IFC brings out my pretentious side.

I should be asleep.
by AC - permalink

I just caught myself watching a movie called Mediterranea for the second time in less than 24 hours. It's an Italian movie shot in 1991, and IFC is showing it. It's about a small group of Italian soldiers stationed and subsequently forgotten about on a tiny, unimportant Greek island in 1941, and it's a kickass little film. Incredibly atmospheric and immersive. It's not a war movie, in fact it's sort of a comedy, but dramatic as well as it follows the lives of the men essentially marooned on this idyllic little island. If you can put up with subtitles, you'll love this movie.

And that's what I like about IFC. Sure, most of the time they show stuff you've never heard of, and occasionally they air Vincent Gallo movies, and I'd kill a man if it meant I never had to sit through another Vincent Gallo shitstorm. But IFC also shows films like Reservoir Dogs, uncut and letterboxed, which is awesome. And they also go international, and when they do, it's generally a masterpiece, something we would otherwise never see in America.

In fact, the main reason IFC is on my DirecTV channel list is for the Zatoichi movies, which they run every weekend, without fail. There are at least a dozen Zatoichi movies, and they're all fucking awesome. If you've never seen one, just put it on IFC on a Saturday. They center on a blind masseur in feudal Japan, a blind masseur who is also a master swordsman. Most of the movies follow the same basic plot of A Fistfull of Dollars. Every film, every single one, is beautiful in every way a movie can be beautiful. From the sound to the cinematography to the acting to the editing, these movies are masterpieces. Any one of them is "desert island" material. Again, they're only for people who can put up with subtitles. Dubbing sucks all the life out of foreign films, literally.

And I might as well point out that I've been sucked totally back into Star Trek recently. The Next Generation hooked me during its first season, and I became a total Trek nerd for years afterward. After the death of Enterprise I slacked off and kind of forgot about it all, but G4 and Spike air Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, and even the original series so often that I've been pulled back in, and I don't really watch anything else on TV but Trek now, except The Daily Show, Sportscenter, Family Guy, and anything on Adult Swim that isn't anime. DS9 has always been my favorite series, and I wish those series box sets cost less, because I love the story arc of the last few seasons, but there's no way in hell I'll pay fifty or sixty bucks for one fucking season of a TV show, no matter how good it is. Probably. Maybe. I really like that show...

I love Valve, but enough already.

Hey, it's another patch. And another. And... wait.
by AC - permalink

So here's my problem. To patch, or not to patch? Does it matter? Do you have to patch? It depends on the game, and the patch, and the developer's commitment to releasing patches that mean something. I'll give you two examples of why this whole issue makes my head hurt.

I have UT 2004 Editor's Choice. I'm not sure what build of UT2K4 I have, because there's no easy way to know, but I know it's been patched since my version. I've been trying to find the latest patch for the latest retail release, and I can't. The official site has this one patch for me, but the link is broken, like every other link on that half-assed site. Looking around at various game and software oriented download hubs led me to three different patches, all claiming to be the latest. On one site, the link was dead, and on three more all the servers were tied up for up to half an hour. So I gave up on the whole thing, because my UT2K4, ultimately, is working just fucking fine anway.

The other side of this issue is Valve Software. Look, I love Valve. They gave me Half-Life, and Half-Life 2, and Counter-Strike: Source, and more. But they also game me Steam. Steam means if there's a patch for one of my Valve games, I can't play that game unless I download the patch. No matter what it is, or how big it is, or whether I'm on dial-up and never play online and don't necessarily want to spend two days downloading a patch that will mean nothing to me, I can't play the games I've already spent $30 or $40 or $50 on until I download the latest patch that Valve thinks I should. Suddenly, I don't like Valve so much.

Some of the more recent patches for Half-Life 2 have gone a long, long way towards reducing, and at some points eliminating that infamous stutter. The game became quicker and more immersive. In addition, patches were forced on me that gave a few CS:Source maps HDR, and it looked good. I also downloaded, via Steam, the demos for Darwinia and Rag Doll Kung-fu and Shadowgrounds, and Half-Life 2: Lost Coast and Project Gordon and other misc. freebies I get for buying HL2 retail. This all took days and days and days of background downloading over dial-up. But I did it, and thanks for the opportunity to download stuff in random increments, Valve, because it's very helpful.

But why was I forced to download the latest Steam engine update that has not only undone all the previous patches' effort to reduce that stuttering problem, but made it worse than ever? Half-Life 2 is one of my favorite games of all time, and now it lags and stutters so badly that half the cutscene NPS dialog is unintelligible, and the game seems to randomly stop and start, as if it's loading new content into memory. But it isn't, because I've tweaked HL2 to use half a Gig of my RAM, and I know from playing the game for the last several months that this is plenty of damned RAM. It's this newest patch, one that I never wanted, and certainly would have surfed around looking for user feedback on whether it was worth it or not before downloading on my own.

Here's the main issue. If you release a game, it's out. It'd better work. If it doesn't, you have to make sure your users know that there's a patch that will make it better, and where they can find it. You can't just keep throwing out patches, then wait and see how it works for us before forcing more patches on us in case it's shit.

Are you listening, Valve? We are not your play-testers. We are your end-users. We've already paid good money for your games, and that exonerates us from unwillingly beta-testing for you.

As for Atari and Epic, fix your goddamned web site. Three quarters of the links to the MSU contest winner sites are broken, many due to improperly-written HTML code. And all the official download links throw up a tiny pop-up window that either goes nowhere or links to Atari's main site, which is less than helpful.

Look, I just want to play games. It's why I bought a fast PC and spent even more upgrading it. Obviously, it's why I've spent so much on games for it. Is it really too much to ask that they work? I know everyone's PC is different, but if you're going to release patches, tell me where they are, and for fuck's sake, test them. Don't make me your lab rat, and don't force me to download patches for games I already own.

The duality of FPSdom.

Sandbox vs. corridor-crawl.
by AC - permalink

I've gone back to Halo recently, and I'm making progress. I thought I was stuck for a while in that tower deal shortly after encountering the Flood for the first time, but it turned out I'd just somehow managed to miss a progress-mandatory waypoint. I had to backtrack a long way before I could convince the game to let me keep playing by triggering the next cutscene. This game is getting really repetitive. Even after continuing, I'm still running down the same hallways I was running down a week ago, just with different things to shoot at. Every now and then Halo lets me think about switching one of my two weapons by depositing a bunch of rockets in front of me, but that's really the end of the variety. Otherwise, the only way to affect the gameplay is deciding whether to use grenades to clear my path, or just running past to the next checkpoint.

In that way, it's not so dissimilar from Half-Life 2, but at least in Half-Life 2 the environments are constantly shifting and changing, and the whole feel of the game is altered. And you can always play every moment with nothing but the gravity gun, which was probably never intended but can be done, because it's such a robust game.

I also started Far Cry from the beginning a little while back, and I've reached the not-so-fun parts in that. Again, it's corridor-crawling, this time against melee-fighters (the early trigens) that can kill you with two hits, even through catwalks and from seven or eight feet away. That's a hit-detection issue, but it's also gameplay-related. Melee fighting plus FPS equals shit. It just doesn't work, ever. It's no fun. The only exceptions in my experience are chainsawing pinkies in Doom and chainsawing zombies in Doom 3. But that's it. Throwing melee fighting into a shooter for variety is just about the worst thing you can do. Look at Quake IV; everything shoots, and you can shoot back at everything. Hence, it's fun. Same deal in UT 2004, Half-Life, Call of Duty, Ghost Recon, and I could go on and on and on.

The corridor-crawl missions in Far Cry are particularly irritating after mission after mission where the maps are so massive that you can do just about whatever you want. You can blast your way through, via several different routes, or you can sneak your way to a gun emplacement and mow down everyone you bypassed, or you can just sneak your way past everyone. Or you can highjack a boat and use machinegun fire and rockets to take 'em all down from offshore. And that's just one mission. The campaign in Far Cry is enormous, probably the last PC FPS of that size we'll ever see.

They call that "sandbox" gameplay, but that really isn't accurate. You can't do whatever you want, just whatever the game will allow you to do. But in Far Cry, the limitations are so low that you don't notice them.

You might use stealth and a silenced MP5 (if you decided to pick one up - again, up to you), to make your way undetected onto a high point overlooking a couple of enemy strongholds. Then you can use your binocs to lock the position of all the enemy sentries into your HUD's radar screen. And you'll realize there are two or three dozen mercs out there. But without even thinking about how you're doing it - in other words, without breaking the "fourth wall" and thinking outside of the game's rules - you can use stealth to find a good position, then use loud weapons to simultaneously kill nearby mercs and draw in others farther away who heard something but don't know they've been drawn towards your protected and well-armed position. Before you even know it, you've wiped out all the significant resistance between you and your goal.

That's good gameplay, especially when you realize on your next play-through that you could have gone prone in the bushes, taken out a patrol or two, and then snuck past the remaining guards to kill the last few sentries to get to the objective.

But again, it only lasts for so long. It must be either good luck or insane diligence to come up with a shooter that good, which probably explains why there are so few of them out there. Far Cry is one, for a while. Ghost Recon is another. You can probably put Medal of Honor: Allied Assault in that category for select missions, and Half-Life 2 for the same reason.

But corridor-crawling can be fun. Anyone old enough to appreciate Doom II knows that. I'm not talking about Doom 3, which would probably be crawling at it's worst if it wasn't for the suck-you-in visuals or those awesome hell maps. I'm talking about Quake I-style shoot everything five or six times, and if it's still moving, shoot it some more, then keep running and shoot some more. That shit can work very well when it's done right, even in a single-player game. Call of Duty fits into that mold, and the CoD series is in the pantheon of all-time great PC shooters. You can throw in Quake II, the original Doom games, Elite Force, the Half-Life expansions Opposing Force and Blue Shift, and the Serious Sam's.

So which is better? There's no answer to that. I can only tell you that games like Halo drive me fucking crazy because they can't make up their minds. Halo pretends to sandbox by giving you huge maps that let you pretend you're making your own way through until you realize the enemies are just going to keep spawning until you make a beeline for the next checkpoint, tactics be damned. That sucks, and no strategy you come up with will help you until you figure it out.

Can't get enough FPS.

I likes the shooters.
by AC - permalink

The great thing about PC gaming is no matter how old the game is, as long as it will run in your OS, you can play it. I mean, if you drop $400 plus tax for an Xbox 360, you can only play 360 games plus a small percentage of Xbox titles. But I spent $650 plus tax, plus another $250 for a good video card on my PC in January, and I can play virtually every PC game ever. So I've invested in some more recent games like Quake IV, Doom 3, GTA San Andreas, and Half-Life 2. But I can also pick up older games like Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Quake III, Ghost Recon, Far Cry, and GTA Vice City, with the bonus of knowing that not only can I play them, they'll look better and run smoother than their developers can have imagined.

Which is why I finally got around to buying Unreal Tournament 2004. I've been meaning to get this game for a long time now, but I wanted a new copy, and Atari is still selling it for $40, which is way too much for a two-year-old game. Then I stumbled across UT 2004 Editor's Choice DVD edition at Newegg.com for $15. Ordered, done. Three days later it was on one of my hard drives, all ten gigs of it. And now I'm realizing that it might have been worth the forty clams. There's just so much damn depth here. No, the single player game isn't perfect. The difficulty scaling has issues; it goes from way to easy to way, way too hard with no warning at all, but the fact that a multiplayer-centric FPS has such a robust single-player mode at all is pretty amazing. It's much more than I was expecting, and even after almost a week I haven't even popped in the second DVD, which is supposed to be full of free apps and tutorials for modders.

To get back to the game, it's basically bliss for anyone who cut their PC-gaming teeth on FPS deathmatch, like me. I started with Doom deathmatch, then Duke3D, then Quake. At this point, I have to compare UT 2004 to Quake III Arena, and I honestly can't pick a winner here. The biggest beef I have with UT 2004 is the scaling. The maps are so big that the players seem too small. Quake III scaled down the maps to a more realistic size, with slower moving combatants. It made the arenas more realistic. In UT, the maps are more impressive in scope and scale, and certainly in grandeur and wow-factor, but it's harder to pick out the tiny little folks running around in them. Which is important when you're supposed to be shooting them.

But the controls are hyper-responsive and accurate, and the visuals are varied and impressive, at least when it comes to the maps. Weapon models are fairly crude, and the weapons themselves aren't that impressive. Nothing really original or game-changing, like Duke3D's shrinkgun or Half-Life 2's gravity gun. And the variety of gameplay modes can be a little over-complicated and overwhelming at first, but that does testify to the complexity and depth of the game. Then again, the more team-oriented modes like Assault and Onslaught, and even CTF, which give UT it's depth, are made almost more frustrating than fun by obstinate bot AI that requires you to do all the heavy lifting yourself.

I'll give you an example. In a Bombing Run map, you might throw out an order like, "Cover Me," because, I dunno, if you have the bomb, you're completely defenseless. And if they're around, one or two bot teammates will dutifully run along behind you as you try to get to the enemy score zone. But they don't look around. A single enemy bot can take you down because he's shooting you in the back and your dumbass bots aren't really paying attention. This makes certain Bombing Run and CTF makes virtually unwinable unless you get really, really lucky and use the right adrenaline power-up at the right time. That's frustrating.

But overall, UT 2004 may not offer the kind of immediate, visceral combat you can get by jumping into a deathmatch on q3dm7 or q3dm17 in Quake III, but there are just so many things you can do with the game out of the box, at least in the Editor's Choice edition, which is still being printed, that it's probably worth whatever price you find on it.

