I've Got the World on a Ring

Confession time: Up until very recently, I had never played Halo: Combat Evolved. Weird, right? Halo is one of those games that even non-gamers' grandmothers have played, but I never got around to it. There were a couple of reasons for this, the biggest being that I never owned an Xbox. By the time Halo came out for the PC, Halo 2 was almost out and I had move on to other games. The other reason I never played it (and I am embarrassed to admit this) was that Halo has a bit of a reputation for being the game that the beer-swilling, football-throwing jocks play. Not only that, it has the reputation of introducing the beer-swilling, football-throwing jocks to gaming in general, and I guess part of me resented that at the time.

Of course, what I saw as an invasion of my hobby was really just an example of the budding trend of our culture's general acceptance of geekiness. When I was a kid, we were the ones being shoved into lockers, but three Star Wars prequels, three Lord of the Rings movies, seven Harry Potter books, six Halo games, and a string of popular comic book movies later, I can have an actual conversation with someone on the street about why I'm excited about the new Thor movie. That's something to be celebrated, not looked down upon, and it was partially the acceptance of this fact that made me decide to finally sit down and play Halo.

I still had pretty low expectations. I had heard from a lot of hardcore gamers that Halo was over-simplified, derivative, and overly repetitive. Maybe it was these low expectations, maybe it was my newfound respect for mainstream geekery, or maybe Halo is just a really good game, but I really liked it. I didn't love it, but I liked it.

So here's my opinion of Halo: Combat Evolved, as someone playing it for the first time, a full decade after its release.

The first thing that struck me about Halo was the color. It's a very colorful game, all the way through. There is more color in this one screenshot of Halo than there is in the entire Call of Duty franchise.

And there aren't even enemies on the screen there. In the middle of a firefight, there are dozens of enemies with deep red and blue armor, highlighted by the lush, green, outdoor backdrops, as hundreds of multi-colored plasma bolts fly through the air. If Halo had been yet another bland, gray, visually unappealing shooter, I don't think it would have won me over like it did.

The second thing I noticed about Halo was how well grounded it was in its science fiction roots. If you pay attention, you'll notice that Halo is hardcore sci-fi, and I was surprised to see how many tropes they were able to pull in. Just within the first hour of the game, you have a ring world, strong AI, holographic interfaces, anti-gravity propulsion, plasma weapons, energy swords, alien races, and faster-than-light travel. In this day of "realistic" sci-fi, very few games are able to hit as many iconic themes as Halo. The people at Bungie are clearly fans of the genre. The fact that the pilot of the main human dropship had the callsign "Foe Hammer" made me grin from ear to ear.

In terms of gameplay, everything I had heard about Halo was true. It was simple, derivative, and repetitive. That was what made it fun. I was able to mindlessly run and gun for the vast majority of the game. I didn't have to hide behind cover very often, my finger was constantly on the trigger, and I almost never stopped moving. It made me feel powerful and awesome without shoving it down my throat by reminding me how much of a hero I was.

In fact, Master Chief is such a staple of today's gaming culture, that I just assumed that the game idolized him the way most Halo fans do, and that's not true at all. Master Chief appears to just be a high-ranking soldier in some cool armor. Nobody on the field seems to recognize him and when he does something cool, people congratulate him on a job well done instead of lauding him with unnecessary praise and affection to make the player feel good like some games do. It was well done and appropriate. I appreciate that.

Then there's The Library, Halo's seventh level. For years I have been hearing about how terribly designed The Library was, and, again, it might have been my low expectations, but I thought it was a blast. The environment was lonely, yet mystifying and reminded me quite a bit of Space Mountain in Disney World. The music provided good atmosphere, I got through it pretty quickly, and it gave me another opportunity to fight the Flood.

I really enjoyed fighting the Flood (Halo's equivalent of the headcrab zombies from Half-Life) simply because they offered a different approach to combat. There are so many of them that every time you kill one, five more take its place. They aren't that big a deal to fight individually and even fighting a dozen or so isn't that bad, but when they start to swarm and they begin to live up to their name, they start to feel like a real threat. Of course, shooters have done this before, but I think Halo does it particularly well.

