narcogen's blog

The free, iOS version of Marathon that Bungie mentioned last week is now available in the App Store. The base application itself is free, but there are in-game purchases that improve the experience (better textures) or provide cheats ("Master Chief" mode).

I've not played a lot of games on the iPad, but due to its origins, this may be one of the more difficult ones to control. There's an on-screen joystick for handling movement forwards and backwards as well as strafing side-to-side. Aiming and turning are controlled just by pressing on the screen where you want to aim. Primary fire has an on-screen button, but there's an option to do it by tapping the screen. There's another on-screen button for secondary fire, and one for the use key, and hitting the motion tracker switches to the map screen. There are also two more buttons to scroll forward and back through the available weapons. And a pause button. Marathon's movement speed is a lot faster than Halo's, so moving around the game's labyrinthine levels proficiently with the touch controls takes a bit of work.

It's hard for me to see this as much more than a novelty-- hey, look, I've got Marathon on my iPad! Playing seems less enjoyable than other old game ports to the platform, like the Monkey Island adventure games, and just like those games, there are a lot of options-- Aleph One, which served as the basis for this conversion, runs all the Marathon games on all modern operating systems, plus Marathon 2 was ported to XBLA, so if this game is serving people who have no other way to play Marathon, it's because they don't have a Mac, a PC, or an Xbox. Perhaps the target audience is PlayStation owners who don't have a computer, but own an iPad? I'm not sure.

I'm guessing the main game is free in order to maintain compliance with Aleph One's license, although if history is any lesson, it might only take one developer who has contributed to Aleph One and alleges that Apple's App Store license is incompatible with the GPL to get the app removed. Of course, it's also undoubtedly true that this project took a considerable amount of effort, for which the seller would like to be compensated; hence the in-game purchases of high definition upgrades and cheat codes. I find it hard to imagine how many people will want or need those-- the game looks plenty good to me in its current form, and I haven't seen screenshots of the paid upgrade. I can see people having enough difficulty with the game to want the cheat code, but there's already a wide range of difficulty levels, and myself I wouldn't really feel good about buying a cheat code-- perhaps others won't have that problem.

The iPad conversion seems to score over the other recent port of the Marathon franchise in one important area: unlike Marathon 2 on XBLA (and the more recent port of American McGee's Alice) it doesn't give me motion sickness.

The following is a crosspost from the HBO forum, in a discussion started by Cody Miller about retcons of Halo's continuity by the latest game in the series, Reach. Some fans (namely Hawaiian Pig) take exception to David "Evil Otto" Candland, Bungie UI Designer, saying canon arguments aren't important. The image is from another post of Cody's, seemingly showing that Installation 04 isn't located in the Milky Way galaxy any more.

After reading part of this thread at HBO and finding myself in agreement simultaneously with HP and Evil Otto, I had another series of thoughts about how works are viewed by their creators, as opposed to their fans.

A work like Halo is not the creation of a single person, even if some people contribute more to some aspects of it than others. It is also not a static thing. While certain key concepts may endure from the start of brainstorming until the declaration of a Golden Master, many of the details may be in flux for months or years. Listening to the commentary by Jones, Staten and O'Donnell for the cutscenes of the first two games, it becomes apparent how different the series might have been if Bungie had made different decisions.

 Click here for the complete text.

I would like to propose that the gaming press stop posting stories like this one:

Man Let Son Suffocate Because He Was Playing WoW

Before I go on, I'd like to say that I do not now, nor have I ever, worked in the gaming industry in any capacity.

Any number of children lose their lives each year to causes relating to parental neglect or abuse. Each one is a personal tragedy, and indeed, many may have been entirely preventable if the parents behaved differently. In many cases, there may have been circumstances relating to some other activity that led a parent to believe, temporarily, that their unjustifiable actions were justifiable, or that some other activity they were engaged in was more important than attending to the child.

