TechTank

Unbridled Gaming Rage

2011-07-21T06:35:00.000-05:00

Nearly every gaming forum and community-run site I frequent has been overrun by impotent and misguided rage from gamers. They rail on about perceived slights and insults to them personally from some multi-national corporation serving as publisher, whether these threats are real (overpriced paid DLC right when a game's released) or imagined (this idea that EA is charging extra to pre-order games on Origin - hay guys, it's a down-payment, not an extra charge).

This is what I don't understand about all this: gaming is supposed to be about relaxing and having fun, but so many people spend so much time complaining on forums about how horrible gaming is now. Why would a reasonable person spend all that effort and time? Sure, maybe if a bunch of loudmouthed people complain enough, they'll hold back the tide for a very short period of time, but is it really worth having spent so many hours raging on internet forums - in some quickly-forgotten thread that disappears into the bitbucket the next day - about how you're upset that some video game won't be quite as amazing as you originally thought it'd be?

And just for some perspective: I live and breathe video games. I grew up playing them, I work in the industry, and the only job I've had as a productive, responsible adult has been in video games. I'm invested as hell in this, and at worst, I don't have even one third of the vitriol and hatred spewing from my fingers as some of the shit I've seen recently.

I don't disagree with the very basic feelings people have, assuming that the thing they're upset about is actually real. What I don't understand is the unbridled anger that goes into it all, along with the significant amount of time wasted complaining about video games on the internet. There are people out there who don't get enough to eat; they're homeless, they've lost their jobs, they have no way to get to an unemployment office to register for unemployment, and their families have abandoned them. (I'm talking about here in America, not some far-off country.) How wonderful must your life be when the worst thing that's happened to you all day is that you found out your most hotly-anticipated upcoming game will only appear on a digital delivery platform that you don't feel like installing?

Get things into perspective, people. Worry about things that matter: about how you're going to make the next mortgage or rent payment, or whether your car will make it to 200,000 miles before the transmission goes kablooey, or whether you're showing your family and loved ones how much you care, or whether you will still have your job in six months. These things matter; video games are what you're supposed to have for a little escape from it all. Try and treat them like that, OK? And if you've got all that other serious real life stuff figured out, then try starting a game up and, I dunno, playing it and having fun!

Call of Duty: 20 Million (and counting) Douchebags Bred

2011-07-17T04:36:00.001-05:00

Call of Duty is now the most popular gaming franchise in history, and while its single player campaigns are always over-the-top rides through some ridiculous plot, the online play is where a vast majority of players put in the most time spent. The last few Call of Duty games have gone on to be billion-dollar properties - each - and the dollar of the teenager is most definitely fueling this. As much as Activision, Treyarch, Infinity Ward, and other developers involved in the franchise might suggest on the surface that Call of Duty is an M-rated game made for those 17 or older, any seasoned gamer knows the truth: the online play was basically custom built for America's millions-strong army of early teenage boys.

Think about it for a second. Nearly everything happens in Call of Duty's online play very quickly, as players often going from spawn to two kills to death in less than a few seconds. Its progression system makes players feel like they're accomplishing a persistent goal, but it never really forces them to make an important choice that closes off the opportunity to choose something else. Finally, the game asks little of its players to get them to work together, as the team's loss can still easily lead to a huge personal win. Oh, I'm sure there are a few semi-serious clan members that would disagree with my description, but the fact is that vast majority of games played have little teamwork in them. Despite the team-based objectives, players treat their buddies as enemies that they're simply not allowed to shoot right now.

Those of us who have made it down into the teenage dens of Call of Duty players know the scenario well: the Xbox 360 is spinning Modern Warfare 2 or Black Ops, the parents are nowhere to be found, the kids are usually 15 or under and cussing and yelling non-stop over their headsets. Now, I would never suggest that games like Call of Duty make kids into killers - but it's turning at least some of them into douchebags. The anonymity of the internet and the complete lack of any structure that forces gamers to work together turns the whole thing into a breeding ground for abrasive, confrontational, over-competitive, selfish, and anti-social behavior.

It wasn't always like this, though.

