March 2004
- 31 -
Building an empire
Here's how I want the story of
Azenera to pan out. When you're first trapped in the flooded valley,
there are all these enemies who attack you, and you don't know why.
As you go on, you find out that the enemies are not mere rogues or savages,
but rather organized groups who have different goals. For example,
the orcs originally seem to be a band of raiders who are out for themselves
and have no ties to anyone, but soon it is revealed that they're part of
a fledgling empire called Guranga that spans across the entire continent.
The hostile goblins, too, also seem like rogues, and even the friendly
goblins believe they've simply strayed from the path of peace and gone
wild, as you can see if you find Tesahiva's journals on level 3.
But actually, it will soon be revealed that these goblins are part of a
cult that worships Tesunas, a mysterious being who lives in the Rift World.
I'm also adding story elements from Drakan 2. Surdana is mentioned,
as well as some evidence that Azenera is the "Southern continent" with
the poisonous air that's mentioned by the book-loving monks. The
poisonous air will be featured in one of the later levels that take place
in East Azenera, and the nature of the poison will have ties to the Tesunas
storyline.
At the risk of being like George
Lucas when he angered fans by changing a bunch of scenes in the original
Star Wars, I'm making a few changes to the first four levels of Azenera.
The biggest change I'm making is making the Greedo of level lighting do
the shooting first of being brighter... wait, that makes no sense when
I read it again, so I'll ditch this Star Wars analogy and just get to the
point and say that I'm raising the brightness of the levels. I'm
doing this because I've been running at 1.20 gamma all this time, and at
the normal gamma level of 1.00, the levels are just too dark. It's
not a drastic change in brightness that spoils the mood of the levels,
but it'll help people see the enemies they're fighting. I'm also
adding dust effects to the stone doors when they go in and out of the dirt,
and I'm adding a little more dialogue to help explain what's going on with
the world.
Now I'm going to search the Internet
for information regarding our missing links.
- I did a search for the toilets of Melbourne and found this,
but it's just not the same. There are no detailed descriptions, just
a list.
- Mr. T Ate My Balls
and Chewbacca Ate
My Balls are both still around on the author's Geocities site.
- Here's a banana
sticker site similar to the one Dave Barry mentioned.
- The Wave to the Cats site may be down, but the owner's main
page is still visible, although I don't know how long it's been since
it was updated.
- Find out about the Captain and Tennille on their main site here,
if you really want to.
- Here's a site
about cursing in Swedish, but their non-ASCII coding seems to be a bit
off.
- This
site has some Dutch traffic signs, but I don't know if it's identical
to the one Dave Barry saw. It should be close enough; how much difference
can there be in traffic sign sites?
- Here's a Fabio fan club.
- Find out about those deformed Minnesotan frogs here.
- This
site talks about musical sand and even has some sound samples, just
like the site Dave Barry mentioned.
I didn't find much about the guide to crackers, the Spam cam, or the people with toasters. I did find some stuff about George Goble, the barbecue ignition guy, but his homepage and everything on it is gone.
Back in 1996, humor columnist
Dave Barry wrote a book called Dave
Barry in Cyberspace, in which he talks about his experiences with computers
and the Internet. In it, there's a chapter that lists several interesting
web sites that feature things such as viola jokes, banana labels of the
world, and flaming Pop-Tarts. I'm taking it upon myself to find out
how many of those links are still active, and if any are, how they have
changed since 1996. Maybe later I'll try to see if I can find out
if some of the sites whose URLs don't work have simply been moved to a
new place, but for now, I'll just check the links listed in the book.
And here we go!
The Toilets
of Melbourne, Australia - This site doesn't seem to be working.
In fact, it looks like the server doesn't exist anymore! This is
a depressing start. Let's move on.
Giant Collection
of Viola Jokes - Hooray! It still works! And it even mentions
Dave Barry's book!
Guide
to Crackers - This isn't working for me. It can't even find the
server.
