The Blag Switch

So I’ve got a problem.  Or maybe not.  It really depends on how you look at it.  Let me start again:

I’ve got a situation.  See, I love video games.  I’m one of those crazy mouth-frothing nuts who thinks that video games are art and I take that art very seriously.  As a serious consumer of said art, I’m hampered primarily by the fact that I’m perpetually short on free time.  In a video-game-intense week, I’ll get in about 8 hours of playing, mostly on the weekend.  Now the problem I’ve encountered is that games I want to play get released at the rate of about one or two a week most of the year.  This leads to problem wherein I have more games that I want to play than I ever possibly could.

On the upside, this means that I will always have something to play when I have the free time.  On the downside, it means that I’m in a perpetual state of gaming triage, wherein I have to allocate limited resources to only those games that will best benefit from my attention.  Most recently this has meant my stop in at Game Stop to grab Fallout 3 and Fable 2.  Unfortunately, it also meant my having to pass up Far Cry 2 and will probably mean that I’ll be well-delaying Gears of War 2.  (Huh, it just occurred to me how many of my currently-coveted titles are in existing frachises.  Interesting, that.)

Maybe I shouldn’t complain, but it feels a bit Sisyphusean to go to the game store every month, see 5 games I want and only take home 2.

Well, I just finished my first run through Dead Space today.  Oh man, how long has it been since I played a good, new survival horror game?  I mean, if you count Dead Rising, then that’s been two years.  If you don’t, well, it’s been a hell of a lot longer.  Of course, what qualifies as “Survival Horror” depends on who you ask.  After all, some purists rule out any game where the character defends himself with anything stronger than tears and soiled britches.

Dead Space certainly fits my definition, which is basically “any horror game in which the object is no loftier than plain survival”.  Sure, the Silent Hill series are Survival Horror games but then again so were System Shock 2 and Bioshock.  By that definition, Dead Space certainly fits the bill.  The game tells the story of a small group sent to determine the fate of the giant mining vessel Ishimura.  Of course by the time they arrive most of the crew have died and comeback as hideous, flesh-eating ghouls.  The ship you arrived on explodes while you’re trying to fix it to get off the Ishimura and it’s game on.

The story that unfolds isn’t really anything new (honestly, the major plot points follow those in System Shock 2 so closely that it raises eyebrows at some points), but it is compelling and well told.  It’s of the classic “oh shit, this be broke go fix it!” plot.  You spend the majority of the game fixing one thing after another.  That being said, all of the “hey fix this” quests make complete sense.  They aren’t forced or random.  Rather they are exactly the kinds of tasks one would be concerned with when trying to survive on a disabled mining ship: getting the engines back online to prevent the ship’s orbit from decaying and smashing into the planet below, getting the anti-asteroid defense systems back online, etc.  You know, important, survival kinds of things.

The gameplay and the story intertwine very well in this respect.  There are a number of zero-gravity and zero-atmosphere scenes.  Sometimes both.  Your character, being an engineer, uses mostly coopted tools to defend himself against monsters.  Even the flamethrower is, according to the game, a modified torch.  This dynamic works very well with one of the rather grizzly motifs of the game: dismemberment.  The whole game is about chopping off limbs.  Now, if it were just a “ooh look what we can do”, body-physics show off thing, it’d probably be kind of annoying.  As it is, though, the dismemberment theme pulls triple duty and a game mechanic (hack an enemy’s limbs off does more damage and forces it to adjust its fighting style accordingly), a mood-setting device (nothing like a room completely strewn with arms and legs to get one in the Horror mindset), and even as a literary device.  Many of the characters, driven crazy by the force that’s infected the ship, ask to be “made whole again” in an entirely metaphorical sense.

But of course no survival horror game would be complete without atmosphere.  After all, as Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw rightly points out:

“Horror as a genre of art exists for the same reason as roller coasters and the terrorist watch list – because for the most part modern society is so stable and orderly and boring that the occasional artificial scare is what we need to make us feel alive.

Evoking fear is, in itself, an art form – and nothing in the entire history of storytelling has explored it better than video games.”

If a horror game doesn’t scare the player, it has failed.  Dead Space does an amazing job of bringing the player so close to the edge of their seat that they’re only a knocking air vent away from startling themselves out of it.  And while it never gave me nightmares (unlike Silent Hill 2), it did scare the holy hell out of me on several occasions.  More than just sudden startles, however, the whole game is just downright eerie.  You’re one a dead ship, where everything is falling apart, plus you’re alone save for a bunch of aliens who just want to eat your face.  The few people you see in person after the intro are either insane, in the process of perishing (sometimes even by their own hand), or both.

One final note on the game: I was gratified that there was no cliffhanger.  When it was over, it ended (and in classic horror style, too) and it felt like the designers were saying “thanks for playing, here’s your ending!”  Not, “okay, well done, now get to wait for the privelege of buying the sequel!”

All in all, brilliant game.  If horror’s your thing, you need this game.  It’s available on XBox 360 and PS3 and it’s WELL worth the $60.

Okay, a few things.  1.) I would have been blogging more in this space but I’ve been slammed with work of various kinds.  Also, I recently discovered the hilarity that is Zero Punctuation, which is a weekly video game review.  It’s hilarious to the point that I’m pretty sure I enjoyed the four minute review of some games more than I enjoyed the game itself.  Case in point.

