spring cleaning «
I've been thinking a lot and throwing out old stuff I don't need anymore. So there's a reason I didn't blog anything for two weeks: I was in the mood to do only what I wanted each evening, and this didn't include writing.
My apartment was quite cluttered after three years of casual crap accumulation. I still had stuff left over from my divorce several years ago, mainly because I had trouble triaging anything with sentimental value associated with my kids. Now nothing gets me choked up any longer, so I can prune ruthlessly. I started clearing out things I may never use again.
Then I wondered: hey, what am I going to do with this website? Am I going to throw it out? Or is there something I'm still using? So I simplified its design, which you can see now, throwing out almost everything. Except all the old content is still around, in a digital attic of sorts. Over time I expect to prune away some old content and reformat the rest to match the new layout.
Fiction is fun, so I kept a fiction section. I could tell you all about recent story design, but I'm not going to—you can read it when more appears.
Deciding how to constrain what I write about code took more thought. The new code page already has an intro breaking the ice. But to see where I'm going, you'll just have to wait and see what appears. I make no promises. In fact, please note my official attitude: I don't owe you anything. A lot of folks do and say things for social reasons, and when they announce plans they form a kind of vague contract with others in exchange for kudos and recognition. But I don't have a social life, and I don't do things for social reasons. There's no contract. You have zero social contact with me, I owe you nothing, so we're square.
relaxing ¶
I took the last week off, and just played at various things, trying not to work during my vacation for a change. I bought myself an easy chair to replace one I sold a few years ago when I had to sell furniture just to pay immediate bills. I've been doing without something comfortable since.
I played through inFamous at least once more the last week, so I've gotten much better. (When I started playing this game, I was a spazz because I could neither work multiple controls at once, nor take reflex actions; now I can do complex things quickly.) But the game gets boring when you have enough bandwidth to kill NPCs using high-score stunts. The hard mode is now no longer hard enough. I can wade into large groups of NPC zombies without breaking a sweat. It's disturbing when other NPC groups just out of range ignore what I'm doing. If they swarmed when I attack nearby groups, it would be more fun. Anyway, I wish the game had one more setting: really hard.
One thing I really enjoy in the game is the physics of throwing, so where you aim is a complex function of how far you are from a target. The model is reasonable in inFamous, though it's easier to stick targets below you with straight throws than seems right. I've gotten good at putting the target reticule where it needs to be so I hit targets at any distance with sticky grenades. Very close (and getting closer :-) targets are hardest since they tend to move sideways with high angular motion: it's hard to lead correctly.
The game has a stunt called Insult-to-Injury, with a nice bonus, when you zap a target after sticking them with a grenade. You have less than second after landing a grenade to take out the target another way before it explodes. (Hosing them down with lightning bolts will work.) The bonus is almost as big again as the sticky grenade bonus. When you play in hard mode you get more targets, so it's easier to rack up experience points in hard mode.
sandboxes ¶
Some games, like inFamous, have an "open world" format bounded by a sandbox letting you wander around and tackle tasks in any order you like. I strongly prefer such games. My sons learned I buy them any game automatically if format is open world—because I assume experience is better for them when choice of what to do is present constantly. Mission-oriented games suck. (Do I seem biased?) Marketing folks, please take note: open world sandbox format is a big selling point—very big. It's my first priority.
Among other things, an open world format lets you make a game harder after a hardest level gets too easy, since you can enter dangerous areas looking for trouble.
You can also explore strategic choices. For example, buildings in inFamous tend to be laid out in triples with alleys meeting in three-way intersections. These make great choke points when NPC gangs chase you, since you can't easily be surrounded (unless you make a mistake of letting snipers occupy buildings overhead). So you're armed with energy grenades, right? Controlling small spaces is easy—almost too easy because NPCs don't swarm more than a little.
directional hearing ¶
Like many games, inFamous has a local neighborhood radar display showing your near situation; but attacks outside that range are common. For example, snipers often shoot you from outside your radar's range. What's wrong with that? It's hard to figure out direction of an attack, unless you catch a passing bullet trail, magically by sight.
I have very directional hearing, so it's mildly disorienting not to have binaural cues, especially when getting pounded by an invisible sniper. When a firefight is in progress around the block, the only clue is increase in sound volume when you face the right direction.
I know 3D sound modeling is too much to ask, but it'd be nice. :-) If a game used head phones to give binaural hearing cues, I'd go for that.
Instead of that, a cheap and effective replacement can be added to the radar: flashes of color around a radar display's rim showing direction of sound you just heard, especially gunshots resulting in a bullet impact.
I might be second-guessing game designers, though. If direction of snipers is hidden, an implicit question might be: Why are you in an exposed position? If taking cover is an option, a game might prefer you do so. Okay.
peeves ¶
I have few peeves with inFamous game play, but one fault in particular grates me a lot: sometimes my foot sticks and I can't move. I've been killed because I've been unable to move for several seconds because my foot is stuck.
This seems to happen when your foot touches an intersection of two objects, like a roof edge and an anchor point for a cable between buildings. Most of these are solved by jumping, but you can lose a critical second or two deciding you can't move unless you jump first.
Sometimes, rarely, jumping doesn't work, and then trying to jump in every possible direction might get you unstuck before you die. This hasn't happened enough for me to figure out a pattern. It seems to happen on the ground—maybe play testing caught most roof-top glitches. If you're running around on the ground in a firefight, you can't watch where you're going; it's strange to die because your foot gets trapped by a round trashcan and something else.
spoilers ¶
Don't read this section if you plan to play inFamous, and want to avoid all clues, no matter how small. These are cheats, in the sense of being hard to see in the UI.
Cole can charge from more things than you'd think, provided you juice them up first. With few exceptions, anything arcing with energy can be a power source, including human bodies. (Leave it to my two sons to discover that one.) So if you just defeated an enemy and they lie at your feet—especially if you bear a grudge—juice them up and charge if you have no other source of power.
More things hold a charge in easy mode. In hard mode, fewer things hold juice long enough to charge Cole. But a roof-top exhaust with a spinning top always hold a charge. (Vents with a fixed cap might hold a charge if no other vents are present.) Water towers might or might not hold a charge—depends on where you shoot them. Trashcans large and small generally hold a charge; this might not occur to you when a fire is burning in a garbage can.
When playing with evil karma, you don't recharge a little from hitting targets, so it's hard to go in dark areas of the city without learning how to recharge from unpowered objects in the environment.
Ready for a couple Munchkin spoilers? (Munchkins are players who obsessively minimax.) One of Cole's abilities uses a lot of juice; it also slows time while he takes aim. In a few contexts, Cole has a source of power replenished continuously; in this context, you can use the slow motion ability to do more damage in a finite period of time than otherwise possible. (This is not always the best tactic, but is when your targets are mainly snipers—especially when they have rocket launchers.)
Don't you hate Golems? (Actually, golems are supremely cool; I'm tempted to write a Betelgeuse riff in fiction where Zé treats golems like sandworms.) There's a trick to dealing with golems: shoot off their arms and then their ability to do damage is severely curtailed. Of course, if you have multiple golems at once, you still have a problem. (Um, the prison sequence is very hard in hard mode.)