Mr. T Ate
My Balls - This is probably archived somewhere on the web, but it's
not found here.
Chewbacca
Ate My Balls - This one's not there either.
The Spam Cam -
This was about the meat, not the junk e-mail. It's not there anymore.
Piercing Mildred - This is
still around! The link now redirects to here.
Banana
Labels of the World - No banana labels here, I'm afraid.
Wave to the Cats
- This is no longer active. It was a web site where you could make
a mechanical hand wave to some cats. Do you suppose those cats are
still alive?
Trojan Room Coffee
Machine - It's a webcam type of site, so I didn't expect it to still
be around, but it is! Go check on that coffee machine!
Captain and
Tennille Appearances - You can probably still find information about
what the Captain and Tennille are doing these days, but not on this site.
Cursing in Swedish
- This isn't around either! När jag blir av med gipset skall
du få se på sjutton!
Dutch
Traffic Signs - Nothing to see here. Insert appropriate Dutch
curse words.
Federal
Corpse Slice Photos - The Visible Human Project is still around in
all its original glory.
People
with Toasters - This site seems to be as dead as the cadavers featured
in the previous link.
Fabio
- I can't believe it's not working! Actually, I can. Personal
pages on non-university sites usually don't fare too well... oh wait, my
site is one of them! Uh oh...
Deformed Frog Pictures
- This local Minnesota link isn't working, but I remember reading about
problems with deformed frogs in school.
Musical Sand
- The server's still around, but the site is not.
Exploding Whale
- This link works, but the site has moved to here.
Exploding whales are just too crazy to let fall into oblivion. Be
sure to check out some of the intelligently written letters shown on the
new site.
World Record Barbecue
Ignition - "The people in charge have requested this web site be removed."
Oh no! The Barbecue Illuminati claim another victim!
Flaming Pop-Tart
Experiment - It works, and it mentions Dave Barry! Watch those
Pop-Tarts burn!
Well, that's it. I'm surprised so many of those sites were still active, given the ephemeral nature of the Internet. Tomorrow, I'll try to see if I can find information related to some of the stuff that I couldn't get to through the links listed above.
I spent three days talking about
Unreal 2, so I should really spend some more time talking about Metroid:
Zero Mission, which is a much better game. First I finished Normal
mode because I've played all the previous Metroid games and I thought Easy
mode would be too easy, and I died a few times, but mostly I did all right.
In fact, I got a few items before I was supposed to, and I didn't even
know it. First, I did the bomb jump to get the Energy Tank in the
ceiling near the beginning of Brinstar. Then, after beating Kraid,
I got the super missiles by doing the ball shinespark trick in Brinstar
instead of waiting until I had fought the giant bee enemy. I also
got the Screw Attack before I even went to Ridley's lair by building up
speed in the room with the three pipes and doing a shinespark jump into
the ceiling. Later, when I was challenging Hard mode, I took the
passage on the far right side of Norfair and ended up going to Ridley's
lair without the wave beam and with only a few missiles and energy tanks.
I must have discovered the secret 15% completion path that lets you skip
most of the items, but I had already gotten too many items to complete
that challenge, so I just restarted the game rather than face Ridley in
my unprepared state. When I take on a challenge like that, I want
it to be for something that gets results.
No more Unreal puns, at least.
