TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Left 4 De-

The Left 4 Dead demo is out for pre-orderererers, and it just sort of… stops.

The four campaigns are usually four missions long each, and the demo only gives you the first two sections of one of them. It’s like releasing the first half of a song as a single to promote your forthcoming album. You can tell from the first half of this campaign that it’s going to be a good campaign, but the first half isn’t one by itself.

I am baffled and saddened by this. To me the point of Left 4 Dead is that “just made it!” moment, the way the Director expertly builds difficulty, tension and drama over the four levels to an incredible climax. Even when you die, that finalé is the highlight of the game. I can’t think why, after spending more than two years years perfecting an extraordinary new system that masters the eternal design problems of pacing and balance, you’d release a demo that does neither well.

This demo is only for people who’ve already committed to buying the game at the moment, but it’s the same one going live to the public next Tuesday, and it’s the one from which the first player impressions will be posted on forums. Playing it earlier tonight was the first time in my five sessions with Left 4 Dead that we’ve survived easily, and the first time the answer to “Do you want to play again?” has been “Not really.”

It’ll do till the full thing comes along, of course, and it’s still great fun. Just don’t assume from the demo that the full game lacks drama, variety or a satisfying climax.

Leaving PC Gamer

I haven’t actually done any work for PC Gamer since March, and I haven’t officially left until tomorrow. But I’ve been there nine years, it’s the only full time job I’ve ever had, and I felt like I should mark its end somehow.

So on Saturday we had a Gunpoint-themed pizza and bourbon leaving party. And melon. It was thematically confused, but excellent. Continued

Learning Unity

My day job is now trying to fix things in Gunpoint and writing e-mails, both of which I’m pretty bad at, so in my spare time I’ve been learning Unity. Not making anything in particular yet, just following tutorials – my test project above has been charitably described by my friends as Thomas Was At Gunpoint.

I have a question, for anyone who uses Unity. Continued

Laying Out Heat Signature’s Ships: Snakey Vs Branchy

Last time I covered how I taught Heat Signature to build ships out of sectors, join those sectors together, lock some of those doors, then place keycards in the right places to ensure they’re all openable. I’d got the algorithm generating layouts like this, which is great: Continued

LA Confidential

Genre: noir thriller.

Stars: Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe, Kevin Spacey, Danny DeVito, James Cromwell, David Strathairn, Kim Basinger, Ron Rifkin.

Plot: three Mexican kids are arrested for a coffeeshop massacre, but neither the straight-arrow arresting officer nor the violent colleague he hates so much think the case has been solved. Meanwhile, a reknown but low-ranking cop with ties to a popular TV show investigates a smut lead he can’t work out, but which he’s starting to think is connected.

Why It’s Great:

• Not only is it based on a James Ellroy book, it’s a superb, Ellroy-esque version of it – despite not being written by James Ellroy. Ellroy himself commented, in very much his own words, “I can’t fucking believe it.”
• Ellroy-esque means mind-bogglingly complicated, subtle and dark. Typically for him, LA Confidential hinges on human weakness and corruption, scandal, drugs, ambition, revenge, hollowness, regret, and anger.
• The three leads and James Cromwell are incredible – the best performances I’ve ever seen from him or Spacey, both brilliant at their worst. The idea of different personality types coming together in the face of a greater evil is hardly novel, but their personalities are so profoundly convincing that it still feels like a revelation. It also helps that the moment Crowe and Pearce realise they’re on the same side, Crowe is in the middle of beating Pearce’s head against the corner of a filing cabinet. In the end, it’s a friendship that arises when it becomes clear they don’t have time to hit each other anymore. And it only becomes jovial when they’re both convinced they’re going to die.
• In fact Cromwell is probably the star of the film, as the brilliantly conceived Captain Dudley Smith, the only common thread in the three books and perhaps Ellroy’s biggest character. His key moment in the film – you know it if you’ve seen it – is extraordinary cinema.
  The 40’s LA atmosphere is impeccable, and the whole thing has an amazingly sylish elegance.
• The action is so expertly directed, so immediately gripping and volatile, that a simple hotel shoot-out makes The Matrix’s lobby scene look pathetic. These are gunfights that respect the fact that line-of-sight means death for one or the other party within a second. Death is vicious and sudden. Every shot has a serious, brutal consequence.

