::A Geek in Korea::

What is seen cannot be unseen.

(From ZanyPickle)

After I got all my cleaning in, and managed to follow all the rules and regulations to satisfy the toughest Korean cleanliness critic, my wife, I set to work preparing for my work week. Since I’ve got two levels of short story classes to teach during the week, preparing for the day takes a little longer than before. Even with all that extra work, I did manage to squeeze in some gaming today too. I’ve beaten Portal and Half-Life 2 this month, and needed to move onto something else to hold my attention. I decided to try the next game I picked up during STEAM’s sale during the holidays last month, Left 4 Dead.

Left 4 Dead isn’t new to me. It’s really great. I’ve been playing it from time to time with my friends at an Xbox room, and I even got to play Left 4 Dead 2 on the 360 not long ago when I visited a friend’s apartment. While everyone might have moved on to Left 4 Dead 2, as it improved on a lot of things, I don’t own it yet. It didn’t drop to the price I was interested in paying before the STEAM sale ended. Having only played Left 4 Dead on the 360 via LAN with players in the same room I knew, I wasn’t sure what the online component for PC was going to be like. I am a hesitant online gamer, but the forced teamwork and design of the game mean it’s not as competitive as other shooters.

After trying to play Single Player on the PC with bots standing in as my teammates, I decided I’d be willing to play with complete strangers. Well, as long as they were less dumb than the bots, played as a team, and I didn’t actually have to listen to them. Any team speak would be useless, as I’d be linked to games in Asia with lots of speakers that probably didn’t speak English well while under attack from zombies. Who wants to be berated in a foreign language as you play online? That’s the same reason I don’t play Starcraft online. Oh, that and I suck at it.

It turned out not to be so bad. I played with some players with Chinese characters in their name that could have been from basically anywhere in Asia. Due to the universal responses built into the game, players from different languages can communicate simple courtesy remarks to one another. “Thanks!” or “Wait here” don’t require any more than a button push. Whatever my response was, it was different for their machine on their end in a language they knew. It works for any language the game comes in without any extra work by the player. It’s pretty simple. Even a few players were willing to type English to help direct their team. Probably because they knew I must have needed the help.

I’m awful at the game. I charge into every situation, but manage to get left behind and picked off by the zombies if I am not extra careful. I don’t have any map memorized, don’t know what to do when I’m attacked from one particular point or another by an expert player. I just try to follow along and be helpful in a firefight. I accidentally shot team mates way too often, and general have little luck surviving the entire encounter. I’m not the first to go down, but I might be the reason why we got bogged down and made someone else fall far too often. I made a few dumb mistakes with a Molotov cocktail that left my teammates wondering which side I was playing on. (OOPS!)

I was better as an Infected Zombie attacker, if I had one of the roles I could do well. I clinched one of the maps early for us with a well aimed Boomer Bile attack that ended the other team’s run immediately and turned the score into a route. That was fun. I can’t do the Smoker worth a damn, and never had the chance to be the Tank. Perhaps that will come later. I’ve only had time to play one game online, so I’m not sure if I had the exception to the rule with my teammates, but they all played the game well and kicked butt.

I’m looking forward to getting back into the game as soon as possible. I’d even buy Left 4 Dead 2 if it went on sale again, only if I didn’t need to upgrade my machine to run it. It seemed to be a lot more system intensive when I played it on the 360.I hope the online community for Left 4 Dead stays around long enough that I’m not forced to move over if I wanted to continue blasting Zombies with strangers. I don’t have time to be hardcore about games much anymore. I really enjoy playing shooters casually with people that also play for fun. I’ve also decided that I’m okay with playing games that have come out a few years before I get to them as long as they are highly regarded and are still being played online. As long as I’m still having fun I really don’t mind if I’m not at the cutting edge.

The latest round of STEAM games on sale included the entire Popcap series that was available on the service. While I didn’t buy the entire package, I did pick up Plants vs. Zombies. This is a much more casual gaming experience compared to some of the other things on sale through STEAM. People like their shooters, and I like them from time to time, but they really aren’t my thing anymore. While Team Fortress 2 or Stalker can occupy my time, I feel like I’m just treading water on them because I don’t have the time to invest my skills to be very good at them. I’m too old for those sorts of twitch gaming experiences.

