Well, it seems I was wrong about Far Cry 2. I can run it perfectly fine. Wasn’t my machine specs, or drivers or anything like that.

You see, what happened was, when I installed the DirectX SDK (software development kit) I enabled the debug version of the directx dlls to help with debugging graphics problems during engine dev.

Except I left it using those debug dlls. As anyone who is a coder knows, debug versions are many times slower than release versions.

Seems I opened my big mouth and ranted prematurely, I can now play it in high detail no problem. I wonder why I’ve only noticed any slowdown with this game? Ah well.

So yeah. Whoops. My bad.

*embarrassed silence*

So…um…how about the weather?

Well, like I said, I’ve been playing a lot of new games recently. But there has been an unusual aspect to this gaming phase. You see, half the games I bought recently were indie titles, and, more surprisingly, they accounted for about 70% of my playing time!

It might seem surprising for an indie developer to say this, but I don’t often buy indie titles. Oh, I play the demos. But being an indie developer myself does not make me any more tolerant of crap. And, let’s be honest, there is a lot of crap in the indie market. Of the indie titles remaining after you filter out the crap, most are simply mediocre. Alright for an hour or so’s play, but once that demo finishes I have no inclination to whip out the ol’ credit card.

So it is a rather unusual situation when I purchase 2 of the mainstream games I’ve been looking forward to on a Friday afternoon (and Denb isn’t home so I have all the time to play games I want) yet I end up only installing the first of those games at 10:30 pm because I just can’t stop playing Spectromancer.

In fact, most of the weekend was like that, the indie titles sucked my attention at a 2:1 ratio, at least. Quite an impressive showing from the indies!

Let me do a small review on each title. Both indie games came from Greenhouse Games

1) Spectromancer. Ok, the name is fairly silly. It should have been called “Magic the Gathering : Kinda". Basically, it’s a battling wizards card game, similar to MtG yet different enough to be interesting to experienced Magic players. Does anyone remember that old 1995 MtG computer game? You were an apprentice wizard who had to wander the world fighting other wizards for spell cards and working your way up to challenging the masters of the different colours of magic? Spectromancer is an almost identical concept. Which is great for me because I’ve been longing for another game like that; I was a big MtG geek in highschool.

Best of all, almost all the battles have some gimmick to them, some trick to spice things up. For example, in one an artifact starts off in play which makes all spells cost double. In another, your opponent starts off with a chimera which cannot die, in fact it regenerates to full health and gains a stronger attack every time it gets down to 0 hit points, so you have to try to avoid attacking it, etc etc.

In fact, Spectromancer was created by Richard Garfield himself (among others), for those who don’t know he is the original designer of Magic the Gathering. So it’s not surprising it’s so fun.

One of the things I really like is that Spectromancer is a perfect example of an indie game done right. It lacks some of the bells and whistles of that old MtG PC game. You don’t see your avatar walking around a map avoiding moving enemies, animated like. You just click an opponent on the map and fight them, which then unlocks further opponents on the map, etc etc. Yet, and this is the key, it is just as fun. It lacks the fancy animations of the mainstream, but the core gameplay is intact and great. It competes in the areas that indies can compete with the mainstream, gameplay mechanics and fun, not graphics tricks.

I bought that one half an hour after I started playing the demo. For anyone interested in this title, make sure to try it on Harder difficulty, the normal settings are too easy. I doubt I would have played it as much if not for the challenge of trying to find good strategies to beat the tough wizards, and the thrill of victory when you do so.

The game also apparently has online multiplayer, though I haven’t tried that yet. If you like that type of game I strongly recommend it.

2)On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness. I’m a huge fan of the Penny Arcade webcomic, so I’m enjoying this title. Not quite as much as Spectromancer, I’m not a huge fan of the timed button-press combat mini-games, in fact I’m not a fan of timed button press mechanics in general. But I like the style and the PA wackiness, enough that I couldn’t miss the rest of the story just because the demo had ended. It may not be for everyone, but I like it.

3) World of Goo. Ok, I haven’t bought this one…yet. But I’m really tempted. It’s a great little physics puzzle game, lots of soul and great presentation. I can’t help but be charmed by it.

Right, time for mainstream titles.

