dodging out of telegraphs. This isn’t totally my jam, but I enjoy it when executed well. The problem with Darksiders is that it seems well executed on the surface, but there’s very little depth there, and over time I started to be frustrated by many of their design decisions.

To elaborate, you have your standard attacks which you can chain into a variety of combos like you’d expect in a console action game. To be honest I never learned these, because I never had to bother with them. In most cases, your combos take longer enough than the monster telegraphs that the best way to get one off is to start attacking from a few steps away. Sometimes I’d take advantage of this with the ‘pause slightly between attacks’ combo by early-starting a few meters back, but I mostly had no reason to, and I’d rather attack my enemies than the air.

The only other combo I used was the one where you hold down attack, which stuns your enemy and damages them a bunch. This is obviously very good when fighting a couple of enemies, especially because it also knocks the enemy and you up in the air where it’s harder for other enemies to hit you, and follows up with a spin attack that hits the stunned target and anyone behind you. When holding down your basic attack button feels more impactful than executing complex combos, that may be a problem in the long run.

On top of the attack combos, you also have special abilities, which cost wrath. You build up wrath slowly enough that you are intended to use these infrequently, and while they do a lot of damage, I mostly found myself hitting them to take advantage of the invincibility frames granted by the animation. What did these abilities do? I’m not sure for most of them. It was poorly explained and awkward to swap abilities, so I mostly just used the spikes one. I think there was one that made you take less damage, one that burns nearby enemies, maybe a couple others, but similar to the combos, using them didn’t feel better than just the base combat. They felt superfluous because they didn’t actually add depth my normal play patterns, they just existed alongside them.

You also have executions, where you can fatality a low health enemy. Some of these are cool, and they give you some invincibility frames, so you are heavily incentivized to use them when you can. For some situations this mechanic works well, in others it becomes tedious to execute a series of small enemies, or even to sit there for the long animation of killing a large enemy. It’s a fine line between “cool fatality” and “I’m so tired of waiting for this animation”. Of course, you could just keep attacking them instead, but some of the most depth I found in the combat was around optimizing use of these execution invincibility frames. While that’s not necessarily bad, I wish the depth came from some of the other systems (there are so many) instead.

Perhaps some of these systems had more depth and I just didn’t pick up on it. For example, there was also a weapon mastery system, as well as bonuses you could slot into your main weapons. Unfortunately, all that having levels tied to my weapons did was make me hesitant to try new weapons later in the game. The bonuses I could slot were mostly vague or uninteresting. I think I went with one that made me do more damage! Maybe some other options would have made frustrating parts of the game easier for me? If so, I had no way of knowing and few incentives to find out. For the most part, that’s how Darksiders feels. It’s a bunch of systems smushed together, and some of them are fine systems, but the game is entirely lacking in feedback around how to use each effectively.

There is potential there though, and it’s too bad, because it feels like if more time had gone into polishing up these core systems, the team could’ve pulled off something awesome with Darksiders. For instance, I often wished that hit interruptions were more consistent. If you hit an enemy as they were attacking, it would often interrupt them. But not always, and I never could figure out any indication as to when I’d be able to get an interrupt in or not. I’m sure there was some (even if it was just a count or timing pattern), but I never picked up on it. If I don’t understand a mechanic, I can’t use it strategically, so I’m going to just ignore it if I can. I wish more of the game’s dozen hour playtime had gone towards showing me the depth in its mechanics.

On the standard difficulty, Darksiders doesn’t require much of you strategically. While enemy visual design is actually pretty good, it doesn’t really matter because each enemy occupies the same mindspace in terms of gameplay. Some enemies have different attack patterns, but rarely different enough for them not to blend together in my mind. You just always hit dodge when they do their thing.

Some of these things are powerful attacks that need to be dodged. Many of them suffer from not-great telegraphing. They tend to be unforgiving too: a swipe in one direction, then back the other direction, then a smash. If you get hit by the first, chances are you’ll get hit by the second and third, which means most of your attention has to be on these big enemies. Pretty late in the game they actually introduce a big skeleton guy with a shield who feels like the best designed enemy I ran into. He has clear, intuitive telegraphs and good windows of vulnerability. He also has a progression over the course of the encounter as his shield gets broken and he goes berserk. He was really the only enemy that stood out to me though, and didn’t appear until later in the game.

