My iPhone sits charging on my computer desk when not in use, and occasionally it emits that wacky GSM buzz that manifests itself through nearby speakers, the same one that impressively prophesies an incoming call seconds before the phone activates its primary, much more confident, vibration.

I was just hit with one of those minor electronic tempests, except this time it actually manipulated Windows. My browser actually started scrolling up and down, perfectly in sync with the Morse code-like patterns of the buzz. Also, I didn’t get a phone call.

Now that my blog is read by more than a dozen people, maybe somebody can explain how that possibly could have happened. Until further explanation is provided, I am assuming Steve Jobs engages in witchcraft of some kind.

If it helps, neither my mouse nor keyboard are wireless. That my brain made the logical leap in deciding this information might be relevant may have further exposed my stupidity on the matter.

I rarely make posts devoted solely to content published elsewhere as part of my job, but I did want to mention an interview that ran today on Gamasutra that I conducted with Dead Space’s producer Chuck Beaver. It was one of the more enjoyable interviews I’ve done recently, because Chuck was able to speak easily and entertainingly about the considerably thought he and his team put into the game’s design decisions. It’s always fun to be able to speak with somebody who can deliver a relevant response even when I get off the rails a bit with my questions.

From what I’ve seen and played, Dead Space seems to be one of those games that won’t be hailed as revolutionary inside and out, but will try its hand with a few intriguing progressive design elements and, perhaps more importantly, coalesces around a fairly defined and coherent design sensibility.

For example, the HUD interface, which takes the form of a projected hologram manipulated by the third-person protagonist, isn’t functionally innovative, but from a design perspective seems to take the best part of an in-world UI (the realism) and the best part of a traditional separate-screen menu (its cleanliness and straightforwardness). It’s not groundbreaking, but it’s very slick, and adds to the realization of the sci-fi game world.

Here are some excerpts:

You were saying when you make decisions about “no cutscenes” or the integrated UI, one of the hardest parts [of development] can be convincing [the team] to do it in the first place.

CB: Yeah. People are really almost religious about their belief in what we should and shouldn’t do. It’s a big binary switch, like, “Are we going to have cutscenes, or are we not going to have cutscenes?” because it’s a big, big deal in design. When we decided in the beginning that we were going to take [the switch], we’re like, “Alright, let’s go for it. Let’s go for it!” (more…)

Someone told me about FeedBurner today, and it sounded like a useful thing to use for tracking purposes, so I went ahead and routed my blog’s RSS feed through that. If you subscribe to my RSS feed, it would be appreciated if you’d switch to this new feed, so instead of assuming my readership numbers are astonishingly low, I can be empirically confident they are astonishingly low. If you don’t subscribe to my RSS feed, why not take this opportunity to do so? It’s win-win!

The old URL will still work, but it’s old. The new one is new. Isn’t that exciting? I’m excited.

Due to a strange quirk of my gaming history, I never played a numbered Civilization game beyond the original Civ (also known as Sid Meier’s Civilization: Build an Empire to Stand the Test of Time). That game I utterly consumed back in the early 90s when it was released, probably completing the game with every possible combination of civilization and victory condition.

Civ II, for example, wasn’t released until 1996, five years after its predecessor (I had spent much of that intervening period playing Civ), and at that point Quake, and then the mod Quake 40K/Chapter Honour (boy, there’s a site I haven’t seen in ages), become my time-sucking game of choice.

During most periods of my life, I’ve tried to consistently play games in a variety of genres—in the 90s, I was mainly into adventure games, shooters, and strategy games—but I’ve also generally had one game that lurks in the background, filling the cracks in my gaming time between this title or that title. Civ was probably the first game to hold that honor. (more…)

Not surprisingly, my tiny blog’s traffic has skyrocketed in the last eight hours. While I was sleeping a lot of comments came in for moderation (I use manual moderation because of ridiculous amounts of spam, not for censorship purposes). I’ll get around to approving it soon; I don’t plan to disallow negative posts.

I realize some of my comments are somewhat inflammatory. Let me say I’m not a fan of DRM. Obviously as a PC gamer it would be nice not to ever have to deal with it, hence the shoutout to Stardock at the end of my PA post. But I do think the backlash has to a degree overshadowed everything else, and I do sort of worry about the perpetuation of an increasingly combative scene (on both sides, not just—or even mainly—the players here) that makes PC seem even more unfriendly than its reputation already makes it seem.

The irony of this for me is that this issue isn’t even generally a big talking point of mine. But Tycho liked my blog post about it, and now it looks like it’s what I’ll be known for on the internet, at least for a while. That’s life! Anyway, hopefully we can keep the DRM-related comments to my piracy post (one of my more reactionary posts, I’ll admit), and maybe a few of you will also see fit to check out some of the other stuff on this blog. Welcome to it!

