Michael Cook’s Place

I just finished Half-Life 2: Episode 2. This means that I am now out of Half-Life. Since I recently finished Season 1 of Sam & Max (my full review: fun, not bad, annoying DRM on boxed copy), this means that Team Fortress 2 is my only reason left to boot into Windows.

Episode 2 was plotted very well, and some of the new graphical touches were quite good. The realistic shadows cast by everything when you have your flashlight on is new, I believe, and looks very good. It’s too bad all the lights in the game don’t cast shadows like that when appropriate. The worst new enemy, the hunter, is like a little strider… at least in the terror that it will start to induce in you. The things are tough, fast, and have a pretty tough weapon on them. In a brilliant sequence very close to the end of the game, you are pitted against waves of striders who are guarded by little groups of hunters. The combination is extremely adrenaline inducing. I died numerous times until I discovered a strong run-and-gun approach that worked well. By the end I was running out of many kinds of ammo, which only increased the tension.

There are many other great parts. The antlion colony looked fantastic and was very well designed. The shimmering effects add a nice touch and don’t look out of place like they do in most games when used “just to make things shiny”. The bloom effect used in Episode 1 continues to be well used. There are some fun physics puzzles, and you get some very tantalizing clues that really make me wish I could just jump into Episode 3.

When I came to the final scene, I saw something that made me really excited for what was going to come next. All of a sudden the generic scripted scene became a full scripted scene with action, drawing me in further. Some events happen (I won’t spoil them) and then the screen blacks out and the credits come up. You can tell the folks at Valve know what they are doing, because I would have happily plunked down $20 at that moment to continue playing the next episode.

Episode 3 is a complete unknown at this point. I try not to know too much about the plots of video games before I play them, but a quick check online shows that basically nothing has been released about Episode 3. According to the only real piece of information I found, they hadn’t even nailed the story down, and that was less than two months ago. There was also the obligatory “when it’s done” kind of message. I believe I’ll be waiting a while for the release.

Now that I have played everything, it’s very clear: Orange Box rules.

I just finished playing God of War: Chains of Olympus. I enjoyed it quite a bit. I don’t have much of a review on this one, there isn’t much to say.

It’s a God of War game, mostly true to the formula. If the God of War franchise wasn’t so good, I could say it’s just a God of War game, but that’s not really a bad thing. It doesn’t feel as grand as the previous two, missing the amazing scripted boss battles… except for one at the start of the game. The script fits in well with what I remember of the previous games (considering this is a prequel). The graphics are very impressive for a PSP game. There are one or two little rendering errors through the game of in the distance, but for the most part it looks like God of War II did. The sound is good, the voice acting is (mostly) good. The controls work fine, no complaints there.

It’s God of War, only a little smaller. It was a fun game, I’m glad I played it. At $40 it’s not bad. Once the price drops a little, it’s definitely something to pick-up.

I’m trying to write a Widget for OS X, but I’m running into a terrible brick wall.

My widget, so far, does nothing. It’s just static HTML. I know that’s right. It works fine in Safari. I’ve got all my various files (like Info.plist). Yet I can’t launch my widget.

When launched, it just shows the loading graphic the whole time, the actual page is never rendered. I can open it in Dashcode and see the correct view of the widget, but when I launch it with run it immediately quits running again. The console output shows nothing.

I’ve been trying reformatting the Info.plist file, renaming things, and anything else I can think of. Nothing seems to work well. I have managed to get my widget to launch once or twice, but I have no idea what I did. When I tried launching it again, it didn’t work. Something is going on but I can’t figure it out for the life of me. If I can figure out what I did wrong, I’ll post it here in case someone else runs into this.

Here is my test version of my widget. I stripped it down completely, but still have the same problem. Test Widget.

Update: So I try this one day later, and it opens just fine. I’m really starting to hate dashboard.

I’ve updated Gravitoids, adding a few little cleanups and making it generally run better. There are still some clear problems with it, such as the fear display lines seem off, and they learn to ignore the walls completely… which means my balancing is off. Still strangely distracting and fun to watch.

A short while ago, I finished playing Patapon. At only $20, the game is a great value. I wasn’t expecting much, but I was rather pleasantly surprised.

Basics

Patapon is a often described as a rhythm game combined with a real time strategy game. This is somewhat true, but I don’t entirely agree with the real time strategy part. During boss fights, it feels more like it’s a rhythm based fighter. This could be applied to normal stages as well, though the feeling is not as strong.

In Patapon you bang your drums of war in specific patterns to instruct your little Patapons to advance, fight, defend, retreat, or charge-up. I’m a big fan of rhythm fans, going back to PaRappa the Rapper nearly a decade ago. Because of the rhythm aspect, decent reviews, the interesting graphics, and the low price, I decided to pick the game up.

Gameplay

The game largely works very well. The system is responsive to the controls, and never feels arbitrary in if you hit or miss the beat (which some games, like PaRappa, did). The better you match the beat, the louder and more complex and rich the drum sounds the game produces. This little bit of feedback works quite well. The best feedback is the Patapon that you command. As you do better and better (by hitting sequences in groups without messing up) they chant louder and louder, then start to sing. Their little war song changes depending on the units that you have in your group.

The game is mostly quite fun. There is a delay between issuing orders and them being carried out. It’s this dichotomy that causes some confusion in the “feel” of the game. If the responses were more delayed, they would feel more like the Patapon were acting on their own and you were sort of guiding them (like an RTS). If the responses were more immediate, it would feel more light a real fight (and thus a fighting game). For the first few hours, this delay was somewhat annoying. While it never went away, I began to factor it in as I played more and it stopped being noticable. Only when I messed up (issued a attack instead of a retreat, when a boss was about to attack) did I notice it, and it felt like my fault. It didn’t feel arbitrary.

The mini-games, while somewhat fun and cute, were kind of simple. I didn’t feel like I needed them too much. Unlike the combat, they often DID feel like they were punishing me for not being exactly on the beat. This was especially true when playing with the baby mountain. The cooking mini-game, with Gashapon, was very fun though. I found his animations (walking along the top of the kettle) to be very cute.

I only have two complaints about the game. While the weapons and armor system seemed somewhat unnecessary to me (I never had to mess with it, just choose “optimize”), the Kaching system was annoying. Kaching is the money that you need to create new units, which can be quite expensive. The problem is that Kaching is quite hard to get, relative to what they want you to spend. This can cause you to replay some simple missions over and over just for the money, which gets tedious.

The other complaint is the ending. I expected more, but was quite disappointed. On the plus side, they left room open for a sequel which I will be looking forward to. At least the game didn’t solve every problem, only to come back a year later and pretend like there was some need for a sequel. The progression here will be much more natural than many games.

But for only $20, I can overlook those. I’ve enjoyed quite a few hours throughout the last week and a half.

Graphics

Like LocoRoco, this programming team’s previous game, the graphics are all vector based, which makes them quite clean and rather stylistic. The little Patapons are quite cute, and their changes of dress (based on the armor and weapon they have) works very well. The bosses are quite a bit more detailed, and the whole world is rather charming. I really enjoyed all the little Patapon animations as they threw spears, shot arrows, and swung axes. The little Megapon units really remind me of some of the characters in Pepper Land in Yellow Submarine.