The main differentiator between enemies is what I’d call gimmick enemies–they are trivial to beat if you can remember how. There is a section where you need to pull the shells off of these mite creatures before you can do damage to them. There isn’t much room for skill expression here; you just have to remember to do the thing. This isn’t making an interesting decision, it’s being asked to remember how to tick a box. There is a lot of that in Darksiders, and it just feels like dated gameplay to me. I don’t feel awesome when I remember to do the thing the developer is forcing me to do to move forward, I feel like I’m taking a quiz.

Another interesting decision was to have no enemy healthbars, even on bosses. I mentioned before that I thought Darksiders did a poor job of giving the player good feedback, and the lack of healthbars was a huge contributing factor here. Health bars are by no means required, but damage optimization is a pretty key part of combat, and the player can’t optimize their damage if there is no way to differentiate effective play from ineffective play. It’s not fair to say there is none of that, but especially on bosses, I didn’t like how static combat felt. The combat encounters had unclear goals and progression. Even when the bosses have phases, you don’t know how many, which means each fight is pretty much trial and error until you figure out the sequence of actions the developers want you to do.

Darksiders’ standard encounter formula starts with the player walking into a large room, followed by a quick cutscene of the doors being blocked, and then enemies begin to spawn into the room and you kill them until they stop spawning. With no feedback on how you are progressing through each fight, combat began to feel contrived and tedious. You just fight until you don’t have to any more, then move forward and repeat, and the juicy combat can only keep that fun for so long.

What frustrated me the most were the bosses in this game. I think I might hate action game bosse in general, because they tend to follow this pattern of “throw away what you have learned about combat so far and figure out this gimmick”. The bosses follow your standard phase structure, usually where you perform an execution gimmick, hit the boss for a bit, and then repeat.

I have a few problems with this. The first is that there is no room for damage optimization (or was there? I couldn’t tell because bosses have no health bars!). You just hit the boss during each window where it’s vulnerable for as long as you are allowed to and then it’s back to executing the gimmick. Sometimes you have to dodge around for a while for a phase.

Another weird choice is that you don’t start boss fights with full health. You start with as much health as you had when you got to the boss room. This makes sense, except what happens if you die? Well, you get put at ⅗ health for your next attempt. Why not full health? I couldn’t tell you. It means that if you start a boss fight with below ⅗ health, you are extra likely to die on your first attempt. You still try, but then you fail, and then it feels like the game is punishing you for challenging yourself in the first place. Any depth in managing your health as a persistent resource is thrown out the window.

There was this portal robot boss which I liked, except that you have to fight it three times. Oh yeah, you get a portal gun in this game. They do a decent job with it from a puzzle perspective, but the implementation of the portals felt lacking after playing…portal. They’d just suck you in when you went near them, and the actual teleportation was a quicktime event. This made them generally awkward to use in any situation where timing or execution mattered. Combine that with clunky aiming, and I found myself once again thinking “good idea guys, but you didn’t quite pull off the implementation”. That’s Darksiders in a nutshell, man.

The portal boss itself got a pretty fun gimmick, where you have to use portals to jump on top of it. Each time you fight it, there’s a slight variation on this, and you have to accomplish it a few times for each fight. It just feels so contrived: each phase transition, your portal disappears and you have to place it again. Why, game? I wouldn’t have even minded if there was some explanation, but it’s just so obviously there to draw out the boss encounter. You figure out the mechanic, plan, execute, succeed, and then the game says “NOW DO IT AGAIN, FROM THE START! AND AGAIN! HAHA!”. It feels disrespectful. Instead, it should have been one boss with a difficulty progression through the mechanics of each of those 3 bosses over the encounter and it could have been great. Instead, it just feels like they had a good boss design and had to dilute it across three encounters to add more playtime. Bummer.

A couple of final points I want to touch on. There is a section of the game (not as close to the beginning as you would expect) where your quest is to complete a bunch of challenges that ask you to fight in unique ways. The concept here is fine, but the execution felt contrived and uninteresting (I need a thesaurus). I don’t even remember the game’s explanation for why I had to do this, but they felt like chores to me. They had nothing to do with my character’s objectives, just more jumping through hoops for an hour. There are better ways of getting players to vary their play than forcing them to do combat homework before they can continue their quest.