But they are also quite entertaining to watch, especially when accompanied by surprisingly compelling and comprehensible commentary in English.

For the next couple months, something that the website calls the Averatec-Intel Classic 2008 Season 2 and the video intro calls the TG Sambo Intel Classic is taking place in Korea, and a fellow named Nick “Tasteless” Plott is on location to deliver a spirited play-by-play alongside the amiable but rather less enthusiastically knowledgeable “Lil Susie.” The organization running the event is streaming it live as well as archiving the videos on its site. (Note that the videos are listed newest first.)

As someone who hasn’t played StarCraft in years and would probably receive a negative ranking just for logging onto Battle.net, I still find these matches to be a great watch. Plott’s audible excitement curve appears to track with the events of the game (not that I would be able to independently understand the in-game actions well enough to be able to verify that), and even my minimal level of StarCraft knowledge—I know the names of the units, basically—is enough of a grounding to allow me to keep up with the calls. (more…)

For all the traffic Crysis Warhead has inadvertently given me, I might as well share my final thoughts about the game itself now that I’ve bought and completed it.

First off: I was quite a fan of the original Crysis. It wasn’t a perfectly polished game by any means, and like most people I feel the team severely dropped the ball during the last third or so, when it turned into a surprisingly conventional tunnel shooter with aliens. But until that point, Crysis delivered some of the most open, player-driven, potentially deep gameplay I’ve ever seen in a straight-up shooter. To my mind, cries of “tech demo!” ring as falsely to me now as they did a year ago.

I say “potentially deep” because if you don’t really invest yourself into the freedom of the game’s open environments and the focus added by the game’s ability-boosting nanosuit and weapon customization, I can see where Crysis could come off as more conventional. It is also a very rare case where I consider playing on a higher difficulty level to go beyond being a personal player choice and actually becoming a crucial part of experiencing the game design in a fulfilling way. Recognizing your character’s vulnerabilities and being forced to consider your tactics carefully actually coax out depth in the mechanics—and, paradoxically, highlight your character’s suit-enhanced strengths—to a higher degree than is typical.

With that preface out of the way, it appears that Crytek decided to play it a little safer with Warhead. It is a much less “pure” expression of the design ethic demonstrated in Crysis before that game’s tonal shift. Gone—or, more accurately, significantly reduced—are the hours upon hours of pure tropical openness, in which you essentially began at Point A, then were given a Point B and little else. Those experiences still occur, but they are less frequent, and generally less sprawling. Here, they are less of the main experience and more like the occasional stretches of relaxing, open-road highway freedom between rest stops—if your rest stops consist of blowing a whole lot of shit up. (more…)

I’ve gotten every Civilization: Revolution achievement, and I can destroy its AI six ways from Sunday on every difficulty level—except Deity, which remains almost a total crap shoot. I’m not sure from which “deity” that designation draws its name—perhaps a nightmarish American McGee-esque take on the Flying Spaghetti Monster, one that sees the carbohydrate-fueled god reimagined as some kind of many-tentacled rapist.

In addition to AI civilizations being able to apparently construct unlimited Legion armies while simultaneously erecting numerous Wonders of the World, Deity opponents seem able to actually influence the laws of probability. Perhaps my perception is colored by that hazy tint of blame-redirecting irrationality that comes along with unfettered video game rage, but I would swear to God FSM that combat encounters in Deity games adjust the odds.

None of this would really be that bad if it weren’t for the fact that AI opponents are without exception irritable prima donnas who can’t go more than a few turns without demanding tribute. (I’ve heard it’s an internal Firaxis joke that Ghandi is often the biggest bastard of them all.) There is in fact no way to maintain positive relationships with your enemies without simply forking over most of your money and technology on a regular basis—and if, like me, you find it too much of an affront to your pointless sense of video game honor to do so, you are under constant siege for the duration of the game. There is no practical method by which to continually exact similar demands on your opponents, which gives the AI an inherent mechanical advantage.

What does all this mean? It means that when I play Civ: Rev on Deity, I become a paranoid lunatic, a save game-abusing freak who lives in a time-bending state of parallel timelines. It’s like an inelegant, turn-based, alternate history version of Braid. (more…)

Most of the recent conversation I had with Crytek’s Crysis producer Bernd Diemer wasn’t actually about the Warhead PC—we actually discussed in considerable depth the lessons the studio learned after developing Crysis, and how those lessons were considered to make Crysis Warhead a better game.

