Posts tagged video-games - Entropy and Ecstasy

Hitman: Absolution

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 21:50:44 GMT

Hitman: Absolution is a stealth/action game about the titular assassin wherein you sneak around trying to kill your way through your former employers after going rogue. The engine is ridiculously smooth, and the game is simply bursting with creative ways to kill your targets, though silently garroting them and dragging the body off to a dark corner to dispose of it is probably the most satisfying. The more linear sections that seemed to force direct confrontation were decidedly less enjoyable. I really wanted 15 more levels like The King of Chinatown and unfortunately, there were only really one or two other spots that came close in the rest of the game.

Verdict

Sneaking around garroting battle nuns and dragging them into the bushes is not quite as fun as bushwhacking heavies and sicking tigers on their friends, but still absolutely worth playing.

Far Cry 3

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 13:30:15 GMT

Far Cry 3 is the most fun I've had playing a video game this year. It is a sandbox where you take the role of an American tourist stranded on an island in the south Pacific that's crawling with pirates, drug dealers, and human traffickers. Your friends are captured by the Big Bad, resulting in your going on a roaring rampage of revenge, rescuing your friends, and killing every pirate you see with a big freaking knife. Kind of like Just Cause 2 meets Assassin's Creed.

Stuff I liked:

The stealth and the recon. There are pirate outposts scattered around the island which you can retake to help liberate the island, and reduce your likelihood of being randomly accosted by pirates. While attacking these outposts, you can carefully sneak up on them from basically any angle, and scope out the position of the pirates with your camera. This gives you a good idea of the lay of the land, how many pirates you're going to need to fight, and where they are.

You can then sneak off, thin out the ranks with your sniper rifle, and sneak up behind guards and stab them in the back. Basically there is actual payoff for carefully studying your enemy and coming up with a plan to eliminate them quietly.

The weapons. While the weapons themselves are not necessarily particularly memorable, you get to pick the load-out that suits your style of play which is something I really appreciate. Lots of games railroad you into carrying the basic assault rifle, and then making you pick through the corpses of your enemies to find the gun that actually suits you. Furthermore most of the weapons are customizable with a number of attachments which gives you the ability to further specialize your load-out to be truly suited to your style of play.

The exposition. While the narrative may be more than a little bit over the top, for the most part the game explains things to you while you have control of your character. This is in stark contrast to Max Payne 3, which bombards you with freaking cut scenes all the time.

Stuff I didn't like:

The story missions. While the story missions aren't particularly bad, they are much more likely to railroad you into blasting your way through tons of dudes, rather than outflanking them, or stealthily taking them by surprise, and I find both of the latter two approaches much more satisfying.

The boss fights. They're a bunch of stupid-god-damned quick time event driven bullshit cut scenes. You know, it might actually be satisfying to sneak up on the big-bad's stronghold, and put a bullet through his head from the next hill over before disappearing into the jungle... but no, you've got to let him talk you to death while you play poker. Fuck that.

Verdict

Sneaking around the jungle and stabbing heavily armoured dudes with a big knife is the most fun I've had with a video game so far this year. You should check it out.

Video Games in 2013

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 11:50:15 GMT

This is a ranking of the games that I have played in 2013. It's pretty subjective and is mostly about how much fun I had while playing it. Also, these are games that I played in 2013, many if not most of them will have come out before then, because there really are not that many games that get me to drop $60 so that I can play them on release day.

Far Cry 3
Hitman: Absolution
Resistance 3
Max Payne 3
Spec Ops: The Line

The Humble Bundle 2, Anchoring and A/B Testing

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 15:54:14 GMT

I recently purchased The Humble Indie Bundle 2 after reading an Ars Technica article about it and thinking: "Why the hell not?" The Humble Bundle is a collection of 5 independant games, released DRM free in a name-your-own-price sale with some of the proceeds going to the EFF and Child's Play.

One of the interesting things about the about the pay-what-you-want sale is that the price field is pre-filled with $29.95 as a default price:

Unfortunately for them, $29.95 is actually slightly above my threshold for why-the-hell-not purchases, but it did get me thinking about anchoring:

Anchoring or focalism is a cognitive bias that describes the common human tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.