However, it's certainly not the god-like messiah of first-person shooters that many claim it to be, and there were quite a few things that stuck out to me as being particularly poorly done. First, the vehicles (though varied and interesting) were so difficult to control I began to wonder if Master Chief cheated his way through Spartan Driver's Ed. Couple that with the fact that every small speed bump skyrockets ground vehicles into the air in a fascinating display of physical surrealism, and you have a  recipe for a controller-throwing headache-fest.

I also didn't understand why Master Chief's armor could withstand hundreds of bullets, plasma bolts, and attacks from parasitic bug-monsters, but one slice of an energy sword kills him on the spot. I could probably count on one hand the number of times I died from conventional enemy attacks in Halo. Nearly every time I died, it was because I was stabbed by a sword, had a grenade attached to my armor, or was blown off of a ledge by tank fire. These deaths were very difficult to avoid and were all one-hit kills. Normally, I wouldn't mind this, however the rest of the game is so easy that having to do the same section of the game over and over just because there's a guy with a sword breaks up the flow. In a really difficult game like Battletoads or Ninja Gaiden, you see the "Game Over" screen every five or six minutes, and it becomes a part of the game. Going two hours without dying and then dying five times in a row from the same thing grinds the game to a halt.

In addition, maybe my perception is skewed, but it's hard for me to see Halo as revolutionary. Halo came out in 2001, and by that time we had already had Half-Life, Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Quake II, Deus Ex, and many others, and there really wasn't much that Halo introduced that wasn't done just as well (or better) in those games. True, it popularized "Wolverine health" and introduced the idea of carrying only two weapons at a time, but while these features were well-executed (and made sense) in Halo, I really hate them in other games. It's hard for me to see those things as a positive influence.

All that being said, however, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I intend to play the sequels, however I'm a bit hesitant, since I have heard that none of them was quite as good, but maybe they will surprise me, as their predecessor did. No matter what happens, I have certainly lost my most vital asset for the next time I play "Never Have I Ever."

Huge Tracts of Land

I once knew a game called The Elder Scrolls. You may have heard of her. She really likes attention. I've heard her called a lot of things in the time I've know her: "the best-looking RPG ever," "Game of the Year", and "one of the best role-playing games ever made.

I just called her TES.

TES and I first met back in 2002. She was different then. She had just gotten out of a long relationship with the PC, and decided that in the new millennium, it was hip to be bi-platform. I played her on the Xbox. She was cute, near-sighted, and one of the most expansive games I'd ever played. Her favorite color was brown, she loved to read, and she called herself Morrowind.

Morrowind was an open-world game, the first I'd ever played. Her world was detailed, imaginative, and grandiose. She was going through a more detail-oriented phase. I had heard at the time that back when she was called Daggerfall, her world was over 300,000 squared miles of sparse, randomly-generated land. Now, she was only 10 squared miles, but her attention to detail in landscaping, lore, and atmosphere was more than apparent. Unfortunately, our flirtation lasted only a few short hours. She was directionless, hard, and wanted to take things much too slowly. I was immature, unable to recognize the value of the story she was trying to tell me, and was unwilling to put in the work to unlock the potential of our relationship. Besides, I was kind of stealing her from a friend of mine, so I cut her off. There was no animosity, no bitter feelings. We just weren't right for each other. I wanted something easy and fun, and for all of her wonderful qualities, Morrowind was not that game.

I didn't see TES for a long time after that, and to be honest, I didn't think that much about her either. It wasn't until 2006 that I saw her again, and I was floored. Gone was the pretty, brown-loving, near-sighted game I met years ago. This game was a knockout! She had clearly gone through several makeovers, changed her name again (this time to Oblivion), and she featured the voice of Patrick Stewart.


Patrick Stewart!

This game was the complete package. She was beautiful, smart, and had a lot of ideas. We had some great times together. We rode horses west to the far-off city of Anvil, fought our way through countless dark, terrifying dungeons, and searched for Nirnroot by every lake we found. We laughed at the bugs and we cried at the tragedy of The Gray Prince. We were happy. Sometimes, I was content to just walk through her world for an hour, just because. And if I happened to get a little action along the way, hey, all the better.

Then it all fell apart.

