Blog: Favorite YouTube Videos (Volume 6)

Welcome to the sixth volume of my favorite YouTube videos. This is another grab-bag music week (this will eventually become less frequent, but it's the kind of thing I was focused on at the time, plus I didn't really use YouTube that heavily).

• First we have a nifty piece of music constructed out of the sounds of the Windows Operating System. I like the song and I think it's a cool idea. It's also good for making people wonder what the hell is wrong with their computer.
• The second video is ... faintly embarrassing. But I'll admit to having watched and enjoyed Kim Possible. I also enjoyed that after the first few seasons we started actually seeing the characters change clothes. You know, like people? Sorry about the music on this one.
• The third video is pretty much my favorite song of all time. I love Chrono Trigger. I love Robo's Theme and this song, by Star Salzman, is great. The video that goes along with it also great and has a few funny / awesome moments.
• The fourth video is another great video from CalebElijah. This time tackling the iconic "Shadow's Theme" from Final Fantasy VI.
• And the final video for this volume is the very exciting Yoshida Brothers, playing the Hockey Night in Canada Theme. Ok well not quite, but Rising certainly evokes that before transitioning into it's own version of awesome.

Blog: Thoughts on Mass Effect 3

This is another post of my thoughts on video games. As with the Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, I finished Mass Effect 3 quite a while ago. Interestingly unlike Skyward Sword, Mass Effect 3 left less of an impact on me and I find that it has largely faded from my mind (and it isn't, on it's own, a game I'm likely to return to).

Just a warning this post will contain major spoilers for all three Mass Effect games.

This is Calrin Shepard. Your only defense against the Reaper threat.

To go back a bit, I really enjoyed Mass Effect, more, I think, than a lot of other people. I enjoyed the RPG aspect of the character management and the combat (although not the inventory). I even enjoyed the Mako sections (that bouncy tank) that no one else liked. The thing I liked most about Mass Effect though was that it let me play a guy who was geuinely enthusiastic about going to space, meeting aliens and doing cool things.

Mass Effect 2 therefore was a mixed bag for me. It was easier to play, better organized and still a lot of fun. It felt a bit more closed in and I found it harder to play Shepard as the space enthusiast and as a realistic human being. Because of the way the game was structured it was necessary to get as many paragon or renegade points as possible to get powers and story points unlocked successfully. This meant that you weren't free to chose the dialogue option you wanted, but had to pick the choice that gave you the points you needed.

Enter Mass Effect 3, which felt on the one hand like an apology for how much Mass Effect 2 wandered off from the original idea of Mass Effect and on the other hand like a plea from EA for everyone on earth to start playing their games. This made the game quite mixed having some of the aspects that I really enjoyed from Mass Effect (such as the interplanetary diplomacy and your original crew), but still some of the streamlining from Mass Effect 2 that felt a bit as though the control of the game was not up to you.

Someone who sorta looked like me used to sorta work for you.

Things I Liked

As I mentioned the thing I liked best about Mass Effect was the feeling being able to run around and be excited about being in space and meeting new and crazy races (if you wanted to play that way). Mass Effect always seemed to be light hearted enough that meeting people and doing things always felt fun. Now I realize that the plot in Mass Effect 3 doesn't allow for so much light heartedness but it was nice to at least have a chance to go do some things that were more "spacey".

It's good to have the old gang back together.

I also liked the way the combat was designed. Mass Effect was clunky at best (even though I enjoyed it) and while Mass Effect 2 was much slicker it also limited the options available to you (playing as an engineer I felt like my hands were tied for much of the game). Mass Effect 3 seems to have found a balance point between the two, where you get to play the way you want to play but the game is still streamlined and organized. That being said though the very best part of the combat (at least as an engineer) is the joy of setting the bad guys on fire.

Surprisingly I also really enjoyed the multi-player. I hadn't expected to enjoy it, in fact I hadn't even really expected to play it. I don't usually go for multi-player games, I tend to play games for a break for interacting with people.  The fact that multi-player was somewhat necessary to get the best ending for the game (and we'll get to the ending in a bit) drew me in especially since I didn't want to spend too much time grinding on the single player elements to get my "readiness" up to the top level.