Another complaint I had over the course of the game was that the world huge, but didn’t feel like it had any reason to be. There were explorables to find, but they mostly felt pointless, so the “I can’t wait to come back here when I can reach this blocked area” feeling never set in for me. Rewards are not compelling if the systems they exist in are not compelling.

Then, towards the end of the game, you get a quest which asks you to go back to all of the other zones in the game. I do like this concept because it’s fun to go back with your new powers and feel strong, but I wished I’d picked up more quick travel points on my first way through. I’d also sometimes end up taking the wrong exit in a zone, or going the wrong way to get to the sword shards I was trying to collect. If you do this, there is no ‘take me home’ mechanic, so you’re forced to work through any traversal puzzles again to get out of the place you didn’t mean to be anyway. The original level design is at odds with the fact that players need to be able to move through these spaces at a reasonable speed later on.

You may have noticed I hardly mentioned the puzzles in this game, despite the fact that they do make up a huge part of playtime. I thought the puzzles were fine. The game is no portal, but for the most part I enjoyed the puzzles and thought they were pretty good. Some of the interactions felt unintuitive to me and I wished the puzzle mechanics interacted with each other more (instead each mechanic is mostly relegated to its own section, where you learn it and then throw it away), but that was all minor compared to most of my complaints. High quality puzzle design is difficult. Still, it also would be awesome if, as a puzzle/action game, some of the puzzle mechanics factored into combat in interesting ways. Instead, you alternate between isolated combat portions and puzzle portions. For that hybrid gameplay to work though, you have to get the core bits right first, and it seems like Darksiders was already trying to do too much at once.

All in all, Darksiders is a decent game, just one that’s very much not for me. I found this especially frustrating, because while it has the makings of something I could love, it  manages to fall flat in so many of the ways that matter most to me. I’m sure there are loads of players out there who adore the game as-is and that’s great too. I just feel like the team was scratching the surface of something truly awesome here, but couldn’t quite pull it off.

Obligatory 2019 Post

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Happy 2019!

I got a job and stopped posting last year, but I actually had a bunch of posts partially written from before then. I finally went through and edited those so I’ll be able to put up posts semi-regularly again. They’re from 2018 and are mostly more game reviews from when trying new stuff was my focus. In the end I started to feel like those were getting monotonous–I’m not a compelling enough writer to keep that sort of piece interesting, and I never had a clear enough focus for the content to carry one, but they’re worth tossing up here.

Going forward, I’m going to think about how I want to format my game posts. I’d still like to capture my thoughts as I try new games, but I’m not sure the best way for me to do that yet.  I expect it’ll either be a more structured analysis or a much shorter version of what I’ve been doing with less extraneous context. I still want to train-of-thought about games, but I’m going to force myself to pick a point or two and make it more succinctly. My hope is that each post can be less of a ‘project’ that I need to put time into, and more of a way for me to capture my thoughts on a game so that I can come back later for inspiration if I so fancy.

Some of the posts aren’t inspired by a specific game and I plan to continue to write those when the inspiration strikes me. I have a few that are partially written already and need a little love which I’ll get around to editing as well. My plan is to do roughly a post a month this year, which I’m saying here OUT LOUD so that I actually do it. Hopefully my backlog makes that a promise I can fulfill.

Why I make software

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While writing my why I make games post, I found myself comparing to why I make web apps. True, I grew up in games, but I also grew up using the internet for everything, and my interactions with it have shaped who I am. When I was playing Star Wars Galaxies, I was also prolific on the game’s online forums, selling items on eBay (sorry, I was a kid!), reading Allakhazam game guides daily to figure out what the hell I was doing, and more. In some ways, these apps shaped my overall experiences more than the games themselves.

It continues into my adult life too. Don’t get me started on how much misery CoverOregon and Healthcare.gov have caused me personally. On the flipside, I adore Todoist and use it every day. I think Plex is one of the coolest pieces of software around (and it’s basically free!). So many sites have been core to my life at different points in time, how could I not try my hand at building some? What I came to appreciate about these apps is that ultimately they had one thing in common: time.

While software can change the world on a massive scale–and it would be awesome (if scary) to work on something of that magnitude–what I love about it is that software saves people time, and time is valuable to everybody. Given enough time and freedom, people do incredible things. I don’t need to write an app to solve world hunger when I can write an app which can save enough time for other people to. Which is good because I don’t know the first thing about doing that!