I remember our first fight. Oblivion gates (essentially portals to hell) were opening all over Cyrodil. Demons called Daedra were invading, with the intention of mass-slaughter. The allies of the resistance were gathering in a city called Bruma. TES told me to go out and find as many allies for Bruma as I could. Happily, I went all over Cyrodil, talking to the leaders of every city we had encountered in our travels together, but they all asked me to do the same thing. Somewhere nearby, there was an Oblivion gate. They wanted me to go in, close the gate from the inside, and then they would aid Bruma. This was a fairly boring, lengthy, and tedious process. I did it three times, and as I did, I was able to think about my relationship with TES. Why would she make me do this? This was her idea of a good time? Then I started think about our other experiences.

Riding for hours through a dense forest, trying to find the main gate of Anvil?

Long, drawn-out, repetitive dungeons?

Having to stop at every, single, stupid lake to look for Nirnroot?

Why was I doing this? What was the point? Oblivion had so much to do, but it was all boring.

But she was pretty.

That's when I realized what had happened. TES had taken all of the things that made her interesting when she was Morrowind and streamlined them, simplified them, and dumbed them down to make herself more accessible. All this time I had been mesmerized by her beauty and intrigued by her ideas, but her ideas were all the same. And they were bad.

As soon as I closed the third Oblivion gate, I took one last look at TES's blue sky, lush rolling hills, and snow-capped mountains, and I quit.

I didn't even save.

In my mind, Bruma is still there, waiting for reinforcements that will never arrive, as the Daedra ravish the land, and TES tearfully looks at me and asks, "Why?"

The next few years were tough. Even though I wasn't playing her anymore, Oblivion seemed to be a constant topic of conversation. Mods were released, then expansions, then DLC. When she won Game of the Year at the Spike TV Video Game Awards, I'm pretty sure I grumbled something like, "I hope it doesn't take her five hours to come up to accept." Any time anyone mentioned Oblivion, rather than tell them the truth, I told them that I hated her because the truth was just too complicated. Months went by, then years. Finally, TES fell off the radar when her sister Fallout 3 was released. Fallout 3 was a great game, but it took few risks. It became so popular that I began to think that TES was gone for good.

Then, a few months ago, at this year's Spike TV Video Game Awards,  Todd Howard from Bethesda Softworks came onstage to announce Bethesda's new game.

It was TES.

Her trailer didn't show much, but it was narrated by Max von Sydow and revealed her new name: Skyrim. I didn't know what to think about seeing TES again, but from the time I spent with her, I knew what the title referred to. In TES's world, Skyrim is a frozen wasteland where the barbaric Nords hail from. Screenshots confirmed this soon after, showcasing ruined temples, desolate snow-covered valleys, and tough, muscular monsters. It looked like TES had grown bitter in our years apart, sacrificing her roots in optimistic fantasy for gritty realism.  And I couldn't help but think it was my fault. In each of those shattered buildings, I saw the pieces of the relationship we once had.

But then she released this trailer.

And I noticed something. Behind the brutal, desolate landscapes, the dark chanting of her main theme, and grotesque monsters, TES had hidden something away. Take another look at that trailer, around the 1:44 mark. Behind the guy getting stabbed, there is a lake.

Beside that lake is a Nirnroot plant.

That one, little plant says so much. It says that despite the changes she's made, TES is still the same game I met all those years ago, full of optimism and new ideas. She lets you live in a world, not just interact with it. She gives you the opportunity to be whoever you want to be, even if it's not very interesting. She offers her players the chance to do anything they want, even if it's just look for plants. Whether it works or not, and whether it's fun or not doesn't matter. It's still a noble goal.

Congratulations on your new game, TES. I hope it goes well for you, and I look forward to hearing about it's release. May you find a better player than I.

Mightier Than the Sword

I'm almost finished with Dead Space 2, and I have to say that it has been one hell of a ride so far. I originally started the first game back when it came out in 2008, but I only played it for about twenty minutes, due to the amazingly poor quality of the PC port. I dredged it out again recently because of a friend's high recommendations and because Dead Space 2 was coming out soon and was getting a lot of hype. I played it with a controller this time (the mouse/keyboard controls really make the game unplayable), and stuck it out through the first (rather boring) chapter. I am so glad I did.

