Ffffffffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccccck.

That was what I said last night when I saw the water running down the inside of the window, rather than the outside. Two of the front windows in the downstairs of this house have been the bane of my existance every god damned time it rains. It’s not like the leaks are huge, but it is like we’ve had three *sets* of people try to come and fix them, to no avail. It’s insane, a complete pain in the ass, and my suspicion is that it’s gonna cost something like 10 grand to fix by the time it’s done. I’ve already spent $4K to have basically no progress made.

Ahg. Dammit.

At 5:53pm today, Paper Cup Games submitted a complete GBA game, entitled “Aura” to the gbadev.org development contest. In a month and a half of our spare time, five of us created a music-based puzzle game that not only looks good, is relatively stable, and polished, but most importantly, is fun. I’ve now been part of three videogames – Seaman, The Urbz, and Aura – and by far, my proudest accomplishment is collaborating with this small team, to start from scratch, and release something that is *really* excellent.

I think for me, the two things to take away from this are that 1.) we managed the scope of the project well from start to finish. In all of our previous endeavors, despite efforts to keep things as simple as possible, they’ve always spiralled out of control into these really elaborate, incredibly difficult to implement schemes. This was simple – something that seems *almost* trivial at first, but then is substantial in the details of the implementation. Having something that we could make substantial progress on with the resources and time we had was absolutely critical, and was a huge part of the difference between finishing a program, and not. 2.) Colin approached the issue with the assumption that it would be done on time, provided we just got to work on it. This is something that we’ve *always* had a problem with, for PCG – the simple fact that we all have other lives to attend to as well has always pushed the PCG projects to the back burner. However, because of the ever-looming contest deadline, and the *assumption* that it would be done, if we simply *worked* on it made a tremendous, and vital difference. Because we’ve always been busy – or someone’s always been busy, in the past, I’ve always been hesitant about asking for deadlines, or making people commit to certain tasks.

Because of that simple agreement, though, things got done. The programmers (Max and Stephen) simply started working. Once there was a base to work on, I got did the art. When we could have sound, we made sounds. Sometimes, I was late – maybe habits are just hard to break. But then the last week and a half, the majority of my free time, every night, was devoted solely to getting Aura as finished as possible. We ended up with three four puzzles, but they’re good, and for someone who hasn’t solved them, they’re probably a minimum of a half hour of gameplay. Gameplay that is consistently fun, and challenging in a wide variety of ways.

One of the other things that I think I took away from this is that the details make a huge difference. Small graphical tweaks in the last week took the project from looking like a good amateur project, to something that I’d be willing to show publishers, in the efforts to actually get this commercially published. Are we done? Of course not. There’s a zillion other good ideas we didn’t have time to implement. There’s thousands of new puzzles to be made, and with additional sample space, we could have a tremendous variety of musical styles to work with, not to mention an endless construction-set environment where users can create their own puzzles. We’re about a third of the way towards that last goal already.

Congratulations to us. I’m astonished at the quality, and the magnitude of our achievement. I’m proud to have been a part of it, and I’m proud to have worked with such a brilliant bunch

Games:

Oops. I forgot. By and large, I dislike Resident Evil-style “survival horror” games. This would encompass Resident Evil, and Silent Hill, to name the two big franchises. My first foray into this genre was Resident Evil: Code Veronica – I’d played RE a good long while ago, but I never played too much of it, so I never got bogged down by the conventions of the medium. RE:CV was great looking, for the time, but the limited, and limiting save points bothered me to no end, and one day, after playing for two hours JUST to find a save spot, I quit, and never played it again.

A year or two later, I picked up Silent Hill 2. I’d heard it was ridiculous in its creepiness, and figured, what the hey. Sure enough, so long as no one’s talking, it’s scary as all get out. But the combat sucks, the puzzles aren’t well-integrated into the story, and basically, it’s like a version of Myst where everything’s dark, and the control sucks. Whee. I never finished the game, ’cause I was so frustrated with it, and though it’s definitely a creepy game, there was just no point in playing it anymore. The mechanics were killing any sense of fun I was having.

Fast forward another year+, and I picked up the RE remake for the Gamecube. For $10, I couldn’t go wrong, right? Well, while the REmake looked really nice, all the mecahnics and game design were at this point something like six years old, and it showed. Part of the gameplay is managing your inventory slots. And not a small, trivial part of the gameplay, but one of the major, central game mecahnics. Gah. It’s AWFUL. The other mechanics involve solving Myst-like puzzles, and running to and from with some of the worst control schemes ever implemented in a modern game.

