Michael Cook’s Place

With this being repeat TV season, I’ve been playing more games than usual. I have reviews coming for two other games, but I just finished playing Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned. I played it off the Episodes from Liberty City disc.

The game it’s self is unchanged. It’s not better looking, in fact it seemed to me like there was a little more pop-up. The bikes handle better (since Johnny, the character you play, is in a bike gang), and the cars worse (because Johnny can’t seem to drive well).

The story, on it’s own, isn’t that great. I liked a few of the characters (like Jim) that you are supposed to. I hated some of the characters (like Billy) that you are supposed to dislike. But I never really felt connected to Johnny, and never cared about Ashley. You don’t get as much time with them as you did with Niko, but they don’t grab you much.

While Johnny’s story I could take or leave, you want to keep playing because of the way it integrates with Niko’s story. You’ll see another side of many of the missions that happened in the first part of GTA 4, and it’s a blast. You see familiar characters, and the game fills in what happened with some of the rest of the world while Niko was out doing other things.

But the missions in this game are fantastic. Not only is there a new weapon or two (the one they call the “street sweeper” is extremely satisfying), the set pieces are great. In one mission, you are on the back of another guy’s bike driving all around the city being chased by the police and SWAT shooting at them to defend the driver, and it’s a total blast. The final mission throws waves of guys at you. You also get to hijack a prison bus, cause a terrorist incident, and more. The missions really make you want to keep going during each play session. Rockstar really knows what they are doing.

Last is the credits. The credits for GTA 4 were long but kinda fun to watch as it showed you the city. The credits for Lost and Damned show you views of various views of the city, but also sequences of events in Johnny and Niko’s lives. You get to see Niko do an execution and a helicopter view of part of one of the motor cycles chases. The neat part is the views of Niko usually pan around to a nearby area where the Lost Motorcycle Club is riding around, showing you how close they are physically at times. It was a nice little capstone.

Like GTA 4? You’ll really like this. I’m going to play the Ballad of Gay Tony next, which takes place at the same time and will provide even more insight into many of these events. I’m psyched.

It’s been a few weeks since I finished Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box. If you have played the first in the series, then you know exactly what you are getting into.

I finished nearly all the puzzles in the game (~115 of ~130?). The story is pretty good, and told well. The little animation snippets are extremely well made. I can’t wait for the feature film. There is a pretty big plot twist at the end of the game. It explains many things (such as why there are puzzles everywhere), but also feels a little bit cheap… sort of like a deus ex machina.

If you liked the first game, you’ll like this one too.

Since it’s release date I’ve spent a fair amount of time playing New Super Mario Brothers Wii. I think it’s been about 15 hours or so. I haven’t completed everything in the game, but I’ve beat Worlds 1-8, including getting all gold coins and secret stages. I’m half-way through the bonus world, World 9.

I’ve had a total blast with the game. If you want to know what it’s like to play, it’s Mario 3 to it’s core. It’s the same basic game. Same worlds, same themes, same enemies, same music, same map layout, same basic plot. There are bits from other games (such as a liberal sprinkling of Super Mario World)… but the game really feels like Mario 3.

And it’s fantastic.

The format is exactly the same as New Super Mario Brothers DS from three and a half years ago. It’s a 2D game made with 3D graphics. The difference is the difficulty. I enjoyed the DS game, but it was relatively easy. This game on the Wii has challenge, lots of it. There are levels you can rush through, especially near the beginning, but the game starts pushing you HARD. As you get to the end, you’re fighting for your life, and it’s a great feeling. The game rarely feels like it’s being mean… you almost always feel like you died because it’s your fault. I’ve had an instance or two where it felt like my jump didn’t register, or the shaking gesture went off when I didn’t want it to, but overall things are tight.

The level design is fantastic. While the start out simple, and there are some (like the under water stages) that feel like total throwbacks, some of the new level geometry abilities the game has are used to great effect. Playing a level where the platforms are tilting left and right and moving up and down as you stand on them ads a great new challenge from the standard platforming we all played 15 years ago.

There are so many memorable levels. There is the level that is entirely in the sky, jumping from one beetle’s back to another, the level you spend riding on the back of a dinosaur skeleton roller-coaster over lava, when you ride a platform under tons and tons of falling enemies, levels half-obscured in the clouds, and more. The designs are very imaginative

The game is a must buy if you own a Wii. There isn’t much more to say than that. Some of the new powers aren’t that interesting (like mini-Mario), but the whole experience is just so polished. You’ll hate Mario for dying in some of the later levels, and love every minute of it.

In the last few days I’ve read a good chunk of the documentation on Palm’s WebOS, and started making a little program. While the documentation is technically thorough, it’s poorly laid out and the example leaves something to be desired.

You can find everything at Palm’s developer site. I downloaded what I thought I needed, then signed up for a developer account. I did this because it seemed that I would need to in order to activate the SDK or download an extra part, but it turned out I didn’t. I don’t know if this is a remnant from before the SDK was open to everyone, but it was annoying and the start of a trend.

I followed the tutorial to make a little “Hello world” program. After that I started following the next part of the tutorial in which you make a button that counts the number of times it is tapped. This is where I ran into big problems.

If you follow the example, you end up with files with names like “First-assistant.js”, but all the screenshots show the names in all lower case. I figured this was a mistake and renamed all my files (and the class) to start with a lower case letter. This was a mistake. The class seems to NEED to start with a capital. That’s a good practice, but it’s not quite what the screenshots showed.

