Great Minds Think Different

I got my start in first-person shooters with Unreal. It was released in ‘98 but I didn’t play it until ‘99, when I was in middle school and joined the after-school “computer club” set up by my science teacher. This was basically just an excuse for a bunch of nerds (my teacher was one himself) to take over the school’s computer lab, eat pizza and play deathmatches in Unreal late into the night.

I had so much fun with it in these after-school parties that I eventually convinced my parents to buy it for me, at which point I tried the single-player story mode. This was a watershed moment in the story of my connection to gaming. This was 1999 and Unreal’s graphics were still cutting-edge; I was astounded at how good this world looked.

Less than an hour into the game, Unreal gave me what is still the most frightening gaming moment I’ve ever experienced. You’re entering some mines; the only enemies you’ve fought so far are big thuggy things with rocket launchers on their arms. Fighting them is pretty routine: you shoot them in the head with your pistol a bunch of times while dodging rockets. The first one you meet startles you but you figure out that they’re not a huge threat. So you’re entering some mines, and you need to solve a puzzle: there’s a force field across the doorway you need to go through, and you need to turn it off. Some exploration reveals a “Force Field Control Area” at the end of a little maze of corridors. You push some switches to turn off the force fields. As you’re making your way out, suddenly some barriers shoot out of the walls and trap you in a bend of the corridor. Then the lights at one end of the corridor start to go out, one by one. And then at the other end. And then you’re almost in total darkness: the only light is a long way away, but at least you can orient yourself. Total silence. Then you hear a growl. Before you have too much time to think about it, some bright energy balls come flying at you from the darkness. In their light you catch glimpses of a new type of monster, running towards you. In a blink it’s right next to you and slashing you with its claws.

If you had presence of mind, you would drop a flare as soon as shit started going down. If you’re like me playing this section for the first time, you freeze up in terror except for your mouse hand, which shoots pretty much randomly until you die. I was genuinely terrified. Like I said, it’s still certainly the most scared I’ve ever been while playing a game, and even when I play it now I still find it scary, even though I know exactly what’s going on. That scene is a masterpiece.

This is the introduction of the primary evil creature of the game, the Skaarj. At the time I just thought of it as “that absurdly scary part that I never want to play ever again”. Now I realize that it’s a classic example of the cinematic enemy introduction, well before its time. Most action-adventure FPSs I’ve enjoyed since then have made good use of cinematic introductions for their flagship enemies: HL2’s intro for zombies, HL2E2’s intro for Hunters, Halo’s intro for the Flood, Bioshock’s intro for Big Daddies. Unreal even does the trick of letting you catch a glimpse of the enemy before you actually have to fight it (inside the crashed spaceship, the first level).

Unreal was a groundbreaking FPS. Half-Life 1 gets a bunch of credit for setting new standards in the genre, but Unreal came out before HL1 and had action-adventure gameplay pretty much figured out already. Granted, Unreal retained a few vestiges of the Doom style of FPS: it had no meaningful NPC interaction beyond a few helpful four-armed dudes who would lead you to caches of ammo and armor, and you could succeed at it basically by charging around and shooting everything. Its storytelling is pretty weak: you figure out what’s going on based on messages that pop up on your universal translator device.

After playing modern FPSs, the scale of Unreal seems pretty tame. There’s not much world there, and it offers a disappointing lack of immersion now. There’s not much enemy AI to speak of (although at the time critics heaped praise on it), and of course the physics are pretty primitive, this being before the days of Havok. There is great attention to detail in level design – there are tons of hidden places to explore – but of course there isn’t much detail as measured in polygons. The sense of immersion is broken when you come across a heap of dirt that is obviously just a tetrahedron, or when an enemy slides sideways while doing a walking-forward animation.

Despite the handicap of designing for less powerful hardware, the makers of Unreal had an impressively keen design sense. They knew how to draw you in. From the very beginning it’s clear that this is a break from the existing FPS tradition: you don’t get a gun until almost the end of the first level, and you don’t fight an enemy until halfway through the second. The first level is designed to scare you without being dangerous. As you wander around the wrecked spaceship, you encounter dead bodies (with unintentionally hilarious low-res facial expressions), hear pained screams in the distance, and pick up panicked messages on your translator. You reach a large, sweeping outdoor environment that pushed the limits of hardware at the time. (Unfortunately the designers did not have a Valve-like eye for cinematic visual design, but it was impressive nonetheless.) As you go farther in the game, the designers’ mastery of atmosphere becomes apparent. You soon realize that the four-armed guys are docile, and are in fact as threatened by the Skaarj’s presence as you are. You observe how they’re downtrodden and enslaved by the Skaarj, and you start to get concerned for them. My impression is of a huge amount of design talent that manifests itself in slightly unrefined ways.

Unreal’s overriding weakness, and perhaps an inherited trait from its adventure-game influence, is a lack of direction for the player. You’re dumped unceremoniously into the world with no idea of what you’re supposed to be doing. You can get a vague picture of the backstory: you were a prisoner on a spaceship that got caught in the gravitational pull of an uncharted planet, you crash-landed and everyone else died. Of course you have no choice but to do the game’s bidding: go out into the world and shoot stuff. It’s never really made clear what your ultimate goal is. Presumably it’s to get the hell out of there, but obviously you have no idea how. So I’m left with the feeling that I’m just running through this world shooting stuff for its own sake; I’m not doing it as a means to an end. Admittedly, that’s probably how the designers intended it: as a shooter at heart, with a bit of a story stapled on. And I’ve been spoiled by the excellent storytelling of games like Bioshock, where the story is deep, the world is mind-blowingly rich in atmospheric detail and the source of your motivation is the central turning point of the story.