Quotes:

Scandal-Rag Journalist: Patchett's what I call 'twilight': he ain't queer and he ain't red. He can't help me in my quest for prime sinuendo.

Coroner: Stomach of the week from a motel homicide: the unemployed actor had frankfurter, french fries, alcohol and sperm.

Kill Zone And Bladestorm

I took on a ‘Very Difficult’ mission in XCOM 2 earlier, to protect some device from attacking aliens. I was determined to do it because the reward was a Scientist, and they’ve been impossibly rare in my campaign so far. We immediately ran into two groups of very tough enemies, and though we had good position and lots of explosives, some unseen, extremely powerful enemy was attacking the objective every turn while we fought. Once they were mopped up, we had no time to be cautious: my two rangers had to sprint to the petrol station housing the objective just to distract the aliens there, with no moves left to fight them off. Continued

Keeping The Peace In Mirror’s Edge

It turns out that if you start talking about Mirror’s Edge in the Future offices, pretty soon a small crowd gathers to weigh in. In a group of editors and writers – one who gave it nine out of ten and another who thinks five was too high – it turns out we mostly agree. We all love to run, and we all get angry when we’re stopped by something difficult.

Most of my suggestions for the combat with cops would make it less difficult, and hopefully less awkward. But it can’t get so easy that you don’t feel threatened, and the grander issue is that it needs to be more avoidable. So this is about that.

The police choppers already work well as a propulsive force for the chase sequences that doesn’t often lead to death or frustration. But I’d like to change each of the three types of ground enemies, and how they’re used.

Cops: Not allowed to fire until they’ve issued two verbal warnings (“Freeze!” – “Stop or I will shoot!”) giving you a window to take one out or escape. Obviously once you’ve attacked one, others in the area can open fire. When they do hit, damage is much more serious – two hits kill – but they’re still wildly inaccurate. It becomes more of a tactical puzzle about how not to get shot, and the way forward never depends on turning a slow valve, climbing a slow pipe or working out where to head.

SWAT: Armoured and with two-handed weapons, these guys can’t be disarmed. But they’re only ever sent after you, so you never have to get past them to progress. They can be killed with stolen cop weapons, knocked out if you drop on them, or pushed into danger by a melee attack.

Chasers: Right now these guys have tazers, which are just kind of annoying. I think they should have mace. They should be knocked back by any melee move – to their death if they’re on a ledge – but if they get right up to you, they grab you and spray a blinding teargas in your eyes, sending your vision haywire and making you scream. You can try to flee while blinded, but if you don’t get away your third macing incapacitates you, and it’s game over.

Being chased was the perfect way to escalate Mirror’s Edge, but the Pursuit Cops are just so lame in combat; dancing about, tickling you with electricity and mild punching. I want to be freaking terrified of these guys. It would help if they didn’t look like dorks.

So one set is easy to deal with, another is hard to deal with but easy to avoid, and the last is hard to deal with or avoid – so do whichever you’re best at. I found lots of fun ways to lure Chasers into positions where I could knock them off a building, but bizarre rules meant that more often than not, I was the one knocked back by the crucial blow.

I was saying the other day that no matter how often the game explicitly tells you to stop and fight, the player still tries to run right past. Replaying the early sections at lunch today, I realised there’s actually a forced pop-up message in the prologue chapter that says “Always try to get away from enemies.” It couldn’t feel more like two different games that were code-merged at the last minute.

Justified

“You let Messer get away?”
“One of your boys let Messer get away, I got the driver. Besides, these boots aren’t made for running.”
“And yet chasing fugitives is a marshall’s primary function.”
“It’s ironic, isn’t it?” Continued

Just ‘Cause

I’ve just declassified my Just Cause shots, since the game is long out. The plot of the game is that the CIA want to overthrow the government of this island nation to destabilise the area and allow them to put their ruler of choice into power. Their modus operandi for this is to drop you, from a plane. They figure you’ll take it from there. You literally do – you control that skydive, and everything from that point on, and you’re basically incredible.