It turned out however that the multi-player was maybe the most fun part of the game (even if I was the weakest link on several occasions). Especially once I got used to the maps and the style of play (and it was kinda tough as an engineer) I had a lot of fun and I think if I were to fire up Mass Effect 3 again in the near future it would be to play multi-player (especially if I could do it with people I know.)

Things I Didn't Like

Unfortunately Mass Effect 3 has a number of aspects that I just didn't enjoy. The first of which the story. Actually it's not the story itself that was my problem so much as all the side-stories you needed to do to get on with the main story. This is one of the parts where my memory is fading a bit, but the number of times you had to do the traditional RPG thing of helping one person to get the thing to help another person to get the thing to help the first person to get the thing you needed to do the first part of your quest seems very high.

In particular I feel like Tuchanka was both the best and worst part of the game. On the one hand you had incredible character moments and scenes that changed the shape of the galaxy, but at the same time you're dicking around on a planet doing things that had do nothing to stop the invading fleet of giant sentient space robot lobsters.

I think the solution to this would have been to make the game much more open (I recognize there are some options, but they're less even than in the previous two games). You have 7 days and all of space open to you. Go see who you can convince to save earth and the rest of the galaxy. You can keep most of the set pieces and scenes of the game the same, but you give the player a lot more flexibility to cut and run when the time invested is out weighing the benefit collected.

Another thing that bothered me about the game is the amount of time taken for Shepard to get anything done. Even if we exclude the length of time it takes for interstellar travel (which they don't really talk about in game, is it seconds or is it days) there's still the fact that the game takes a lot of time. Enough time that the onboard reporter to have several reports that it seems would take place days or even weeks apart and for that mater there's enough time for people to build a giant super weapon. It speaks to the weird construction of the threat in this game. Giant sentient space robot lobsters that are explicitly designed to absorb and destroy all life in the galaxy have to conduct month's long ground wars?

And I'm fighting you by hand ... why?

This is one of the more common problems in video games (and a lot of creative works), the relative power of the bad guys is set way to high for the good guys to ever combat. We want a strong enemy so we can feel great having over come them and been victorious, but if the creators have to invent reasons why the bad guys don't auto-win over the good guys the story telling is going to be slightly hollow.  It's difficult to take a defeatable video game enemy as a real threat to the entirety of life in the galaxy.

This feeds into my last major issue and it shouldn't be any surprise to hear that it's the ending. I'm less bothered than a lot of people because I'm in the camp of believers that most of the game was "the ending" and as such the results of the decisions you made and the actions you took are played out long before you start shambling around the citadel with a small child (the spoilers will really take effect now, also context is everything).

The thing I was most upset about with regards to this was the resolution between the Quarians and the Geth. Now I may in fact be wrong, but as far as I can tell, regardless of the actions you take in Mass Effect 3, if you took particular actions in Mass Effect 2 there is no way for you to get the "best result" and save both races. I suppose you can call this the natural outcome of the choices I made thoughout the first two games (although I'll counter by telling you that it would have forced me to make only the paragon choices through out the game regardless of how I wanted to play it and that in Mass Effect 2 this means siding against the optimism I was playing for with my Shepard), but it is extremely frustrating that there was no option in the game that let you do anything about this.

This may prove to be wrong, as I mentioned, but I did extensive research online at the time, knowing the outcome I wanted. I think this is another thing that game designers should strive to avoid. If someone wants something to happen in the game they shouldn't need to play with the walkthrough open on the side.

The second point where this becomes a problem is in the final ending. You're given a large ending-o-tron which can make one of three endings happen. You "win" by giving up, you "win" by annihilating the reapers and all other forms of artificial life (including the Geth you might have just saved and your teammate/ your own ship's AI) or you "win" by smushing everything together into a big circuty mess and all you have to do is kill yourself first.

