Farewell, Discount Thoughts. Hello, Discount Thoughts!

Well, this has been coming for some time. I haven't been exactly thrilled with jamming all these different kinds of content into a single blog, and I've felt a little pressed to make Discount Thoughts into only a blog exclusively about video games, which is not what I ever meant for it to be. So, I've decided to end Discount Thoughts in its present form and move to independent hosting, where I can have some freedom to experiment and branch out. That means leaving Blogger. This site will remain active in purely archival form for some time, but there will be no further updates, and comments will be closed. If you're seeing this in your RSS reader, it's only because I didn't quite switch the feed over correctly.

So what of the new blogs? Well, there are now three!

Discount Thoughts will be the home of my personal posts and everything that doesn't fit into the two subject blogs.
Conformational Flux will be the home of my posts on scientific articles and commentaries on science.
Ludonarratology will be the home of my videogame-related writing.

I hope you'll come along and enjoy the future at my new websites!
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Brief Thoughts, week of August 19

From Dust's PC port has always-online DRM, is crap: Really, who didn't see this coming? Ubisoft has a richly-deserved reputation for hating on the PC, and From Dust's DRM and terrible port can hardly be a surprise in light of the company's past actions. Ubisoft's upcoming Driver: San Francisco will probably also have this asinine DRM — Ubisoft claims it will not, but a similar claim was made for From Dust. As the man said: "Fool me once, shame on... shame on you. Fool me... won't get fooled again". Fortunately, a cracked version is already available, so you can still play it on PC without Ubi's hateful DRM (but don't be a dick, guys — buy a legit copy and run the cracked one). Or, you can just play PC games from companies other than Ubisoft. That is, after all, what they clearly want.

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Capsule: Trauma

Status: Complete, all endings and pictures obtained.

Most intriguing idea: Using hidden-object gameplay as an analogy for self-examination.

Best design decision: The "ghost photo" navigation system.

Worst design decision: Describing the possible endings under the "Discoveries" tab. These are telegraphed enough as is.

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Capsule: Child of Eden

Status: Completed all levels (final level in "Feel Eden" mode)

Most Intriguing Idea: Gameplay as synaesthesia.

Best design decision: The "Feel Eden" mode

Worst design decision: Having modes that are not "Feel Eden"

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Brief thoughts, week of August 12

Rage to require 22 GB install on XBox 360: The game is also shipping on three discs: two for the main game +1 for multiplayer. My understanding is that Rage will still be playable from disc, albeit with a notable performance hit. It's a little silly to be outraged by this (no pun intended), despite Microsoft's ludicrous price-gouging on hard drives. The existence of the hard drives always made this sort of requirement a temptation, and PS3 owners have already "enjoyed" mandatory installs for some games. The next generation of consoles will all have hard drives, because we're reaching an era where the performance hit due to streaming data from disc is becoming noticeable. Given the increasing penetration of broadband and wi-fi, and the growing (publisher-side) popularity of "always on" DRM, as well as their desire to squelch sales of used games, the total abandonment of optical media may be nearer than we think.

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Roundup: Week of August 5, 2011

This was a big week for fans of loot-whoring RPGs, yeah?

Diablo III to have always-on DRM, no modding, real-money transactions: Let's not beat around the bush here or buy in to Blizzard's frankly insulting rationalizations for the always-online requirement. These are not choices in favor of optimization, they represent DRM that can only make the single-player experience worse. The no-modding choice in particular takes a dump on one of the great advantages of the PC. I can't say I care one way or another about paying real money for digital swords, nor would it matter: that ship has sailed, returned to harbor laden with riches from distant lands, and sailed again. This is a case where I can vote with my dollars, though, so Runic Games probably owes Activision-Blizzard a thank-you note. The story's amusing coda is presented by Blizzard's Robert Bridenbecker, whose bewildered response to the outcry is so larded with PR-speak it barely seems like a communication from a human being.

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Scenario and story in Bastion

Bastion is a game with marvelous art, a wonderful soundtrack, and solid mechanics, but it was not sold to the public on the strength of these aspects. Rather, it was sold on its storytelling system, in which a narrator responds to what the main character (called only the Kid) is doing. In the game, however, the narrator actually does relatively little of this, and Bastion's plot is thinly realized, offering little insight into its characters and their motivations. Rather, the game's storytelling system primarily delivers background information on the city of Caelondia and the Calamity that has caused the destruction of the city and its environs. Bastion's narrative puts scenario first and story second, in a way that both supports and weakens its central themes.