Time is worth saving, but there’s more beyond that. On top of saving you time, good software can save you frustration. Sure, filling out your taxes online is much faster than doing them on paper, but it’s also so much less mentally exhausting (when it works, but that’s another post!). Life is full of these kinds of necessary tasks which we have to make sure to complete “or else”.

These chores cost not just the time they took, but also the willpower needed to get yourself to do them instead of something less…awful. The more we minimize the time and effort drained by these tasks, the more people can do what truly matters to them. For some folks, I hope that is solving world hunger. For others, just helping give them more time to spend with their loved ones is plenty.

In a way, what software does is help me to to create freedom. It lets me automate stuff I don’t like doing, freeing me from chores. It helps me to efficiently learn whatever I need to, giving me the confidence to pursue my goals. It frees my mind from having to remember unnecessary information. It keeps me in touch with my friends and family, freeing me from worry and isolation. The list goes on.

That’s what it comes down to: software has the power to help people live happier, more fulfilling lives. That’s something I’m privileged to be a part of. This power extends to me too, as I find writing code personally fulfilling. Programming has a level of creative expression that I think people tend to overlook, as well as incredible depth of knowledge to explore. I’m always learning, always growing, and through it all, building software which saves myself (and hopefully numerous others) time and frustration. So that’s why I make software. Because software is amazing and I love building it.

Why I make games

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Like a lot of folks, I grew up playing games. I remember playing One Must Fall when I was 4 or 5 and thinking it was just about the coolest thing ever (it was; giant fighting robots!). Of course, I was quickly forbidden from playing something so violent. I have a vivid recollection that “I’d be allowed to play when I turned 6”. Which I forgot until long after I was 6 and had moved to other games (like Trophy Bass 2, the second coolest thing ever).

Eventually though, Diablo came out. It would often crash our computer once you got to hell, but I convinced myself that pushing the logo on the front would help the loading screen to complete instead. Then Homm3 came out, but our screen didn’t support the resolution it required, so it was only half-playable. We persevered though, having to avoid fighting any monsters who were ranged, since they would just kill us from offscreen. Once we bought a new monitor, Homm was all I wanted to do.

Diablo 2 came out in 2000, so I was 8. My brother bought a copy, but I couldn’t afford my own. I remember waking up early on weekend mornings so that I could sneak over and play on his computer. He wasn’t keen on that–I’d bolt if I heard any noise from his room–but I had to play on his computer because my pirated copy wouldn’t work on battle.net, and what was the point of playing alone when I could play with…anyone?

I’m sure I did other things in those years, but all I remember is D2. I got my friend Nick to play with me and we spent every moment we could playing or talking about the game. Both of our parents ended up giving us our own landlines (this was before cell phones) because they were tired of us being on the phone playing Diablo all the time. I used to tape mine to my head so that I could play hands free before I finally saved up for a headset phone.

From then on, most of my free time was spent playing online games. Diablo 2 -> Runescape -> Star Wars Galaxies -> City of Villains -> World of Warcraft -> Age of Conan and various mixtures therein. I track periods of my life based on what MMOs I was playing at the time. I grew up in those worlds with those people. I think about it often, too. What if I’d spent those years learning a skill or socializing with actual physical beings? How much better could I bet at programming or art or just living? But then I remember the memories I do have.

I remember feeling my heart race the first time I walked into the Den of Evil in Diablo 2. I remember how clever I felt when I stole that one guy’s account and the guilt that made me give it back immediately once I realized what I’d done.

I remember how awesome it felt to take on crazy odds in Star Wars Galaxies PvP. I remember the frustration that everyone would rather gang up on individuals than have a fair fight. The bitter disappointment that people I respected had no problem joining in.

I remember late nights just talking to people who lived thousands of miles away and hearing about their lives and growing to love them. A summer spent up all night playing Age of Conan because we just had to rush to max level.

I remember the Starsider coffee threads, which were there every morning to remind us all that we were a part of a community, that our crazy problems mattered, and that they didn’t. I remember how cool it was to buy a laptop with the money I’d made selling virtual stuff. I remember hours of theorycrafting, trying to decode combat formulae so that we could keep fighting those 3v10s.

I remember taking the boat into Howling Fjord for the first time. So many memories from WoW raids, especially in Wrath. Flame Leviathan. Mimiron.  Anub’Arak. Sindragosa. Arthas. I had a great time working with some of my favorite people ever to down those bosses. I remember practicing 3v3 arena on the tournament realm, thinking we’d go pro. There are so many more. Maybe someday I’ll make a real list so that I can always look back and remind myself of that journey.

