Mod Auteurs: Brendon "Blender81" Chung (part 1)

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources," said... someone... supposedly. That's how I feel about Brendon Chung -- I've stolen so much from him and I've worked hard to conceal it's from him.

Or didn't Picasso say something about how "good artists copy, great artists steal" or something to that effect? It's like Johnny Cash stealing "Hurt" from Nine Inch Nails or Jimi Hendrix stealing "All Along the Watchtower" from Bob Dylan. I'm going to make these methods mine.

My midnight pillages have focused on his sense of humor and techniques in creating setting and back story, all while not being terribly serious about it. Yes, Adam Foster creates a sense of place through his level layouts, but Brendon creates a sense of place with his wit.

First, like Adam, he had a pre-Half-Life 1 career making some Quake 2 levels or something. Whatever.

... Anyway, his first effort with HL1 was the obscure "1986," which Brendon doesn't even link to on his website. I almost forgot it ever existed, but I realize now it's pretty important to me for one crucial setpiece: (spoiler alert)

Introduction to Starcraft and Heidegger (Part 1)

(This is a two-part essay on Starcraft II, why it is great, and its relation to Heidegger's writings on technology using Sirlin's excellent write-ups for a Starcraft class. It is aimed towards relative novices who don't really play Starcraft multiplayer.)

So one day, I was playing Starcraft II against some dude. We were both Protoss... and it wasn't going well for me.

He had all these "Stalker" spider-robot-things that shoot ranged lasers / can teleport short distances instantaneously. It was kind of hopeless for me: he shoots lasers at me, I run towards, he "blinks" away -- repeat.

This is micromanagement -- high-frequency, repetitive actions that require a high APM (actions per minute) to maximize a unit's flux, or ability to inflict damage.

He had to teleport away carefully, at just the right time, to maximize the laser-shooting while staying out of range of my units. If he teleported too late, my units would catch-up and kill his units. If he teleported away too soon, his units would barely have any time to acquire a target and fire.

In doing so, he was also kiting (as in, a kite) my units away from my base, as his Stalkers teleport further and further away and my army chases after them. It leaves my base utterly defenseless. He has a second army waiting. They charge up the ramp to my base...

A rose by any other name...

So there was a recent Unity game revealed, "Pirates of New Horizons," and it looks pretty sweet but over at Mapcore we started being jerks and picking away at the awful, awkward-sounding title.

That got me thinking -- in contrast, "Sins of a Solar Empire" is one of the greatest video game titles ever. Here's why:

It just sounds awesome. The "S" of Sins and Solar together, the "aa" in "a" and "sol-A-r", and the "RR" in "Sola-R" and "Empi-R-e" -- in literature we call this effect "sibilance" (sss), "assonance" (vowels), and "consonance" (consonants) respectively. These combined effects make the title roll off the tongue nicely, at least with fluent American English speakers.

The Oil Blue: how someone took all those silly panel puzzles from Resident Evil and made it interesting

What if someone took all those ludicrously involved and improbable mechanical maintenance panel puzzles from the Resident Evil series and turned it into a game? That'd be Vertigo Games' "The Oil Blue." And it's surprisingly good. (These impressions are based on the demo.)

The visual design? Purple gradients everywhere. Love it. The sound design? Buttons and panels have satisfying clicks to them. Fantastic. What about the gameplay? It's multi-tasking to the extreme. You have to press buttons to extract oil with various machines, all working at the same time.

The closest analogy I can think of? Oil drilling is like cooking a dinner for 10, as quickly as possible.

Inception

1) Fantastic movie.

2) I'm scared because it's going to dominate popular discourse on "levels" as psychological architecture. Before, it was an idea relatively unique to video games -- specifically, the awesomeness that was Psychonauts, complete with subconscious censors that try to kick you out, etc. -- but now? Psychonauts will be ripping off Inception. Radiator will be ripping off Inception. We are all now in its shadow.

And that scares me because, quite frankly, I don't think I can craft an experience as satisfying as that film.

Hell, now I feel like I'm ripping off Inception. I wonder why. Did it plant something in my brain?...

Dragon Age: Origins is the First Game About Gay Marriage + The Power of Mods

(I was waiting to see if the Escapist cared for an article pitch based on this blog post, but they didn't, so now I'm just going to ahead and post it.)

Dragon Age is the world's first commercial video game about gay marriage.

... and now with that incredibly misleading and generalizing hook, let me explain:

So I tricked Dragon Age: Origins into temporarily thinking my dude mage was female to trigger a gay romance with the dashing knight Alistair (and for anyone wanting to do the same, it works pretty seamlessly, just get the mod at Dragon Age Nexus) -- and the result was an oddly tragic playthrough with inadvertent commentary on gay marriage. (Inadvertent because I had to use a mod to get this reading of it.)

I mean, Dragon Age has plenty of other gay shit in it: lesbian dwarves, a threesome, two bisexual romance options, etc. And this is all the intentionally designed LGBT content that BioWare saw fit to implement, which isn't a complaint because this is probably as "progressive" a major commercial Western RPG has ever been. So kudos, BioWare.

But none of that "intentional" gay content compares to how rewarding I found Dragon Age when I hijacked Alistair's sexuality. So, this is how a gay romance with Alistair goes (minor spoilers await -- then you'll get another warning about major spoilers):

p0nd

http://peanutgallerygames.com/blog/games/pond/

http://www.rjlayton.com/pond (update! mirror!)

The greatest Flash game ever. A masterpiece. Make sure you inhale / exhale in-time with your character in order to experience the full effect.

(prediction: it's going to go viral in, like, 5 hours)

On Game Reviews + Games Writing + Sports Writing Is Cool

Did anyone else read the "Blacklight: Tango Down" review at Eurogamer? My god. I mean, I don't intend to bite the hand that feeds me, and I definitely don't want to defend a game I haven't played / looks mediocre anyway, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to risk an ungrateful nibble here:

"All the major functions are present, correct and mapped exactly where you'd expect to find them."

So it copied Halo's control scheme on the X360 -- or, as we would say in PC-land, it has keyboard bindings! Awesome.

"The sprint feels a bit sticky..."

I don't know what this means. When you sprint, you stick to surfaces? When you sprint and let go of the button, you continue to sprint? When you sprint, sticks fly out of your screen and poke you in the eye?

Must game controls necessarily feel responsive, or can they be "sticky," whatever that means, by design? (e.g. in Team Fortress 2, the Heavy's slower aiming / movement when firing the minigun) Would you criticize the Heavy Weapons class for moving too slowly, or the Scout for moving too quickly, or the player character in the Graveyard for handling like a shopping cart -- when it is all by design?

If a playtester ever told me that the "sprint feels a bit sticky" or that I had to "tighten up the graphics", I'd probably stickily sprint off to the front of the nearest speeding bus.

"... but the genre basics are pretty much as they should be."

By using the word "but" after talking about sticky sprinting, the reviewer flags this as a compliment. I thought the problem was that this game was too average, and now suddenly it's good that this game follows conventions? And why is it necessarily a strength that the game keeps to "genre basics"? The tone of this review keeps going back and forth between "not different enough from AAA games" and "not similar enough to AAA games." Which is it?

"... it's only really co-operative in the sense that you're playing alongside other people." 

I understand what the reviewer means, but still -- this is an amazingly dumb thing to say because cooperative play means... well, playing alongside other people. It's like saying "it's only singleplayer in the sense that you play by yourself."

But here's the part of the review that originally got me thinking, "what the hell is he talking about?!"...