The earlier days of first person shooters, when Quake brought us true online play over the still-young public internet, were different. Early games didn't support teams, but that didn't last long, as Threewave CTF and Team Fortress turned competitive gamers into team players. Other games followed: Tribes, Battlefield 1942, Planetside, and others honed the skills of players and got them working together to kill the enemy. And those games didn't serve up a constant stream of persistent point-accumulation to make players feel like they're winning - even when they were contributing nothing but a few worthless kills to a team that was losing the battle overall.

Let's look back for a second at the Call of Duty games that had slightly more advanced teamplay. I think the best examples are Treyarch's earlier games, Call of Duty 3 and World at War. Both games offered vehicles, and that alone kind of forced players to work together not only to support their side's tanks, but also to take out the other side's hardware. And those games did not do nearly as well in the sales figures as the rest. Even now, Treyarch has essentially given up on trying to shoehorn vehicles onto the venerable and tired Call of Duty engine, as Black Ops features the same bare-bones multiplayer that Infinity Ward's last couple of games included.

Some informal study has shown me that even in a teamplay scenario, Call of Duty does not foster any semblance of working together. It's akin to being on a deathmatch server where you're simply not allowed to kill half the team. Players are just as likely to get into pissing matches or idiotic tirades with their teammates as they are with their enemies. What's worse is that Activision knows precisely what they're doing, because they are not looking to move the series forwards - just update a few killstreak rewards, throw in a combination of new and old maps, tweak some weapons, and make another billion dollars, year after year.

One could argue that the technology and map size are holding back Call of Duty from having larger battlefields with more vehicles, more goals, and - possibly most importantly - more players, but it seems silly to me that after years and years of massive success, Activision isn't looking to the future with their biggest cash cow franchise. But for years in a row now, we see another Call of Duty using the same old technology - a game engine that has its origins in Quake 3, a game that started development over thirteen years ago - with the same disappointing scope and scale. Of course, it's not disappointing to today's gamers, because they don't want to work together, and they don't really care for the rock-paper-scissors style seen in the play between vehicles and infantry in today's teamplay games.

Battlefield 3 is coming this year for both PC and consoles, and while it will be a solid seller on PC, the majority of its sales will still be on consoles. We've already seen that its frame rate will be 30fps, half of the 60fps you can expect from Call of Duty, and that's a shame because I'm positive that even though a thirteen year-old doesn't know it, the smooth frame rates and near-instant reaction time that Call of Duty has (say, in measuring the milliseconds between pulling a controller's trigger and seeing a gun fire on the TV) is actually a pretty big reason that this franchise is on top. In that respect, it's possible that Battlefield's building destruction and awesome lighting systems are wasted on consoles; maybe they need to tone that all down and just deliver a superior game to Modern Warfare 3 with the same silky-smooth frame rate.

Call of Duty has its place. It has to, otherwise people wouldn't have bought it in massive numbers. It's a good start, if anything. But I suggest that when those "boys" (whether they're, in reality, teenagers or adults) are ready to move beyond the attention-defecit, flash-things-in-front-of-your-face games that amuse people at a low level, that they come join the men over in these other games. Over here, headsets are used primarily for players to work together, not to insult each other's sexuality. Whether it's a current or next Battlefield, a resurgence of Tribes, maybe the MMOs Global Agenda or Planetside... we're waiting for new players to team up with.

Little is going to change this year, though. Activision will still make another billion dollars from Call of Duty this coming November.

Open World Games: Where to end?

2011-05-10T23:51:00.000-05:00

With open-world RPGs being so popular nowadays, I was wondering just how much effort people feel that developers should put into making their worlds feel truly lived-in. The Witcher 2 is almost out, and Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is on the way this November, and one of the things both games profess to include is an AI-powered populace that is more "alive" than ever before. Yes, this time they will have conversations with each other, they go and eat, they do their jobs, and they go to sleep at night.

If you just watch an NPC in, say, Oblivion, you'll see how hollow their day is. They always wear the same clothes, sleeping in them when they go to bed at night. They never use covers or blankets, and their conversations are dull and often non-sensical. In a Skyrim forum thread on another forum, someone suggested that maybe Bethesda could have NPCs actually pull the blankets back and sleep under them at night. But, I had to ask, why that specifically? Would that be so much more believable than what we have now? If we insist on having NPCs sleep under the covers, shouldn't they change into some kind of clothes for sleeping in? Or change clothes even in the first place? Do they just shuffle through a set wardrobe of, say, five outfits?

