This title should make no sense at all.

Now, you're probably thinking: "StarCon" sounds like it refers to Star Control, which it does. Star Control was, obviously, released... many times in fact, including sequels and ports. So WTF is Martin going on about?

First, a history lesson: Star Control was a really, really good pair of games (SC and SC2) released back in the '90s. The first was a boardgame/duel game hybrid, the second was a space-adventure/duel game hybrid. Both of them excelled at their 1 on 1 action and their outer-game components. Star Control 2 in particular is remembered as one of the best games of all time. They were made by Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford, AKA Toys for Bob. Star Control II is available for free online, thanks to TFB releasing all content to the 3DO version of the game under an open license. If you haven't played it, get it. Now. Like, stop reading this post and go download it and come back later.

The third game was not. Accolade (the publisher) retained many of the rights to Star Control, particularly the name, but not specific characters, so they hired a third party company to make a sequel to SCII. It flopped.

The fourth game also was not made by Toys for Bob. It was a PS1 game that was heavily divorced from the series - a behind-view shooter based on the Colony Wars games, instead of a top-down adventure game. Even the name was changed - instead of Star Control 4, it was simply called StarCon. Or at least, it would have been, if it had been released. But really, nobody wanted a confused sequel to a series that had obviously become utterly aimless and was also long-past it's sell-by date (SC2 was originally a DOS game).

At least, until now. I stumbled upon this news while looking for a way to get SC2 music as a ringtone (I suck, I know).

StarCon Released

It was a sequel nobody wanted that the company decided to can, so it probably isn't any good... but I'm downloading it now with bewildered curiosity.

Just went shopping. The mall calendar/boardgame store is starting their discounts on boardgames now, so it's a good time to pick up that game you've been holding off on. They've got Settlers of Catan for $40, and the 5-6 player expansion pack for $21. I was tempted, but the also had this:




Which won out. Risk as it should be - with nukes, lunar colonization, and a 5 turn limit. Plus, all my friends already have Catan sets, and since I usually end up playing with them I didn't feel it necessary.

Also, at Zellers, I saw this for $30:




Battlegrounds: Crossbows and Catapults - Orcs Vs. Knights. I already have a set, but any younger gamers out there take note: Crossbows and Catapults is not to be missed. This was a kids game, but is very playable as an adult. It's half war-game, half bar-style darts/pool ballistic skill game. Very fun. I have a combination of the original set and the Base Toys re-release, but the new one looks much more stylish - replacing Vikings and Barbarians with Orcs and Knights is extra-cool, and the darker, grittier paint-jobs (and the new cannon piece) are very nice.

Only worry is that the Base Toys re-release was very light on the rules (we played from memory of the '80s version, and I'll bet this one is similar since it's a children's toy. Plus, they only come with 8 pucks per team, but of course they come with lots of the little stand-up men that were only spies in the original, so if you use the old rules you could probably use them as "captives" and keep the pucks in play.

Happy Holidays, all. Today was the ending of my Xmas vacation time, so I'm back to my joyous bicycle commute. Several things happened over the holidays of note, but I'll chose to pick 2 at random.

Julian and Teething

Julian may or may not have been teething for the last week.  The signs were all there - drooling, chewing, and misery... but he's only 4 months old.  Also, don't let people understate how hard it is to deal with a teething child.  He was outright miserable - it wasn't just the crying and lack of sleep - it was the heartbreaking whimpering of a baby in pain, with nothing to do but hold him.  Either way, by some inexplicable miracle he seems to have bounced back (save for one backslide last night).  As for his other assets, he continues to grow at an absurd rate, bursting his way into 9-12 month size clothes at under half that age.  He's still mastering the fine art of sitting up, and is waging an ongoing war between frustration, laziness, and self-soothing when it comes to the skill of grasping and stuffing toys in his mouth.

He still loves his gym, and he's enjoying his "Sophie the Giraffe" - a French teether-toy made of natural rubber.  He's been mauling it so hard he's given its face nostrils.

He's freaking awesome.

Super Mario Galaxy

Wifey bought me Super Mario Galaxy for xmas.  The game lives up to the hype, it is awesome.  The maps are constantly innovative, the minigame-esque puzzles are constantly startling and exciting, and the game never seems to frustrate me.

But of course, I'm a curmudgeon.  You already know the sixteen flavours of awesome that SMG is.  So, I'm going to grouse about the minor flaws I've found in the game, because flaws are far more interesting than excellence.