Dead Space isn't just a good game. It's a great game, and when I beat it, I immediately bought, installed, and played the sequel. As long as I have played video games, I have never beaten a game and started its sequel on the same day. It's usually just too much of the same thing for me, but Dead Space was that good. One of the things that made it so good was the characterization of the main character, Isaac Clarke, which is odd because throughout the first game, he doesn't utter a single word. Isaac is yet another example of the tired "silent protagonist" trope, a concept so inane and outdated that it makes the save points littered throughout both games look like the way of the future. Instead of speaking, Isaac's thoughts are written in his "personal journal," essentially the quest log. It's actually pretty interesting, and it got me to read to read the log for every quest, which is not something that I would normally do.

In the second game, in addition to keeping a journal, Isaac is fully voiced, which gives him an opportunity to talk about things other than which part of the ship is broken and how he needs to fix it. I still read the journal, however, and it was going great until towards the end of the game. I checked my journal, and read that Isaac was looking for a certain character that he was particularly worried about. I then moved forward a couple of feet, which triggered a cutscene in which the character that Isaac was looking for dies a horrible horrible death. After the cutscene was over, I pulled up Isaac's journal to see what he had to say about it, but according to the journal, Isaac was still looking for that character and was still very worried. That was the first time in either game that the illusion was shattered enough that it occurred to me that there was someone who actually wrote these journal entries. Someone over at Visceral Games actually took the time to put this much thought into characterizing Isaac through his mission objectives and, for the most part, did really, really well with it.

What an awesome job. I want that job.

Most quest logs are terrible. The ones that do try to take the first-person narration style usually don't work and are filled with unnecessary filler. The others are usually short, to-the-point, and boring. Borderlands did a pretty decent job, but after a couple of hours they descended into tedium. Alan Wake was interesting, but that game didn't really need mission objectives, and ended up just rehashing recent events. I think quest logs need to be spiced up a bit, and I think it would be awesome to be the guy that does it.

I went through the Dead Space credits to see if I could find out who this guy was, but there was not a single writing credit. Not one. There were a bunch of general "designers" credited, but nothing specific in terms of writing. Oh, well. I guess I'll have to go back to my old dream of being the guy that designs the "options" menu.

Resistance is Futile

A while back, a friend of mine recommended that I play an old Star Trek game from 1996 called Star Trek: Borg. It's a moderately short interactive movie which has some interesting puzzles and features John de Lancie reprising his role as Q. It sounded like fun, and I love playing old games, so I decided to give it a shot.

I say I love playing old games, but really there's more to it than that. What I really love is figuring out how to play old games. I've spent many hours tweaking settings in a Playstation emulator trying to optimize Resident Evil. I dual-boot 32-bit Windows XP and 64-bit Windows 7 so that I can play the games that run in one and not the other. One of the twelve icons I have on my desktop is a shortcut to DosBox. It's the thrill of getting something working that didn't work before that really gets me excited.

Therefore, I apologize for geeking out a bit. The rest of this post will be rather technical and boring. Spoiler alert: I got Star Trek: Borg working, and it was hard.

What made Star Trek: Borg interesting was that any attempts to get it working in a modern operating system were pointless. Upon installing the game, the installer makes three checks. The first is to ensure that the host operating system is Windows 95, the second is to ensure that the resolution is set to 640 x 480, and the third is to ensure that the color settings are set to 16-bit color. These three checks meant that none of my usual tricks were going to work. I was going to have to get a Windows 95 machine.

Of course, it didn't have to be a real Windows 95 machine. Getting Windows 95 working on modern hardware is pretty much impossible, and I was not going to buy an antique computer to play an FMV game. So I decided to set up a virtual machine running Windows 95.

That was as far as I got before I started running into problems.

The first thing that I needed to do was get some virtualization software. As a student, I have access to Microsoft's Dreamspark program, which gives out free software to people with valid student IDs. One of the programs that they offer is Virtual PC 2007.

Perfect.

So I downloaded Virtual PC, but apparently it doesn't work in 64-bit operating systems, and I wanted to do everything in Windows 7, so switching to XP wasn't an option. I happened to have an older version of VMware Workstation, so I decided to use that instead. I also had a physical copy of the Windows 95 CD-ROM that I found in a drawer when my family decided to sell their house a couple of years ago. I installed VMware Workstation, created a new Windows 95 machine, and inserted my disk.