Another six months pass, and I pick up Silent Hill 3 from the local EB for $10. How could I go wrong? Gah. While this is a really, really nice looking game, the problem is that it sucks. The puzzles, again, make no fucking sense, and part of the gameplay involves running around in corridors so dark, you literally cannot see *anything*. Is this fun to some people? I just don’t get it. After about two hours, I just gave up, sick of not being able to see anything, or trying to solve ridiculous, nonsensical, context-free puzzles. Bleah.

I think the problem is that the Survival Horror games I’ve gotten have been cheap, and I keep expecting that since the last one sucked so bad, maybe this one will be good. I keep being wrong, man. Really goddamn wrong.

kill.switch – definitely overlooked. While it’s a pretty simple third person action game, the cover-fire mechanic is really well done, and remains fun throughout, much like Max Payne’s bullet-time effect. It’s a short game, with a surprisingly weird and interesting story. Given that it’s $10 a lot of places, it’s definitely worth picking up.

Second Sight – again, definitely overlooked. Almost a month after its release, it’s easy to find at $20 almost anywhere. It has a very distinct “Free Radical” feel, which includes both the controls and the character designs. The voice acting is pretty awful, at least at the beginning, and the graphics and controls, well, if you like Timesplitters, it’s not *too* far from that. But the gameplay’s quite good. A wide variety of psychic powers complement the solid run & gun action, to create a game where both force and stealth, combined with some forethought, make for a surprisingly fun game. Add to that one of the cleverest plot twists I’ve seen in a game recently, and you’ve got one of my favorite recent games. Definitely overlooked, and I wouldn’t expect it to really find its fanbase, but worth picking up, for sure.

Yourself!Fitness – wha? Yeah. It’s a fitness program for the xbox. Is it overlooked? Well, it’s certainly not mainstream, though I understand it’s selling better than ResponDesign actually expected. Basically, you undergo a series of diagnostic exercises, then the program generates a series of workouts based on your fitness level, and your responses to some queries throughout the workout. It’s consistently interesting, varied, and a good workout, and a hell of a lot better than any workout tape. Both me and my finacee are using it, though not as regularly as either of us should. It also asks what sorts of equipment you have – weights, step, ball, whatever, and incorporates whatever you have into your workout. Great stuff.

Headhunter: Redemption – Just about as generic a third person action game as you can get. Though the targetting mechanic is unique – your target sways back and forth, and timing your shot is as much a rhythm thing as anything else – the game itself is so … underwhelming in its ambition, that it’s really hard to get into with any sort of enthusiasm.

Lord of the Rings: The Third Age – though the story’s really weirdly told, though re-narrated cinematic clips from the movie, it’s surprisingly … fun. At least through the 65% mark, which is where I am not. There’s a lot of battles where you’ll wipe out three guys, to have them replenished over and over until you’ve basically killed 20+ enemies – those are irritating. But then again, the fight with the Balrog was one of the most compelling battles I’ve seen in a Japanese-style RPG. Crazy stuff. Strangely compelling – I think part of it is seeing “more” of the locations in the movies. Wandering around Helm’s Deep is neat. Wandering around Moria is neat. Not much character development, not a lot of story, so if that’s what you’re here for, go elsewhere. But I expected to be extraordinarily underwhelmed, and strangely, I wasn’t.

Catwoman: One of the worst games I’ve ever played. Rightfully overlooked, and should remain that way. In this day and age, the right stick is for camera control. If you want to do something else, like control a whip, fine – make it so you have to hold down a trigger and use the right stick, but by default, the right stick controls the camera. Period. You screw that up, and you’re not worth playing.

Galleon: Awful graphics, but pretty good animation, and a really excellent sense of scale in the levels. The story is charming, and the general exploration is reasonably fun, but it feels like about a quarter of the necessary animations are simply missing, and the “momentum” aspect of the control is put to use, but it really sort of sucks, and makes moving Rhama around the levels a chore sometimes. If you’re *really* interested in what the next Tomb Raider might be like, it’s worth picking up, but otherwise, it’s a very flawed game, with some pretty excellent ideas.

Games:

Picked up Ghost Recon 2 a couple days ago, and it’s quite good, but a little … weird, given that it’s set in North Korea, and my fiancee’s Korean. So it’s a little unsettling. I’ll probably be sticking mostly to the multiplayer aspects. Halo 2’s been still the mainstay of my multiplayer time, by far. Awesome stuff. Also picked up Doom 3 at EB’s Black Friday sale, which was a cool $20. Figured I’d see if my comp can run it. Can it? Just freakin’ barely. I get maybe 15 FPS when it’s slow, and 30 FPS when it’s “fast”. The lack of an AGP slot in this machine is a killer, ’cause otherwise, it’s pretty quick.

