Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Another Day of Failed Attempts

I spent a good amount of time today trying to get Prince of Persia to function in a window, but it still didn't work. I tried installing Windows XP on VirtualBox but the 3d support in VirtualBox appears to be the problem. For whatever reason, the card it pretends to be isn't good enough for any of the PoP games.

As a result I'll probably just play through the games without streaming. I might try to see if I can record some of the gameplay to post on my youtube channel with something like FRAPS for those people that are interested in seeing it.

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Windowed Gaming Woes

Yesterday, I saw that the Prince of Persia series was on sale on Steam, so I went ahead and picked up the games. I figured I could try streaming them to let my viewers have a different kind of game to watch. Also, I haven't actually played through any of those games yet. As you might be able to guess from my tone so far, I didn't actually get to stream any of the games. The main problem is that I can't stream a game that is fullscreen on my computer; it has to be windowed. As a result I spent the entire time of my stream last night trying to find a workaround to get the game into windowed mode. I tried something called UniWS (doesn't deal with windowed mode, but does make it widescreen), DXWnd (last updated 5+ years ago), and all forms of alt-enter or -window. It appears that there is no way to actually get the game into windowed mode at the current time.

However, there could be a sneaky work around by running the game in a virtual OS. I downloaded VirtualBox and installed Ubuntu 11.04 on it. Then I installed the 3d drivers from VirtualBox followed by installing wine and steam using wine. After that I mounted my steamapps directory so that I could copy the already downloaded Prince of Persia from my host machine to the virtual machine. Sadly, somewhere in this mix, the evidence of my graphics card didn't get passed down, so the PoP launcher claims that my graphics card doesn't have 3d capabilities. By the time I finished all of this it was nearly 3am, so I decided that I should get some sleep.

The plan for tonight is to try installing windows XP on VirtualBox to see if I can get it to work that way with one less layer of abstraction.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

My first boss kill in Terraria

Just a short post to say that I defeated the Eye of Cthulhu in Terraria last night and that I'm pretty happy about it. Here's a video of the fight:

Terraria Wiki


As those who have been watching my stream know, I've been playing Terraria a lot lately. It's a really fun game with a lot depth and tons of things to find. I personally try to explore and discover things on my own, but there are occasions when I need a little extra help to understand what something is. At times like that I have gone to the Terraria Wiki from wikia. In it's current form, it essentially has all of the essential information, but I think that the organization is somewhat lacking. If you don't mind doing a bit of hunting, you can eventually find what you are looking for.

However, I just now found the official Terraria Wiki, which seems to have a much better organization than the one I've been looking at. I haven't used it much so I can't comment on the completeness of the information, but it should be a good resource nonetheless. So for all of you Terraria players, check them out.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Terraria Stand Alone Server on the Way

So I've really started liking Terraria and wanting to be able to play with my friends. After playing the game shortly after launch, I've been somewhat disappointed in the server software that is available at this point. However, the developers have said that they are going to eventually release separate server software so that people can run dedicated servers. I for one hope that some software is released for Linux because I personally much prefer running servers on Linux. In addition, they intend to allow for easier joining of games using the Steam API, which would mean you could click on a friend to invite him to your game or join his game. To read more that was said by the developer that goes by the name "Blue" read this forum post.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Diablo 3 Follower Preview

Blizzard has recently talked a bit about how followers will work in Diablo 3 and I thought I should say a little something about it. Based on a particular blue post on the subject, the point of followers is to give people playing through on single player a bit of the feel of having a friend with them. The balance of the followers is such that they will be useful on the first playthrough, but will have a severe dropoff in usefulness on the harder difficulties, making multiplayer the much better way to play in the long run. Also, they can provide an introductory feel to multiplayer.

Followers also stop following you when you play with a friend. I personally plan to play the game with friends as often as I possibly can because I really enjoy the social interactions that come along with most of the games I play. To hopefully give you a feel for how followers work in game, here is the video Blizzard released showing follower gameplay.

Monday, May 16, 2011

Trying out Terraria

I decided to pick up a game I saw on Steam today called Terraria. It looked quite interesting being a side scrolling platform type game, but with elements of construction and harvesting. In a way it's very similar to Minecraft, but in only 2 dimensions. You can still build enclosures through the use of wall blocks and they feel a lot like a home you might find in an NES platformer. You can even place tables, and ledges and other things to decorate your homes.