First off, the game is easy.  Maybe this is because I already ran through Mario 64 multiple time and am twice the age of the target audience, but I didn't break a sweat until the third Bowser fleet.  I find myself frugally storing up ammo, simply because most adversaries are simple enough to dispatch manually, and the star-bits are generally ineffective against the ones that aren't.  Still, the game is really, really picking up now (although I'm well-over halfway through, I think), for example the the Ghost race got my heart going, and I'm starting to shoot my way through some of the tougher brawls.

One thing I notice is that the game is pretty tight on revealing the old 64 moves - it seems to assume you remember how to triple-jump, long-jump and black-flip (the punch-related manoevers are long gone, along with the punch-button).  I could see the game being much harder without that knowledge.  On the other hand, the wall-slide means that wall-kicks are actually possible and no longer insanely frustrating.

The game revealed an odd insight about my taste in games: I hate games that are based on secrets.  If you gamed during the late NES through to the early N64 era, you remember secret-oriented games.  The heart-tanks and upgrades of Megaman X.  The various goodies of Mario 3.  The switch-blocks of Mario 64.  These things drive me batty - it's not just that they frustrate you with backtracking and nasty challenges that were intended to be simple based on a previous pick-up.  It's that they screw you up in other games.  In Galaxy, I find myself squeezing every level to the fullest, leaving no foe unsmashed, no corner unchecked, and so-on, simply because of the risk I might miss some essential secret needed to make the gameplay a proper experience.  Galaxy seemed pleasantly bereft of these features ... until I found a (*SPOILER FOLLOWS*) "green star" in the Floating Fortress level, which apparently unlocks some sort of Trial Galaxy.  Also, I can't seem to figure out how to re-rescue Luigi from the first galaxy. (*END SPOILER*) 

This sort of stuff drives me batty - it sets off a twisted OCD in the hindquarters of my brain.  I keep reminding myself that Galaxy isn't like that - I'm probably just missing a few hidden worlds, not essential crap like the gun-upgrade of Megaman X.  Galaxy is kind - the bee suit is right in front of you on the bee world - you don't have to track down some absurdly-hidden switch-block to enable it a-la Mario 64.

Hell, maybe that's why I find Galaxy so much easier than 64 - not that the game is simpler, but because it's so much more pleasurably straightforwards.  There is no endless meandering trying to ferret out an ambiguous objective - the game is generally linear.  Still, I do occaisionally miss that feeling of first arrival in Thwomp's Castle in Mario 64, where I first got that sensation of "wow - this looks cool.  Let's go exploring!".... but on the other hand, Galaxy delivers so much more fun-per-second, the payout is definitely worth it.

To me, that's where the game is really paying off.  Fundamentally, there seems to be three approaches to gaming these days:
1) Short and sweet movie games.  Deliver constantly new whiz-bang content, but have under 10 hours of play.
2) Endless repitition.  Sixteen million variations on the same damned theme.
3) Get lost.  The player spends so much time getting from point A to B or finding the next objective that they heardly spend any time actually _dealing_ with said objective, and so the content is stretched out.

Galaxy is none of the above.  It is endlessly fresh and fun.

Galaxy Review Addendum

There were three nits I have to pick that I missed in the review:

1) Spare lives are pointless.  They don't get saved, they don't get recorded, and since half the time the Princess has a letter full of them waiting for you when you log in, you're never short of them.  This wouldn't be a nuisance except the game is full of little side-puzzles for which the reward is an extra man.  Worthless.

2) I haven't tried it, but the "second player" job seems pretty dull.  There are a lot of parts in the game where starbits are absent or useless, and starbits are the only thing player 2 does.  Speaking of the wiimotes, the "shake to spin" gimmick is cute, but a button-mapping as an alternative would've been nice.

3) The camera.  It still has all of the flaws of the Mario 64 version - it seems like whenever I want to use the left/right buttons to rotate, it tells me I can't.  The first-person look mode has a limited field-of-view, which is similarly frustrating.  And even worse, the camera controls under water are terrible whenever you want to do a fine movement - the arrow buttons totally fail to work, and the camera does not adjust to face the same direction as Mario.  Even the painful whirling of Monkeyball's camera during fine-motions would've been preferable to the terrible underwater camera behaviour.  Still, it beats the Sonic Adventure series.

On the other hand, shell-riding underwater is holy-crap-lots-of-fun, so underwater levels still kick ass.

If you read Penny Arcade, you probably noticed the eye toy card-game... not being a close follower of E3, this was the first I heard of it. For those who don't know, you play a card-game on a table, and point a camera at the table. The PS3 overlays 3D gameplay onto the real-world space and shows it on your TV screen, making a decent attempt at keeping perspective and casting shadows onto the real, table. This technique of overlaying real-time 3D objects into images of real, human space is called Augmented Reality.