I'll still make bad puns about other game titles, because I'm too dumb
to think of anything better. I finished Unreal 2, and I have to say,
there were some parts of that game that really seemed like they had some
promise, but the execution of those ideas wasn't very good. For example,
there are a few interesting twists in the story that are revealed near
the end, but they don't really have the emotional impact that the developers
probably intended because the characters involved in the story really aren't
that interesting. Also, the base-building sequences are more fun
than the straightforward action sequences, but even they are hampered by
your character's slow movement and the fact that you can't give orders
to your teammates over long distances. And then, there's the level
design. The original Unreal had much more intricate levels, with
sprawling temples, castles, and fortresses that, although fundamentally
linear in nature, allowed for some exploration and felt like part of a
much larger world. Most of the levels in Unreal 2 are short, and
they seem like you're just walking down a corridor with different scenery
in the background. There are usually only one or two kinds of enemy
per level, but the original Unreal was the same way so I guess I shouldn't
expect more from the sequel. Sometimes in my Technical Japanese class,
someone will give a translation of a sentence that doesn't quite make sense,
and the professor will say "You've got elements of it, but you had a little
trouble putting it together." In the same way, Unreal 2 has some
elements of a good game, such as diverse worlds, a suspenseful plot, and
interesting weapons, but when those elements are put together, it doesn't
necessarily make a great game.
I'm a few levels into Unreal
2, and I'm not very impressed. Actually, I do think the graphics
are really good, and I like the environment mapping effects on all the
shiny objects, but those graphics don't do much for me unless they're part
of a good game. Unreal 2 isn't really much of a game at all.
It's more like playing a movie than playing a game, except in this movie,
you have to press keys and click the mouse in the correct sequence or else
the movie will go back to an earlier point and you'll have to watch the
same events all over again. In the first level, the Sanctuary, you
go down a completely linear path, fighting only one type of enemy all the
way. Then you get stuck in an elevator and attacked by a Skaarj (this
was the end of the demo), and this part of the level is kind of cool, but
then you get to an outdoor part of the game where you go back to the same
kind of linear path, this time fighting Skaarj (pronounced "Scar" by the
characters in the game, like in Return to Na Pali) instead of monkey-lizards.
After this level, there's a level where you have to help a group of marines
defend a base in the swamp from invading enemies. These "defend the
base" levels seem to really be the best part of the game, but the Unreal
Tournament games do this kind of team-based gameplay so much better.
One of the things I've noticed is that your character walks so slowly,
especially compared to the player character in the original Unreal.
The only way you can go fast is to double-press a movement key to do a
dodge move (but only after setting "Dodging" to something greater than
zero in the options menu), and taking a page right out of the Book of Drakan,
you can actually go faster by continuously dodging forward than you can
by running! That seems like a serious oversight to me.
Another game I picked up over
Spring Break was Unreal 2: The Awakening. I played the demo earlier,
and it wasn't all that great, but the full game was only $20, so I decided
to get it. It's single-player, but there's a multiplayer expansion
called XMP that contains vehicles and tactical elements and I might get
around to playing that someday, but for now, I'll just stick with the single-player
game. I'm not expecting much though.
So I picked up the new Metroid
game, Metroid: Zero Mission, for the Game Boy Advance, and I'm lovin' it!
Ba da da da da! Oh jeez, I'm sorry, that just slipped out.
Anyway, Metroid: Zero Mission is a sort of remake of the original Metroid,
but it contains some elements from Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion as
well. The level structure and plot are basically the same as Metroid
1. You go around Brinstar and Norfair collecting items and abilities,
and you go into the lairs of the bosses Kraid and Ridley and defeat them.
Once they're dead, you can get to Mother Brain's lair of Tourian, where
you'll face the Metroid and finally Mother Brain herself. When you
defeat Mother Brain, you have to get to your ship and flee the world of
Zebes before a bomb goes off, and that's the end of the game... or is it?
So, the basic structure is pretty much the same, and there are some familiar
areas that'll trigger a fit of nostalgia in anyone who's been a Metroid
fan from the beginning, but there are also some major differences.
Items from later games such as the Speed Booster and Super Missiles are
included, and the Wave Beam and Ice Beam can be used together instead of
one replacing the other. The above-ground realm of Crateria makes
a return from Super Metroid, and Kraid and Ridley take on their Super Metroid
forms rather than that of their smaller Metroid 1 counterparts. In
Zero Mission, there's a ton of stuff to unlock and many challenges for
expert players. There are bonuses for getting 100%, for finishing
the game in Hard Mode, for finishing under certain time limits, for beating
the game with less than 15% of the items, and for different combinations
of these feats. Most of the bonuses come in the form of different
ending screens, but there's also a sound test and you can play Metroid
1 in its original NES form.