Another good thing about the game is that there seems to be a large variety of enemies to fight in the world. The first thing I found was a green slime, and I hit it a few times to kill it, granting me some coins. Terraria also has some sort of economy built in. I've heard rumors that you can somehow create rooms and have NPCs appear in them that will buy and sell things with you by exchanging currency you get from killing things.

Another feature I enjoy is the large variety of weapons available to use. I logged into my friend's server shortly after installing the game to find people running around with tons of different weapons that I didn't expect. I felt overwhelmed in that world however and left shortly after to explore things a bit on my own single player world. There is a helper guy that starts with you that gives you some idea of how to get started. He recommends you chop down some trees and set up a workbench to craft more complicated designs on. I only had a short time in which I could play the game, so I barely scratched the surface of the many many items there are to craft. This is definitely a game I'll be playing more in the future.

For your information, this is the trailer for the game:

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Console vs. PC Controls (controller vs. mouse+keyboard)

It is pretty common for gamers to discuss which control scheme is better for FPS games. I'll go ahead and state my opinion up front that a mouse is way better for aiming in an FPS and for that reason, PCs win outright in the competition for better First Person Shooter controls. However, despite the fact that many game developers seem to think that shooters are the only kind of game in the world, there are many other kinds of games that people make and that are fun to play. Perhaps a better way to look at these control schemes is to consider their roots.

The console controller with dual analog sticks that is the prevalent control scheme for console games (they even have them on the wii classic controller) first appeared in the late 90s and seems to have won out due to the increased precision of control over a simple direction pad or camera buttons for the 3d games that were being released. Analog sticks provide a much needed increase in the number of levels of movement available so that the player can in theory move exactly where he wants to. In practice, the issue is nearly always bad camera control, either with automatic camera movement, or with player controlled movement that can sometime be too sensitive, or too slow, or both. Camera control is a very hard problem for console games.

For this same reason, first person shooters do not work well with an analog stick camera control. If you turn the sensitivity way up to be able to turn around fast enough, you lose the ability to make small movements to aim accurately, while if you have the sensitivity low enough to be able to aim accurately, you can no longer turn around fast enough to deal with threats behind you (or circling around you). The mouse somewhat solves this problem, although there is still a limit to how far it can move, based on the size of the mousepad. In practice, there is nearly always a sensitivity level you can choose for a mouse that allows for all of the necessary movements quick enough while maintaining the subtle precision aiming capabilities.

The weakness of PC controls comes from the keyboard, which was designed to mimic the text input of a typewriter. The keyboard is quite good when you need to input text, which is occasionally important for some video games (particularly ones with text chat in multiplayer). However, when used to control movement, the keyboard is much less accurate and only provides two options for each direction of control, on or off. If you want to move forward, you can press the move forward button (usually 'w') and you move forward, but you can't really slow down your movement by only pressing it halfway down. The common solution is to have a speed modifier button for "sneak", "walk" and "run" speeds. This input is still a digital choice and does not allow for the full analog selection provided by an analog stick. Thus for precision of character movement, a console analog stick wins out. A key point to realize is that for FPS games it is much more important to be able to face and aim the right way than it is to be able to move to a slightly more precise position, giving PC controls the advantage. In platformers, where precision of movement is more important, the analog input of controllers wins out every time.

In this post I've discussed the two control schemes I deal with most of the time in my gaming, however there are many more possible controls that have been explored that you can read about on wikipedia. Touch screens and motion sensors seem to be a newer input type that is growing in install base, but I believe there has yet to be seen a game that best uses those inputs for gaming. FPS games control poorly, or at least non-intuitively using motion and touch controls. I am excited to see what things people can come up with to innovate gaming.

Friday, May 13, 2011

Starcraft 2, Day 2

On my second day of Starcraft 2, my friend Phorisc wanted to play with me so I started by playing a 2v2 where we placed into Diamond. Then we played some 3v3s with Bothari and after that I played my 1v1 matches for the day. Sadly, my stream stopped working somewhere in the middle of the 3v3 matches so my triumphant victory while playing terran (my worst race) was not recorded and I can't share it with you. Instead, I have to share the placement match with Phorisc on my team. I also helped Phorisc set up his stream by pointing him at my Streaming Tutorial.