2.) If any rich admirers out there are wondering what to get me for Christmas, I’d like one of these in .300 Win Mag or this ludicrously nice amp or a copy of the Secret Museum of Mankind if you can find one.

3.) Well, my Washington State ballot arrived a couple of days ago.  (WA ballots are all mail-in.)  Which means I finally have to figure out who I’m voting for for President.  I still haven’t ruled out writing in one of the Roosevelts.

Randall Munroe, the mad genius behind XKCD, serves up probably the best analysis of the “Airplane on a Treadmill” debate to date.  Money quote (after comparing interpretations of the problem):

So, people who go with interpretation #3 notice immediately that the plane cannot move and keep trying to condescendingly explain to the #2 crowd that nothing they say changes the basic facts of the problem. The #2 crowd is busy explaining to the #3 crowd that planes aren’t driven by their wheels. Of course, this being the internet, there’s also a #4 crowd loudly arguing that even if the plane was able to move, it couldn’t have been what hit the Pentagon.

Well worth a read.  He also links to some of the finest math/science paradoxes around, so be prepared for a heavy mental workout.

For the record: I’m firmly in the “plane takes off as normal” camp regardless of which interpretation of the problem one accepts.  Any physically plausible construction of the problem can be resolved by the fact that the plane’s engines push against the air and its wheels are merely to provide rolling friction against the ground, instead of having to just scrape the belly of the plane across the tarmac.  This  is the same reason why a plane could take off from a frictionless surface (with or without the landing gear down.)

Courtest of Cyanide & Happiness and Overcompensating.  (Click on the comics to embiggen.)

Okay, so I’ll cut to the chase: if you have a 360 and don’t yet have this game, then buy it immediately. Don’t even bother finishing this review, that would only delay your enjoyment.

Braid is a side-scrolling puzzle game, which is a genre which, for me, tends to have a “Time Until Thrown Controller” measured in seconds. The basic premise is that you have to go from world to world, collecting puzzle pieces by using your environment and manipulating the flow of time.

This is in the same way that two people play chess by shuffling little carved figurines around a checkerboard.

First of all, the presentation of the game is simply stunning. The music is not only rich and evocative, but well-suited to the game (it even responds to the player’s manipulation of time). The artwork is beautiful, with a water-color aesthetic which is fairly novel. The net result is that the game itself, absent of game play, is extremely sensually rewarding.

Combine with this the fact that the gameplay is addictively engaging and the game ends up firmly in “must play” territory. The puzzles are interesting and while it would seem that the whole “temporal manipulation” thing would make the game a one trick pony, the theme is played with enough over the course of the game that it never gets old. (E.g. some objects are immune to manipulation, others move back in forth in time as one’s character moves around in space, etc.) It’s a little more expensive than some other XBox Live Arcade offerings (about 15 bucks), but it’s well worth the money.

Blogging’s been light.  Blame work and thesis.

Also: Tropic Thunder wasn’t all that great.  It had its moments, but overall it could have been better.  Honestly, it would have been a LOT better without Jack Black or Tom Cruise.

So Tropic Thunder was kind of moderate fail, but here’s some epic win:  You know that NanoSail-D project that was lost on board the SpaceX Falcon?  There’s a spare!  That’s brilliant news, since I’m just geek enough to think that alternate space propulsion systems is one of the most important projects going at the moment.  And considering that projects like NanoSail are the leading edge of that project, it’s good to hear that the whole thing wasn’t lost.  As Paul Gilster quotes from the movie Contact: “Why build one when you can build two for twice the price?”

So yeah, basically corporate-sector Astronautics and solar sails FTW!

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to crash: turns out the 8:30am meeting I had to go to last week is going to be a weekly thing…

Looks like Earth-like planets may be the extreme exception to the rule after all, if new simulations of star system formation are to be believed.

I know that science is all about rational progress and embracing the best theory available to fit observed evidence, but man, I’m really hoping the Rare Earth Hypothesis is wrong.  Both because aliens are cool and because if we can’t SOME day get off this rock to another habitable world, then our species is well-screwed.

On the plus side, the Tau Zero Foundation finally has their website up and it’s a swanky one.  (Also: a .aero TLD?  Who knew?  I certainly didn’t…)  So, you know, if we ever do find any places in the galaxy interesting enough for an up-close visit, there are some smart people already laying the groundwork for getting us there.

The past few days have been kind of depressing, with both the passing of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the loss of the SpaceX Falcon booster.  Being both a huge fan of Solzhenitsyn’s work (A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich for the win!) and a huge space-flight fanboy, I was quite saddened to hear about both losses.

On the plus side, my friends Trevor and Molly got married in a beautiful ceremony in sunny Helena, Montana over the weekend.  I wish them much happiness in their new life together.

So for part of my working day I’m tied to an ancient, under-powered laptop which isn’t THAT much more powerful than the handheld devices I develop for.  This poor old machine is decrepit enough that running WinAmp and a basic development environment at the same time is a MAJOR CHORE.  (Enough so that WinAmp, a DevEnv and Firefox at the same time is right out of the question.)  So out of curiosity, I consulted Google for a lightweight Windows audio player so that I can play CDs and still do my job effective.

It turned up foobar2000.  If you’re in need of such a program, I highly recommend it.  Small, free (as in beer), extensible, and in its basic configuration uses up next to know resources.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to cut code, consult firefox, AND listen to CDs, all at the same time…