Game design decisions that piss me off.

Ever been playing a game, even a really good game, and you suddenly--or gradually perhaps--discover something that just annoys you really badly? I've had that experience a few times and I'm sure I'm not alone. Without further ado...

1.) Sandbox, or This Shit is Getting Old

Ladies Man

Pro-tip: If you're going to make your game non-linear, you better give players something extra to do that's at least moderately entertaining or immersive. Don't just say "WELL, THEY CAN DRIVE THEIR CAR ANYWHERE THEY WANT. YEAH! SHIP THIS SHIT!" and let that be the end of it. There has to be something interesting to do. This is a big reason I didn't love Grand Theft Auto IV when everyone else seemed to have a raging boner for it. The story segments of the game were really fun and I enjoyed watching the narrative unfold. However, I didn't enjoy a nagging fucking girl that wanted to go out with me all the time. It was the same pattern: pick up girl, drive to date, go home, maybe get laid. Great. I can tell all my friends that I got Niko Bellic some ass in GTAIV. Can we please get back to the story? The intrigue? The suspense? The plot twists? Sandbox games can be really fun if the secondary content is compelling. However, if its not... then I just find myself bored. How many times can you go on a crazy rampage in Liberty City and be entertained? It's finite, for me.

2.) Playing Rock, Paper, Scissors with Guns (Do not try this at home)

This is one thing that pisses me off about Mass Effect (and other action RPG games). In Deus Ex, I can increase my skill and add modifications to my pistol and make it a very powerful weapon, easier more powerful than a typical assault rifle. I do this because I like handguns and I enjoy using them when I have the option. Plus, ammunition is typical very plentiful. However, games sometimes say "handguns suck, buy a rifle and deal with it." In a game that supposedly offers players freedom of choice, this is especially egregious. Give me a choice and not "M16 beats 9mm and Sniper Rifle beats M16" bullshit. If I want to kill the final boss with a fucking pea shooter make it possible, if not more difficult. Otherwise don't persist in the illusion of open-ended gameplay. Note: this only applies to games like the previously mentioned Mass Effect, Deus Ex, and others like Fallout 3. If your aim is to give players freedom in selecting and managing their equipment (which all of the mentioned games do), go all out and give them a personally tailored experience.

3.) Adding "depth" by including a pointless mini-game(s)

Zidane has made a startling revelation!

Sometimes developers try to add some supposed "depth" to the game by including a mini-game. I think the best example of how to do this best is Final Fantasy VIII's card game, Triple Triad. You collect cards throughout the game and can challenge NPC's to a match anytime. It's a neat little game where you place cards on a 3x3 grid. The object is to capture opponents cards and defend your own. The cards have strength values and some have elements that make them more effective against other elements. The cards you get can later be transformed into helpful items like "Holy War" which makes your party absolutely invincible for a time. However, when Final Fantasy IX tried the card game mechanic, they got it all wrong. There are no rewards whatsoever for playing the game. None. Zip. Nada. It's the same placing cards on a 3x3 grid with each having unique strengths and weaknesses, but the card values are confusing. Instead of simple numerical values, there's letters and number combinations. The game also doesn't fully explain what the hell they mean. Why do this? Ugh. Better question: why include it if it doesn't matter? It's not more entertaining that the main game by any stretch of the imagination. At least with the system from FFVIII I can later benefit from the mini-game by getting really good items.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

Sarah Palin & Dessert, or Let Them Eat Cake

Sarah Palin wants the government to stay the hell out of our business. Especially when it comes to nutrition. On her TV program, a strange reality type program, she took a shot at Michelle Obama’s efforts to curb childhood obesity by saying something to the effect of “Michelle Obama doesn’t think you should have dessert”. First of all, that is factually inaccurate. She said children shouldn’t have dessert with every meal. That’s an important distinction. Secondly, her arguments for why the government shouldn’t be in charge with nutrition are a little odd.

GIMME SOME CAKE!!!!!!!

The idea I hear espoused all the time is LET THE PARENTS DECIDE what their children eat. That sounds good when you say it, I’ll concede that. A big helpin’ of American freedom; covered in bacon and cheese, no doubt. However, how would that be implemented? No one has yet to give us their plan... at least I haven’t heard any plan put forward. How would parents do this? From their iPhones? I know when I was in school, my parents sometimes, though rarely, decided what I ate for the day by forgetting to give me any money for food. But wait, aren’t these parents the ones stuffing their children with food and allowing them to sit in front of the TV all day anyway? It’s certainly not the schools. It’s almost impossible to overeat in a school lunch room. Theoretically, you COULD spend all your money and buy 10 bags of chips, flushing it all down with five Mountain Dews everyday if you felt so inclined. I’m not sure who would actually do that, though. If these people are fattening up their children like livestock in the first place why would they be the the best people to consult about what their children eat at school?