Nothing happened.

I played with the boot order, checked the settings again, made sure that the virtual CD-ROM drive was reading properly, and tried again. Still nothing. I was a bit stumped, but I decided that it had to be the disk that wasn't working. To test this, I created a new identical machine and installed Windows 98 on it. It worked like a charm. Now I knew that there had to be something wrong with the Windows 95 disk, so I went off in search of another copy. What I found was the thirteen floppy disks for the original build of Windows 95. I hesitated to do this because I knew that the original build not only had issues that were fixed in later releases, but also that it came without a web browser. That meant that it would be tricky to do things like download drivers and patches.

Well, I did it anyway, and the installation really went off without a hitch. The problem came when I tried to install the VMware Tools that come with Workstation. Included in the VMware Tools are the virtual video drivers that would allow me to set my resolution and color scheme. Whenever I tried to install the VMware Tools, Windows would give me the all-to-familiar "illegal operation" dialog box that, honestly, I had almost forgotten about. There wasn't too much I could do. I couldn't get online to download a solution, and if I couldn't install the video drivers, I wouldn't be able to set my color scheme beyond 16 colors, and I needed to get up to 16-bit color.

So I went off in search of another copy of Windows 95. This time I found the latest release that I could, the OEM Service Release 2.5, which was released in late 1997. This version came with Internet Explorer, was released on CD-ROM so I didn't have to keep switching floppies out, and was much more stable. It also came with Hover!, a capture-the-flag style 3D hovercar game that I sunk quite a few summer afternoons into as a kid. That last one didn't really help me achieve my goal, but it was an added bonus. This time installation ran smoothly and the VMware Tools installation ran, but there were errors. Specifically, the video drivers didn't install fully. That was okay though, because they provided instructions at the end of the installer on how to install the drivers manually. I did so and rebooted. Much better.

To test things, I got out my original Fury3 disk. It installed fine, but I noticed that there was no sound.

Sigh.

The sound drivers hadn't installed properly either. This one wasn't easy. I spent several hours browsing online before I found a solution. Apparently, sometimes the sound drivers just don't work in Windows 95. Imagine that. I eventually found a patch that installed different sound drivers. I uninstalled the default sound card, manually set the default to the new one, booted up Fury3, and was treated to this. Awesome.

By the way, as a side-note, Fury3 is a really fun game. I had forgotten that too.

Anyway, with all that done, I set my resolution to 640x480 and put in the Star Trek: Borg CD, excited to finally get to play something I had worked so hard for.

But I had forgotten something. When VMware Tools installed the video drivers, it gave me tons of option for resolution, but only three for color palettes: 16 color, 256 color, and 32-bit color. Of course, when you have 32-bit color why would you ever downgrade to 16-bit color? Except I needed 16-bit color to bypass the check that Star Trek: Borg made.

I was stumped. I had no idea what to do. I did Google search after Google search, and none if it yielded anything. My friend had told me about a patch for the game that just bypassed the three checks, but at the time I told him that wanted to run the game in its native condition. Now that option was looking better and better all the time. I was depressed. I had put all of this effort into something, and I had hit a dead end. I went to bed with the intention of asking my friend for the patch in the morning.

The next morning, I sat down at my computer to do my usual daily routine and noticed something that I had left up the night before. It was the VMware documentation for setting screen color depth. I'm not sure why I hadn't noticed it the night before. According to that documentation, VMware Tools would enable only 16 colors, 256 colors, and whatever color palette the host operating system was using (in my case, 32-bit). With this information, I set my Windows 7 color palette to 16-bit and restarted VMware Workstation. No change. But I wasn't ready to give up yet because now I knew what I was looking for. After a few more searches, I found a small app that would automatically change the virtual machine's operating system's palette to a specified color depth. I downloaded it and set it to 16-bit color.

Star Trek: Borg installed and ran.

I was so excited. It worked, it had sound, and the I did it without modifying the game at all. It was a wonderful feeling.

You might think I'm insane for all of this, but that's okay. It was worth it.

On to the next project.