The problem comes here though, if your "readiness" score is high enough and you choose to destroy all artificial life then you get a scene which suggests that either Shepard survived or, at least, Shepard's corpse was recovered. No mater how high your score is if you make the other two choices then this hint isn't given at all.

So for me, the choice came down this, kill my ship/shipmate EDI or kill myself. I had my score up high enough (thanks to all the multi-player I played) and arrived at the final choice with enough war resources to "win" the game. In and of itself this isn't a bad choice. You or your friend. Selfishness or Selflessness. Simple dramatic choice. My Shepard chose selflessness, of course, because that's the way he is.

My problem is that I could have made that choice without doing all the extra work. I could have skipped all the optional missions and all the multi-player. None of it mattered. I gave up all the work because of a plot related choice. So in effect the game didn't reward me for my work and actually punished me for trying to live up to an ideal.

I haven't played the "extended ending" so I don't know exactly how it affects what we know about the world at the end of the game. From what I've read it doesn't bring Shepard back to life, nor make clear if EDI survives if you chose to destroy the Reapers. It adds a do nothing option, but I don't know what the result of that is either.

I would have really liked to see a result that allowed you to explore the consequences of your decisions without relying solely on which button you chose at the end and what your "score" was thought the game. To stick within the framework they've chosen it the ending should reflect at a minimum how well you've played and what you've decided. So if you want endings for people over a line in the score and under it then make six endings, good merging, good surrendering and good destroying and then bad / mediocre merging, surrendering and destroying. Don't tie the quality of the outcome to the choices made by the player.

However the other way to do it would be to remove the score and make the result of the game much more dependent on the choices the player has made throughout the game (and in fact all three games, as long as there's a chance for the player to try to get the result they want for the major decisions). This allows for players to see the ending that's tailored to the way they played the game (and saves you from needing to incorporate a weird ghost-space-child to give you a sudden victory at the end of the game).

The final thing I'd like to gripe about, is the Citadel. In the first game it was a wide open space (if not as large as you might like) where you could chose several different ways to get around. In the second game it was a 3 story office building with nothing interesting in it at all. Mass Effect 3 does a better job of making it an interesting place to visit, but it still feels small and chopped up. I wish there had been more space, more options and more things to do even if it meant spending more time in elevators.

Things I Noticed

When I wrote up my thoughts on Skyward Sword, I found there were a bunch things which I didn't feel that strongly about, one way or the other. For Mass Effect 3 I don't have anything I feel that neutral about. If this continues in future thoughts on games, I may remove this section all together, but for now I'll leave it at my unneutral feelings.

Things I'd Include in a Game

By far the best part of Mass Effect 3, and the whole Mass Effect series is the relationships between you and your team mates. Characterization is important to making you feel connected and making you care about what's going on in the game. If you had never spoken to Mordan would you care when he sacrifices himself? You might, because some of the characterization is done through the main plot, but there's so much more when you've had those long weird chats with him every time you've run past.

Sometimes you just want to hang out with your buddy. 

When developing my own game, I want to make sure that the way you interact with your team mates and the choices you make and the actions you take are well reflected. I want to make sure that you feel like you're working with real people who care and are interested in what's going on around them. This can be complex, but it's also as simple as Shepard's relationship with Wrex: "Wrex." "Shepard."

I'd also keep the number of team mates down. By the end of Mass Effect 3 you have two and a half crews whom you've adventured with and whom you care for. When wrapping up the story a lot of these angles are going to have to be cut short or else the game will last forever. To combat this keeping a small handful of people to really care about is important and helps make the game feel more meaningful.

Final Thoughts

Despite what EA would like you to believe, there's no real reason to play Mass Effect 3 if you aren't a long term player of the series. I really enjoyed a lot of my time playing the game and if I'd stopped halfway through I'd have had a much more positive outlook on the game. I know that endings aren't easy, but unfortunately Mass Effect 3's really hurts it. Not so much for its content alone but for highlighting all the weakness of the series all at one time.

At some point, I may play these all again. I've partially played through Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 to see what the renegade side is like but never to completion. I'd like to revisit them, but I'm still disappointed that to get some of the outcomes I want I have to auto play the paragon route.