Spring Break is over and it's
back to the drudgery of everyday life. I almost didn't finish my
homework yesterday because I had a headache, which I sometimes get after
I ride the bus. One thing that may have contributed to my headache
was the fact that one of the movies I saw was Bad Boys 2, which is one
of those movies that you're watching and you think to yourself, "This can't
be a real movie." That is, it's so over the top and full of clichés
that you wonder if everyone involved in the movie was just playing a big
joke and somehow a movie got made out of it. Let me tell you, if
you see Bad Boys 2, then you'll never need to watch another buddy-cop movie
ever again, because this movie completely exhausts the genre. Here,
let me describe everything about the movie that I haven't suppressed from
my mind.
You've got Will Smith as a cop
who plays by his own rules, with Martin Lawrence as his more reserved partner
who gets dragged into all the shootouts and car chases kicking and screaming.
Then you've got Joe Pantoliano as the police chief who's always yelling
at our two heroes and telling them they're off the case. On top of
that, you have Will Smith's love interest, an undercover agent who also
happens to be the sister of the Martin Lawrence character, and you've got
a plethora of villains led by a maniacal Cuban gang leader with ties to
Castro who chops up his enemies in his kitchen and kills henchmen who disappoint
him in front of a bunch of people, including his mother, because that's
just how evil he is. I should also mention that nearly all of the
main characters are involved in some kind of new-age anger management program
where they try to control their rage by repeating the mantra of "woosah"
or something like that. The story begins with our two heroes undercover
with the Ku Klux Klan, who decided on a whim to burn a cross right in the
middle of a drug deal they were supposed to do. The Bad Boys take
off their masks and try to arrest the KKK members, but there's a shootout
and Will Smith accidentally ends up shooting Martin Lawrence in the butt,
and this becomes important later because it paves the way for a scene where
they talk about the shooting, and they think they're alone, but there are
cameras on them and people are watching them, and it sounds like they're
a gay couple and it's just so funny and original. After the incident
with the Klan and the inevitable chewing out by the police chief, the Bad
Boys have a few shootouts with the Haitians (cue Grand Theft Auto: Vice
City joke here), and they go sneaking around the Cuban gang leader's house,
where they learn about a plot to smuggle killer ecstasy into America inside
hollowed-out corpses. This, of course, leads to "hilarious" scenes
such as a corpse falling out of a van and getting beheaded by another vehicle,
and Will Smith ogling the corpse of a young woman with large breasts.
Yes, that's right, they're playing necrophilia for laughs here. I
started to drift off after the first few hours of the movie, but I remember
it ended with a car chase in Cuba that destroyed a hillside town, followed
by a showdown with the villain on a minefield, in which the villain ends
up getting shot and blown up. Since he got blown to pieces,
there was thankfully no way to play out the old, tired "you thought he
was dead, but he wasn't really!" cliché that was last seen in Mission
Impossible 2, but we did get a final scene where Will Smith makes out with
the love interest in the middle of the minefield with Martin Lawrence yelling
at them to be careful because of all the mines. Unfortunately, they
don't all get blown up at the end, and that means there's a chance that
there might be a Bad Boys 3. Woosah.
Well, I've finished blindly stumbling
my way through another midterm. Seriously, this has been like a mini
finals week, and it's insane. I'm really worried that I might not
have done well on those midterms, and this isn't like the kind of worried
I was about all those literature classes. This is real worried, because
these are Computer Science classes that I'm supposed to be really good
at because, you know, it's my major. I guess I can hope that I at
least did relatively well compared to the rest of the class, but even that's
not for sure. I'm always a little worried about classes that grade
on a curve because I get afraid that maybe this semester, a few hundred
really smart people and aspiring professional economists simultaneously
decided to take Econ 102, and they'll be in the top 50% with a perfect
100 on every test, while anything less than a 100 will be a C at best.
