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Sigh.  Following up on the original Steam Rolled post, I never did succeed in contacting Valve cust service, and forgot about it.  Until now, when I realize that the reason this defrag is taking so long is that Left 4 Dead is still out there burning 5 Gig of my disk.

It also happens to have a lot of fragmentation, along with Zeno Clash.  Curious.  Does Steam’s architecture lead to a lot of fragmentation?  Perhaps it’s just because I often have 20 to 30 apps running at a time.  In fact that’s likely.  Steam, by design, quietly and seamlessly downloads in the background, encouraging you to keep working while it does.  Which is a great user experience, until it’s time to defrag.

Recently Valve rolled out a 24-hour trail of Left 4 Dead for the PC. Generally speaking, Steam is first class and things are highly polished, so the way this turned out was entirely unexpected.

I’ve seen the game on consoles and, well, hey, it’s a console game. Endearing but not a lot of depth. Still, it’s well done, and so when Valve gave me a chance to try it out on some real hardware, well, I had to check it out. One of the many things Steam does well is pre-loads, so well before the 24-hour free trial I decided to jump on it.

It all looked good and pre-loaded seemingly fine.  Until it decided to disappear.  Yup, after umpteen minutes and umpteen gigs of data had tied up my line, and it showed as pre-loaded, it magically disappeared. I probably should have taken the hint then.

As it was, I wasted precious playtime because the pre-load just disappeared, which took a while to believe.  Sweet guys!  Now what?  Eventually I threw in the towel and decided to eat the loss and pre-load again, which would cost more hours of playtime.  But bang, it was back instantly, apparently hidden somewhere on the disk.   At least that went right, but I had already lost 2-3 hours of the demo at this point.

I’d love to know what rocket scientist figured that the hot plan for a 24-hour free trial was Thursday at midnight ’til Friday at midnight? They must have been a good kid, because I don’t know about you but our Friday’s ended long, long after midnight!  And figure most people with jobs don’t get home ’til 6 PM, that means unless you were up after midnight on a Thursday, you would miss 18 hours of the free 24-hours.

What a deal!  Well, apparently, someone said something, because rather quickly Valve changed the free play period to 41 hours, that is, through Saturday ’til 5 PM.   Now THAT made a lot of sense.  I’ll actually get a chance to play the game in the dark, play a meaningful amount of time, and might even come to like it more. (I did.)  That sounds like Valve I expected, realizing a mistake, turning on a dime, making things right.

If only.

One thing I’d been wrestling with is Left 4 Dead is just too much for the kids, so I had never let them see it.   But by the time it was 4:30 PM, well…  I’d gotten a little more used to it, the younger one was taking a nap, and I got of a mind to let the older one, uh, grow up a little.  So why not play the intro.  Cant hurt, right?

Smack.

Apparently 4:00 PM is the new 5:00 PM, which is cool except, oh yeah, we’re already the Eastern time zone, so apparently Valve’s cutoff was 5 PM in Iceland, or something?   What next, GMT?  Of course they already have my local timezone via Steam, and showed the kill time there as 5 PM there, so even if they meant GMT… well, let’s just call it a very flexible interpretation.

Still the worst was yet to come.  Oh well, I figured I got the time wrong, that it was fun, but not my thing, and decided to un-install it, only to find out they’d removed the game from my games list, with no notice, no prompt, and NO WAY TO UNINSTALL THE DAMM GAME!

WTF!?!

So here I sit, with almost 5 Gig of disk tied up in a demo that I no l0nger want, but can’t uninstall.  I checked and yup, it’s still there.  So I went to email customer service, but customer service is … surprise!… a non-Steam webpage that demands my account information – information I have no idea of, information I have never keyed in but one time when I initially signed in to Steam like a year ago.   So I’m sitting here currently logged in on my Steam account, unable to get customer service, IN their client side app.

Just … wow.

With as much as they get right, I never expected Valve to drop the ball like this.  Over, and over, and over.

This was written over multiple days.

I wanted Zeno Clash for the graphics alone. The screenshots were awesome, so awesome I actually bought it as a pre-release, which I’ve never done. And when I loaded it up, it did not disappoint. The environment is gorgeous and imaginative… I was seriously geeked.