This seems to me another paranoid attempt by the right to portray the government as some sort of invader of your personal freedoms. Let me temper that by saying that I do believe the government sometimes DOES invade our personal freedoms: the PATRIOT act, the TSA crotch grabbing scandal, and, of course, the ever-growing fight on Net Neutrality, copyright issues, etc. There’s a difference between REAL government overreach and paranoid, Glenn Beck-style government overreach. Here’s how you tell the difference: if anyone disparages the government and, at any point, calls our current President a socialist or a “commie”, odds are they don’t have much useful to add to the debate.

More Apple Fail!

Who needs misteltoe? Who needs a competent web designer? :p

iTunes: A quick guide.

Welcome to iTunes. Best media player ever!

"iTunes is a free application for your Mac or PC. It organizes and plays your digital music and video on your computer. It keeps all your content in sync. And it’s a store on your computer, iPod touch, iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV that has everything you need to be entertained. Anywhere. Anytime."

It's so good that it's currently on version 10... and it STILL HASN'T ADDED ANY FORM OF MEDIA MONITORING. Let me give you an example:

Let's say I get a spat of OCD one day after watching Monk and I decide I want to organize my music folder. I added a bunch of mp3 files to iTunes when I started using the application that I had already ripped onto my computer. So I move files around and organize them by artist, album, etc. I go back to iTunes and play a song...

Whoops! It seems that iTunes is fucking retarded and needs to know exactly where every media file is located. It can't track certain folders automatically and reflect any changes I make to my media library manually. Nope. Why do that?

OK, open Windows Media Player. Play a song. Then, go to your music folder and move it to some other location. Drop it on the desktop, whatever. Now, hit F3 (or go to File, Add to Library). You get this:

What a novel concept. If you add the Desktop to a monitored location then any media stored on the Desktop will be updated automatically to reflect changes.

To my knowledge, this feature has been around definitely since at least four or five years ago, when I first started actively keeping a music library. iTunes was probably in version 7 or so then. Why haven't they implemented a media tracking feature in their media playing application yet? Because they don't want to copy Microsoft?

Zune Social: Launch date: November 2007
iTunes Ping: Launch date: September 1, 2010

Well never mind. That can't be it.

Let me show you another reason why iTunes is so awesome.

I added The Gallery into iTunes and it looked like this. For some reason, it seems to think that Dark Tranquility released the album three times and twice with only one track.

I added The Gallery into Windows Media Player and it looks like this:

Hey, look! One album. That's how I remembered it.

In closing, use iTunes as little as possible. It's a child. It always wants its way and gets mad at you if you don't listen to it.

No.

Combating Terrorism

Counter-Strike in real life

Since 9/11, a lot has been done to fight "the terrorists": more security at airports, the PATRIOT act, freedom fries, and--of course--the "War on Terror".

I bring this up because just the other day I had a thought. An experience in high school that I had forgotten about. I discovered in my junior year of high school why this whole "War on Terror" will likely bring about no real victory.

In 2005, I had two computer classes back to back: Programming I and Applications II. In those classes, I killed boredom by browsing Wikipedia, posting on web forums, editing images, and an occasional flash game (White Room was one of my favorites) after I had completed my work. Most everyone else played flash games and browsed the web while they were doing their work... and, sure enough, one by one the flash game sites fell to IP blocks. MySpace soon followed (remember, this was 2005).

Necessity breeds invention. It also breeds intuition. Soon, students discovered web proxies that allowed them to bypass these IP blocks and get to the content they wanted to access. We had won.

Not quite. Soon, the network administrators began blocking web proxies. When one went down, the students found another. However, it was useless. As soon as the traffic got heavy enough, the banhammer fell. This wasn't a problem for me, though. I could do without the flash games and MySpace when I was at school. I was content with my forum and my Wikipedia.

The US Government has taken the same type of reaction to the terrorist threat against this country. As George Carlin reflects in his tirade on airport security on the album "You Are All Diseased" (Video), in the pre-9/11 world, you could carry box cutters on a plane. No problem. That changed quickly. Airport security has become reactionary. The terrorists started using non-metallic bombs and the TSA started subjecting people to their infamous "pat-downs". The fact of the matter is, if someone wants to get a weapon on a plane, they'll find a way to do it. They'll find a new weapon that the TSA isn't ready for. They always have and they always will. They're probably working on pocket blaster pistols right now. (Joke. We're years away from Star Wars.)