Also, there's the whole competition thing, because success depends on the
failure of others. Since I've taken my Environment and Global Economy
midterm and I have population dynamics on the mind, I guess I could say
that a class graded on a curve is sort of like a predator-prey relationship,
or at least a case of survival of the fittest. Luckily, the savanna
that is my economics class seems to have enough straggling wildebeest,
so I'm not too worried about getting eaten by the lions of bad grades.
But all this talk of midterms is old news right now because it's almost
Spring Break and I am free, free, free! I'm free to... oh wait, I
still have to get that report for my Operating Systems class done the week
after break, and I don't know what's going to happen with my Technical
Japanese homework. Oh well, at least I'll have a temporary break
from all this homework and studying.
Oh god, it's worse than I thought.
There's blood everywhere. I just took my Environment and Global Economy
and my Operating Systems midterms today, and they were a bit harder than
I expected. Especially the Operating Systems exam. What'll
I say if I get a bad grade on one of these exams? Will I finally
have to face up to the reality that every minute I spent on games could
have been spent on studying instead? Or even worse, will I find out
that all this lack of sleep has ruined me forever? You know what?
I'm just going to get to sleep right now. Tomorrow I have my Artificial
Intelligence midterm, and I want to at least feel like I did decently on
that.
Because I'm studying like a superfreak!
A superfreak! I'm superfreaky with the studying and the reading and
the oh no this is not making any sense! Seriously though, there's
nothing I can say today, but if you want to, you can just pretend I'm saying
something really funny right now. Laugh! Come on, I said laugh.
Midterms are coming up so this
is my Week of Dread. I won't be able to play Jedi Knight before Spring
Break... well, not much, anyway. I have to study up on my environmental
readings, operating systems information, and artificial intelligence systems,
and it's not going to be fun. I'm going to get distracted.
That's a given. Or maybe it's a gibbon, I'm not sure. Say,
I wonder, are gibbons an endangered species? They probably are, since
so many primates (other than humans) are endangered due to habitat loss
and... oh, sorry, I got distracted. See, I told you I would.
Well, at least it was about something related to the environment.
And also, I'm on the computer, and you can do studying on computers, so
I guess you could say I'm engaged in studying-related program activities.
That's gotta count for something.
The level design in the first
Jedi Knight is pretty good. There are some repetitive passages in
some places, but for the most part, the levels flow well and have a wide
variety of areas. There's a level with a house you have to find your
way inside, a level where you follow a series of water drainage pipes,
and a part of the game where you go up on a rooftop and you have to dodge
an enemy ship that tries to drop bombs on you. In addition to being
diverse, these levels are huge. It takes a long time to get through
a single level, and there are often lots of keys to find and force fields
to disable along the way.
Now let's talk about the Force.
You know, I've always had the mistaken notion that Force Push and Force
Pull are central to the entire Jedi Knight series because they play such
a pivotal role in Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy, but the first Jedi Knight
doesn't even have Force Push! There is Force Pull, but it only pulls
items toward you and disarms enemies. Force Speed and Force Jump
are available near the beginning, and they're pretty good powers to have.
Jedi Knight was actually designed so that it's not necessary to have any
force powers at all, and Force Jump often lets you get to places you wouldn't
normally be able to go, like to a catwalk high above a canyon. Force
Healing, which is available later, takes a lot of force power to use, but
it works more quickly than its counterpart in later games.