And do you know how difficult it is to properly model a character simply taking off a shirt? Imagine all those cloth physics, clipping issues, long hair, and such that'd have to be taken into account. Is it worth it?

You could go further. If the characters have clothes, shouldn't they wash them? Is there a laundry-person in each town that just washes people's clothes? They'd have to go through a daily cycle to pick them up, probably in baskets, wash them, then hang them up on some kind of awesome medieval clothesline. In a recent trailer for The Witcher 2, the developers showcased a dwarf weaponsmith that makes swords all day. I'm betting that this dwarf, if you just sit and watch him, always works on the same sword, day in and day out, never making any progress on it. Well, if you're going to push that as an amazing, awesome feature, maybe he should actually finish making a sword once in a while. But then, I have to ask, is there a finite amount of iron that he has to work with? Where does he get it? Is it shipped to him? Can we follow the guy that ships the dwarf the iron back to the mine, and watch miners actually use picks on the rock, hi-def-Minecraft style?

Now, I'm not suggesting that game developers actually go through all this. But I want to stress that everything a developer adds - or at least anything that makes a video game seem or look more like real life - only exposes five or ten other flaws, more things that the developer should add to make that look more realistic too. And each of those five or ten things, five or ten more, and so on and so on.

Maybe some day we'll have the math to be able to process all this procedurally, and it will get us closer and closer to the days of Star Trek's Holodeck. In fact, I see this as one of the bigger limiting factors in future generations of video games: that even with the amazing tools and fantastic HD graphics we have, there's always a finite limit of manpower available for putting these things to use. Sure, some studios have over 400 developers working on a single game, but look at what's happening: those games are deemed failures by their financial backers unless they sell millions and millions of copies.

In the future, I'm thinking that it won't be outsourced Asians making our interactive entertainment, because it gets more and more difficult to give a game a distinctive look and a solitary vision when you put thousands of people to work on the same project.

Maybe the answer is to have the computers do the game design for us.

Creating solutions versus finding them

2011-04-29T20:10:00.000-05:00

We've seen a lot written about Valve's latest first-person action/puzzle game, Portal 2. Some have found it too easy, some have gotten stuck for hours, and others have said it's just the right difficulty. Admittedly, the lack of a "challenge rooms" feature of just extra-hard puzzles isn't in the game, but Valve has announced that the free DLC coming this summer will fix it.

So in that case, what kind of puzzles should Valve make? There were a lot of new types in Portal 2, from the light bridges to the laser beam/refractor cubes, but I think the most interesting ones had to do with the colored gels. And not just one type of gel, but multiples. Sure, the white gel puzzles could be very easy once you saw what to do, but I think that these were superior puzzles because they didn't just ask you to find a solution, they asked you to work it out for yourself. In the campaign, one puzzle made us realize that all we needed was to drop from high enough to fling ourselves, but then we had to figure out how to get enough height to do it; and the solution was to throw white gel on a pair of columns facing each other, "walking" new portals up the sides of the columns in order to get enough paint to put a portal up high enough to stand at the top.

Frankly, those are the kinds of puzzles I'd like to see the most in Challenge mode.

MEElectronics M9P-BK Headset Review

2011-03-08T12:41:00.002-06:00

Last year, I was on the lookout for some new in-ear headphones. I'd gotten sick of my years-old Shure E2Cs, mostly because of the discomfort with the foam-based ear inserts. Tracking down reviews and rankings over at the HeadFi forums, I decided to jump in and by the M9 headphones. I spent less than $20, and was amazed at the sound, happy to use them as my main headphones while traveling for months.

Until I forgot to take them out of a pocket. The wife did the wash, and the headphones were ruined.

I had no hesitation when I went to buy a new set, but I quickly found out that Amazon had the M9P model - the one that also includes a microphone - for the same price. Since I'm using an Android phone, I figured why not, and happily ordered them.

I'm just as happy with these as I was the M9 - you'll be surprised at the quality of sound, the enhanced bass and treble, and the fit and comfort of these headphones. There are a lot of accessories - a full four (!) sets of new silicone tips to try in your years, and a little cable-management doohickey that I don't need, but I'm sure some would love. There's an adjustable shirt clip attached on the headphones, as well as a carrying case to put everything in. This is fantastic value, especially considering that the M9Ps, to me, sound better than the Shure E2Cs. The only downside is that it takes a while for these headphones to really start sounding good - and this isn't one of those audiophile myths either, like cable stands or wooden volume knobs for a digital receiver. The need to "break in" a set of headphones is a well-documented phenomenon, and everything sounds better once you've done it.