Unfortunately that died pretty hard.

This isn’t to say it sucks. Hell, exactly the opposite, it’s fabulous. They throw you rather abruptly into the story, but the whole thing’s got a ‘mystic’ vibe that makes that appropriate. It’s a fighter, not normally my thing, but the fight mechanics are interesting too. And then they stir in a perfectly whacked out, wonderful story and baby, I was in the zone, having lots of fun playing along. Great stuff, until the game drops me in front of a heavy that brought the game to a screeching halt.

Suddenly the game changed into a torture chamber, where he crushes you over and over in an endless cycle of death. You think, ah ha! Time to use those other fighting techniques. Not this time. Maybe it’s just hard? Yeah, I thought that too, for the first 20 or 30 deaths. Then reality set in.

I wrote the following in anger, after my fun had been ripped out of my hands. So I set this post down and walked away. Since then, I’ve just about finished the game, and it rocks. I’ll probably play it through at least once more just for the sheer joy of it. But re-reading this post, no, nothing’s changed, it’s still true:

“What could they have been thinking, putting this ultra-Boss in the beginning of a game? The combination of bug and bad design choices creates an amazing fail:

- Your teacher teaches you fighting techniques, all of which become instantly useless. Suddenly block just doesn’t do anything. Neither does kick. Or any of the punches. That elbow strike you learned isn’t available either. And no sidestep either – he still hits every time.

- Generally he can block as fast as you swing, and counter in the same time. So you can swing 15 times in a row and get blocked 15 times in a row. Swing perfectly over and over, and you get a handful of nothing. But he can still hit you, and he does big damage.

- Since you can only saunter-sidestep, he can do a running elbow strike with 100% success. So basically, if you ever get far enough back, it’s almost entirely fatal, unless you get lucky and swing at exactly the right time – that will stop him once in a while.

- Not that you can kick, but the spurious kicking doesn’t help either. Kicking isn’t bound to a control, you have to actually look down to kick. This seems cool, until you realize you have to stare at the dirt to kick, which means you can’t see, and it doesn’t work half the time. On the flip side, in the middle of a fight you can be looking up and seeing well above the head of an opponent, but you will cross that invisible line, unexpectedly kick instead of some other attack, and get hammered for it.

I’m not one to give up, but after trying everything over and over for hours, eventually even I begin to think the game’s not worth it and look to dial the difficulty down. Well, I still died. And continued to die as bad as before. It took another 30 mins to realize that changing the fight difficulty doesn’t persist! If you set the difficulty down a level, every time you die, it’s bumped back up to hard again.

You’ll get a lot of practice setting it down, because you’re trapped in this Circle of Hell forever. No matter how many times you die, you still start in the same spot over and over with 33% health or whatever you had left. And since there are no save games, the only way to be prepared for the big boss is to replay the entire section up to that point.

You’ll think “It can’t be this hard. Maybe I forgot something?” But sorry, no clues for j00! If you had to step away from the machine or are otherwise interrupted, you’re out of luck. The fighting techniques, which are presented as tips as you go along, aren’t listed anywhere, including on the Zeno Clash website. So you get to replay the entire game if you want to review something you got to see once.

…

It eventually happened in the wee hours of the morning. I’m not sure how long I’d been at it, because I’d died literally 50-100 times, desperate to move the story on; it’s an awful spot, barely into it, but with no options to move the story forward because here in the bloody training levels someone put in an ultra boss.

But ultimately, after hours fighting this same boss, waiting for the same ‘must bash’ tooltip, the same animation of him breaking the cage, resetting the difficultly back down each time, over and over and over, I actually managed to beat him once.

Only to be jumped by two new guys as soon as I left the cage, before I could get even 1 little health. Whack, you STILL lose!

O.M.F.G…   :-O

Didn’t anyone playtest this?

This is a case study in how NOT to design gameplay, but that post will have to wait for another day. Gotta go measure my blood pressure now…”

I’m not one to quit. So it was with heavy heart that, some hour(s) later I finally admitted the situation was irrevocably broken, and resigned to replaying the game from an earlier save. The game doesn’t let you save, and doesn’t let you name saves, so I had no idea how far back in time this would be.