However there is also no justification for the peculiar attention paid to gaming when the other activity is somehow gaming-related. I'd wager that any number of infants smother, suffocate or strangle on pillows or bedclothes all over the world each year while an inattentive parent is performing some other activity: watching television, speaking on the telephone, working out, gambling, drinking, perhaps even reading a good book. When the parent was watching TV, I'm not going to read about this tragedy in TV Guide. When the parent was watching a film, I'm not going to end up reading about it in Premiere magazine. When the parent was eating or drinking, I'm not going to read about it in Gourmet. If they were reading a book, I'm not going to read about this death in the New York Times Review of Books, along with a sidebar about whether or not reading is addictive or leads to child abuse. If an inattentive parent leaves a child locked in a hot car on a summer day, I'm not going to read about it in Road & Track.

 Click here for the complete text.

This VGChartz article bugged me as an example of bad and sometimes contradictory advice.

Lesson 1 - Don't Take Six Years to Make Your Sequel
Gran Turismo 4: 89.61%
Gran Turismo 5: 84.69%

First of all, a MetaCritic GameRankings score (why is he using GameRankings instead of Metacritic, anyway?) drop of 5% is not necessarily statistically significant, especially since there's no way, from just the scores, of verifying that the same selection of outlets or reviewers were included. The drop may indicate a drop in popularity of the genre, or many factors other than the development cycle.

If what he means to say is that the earlier you release, the earlier you get paid, then he's right, but for every GT5 that fails to meet expectations or Daiktana that becomes the butt of jokes or DNF that fails to materialize, there are games rushed out the door lacking polish or originality. Of course, since the subject is sequels perhaps originality is not a factor.

Sure, six years might be extreme, and there might very well be a point of diminishing returns, where more development time doesn't necessarily improve things. However there may very well be cases where 2 years is not enough, and where even three or four may be justified. Might not another 6-12 months have improved, say, Halo 2?

 Click here for the complete text.

Nothing to do with Bungie directly, but I did write a couple of blog posts about the recent discussion on the interwebz in general (and at Penny Arcade in specific) about the used game market, spurred by comments made by THQ's Cory Ledesma earlier this week.

It's not hard to see the appeal of the idea of the Firefight mode in Halo 3: ODST. If you follow Bungie's shooter roots back to Marathon, and to the PC shooter that really kicked off the modern era, Doom, you can see the start of it.

Doom didn't have discrete multiplayer 'levels' the way Marathon and Halo did. It had a series of Episodes, each broken down into Missions that comprised one map. Each map had a series of keys necessary to open a series of doors. The last door was the Exit and led to the next Mission. Between you and each key and each door were a number of demons to kill. You could tackle this challenge solo, or bring in some friends on a local network.

Of course, you could just as easily shoot your friends as the demons. You could also set up a game on any Mission map without any demons and just play deathmatch, or you could play a deathmatch game with continually respawning demons on it.

Marathon had a similar setting, an "Aliens" checkbox that put enemies from the campaign mode onto the multiplayer maps. So while it wasn't always referred to the same way, Marathon had all the current play modes: campaign solo, campaign co-op, multiplayer (deathmatch and objective) and deathmatch-with-aliens. That's essentially what Firefight is, except it's supposed to be more towards cooperative.

So we can now safely say that with the release of Halo 3: ODST, in combination with Halo 3's multiplayer mode, has finally brought all the features of a 1994 Mac shooter to Xbox Live.

I'm only half kidding.

 Click here for the complete text.

Got some interesting mail from Amazon today.

First:

Hello from Amazon.com.

We now have delivery date(s) for the order you placed on August 26 2009 (Order# 104-9132614-4806655):

"Halo Reach"
Estimated arrival date: October 26 2009

Two months ago? That's great! Send it right away. Sure, the developer says it won't be out for another year, but I don't mind getting a sneak preview!

Then, an hour later:

Hello from Amazon.com.