Plants vs. Zombies is fun for more than the quick reaction aspect. It has a good sense of humor and is well made. Right now it is a little easy for me, but I hope with the different unlocked plants and different modes there might be a challenge in there somewhere. It’s fun enough that I might just replay it later too. There are also STEAM achievements, so playing in one particular manner or another might provide more gameplay for me. I already sunk a few hours into it and have really dug everything so far. I wouldn’t pay the full price for it, and even the 50% off price was too steep. The 75% off price was just right to get me to purchase it.

It’s a well made, replayable flash game. It’s got a cute style and is funny, yet has a enough depth to keep me playing level after level. I’ve been on a big zombie kick recently, with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, World War Z, and now Plants vs. Zombies. I actually went out of my way to purchase non-monster related fiction because I had been dipping into that well a little too frequently.

There is that cliche that women love to shop for shoes. How many episodes of Sex in the City would exist if it wasn’t built around that exact premise? Two? Three? To be fair, not all women follow that particular trope. My wife, thankfully does not like to shop at all, let alone for shoes. She’s comfortable with herself enough that she doesn’t need to go shopping for things. She happens to be a restrained shopper that waits for sales and only buys things she absolutely needs that she can afford.

I usually only shop impulsively when I end up in an English book store in Seoul. I can plan out purchases of almost anything else, but I usually just end up getting whatever strikes my fancy when I end up with an overwhelming stack off books to read. Now though is the STEAM sale for the holidays. I’ve got a point and click interface, a credit card, and English video games delivered digitally to my computer as easily as could be possible. Some of the games I’ve been looking forward to playing for years. Right now they are on sale for 80% off. It’s insane. I’ve been shopping pretty conservatively for the past few days, asking my wife if it was okay if I bought a few games for myself now and again.

Every one I’ve gotten has been throughly researched and well reviewed. Now they are steeply discounted and I can actually purchase them for less than the price of the cup of coffee I bought on my walk with my dog yesterday. It’s so cheap it’s almost criminal…and this sale continues for a week. There will probably be games worth buying every single day! It’s not even really started yet and I’m purchasing stuff impulsively. Last week I didn’t own a single digitally distributed game. By the end of the sale I’ll have more than a dozen. Forget about console gaming. If I can keep this trend going and always pick things up on sale, I’ll gladly upgrade my computer from time to time. As long as they “just run”, I’m fine with this model. Hell, not needing to deal with discs or going to the store to pick up a physical copy is worth the price.

My wife just gave me the budget for the rest of the month I am allowed to spend on video games. This is usually what I’d be spending on one or two games if I bought them at a physical store. It’d be like me going to the English book store ONCE, not including the price of traveling there and back. Instead of spending that sort of money on a few items, I can get a bunch of digitally bundled discounted items cheaply and play them all next year.  Since I haven’t played computer games in such a long time, it’s fine with me if they aren’t the newest things. I’m fine with having a backlog of games. If I find the time to play one a month I’ll be happy. By the time I finishing playing all my old games, I’ll be ready to upgrade my computer again so I can purchase games that are coming out now. Either that, or another sale will come along and I’ll pick up a few more along the way.

Basically, what a woman is in a shoe store, I am in a digital computer game store with a steep discount for the holidays. I’ll be buying things to play for the next year or more if all things go to plan. I’ll have too many games to play, and not enough time. This is a good problem to have.

Playing the hell out of Torchlight.

This game is a natural progression from when I was playing Dungeon Crawl. That game was an ASCII or Tiles based game in which you were on a quest to delve to the bottom of a dungeon to get a Rune of Zot to return to the surface and win the game. You had level progression and character customization, randomized items, and a primitive interface. Torchlight, much like Diablo before it, draws from elements of Roguelikes and then puts them in a blender with lots of pretty other things, and refines them to work with a mouse and keyboard in an active time context.