The saber fighting in Jedi Knight
isn't as advanced as that of its sequels, and I suppose that's understandable
because Kyle just picks up the saber and starts using it with no training,
so he hasn't yet learned all the acrobatic moves that he can do in Jedi
Outcast. You can still block blaster fire, but not as well as in
the sequel and Jedi Academy, so you'll end up using the long-range weapons
more often. The weapons in this game seem to be more powerful than
the ones in later games, especially the concussion rifle. This weapon
is just as powerful as the Stouker rifle in Jedi Academy, but it only uses
8 power cells instead of 40 metallic bolts. Maybe the weapons just
seem so much more powerful because in this game you're just fighting mercenaries
and stormtroopers most of the time, and while there are dark Jedi to fight,
they're bosses rather than normal enemies who pop up everywhere.
Let me tell you, these Jedi Knight
graphics aren't as good as I remember. I suppose they were pretty
good for their time, but now everything looks blocky and artificial.
Someone made a model enhancement pack for System Shock 2, and while it
would be nice to have something similar for Jedi Knight, that still wouldn't
help the low graphical complexity of the world geometry. The indoor
parts mostly look fine, but the outdoor areas don't really seem outdoor
to me. For example, there's this one part of level 3 where you can
stand on some barrels and when you jump, you'll bump your head on the sky.
The explosion effects are pretty much a joke, because each explosion consists
of a single 2D sprite, like the explosions in Quake 1. Fortunately,
the gameplay has held up better than the graphics, and I'll talk about
that tomorrow.
I'm getting back to the first
Jedi Knight, since I never actually finished it in the first place.
This time I'm more familiar with the whole Jedi Knight system of combat
and force powers, and I've done some reading on the advantages of different
powers, so I pretty much know what to do. One of the things I remember
about this game that kind of put me off the first time is how you have
to find all the secret areas in each level if you want to get all the force
stars. I'm kind of a completionist who likes to get all the special
items and bonuses, and that's what draws me to games like the new Castlevania
games and Ratchet and Clank, but scouring every wall, floor, and ceiling
of all the Jedi Knight levels just seems tedious. I'll talk about
Jedi Knight some more later.
Oh no, oh no, oh no! I
have three midterms next week! This is just crazy! I've gotta
study or else. And on top of that, I have a bunch of homework assignments
to do. I'm glad they're not scheduling all the midterms for the week
after Spring Break, but they could have at least had one this week or something.
It's time to get back to the
important things, like Journey to Azenera, which I promised I would work
on. Actually, I made a specific point to not promise anything, but
in the end it's still going to be treated like a promise. I'm finally
getting around to adding textures to the main outdoor areas, and I'm using
the usual technique of setting the walkable surfaces to 33°, hitting
the A key to see the outline of all the places you can walk on, and then
placing a grass texture on the walkable part of the landscape. It's
not as easy as it sounds, because you have to add the edge and corner textures
separately, and you have to make sure everything is aligned properly.
If you fail to include a row of edge textures, which is easy to do since
they're so hard to see in the editor, then there'll be a smooth line separating
the rock and grass, which doesn't blend in well with the landscape.
Sometimes, when I'm texturing the top of ridges, I extend the grass outline
a square or two beyond the walkable area so that the grass on top can be
seen from lower areas. I find that this method of landscape texturing
produces a pretty consistent pattern, but sometimes I feel like there's
not enough grass to suit the climate, at least compared to other games
that take place on the same kind of landscape. Come to think of it,
I don't know what Azenera's climate is even supposed to be. I'm kind
of going for a swamp canyon feel, but swamps don't really seem to go with
tall mountains. The closest real-world landscape I can think of that
compares to what I've made in Azenera so far would be something like the
cloud forest of Costa Rica, especially with the close fog that has to be
in every Drakan level because of engine limitations. This may be
the last level in this particular climate, though, because level 6 will
be an arid canyon that you explore on foot, and level 7 will be a huge
desert that separates West and East Azenera. I was originally planning
to have East Azenera be the same type of landscape as the levels I've made
so far, but now I'm thinking about making more open areas and fewer narrow
canyons, and maybe I could make the valleys lower so Arokh can have more
room to fly.