Unfortunately, an unexpected delay from our supplier may prevent us from delivering some items in your order placed on August 26 2009 (Order# 104-9132614-4806655) by December 24. We'll keep working to obtain these items for you, and we'll ship the items as soon as we receive them. Other items that may be in stock will still ship separately, with no increase in your total shipping charges.

"Halo Reach"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002BSA20M

The developer said this game will be out in Fall of 2010. How is failing to ship in Fall 2009 an "unexpected delay"?

Ten more minutes go by.

Hello from Amazon.com.

We now have delivery date(s) for the order you placed on August 26 2009 (Order# 104-9132614-4806655):

"Halo Reach"
Estimated arrival date: January 22 2010

These are the kinds of messages that send customers screaming to fansites that games are being pushed up, delayed, or cancelled. The developer has stated to everybody "FALL 2010". Is there a reason Amazon's ordering system seems to be ignoring that general date and instead consulting psychics?

UPDATE: I sent the above into Amazon's feedback system and got back another automated message that makes about as much sense as the first three. Stripped of its administrivia, it says:

Regarding your "Halo Reach":

I see we sent you an e-mail message about the unexpected delay in obtaining "Halo Reach." I realize this has been a frustrating experience, and I'm sorry about this.

When we ship your order, we'll send you an e-mail confirming the date, contents, and tracking number. Please contact us again if you don't receive a shipment confirmation by January 22. You can reach us at www.amazon.com/contact-us.

If you'd rather cancel your order, I understand.

Which is ridiculous. There is no way I, nor anyone else, is going to get a shipment confirmation on Halo Reach by January 22. I realize that retail outlets MUST give some kind of release date to people who buy preorders. Why they don't pick a more accurate date is beyond me-- why tax themselves by having to dance this little dance, "delaying" the game by a few months every few months?

Now that I've actually gotten my hands on the game, I've been able to add some more data to that Google Earth Network Layer for Halo 3: ODST.

Each of the 29 audio locations in the Mombasa Streets level are labeled. So far there's no additional information (screenshots, descriptions) but I will add that as I go through on my next playthrough.

I've also added the mission beacons, the supply caches, some landmarks and some of the health pack locations, although these are not exhaustively listed yet. The city streets can get to looking like a twisty maze of little passages, all alike, at times, which is why I'm trying to include notable landmarks like wrecked Oliphants, crashed Banshees, drone wreckage, and other items that might make it easier to tell one place from another.

Again, in Google Earth, choose "Network Link" from the Add menu and insert this URL: http://rampancy.net/sites/rampancy.net/files/mombassa_odst.kml and when you launch Google Earth you'll get the latest updates to this layer.

If you have additions or changes, put the new or modified items in your own KML file and mail them to me at narcogen@rampancy.net and I'll include them in the network layer.

First I'll say this: I liked District 9.

However, I never really thought Neill Blomkamp was really the best choice to do the Halo film, and reading this quote in his interview with Rotten Tomatoes only confirmed it for me:

But the flip side is that the reason I wanted to do Halo in the first place, and the reason I was so energised to do Halo, is that creatively I love it. I totally love the universe of Halo on every level. Not only is it this epic space saga but Master Chief is such an awesome character. This guy - whether he knows it or not - is a victim of this military-industrial complex. It's a totally compelling world to be involved in.

I can easily see where Blomkamp gets that interpretation.

At the same time, that's not Halo. That's not the story we saw in the Halo games, and it's not the story we saw in the novels.

It's actually closer to the story in Marathon, although the source of the victimization there isn't the amorphous "military industrial complex" but their avatars, the three AIs aboard the colony ship Marathon, and the alien species that Durandal puts humanity into contact with, and later foments revolution among (the slaver Phfor and their slaves, the S'pht).

If the subtext of a Halo film by Blomkamp would have been that, when all is said and done, Cortana was "honored to serve" with the Master Chief because she was programmed to, and that the Master Chief saved Earth and humanity from the Flood, from the Halo array, and from the Covenant because he was a victim, then I think it's just as well that film never got made. Not everything needs to be made ironic.