Triumph! Betrayal! Hearbreak! Shame! Pride! I experienced the gamut, all while growing up in these online communities. I have decade long friendships from those games, as well as dozens of people who I’d love to hear from but probably never will. Probably some enemies in there too…

These are all real, emotional, social, often educational experiences. Games have taught me so much, from how to spell “knight”, to how to lead a team of people. On top of that, they teach in the best way possible–by inviting you to experiment and learn and experience in a place where you are (mostly) safe. I formed real, lasting relationships. I learned that stealing feels shitty without having to actually steal anything real (I know, it was still kinda real, I gave it back!). I learned that I could make money and support myself long before I had to. All because of games. All before I’d even left highschool. I think that’s awesome.

That’s why I make games. All of those experiences that I’ve had, I want to share those with anyone who wants them. And to me, that’s what games are for: to share experiences. I want to share them with my generation that missed these games because they were outside, and with whoever comes later when the games I grew up on have faded to nothingness. I grew up on the Starsider server of Star Wars Galaxies, but it’s long gone now. Maybe I can make another Starsider for someone else to grow up on. Maybe I can make something better. I’m sure as hell going to try.

Bioshock 2 – Review

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I wanted to switch to a different genre after Bioshock, but I found myself compelled to play more after I’d finished it, so I started Bioshock 2. I enjoyed it immensely, even if it was nothing groundbreaking compared to the first. While the story wasn’t as engaging for me as Bioshock, it was still excellent. It’s a little of the Portal 2 problem, where Bioshock was so good that, even though Bioshock 2 is objectively better in many ways, it doesn’t feel as fresh and exciting.

It’s always interesting to see what gameplay changes sequels make. It’s tricky — you want to push things forward, but you have to be careful not to alienate franchise fans. One of my main complaints in One was that you had to switch to plasmid, shoot, switch to gun, shoot, as the core combat loop. In Two, you can have a plasmid and a gun equipped together, which is a huge improvement in terms of combat feel. Most of the ‘useless’ plasmids still exist, but at least they got some extra effects added on to make them more appealing. Upgrading plasmids also gives them some powerful bonuses now (mostly around helping you take on groups of enemies), which makes those a more interesting decisions about how to spend your Adam (skill points, basically).

That’s another of the changes — I felt like Bioshock 2 had far more enemies to fight at once than One. The overall difficulty was similar though, because with more enemies came the ability to fight groups better, and supplies were much more plentiful. Scaling up resources and power along with number of enemies makes for more exciting combat, but I’d also say it takes a little away from the feeling of scrounging for supplies. While in One I was sometimes forced to get creative with ammo use, in Two I felt I had plenty of everything. I even capped out my money (600, feels crappy that there’s even a cap) a few times, which doesn’t fit with the ‘scavenging and alone’ atmosphere.

It’s tough to balance though. In both games you can hack health machines, but in Two you can get a ‘bonus’ hack which drops a health pack. I love this, because in Bioshock 1 I used to go around hacking stuff for health/eve (I had a bonus that made hacking restore resources), which pushed me to explore. I enjoyed being incentivized to go around and hack everything in One, and machines dropping a health pack felt like a better designed version of that. With resources so plentiful now though, the extra packs rarely felt rewarding. Additionally, in the later parts of the game, the health stations didn’t let you bonus hack them, which kinda ruined that.

Hacking is much improved, now a timing puzzle rather than just a timed puzzle. It fits the game much better, no longer freezing all action while you arrange tubes, but instead generating some solid gameplay where you need to focus on properly executing the hack while not dying to attackers. I don’t really like timing puzzles, but I didn’t mind them here and the system fits Bioshock much better than the previous iteration.

Ammo was streamlined in some ways, though not in others. To be honest, I used more variety of ammo in One because I had less of it and because it was more clear what each type was for. In Two I just shot everyone in the head with the rivet gun, which seemed to be the best against most enemies.

Some of the best changes in Bioshock 2 are around little sisters, which you now get to carry around and defend while they gather Adam. It fits the world brilliantly and the area defense gameplay is really fun. I think they could have been a little more creative with some of the areas or attackers, but I always enjoyed setting up traps and planning plasmid strikes before each wave of enemies. These also acted as a way of forcing the player to stop and pay attention to their surroundings. When you’re guarding your little sister for a couple minutes next to a big statue with a plaque on it, you’re more likely to actually read it and get that insight into the world.