... says the Wikipedia. It actually has a very interesting effect on our perception of prices. Basically, if someone tells you that something was originally selling for $1000, but you can buy it for $500 now, you are very likely to be thinking about how good a deal $500 is when compared to $1000 even though the "original" price could very well be a completely made up number (this is where MSRPs actually come from).

The $29.95 in the box is an anchor. So is the $85 in the copy where they explain the set-your-own-price nature of the sale, but I expect it's a much less powerful anchor as it's not inside the box where you name your own price. Since $29.95 is an anchor, and there is a reasonable expectation that changing it will affect the number/value of purchases, I started thinking about another, somewhat related idea: A/B Testing. A/B Testing, in software development, is the practice of serving multiple versions of your software and seeing if one version works better for some value of "works better".

In the case of the Humble Bundle, I would be very interested to see if changing the value inside the set-your-own-price box had a significant impact on the size/number of purchases. You might have variants with $14.99, $29.95 and $59.95. Perhaps toying with people's cognitive biases is too evil for a project that's supporting not one, but two charities, but I'd still like to see the results of such an experiment, y'know, FOR SCIENCE!

s/the Combine/the combine harvester/g

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 06:51:55 GMT

Image Credit: kenny_lex

I have come to the realization that Half-Life 2 is a whole lot funnier if you mentally add in "harvester" whenever anyone mentions "the Combine":

Alyx: Dr. Freeman I presume? We better hurry, the combine (harvester) can be slow to wake, but once it is up you will have a hard time taking it down.

A letter: Dear Dr. Breen. Why has the combine (harvester) seen fit to suppress our reproductive cycle? Sincerely, A Concerned Citizen.

Citizen: We better hurry, we have to tear down this camp before the combine (harvester) gets here.

Aylx: We know all about you and Breen. You have been a spy for the combine (harvester) the whole time.

Gordon Freeman, the MIT graduated theoretical physicist hero-protagonist, saving the world from enslavement by a piece of anthropomorphized farming equipment.

Portal is Awesome!

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 22:55:10 GMT

Ever since Portal 2 was announced I've been thinking about playing Portal again and I finally got around to it this weekend. Verdict: Still Awesome.

It was lots of fun. If you havene't played it yet, you really have to. It's sublime. Now I'm even more excited for Portal 2... I mean, the prepulsion gel alone!

Flower is Beautiful

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 21:08:28 GMT

Flower is beautiful... it really and truly is.

Why?

As a previous article may have hinted, I've been playing a lot of Uncharted. I finally got to the part where you start fighting mutated Nazi zombies in a poorly lit World Ward II era bunker and the game went from fun and adventurous to downright scary. I decided I needed a game that wasn't quite as... heavy, to break up the zombie Nazi killing marathons.s Having recently read the Ars Technica review of Flower I figured I would give it a shot.

I layed out my 11.29 USD, downloaded it from the PlayStation store and have been very happy with my purchase. All in all, Flower is beautiful, a joy to play and definately worth checking out. If you have a PS3, I would highly recommend giving it a shot and if you don't have a PS3... (I was going to make a joke about breaking and entering, but tha's going a little far just to play a video game).

But

... if three quarters of the way through Flower I have to start killing mutated Nazi zombies I'm going to frigging scream!

Guns, Bullets and Uncharted

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 20:09:06 GMT

I've been playing Uncharted: Drake's Fortune recently and so far it's a really fun game... but, the balance of the weapons has been really irking me.

You Start with a 9mm...

You start out with a generic 9mm pistol which seems to take 3-5 body shots to kill a bad guy with. Yikes! Meaning that instead of doing what actual people who shoot at people (cops, soldiers, etc.) are trained to do (center of mass shooting) you end up peering around corners trying to get head shots while your enemies shoot you in the face (thankfully your character appears to be even more nigh invulnerable than the bad guys).

Then You Get an AK-47

That iconic Soviet assault rifle, which holds more bullets than your 9mm, still takes 3-5 body shots to kill a bad guy and will run out of ammo a lot faster if you carelessly hold down the trigger.

For some insane reason, it's actually harder to get head shots with the AK than with the 9mm, so I found myself fighting with the pistol because I would at least have a chance of taking out a bad guy with a single shot rather than spraying bullets all over the place (that's right, the shoulder mounted rifle is less accurate than your pistol because... it's crappy and Soviet *shrug*).