It’s pretty. It’s addictive. Best yet, it’s fully customizable. The developers of Torchlight are using it as a test bed and way to raise capital before releasing an MMORPG that I will never play. They released this single player only game to make money, but they’ve let the community playing the game customize it and improve upon it. You can still play a vanilla game of Torchlight and enjoy yourself, but any nagging problems that remain can be handled through user created modifications that can be installed easily and removed just as simply.

There are three classes with three different builds. You can mix and match, or create pure builds depending on how you want to play. There are different difficulties, as well as randomized infinite dungeons, which means you could keep playing this for quite some time. I was never one for Diablo, but this game hits all the right buttons for me. I can play it all day and not notice the time slip by. I’ve only got a few days of free time left to enjoy, so I don’t really want to lose it all to this game, but it’s so good and I’ve barely scratched the surface. I picked it up when it was 50% off of it’s normal price. It was a total bargain then. Even at full price there is a lot to do and see. With the modding community embracing it, there could be a lot to do in the future as well.

The only thing that is going to stop people from playing this game is when Diablo 3 comes out with a similar play style, but that might be a few months away. This game would benefit from Co-op, but it doesn’t have that feature…yet. Who knows if some intrepid modder might try to write that into the game to extend it beyond what it is capable of right now?

Anyway, since I have easy access to STEAM on my computer for games now, I can see a serious problem of having too little free time and too many games to play.

There have been a few things I’ve really wishing I could check out, but for whatever reason I didn’t have the opportunity to explore them yet. Now that I have some time to do whatever I please, I’ve been indulging in stuff I’ve missed out on in the past. It’s expensive to keep up with things however, so I’ll hope that my current purchases will last me a few weeks before I get bored.

The first thing I’ve been wanting to check out for a while is Portal. You couldn’t be a geek on Twitter without knowing the expression “The Cake is a Lie” for the past year. I’ve even played an ASCII variant, and I love Jonathan Coulton, who sings the ending theme, but I hadn’t played the real deal. It’s about damn time I got down to it then, isn’t it? I purchased The Orange Box, which contains Portal, as well as two other games, Half Life 2, and Team Fortress 2, neither of which I had played. I’m basically the last gamer to buy this package, and it is an amazing deal. Anyway, now that I can play games again when I have the time.

From what I’ve played of Half-Life 2, I find the level design less than inspired. There is basically a LONG corridor that winds along with locked doors, barriers, and little force fields keeping you from leaving the shooting gallery they’ve made for you. It’s well camouflaged, and it is well created and scripted. There is a cool theme, but it’s basically just a long linear path. I would greatly enjoy a more open ended game where I can approach problems however I would like. Perhaps this changes later, but I feel like I am being railroaded along a single path.

To quote Bart Simpson regarding Knight Boat, the Crime Solving Boat. “There is ALWAYS an Inlet, or a Fjord.” There is only ONE real path to go, so every time I get stuck I get frustrated because I know that I need to accomplish the one thing that will let me move on to the next place. If I had approached a situation and failed because it was my attack plan, that’s different. Anyway, this game also triggers my motion sickness, so I’m being careful how long I play it.

So far I’ve been enjoying myself because it is a more cerebral sort of game. You have to get from point A to point B with the use of a gun that opens portals. There are objects and obstacles you must manipulate to achieve this goal. There are things that shoot at you and whatnot, but you have time to think (so far) as to how to progress. What I like is that because it is a puzzle game set in a lab I am able to suspend my disbelief about how there is only one narrow path to take and not many alternatives to where I can go. It is really well made, and the mechanics are awesome. I really like this so far.

I haven’t touched Team Fortress 2 because I need to get acquainted with the background materials regarding the classes and roles, as well as find a server to play on. I also dislike multiplayer games, so I’m not sure if I’ll dig this. The Art, level design, and humor of this game is awesome however. I hope to find a class and play a little when I get the chance, but first I’d like to beat Portal if I can. Other than that, I don’t know what other gaming I’ll be into by the end of my break.

Clockwords is a masterfully inventive game. Combine “Tower Defense” with “Typing as fast as humanly possible” to create a fun game. The game operates on the premise that you have a safe full of secrets you must protect. Your rival sends mechanical bugs at you, and you must shoot them with a gun by typing words.