The last mechanic I want to touch on is the camera, which I’m still not convinced needs to exist, but is improved in this game. Rather than taking a photograph and getting points for how much is going on, the camera now records an enemy until they die, giving points for killing them in interesting ways. Using different ammo, plasmids, etc gives you more points. It’s a clever way to get players to mix up their playstyle, especially because the bonuses felt worth it. I don’t know if it’s a mechanic I’d put in most games, but this version has a lot going for it. I just wish it would record multiple enemies at once.

Bioshock 2 is really just ‘more Bioshock’, which it pulls off well, adding some sweetener here and there. It didn’t feel as engaging or groundbreaking to me, but it’s still a damn fun game and I might’ve even liked it better if I’d played it first. If anyone is looking to get into Bioshock but the first game felt too clunky, give Two a shot and see if you like it. It stands alone just fine, but you’ll want to go back and play One after. The controls will annoy you more, but you won’t care because you’ll just be happy to have more Bioshock.

Bioshock – Review

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I really loved Bioshock. It’s been awhile since I got caught up in a game like that and it was sweet. I didn’t even mind much when I had to replay two of the sections because the game crashed twice and I lost my progress.

I’d actually tried to play Bioshock maybe 4 years ago, but my first couple hours of play left me just wondering who I was and why I should care about this character. I intended to keep playing, but the game never pulled me back. I guess not quite never.

I decided to give it another shot, and, while I still felt that way, I got more into the setting and the mechanics and so was more compelled to keep playing. I was glad I did, because of course the game answered my questions with aplomb in the end.

The cinematography of everything, the atmosphere, the attention to detail were all top notch. I’m excited to play Bioshock 2 so that I can learn more about Rapture. I do have to critique some of the mechanics though, because gameplay isn’t exactly where Bioshock shines brightest.

Plasmids are cool, but I mostly ended up using electric, fire, big daddy help me, and maybe target dummy sometimes. There were a bunch of others like enrage and security target and even freeze that seemed mostly pointless. Why would I freeze an enemy and kill them, making them drop no loot, when I could also zap stun them and do the same? Eventually I learned freezing bots makes hacking them easier, but I got by fine just zapping them first for most of the game. Having so many useless plasmids diluted their coolness for me and was extra annoying in the short part of the game where you have to use random plasmids. I’d prefer fewer plasmids with clearer purposes and maybe some more depth to each. As an aside, the way the plasmid hotkeys worked was abysmal, where they seemed to reorder themselves anytime I changed one of them. I died stupidly many times where my plasmids had rearranged themselves and I couldn’t find the hotkey for the one I wanted (or wasted had wasted all my eve using the wrong ones).

Speaking of depth, Bioshock has what I would normally deem an overly complicated ammo system. There are ~8 guns, each having ~3 types of ammo, and you have to reload your gun to switch types. The thing is, this system actually spawns some awesome gameplay moments. I loved that feeling of being about to step into a dangerous area and going through each gun, picking the ammo you want in it, and loading it in. It works really well with the desperate atmosphere that Bioshock establishes. Big daddy fights feed into this because they are tough enemies, but you decide when to attack them, so you always have the preparation advantage. The game provides you with both the incentive and the time to make use of the ammo system well, and it feels good to. I’m not sure I’d like it in most games, but here it worked. More ammo varieties also means ammo scarcity can be a thing without being completely debilitating: while you might not always have the best ammo, you usually have something.

In general, I would say Bioshock felt a little overloaded with mechanics. Crafting could have been interesting, but was too limited to feel especially useful to me. In a game like Bioshock, crafting needs to be weak to keep up the atmosphere, but the ability to craft can also add to the feeling of surviving, so it’s a tricky solve either way.

I liked the camera research mechanic and thought it was clever, but it wasn’t really something I wanted to keep up with all game. The different tonics and their various also slots weren’t really something I enjoyed managing. Few of the bonuses changed how I played the game in ways that felt meaningful enough to justify the time I put into the system. It wasn’t bad really, I think there was room for more a more engaging advancement system, or even that they could have left it out and the game wouldn’t have suffered much.

