tempest in a teacup

More coherent thoughts later, but here are some initial impressions:

1. The physics seem weird, even for a Street Fighter game. I don’t recall having this much trouble timing jump-ins the few times I played Third Strike.
2. The challenge mode is kind of useful in that it tells you which normals are cancellable, gives you a bunch of combos and links, and has you try to do them. I don’t think it’s as robust as Virtua Fighter 4’s which actually had you practice using your moves/strings in different situations, but the combo lists did help at the very least.
3. The network features seem pretty robust, only hampered by PSN’s crappy interface for sending invites (it piggybacks on top of the normal instant messaging system).
4. I’m probably going to take some flak for this, but I’m still not a huge fan of the art style used in-game. It looks polished and all, but some part of me is still wondering what this game might have looked like had it been in 2D.
5. Having to unlock a third of the roster by slogging through single-player modes that I don’t have much interest in is kind of annoying.

In any case, I’m not really going to be playing online until I get my PS3 stick, which should arrive on Tuesday (playing on the Dual Shock controller is starting to give my right hand cramps). I’ve unlocked everyone except Gouken and Seth by this point, so I’m trying to figure out who I want to learn how to play. I’m thinking Ryu (lol), Abel or Fei Long…

I was reading a thread about the upcoming Left 4 Dead Survival Pack on one of the Internet forums I frequent today, and I came across a rather strange quote from one of the forum regulars:

I think all DLC that doesn’t bring in new achievements with it should be free, and if it’s not, it should be pretty cheap. I’m talking 100MSP.

It wasn’t the fact that he was willing to pay for DLC that struck me as strange (that seems to be a fixture of our times) – it was that he viewed achievements as worth paying for.

I have quite a bit to say on the subject of achievements in video games, but I’ll start off by saying that anyone whose buy/not-to-buy decision is based on the availability of achievements for a particular game is a gibbering idiot.

Harsh? Maybe. But I can’t really put it any other way. Achievements are largely pointless in the grand scheme of things. They’re really just a way to artificially prolong replay value by adding silly tasks for players to do, some of which run contrary to the whole point of the game. They’re a bonus, nothing more, and they’re most definitely not worth anything.

For instance, take the infamous gnome achievement in Half-Life 2: Episode Two. This achievement gives you credit for successfully bringing a lawn gnome, found near the start of the game, to the final area and stowing it in a rocket before the end of the game. Keep in mind that while doing this the game has you drive a car (which the gnome has the habit of frequently falling out of) over a large distance while engaging in several large gun battles. Is the ability to do this rather ridiculous task really worth any money at all? Is the game worse off for their exclusion? Obviously not.

Alright, admittedly it’s not such a big problem in single-player games. Heck, I’ll admit to going back and replaying HL2: Ep Two while trying to get the achievement where you squish all the antlion grubs (which is pretty much where I drew the line). It’s when the spectre of achievement farmers begins to haunt multiplayer games that I start to take umbrage. As a prime example, here’s a revealing quote from madlep, one of the main contributors to ubercharged.net (a major Team Fortress 2 blog):

You know how I mentioned that I top scored as pyro at the beginning of the post? IT WAS BECAUSE THE ENTIRE SERVER WAS FULL OF MEDICS TRYING TO UBER DEMOMEN JUMPING OFF CLIFFS, MEDICS TRYING TO UBER SCOUTS, OR MEDICS TRYING TO UBER FIST HEAVIES (or the scouts or heavies or whatever from their clan helping them out)

Ridiculous stuff. What the hell did valve think would happen when they put such moronic criteria for the achievements in there?

You can read the rest of his post, which deals with the mentality of achievement farmers, here.

That post was written shortly after the first content update for Team Fortress 2, where Valve added three new weapons and 36 new achievements for the Medic class. The achievements would have been harmless by themselves, but Valve tied the new weapons to your progress in obtaining the achievements, resulting in the tomfoolery that madlep described above.

The problem with adding achievements to multiplayer games is pretty clear – the rules and mechanics of the game are already sending you a strong signal as to how you should be playing (this is true of single player games as well, but like I said above I don’t consider achievement farmers in single player games to be that big a deal). Good Team Fortress 2 players know that Scouts should almost never be ubered, that Medics who run off trying to kill enemies with their syringe gun aren’t doing their job, and that Heavies running around punching people while ubered are colossal morons. Yet the achievements tell players to do these things, and say that they will be rewarded for doing so! Absolutely asinine.