The longer the words, the more damage you deal. The words that contain all the letters in the chamber in the “word gun” unlock more letters per turn to increase your damage. You can type anything, but the longer and the faster you type with the letters provided the more damage you will do per second, stopping the bugs. As you play, you unlock more powerful letters to load into your word gun by combining more common letters. There is a balance between striving for the most obscure words with the rarest letters, and keeping common letters around to score some points. I unlocked several levels and replayed  a few to “grind” for more powerful letters.

It’s fun in a hectic, Bookworm Adventures sort of way, but it relies on good typing skills, which I sorely lack. I think a few people in the office might enjoy this game. I’ll pass it along.

Want a mind blowing two dimensional puzzle game? Well, there is always Portal: The Flash Version. That’s pretty geeky. Converting a 3-D puzzle game into a flash based version of the game in 2-D? That’s good, but there was something missing to make me sit up and pay attention. Convert that now 2-D game into an ASCII game and let people create levels for it? Hell yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. ASCIIpOrtal is brilliant in it’s simplicity. Use two portals to transport around a level and solve puzzles. It is mind blowing in it’s complexity as those portals warp and change the level around relative to themselves. It strips out the third dimension, but leaves lots of mind bending puzzles to solve.

I’ve given it a whirl, and it’s really tough to see the consequences of a misplaced portal until it’s too late. I wish it ran a little more smoothly on my system. Currently the aiming interface for portals also is a little awkward, but it’s got a lot of promise. My hope is that it will run faster, or be ported to a web based game sometime. ASCII + Portal is awesome. The gameplay holds up, even without graphics. That’s the sign of a remarkable game.

We have a swing that sits in the bedroom for the baby. The key feature of the swing is that it has a jewelry box style sample of four different songs that play over and over again. Glow loves this, and we have to keep hearing the same songs over and over again. When I’m walking around the apartment I find myself speaking to the rhythm of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” It drives me crazy to have to listen to the same four songs over and over again.

I can’t read or play music, but ToneMatrix lets me create simple tunes that play over and over again. That website is already really awesome and I lost an hour fiddling with it just listening to the music I created by pressing a few buttons. It’s enchanting, but you have to keep the page open and keep fiddling with it constantly, otherwise you’ll get the same short tune over and over again, which means you get sick of it eventually. You can’t change the tempo, and the song doesn’t evolve or change over time. It’s a neat, but it’s really only a concept.

Harmonium is a homebrew version of the ToneMatrix that takes it to another level. You can change the tempo, and even better, there is a secondary mode. There is a “Conway’s Game of Life” mode, where the on/off states of the different cells determine the next sound played. Each generation, the following rules are applied:

• If the cell is alive, then it stays alive if it has either 2 or 3 live neighbors
• If the cell is dead, then it springs to life only in the case that it has 3 live neighbors

You can create stable little cells that are stable, or ones that evolve and move across the board. Each time they are played they change their position and possibly their on/off state. That means the songs can change over time with no interaction on your part once you “seed” them. There are shapes that are dynamic, and others that just die. It’s a wonderful little addition to an already fun toy. I spend half an hour playing with an evolving sort of song that continues to keep a simple, well timed beat that is just like a jewelry box that’s gotten an awesome geek upgrade.

My daughter does not yet appreciate this, perhaps because it is situated in the living room, and she can only hear it when I carry her around during one of her fussy moods. Eventually thought she’ll be able to hold a Wiimote in her hand and manipulate the sounds herself. That will be a geeky day of pride for her father.

For the past month, I’ve been obsessed with two things. My daughter Glow, and Dungeon Crawl. One sort of feeds into the other from time to time. While my wife is care-giver numero uno in our house, whenever I am of no use in caring for Glow, I go onto the computer and play some Crawl. Breastfeeding for Glow is Crawl time for me. Sleep time for Glow is Crawl time for me. Aunts and Mother-in-Laws come to make silly faces at Glow? I’m either doing chores to make them comfortable, or I’m playing Crawl when I’ve been released from chores.