I’m riding a weaponless civilian jet-ski along a winding river with three gunboats following me, three helicopter gunships slamming missiles into the water all around, and the military about to dispatch fighter jets to take me down. I have a grappling hook. And these guys are so, so screwed.

In a minute or two everything is a flaming wreck except the best helicopter, which I am flying, at an altitude of five inches, in pursuit of a police boat that’s arrived to investigate the carnage. I pull up, jump from the cockpit to the boat, and kick the cop out of it as the chopper doubles backwards and crashes upside-down, blades-first into a group of troops lining the coast to get a shot at me, and I zoom off into the open ocean. This is normal for a Tuesday.

Jon Stewart On Presidential Elitism

“If you get this job, and it goes well, they might actually carve your head into a mountain. If you don’t think you’re better than us, what the fuck are you doing?” (7m20s in)

Jerk, Jounce And Rates Of Change

Yesterday I tweeted from the Heat Signature account about avoiding a tricky problem with homing missiles by just increasing their acceleration over time – I called it AccelerationAcceleration. Today, Coriolinus replied to say that the scientific name for this is actually ‘jerk‘. This is amazing, and so is the Wikipedia page about it. Continued

James 2.5 Explained

Welcome, to the all-new James! The partly-new James! The slightly-altered James! I’m calling it 2.5 – it’s the third redesign of my fifth personal site, but it’s not exactly a generational jump. I coded my first blog when I was fourteen, so I’m littering this post with embarrassing shots and links of the older incarnations. Sadly Archive.org only goes as far back as the first James, so the design marvels of, er, “Pentadact’s Site”, “Ugly Fruit”, “The Open Focus Network” and “Politics” are not on shown here.

Turns out I liked dark blue in 1999 too. And I took my tea black? Was I ever that young?

Very nearly changed the name this time – for a long time the prototype read ‘Pentadact’ at the top. There’s every reason to make that change, not least of which is that people might finally spot that it doesn’t have a ‘u’ in it. But no matter how long I left it like that it just looked wrong. This obviously isn’t Pentadact – that’s me. It would be like calling my house Tom Francis.

The smallest change is the new visual motif; that didn’t take long. In a weird way I hope making it narrower has made it look wider – when it greedily filled the whole screen, it had no shape or size of its own. Filling the screen used to be one of my design commandments – I loathe sites that cower in a column on the left-hand side of any reasonably-sized display. Now, I’m starting to see that there are readability reasons why ultra-wide isn’t always awesome, and I prefer sites with a sense of place to sites with a design philosophy.

Weird, news-style proto-meta-blog

The idea behind the stuff in the sidebars – which took all the time – is that as much as possible, it should be different each time you come. Almost everything is either automatically-updating, easy to update, or just randomised. Instead of a static set of dozens of nameless thumbnail shots of things, I wanted to actually explain what each thing is that I’m featuring. But for the number of things I want to feature, that takes a prohibitively large amount of space. So instead, the template randomly chooses two items and I attempt to explain what they are.

I also wanted to dredge up some older stuff occasionally – hence the At Random panel. Blogs are all about what’s new, my sites never were: I like to create a load of stuff and leave it all hanging there, like so much dirty laundry. I’ve read everything on this site at least twice, and I wrote all of it, but even I see things cropping up in that box that make me think “What the hell was that?” If you ever see it blank, by the way, click the Full post link and let me know where it takes you. Every post is supposed to have an excerpt, but I think one or two slipped through the cracks.

Apparently I actually had other people submit reviews and stuff to the first James. I invented Web 2.0?

It’s not supposed to hit you in the face or anything, but there is a logic to what goes in the left as opposed to right sidebar. Left is stuff by me or on this site, and right is elsewhereville, things by other people that I liked. The Favourites panel is a solution to the problem of distinguishing between the types of places I link. I don’t link anyone’s blog unless I read every post of it, but that doesn’t always mean it’s essential reading I want to push on everyone. I wanted a separate place for the stuff I truly couldn’t live without, and to give it a little love. It’s also the first thing I did, and trying to articulate why you like your favourite sites is not a bad way to start a blog redesign.