Valve, perhaps realising this would be a problem, has made the criteria for the subsequent achievement packs much more reasonable – the Pyro and Heavy Achievements stick more closely to what players are expected to do with those classes (although there are still some pretty weird ones in there). Still, the fact that players needed to unlock them in order to access the new content rendered the game almost unplayable for the week following the respective updates. You would see teams with six Pyros per side, with pretty much all the other players on fire at the same time. Classes like the Scout and the Medic became practically useless – It was a truly ridiculous state of affairs.

The game is already telling you how it should be played – why not listen to it for a change?

I’d really like to kick the idiot at Intel who designed the Core 2 Duo heatsink/fan assembly. I had to use a screwdriver to force that thing into its locked position because my thumbs weren’t enough. Why can’t they just use a backplate and screws like just about every decent third-party heatsink out there?

As for why I was fiddling with my heatsink, well, today I added a fresh layer of thermal grease to my CPU. It’s been running way too hot for quite a while now (50 degrees Celsius at idle) so I decided to finally get to the root of the problem. And of course now it’s idling at a healthy 20 C, with the temperature under load being about ten degrees higher. Given that, since the 4GB of RAM I bought over Thanksgiving was causing my CPU to overheat at load when I installed it back then, I think I should probably give it another shot (although Windows XP won’t be able to use all of it, more RAM is always good). Hopefully it fares better this time.

I also did a reformat recently, and all I have to say is that the entire process has convinced me of the obsolescence of the DVD as a backup medium. I burned something like eight single-layer DVDs trying to back up all my files, which is pretty ridiculous. I’ve been pretty sloppy with my disk management, so I guess what I need is to either create a dedicated data partition or buy a new hard disk exclusively for data. Then again that raises concerns about what happens when that disk fails…

Maybe I should set up a RAID? Heh. As if I didn’t have enough trouble holding on to my money as it is…

On another note I got my hands on Maaya Sakamoto’s newest album かぜよみ (Kazeyomi) yesterday (and before you ask me where I downloaded it from, I paid for it with money, you goddamn pirate). So far, I like it more than 30minutes night flight and 夕凪ループ. It has a few singles on it that are anime-related, most notably Triangular, the first opening theme for Macross Frontier (which is a pretty great song in and of itself). The main reason I bought this album on release is because it was made with Youko Kanno’s involvement – a big plus for me since most of Maaya’s best songs were composed by Youko Kanno.

Tentative thumbs up – I’ll be listening to this a lot on my iPhone for the next few weeks to confirm that initial impression.

And now for no reason I’ll end this post with a Youtube video I capped off my laptop while I was playing Outrun 2006. No, I’m not normally this bad at the game…but I think the fact that Fraps was affecting my framerate might have had something to do with it. Not to mention the fact that I recently switched from using the keyboard to using an Xbox 360 controller to play (great controller, apart from the terrible d-pad).

I’ve only played the Wii version of Resident Evil 4, so someone please tell me – were the aiming controls as sluggish in the PS2 and GameCube versions of RE4 as they are in RE5? I don’t mind that you can’t run and gun like you can in Uncharted, but seriously even on the ‘Fastest’ setting the cursor moves way too slowly.

The Wii version supports classic controllers, so I suppose I could go figure that out for myself…

On another, happier note, Valve has updated Team Fortress 2 today with what most people would regard as a surprisingly good update. Among the changes are a couple of things that the competitive crowd has been asking for for a long time:

• The ability to turn off random damage at the server level (something which I alluded to in an earlier post)
• The ability to turn off weapon models or adjust the weapon models’ FOV (to improve the viewing area)
• The ability to turn off the ‘nemesis’ icon above characters’ heads (this was giving away enemy positions)

In addition, they’ve made changes to how critical hits and random damage work in the normal game – the ranges for random damage have been reduced from ±25% to ±10%, meaning that we should no longer see the Demoman occasionally one-shotting Scouts and Snipers with his grenades. On top of that critical hits have been changed, and for the better, I think. The base chance to crit that every player has has been reduced from 5% to 2%, and the maximum it can go is now 12% as opposed to 20% before. On the other hand, Valve has also reduced the amount of damage you need to deal in order to get a bonus to your crit chance. The idea (according to them) is to make crits less random and more based on recent performance, which is a good idea – in theory, at least.

There are a bunch of other fixes, most of which are assorted class buffs and bugfixes. They’re mostly being overshadowed by the stuff I mentioned above, though – the Steam forums are honestly going nuts right now. And this is before the Scout update has even been revealed…