Month: November 2004

There haven’t been (and probably won’t be) any real updates to delineate or actuality as I am not around to update either.

I’m at a place I’ve been to like 4 times, and yet feel more at home than anywhere else. Strange, but awesome.

I have absolutely no self control, and that sucks for a variety of reasons. But hey, at least I got to get through Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia: Sands of Time for the GameCube (PoP:SoT) in a couple of nights, when I probably should have been preparing some stuff for the upcoming talk.

And I’m not kidding, I really did finish it in two sessions of under 5 hours each. It’s that short. Here are some thoughts. Firstly, the one game that kept coming to my mind as I was playing this was (Raven’s Quake II engine based) Heretic II. They looked vaguely similar, but that’s not why. This and Heretic II are the only third person action games (you can’t really call them third person shooters since they don’t really have guns) in which I’ve actually cared about the characters as the story progressed.

While I am starting to relate it to other games, I might as well compare it with the other games I’ve played in the PoP series and get it over with. Funwise, it is definitely better than PoP I, arguably comparable to PoP II and light years ahead of PoP 3D.

Now, returning to the star of the show, PoP:SoT. It has a well thought of story that ends with a pleasant twist. It doesn’t follow the formulaic “the evil vizier kidnapped the princess and you must rescue her” scheme, which is nice. You sort of have a sense for what is going on during the game, but it all makes sense and falls into place during the last sequences – like The Sixth Sense. PoP:SoT is also extremely funny at points, realized by some brilliant voice acting. And the music fits the mood nicely. Except, the music sounds more Indian than Persian, but I’m not complaining.

The game is what I call “super linear”. There is absolutely just one path from the time you start the game to finish. If you see something and can reach it (jump across across to a ledge at a 6000 m elevation, say), that is the way you must go. As long as you can move in a given direction, you are progressing along the intended path. Which is actually nice, as it involved very little intelligence, some things most games these days force you to expend waaay more than necessary making the experience less fun. Because of this strict linear path and a not-so-subtle hint system (premonitions warning you of all possible traps and how to get by them), the game is short, and simple, and I loved it.

True to its PoP lineage, a bulk of the gameplay deals with avoiding and circumventing all sorts of devious traps and things that hinder your progress. Now, just as in the rest of the series, one false jump, one spiked ram knocking you off a ledge or just about any other wrong move can kill you in an instant. But since it will be no fun to allow saving after every step, the creative story writers worked in this (sand powered) dagger that controls time (don’t ask). Occasional screw ups are now acceptable because all you need to do is “rewind time” to a point before you made a mistake and get on with it. It sure beats restarting at the beginning of a level and having to go through all sorts of devious jumps and things again. You realize the true glory and brilliance of this simple addition only much later in the game, when it gets taken from you. You then have to perform a bunch of things without screwing up once. It can get irritating when you make a simple slip up 90% of the way through a sequence and have to redo it all over again.

All in all, it’s a super fun game with a carefully crafted story you want to believe, with interesting characters you’ll get attached to, with some very witty dialogue worked in. It’s a pity it was so short, but it still deserves a 5/5.

I’ve not been able to write too much recently. I have at least 4 unfinished posts which ended up stranded cause they were insanely boring (and pointless) even though they seemed like great ideas when I started. So I’ll stick to life news, since boring as it may be, the primary objective of this place is to chronicle my existence.

I’m heading to Boston Monday for the week, for another talk. And I think I might be there this summer too – it’s like my life is not complete and will not move on if I don’t spend a week a year in this place. But it’s awesome, so all’s well.

I am not taking the EOS 20D because I don’t trust myself yet to not screw up when something pretty worth taking comes along. Plus, it’s heavy and after half a day of walking around town with it, my arms hurt like as I’ve stressed myself working out. I mean, how I think they might hurt if I stressed myself working out, if I ever tried.

For the first couple of days, I’d been keeping myself busy with other things and didn’t make time to try out the new camera. I didn’t make the time to, or … I didn’t want to? I don’t know, I’d been overly ambivalent about the whole denting my life savings exercise, but all that changed late last evening. After 83 test shots at home and familiarizing myself with some settings, I stepped out into the darkness and biting cold to take a bunch of pictures. I am pleased to report I am very impressed.

Here’s one of them. There was no noise, no blur, no struggling to auto-focus, no chromatic aberration, no spherical aberration, no dead pixels, no nonsense. Just a clear capture of exactly what I saw. All I had to do before uploading it to delineate was scaling. There was no need for the usual subtle tweaking of any sort.