Thursday, May 12, 2011

HoN Turns 1 Year Old

Heroes of Newerth, a game similar to League of Legends and Defense of the Ancients (or SotiS for SC2) has reached a year since it first released and left beta. I've played it a very little on and off since the beta, and I've never really been able to get into it. I think the reason I haven't gotten into it is because I don't have the patience to endure the learning curve while dealing with a bunch of angry players that hate that I haven't played it as much as they have. In any case, S2Games (the company that makes it) has a bunch of stuff planned to celebrate the occasion, so I might have to play a couple games again just to remind myself how little I enjoy it. I must say that the game does seem well tuned for people that are already very experienced at it (or DotA since it was made to appeal to hardcore DotA players).

Probably the best news for people that aren't ready to spend $30 on the game just yet is that they're allowing anyone to play for free for 11 days as part of this celebration so if you want to try it go to their website and sign up.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Tharesan's Shinobi Texture Pack

My friend Tharesan made a new Texture Pack. Here's my video showing off some of the blocks and a link to the planetminecraft download. If you like it support his pack by upvoting it.


Tharesan's Shinobi Pack
View Tharesan's Shinobi Pack


Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Starcraft 2 Journey from Bronze Day 1

It has been a long time since I've played Starcraft 2 regularly and I decided I should give it a shot again. Last season my 1v1 was primarily just worker rushes to farm portraits. I didn't really get all that many, but I did manage to get my league down from gold that I placed into to bronze. As a result, my placement for Season 2 is also bronze (after 1 match).

Today I started my 1v1 journey on the ladder. I played a handful of matches, and to my surprise, I'm bad enough to actually lose to bronze players. I really feel like I need to get better at the basics of the game, like macro, micro and understanding the flow of the game first before I worry about strategy. I'm playing random because I feel like I should get to know all of the races and how they play, even though I feel like zerg is my strongest race (and favorite to play). Hopefully I discover some useful things over the next little while as I continue to try to play a few games a day (casually like a normal person) and be able to move up to at least Platinum if not Diamond.

If you have any suggestions for what strategy I should use as I attempt to improve in Starcraft, feel free to leave a reply here or on my facebook wall (or twitter @cordoro1). I do plan to stream the whole thing.

Monday, May 9, 2011

Diablo 3 Beta Tentative Date

Okay, I've posted a lot today already but I feel like I need to add one more thing because of how important Diablo 3 is to me. According to the Blizzard post tracker on d3db.com, the Diablo 3 Beta is planned to begin somewhere between July 1st and September 30th, 2011. I am very excited.

LoL Tenacity

So I just heard that they're adding a new stat to League of Legends called "Tenacity" so that they could add a few more items that have the stat. For a list of the items and a discussion on the topic, see this post on the LoL forums. Tenacity is basically the stat that Mercury Treads had before, that reduces the duration of crowd control effects. I believe the way it works, is that each point of tenacity gives you 1% duration reduction of CC. The big catch is that tenacity doesn't stack and you only get the bonus from the single item you have with the highest value. At this point, only two values exist, 35 from merc treads, or 25 from everything else you can get, meaning you get 35% CC reduction from merc treads and 25% from any of the other items you can get. I think this change will give many more options to many of the champions in the game that were particularly vulnerable to CC since you no longer have to get merc treads to resist it.

Just for more complete information, here are the new and changed items related to tenacity:

Mercury's Treads (Rework)
Cost: 1200
+35 Tenacity, +25 Magic resist.
Enhanced movement speed 2

Cloak and Dagger :
Cost: 1450
+25 Tenacity
+20% attack speed
+20% critical chance

Moonflair Spellblade :
Cost: 1290
+50 Ability power
+ 25 Tenacity

Eleisa's Miracle :
+25 Health Regen per 5 sec
+20 Mana Regen per 5 sec
+25 Tenacity

It looks like there's a tenacity item here for almost everyone that could want one. Here's the patch notes video if you want to hear about the changes straight from Riot:

GameDev Story

So last night I was originally planning on doing some streaming of Recettear or something, but before that I decided to play a little GameDev Story (links in the next paragraph). After a couple hours I decided I was just going to play all the way to the end of year 20 where the scores stop being reported to Game Center. I ended up taking quite a few hours and getting about 4 games of the year before the end of year 20, but the entire thing took quite a few hours. My iPod Touch's battery ran out during the time, so I had to plug it in to charge so that I could keep playing. This game is ridiculously addicting, and I'm afraid I need to keep myself from ever playing it again so that I don't get sucked into not following through with my plans.