Also been playing a lot of Need for Speed Underground 2. Good game, but the rubber-bandiness of the AI is getting to me. I can be ahead by 7 seconds going into the last lap, and what happens in *most* circuit races is that on the last turn, I get nudged into a 180 by a competitor. It’s getting… frustrating, because there’s essentially no way to really be “good”. I understand the need to keep the challenge level relatively high, but I fucking HATE these stupid rubber-band AI’s, because they really kill the notion of being a “racing” game. I want to get better. I want to dust the opposition when I do well, and get spanked when I don’t. With the rubber-band AI, neither ever happens. It’s always close, whether I drive like a blind idiot, or Ayrton Senna. It just doesn’t matter, and it kills a lot of the fun of the game. Still, even though it’s frustrating, the customization is pretty cool, and the sense of “progress” as you level up the parts in your car is nice. ‘course, that AI kills it after a few races, but what can you do?

Ah, Thanksgiving. WAY too much food, but what can you do? I thought an 8.5lb bird would be too small – and it was small – don’t get me wrong, but with the ridiculous amounts of other food we had, it was… well, ridiculous. Lessee – we had a brined, deep-fried turkey (brined in 2 gallons of water, with two each lemons and oranges, quartered, a cup of salt, a cup of brown sugar, thyme, and rosemary), stuffing with sausage (prepared separately from the bird), garlic mashed potatoes, green beans, roasted garlic, a yam casserole, biscuits, orange-cranberry dressing, a small Niman Ranch ham, homemade gravy, sugar snap peas, salad, then homemade pecan pie, pumpkin cheesecake, and cookies, with some unfortunately improperly frozen homemade maple ice cream.

Of that, after seven people ate ’till they were silly, almost half the food is now leftovers, which will end up as sandwiches over the next freakin’ week. Tasty.

Tomorrow’s Black Friday, but I don’t intend to get in line at like, 3am. At the most, I’m gonna swing over to EB and see if they still have $20 copies of Doom 3.

Hope y’all had a happy T-day. Tomorrow, I gotta get to work on the GBA game. Dayum. Maybe some GR2, just for laughs, or a trip with the doggius to the beach.

To take the format of a friend’s blog:

Pissing me off today: Santa Claus

What is it about Santa Claus that people seem so protective about? Oh, you’ve lost the “spirit of Christmas”? What fucking spirit? That I should buy a Hallmark ™ card, spend hundreds of dollars on frivolous decorations, and then pretend that an imaginary man in a red suit *came down my chimney* and delivered the presents I purchased? Not that we even *have* a chimney.

But it really does this one-two combination of freaking me out and disgusting me when you see movies like The Polar Express, or whatever, talking about how people almost lost their faith in Santa Claus, but then had it reaffirmed, and oh, isn’t Christmas just *so great*!?!? Let’s go buy some stuff. Maybe Polar Express branded gift merchandise! Gah. Fuck that.

Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Leprechauns, Mr. Kwanzaa, and Channukah-Man are some of the most ridiculous and inane concoctions I’ve ever heard of. And right this second, if what you’re thinking is, “Boy, you’ve really got no holiday spirit!” or, “Boy, what happened to your imagination?” Let me tell you this: Imagination isn’t thinking that a giant red man invades the sanctity of your home and leaves unidentified packages with mysterious contents, because you’ve been brainwashed since you were a child. *Imagination* is something else entirely. I love the concept of “holiday spirit,” which would include things like “giving” and “love of family” – but let me tell you, I don’t need an imaginary man to tell me these things, or help me to remember that I love my family, and like giving people things.

And I feel sad – genuinely sad – for people who do, or think their kids do.

Man. So the game’s coming along really well – the other people on the team have really been kicking ass, and it’s great to have a first playable there. I’ve got a bunch of sprite and sound stuff to do this week, which is cool, ’cause it’s really grea to be able to see almost all of it in game nigh-instantaneously. Awesome stuff – I think it’ll be excellent when it’s done.

Crazy, though. Property tax payment coming up, engagement ring to pay for, and the most insane glut of videogames ever released in a single season. What’s a person to do? Sell their organs? Donate blood? Madness. I could probably trade in a couple games that I’ll never play and don’t particularly like, and pick up at least Alien Hominid, or Ratchet & Clank, or something, but man. Madness. True, true madness. On the “man, if I had $150, I’d get these right away burner” – Alien Hominid, Ratchet & Clank 3, Ghost Recon 2. Well, $120 would get all three, I think, but still.