Anyway, the whole point of this was that I’ve been thinking a lot about game design lately, and coincidentally had a hankering to play an old game. I played Unreal with a more critical eye and realized that the terrifying Skaarj introduction scene was actually a classic cinematic enemy intro, thus spawning all my other thoughts and ruminations on Unreal’s design. I’m actually in the midst of writing a huge long piece on the design of Half-Life 2 and its episodes. Maybe that will be done sometime.

StarCraft II. Tagline: “Hell, it’s about time”.

I must confess to a bit of disappointment. I expected to be shitting my pants in excitement when they announced it. What is it really, though? StarCraft with a new graphics engine and some new units. Not even a new race.

Admittedly, SC is a hard act to follow. And of course I’m judging on the basis of the preview site and some screenshots. The cinematic trailer is incredible, BTW. If they put cinematics like that in the game, I will be a happy camper. The graphics do look quite flashy.

The storyline had better be good. To me, that’s one of the things that makes the original SC immortal, even though almost nobody plays SC for the story anymore. I’ll definitely play SC2 for the story.

It is indeed about time.

I’m of the opinion that makers of hardware-intensive games like FPSs should always include a “holy shit mode” of the graphics. By that I mean a setting where the graphics are so ludicrously detailed that no current computer could possibly run that mode without choking. Just pull out all the stops. Don’t consider resource limits.

The reason for this is that pretty soon, the resource limits you were working under will be gone. That’s just how the industry works. And if a game has a holy shit mode, you can run it on a top-of-the-line machine three years after its release and have it look like it’s current.

Quake 4, for example, seems to have a holy shit mode. I can tell it’s a holy shit mode because if you turn the texture detail high enough, it automatically lowers the resolution and gives you a warning saying “this mode uses more than 500MB of texture memory, and enabling it is not recommended.” Bring it, I said, dismissing the warning and putting the resolution back up to full. That actually caused the frame rate to slow ever so slightly in one place in-game. Disappointingly, though, it didn’t seem like the textures were actually that incredibly detailed.

UT2004 doesn’t have a holy shit mode. With the graphics turned up to max I still can’t get the frame rate to slow even a tiny bit. While I admit this is good for gaming purposes, I want holy shit graphics now that my rig can handle them.

Scrubs 607 is a complete travesty. Travesty. Travesty travesty travesty. It’s terrible.

The Colts won the Super Bowl. But the media are forgetting that, in fact, all of America won because there were two black head coaches in the Super Bowl. OK, I promise I will stop harping on that. I just had to get one last jab in.

I think it’s a strange phenomenon in video games that if one plays two games that are part of the same series, one almost inevitably thinks the first game one played is better, even if it is older and the graphics are suckier. In my case, for example, I like Unreal Tournament the original a lot more than UT2004. Also, I can’t stand the graphics of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time because the first Zelda game I played was Twilight Princess, but to those who played OoT before TP, OoT is inevitably “better”. The graphics are a travesty (can you tell I love that word?), what with the main character being made of something like six polygons, and the music is MIDI. But how many longtime Zelda players will say TP is better despite its better graphics and music (and control system, if you play the Wii version)? Not many, I’d wager.

I think the UT-Zelda analogy might not be apt, though — because there are a lot of things that make UT palpably better than UT2004, those including music, weapons, game modes, maps, and general atmosphere. UT2004 has a graphics engine that is, I think, two generations ahead of UT’s, but the gameplay and maps are pretty much a travesty. I admit that Onslaught mode is bloody amazing, but that’s about it. Assault mode is a travesty. And the music is — can you guess? — a travesty. Onslaught mode could be so much more fun if there were decent music.

GAH I SHOULD BE WORKING

SHIT WHATS AN ALGORITHM

Warning: this post is completely devoid of any intellectual merit.

The Lightning Gun in UT2004 has grown on me. I used to think it was a gimpy replacement for the original UT sniper rifle (which I guess was deemed overpowered), but I’ve gotten used to it. I thought its two main disadvantages (incredibly slow rate of fire and slight delay between pressing mouse and actual firing) made it worthless.

Then I played a deathmatch on skill level “Skilled” and went through the entire game (25 frags) without dying, using only the Lightning Gun. This was mainly thanks to the Damage Amp and the Berserk adrenaline combo, along with the fact that I started adjusting for the trigger lag and I was really good at aiming for a couple of minutes. But seriously, Lightning Gun + Damage Amp + Berserk = RIDICULOUS UNSTOPPABLE ZAPIFICATION MACHINE.

I can’t score headshots with any reliability (when I do, it’s just luck), unlike in the original UT where I could use the Sniper Rifle and never get anything but headshots. I think this is because the character models in UT2004 are all stupid and have their heads merged into their torsos, whereas the UT characters had discernible heads.

The Lightning Gun is awesome. The same cannot be said of the UT2004 Flak Cannon. It was by far my favorite weapon in the original UT (according to my stats, in all the time I’ve played the game I’ve scored 5419 frags with the Flak Cannon, with the Sniper Rifle in second place with 1715 frags). In UT2004, the weapon’s dynamic is completely different. First of all, it’s actually a viable medium-long range weapon now because the bits of flak shot out by the primary fire don’t seem to be subject to gravity. But this change seems to coincide with a change in the speed of the projectiles, which completely throws off my timing. The secondary fire is now completely impotent. I guess the designers supposed the primary fire’s long range would compensate for the secondary fire sucking. But that means the secondary fire is now redundant, because you can’t use it at short range — you’ll kill yourself.

Oh well, can’t have everything.