Only then I find out it was only about 60 seconds back. After a couple plays through the warm up act, I went up against uber-boy with full health, took him down, and this time lived long enough to tell the tale.

I’ve played the entire game since then straight through, and that says a couple different things. First, apparently no, after 30 years of gaming I didn’t magically lose my sk1lz overnight. Apparently I can handle the simple mechanics of this game, minus one boss. But it does speak to the wild inappropriateness of putting that one boss that early in the game.

I’ve since beaten 2 or 3 other ‘heavys’, each time on the first try. And each time, mostly using hack tricks I developed in the endless circle of death. Except those heavies had health available. This doesn’t make me proud, this just makes me angrier that they ruined an otherwise perfect groove. The game is truly classic, or it should be. But this is just the kind of mistake (aka Demigod) that will single-handedly take it’s ratings into the gutter.

Most of me wants you to rush out and buy this game. Part of me is still angry…

My laptop’s been getting warmer, slowly over time. I realize now in retrospect that I had seen it coming; at one point I had downloaded the CPU temp gauge, I had process explorer on it looking for something always on, etc.  And then I remembered … when I first got it, I remember being surprised to hear the fan come on at all!  Now it never went off, and the GPU was approaching 200 degrees.  Clearly something has changed.

So after screwing with it, one thing I came across was a link to an HP service guide that said to blow compressed air backwards through the exhaust port. I would rather take it apart and clean it for real, but it’s pretty inaccessible, so I fired up the compressor and with great care blew it out.

Damm, temps dropped fifty degrees!   :-O

Thus motivated, I decided to blow out the Mac Mini also and had equally impressive results.

On a PC you see this stuff coming anytime you look in the case.  Fans act as air processors moving air through the unit, and over time it adds up to be a lot of air.  Then we run that air over cooling fins which do a nice job of catching and collecting dust, which massively reduces the cooling efficiency.   It’s easy to see the dust build up on things like the CPU fan.  Video cards now often have a housing over the fins making it harder to see, and the power supply?  Just trust me, it’s packed.

This isn’t new, the real world’s been dealing with it for years.  The kickplate at the bottom of the refrigerator is removable specifically so you can clean off the coils.  Your furnace filters are disposable on purpose, and there’s a reason you’re supposed to hose off the air conditioner outside once in a while.   If you’ve never cleaned any of this stuff, go check them now(!)  All that dust build up make the unit run harder, which shows up directly on your electric bill.

Nowadays though we have something new.  We have quite the collection of tightly closed boxes with fans.  Laptops, Mac Minis, Mini-ITX PCs, the Wii/PS3/Xbox.  All devices that have cooling fans, but that aren’t designed for maintenance.  Inside these sealed cases it’s completely hidden, and they’re not designed to be opened.  It’s great to sell new hardware, but it makes the consumer electronics industry seem amateurish compared to other industries that have been designing for maintenance for 100+ years.

Really makes you wonder how many of those Xbox red rings of death are just because they can’t breathe?

Sometimes little things head in the strangest directions.

Tonight I showed the runts Jason and the Argonauts.  A stylin’ 60’s film of Greek adventure, with lots of pagan ceremony, swords, manly manly men, and stop-action monsters.   And make no mistake, making a 60 foot Collosus come to life with modern technology might look smoother, but it absolutely won’t have any more impact!  A fine show, which is why I queued it up.

It must of worked, because the peanut gallery comments were way down, and everyone was awake ’til the thrilling end when King Not-Really-The-Bad-Guy (there are some moral issues with this show) uses the teeth of a slain hydra to summon the skeletal remains of all the heros it had killed, and orders them to slay our show heroes (for theft.)

Needless to say, Jason and the Argonauts win the day, albeit it with some casualties.  And then the show ends.  Great stuff with a hint of Army of Darkness.  But in the Q&A session afterwards, well, it wound up here:

“Skeletons with swords are kind of scary huh?”

(syncronized nods)

“You know what we’d do now?”