Games:

Finished Halo 2. Though it has one of the most unsatisfying endings ever, and part of the gameplay is one of my pet peeves (switching playable characters), I really enjoyed it. I really like the atmosphere, and I really want to find out how it all turns out. Been playing a lot of the multiplayer, and as a multiplayer game, it’ll be around for a long time, I think. Picked up the soundtrack on sale at Best Buy, and though it doesn’t have what I wanted (which was the instrumental version of the song “Blow Me Away” by Breaking Benjamin (the lyrics are really pretty insipid), I like it quite a bit, as well. Also picked up a copy of Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando, which I’d already finished, ’cause I found it in non-Greatest Hits packaging, and I don’t actually own a copy, and it’s a really stellar game. One of these days, I’ll also pick up R&C III. Maybe when the INSANE GLUT of games dies down.

Also been playing NFSU 2 and LOTR:TTA. Both EA games, which I got at discounts from the store. Had I not gotten these cheap, I’d undoubtedly be playing GR2 and R&C III already. Ah, well. NFSU 2 I didn’t really like at first, but it’s growing on me. The city’s a pretty interesting environment, and though it’s really “more of the same” in terms of the actual racing, there’s a lot of races, and a good variety of tracks. TTA is a weird one, which I may have already elaborated on, so I’ll put that off ’till later.

Looking to get Alien Hominid, but none of the stores I’ve been to have it in stock. Alas! Perhaps next week, or sometime tomorrow, I’ll swing by the other local EB, and trade in Catwoman, which is well and truly awful (and I got it for $5, and the $5 went to charity, so whatever), and maybe Drake of the 99 Dragons, also awful, also for $5, though not to charity, alas.

Also played with a demo DS unit, and I remain relatively unimpressed. I used the stylus control on the Metroid demo, and it actually worked alright… for the demo unit. Without the demo unit stand holding the DS in place, though, I have NO IDEA how I would play this game. It’d be nigh-impossible to use the stylus with one hand, move with the other, and also mysteriously levitate the unit in some marginally stable way. The thing’s also fucking ginormous, and I wouldn’t be able to carry it in my pocket even if I wanted to. So, between the DS’s ergonomic catastrophe, and the PSP’s awful battery life, which one will come out the winner? Easy. The GBA.

Anger, and Politics:

There’s a lot of times in political discourse, when the “angry liberal” gets trotted out. Apparently, according to the way it seems to be presented, being an “angry liberal” is the worst kind of sin, and beyond the pale in modern political discourse.

Fuck that.

There are things that one should be angry about. Not only should a person be angry about them, it is inconceivable to me that people are *not* angry about them, liberal, conservative, or independant. We were brought to war on false pretenses. It’s becoming increasingly documented, despite being obvious from the get-go, that the buildup to war was predicated on lies. Lies about WMD, lies about Iraq’s terrorist ties, and lies about Saddam Hussein’s threat to the US. As a result, more than a thousand American lives have been lost, we’re more than two hundred billion dollars in the hole, and on the order of a hundred thousand Iraqis have been killed. Civilians, not insurgents. Innocents, not terrorists. And I’m angry about it. I think it is *right* to be angry about it, and I think it is *wrong* NOT to be angry about it.

But there are other things. Things like the speeches at the Clinton Library this morning, during its dedication. People talking about the Family Medical Leave Act, and how it helped on man spend his daughter’s last month with her, instead of at work. Talking about programs that helped them, as people. About how crime went down because of Clinton’s policies – every year he was in office. And looking at how the Republicans want to cut these programs, or have already cut them, and how under Bush, crime has *increased* every year, abortion rates have gone up, and basically every measure of the quality of life in our country has gone down. And it makes me angry – really, truly, deeply angry, that two weeks ago, this nightmare could have come to an end. We had a choice, as a country, to end it, and we didn’t. We didn’t. Because of some bigoted, fearful, ignorant hateful shits, we’re stuck with this miserable bastard for another four years.

So, fuck you, Republicans. Fuck you, Neoconservatives. Every single person who voted for Bush – fuck you. You assholes are going to ruin this great country, on the back of your brain-dead moron leader. Good job. Some of you are fond of telling the ones of us who made the *correct* judgement about policy, war, and why we went to war that since we were so unpatriotic, we should leave the country. Fuck that. What we should do is let our anger run free. We should stop you at every opportunity. We should block all of your policy. We should grind this country to a dead stop. You did it to us years ago when you impeached Clinton over something so trivial as an extramarital affair. Bush lied to us and people are dying on a daily basis because of it. The common defense seems to be that he’s too stupid to understand when he’s lying, so it’s not really his fault. Too fucking bad, the buck stops with him. God, I hate the idiots who voted for this asshole. Every god damned one. The world could have been a better place, today, if you fuckers all just drove off a cliff. And instead, here we are.