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Brief thoughts from July

Nintendo drops 3DS price by $80: It had to be done, given the below-expectations sales numbers and widespread hyperventilation over them. The DS also had a slow start, in terms of both sales and software, but that was before mobile phones were the most widespread handheld platform. As such, a price cut may not be enough to save the 3DS. The new price certainly doesn't do much for me: my only experience with the handheld gave me a splitting headache, and the lineup of games includes exactly one thing I want to play (and even then, I'm satisfied with OoT's original graphics). As for early adopters, the free virtual console games they'll get should take away a bit of the sting, but they probably feel a bit betrayed. While the price drop may shore up 3DS sales, it may adversely affect the Wii U launch. It would only make sense to hold off on buying a new home console, after all, given Nintendo's demonstrated willingness to burn its most loyal fans. Speaking of which...

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Actor, Director, Producer: The player role in RPG battles

I have more to say about Final Fantasy XIII, but that post is so depressing to write I thought I'd hold off for now and elaborate on a point I made in my post discussing its combat mechanics. Role-playing games tend to get broadly divided into "turn-based" and "action" categories, distinctions that are not particularly informative, often get used inaccurately, and don't usefully elaborate the relationship between the player and the system. The battle systems in RPGs can be described in a variety of orthogonal ways, each of which has some value for describing the game's engagement with the player. Here I want to focus on the role of the player in dictating the course of the battle. Traditionally the player has either been an "actor" or a "director", but in the past decade or so, "producer"-style play has also become common. Depending on context, any of these player roles can be used to generate a compelling play experience, but an understanding of their strengths and weaknesses is essential.

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Final Fantasy XIII: A series of tubes

The worst reason to hate Final Fantasy XIII is because of its linearity. Non-linearity doesn't necessarily improve a game, and following a constrained path doesn't necessarily make it worse. All Final Fantasy games, including the most highly praised ones, have been essentially linear in both story and world design, and FFXIII is not even unique in degree, given FFX. A player's desire to break out of a constrained experience is usually not a result of linearity per se, but instead reflects a failure of the game's story to engage that player. "Failure" is a reasonably good description of FFXIII's story, which is surprising because Square-Enix had done so much of this stuff before.

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Final Fantasy XIII: The best part

Despite respectable review scores and reasonably good sales, Final Fantasy XIII is widely derided, for many good reasons and a few bad ones. Defenders of the game often point to the battle system as the game's saving grace. I found myself sharing the sentiment when I played through the game recently. That might be seen as damning by faint praise, given that so much of the game was attacked, but the combat system really is quite strong, and manages to incorporate principles that are familiar from hard-core RPGs in a dynamic and accessible way. While it probably won't satisfy players who cut their teeth on those older systems, FFXIII represents an interesting fusion of principles.

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The Road Course

This past weekend marked an interesting turn in the NASCAR racing season, by which I mean a right turn. Both the Sprint Cup and Nationwide Tour visited road courses, a rare departure for a racing brand built on ovals. The weight, center of gravity, and wheelbase of a stock car can make even the ovals difficult to drive at racing speeds, so even though the road courses make use of the same basic skills, they pose a unique and difficult challenge, so much so that it was once typical to see "ringers" with road racing expertise make an appearance at the two annual road races. The change-up can result in some uniquely exciting racing, or, as happened this weekend in both races, bruising wrecks. Video games that try to change up their gameplay midstream face similar risks. To understand this, we need look no further than the shmups appearing in Goichi Suda's third-person action games No More Heroes and Shadows of the Damned.

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Where Armageddon failed

I initially had a hard time writing my review of Red Faction: Armageddon. I almost fell into the same trap that caught me in my review of No More Heroes 2, another game that essentially abandoned an existing open-world concept, of reviewing the predecessor rather than the sequel. This was an enticing prospect, because I liked Red Faction: Guerilla a great deal, and I did not like Armageddon one little bit. I ultimately did the review the right way (it should be going up on GameCritics.com soon), but I still want to talk some more about Red Faction: Armageddon and why it's such a disappointment in juxtaposition to Guerilla

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The Hollow Man

Who is Cole Phelps?

Oh, I can recount the dry facts easily enough: lousy Marine officer who got a Silver Star anyway, good case man for the LAPD, affair with a German junkie, etc. What I'm curious about is the emotional life of the fellow. I spent upwards of twenty hours plodding around a sterile version of L.A. with the guy and I still don't have a clue. He's a lump, as unreadable and impenetrable as a copy of Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft written in cuneiform on a lead brick. And we can't even blame it on lousy animation. L.A. Noire's problem is, instead, structural. It exists at the unhappiest place along the spectrum from movie to game, where the developers don't do enough to create characters, and fail to give the players any tools to do it themselves.