Today over at Gamasutra we published a feature based on that interview, which ends up kind of like a postmortem of the original game as as applied to its followup. For example:

“From a pacing standpoint, we switched almost entirely to alien combat at a certain point in the game, and from then onwards the expectations were set. The players knew, ‘From now on, it’s aliens.’ Forum posters talked about the first part of the game, and the second part of the game. The public perception was really driven by these design choices — there was ‘pre-alien Crysis‘ and ‘post-alien Crysis.’

“In Warhead, we tried to stay away from that. As a team, and as a company, we’re now a lot more familiar with the IP we created. Crysis‘ nanosuit actually came into development rather late, while we were building the game. As a game designer on Crysis before I moved into the producer rule, I had to convince level designers into changing levels to be more suitable to the nanosuit gameplay. If somebody had spent three months working on a level, it can be tough to accept a different mindset for that level. Now, as a team, we are much more comfortable with how levels have to be built. The nanosuit makes sense.”

It’s a pretty good read, if I do say so myself (and I can say so myself without feeling bad about it, since the whole thing is in Diemer’s words). If, like I was, you were a fan of Crysis but were also aware of its flaws, it’s encouraging to see that the Crytek team recognized those flaws as well. Diemer is straightforward and demonstrates a strong grasp of design, and I’m looking forward to playing the result of that.

[Update: EA has sent out final details on the PC. The full specs are as follows:
- CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E7300 @2.66GHz
- Video card: Nvidia GeForce 9800GT 512MB
- Motherboard: G31 mATX
- RAM: 2GB
- Other components: 250GB 7200RPM hard drive, 16X DVD-ROM drive, network adapter, integrated Realtek audio, keyboard, mouse, Ultra X-Blaster ATX Mid-Tower case, one-year parts & labor warranty

Prospective buyers can sign up for updates over here.]

Original story: About a month ago, I reported that EA was planning to market a Crysis Warhead-ready PC. I have now learned that the machine—which, at least among the Crytek staff that specced it out, is called the “Warhead PC”—will be officially announced next week.

In my original post, I pegged the price to be between $600 and $800; as it turns out, it’s almost exactly in between, at $699, and it will apparently be coming in a single SKU. It will be sold by UltraPC, and unveiled by EA.  Crytek, Nvidia, EA, and UltraPC were all involved.

I spoke with Crysis franchise producer Bernd Diemer, who explained the history behind the machine. ”When we started working on Warhead, we decided performance was a big issue,” he said. “So we said, ‘Guys, we’re going to build a PC which has a maximum price of six or seven hundred dollars, and it has to run Warhead in high spec at an average framerate of 30.’ We built that PC—Crytek in the Budapest office [where Warhead was developed]—and we put it in the middle of the studio, and every review was on that machine. All the milestone presentations we did for EA, for the Yerlies [founding brothers Cevat, Avni, and Faruk], for the team, all the new prototypes, we showed on that machine.”

Eventually, they began referring to it as “the Warhead PC,” and used it as a way to force efficiency and optimization: if frames were dropping on the Warhead PC on a high graphics level, the team would tweak the game to better scale to the hardware. (I can attest to the results, having played through a full level today and being impressed by the consistent framerate and visuals, before being told it was a “Warhead PC.”)

“For us, it was really helpful, because we sort of had a hard cap,” Diemer told me. “You couldn’t say, ‘It works on my computer, looks great on my machine.’ No no no, this is the benchmark, guys. If it sucks on this, the whole thing sucks. For us as a team, that was really valuable. We had a tangible border we could bump our heads into.”

The Crytek team originally planned simply to give the Warhead PC’s specs to EA to use for the recommended requirements, but eventually Nvidia got involved and it became clear that there was no reason that such a machine couldn’t simply be sold straight to consumers looking for an easy entry (or re-entry) into PC gaming.

Though I don’t have every nitty gritty hardware detail, I did get the machine’s most important specs:
- CPU: Intel Core Duo e7300 (@2.66GHz)
- Video card: Nvidia 9800GT
- RAM: 2GB

I snapped a picture of the Warhead PC I used today. It had no external branding, and it wasn’t clear whether the final version (which can be preordered next week and will ship alongside Crysis Warhead on September 16) will, although a Crysis-themed desktop background will be preloaded. It’s a visually conservative rig, but I appreciated that there weren’t a dozen obnoxious blue neon lights swirling visibly through a plexiglass window—we’ll see what the shipping machine brings.

As Diemer was sure to point out, ”EA’s not getting into the hardware business, and Crytek isn’t either.” Rather, the companies are trying to practically combat the idea that to play high-end PC games at high levels of detail, you need to spend in excess of a thousand dollars. “The biggest thing for us is convenience,” Diemer added. “We want to make PC gaming convenient.”