The channels at the top were supposed to be a bigger deal than they’ve ended up being. I thought that since virtually no-one is interested in everything I talk about, and since I personally stop reading a blog after one or two posts I wasn’t interested in, it’d be useful to be able to filter it by topic. Everything here does legitimately fit into one of those, and if you’re an RSS user you can subscribe to each of the ones you care about to get a sort of custom feed. Update: stats show people really like to click the word ‘Games’ up there. Knock yourselves out, chaps!

I was fond, perhaps too fond, of the left-centre-right alignment pattern.

The subscription stuff is technically not new, but I want to highlight it this time: RSS means new posts get sent to you rather than you having to check for them, which in turn makes me feel less guilty about erratic posting. Jason L’s already requested the ability to subscribe to the comments that get made here, so I’ve implemented that too. Google Reader makes the internet a single page that can be read by repeatedly pressing a single key: Space. So at last, we can start out-evolving these pointless limbs. I’m just trying to help that along.

And as you’ve probably seen, I’m embedding MP3s a lot now – I’ll also add a direct download link for them soon. I want to post more than just music, and I’m thinking of a new regular related to that. I have 1.5 terabytes of storage space now, and ten times that in bandwidth, so I might as well put it to use.

2003 – first recognisably bloggy incarnation. Hopelessly dark.

Oh yeah, the hosting: James was long overdue for its own domain, I got constant complains about the acronymic URL (good luck spelling this one, whiners!), and the real reason: my ISP now sucks so hard that I have to leave them as soon as I humanly can. A load of providers now owned by Tiscali are now getting horrible service as people are moved to cheap, shitty servers in a bid for the parent company to turn a profit for the first time ever. So that really filled me with the warm glow of consumerism.

I chose BlueHost because a hundred blog posts told me to choose AN Hosting. I don’t know if you know this, but there are no longer any objective reviews of this kind of thing – every major company offers a huge cash kickback to bloggers sending new customers their way. The most trustworthy you get are the minority who admit they’re being paid to recommend you.

Holy shit I used to write a lot.

I almost went with AN Hosting anyway, but I happened to have their page up when I closed my browser for the day. It stopped me with a flashing alert claiming that a customer service representative for AN Hosting was trying to talk to me, and even lamely generated her (of course her) introductory lines. I almost spat. When I tried to close it, it generated another alert trying to panic me about that.

If these guys invent a cure for cancer, and I actually have cancer, they will still never see a penny of my money as long as I live, in cancery pain. BlueHost feel nice. Their CEO blogs. Their website lets you try out a dummy account. In fact, I like them so much I’m not going to link them, just so you know this isn’t a pay-per-post.

That would actually violate the prime directive of James, by the way, which is never to make money or sense.

James 1.0

I was meaning to shoe-horn the old version of James into this new template one day, but it has long been clear that I never will. Instead, I’m just uploading it and linking it. I think most of the post titles are bookmarks, so individual bits of its are theoretically linkable, but we’ll see.

For those who know only this new, shiny James, the original version was all one page, rather gloomy-looking, and at 70,000 words the longest document I’ve ever written. It starts shortly after I moved into my last flat, a few months before I started working for PC Gamer, and ends at the time Mark Sutherns left the mag. I may reappropriate some of its content to flesh out the Games section here, which has never really made a lot of sense.

It’s Time I Did Something About This ‘Gunpoint Ripoff’

Someone named Tomasz Waclawek is making a side-scrolling stealth game, with mouse-controlled jumping, set in office blocks with smashable windows, and which he himself describes as a “Gunpoint ripoff”. The game is called Ronin, and it’s time I did something about it. Specifically, it’s time I did a Let’s Play about it, because it’s really fucking cool. Continued

It’s Like 16 Ropes When All You Need Is A Bomb

Fact Friday: this was Morrisette’s original lyric until Warner Brothers demanded it be changed to spoons and knives because of “What.”