Most people I know don't care what headphones they get, so they're perfectly happy with that awful set of earbuds that come with their Apple devices and other MP3 players - until they hear something significantly better and spend a little time with them. And while in-ear headphones are a little awkward to get a friend to try - eww, earwax and all that - the friends I have that took the plunge with me when I bought the M9s most certainly agreed that they were superior to almost everything they had tried short of $100+ models. The M9Ps are cheaper now than the M9s were when I bought them last year, so if you're still using crappy headphones, there's no reason not to rush out and buy a pair. As long as you're not looking for ridiculously accurate "studio monitor"-style sound and don't mind the crisp and clean enhanced bass and treble afforded by the M9 series, then you should definitely check them out.

9/10

Alienware M11x Review

2011-03-08T12:38:00.001-06:00

Alienware has a pretty sour reputation in the enthusiast gaming community. Their computers are known for their garish exteriors and high prices. Their reliability is pretty good, but some have said their image as a boutique manufacturer has fallen apart since Dell bought them, too.

I finally got the chance to buy a refurbished Alienware M11x for under $500, so I jumped on it, and I have to say that I'm in love. The machine weighs around 4lb and has an 11.6" screen, but it's got the guts of a much faster computer than its size might tell you. Yeah, it's a bit heavier than you expect for its size - it's packed tight with solid hardware - but it's still right at the top of the bell curve for horsepower versus size and weight. Hell, the only thing that held me back from buying one a year ago was the price, as the R1 model with the Core 2 Duo SU7300 (the one I'm reviewing today) used to cost a cool $700. Now, with prices dipping much lower, this becomes an attractive machine.

The M11x is still a bit ugly, with a small alien face on its lid and its angular design on the speaker panel. In a stuffy office boardroom filled with paisley ties and Lenovo Thinkpads, you'll definitely stand out if you're packing an M11x, and for a lot of people in that situation, standing out in that way is a bad thing. But if you're not worried about maintaining a hardcore corporate-yes-man image, then this is a fantastic little powerhouse.

The SU7300 CPU is a Core 2 Duo that runs at 1.3GHz by default, but you can turn on the Overclock option in the BIOS and get 1.6GHz, fully supported by Dell and their warranty. The GT335M CPU is quite powerful, and can handle many of the latest games with no issues. Stuff like Starcraft 2, Mass Effect 2, the full range of Valve's Source engine titles, and even Battlefield Bad Company 2 range from very playable to screaming-fast on the M11x.

The machine comes with the usual range of weird Alienware pre-installed apps, but what I'm really happy about is the complete lack of bloatware. Everything that's on here beyond Windows 7 64-bit is either a driver or something made directly by Dell's Alienware division, and while features like facial recognition through the webcam are kind of silly, I do like having fine control over the system's lighting. You can make all kinds of conditional lighting configurations for the system's four main light regions: the keyboard backlight, the speaker lights, the small Alienware face just above the touch panel, and the Alienware name just below the screen. You can have a light come on when you've got email or an IM, or have a light panel change colors to tell you how much battery you have left. No, that doesn't really add up to much, but the backlit keyboard alone is very nice to have, and you can dim the light down just enough so that it stays low key but you can still see the keyboard during a late-night World of Warcraft session in a dark room.

Port placement on the M11x isn't terribly bad, but for a machine whose battery is entirely internal (you can still easily get to it, as well as the hard drive and RAM, by popping off the service panel on the bottom - all without voiding your warranty), I was hoping to see more ports on the back. I disliked seeing so many laptop manufacturers stuff all the ports onto the side of their models once the batteries had to start jutting out the back, and while the power does come off the back of the M11x, all three USB ports are on the sides, as well as the rest of the ports. (Speaking of that, the ports included are: HDMI, VGA, SD, Memory Stick, eSATA, two headphone ports, a mic port, the 3 USB, Ethernet, and a spot to put a lock if you have one.)