(not a clue)

So the hands go to the mouth with a muffled cry of “Tell ‘em to go to Hell”, then BRRRRGHGRHGHRGRRGRHGRHRGHR as I go Team Fortress Pyro and run around creamating the undead where they stand.

…

I’m afraid this may have broken the spell of the show a bit, but it was time for young minds to get modern.  Skeletal armies versus flamethrowers?  Or a minigun?  Even a Louisville Slugger would go a long way.  Or we could simply drive over them with the truck.  Sad but true, some of yesterday’s demons  just aren’t what they used to be.

Of course they didn’t worry about people dumpster diving for all their credit card data…

Take for a moment your favorite trilogy. Not necessarily a trilogy, just the multi-part story that your dearly love, film or book. It could be epic, classic, noir, slapstick – whatever presses your button. Maybe it’s Lord of the Rings, Bourne Conspiracy, the Godfather, Evil Dead, Back to the Future? Or perhaps a book has pressed your button, say David Eddings, Harry Potter, Elric, Knuth’s Art of Programming, Ringworld, Thomas Convanent?

For each of these, while each volume is a great story, it’s as a set that they transcend into something compelling, something “more.” In Star Wars, the battle over the Death Star makes a fine movie, but it is Luke’s conflict, discovery of and final resolution with Darth Vader that binds the films into something greater. Or Neo’s inital discovery of self in the Matrix, which sets the stage for the Matrix’s own final self-examination. Great stories, wonderfully told, that combine to form something more than the sum of the parts.

Now lets say you recently learned that one of your best friends has never read one of your favorite series, one that you know they will love! Here’s your chance to hook them up with hours of one of your all time favorites, which you probably already have on the shelf.

Now imagine you gave them the last 2 books.

…part of the series?!

What kind of bastard are you? Can you tell the story of Luke without his angsty farming roots? Would you share the Lord of the Rings without The Hobbit? How about Harry Potter minus his life with his uncle and that first year at Hogwarts? Ugh, it’s even annoying to talk about, some sort of fundamental offense against continuity.

Unfortunately, that is exactly the fate of storytelling in the modern age. We’re giving new audiences broken stories.

Enter the world of gaming dreams

In the last 20 years or so, a medium has arisen that enables rise to an entirely new generation of compelling storytelling – video games.

Gaming has reached a certain level of storytelling craft. It’s a bit tricky, and it hasn’t been immediately recognized as storytelling because the player’s actions are part of the story, which is definitely a factor you wont learn about in English class.  But we have long since reached the point where game story content has turned into something akin to literature. Some of the early elements of story were present in Scott Adams Adventures, Ultima, or Infocom games like Zork. How many hours were burned in Zelda? Or wrists in splint from Atari Adventure? Even in Robotron 2084 you were rescuing a family.

That said, early games’ story ‘content’ was often in the form of an external tie-in, occasionally a tenuous one. In the case of Dune II , it worked pretty well, but in the case of 10 Yard Fight, well, hey, it was football-esque. Sometimes it was pretty raw, to the point where the box art or the side of the arcade cabinet told as much of the story as what was on the screen.

But as platforms have become more powerful, games as a storytelling medium have really come into their own. In particular, the evolution of in-game video really gave game designers a chance to tell more than the gameplay itself would allow. And once they had video, they had the expressiveness of a movie, plus the game itself. It was a giant leap forward, and let to some of great stories in gaming.

Which, unfortunately, are exactly what’s at risk today.

continued in Crumbling Foundations, Part II

After several polite requests, I decided it was time and so gave in to letting my 7 yr old play Civilization IV himself. As a parent, these formative moments are critical, and whenever possible I try and make sure they’re ‘just right.’ So there was a whole lotta Civ before today.

We’ve been playing Civ for .. years? … now. It’s a great game, but an even better game for a parent, since it creates context and a framework for understanding the human experience. No, I’m not kidding. Lately, with schools teaching to the test, and most parents worried about excessive violence on the Nintendo, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of Education in the grander sense of the term, but it still matters to me.

So early on, starting from those first civ games, I was smacked with the issue of cultural context. For an adult it’s something of an alien thought, but those club wielding cavemen you start with assume you know what cavemen are. Or the importance of the wheel, the tactical advantage of the Praetorians, the idea of cultural influence… on and on and on. The game covers all of human history.