The best way to fight "terrorism" is at an information level. Espionage. We need more James Bond types. Stopping plots before they come to fruition is the best--and probably only--way to prevent terror attacks. You can't do it at the airport. If they get to the airports, we have failed. Every now and then you'll hear about a foiled terror plot on the news. That's a real success. The aggressive measures taken by the TSA are not only an attack on your liberties (See Fourth Amendment), but totally unnecessary. The people who suffer from these limitations and arbitrary encroachments on personal freedom are the citizens.

Eventually, the forum that two of my friends and myself were active on got blocked by the school network. We were in no way violating the class rules and we always made sure to complete all of our work before we accessed the site. We also made sure to not use any foul language so we wouldn't trigger any profanity filters. I even remember Wikipedia being blocked for a few days because of traffic. So you know what we did? We went elsewhere. Somewhere the content restrictions hadn't touched yet. We're a resourceful race and it's the reason we dominate this planet. We made the system. It's naive to think that we can't get around it.

Best Android Apps

Many who have used the Android Marketplace know that it's sometimes a little difficult to find things. Especially if they're not very popular or well-known. With Amazon's plans to launch their own Android app store, it's an almost certainty that the Android Market will see a revision soon. However, until then, here's some of my favorite apps that I've discovered during the past year.

Tajm

A simple clock widget that displays the current time in text strings instead of numeric values. That's really all there is to it. You can change the color and what information is displayed. It's pretty cool.

LauncherPro

"Launcher" is an easier way to say user interface (well, actually UI is...) The stock Android launcher gets the job done, for sure. Other companies have also created their own launchers, like HTC's SenseUI. However, some people want more out of their phone. For those people, I'd highly recommend LauncherPro. It provides new icons, customization options, and very well designed built-in widgets. You get all the basics for free; but if you want the widgets and increased customization, you can pay $2.99 to the developer to unlock the extra features. Why can't you do this through the Marketplace? Well, the developer lives in a country where you can't charge for apps. Payment is handled through Paypal. It's well worth it! (link to LP website)

Handcent SMS

A SMS client with robust customization. You can modify almost everything about how you read and reply to text messages. For example, you can choose colors for the message bubbles, adjust the size of the font, customize notifications (different icons on the status bar for different people), and even set a custom background to display the conversation on. The developer also offers themes if you register on their website. I currently have a space theme with planet Earth and blue/black message bubbles. Looks great. Also, it's all free. (website)

Music PlayerPro

Despite the pretty banal name, nothing is banal about this app. Once again, you have to pay for it (though a trial period is available), but it's hands down the best music player I've found on Android. It automatically downloads missing artwork and photos of bands and musicians for the artist view. To give you an idea of how awesome this is, I had a Street Fighter II song in my music library that wasn't labeled. From the application, you can edit title, album, artist, etc. I put "Capcom" as the artist and, almost immediately, a Capcom logo was displayed for the artist view. For those who are ADD about their music libraries, this is really cool. You can also customize the way the player itself looks with skins that come with the app and it has a huge options menu that you can tweak to your liking. Only complaint I have about the app is that sometimes you have to manually refresh the "mediastore", which is basically your library of music, after you add new songs. Very minor complaint. Very. Link!

twicca

My Twitter client of choice is twicca. A crisp, clean UI is one of the main draws for me. Simply selecting a tweet gives you the option to reply, quote and reply, retweet, go to the user's profile, follow any links posted with the tweet or hash tags (#likethis), favorite, and manage the user (lists, etc.) It also seems to refresh and load tweets faster than the official Twitter app and TweetDeck. It makes being a Twittard easy. Also, the option to color-code different people you follow is a nice touch. Completely free, btw. Linkage


DroidIris

I love Cooliris. Cooliris is a browser extension (available for IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and more) that turns a simple photo search into an interactive experience. Using whatever search engine your prefer, it grabs all the images that come up and displays them in lines that you can use your mouse to slide and zoom through. DroidIris is essentially a mobile version of Cooliris. The touch controls work just as you'd expect them to: drag to see more images, pinch to zoom, tap to select. It's just awesome. You'll feel like you're in Minority Report, flinging pictures all over a screen like Tom Cruise. Link-tastic

That's all for now. I'll post more interesting apps as I find them. Hope you enjoyed. :D