Important life lessons
Playing 7th Guest has reminded me of something: I really, really hate puzzles. I consider them the cost of being allowed to explore. Fortunately, you’re allowed to spend points to skip puzzles if you’re really put out by one. I’m sure there’s a trophy for not spending any points, but screw that.
One of the funnest bits are the 140 paintings scattered around the haunted house. They all have an alternative version you see if you shine your flashlight on them. Some of them made me bark with laughter.
This guy says he did about half of them (gallery at the link). I don’t think he’s the guy who did my favorites though. The really good ones do a bangup job matching the style of the original art.
Pity. I wanted to get in touch with my guy and tell him, “son, count your blessings. You will never again have this much fun and get paid to do it.”
Have a good weekend!
June 7, 2024 — 6:45 pm
Comments: 3
Like visiting an old friend
They’ve released the 7th Guest as a VR game. And actually, no – it’s not like visiting an old friend. It’s a completely different game. They’re both haunted house puzzle games, and there the similarity seems to end.
The original 7th Guest was released in 1993 and even my non-game-playing readers might remember it. It was a literal game changer.
It was one of the first games to be released entirely on CD at a time when not many people had a CD player. Adding one was hundreds of bucks. The game itself was a Benjamin. Remember when anything to do with computers was stupid money? There must have been significant buzz about the game because, according to this short video about it, CD player manufacturers said sales went up 300%.
It was one of the first first-person games and one of the first to use Super VGA 640×320 graphics with 256 colors. It was stunning at the time, which is hilarious when you see it now.
Doom came out the same year and was amazing because you could move freely in a 3D world. The world of 7th Guest was in a much higher resolution than Doom and you thought you were moving freely in it, but it employed a very clever trick: the motion was accomplished with hundreds of pre-rendered video clips. CD made this approach possible.
So for any given spot in the game, you had stand on A and look left, stand on A and look right, move from A to B then repeat with B until you’d built all the possible paths.
I thought that was a wonderfully clever idea, so I stole it. I built a simulation for work where you’re an engineer moving through a warehouse. And because my simulation could live on the hard drive, it was in much, MUCH higher resolution. Like, damn near photo-realistic. Nobody had seen anything like it.
In the end, the idea came to nothing, but I got to spend several years working on it and everyone thought I was a sooper genius.
Dark, dimly lit warehouse. All linear paths. It was actually very easy to make it look amazing. This must have been after 1995, because that’s when we first got 3D modeling. Also, I would never have spent a hundred bucks on a game.
You can watch a full playthrough here of the original game. The comments are hilarious. I was a grown-ass woman when this came out and it was camp and stupid and fun. A lot of the commenters were little kids and it scared the shit out of them.
June 6, 2024 — 7:45 pm
Comments: 2
Lookit this!
I got my machine back a couple of hours ago. They charged an eye-watering price for putting the drive in for me (never again – next time we bull through it ourselves).
But look at this! Is there anything more beautiful than a two terabyte SSD with one folder on it? I’m so looking forward to corralling my games in this one place. I shall bring them all to heel!
My house may be chaotic, but my hard drives – when I have the capacity – are neat as a pin.
May 14, 2024 — 7:31 pm
Comments: 6
I have no computer and I must post
My birfday present was a nice fast SSD to put games on and which we could install ourselves in a flash!
Yeah. No. Computer’s at the shop. Might get it back tomorrow. All my stuff is on it, including the old stuff I’ve been posting. So – hello!
I did play the cat game through during the break. It was beautiful and sweet. And weird. (Fair warning, it hurts the cat a couple of times in unavoidable cut scenes).
Also, I did something I’ve never, ever done. I take a tiny sliver of pride playing games through on normal difficulty, old lady though I be. Not resorting to easy or – god forbid! – story mode. What do I look like, a games journalist?
But I gave up and downloaded a cheat trainer for this. That’s what they call them now – cheat trainers. Kitty has to run through swarms of little parasitic creatures and I got sick of hearing him get jumped, scream and die.
Insult to injury, I watched other people play through on YouTube and they had no problem zig-zagging and avoiding trouble. I suck under pressure.
Now, to top it off, I miss the little cat and feel really sad about it. Stupid monkeybrain. Nothing for it but to play through again. When I get my computer back.
May 13, 2024 — 7:33 pm
Comments: 7
Next!
Coming to the end of the wizard game at last. It was fun – and, in the end, much bigger than I expected. I certainly won’t 100% it. It would take ages to get all those last little bits.
There were several epic spider fights, of course. I’m not -phobic about much, but arachna- makes the list. There’s a subtle thing they did in dedicated spider fights: they waved tiny black tendrils in the corner of the screen. This was probably ha-ha funny in 2D, but in VR it was both subliminal and unnervingly like what it’s like to have a spider on your face.
I know this because I had a spider on my face once. I was about nine, I was at a picnic, I thought my hair was blowing in my eyes and someone said to me, “did you know there’s a spider on your face?” I can feel it now. Spiders are scratchy.
Happy last day of April. We know what comes next, don’t we? BIRTHDAY MONTH!