I really liked Mass Effect and I liked Mass Effect 2 even though I disagree with a lot of the decisions BioWare made about that game. For Mass Effect 3, I enjoyed the gameplay, but feel left short by it. I enjoyed the story, but felt it didn't fill in all the gaps I wanted to know about. At the end of the day, I was left liking Mass Effect 3, but not loving it.

Yeah, I had a few graphical problems. It may be time for a new PC.

Blog: Favorite YouTube Videos (Volume 5)

Welcome to the fifth volume of my favorite YouTube videos. This week is a bit of a grab bag. Still mostly musical but also a little bit of brain melting thrown in for good measure.

• The first video is the video for Dana Lyons song "Cows With Guns". It's ... punny and you should consider yourself warned. The song is also a fond reminder of the old days of CBC radio and "Richardson's Roundup" which was always the highlight of my day. Quick note, really long intro so you might want to skip about 20 seconds in and turn your volume down until after the singing starts.
• The second video is a few minutes with renowned physic professor Walter Lewin. This is part of his Electricity and Magnetism Lecture (I think from 2002). It comes in a bit late if its been a while since you covered electro-magnetism, but is still a fascinating video and a view of an amazing lecturer (also he's a man who is very good at drawing lines). 
• The next video is a return to our friend Brentalfloss and his interpretation of the original Zelda Theme. (And it's a good thing he got those 400 views of his Mario medley.)
• The fourth video for this volume is of comedian / musician Rob Paravonian and his famous Pachebel Rant. (I'm not sure about famous exactly but looking on the internet this seems to be the thing he's known for best). 
• And the final video for this volume is Stephen Malinowski's Music Animation Machine video of a harpsichord recording of Domenico Scarlatti's Sonata in G Major. This video is favorited for two reasons, the first of which is that I like the harpsichord rendition of the song (midi though it may be) and the second is that the style of animation of music inspired the visualizations I used for a project of mind called Agent Jam (which I haven't mentioned here yet, but I  may in the not too distant future.)

Interestingly one of the videos that would have been in this volume got axed by copyright request in the last few days. It's interesting in this case because the video was of Rostropovich playing the prelude from Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 and had been up on youtube for at least 5 years by this point. Copyright is always a thorny issue and I'm not making any statements about that here other than that its frustrating when things disappear out of my favorites list.

Project 4 : Snake

As I have mentioned here before, one of the goals I have is to design and make video games. I don't know that I mean to do it as a career (said the perpetual student) but  it would be a fun hobby.

I don't have experience in games programming (baring some assignments during my bachelor's degree) so I need to start actually doing something to start getting some experience (you have to start your 10 000 hours somewhere).

I figured to give myself an achievable start I'd though I'd tackle something with not too many moving parts. As such, I thought I'd implement Snake. For the uninitiated, in basic snake you play a snake, made up of squares and you eat dots which make you longer and you try not to crash into things (either the wall or yourself.)

Emulation of the Snake I remember best on the TI-83.

I like snake for a number of reasons. The first as I mentioned is that it's relatively easy to program and a simple implementation can be put together in a day or an afternoon (even if you don't really know what you're doing). It is also easily extendible (it's not too much extra work to get to tron bikes or to caterpillar) and still has enough game play aspects to introduce interesting ideas.

This is not a terribly novel thing to do. There is a site at snakegame.net which has an archive of some of the more interesting implementations which come in a variety of flavors. There's also a cool version Snakes on a Cartesian Plane which plays with a lot of different game play concepts and ideas.

It's punny and an exciting experiment.

A friend of mine, who happens to be experienced in the way of game design, mentioned a developer who always implements snake as a way to get familiar with a new platform. I feel like this is a good idea and I'm planning to follow that as well as I start teaching myself how to make games.

The first stage I'd like to finish is to implement a vary basic, limited graphics version of snake using Processing.org. I actually did most of this a while ago but somehow lost the project on my computer so need to start again. This should be fairly quick (as I said maybe an afternoon of work) but I'm going to give myself a deadline of September 1, 2012 to finish.