Here’s a crop of the unscaled image for those curious. And for those who aren’t as well.

Sometime early afternoon, yesterday.

arbitrary person: Dude, it is going to snow soon.
me: Quiet down foo, it is over 50 degrees (in the devil’s own unit) outside. It isn’t going to snow.
ap: But dude, tomorrow’s Thanksgiving. You’ve gotta have “first snow” by Thanksgiving.
me: STFU.

Sometime late afternoon, when me steps out and into a shiny white powdery coat of snow.

me: Ayee! God damn it.

^*YACE — Yet Another Conversation Excerpt

– Site 1
– Site 2
– Site 3

I had at least 3 more, but I’ve forgotten them. Which is why I’ve now linked to these two… before I forget. People who attribute original sources rock.

This is probably the funniest thing I’ve seen on slashdot in ages. It’s a picture of how a rock might be rendered in three modern game engines, along with the real rock, for comparison.

And have felt, touched, and started using:
– this camera body
– with this lens
– storing images on this card.

First reactions? It’s insanely heavy, and I still feel poor.

Recently, I’ve been playing quite a bit of Resident Evil. I mean, I’ve been playing it so much that you could say I am quite hooked on it. Rather than give my standard-styled opinion on things, this time I’m going to take a sort of comparative approach. So here it is, Capcom’s Resident Evil for the GameCube (RE) as seen from the eyes of one who holds Lucas Art’s Grim Fandango for the PC (GF) as the gold standard, even across genres.

– RE’s genre is technically “survival horror”, while GF is a “traditional adventure” game. But they’re actually closer than their genres might indicate.
– There is much less talk in RE. In fact, there is almost no talk at all (discounting the grunts and moans of the zombie folk). It’s all text you need to read when you’re out exploring.
– There is absolutely no real music to speak of in RE. GF had extremely immersive tracks that fit the scene’s mood perfectly.
– RE’s puzzles are, in general, infinitely easier. Plus you have your trusty map that tells you whether you’ve finished everything important in a region, so that helps. And oh, if something moves, push it. It is bound to solve something.
– As far as I remember, only one (annoying) puzzle in GF involved timing. RE has more such, but only because you might get mauled while attempting to do something.
– RE has very little by way of range of characters. You have a few human males and females, that’s it. Oh, and the zombies and other monsters.
– The control scheme in RE is the most stiff, antiquated and retarded I’ve ever used in a long time. Basically your character can do a standard up-down-left-right, but in some sort of super stiff and clunky way. GF’s controls were nothing to write home about (if played with a joystick), but RE is just poor. After being spoiled by z-targeting in action-adventure games like Zelda, being unable to control the camera is downright lame. But I guess it’s a necessity given most things are pre-rendered for a given camera position and orientation. Which naturally leads to the next point.
– RE is graphically very pleasing (and so was GF at its time). I am quite impressed by the lighting, shadowing and general effects in RE. It is also very scary once you really get into it. But then again, while GF was spread across a variety of rich (, colourful and pretty) lands and times, RE is pretty much all in one mansion, over a night. Also, it would have been nicer if the characters in RE turned their heads and focussed on the interesting things in a room, rather than make the items shine, which seems out of context, atmosphere wise.
– You can die rather easily in RE. In GF, you can’t die. (Which is good since you’re actually “dead” before the start of the game.)
– More importantly, you don’t particularly care if a character in RE dies. Sure, she’s kinda pretty, but it’s no big deal when she gets mauled by a zombie and blood flies everywhere. GF on the other hand, though I knew nothing could go wrong, I almost cried when I thought Glottis was going to die.
– Trying to model reality closer, there is a limit to the number of things Jill can carry in RE. Manny Calavera on the other hand could carry infinite things in his suit. (Which sucked later on because you couldn’t do the “attempting to use all items in all possible locations” and hope to solve anything.)
– GF is quite linear whereas RE seems to have quite a few story branches. Each time I start from a restarted point, things sort of head in different directions. Which means, it isn’t as simple as remembering where a zombie is, dying, coming back there and taking him out with ease in the next life, like in say, doom.

All in all, RE is still a great game and loads of fun, in a freak-you-out-scary way at points. It’s just when it is compared to an absolutely stupendous experience, like GF, are its flaws apparent.

More succinct ratings will be available on the GameCube Page.