All of human history!

Pestered with annoying questions about what he was seeing, which required explaining vast swaths of human events, it struck me that I could turn the situation on its head, and use Civ to explain it. Civ became the segue and the excuse to hop on to Netflix and turn the summer into a History channel binge, and we spent the summer learning about the construction of the Great Pyramid, the history of flight, Roman engineering, metal casting, the Battle of Midway, you name it. Science, art, engineering, all come to life in a human framework, and all made possible as a necessary background to Civ.

Seriously, it’s a great scam. History classes were invariably awful, but with Civ on the table I had carte blanche, the ultimate excuse to fill his brain with madatory backstory. And it’s a symbiotic relationship – completing the Great Pyramids in the game made the special on the Pyramids infinitely more interesting. More importantly, it’s experimental history. What if Napolean waited until the Russian winter passed? What if Ghandi was a war machine? Civ is better than history in that you can not only learn what happened, you can play what if.

So it’s gone on for months, with me being rather proud of myself for creating a self-driving interest which has worked to immensely expand his understanding of a wide variety of subjects. Until the recent requests to play not with me, but on his own. All leading to today’s formative first game.

How many times have we played? How many endless strategies have we discussed? Balances and ideas and plans. And so when Tokugawa finds him on turn 4, what does he do?

Declares war on him, naturally. Ack, crap!

So suddenly I’m far more involved than I want to be for the first 20 turns, desperately trying to keep the AI from kicking his butt right out of the gate. Fortunately, with a little strategic military unit production and the game’s low difficulty setting, after a bit we were able to convince Tokugawa that this was all a terrible misunderstanding and at least get the active war off the table.

But it’s certainly a tough moment for the parent gamer. On one hand, I know that the only way to let him learn is to let him fail, over and over and over, as all of us have before. But at the same time, ouch, does it have to be in the first 15 minutes!

Oh well, I’m sure we’ll be here again. And while I’m here, if it wasn’t obvious let me spell it out. Civ 4 is Must Play Gaming.

The problem with the computer age is it’s all been on computers. That sounds good, until you realize computers have delete keys.

Now most folks personally like the delete key, since it’s saved their behind many a time. From that rage-fueled rant where they finally told the boss what for, to the time they mindlessly typed their Visa card information onto the wrong website, folks have gotten really fond of the old back button. They’ve also gotten fond of it’s big brother, Delete File, and the really motivated types fell in love with Format. Get pissed off enough, and nothing brings the joy like the digital equivalent of nuking the drive.

The problem with this is the computer age is transient. Pound delete, and it was never there. Format the drive, and it never happened. To a very real extent, in the computer age history has ceased to exist, because there’s no record of it, and this is a very big change from the last 10,000 years or so.

I mean, you’ve gotta hand it to the hardy souls of Babylon, who were scratching out their letters in clay. Thanks to them, we’ve got piles of information that’s hung in there a good 5,000 years so far. And even papers and books have made it a 1,000+ years. But where’s that letter to the editor from last year? Oops. Lost with the upgrade, deleted to make space, or even if you don’t hit delete, the machine will helpfully have the drive fail.

So what’s been happening for the last 30+ years is, well, nothing – at least as far as anyone under the age of about 30 knows. Once the personal computer hit, things tended to get typed in, not written down, and all that is basically up in smoke. Sadly, the only real record of it is in the minds of bitter old geezers.

Which would be fine, except there was some really great stuff along the way. And not just computers, but this “role playing” fad kinda took off and blended with the computers to start a golden age of gaming that’s rolling
through the $4 billion mark about now. Hello! We were playing Yathzee before this hit.

It’s been a Hell of a ride, and it’s still going strong, but … who’s to know? With no history to speak of, for too many people, “gaming” equates to whatever’s on the shelf at Best Buy, which is just harsh. And games haven’t always evolved for the better. UT3 is great, but 4-player M.U.L.E. was like a gaming crack pipe. Folks should know! Dammit, there outta be a law!

We gotta get this stuff down before the rot sets in.