April 30, 2024 — 7:21 pm
Comments: 6
I have come to the conclusion I am below average :(
Hello, frens. I played my game instead of coming up with something interesting to post tonight, in a pattern that has repeated in my life for upwards of six decades.
I’ve come to the conclusion I’m quite bad at vidya game combat. I’ve hated boss fights increasingly in recent years and finally had to nerf this one right down to easy mode to beat the big battles.
I’m supposed to have killed, like, five trolls by now, but any trolls I find bound across the room and smash me to jelly with one good whomp. Humiliating.
I keep taunting myself that this is a game for literal children, but I’m not so sure. The game and the rig to run it properly are not cheap and I wonder how many middle schoolers are playing.
Also Deek, my house elf, has been told to teach me how to breed magical animals. He has instructed me to capture one male and one female Thestral and buy blueprints for a breeding pen.
I’m dreading this.
April 16, 2024 — 7:50 pm
Comments: 4
Ha ha! The wizard game has a real-world problem
The Hogwarts game has an insurmountable problem: it’s set in a mythic English public school. To work, it has to be stereotypically English, and aggressively so. But white people are bad, m’kay? and must never be allowed to congregate without brown chaperones. Goodness me, English people are like turbo white people. What to do?
You can accept an African or Indian professor because I guess a school of magic would want representation from other magical traditions (lookit me, taking the world building seriously!). But when the student body is more brown than white, you start to wonder if you’re really in Albion any more. Subvert expectations too far and you’ll break them.
This is happening in meat-space, too. There’s a school near us that attracts a high number of foreign students. It isn’t a terribly good school, but Johnny Foreigner doesn’t know that. It has smart school uniforms and a horse riding program and it looks like Hogwarts inside. That still has cachet around the world whether our masters like it or not.
I read that the school has a target of…either minimum 40% English students or maximum 40% non-English students. I forget which. They struggle to maintain it.
It’s hilarious to see something marketed for its whiteness and Englishness, particularly when I know for a fact they’re exaggerating the whiteness and Englishness because whiteness and Englishness is their main selling point.
p.s. This is a very fun game in spite of itself.
p.p.s. I screwed up somewhere along the line and gave myself pink hair.
p.p.p.s. Good weekend!
April 12, 2024 — 7:06 pm
Comments: 6
“Maybe not quite so heavy”
Just watched a Portal fan film called GLaDOS – which, frankly, wasn’t very good. It had lots of fun call-backs to Portal (and Half-Life), but it needs a tight edit and it’s not really for normies.
But it made me think of the night I finished Portal for the first time. I was sitting in this very spot. Uncle B had gone to bed, but I knew I was close to the end and wanted to stay up and see it through. It was a stonking experience. And then the credits rolled.
I think Still Alive is the cleverest passive-aggressive manifesto from a deranged and murderous AI ever written. It’s brilliant work, and you’ll enjoy it even if you haven’t played the game.
Want You Gone from the credits of the second game is also good.
I’ve been thinking about the mess DEI is making of AAA games in 2024. There are 186 games in my Steam account (most of which I’ve never even looked at). If they never make another game I want to buy, I can still play vidya for the rest of my miserable life.
April 9, 2024 — 7:31 pm
Comments: 5
Leaning into it
In contrast to several recent expensive AAA flops – corrupted by the dour influence of blue-haired “story consultants” – an unabashed shoot-em-up leaning into the Starship Troopers theme has been the surprise hit of the year so far. Helldivers II.
Seriously, watch the trailer. It’s funny as hell, in a fascistic sort of way. Is there a word when someone is tongue-in-cheek, but really sort of means it, too?
The motto of the studio is “a game for everyone is a game for no-one”. Sadly, it’s probably not a game for me.
It’s a co-op you play online with up to three friends, and all my friends are frail, elderly Englishwomen. I don’t think I can get them on board. So anons it would be, then.
Also, it’s hard. I avoid any game that requires good reflexes and not completely losing your mind under pressure, especially online where I’m likely to play on a team of anonymous 14-year-old boys. I got a lot of poop kicked out of me before I learned that lesson.
“Managed Democracy” – still chuckling.
April 3, 2024 — 7:39 pm
Comments: 4
Tea time’s over
I had a wonderful Easter. I spent the sunny hours – of which there were many – sitting in the garden watching the new lambs gambol.
I spent the less sunny hours – of which there were also many – wearing my magic spectacles and playing games in VR. Specifically, the Hogwarts game. Yes, I got the plugin working that makes non-VR games into VR.
It’s an astonishing piece of work. I’m not a fan of the books, which were derivative as hell, but the visuals and the scale of this thing are amazing.
There’s a sort of giant junk room in it that contains thousands of individually-modeled items – I know they are because they animate as you walk past them. That’s the room in the picture above, but it’s many times larger. There weren’t any loading screens, either. How they fiddled the memory management for that, I do not know.
It should have been Game of the Year but wasn’t because JK Rowling.
Sadly, though, I have to run it at the game’s lowest resolution. In VR, games have to render three times: once for your left eye, once for your right eye and once for your monitor (I think there’s a way to turn off the monitor render, but I haven’t found it yet). My five-year-old rig coughs and wheezes at the prospect.
April 1, 2024 — 6:51 pm
Comments: 1