4) Dead Space. This one…is a mixed bag. In some ways I like it a lot, in others I’m a little frustrated. Then, in other ways, I’m flat out annoyed.

Firstly, the good. Dead Space has great atmosphere. The horror aspect is well done, there were many moments when I jumped in fright. It’s fairly creepy, although I have to say I think horror designers should be a little more understated in their attempts to creep people out. Eerie empty rooms, strange noises, subtle signs of struggle, that freaks me out more than rooms that look like some mad finger-painter has gone wild with a bucket full of blood. After a while, you just tune that out, at least I do. People need to realise that fear is more about what you don’t see than what you do.

Anyway, besides the creepy atmosphere, this game has some of the best spaceship environments I’ve seen. It just feels like a gigantic derelict spaceship. Unlike, say Doom 3, which was mostly corridors, DS runs a gamut of really realistic looking environments. Giant engine rooms, centrifuges, places that look like the inside of giant mechanics shops…you feel like you’re on the set of a sci-fi movie. Kudos to the designers. The zero grav sections are also great, although I really wish designers would avoid these “you’ve got 30 seconds worth of air, quick, to the next airlock!” space designs. Seriously, who designs a space suit with a 30 second air-supply? Cause that would be real useful, if you found yourself outside an airlock without convenient oxygen refill stations every 20 feet.

Ok, now the bad. I’ll start with the design. First, I hate that close over-the-shoulder camera. Why, oh why, couldn’t they have gone for first person view? It’s fine when enemies are at a medium to far range. But this type of game always has enemies popping out from vents or coming up behind you. Since the camera isn’t locked onto your character, more often than not, spinning round quickly just gets my bloody avatar in the way of the action. It’s frustrating, because I’m good at FPS and it feels like I’m fighting my avatar to aim properly. Bloody console-ized control schemes.

Additionally, my little engineer sucks in melee. Which is fairly expected, except it isn’t the strength of his punch which is the problem, it’s that he can’t aim downwards. You get these sort of legless zombies, they are pretty quick and can get up close to you (especially if you’re busy fighting the camera). It would be nice to just be able to sock them one so you can gain some distance to shoot. But no, you have to watch as Isaac flails about at chest height, completely missing the low profile beastie.

(Punching things isn’t as easy as this picture makes it look)

I also seem to have developed Horror ESP. By which I mean that I can walk into a room and immediately tell “it’s an ambush!". This happened in Doom 3 as well. The monsters popping up just gets too predictable. Yes, I’m going to press this button to turn on the machine as per the objective and yes, the second I do so the nasties are going to come through vent A over on my left and FROM BEHIND ME, HOW UNEXPECTED!!

Ok, it isn’t quite that bad, I still got some frights, but these are more due to the great audio and creepy environmental noises. I’d prefer more non-combat encounters. Seeing a monster at a distance, watching it scamper away and wandering when it will pop up is far more nerve wracking than when it actually pops up.

And then there is the “clever” holographic interface. I use the word clever to mean not clever at all. Some smart-arse thought it would be great to remove all gui overlays, by which I mean there is no 2D gui overlay on the 3D scene showing your health, like in FPSs. All displays are in-game. You see your health by looking at this glowing bar on your avatar’s back. Which is ok, actually, it’s the inventory that is the problem. You see it is done with a neat holographic display which the avatar projects in front of him. Very sci-fi. Very unnecessary. The problem is the “projecting in 3D space” part. You see, like other 3D objects, sometimes your camera isn’t at quite the right angle, so it clips part of it off. Which means I have to move my avatar back a bit to see it all.

It’s a minor annoyance, but it is just so unnecessary. Players will notice that it looks neat…for all of 2 minutes. Then they just want information conveniently displayed to them on demand.

Your avatar also has these 2 inexplicable powers : You can move things telekinetically and freeze time. Why? Because other fps games have had that recently, and someone thought it cool, I reckon. Because it’s never explained in game. The telekinesis is unlimited, which just makes the fact that you’re having to rely on little things like bullets to kill enemies silly. You can lift whacking great pieces of equipment with it but not enemies? Come on.

Final design flaw : Checkpoints. Enough said. These are just a completely bad idea, I mean seriously. It’s the year 2008. Enough with the checkpoints now.