For those that aren't familiar with what GameDev Story is, it's a game for iOS (and Android too I think) where you run a game development studio. You hire employees, keep them motivated, give them different jobs within the studio, and develop a bunch of games with an array of genres and game types. One of my best games from last night was an Action Ninja game. I also had an Online Sim History game that did quite well too for some reason. As the game progresses, different consoles come out, and developing for a console always results in better returns than developing for the PC, but they have higher licensing and development costs. Once you move in to a large office and develop a game that makes it into the "hall of fame" you can develop sequels. I would never have imagined that I would develop upwards of 10 sequels to my Checkers Board game, but they always sold well and would score very high in graphics if you can believe it. The game is pretty fun, especially for people who have a desire to some day work in the video game industry. You can develop all sorts of strange combinations, like Robot Trivia games.

If you do decide to pick up the game, please try to keep track of your life so that you don't lose it. This game is way more addicting than World of Warcraft.

Sunday, May 8, 2011

Gaming Poll

I decided I wanted to remove the poll from my blog footer so I figured it would be good to keep a record of what it looked like when it close. This post just holds a screenshot of the final state of the poll. Thanks to everyone who voted.

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Indie Game: Dwarfs!?

So today I decided to try out a new game that I haven't heard of before, so I got a game called Dwarfs!? on steam. The first thing I noticed from the video is that the dwarfs seem kinda like ants digging around underground, and honestly it feels a little that way. I consider this to be a good thing. But imagine if your ant could also fight using axes to keep back the mystical shaman they find hidden in caves. In reality, the standard game mode (called arcade) is quite simple, and gives you a time limit in which to explore as much area and as many caves as possible, while defeating any baddies you find along the way. Oh, and as dwarfs, you're also trying to collect treasure. As you gather treasure, you can use it to train more troops, close of dangerous areas of the map, and build new outposts to train troops to defend your miners. At $10 it's a pretty good buy that I would recommend to pretty much anyone that wants some single player strategy gaming.

Oh, and coincidentally, my high score at the time of writing is 5th on the 5 minute arcade mode on Normal difficulty. Here is the video:

I beat Portal 2!

So last night I beat Portal 2 on my stream and I must say, the game was a great experience. The first thing you notice when the game starts is that it has a great sense of humor. The script is very well written and the voice actors execute it extraordinarily well. Even when I wasn't laughing, I felt like I was enjoying myself with my virtual friend in the game. Another game that similarly has good writing and makes you feel like you're rarely left alone is Uncharted 2. I think the technique that both of these games use to keep the flow natural and enjoyable is to play the voices at times where you are platforming, allowing the player to do a little bit of multitasking by advancing story and gameplay simultaneously.

In terms of the levels, I believe the design team did an excellent job of keeping the objectives clear while still providing challenge and opportunities to think about how to solve the puzzles. Nothing is more obnoxious than a level where there is no clear goal, but Valve avoids those problems for the most part. The various features available in the game build on each other as you progress, so you are never presented with a huge jump in difficulty, but there is always a new challenge to deal with, so it never feels boring. Beyond the level design, the environments are varied and interesting, and span a large amount of Aperture Science history, giving you a look into the past for the lab you are being tested in. Portal 2 is a game that I highly recommend to everyone that has any inclination to play video games. If you'd rather just watch someone else play it, you can check out my playthrough on my Portal 2 youtube playlist.

Monday, May 2, 2011

Moving to justin.tv

Even though I originally started streaming on ustream, I had recently been having problems with it. The main problem was that videos I recorded there would not upload to youtube automatically and required me downloading them, and then compressing them again in another program. This conversion resulted in a huge loss in quality, and the audio and video being out of sync. Clearly this is not a good way to make youtube videos, so I decided to switch to streaming on justin.tv.

There are a couple benefits to justin.tv from my point of view, and the main one is that uploading videos to youtube is way easier. Whenever I stream to justin.tv, the video is automatically saved (for 7 days). While the video is saved, I can easily go back and watch it to make highlights. These highlights can then be uploaded to youtube, and the best part is that justin.tv will split the video automatically for you, so that you can upload something that is longer than 15 minutes in multiple parts. I used to have to watch the clock to try to stop the video every 10-15 minutes to be sure the video would upload. The other benefit to streaming on justin.tv is that they seem to have way more gaming streams, meaning people that are interested in watching games will be more likely to be on justin.tv already, giving me a greater chance of higher exposure.