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Alternative side-chain structures from methyl CPMG

As I have mentioned before on this blog, the use of tools like CS-ROSETTA holds the promise of determining protein structures using only the chemical shifts of its backbone atoms. In addition to potentially making NOEs and RDCs redundant, this technology allows biologists to determine the conformations of minor members of the structural ensemble, which are very difficult to obtain using conventional approaches in population-dominated techniques like NMR and X-ray crystallography. There are two limitations here, however. First, we only gain insight into the backbone, and as we know, the positions of side chains in minor states can be critical for function. In addition, backbone chemical shifts are not always available due to relaxation problems. Both weaknesses could, in principle, be addressed by extracting conformational information from the chemical shifts of methyl groups, which report on side-chain behavior and continue to give good signal even in very large proteins. This is the rationale behind a series of recent papers from the Kay lab [1-3] intended to determine changes in side-chain rotameric state from methyl relaxation-dispersion data.

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What Blackwater should do

Fundamentally, the bodyguards' mission differed from that of the U.S. military, noted Hammes. "The contractor was hired to protect the principal. He had no stake in pacifying the country. Therefore, they often ran Iraqis off the roads, reconned by fire, and generally treated locals as expendable." Yet Iraqis saw them as acting under American authority. "You have loosed an unaccountable, deadly force into their society, and they have no recourse."

— Thomas Ricks, Fiasco

The annual Electronic Entertainment Expo continues, producing a deluge of coverage and critique as journalists and bloggers debate the merits of this hotly-anticipated sequel and that oddly-named, overpriced new platform. All the games get some coverage, but many sink beneath the tide of information. The announcement by Backbreaker publisher 505 Games' upcoming "FPX" Blackwater seems to be one such. For those who recall the outrage that greeted the announcement of Atomic Games' still-unreleased Six Days in Fallujah this might come as a surprise. Blackwater Worldwide (now renamed Xe) was one of the most infamous of the private military contractors employed in Iraq, involved in several incidents that remain a sore point with Iraqis, and has been accused of violating both federal and international law. Yet the mainstream press, which frothed at the mouth at the thought of a legitimate attempt to portray the struggles of actual U.S. soldiers, seems content to let slide a game where you play as a mercenary in an organization that has murdered civilians and smuggled weapons, doing real harm to U.S. interests in the process. 505 Games does not owe the world a game that criticizes Blackwater, but it should produce a game that engages criticisms of the organization in a more-than-superficial way.

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Identity Crysis

Let me start by stating something important, which is that Crysis 2 is an excellent game and worth playing if you have ever enjoyed first-person shooters at all. The core design is very strong, especially the extent to which the nanosuit was tuned to make the player feel like a badass without feeling invulnerable. On many levels, however, I thought the game couldn't really decide what it wanted to be about. Is it a game about making sound tactical choices in an operation against a superior force, or is it a (bad) story about squid attacking New York City with a bioweapon?

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Capsule: Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes HD

Status: Story complete, no attempt at multiplayer

Put this on your (virtual) box: Match three for triumph!

Most intriguing idea: Making a puzzle-strategy-RPG.

Best design decision: Using troop distributions on the battlefield as a substrate for the puzzle

Worst design decision: Inadequately balancing the initial grid states.

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A few thoughts on Portal 2

While I still have it fresh in my mind I want to put down my thoughts about the single-player campaign in Portal 2. I haven't played any of the co-op, primarily because of the mysterious, ongoing problem with the PSN. However, I completed the solo campaign, and while I agree with many of the criticisms Michael Barnes made in his review at No High Scores, I greatly enjoyed Portal 2. I don't think it's a 10/10 masterpiece, but it is a very good game.

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Capsule: Beyond Good & Evil HD

Status: Complete, achievements 100%

Put this on your (virtual) box: The image is mightier than the stick!

Most Intriguing Idea: That years of word-of-mouth would produce a strong market for an up-rezzed version of a largely ignored game

Best Design Decision: Making the protest signs more legible

Worst Design Decision: The camera behavior, especially in the Slaughterhouse area


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The classic Alzheimer's aggregates are linked

The classic neuropathological hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease are the appearance of amyloid plaques composed primarily of amyloid beta (Aβ) peptides, and neurofibrillary tangles composed mainly of hyperphosphorylated tau protein. For many years, research into treatments for Alzheimer's disease proceeded on the hypothesis that the plaques were toxic to the surrounding neurons. More recently, however, evidence has shown that soluble Aβ oligomers may be the primary toxic species. A recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences supports this hypothesis by showing that Aβ oligomers isolated from the brains of Alzheimer's sufferers cause neuronal degradation and improper phosphorylation of tau (1). This paper is open access, so open it up and read along.

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The trouble with Tripitaka

During the "Females on Female Characters" panel at PAX, Susan Arendt argued briefly in support of Tripitaka (Trip), a character from Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. This appreciation seemed bizarre to me, so the moment stuck in my mind. Enslaved was a gorgeous game with phenomenal voice acting, decently expressive gameplay, and very bad writing, of which I thought Trip was a prime example. The game apparently wants us to like and sympathize with Trip, but she struck me as a perfectly reprehensible person in general, and seemed to represent patriarchal stereotypes more than she undermined them.