One thing that has resparked my interest in Crawl has been the somewhat recent release of the 0.5.0 version of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. This version of the game moved to SDL, which is nerd speak for “Pretty 3D effects”. While Crawl remains a tile based game, they started using Alpha rendering and transparencies to make the screen easier on the eyes and nicer to look at while playing. There were increases in functionality, as well as bug fixing behind the scenes, but the real thing that caught my eye was the addition of a new race.

The Deep Dwarves are a unique race in Crawl that replaced the Gnome. Deep Dwarves can recharge wands by sacrificing Magic Points permanently, and can map the level of the dungeon without traveling around at the cost of some food. The drawback? They lose all regeneration. Normally after a conflict, characters rest for a certain number of rounds to regain Hit Points. Deep Dwarves can only gain back healing through magical means. They start with a Rod of Healing with a limited amount of charges. Any potions or magical ways of healing are a must for survival. Each attack got a little damage reduction on account of Deep Dwarves being tough, so a light poisoning wasn’t something that could instantly cripple you, but you needed to think strategically about each heal and each encounter. I wanted to try this new race out, which necessitated my move to the 0.5.0 version of Crawl.

When I went to build and install the game, I ran into a peculiar problem. The new graphical upgrades had left the game unbearably slow on my system. A 2D tile based roguelike had LAG. What the hell? How could a game that is as basic as can be cause my computer to grind to a halt?

It’s all ATI’s fault. They made the 3D graphics card I use, but hadn’t released a decent driver for my model in Linux, or so my previous research had uncovered. I was drawing lots of Alpha transparencies and rendering everything with my CPU, which is moderately intensive. Considering the constant redrawing of the screen there was a lot of processing going on in a game that looks relatively simple visually. I was at an impasse. I wanted to upgrade my player experience, but without a better driver I was stuck with the older version of Crawl and poor computer performance despite an upgrade a few months back.

I went on to discover that other people with integrated video driver cards also were having problems, and there was a release targeted specifically at those players of Crawl. I tweaked the trunk version for speed, and it was moderately playable, but not blazing fast. I decided that while Glow was spending all day asleep, this was my chance to try to fix the root problem, finding a better ATI driver to run my 3d programs. I had spent good money on a speedy card that my Brother-in-law had picked and installed, and I wanted to get my money’s worth.

After a lot of searching, I ended up at a page at the ATI website that seemed to have the driver I needed. I went on to install it and tried to configure it. There are whole hosts of options that I don’t understand, but even more difficult was the dual screen monitor set up I use. The proprietary installer would find one screen, or the other, but set them up on the wrong sides of each other. They’d run at different resolutions, and the screens would be so hard to read it’d give you a headache. They’d require a restart or a reboot after changing anything, and there was no knowing when a change might cause a catastrophic failure. Every ten minutes or so I’d walk out, go kiss my wife and daughter on the head and say, “I’ve really messed up the computer properly this time. I’m not sure how long this is going to take to get it back to a usable state. Stopping by to see how it’s going helps me keep calm.”

It was a total pain in the ass. Eventually I got to the point where I had tried and failed to follow a guide and was left with two blank screens that didn’t show anything after the boot up text flashed across the screen. I ran the last ditch “start over from scratch” command I had written down specifically for this purpose, and hoped for the best. I rebooted one last time and got to the log in screen. I stood up, checked on the baby again, and then went for a long walk with Yoshi.

When I got back I went through the basic procedures and managed to get everything working. The 3D acceleration was immediately evident when I booted up Crawl. The game was as fast as the old versions that didn’t use SDL or any of the rendering tricks that made the new version slow. I had to go back and remove some of the speed tweaks I had made to make it more playable. The game was too fast.

I went on to play a Deep Dwarf Chaos Knight of Mahleb, summoning demons and blasting enemies for several hours after I got the game working. I had my second best run of Crawl ever, and now want to play the new version all the much more because I have new races and challenges ahead of me. Now I can run fancy window effects and enjoy the video card I paid for months ago. I don’t want to go bothering with performance tweaking any longer. Crawl is the only game I play at the moment, and as long as that runs fine, I’m totally okay.