... And Finally a One Shot Kill

... and it's a Desert Eagle .50AE (well actually the first one hit kill you come across a .44 Magnum but I have more rant material for the Desert Eagle and in terms of ballistics they are largely equivalent). This is the classic shooting game, hit them in the knee and they fly back a meter or two an fall the ground dead style of one-hit-kill weapon. Fun, but seriously, why a Desert Eagle?

Yes, I know that both Bullet Tooth Tony and The Agents use them, thus, they must be totally bad ass, but seriously they're hand guns.

I get that, when you're making a game, you want a power curve on your weapons so that as the game progresses your character gets progressively more kick-ass weapons; however, why on Earth is a pistol the first weapon you encounter that can reasonably knock someone on their ass the first time you shoot them.

... And Order is Restored... Sort Of

A little deeper in you get a SVD (Dragunova) which is a sniper rifle of Soviet origin, which also has the ability to deliver one-hit-kills. So at least one rifle is able to out perform the Desert Eagle, but neither the AK-47 nor the M4 (which is black, futuristic looking and American, thus, better than the Soviet piece of shit (... or the the AK at least)) manage to do so, each requiring multiple body shots to disable your opponents.

Pretty Graphs

I pulled together the ballistics data from the Wikipedia for the:

... and plotted muzzle energy, muzzle velocity and projectile mass.

The muzzle energy of (in Joules) 9mm, .50AE, 7.62x39mm and 7.62x54mmR rounds.

The muzzle velocity (in meters per second) of 9mm, .50AE, 7.62x39mm and 7.62x54mmR rounds.

The projectile mass (in grams) of 9mm, .50AE, 7.62x39mm and 7.62x54mmR rounds.

Discussion

You'll notice that the SVD delivers substantially more energy (3939J) than the runner up, the AK-47 (2010J), 96% more in fact. The AK-47 in turn delivers 21% more energy than the next runner up, the Desert Eagle (1666J). Admittedly, the Desert Eagle has a massive round (massing in at 21.1 grams) which does endow it with favourable penetrative characteristics, but the only round which it clearly out performs is the 9mm.

Consequently, why the world of Uncharted seems to treat the Desert Eagle as largely the equal of the SVD and the AK-47 as the equivalent (... or lesser if you consider the fact that you can't hit a damn thing with it) of the 9mm is frankly mystifying. Further exacerbated by the fact that late in the game you begin to encounter "snipers" that use Desert Eagle with laser sights to one-shot-kill you if you stand in place too long whereas the guys will assault rifles can't seem to think of anything better to do than spray bullets randomly.

In Conclusion

My crazy mental model of guns, is that a body shot will pretty much disable anybody, regardless of what you use to shoot them. So seeing the bad guys limp around like I kicked them in the shins after pegging them 2-3 times with an AK, is just kind of crazy. Admittedly, having every gun dole out one-hit-kills could make the game too easy (if the one-hit-kills only apply to your enemies) or too hard (if it applies to your character as well), inject too much realism and make you resort to stealth when you just want to race in and kill people.

The FBI Handgun Wounding Factors and Effectiveness is an interesting read and discusses the use of handguns in combat from the perspective of people who actually rely on them (namely law enforcement officers). One of the interesting observations (when discussing the tactical realities of law enforcement) notes that due to the difficulty of making effective use of handguns in combat:

[...] no law enforcement officer should ever plan to meet an expected attack armed only with a handgun.

A world in which game designers read some Box O' Truth and therefore knew that "rifles are rifles and pistols are pistols" would be a scary place indeed, but at least the uber-weapons would stop being handguns.

Fun Fact

In the 2008-2009 skills competition, Zdeno Chára won the hardest shot competition with a shot registering 105.4 miles per hour. Given the mass of a hockey puck ranges between 156 and 170 grams, the winning puck had approx 173-189J of kinetic energy. Which is just 1 - 10% shy of the muzzle energy of a .22 Long Rifle. Which, I suppose, explains why NHL goal tenders wear so much equipment.

World of Goo

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 18:58:03 GMT

I just finished playing World of Goo and I have to say that I really enjoyed it. I'll gladly be the six millon eight hundred and ninety three thousand four hundred and sixty first person to recommend it.

Seriously, it's like fifteen bucks go out, get a copy and have some fun!