The keyboard feels very solid with absolutely no flex if you push down on it - it's much better than the ASUS 1201N I had previously. The touch pad isn't really the best I've seen and it's not a multitouch device, nor do I really like the buttons, but for me, I almost always use a mouse anyway. Take your pick of one of Logitech's mice that has the tiny little USB receiver, and you'll forget about the touchpad anyway. While I'm not big on the angular design or stupid alien face on the lid, it at least does feel sturdy since it's made of metal. The bottom panel is metal as well. Nice touches.

From my experience, the battery life isn't really stellar on the M11x, but I admit that I've been pushing it pretty hard, too. This machine has Nvidia Optimus switchable graphics, so you can press the FN+F6 keys to swap between the Intel onboard video (very power efficient, but completely ill-equipped to handle anything beyond the Windows desktop and non-HD video playback) and the Nvidia GT335M. In full-power mode with overclock turned on and all power saving features disabled, I can get a good three hours of normal internet-based usage out of the M11x, or about two hours of full-bore gaming. Simply put, I haven't done much power-saving since I got the M11x, so I don't have first-hand information on how it runs in its power-efficient mode. I've read that you can squeeze a massive seven or eight hours out of it with things turned way down. Either way, the M11x's power brick is very modestly sized and adds only a small fraction of a pound to the total weight, so I haven't found it too be much of a hassle to take it around.

While I'm not going to run through a huge battery of benchmarks for this quick write-up, suffice it to say that most games you can play will run fine on the M11x R1, and more still will run on the models with Core i5 or i7 CPUs - the 1366x768 screen size is small enough that the GT335M video card can handle just about every game I attempted to run on it, and almost everything was able to run at 30fps or higher - with only a few exceptions.

While the M11x is not a great machine if you're paying upwards of $700 or $800, getting a refurb off of the Dell outlet (complete with a full 1-year warranty, even including on-site service) for $450 is a damn fine deal. I immediately did some upgrades when I got it, like dropping in a 500GB 7200RPM hard drive and replacing the 2GB of RAM with a more beefy 4GB, but even then, we're still talking about a machine that destroys the netbooks of old (and even many full-sized laptops up to a year or two ago) for basic usage. And in gaming? There are $1000 laptops sold today that can't play games like this little machine can. It weighs less, it fits in a smaller bag, and it's built very solidly. Alienware still makes plenty of overpriced machines that offer little compared to offerings by ASUS and the like, but no one on the planet makes a machine that's quite like the M11x.

If I were to score this on a 10 point scale (with no decimal points), I'd give it a 9/10. It's a phenomenal little machine, and while I have found a few very, very minor annoyances with it, they'r

The following video is not my review, but if you like watching videos instead of reading a wall of text, well, this guy's review does well enough.

Black Eyed Peas

2011-03-08T12:36:00.001-06:00

This is how the Black Eyed Peas used to sound. At some point, they added Fergie and went pop, trading away their unique and original sound for the auto‐tuned bullshit you hear today. The Super Bowl Halftime show was a good example of how these guys are utilizing some of the most sinister scorched earth pop music policy we've ever seen. They misused Usher, they crapped all over Sweet Child o' Mine (obviously only getting Slash since he's not in GNR anymore and doesn't care about the legacy of that song now), and their own song selections were almost entirely relegated to their extremely simplistic pop anthems.

The choruses are rudimentary, will.i.am spends almost as much time auto‐tuning his crappy singsonging as he does rapping (which he's actually good at), and the music is of the lowest common denominator club‐trash variety. But what's worst is that we know they can do better - see the video above - and yet they choose not to. Even after hitting huge fame and selling millions of records, they seem happy with these elementary school‐level lyrics, recycled electronic beats, and lazy amounts of auto‐tune.

They deserve every bit of criticism they get for this. They deserve to sound like shit, because they want no better for themselves anymore. If you need a reminder of just how bad they sounded at the Super Bowl:

Detroit

2011-03-08T03:19:00.002-06:00

Chrysler's Super Bowl commercial featuring the city of Detroit - and one of its native sons, Eminem - had a real effect on me. Over the last couple of years, we've seen a few celebrities try and prop up the image of Detroit, or at least hold up its roots as the car capital of the United States. Top Gear US had both Tim Allen and Kid Rock pushing Detroit as their hometown, but let's face it: Tim Allen is no angel nor does he really have much substantial to say about anything, and Kid Rock is a talentless hack.

