FEZ, What Are You Doing to Me?

I got into a couple betas this week (including Diablo III) and I was going to tell you about that (it's still coming but later) but I got sidetracked by a little thing called FEZ.

Before I tell you my thoughts on FEZ, I feel I should first tell you that I have a Rule for myself when it comes to what games I play. I came up with this rule at some point after I'd been doing QA work for a year or so. It's a simple rule: "Don't play anything that feels like Work."

Mostly this means anything that isn't fun, but also anything that's buggy enough to seriously impinge on my enjoyment (SWTOR fell, in part, to this aspect of my Rule). Now, fun is a subjective evaluation, and there are plenty of games that I do not consider fun that many otherwise sensible people enjoy. Puzzle games, for instance. I very rarely find puzzle games fun, or any game whose gameplay is predicated on solving a puzzle that is clearly the warped product of some twisted mind who likes to fiendishly torment the poor saps who were foolish enough to purchase their game. I can't stand Braid, for example. (I know I've lost a lot of you at this point.) Or Machinarium or many of the classics of the point and click adventure game genre, because they're all essentially puzzle games. Or as I like to call them "Read the Mind of the Demented Designer" games. If I ever make a puzzle game, I will a) have someone else design the puzzles because I am clearly not demented enough and b) have a murderous alternative to puzzle solving (especially any Damn Jumping Puzzle™), probably some sort of cruel demi-god who demands a blood sacrifice and then does the puzzle for you. (And there will be no penalty or bad ending for the player who takes the blood sacrifice route. This is because I vastly prefer Shooting Things to Reading Minds.) The exception to this are the really stylish and hilarious Monkey Island games as well as Grim Fandango - they get a pass on account of being really, really well written and hilarious. Otherwise, it's a big N-O to demented puzzles for me.

From all the buzz about FEZ, I suspected that it fell into this category, but also that I should still try and play it (like I tried to play Braid and many other games). And it turns out that for some reason I bought a bunch of Microsoft points a while back and then never used them. So I bought FEZ, figuring I'd eventually check it out but not really expecting to play it.

I was partially right.

It actually fails my Rule on both counts. It is one of those Fiendishly Twisted puzzle games and it is also incredibly buggy. So far it's only crashed on me once and otherwise the bugs have been limited to horrible framerate issues and the occasional extremely long load time (>5 minutes once or twice). According to raptr, I'm 10 hours and 4 achievements into the game and it pains me not to pick up the controller RIGHT NOW and play it instead of writing this (also laundry and various other chores that need to be done today).

Why is it sucking me in so much?

Well, for one thing, I think it's a gamer's game. It references so many classic console and puzzle games of the past that are much beloved by many of us (including me) that I find myself looking for/hoping for more references. Mario, Tetris, Castlevania, to name a few. The music (many have commented on how incredible the music is already), the art style, are all reminiscent of those days of yore that many of us (especially if you've been playing since the NES days) remember fondly.

Some of the puzzles are the kind I hate, that basically I have no chance of ever figuring out on my own on account of not being a Mind Reader, but quite a few are interesting and fun. More than once I've come across something and thought to myself "If I put this in my game, it would do this" and lo and behold, that's what it does. Sometimes I'm playing with the world just to play with it and the goal (mind you, I'm still not even sure what the goal is - I think some old man in a village told me but I seem to have forgotten in a haze of wonderment) falls to the wayside.

However, late last night in my voyage I found something disturbing. A number of the puzzles require that one decipher a sequence of characters and then execute a sequence of button presses in specific locations. I eventually cheated and looked up one of these and even knowing exactly what I was supposed to do, it took me a good twenty minutes to execute it. Admittedly, it was late and I was tired and I kept getting confused about which sequence of button presses I was supposed to be executing, but I really, really cannot stress enough how much I hate these kinds of puzzles. They're the same sort of combination of "memorize a sequence" and "execute perfectly" that makes me hate, hate, hate jumping puzzles.

So I'm going to cheat and look them all up. It doesn't do anything for me to sit there staring at a sequence of symbols and write them down and decode them and then have to execute a series of button presses. Obviously I can't get out of the button presses (no cruel demi-god to do them for me in this game) but at least I can bypass the rest.

I'm not even sure why I'm still playing; this should be the Last Straw in breaking my Rule. But I am, and I wouldn't be surprised if I "finished it" whatever that means.

Followup to That Wistful Feeling

A few weeks ago I posted this discussing my feelings about the Mass Effect 3 ending.

But Virtual Shackles sums it up much better (and more humorously):

That Wistful Feeling (Mass Effect)

Note: While I do discuss my feelings about the end of the Mass Effect trilogy, this post contains no spoilers. I make no such voucher for any comments that may or may not be left.

When I walked out of the last Lord of the Rings movie, I had a feeling that I seldom got from a movie but frequently got from books - that utterly satisfied and yet nostalgic feeling of ending.

From the archives: Fionnuala

This is a character background I wrote for AllianceLARP SF.

Python Game Project

Currently working on learning some Python, both for my own interest and in hopes that it will prove useful in my career. I decided to start out working on a kind of old school text adventure game. The project is both fun and interesting and already I've learned quite a few things (aside from the little bit of Python that I've learned from it).

• Everything that everyone tells you about learning to code is true: you learn more if you have a project you are working on. There are several reasons for this, motivation being the least of them; the biggest reason, in my opinion, is that having a project in mind will push you to stretch the limits of what you know and try new things. 
• The guys who wrote the classic text adventure games were amazingly talented writers. It is really hard to make a game interesting when you are limited to text to convey everything. I'm doing text as a placeholder, but even so, it's hard to strike the balance between evocative and tl;dr.
• The more details you have fleshed out about your setting & characters, even if you don't convey 90% of it in-game, the richer your game will be. I started out with a seed idea and haven't really done a lot of world building yet, and it shows.

I'm pleased with the amount of progress I've made in a short period of time and I'm looking forward to continuing to work on it. Right now my goal isn't really to necessarily make something that I can share but mostly to explore some ideas and gain some knowledge of Python; if I do decide to share some of it I'll post it here.

The main resources I've been using for this project have been reddit/gamedev and the tutorials at http://inventwithpython.com.

30 Days Meme: Days 3 & 4

Oops, I missed a post. I bought a Kindle Fire and I was preoccupied with rooting it and playing with it last night and my blog (and SWTOR!) was sadly neglected. You'll get a full Kindle Fire post later this week but for now, it's back to the meme.


30 Days of Video Games, Day 3:
My Favorite Series


This is a tough one, because there are a lot of video game series that I have loved over the years. Elder Scrolls, Baldur's Gate, Warcraft (the RTSes as well as the MMO), Civilization, Mass Effect, Fallout... but I think for the sheer number of games in a single series that I have loved, credit has to go to Ultima. While I did not love Ultima VIII, and Ultima Online was a disappointment (I did not play Ultima IX, I just couldn't bring myself to do it), I deeply loved IV, VI and VII especially (ignoring Serpent Isle) and enjoyed the rest quite a bit (yes, even Ultima Underworld). I think I played the third one on the NES first; I later played through the entire series when the Ultima Collection was released. I was quite sad when I upgraded my computer and couldn't play through the collection any more - it wasn't compatible with the DOS emulator on WinXP.

30 Days of Video Games, Day 4:
Favorite Game of Your Favorite Series


Ultima VII was by far my favorite Ultima game. It was big and expansive, with player choices and consequences, crafting, rich story, etc. I probably played it all the way through 3 or 4 times.

30 Days Meme: Day 2

30 Days of Video Games, Day 2:

A game I've played through all the way twice

So, there are several games that could qualify for this one, especially if I count games that I've tested. But like I've said before, testing is not playing. Even setting that aside, there are several choices; in the end, I settled on one of my favorites, Mass Effect. Of the two so far, while ME2 had somewhat better mechanics, I think ME1 had a far better and more cohesive story. Of course I had to do at least two playthroughs (and I will probably do a third) for each game, to experience both the Paragon and Renegade storylines. I think Jennifer Hale is awesome and will forever be my Commander Linnea Shepard regardless of the role she's playing.

30 days meme: Day 1

As one of my resolutions this year was to blog more often, I thought I'd start the year out with something relatively simple: a meme. A variant on the popular '30 Days of Movies' meme, this will be 30 Days of Video Games.


30 Days of Video Games, Day 1: 
Best video game you played last year


Without a doubt, this is Skyrim. Although I've set it aside for a time in favor of Star Wars, it is still by far the best game I played last year. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only who thinks so, considering how much amazing fan art, music, mods and memes (arrow in the knee?) the game has inspired.


Skyrim is, in fact, kinda metal:

It is also pretty epic:

Be back tomorrow, with Day 2: a game that I've played all the way through at least twice.

My favorite weapon in Fable III so far

The Scimitar of Baron Slaying +3

Best part are the augments:

Know-It-All     Learn all the rules. Even the really obscure ones.  +30% Sense of Self-Importance.
Space Geek     Memorise quotes from fictional science plays.      +90% Damage vs Space Elves
Oh, The Irony  Try desperately hard to make fun of stereotypes. -50% Self Awareness.

Stuff I've Been Playing

Oh, blog... I owe you a post. After all these weeks (months even!) of neglect it should be the best post ever, crafted with love and attention and care.

But that's not what you get.

Instead you get a hella weak "what I've been playing" post because I'm tired and I want to make sure I write something even if it's not very substantial.

So if you're still with me, here it is:

• Fable III - those of you following me on twitter or FB have already heard a few things about this. I'm having fun with it but it's incredibly buggy (always rage inducing for me as it feels like work has followed me home or something) and I think there are some significant flaws in the writing. The "non-menu" menu system is interesting and not quite as annoying as I'd feared. However, if their purpose was immersion, their little popups telling you where you rank in comparison to your Xbox Live friends definitely undermine it.
• Bastion - sadly I've only played a few hours of this. It's a clever and beautiful little game and lack of time and energy to devote to it have caused me to neglect it even though it may be one of the best games in my collection that I haven't already played (yes, I know, why am I playing Fable III instead? Because when tired and stressed, I'll go for the familiar and mindless every time.)
• I had a brief fling with Kingdom Rush (and by brief fling, I mean I played it endlessly and obsessively for about 3 days straight and haven't touched it since). I blame Felicia Day.
• Terraria - I plan to go back to this one. It's fun and mindless, the sort of game I can play while listening to an audiobook or something (ie, my idea of the perfect escape).

I won't promise that the next post will have more substance than this but I do intend to write more frequently than I have been. New job and all, my brain's been kinda eaten by that.

Oh, also, if you have any interest in working in the industry, you should read The Trenches.