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Two (too?) easy games

The most difficult part of reviewing a game is reviewing the difficulty. A few games — Super Meat Boy, I Wanna be the Guy — can uncontroversially be called hard, but the essential question is actually whether they are too hard. Since that level of difficulty depends not only on the individual player's skills and experience, but also on his values, it can be difficult to state what goes over the line. It is even harder to accurately say whether a game is too easy, primarily because most reviewers are skilled and experienced gamers, many of them drawn to the hobby during its early days when challenge was practically all a game could offer in terms of fun. "Too easy" often equates to boring, perhaps to the detriment of games like Soul Bubbles. I have seen the "too easy" charge leveled at two games I played recently, Kirby's Epic Yarn and de Blob 2. In both cases, the statement is wrong, but for very different reasons.

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PAX East 2011 Roundup

I spent the weekend at PAX East, checking out upcoming games and meeting great people. That last one was a bit more difficult thanks to the enormous size of the BCEC, but that size made panels much easier to get into and allowed for an expanded and much nicer exposition floor. In case you weren't there, here are some impressions...

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Arcology

When I was a boy my family used to joke that crows didn't fly in Vestavia. Our suburb, like so many others, had a knotty system of streets that made direct travel impossible, and zoning that made driving a necessity. My high school was less than 2/3 of a mile direct distance from my house, but it was a two-mile drive down a road that became pretty backed up around 7:45 AM. Of course nobody rode the bus. Suburban living allowed my brother and I to go to a good school, live in a big house, and play in the woods frequently as we grew up. It also used a lot of gas.

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Demo-lition

I think I should start with the reason I placed the pre-order in the first place, which is that I enjoyed Dragon Age: Origins a great deal. I didn't particularly care for the combat, which suffered from having continuous time and lousy AI. I also thought that much of what BioWare did to make the game seem gritty, especially the blood spattering, was unintentionally comical. However, I thought the game had some interesting ideas hiding behind its surface pageantry of turgid Tolkienism, and the writing for some of the characters (Shale!) was really great. So, when I heard Dragon Age 2 was coming out I placed an order, and when I heard there was a demo, I downloaded it. Having thoroughly gone through the demo, however, I decided to cancel the pre-order.

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Capsule: Kirby's Epic Yarn

Status: Game completed; some extra levels still locked

Put this on your box: The hardest easiest platformer ever made!

Most intriguing idea: That a platformer can be challenging without forcing you to restart a level every time you fail.

Best design decision: Getting rid of "death".

Worst design decision: The method for getting the extra levels in Grass Land.

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The Text Blues: But I Digress...

It seems like most of the people who wrote reviews of 999 thought very highly of it. I'm not sure why that was; I found the game to be a fairly tedious exercise in the repetition of insufficiently interesting puzzles. 999 creates this problem for itself because of its structure. The enforced replays that are central to 999's design and fiction ask for more from the puzzles and dialogue than they are able to contribute as art or entertainment. In addition to that, I felt that 999 had a tendency to undermine its plot and atmosphere during its moments of exposition, because it did not make proper use of the communicative elements on hand.

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Capsule: Katamari Forever

Status: Normal mode and vast majority of drive mode complete

Put this on your box: Katamari is too unique to be derivative of anything else, so we made it derivative of itself!

Most intriguing idea: That a Katamari game would benefit from HD graphics. (It says "intriguing, folks, not "correct")

Best design decision: Katamari Drive compensates for some of the older games' deficiencies.

Worst design decision: The Prince's jump, which proves that the Move is an improvement on something.

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Why HisH doesn't fire until it sees the whites of PRFAR's eyes

The enzyme imidazole glycerophosphate synthase (IGPS) can be a bit of a lump. If you bind just one substrate it doesn't do anything, even though its two active sites are separated by more than 30 Å. Only if the second substrate also binds does catalysis actually go at anything like a respectable rate. In a recent paper in Structure researchers from Yale report evidence that this change of pace results from a change in dynamics.

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The Text Blues: Silence is Leaden

A few days after the Christmas snowfall in Alabama, while we waited for the lasagna to finish cooking, we popped a copy of Epic Mickey into the Wii and I played a bit of it. I got past the first, easy battle and entered the hallway, where a cutscene began. My mother, who mostly plays Snood, wanted to know why Mickey wasn't speaking. "He's always talked," she noted, and for almost anyone alive that's true. Mickey started talking in 1929, just a year after his famous appearance in the sound-synched Steamboat Willie. Sound has been a famous part of Mickey's history, so it's alienating, especially to non-gamers, to run into an essentially silent version of the Mouse in Epic Mickey. I think the decision to eschew spoken dialogue is defensible, and even clever. However, I also feel that the way dialogue was handled didn't serve the game's aesthetic, because it replaced speech with text.

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