And it's great for me that I found it at $15, since I'm going to be quitting that stupid, dangerous job I have. Hopefully I can stumble across a few more cheap, quality FPS's soon, because I'm not going out of my way to find good games anymore. I just can't afford it. But that's the beauty of PC gaming, isn't it? Good games get cheap, and you can always run them, no matter how old they are.

I quit.

Is it worse being broke or being dead?
by AC - permalink

So I'm probably going to quit my job next week. There's something about having a shotgun pushed into your face that makes you reevaluate whether it's worth $45 net a day to do... well, anything, if there's a chance of getting your brains fucking knocked out of your skull for four hundred bucks. I moved off the graveyard shift because our security was so bad, only to get a death threat in broad daylight. Time to move on? I'd say so.

I think this was the first time I'd ever had a gun pointed at my face, but it was amazing how quickly I reacted to it. It was an instantaneous, gut reaction. All I think I could comprehend in that thousanth of a second was that there was a large-bore shotgun four inches from my face and a semi-automatic handgun right next to it in the hand of a second guy, who also seemed to be wearing a skimask, and that I should back up and get as low as possible as quickly as possible. There's no thinking, no second-thoughts. You just get the fuck down and point in the general direction of where the cash is.

I mean, even if I'd been armed, what could I do? I'd been talking to a regular guest, a friend of mine, who was also in the lobby with me with her four-year-old boy. I was thinking, in those adrenaline-juiced seconds, about that kid, when I suddenly realized that I was basically fucked. If this asshole squeezes the trigger on that shotgun while his fuckwit buddy rifles through the cash drawer, there's nothing I can do about it. I'm just dead. At that point, I calmed way down. I don't really even remember what happened after that moment, until they were gone. Probably the trippiest moment of my life when I wasn't actually tripping.

It's the fact that these guys got in and out in under 60 seconds with no trouble that makes me want to quit this job. Tomorrow the cash drawer will be back to $300 plus income, and security will be no better. So why not hit it again? I don't need that shit in my life. As soon as the manager finally got back from his dinner break I walked out the door. I'm off til Monday afternoon anyway, but when I come in, I'm telling him it will be my last week, if not my last shift. Last night, someone fired a .38 through the window of one of the rooms. We dug the round out of the wall. Two nights before, two guys muscled into the room of a 70-year-old guy staying in the hotel right next door and took four grand from him. Again, in broad daylight. There are pimps, dealers, thieves, and thugs to wade through on a daily and nightly basis who want to rent rooms for the night.

Fuck that. I'm done. I'd rather be flat broke than flatlined.

Doom and Metallica, Heller and Vonnegut.

Hey, you got chocolate in my peanut butter!
by AC - permalink

I've switched to a different old monitor while I work up the guts to throw down a few hundred dollars for a new one. This one has much better color and brightness than that last piece of shit, but even at 15 inches, its max resolution is just 1024x768 at a depressing 60Hz. But that's not so bad, really. I've discovered that just about every game I own runs so well at 1024 that I can jack up the anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering as high as my vidcard can go without dropping the framerate below the refresh rate (I always enable v-sync). 6x AA with temporal enabled does a very good job of eliminating those 1024 jaggies in games like Half-Life 2 and GTA San Andreas.

So anyway, I started playing Doom 3 again, and I think I really do like this game, overall. It's still just a lot of, "walk into that room, shoot those teleporting baddies, walk into the next room, shoot some more," but it's so fucking pretty I still like to play it. I started over from the beginning with a duct tape mod, but I ditched it early on. I really think it works better in the dark. And with a radio playing in the background; this weekend 93X decided to go back to an old gimmick they had years and years ago. They're playing every Metallica song ever recorded in alphabetical order. They call it Metallica A to Z, and it's really cheesy, but it's still awesome. How often do you hear "Disposable Heroes" or "Of Wolf and Man" or "Trapped Under Ice" on the radio? The last time I heard "Trapped Under Ice" it was on a cassette I used to have, and I'd taped it from a Metallica A to Z weekend in like 1996, when we were still playing Doom 1.

I managed to download the Rag Doll Kung Fu demo via Steam this week, and it's weird. Definitely unique, but I don't know about the fun. I'll keep toying with it anyway. I don't think I'm going to try to buy Half-Life Episode 1 over Steam. I'll just look for a retail copy. I'm working on downloading the Shadowgrounds demo now, but God knows when that will finish.