A film based on a theme like that would be interesting to watch, and I'd like to see it, whether directed by Blomkamp or someone else.

A film based on the Halo games might also be interesting, and if it looked good I'd also consider going to see it.

I just don't think these two things have much in common with each other. Blomkamp's admittedly accurate, but undeniably cynical interpretation of the Chief's motives is a bitter baker's chocolate I want nowhere near my chunky peanut butter Halo.

PS: Another podcast episode due out very very shortly, although it does look like I might miss the deadline of getting the last episodes out before ODST drops by a few hours. The last two episodes are mercifully short (at least compared to the two-plus hour endurance test that was The Covenant.

A small database glitch caused us to restore from a backup made a few days ago-- if you've submitted something to the site, or registered an account in the past few days, you may want to check and either re-submit or re-register.

Okay, I admit it. After the announcement of Halo: Reach, set to come out in 2010, only twelve months or so after this year's Halo 3: ODST, I was set to bash Bungie for being unoriginal and Microsoft for upping the production quota on the goose that laid the golden egg(s).

I had a piece all written, with a pleasantly unpleasant pun in the title, about how this was only to be expected; that Microsoft almost certainly extorted... I mean, exacted from Bungie a promise to continue on with at least X more Halo titles after receiving their independence. This would appear to be true for all situations where X is two or larger. Originally I had thought perhaps ODST would be it; that was probably naive of me.

Of course there's always every chance that there are people in Bungie who want to continue with Halo. Just like Id software nearly split in half over the decision of whether or not to revisit Doom with Doom 3, one might imagine that some old-time Bungie devs want to go back to doing a game and a sequel and let the spinoff studios handle the third game, a la Marathon and Myth. It also seems possible, though, that there are Bungie devs who have not worked on anything but Halo, and perhaps some of those want to keep doing it because they like it, and others want to do something else because they're tired of it.

ODST, I figured, would be an expansion pack: some new campaign and multiplayer levels to tide us over while Bungie works on the Next Big Thing. In some ways, perhaps that's true. However it also looks like we're getting a lot more out of ODST than just that, and the design team have made some intriguing choices, many of which were on display at E3.

Gravemind put all his ideas about what would be the ultimate Halo game. I thought I'd take a look at some of those elements and see which I liked, which I didn't, and why:

My preferred compromise would be a Resistance-style "sectional bar" health system, with the player using health packs to fully restore their health; the player's health would have limited regenerative capacity, and could sustain damage that won't come back on its own. The health bar would be divided into three to five sections, depending on which number works better for gameplay or for each particular character. The health bar would be a solid bar with no visible lines to demarcate the sections. Instead, it would change color as it diminishes depending on which section the player's current health level occupies, similar to Halo 1's health bar but without the less accurate individual squares that composed that one -- the colors would be blue, yellow, & red if there are three sections, blue, green, yellow, & red if there are four, and blue, green, yellow, orange, & red if there are five. Each subsequent section could be made to regenerate slower than the preceding one. For example, the blue section might regenerate at one-quarter the rate of the shields, while the yellow section might regenerate only one-eighth as quickly and the red section might not regenerate at all.

This really would be an Ultimate Halo, at least in terms of difficulty, unless the damage model were altered. In this case, players are punished doubly for allowing their health to drop precipitously. Not only are they close to death, with further damage threatening to kill them, but they are forced to wait in safety for health to regenerate longer than if they had taken less damage-- and at that time it would be less important.

Of course, if there are health packs available this difference in regenerative rate is moot, since they restore health fully.

I think the above scheme is unnecessarily complicated and not particularly transparent. Unless the indicator takes up a significant portion of screen real estate the difference in regenerative rate may not be immediately apparent.

Frankly I think the design decision required is bold: to either have regenerating health or health packs but not both. H2/H3 compromised by having your shield, as your primary line of defense, regenerate, while retaining a "hidden" amount of health. (Also not particularly transparent.)

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