But Eminem? Yeah, he does have talent, and he has plenty to say. Hell, when he's not rapping about Proof or his addiction, about his ex-wife or some judge or politician that was in the news last week, he can write good stuff. He has important things to say. After the gravelly voice explained that Detroit is tougher than the news says, and still ready to make great things happen, Eminem said something important: "This is the Motor City, and this is what we do."

We want to believe you, Eminem. We want Detroit to thrive again. Hell, I'm one of the people described in the commercial, writing about how bad it is despite having never stepped foot in Detroit or even Michigan for that matter. But I still think the city has hope, despite Michael Moore's Roger & Me, despite the doom and gloom of Michigan in the news. Maybe it's farfetched, but I think the Motor City can rise again. But is it going to happen at the hands of Chrysler?

Maybe not. Some would say "probably not" - some would go far as to suggest that no, it would never happen. I'd love to see it happen. It's easy to crap all over the Chrysler family of failed cars, a dynasty that's been pushing out mildly poisoned piles of trash (at least, compared to the competition) for a couple of decades now. The wife recently rented a Dodge Caliber. It was the right size inside for what we wanted, and it wasn't really bad to drive. But it's got a huge identity crisis with its muscle-car-meets-station-wagon styling, and I would never actually put money into buying one for fear of it falling apart before it hit 120k miles.

The ad in question was for the Chrysler 200 and had Eminem driving through the city, and it looked clean and crisp inside, but it is a luxury sedan, something I personally am not terribly interested in. The commercial even suggested that it's a bit weird for a place like Detroit build luxury cars. But hey, if they can improve the styling over the competition and then come in at a price that isn't terribly more expensive than the new line of budget luxury cars from Korean and Japanese makers, maybe they have something. Longer-lasting cars would be the final icing on the cake.

But I'm doubtful that any one solid line of cars, even for a couple of years running, is going to put Chrysler back on top, and I'm not sure that a resurgence even in all three Detroit-based manufacturers will lead them to re-invest back in this city anyway. It seems to me that while Chrysler may yet live - GM and Ford are now doing fine, of course - any major corporation that wants to survive may need to cut and run from the country's biggest urban ghost town.

Doing so would kind of undermine the point of this ad. But for now, I'll play along, and cheer for the sentiment seen in the commercial: that cars from Detroit are like no others (the good and the bad), and that we haven't seen the last of the great cars from Chrysler or from Detroit. Well guys, you've talked, and we listened. Now you have to show us.

Real hiphop

2011-03-08T03:17:00.001-06:00

What's most frustrating to me about today's hiphop isn't really about how brainless a song like Soulja Boy is. Or that it's degenerated to the point where almost all the hiphop songs now are about women, money, and clubs. (Not that any of this is new, but it's gotten worse. Hell, at least 15 years ago there were at least huge-production diss songs, lots of violent talk, and more all getting into the mainstream. It wasn't good for hiphop, really, but at least it made things a bit more diverse.)

And while it's annoying to hear so much egotism and so many self-centered attitudes in this music, it might be something that's unavoidable. I've heard the argument that it's an inevitable byproduct of having grown up as a black man in America, and since I'm white I'm not really in a place where I can argue, nor do I think I actually would argue against that statement.

Nope, the worst part is that the musicianship is gone.

These days, the music that many consider to be the best hiphop tracks aren't even ones with new music by actual live musicians - it's just songs that have stolen innovative music from the 70s that no one recognizes. And the 100% new songs that come out have the most minimalist of beats backing them, likely crapped out by Timbaland's sweatshop of boring-ass percussion, with tinny and annoying synth on top and bass hits that try to overcompensate for the lack of anything else for your subwoofer to do. There's rarely a change in the beat or in the "pace" of the song, other than a few places where an instrument is simply muted in the sequencer that processed the final product. That's it.

What happened to the days when rappers would make music with other live musicians - and then, you know, put that on an actual friggin' album? Rap can thrive on top of many genres of music, adding that hiphop element to almost anything with a half-decent rhythm, but we almost never hear that anymore.

A musician named Tor put together a remix of a Sufjan Stevens album - a folk album, no less - with some fantastic beats and some really great rappers. The original songs are often worse than his new creations, at least in my opinion, with only a couple of exceptions. The full album is available for free download here. Here's my favorite song from that album: