narcogen's blog

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.)

 Click here for the complete text.

At Edge Online, N'Gai Croal in his blog discusses some interesting issues relating to realism, verisimilitude, and detail, many of which echo some of my own experiences.

Because even those titles which are widely seen as exemplars of game realism, be they Crysis or Mass Effect or Grand Theft Auto, are themselves stylised in some way. So what is it that we mean when we say that a game is realistic? Are we talking about verisimilitude? Detail? Atmosphere?

I tend to think that of all these, "realism" is actually the least important, followed by detail, atmosphere, and verisimilitude. This is the opposite of the order they are usually discussed (perhaps it's a prejudice against long words).

Realism, especially in a combat game, is the last thing you want. You don't want things to be real, just to seem real, or real enough. The exploits most combat games require of their players in order to "win" are ridiculous by their very nature, even for the super-soldiers those games have as protagonists. The last thing they need on top of that are realistic treatments of weapons, damage, fatigue, and the like.

I think that's a big part of the reason that so many very successful franchises (Halo, Mass Effect) largely operate outside those parameters by operating in the future, where unrealistic situations and damage models can be explained away by advanced technologies-- better shields, better weapons, better vehicles.

It is where realism is misapplied, or rather selectively applied, in games like GTA, where I think there's the most dissonance. Things look and seem like they are happening in the real world, but the perception of verisimilitude recedes as more and more unrealistic things happen, or else the fun turns into frustration when the virtual reality restricts the player's actions.

 Click here for the complete text.

...and what they are not doing is investing in original intellectual properties.

Actually I think that entire phrase is a contradiction in terms, at least in terms of how Microsoft can invest in something. Invest, in their case, means buy, and once something has proven itself worth buying it's no longer original.

Take a look at Halo. Microsoft bought Bungie in 2000. Bungie developed three Halo games and Microsoft published them. Now Bungie has been spun off, and Microsoft kept Halo.

Is Halo an "original" intellectual property now? Microsoft no longer has an "investment" in Bungie, which is going to do one more Halo game (ODST) and then move on to other things. Knowing Bungie, those "other things" are probably underway as we speak, and the latest podcast mentions things that may not be mentioned. These unmentionables are (drumroll please) original intellectual properties that Microsoft has not invested in, and presumably did not want to invest in. Instead, they kept Halo.

UPDATE: Microsoft is reorganizing Rare now, too. Rare has created aan "original IP" for Microsoft-- namely, Viva Pinata. PDZ was a sequel, but it doesn't look like it's getting another sequel anytime soon.

We have a well defined, carefully orchestrated, properly planned universe to explore not exploit.

--Frank O'Connor, July 2008, GameFocus

I can tell you that if you could think of a game that would work with a party atmosphere that would not gut the franchise, or milk it, we would think about it, seriously.

Jason Pace, January 2009, Videogamer.com

What's next? January 2009, Microsoft announces Halo Kart, Halo Halo Revolution and Halo Smash Brawl?

What part of a "party atmosphere" game in the Halo universe could possibly be exploration and not exploitation? How about a nice clear line in the sand now, not just "we know what we're doing"-- how about a laundry list of what you won't do? Promise us no karaoke, no karting games, no minigolf. Please.

RTS? We'll see, the demo is out any minute.

MMO? Don't blame them for trying, although I think something like this is just a lot harder to execute than a shooter, and the further away the franchise gets from Bungie the harder it is to execute.

This article boils down to this paraphrase:

Everyone agrees sequels are bad. I mean, not all sequels are bad, but sequels in general are bad. And just like every game downloaded by a pirate is a lost sale, every dollar budgeted for a sequel is a dollar less for one of the kind of fun and original games they made when I was a kid and they just don't make anymore because the industry is full of beancounting sellouts who like sequels because they're safe. And that's why I don't want another Bioshock game.

This is almost complete and utter poppycock. It's so ridden with nostalgia masquerading as judgment, logical fallacies taken as common knowledge, and flawed premises that it's hard to know where to begin. But the beginning is as good a place as any.

"this is not a hate piece towards the Bioshock franchise. It is a deep look at one of the biggest problems in the video game industry right now, sequels and how they kill originality/creativity."

So we've got sequels kill originality/creativity. Let's separate those out.

 Click here for the complete text.

Thank goodness Sony is a Japanese company, because they can at least claim that English isn't their native language when someone points out the nonsense in claims ilke the latest regarding PlayStation 3 sales.

Things start out fairly innocuously:

"In terms of units, it is true that PS3, as compared to last year, is slightly worse, but on a full-year basis we believe we are on track to sell the 10 million units that I said at the beginning of the year."

Okay, that's not so bad. Specious perhaps, but possible. After all, the fact that 2008 was not as good a year for them as 2007 doesn't necessarily mean that 2009 won't be as good as they are planning. It would strongly indicate that, given that presumably they predicted that 2008 would be as good or better than 2007 (which they did); and if that prediction turned out to be wrong, might not this one, too?

Then they start digging:

"...Relatively speaking, [compared to] the growth of other platforms, we are behind, but it's not the case that we are not meeting the target."

If they are behind the other platforms but still meeting their target, this means they were planning to be behind at this stage? I think that's not true. I seem to recall that initial projections from Sony for the PS3 included catching up to MS and the Xbox 360's one year head start fairly quickly, and in no way included getting trounced, month after month, quarter after quarter, by Nintendo, a competitor that many commenters gave up for just about dead last generation, myself included.

 Click here for the complete text.