The problem seems to be the Prototype framework. You are expected to be familiar with it, Java script, the command line, and HTML. The tutorial gives no basic information at all. To update the count on the tutorial application, it uses Element.update(String). What exactly does that update? No one knows, if they only read the tutorial. You have to go Google the Element class in prototype to find out the update method replaces the HTML contained in the element. The tutorial just assumes you know that. You’ll use lines like “this.controller.getThing().set(this.myMethod.bind(this))”, but there isn’t even a sentence explaining why you have to use .bind(this), the only documentation is that the line associates a function with Thing on the controller.

And what is the controller? Why it’s an app controller. Or is it a scene controller? Or a state controller? WebOS has all three, but the tutorial doesn’t explain any of this, you’ll have to look it up on your own. (PS: it’s a stage controller).

As a tutorial, it’s not newbie familiar at all. It’s like giving someone a C program that uses pointers and plays music, with a few lines of comments, and saying “use this to learn sound generation”. The reader is forced to muck about and make nearly random changes until the figure out what is going on, or find a better way to learn. As someone who had never touched Prototype, this was rather annoying and made the learning curve much steeper than it needed to be. A few extra sentences (especially pointing where to look for more information) would have been a real help..

So I eventually figured out what went wrong. How do you do that? You have to connect to the emulator (or a real phone) over a socket with the full program name (com.mycompany.myprogram) to get the error messages. This is explained on the debugging page. There is one link to it on the tutorial page (nearly: “If it doesn’t work, you’ll need to debug it.”). Once you connect, it’s up to you to figure out what the messages mean. They are actually quite helpful, but it could have been explained better. The debug function in Eclipse doesn’t seem to do anything different from the run function.

The emulator and it’s connection to Eclipse was a source of frustration for me. It’s made using VirtualBox and works well technically. But every time I booted it (and every time it did something) VirtualBox would pop up a modal sheet informing me of something until I started to check the “don’t show again” checkboxes. It’s also quite unclear how to do many things in the emulator, and finding the right page on Palm’s site to learn the 6 or 7 magic keys is very difficult. On WebOS you do a swipe up from the gesture area to go back to the launcher from an open program. But on the emulator, there is no gesture area for me to use with my mouse. There is no little ball button to light up (should I make my program do that). You just have to find out to press Esc. There is no help in VirtualBox about this, because it’s OS specific.

Loading and launching programs (as well as creating new ones) is done with a set of command line tools. They work well, but they don’t have man pages. The only help (short of somewhere on Palm’s site) is to run the command without arguments. This prints out some help text, that doesn’t match the format of any other help text from any normal set of command line programs. It’s not DOS style, it’s not Linux/UNIX style. It’s sort of DOS like, with a bunch of examples on the end.

Now you can choose to ignore that, and use Eclipse, but that didn’t work for me. I could create projects and such just fine, but the run button didn’t work to launch the program in the (already open) emulator. Eclipse said there was no way to run the program. I had installed the Palm tools (that’s how it knew how to make the project), but it didn’t work. I had to dig through preferences to find out that the action pressing Run triggered for a WebOS project didn’t get set for some reason. As soon as I set it to “WebOS” (as opposed to “Java”, etc.), it worked. How would someone new to Eclipse know to do that?

I’ve got a little program working that queries the GPS. The documentation on the calls to get GPS information tells you exactly how to use the service (which call to make, what to pass). The problem is that how to use services in general (specifically, how stuff gets back to callbacks) is documented on another page that isn’t exactly easy to find. It makes a ton of sense (you get single object of JSON data), but you have to go look that up first.

Developing for WebOS so far has been… something of a challenge. Palm’s documentation is clearly for experienced developers.

With the recent release of GTA: Chinatown Wars on the PSP, I took another look at the game. It had been on my list of games to play, but seeing the reviews made me go get a copy. I chose to get the DS version based on the reviews commenting on the difficulty of the various mini-games using the PSP controls, as well as cell shaded art style on the DS.

The game controls very well. GTA4 was the first game in the series that I’d finished, because it was the first where I felt my character (specifically in gunfights) was doing what I wanted him to, and would actually shoot the right target. The controls on the DS worked very well. The lock-on often chose the wrong target, but it wasn’t a big problem. My biggest problem was tossing grenades/Molotov cocktails. The says you flick to throw them, but doing that I would often drop them at my feet (to great detriment). It turns out holding an area on the target circles that come up let you chose direction and distance. You don’t need to flick. Once I found that out, aiming was easy.The story was pretty good, and it’s got some nice twists and turns. There are a some semi-likable characters, and some who you are ready to kill from day one.

Liberty City is amazing. The game looks fantastic, and reminiscent of the first 2 GTA games (which was purposeful). What I wasn’t expecting was all the little details. As cars drive around, you’ll find that some of them have neon undercarriage lights, and they use their turn signals. Even on the DS, police chase people around, and other cars get into accidents and hit pedestrians on their own. Liberty City feels alive, much like in GTA4.

And speaking of GTA4, you’ll see so many landmarks you remember if you played through that game. The game takes place in the same city, and you get all the islands except for the fourth, Alderny. As you drive around, you’ll recognize all sorts of locations. I saw the turn out by where Roman’s shop was, that you pass through 40 times on the way to see Brucie. You’ll see the amusement park, the Burger Shot up in Bohan, the museum where you help with the diamond heist, the game’s equivalent of Times Square, the abandoned mansion on one of the smaller islands that was a big gang hangout in GTA4, and more. While the road map isn’t identical, you’ll see so many land marks during the game, you feel like you are still in Liberty City.

The game was fantastic. I spent tons of time trading drugs (basically Drug Wars with a car), blowing up security cameras (I got 53 or so), and collecting safe houses (got all but 1!). It was easily worth the $35. I hope Rockstar makes another portable GTA game in this style. The GTA3 style games (Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories on the PSP) had horrible control problems, mostly shooting, that made them nearly unplayable. It was great to have a working GTA game to play on the go.