Which reminds me, I'm reading God Knows by Joseph Heller now. It's fucked up, but that's what we love about Heller, isn't it? You only have to read Catch-22 once to love him. He invented a character called Major Major Major Major and we bought it. After God Knows, I think I'll finally get around to tackling this whole Kurt Vonnegut shelf I have but have never gotten around to reading: Jailbird, Galapagos, Deadeye Dick, and Bluebeard. Vonnegut is tough for me to get into. I always liked Slaughterhouse-Five, but then a good friend of mine found out about that and told me it was bullshit. And I suddenly realized that she might be right. You either totally buy into what he's saying or you can't fucking stand it. But then that's the mark of great fiction, isn't it? It's why I love Chuck Palahniuk's books. Because I get it. But Vonnegut? I'm still working on it.

Halo, Half-Life, headaches.

You take the bad to get to the good.
by AC - permalink

I'm taking a break from GTA this weekend to get back in touch with all my first-person shooters. I started by finally getting around to downloading Half-Life 2: Lost Coast via Steam. With dial-up, that's a long, long process, so we'll come back to that. After getting that going on Thursday morning I started playing through the Call of Duty expansion pack United Offensive again. Compared to more recent games like GTA San Andreas and even Half-Life 2 and Quake 4, United Offensive is still a damned good looking shooter. At 1280x1024 I can max out all the AA and AF settings, and I continually stop to look around at all the pretties. The Quake III engine is just one of the all-time great shooter engines.

Anyway, I also decided to revisit Halo PC. I started over with a new profile, on a lower difficulty setting. I dropped it to Normal, not because it was too hard, but because it was too hard with a 70-degree FOV with those crappy Halo guns. I'm sorry, but most of those weapons are all nifty and whatever, but they're inaccurate and too short-ranged. So I finally got around to looking for an FOV mod, and thirty seconds later I had this FOV/third-person mod I found at Filecloud. It's just a little executable you launch before running Halo. It lets you toggle between the default FOV and one you select in the app (like 90, the gold standard since, I dunno, fucking Doom), and also lets you switch to third-person with on-the-fly camera adjustment. Finally, Halo for PC is playable and fun. Still too resource-heavy, but a resolution like 1152 is good enough, I guess.

Eventually, after almost three days of off-and-on downloading I had Lost Coast. So I launched it, and... Error: "Failed to lock vertex buffer in CMeshDX8::LockVertexBuffer." Then, "The instruction at '0x241fe49b' referenced memory at 0x0dacf438'. The memory could not be 'read'." Oh, that's cute. It's actually almost the same error I've been getting when trying to run Half-Life: Source. So I checked the Steam support site and got a long list of fixes I'm not going to try, because I know enough about this shit to know they won't work. At the bottom, though, was this:

14. Put this CVAR in your HL2 launch properties and see if it helps:

-window +mat_forcehardwaresync 0

It helped. It's enough to get the app running, anyway. I can then just go to the video options and set it back to full-screen at whatever resolution I want. So I played through the first 45 minutes or so of Half-Life: Source, because it's still so damn fun even after, what, eight years? I only played through Lost Coast once, with HDR on full, because I know it was really all about the HDR. Unfortunately, this shit monitor I'm trying to use now made it way to dark to really appreciate. I got the odd sensation of appreciating how cool it should probably look, but doesn't quite. The more muted HDR in CounterStrike: Source's de_dust looks a lot better. But visuals aside, there were some really interesting gameplay moments in there that I didn't see in Half-Life 2, and have me looking forward to Episode I more than ever.

Oh, and I also downloaded the Darwinia demo via Steam. Again, it's overly dark with this monitor and the app has no brightness settings, but I played through the tutorial, and it's just like nothing else I've ever played. Of course, the last RTS I played was Centurion: Defender of Rome for the Sega Genesis, so I might have missed something. The entire game is under 40MB, but I'm not yet sure it's actually worth $20 to download.

And one last note. Apparently I'm still in my compulsive DVD buying mode, because last week I picked up Jarhead, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World for no real reason. I used to have a copy of Master and Commander and I thought I had it out of my system, but no. I just love that movie. It's in my all-time top ten, I think. I put off buying 9/11 for a long, long time, because I knew it would just piss me off. All of Michael Moore's movies are terrific, but they piss you off because you wonder why someone had to make a movie to point out all this awful shit that's happening right under our noses. Well, except for Canadian Bacon. That pissed me off because it was just kinda stupid. I bought Jarhead because I just love war movies that don't actually glamorize war, and I think Jarhead could be this generation's Full Metal Jacket. Sure, it would've been better with R. Lee Ermey, but we can still get our Ermey fix with Mail Call on the History Channel.

By the way, the Title tag on his web site, rleeermy.com, says, "Welcome to R. Lee Ermey.com NOW DROP AND GIVE ME 25!" That's fucking awesome.