I did want to touch on hacking as well, because it threw me at first. Here’s an atmospheric, high tension FPS/RPG where everything gets paused while you guide liquid through a series of tubes? But you know what? Even though some of the hacking puzzles were actually impossible and the minigame weirdly broke up the game flow, I found myself improving at them over time and often enjoying the gameplay variance they brought. That’s just me though; I’d wager it’s a pretty divisive mechanic.

Those are all nitpicks though and I had a blast with Bioshock. It’s truly a triumph of storytelling and worldbuilding and an excellent game all around. Highly recommended and it’s definitely going on my favorite games list.

Mirror’s Edge – Review

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Ah, Mirror’s edge. My first review! To preface, Mirror’s Edge came highly recommended to me by a friend of mine who always said it was one of his favorite games. Somewhere in him telling me that, I got the idea that the game was best played without using guns. After getting through most of the game (a little painfully) without guns, he informed me that he’d always played with guns and they made up for most of my complaints about the game. I was already in too deep though, so I had to keep going gun-free.

With that in mind, here’s my thoughts on Mirror’s Edge with no guns.

Mirror’s Edge is one of those games where it feels like a great concept, but they couldn’t quite build a game around it. The high notes are there: when you really get running and pull off a sick series of jumps, slides, wall runs, all surrounded by a beautiful cityscape with bullets whizzing past you, those moments are awesome. To get to them though, you have to struggle past the inconsistent controls, linear level design, and filler puzzles.

For a game about the flow of movement, there’s a lot of time spent doing weirdly slow  jumping puzzles. They aren’t really puzzles, because what Faith does in this game is dictated almost entirely by what angle you’re facing, rather than something like a button press. The number of times Faith didn’t grab the bar or the pipe, or didn’t QUITE land on the ledge when I was sure she would (first person platforming can be rough) was too high for me to maintain my sanity.

And the thing about mirror’s edge is, it’s on rails. You can only climb up SOME of the pipes. The path you end up taking is always one set explicitly for you by the level designer. Sometimes they give you a couple of options, but you’re always following a set path, meaning you must do each puzzle set out before you. There’s little room for self expression in the gameplay; it’s all about learning to execute the series of steps set for you by the designer. That being the case, I often wished I could see more of the level beforehand. It might have been more fun to plan and execute my route if it felt like a goal I’d decided on rather than a series of steps I was stumbling through as I got to them. And if you fail, you better be ready to do the whole level over again from the start.

Quick aside to rant about a little thing for a second! In Mirror’s Edge, the button for ‘roll after a long drop’ is the same as for ‘let go of ledge you’re dangling from’. That’s too bad, because there are a lot of long jumps that you want to roll out of to avoid stumbling. What happened to me countless times was that Faith would be about to land one of those jumps and I wouldn’t be quite sure if she was making the jump completely, or if she’d just grab onto the ledge. If I hit the roll button and she lands it, great. If I jumped short and Faith hits the ledge though, the roll button now drops me to my death and I wish I’d taken the potential stumble instead of having to restart.

The combat I actually enjoyed once I got used to it. It was clunky like the climbing, but there was a simplicity and rhythm to it that I liked. Getting running and slide or jump kicking into a dude before punching his face in was a pretty good gameplay moment. Good thing too, because I had to beat up quite a few of said dudes to finish the game gun-free. At some points I marveled at how poorly the levels were designed for someone not using guns, but I was committed to my Batman rule. Sadly, on the final level, you have to take out this machine guy guy who is enough out in the open that, to melee him, you have to just sprint at him and hope you live long enough to take him out. After a couple hours of trying, I had to lower the difficulty from normal to easy to survive long enough to do it. At that point I just wanted to be done.

Overall, the “run fast and parkour”  elements are fun, and so is the way that your momentum makes your attacks more powerful. Ultimately though, I felt that the game built around those moments did a poor job of supporting them. The jumping puzzles might have been alright if they felt like something I was solving instead of barriers to the fun parts of the game. While pacing is important, the differences between the “run for your life” moments and the “jump into this wall 20 times” moments was a bit much for me. I’d say I spent ⅓ of the game enjoying it and the other ⅔ frustrated, but YMMV. Definitely using guns would have alleviated some of that, but gunplay felt out of place for the character I thought Faith should be. I hear in the second game they removed guns completely, so I’m looking forward to seeing if that served the game better.