Ok, despite these design issues I quite like Dead Space, overall. But there is a bigger problem. Bugs. Sometimes the game renderer is just completely boned when I load the game. I mean complete black screen. Wonderful. I have to change resolutions and alt-tab a few times to get it to realise that it is time to render some polygons. Bloody unbelievable. No wonder people like the ease of console games.

And finally :

5) Far Cry 2. This will be short, I promise. Main reason is, I can’t play it. My machine, with its Dual Core processor, 3 gb of RAM and Geforce 9600 GT runs it at 2 frames per second on minimum settings, I ran the benchmark app. Unacceptable. I tried new drivers, I tried disabling things, nothing. I cannot believe anyone would create a game that won’t even run on minimum settings on my machine, I always thought it fairly beefy, I run most games on High. Crysis is the exception, I had to settle for Medium. 2 FPS. What the hell? I’ll be returning this rubbish tomorrow.

And you know, I’m getting all this shit from the mainstream titles and I can’t help comparing the experience to the indie games. They just work. They don’t come close to taxing my machine. They’re cheap. They come with playable demos so I can try before I buy. I’m becoming fairly disillusioned with the mainstream market. Now, if only there were more good quality indie titles…

Dammit all. Can somebody tell me why, despite America’s economy spiraling down the drain, the Dollar has strengthened dramatically against the Rand?

It just doesn’t seem fair, does it? To quote a news report :

In South Africa, the balance sheets of our banks remain sound. They rely on rand-based capital and South African deposits, and the local inter-bank market remains fully functional and competitively priced.

The World Competitiveness Report ranked the soundness of SA banks 15th in the world, above both the United States and Switzerland, he said.

So our banking institutions are solid, we’re received international praise for the financial strategies we have in place which have helped us weather the financial crisis fairly well, better even than the US and countries in Eurpoe…and yet the American dollar has suddenly climbed upwards to be worth 2 Rand more? Why, for the love of all that is holy?

Bloody macroeconomics. Making my planned overseas vacation next year that much more expensive. *waves fist angrily*

Hmmm, I did say I was going to be back on Wednesday, didn’t I? Well…that didn’t quite work out.

Sure, I was actually back on Wednesday, physically. But mentally, I’ve been lying on the beach the whole of last week, blissfully lazy and self-indulgent. Once in the holiday mode, recovering from the last few weeks of stress, it proved difficult to return to standard operation.

But it was a good week off, all in all, I really needed to get away from responsibility for a bit, even from thoughts of SoW. So, besides the beach and sunlight, I gorged myself on gaming and reading. Finally finished off Steve Erikson’s Gardens of the Moon, a great book, if a little longer than it really needed to be.

It’s funny, when I was in University, that kind of indulgence is how I spent most of my time; I took it for granted. Now it seems like a rare luxury indeed! Sometimes this whole “making a living” thing seems really overrated.

Anyway, I’ll finish off this post with some obligatory pictures from my holiday. Yeah, I know, this is supposed to be a blog about games and game development. Not one of those tedious personal life blogs. You’ll just have to grin and bear it.

The Beach :

The place we stayed. The weather was a bit off and on, as you can see from the clouds in this photo.

This wasn’t one of those adventure holidays, where you do all sorts of exciting activities. We vegged by the pool or on the beach and did as little as possible. About the most exciting activity was a trip to the crocodile park. Denbeigh pointed out that over half the photos I took on this trip were of the crocs. What can I say? I like large, carniverous lizards. Sue me

Feeding frenzy :

Finger lickin’ good :

I sampled a croc burger at the park’s restaurant. There is something quite satisfying about eating part of a large, man eating predator, I must say. Who’s the top of the food chain now, huh?

(They taste like crunchy chicken btw)

They also come in nugget sizes :

(No, I’m kidding, the baby croc was fairly cute, little more than gecko sized.)

That’s the smile of people who aren’t at work :

Finally! Time for a much needed vacation!

I’ll be down the coast, chillin’ on the beach, for the next few days.

Normal posting shall resume on Wednesday. Until then, I leave you with a pic of Denbeigh and I on our previous vacation in the Natal Midlands.

Cheers!