As a fan of tabletop card games, this thing blows my mind. Augmented reality toys are one of those Next Big Things that I'm really looking forwards to, but AR card games are something I never even considered. Plus, I had no idea that the PS3 could do AR graphical processing on-the-fly, which is challenging since the PS3 needs to get a sense of the perspective of the table in order to know where and how to render the models and shadows, beyond just reading the cards.

Still, all I can think about is the possibilities of AR card-games. There are several challenges with AR card games - the gameplay has to be complex or real-time to justify the AR, otherwise a desktop would be fine - AR card-game Uno or War would be pointless. Second, the off-screen gameplay as to be simple - after all, games with complex card-managing and collecting would probably get annoying with the screen explaining "player X draw a card. Player Y draw 2 cards from deck Z" - so Settlers is out. Finally, the game needs to be closed-hand. Open-hand games would be pointless, since then you could just have the deck be simulated on the CD - what the AR brings to the table is players having a private hand of cards, secret information from other players.

Thinking it over, the perfect AR card-game would be Robo Rally. The boardgame is entirely controlled by cards that are simply played, and the logic of the boardgame itself is complex... which could be handled entirely by the board. You'd have to make some changes - I'd turn any interrupt-driven option parts into phase-programmed, but otherwise it would be the perfect AR card-game.

Still, I don't expect AR card games to catch on. The expensive hardware, the needy environment (set up a card-table in view of the camera AND the TV), etc. Probably not gonna happen.

Still, the possibilities are so cool, I'm tempted to see how feasible a simplified form is on the PC with conventional low-res webcams. Obviously, you wouldn't do full AR, but maybe a camera could read the cards and their locations so you could see what each player is showing. For a game like Robo Rally, where the screen would be showing a completely computer-generated environment (the factory) that would be enough.

The new directions of the game industry blow my mind. It seems that Spore is not alone. COolest game I've ever seen - like a party version of Mario 2 with HD graphics and fun physics.

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Plus, it has a complete game-editor:

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I guess this is that "game 3.0" stuff. It blows my mind.

.... crap, apparently LJ doesn't do GameTrailers.Com embedded video links. Rats. Oh, well: Check This Out. Only tragedy - it's a PS3 game.

I've been away from LJ for a bit. At some point I will update it. But not now. Now is the time to show you the coolest thing ever:

Spore.

I don't care if you are a gamer or not, you have to see this.  My mind is blown.  Will Wright (the guy behind The Sims) has outdone himself.

Been getting back into games a bit lately. Good times. The big 3 I'm playing right now are:

Megaman and Bass for GBA: I don't know if it's because I played so much Kirby, or if it's the DS, or if it's just a weaker entry in the series - but this game isn't doing it for me. The bosses are painfully tough, dashing with Bass is frustrating (it's a double-tap-arrow action), and the main gameplay is boring me. Maybe I'm just getting old. I played so much Megaman, and yet this game just isn't doing it for me at all, and it's one of the coolest concepts - I love playing Bass, he's so much fun. He can aim in any direction, he can double-jump, and he can dash-jump. It feels like a mix of Megaman 2 and Megaman X to play Bass. Very nice. The problem is that after beating the first robot, the remaining robots have been like a brick wall. They're just agonizingly tough - I took like 8 continues before defeating the second one.  The level feels like the same old Megaman action, just with really really hard bosses. Not even much in the way of clever theme-levels. There's also little indication as to what order I'm supposed to fight them in, so it's a painful trial-and-error process.  I guess that's been part of every Megaman game, but I've never really hated it until now.

Plus, the GBA games are just plain bad for on the the DS. The button mapping is bad - the buttons are perpendicular to your thumb instead of parallel to it, meaning jump-shoot is an uncomfortable sideways roll instead of just sliding your thumb forward. I think it's the same on the SP, but on my oldschool-styled GBA, it's much more comfortable. The screen is also oddly letterboxed - I guess the resolutions must be different. I seriously don't think I'll be playing much more of Megaman - at least not this title.

Serious Sam: I finished Serious Sam a while back and started playing Serious Sam SE. SE added a lot to the game, but eventually I just got tired of it - not that it wasn't good and creative, but I had just gotten a little bored. Anyhow, a glutten for punishment, I saw that Sam 2 was at EB and only $40 CAN, so I've picked it up. Haven't gotten to playing it yet, but I have high hopes after reading the stuff they've put in. Kinda sad though, the first Sam was an a-list title, while Sam 2 is obviously budget - the price, the lack of promo, the fact that the discs come in unmarked sleeves instead of any kind of case. Apparently they've left out the mod-dev-tools this time too. Still, I have high hopes.

Spring: Oh god, Spring. I was playing until 4am last night. Absolute Annihilation was just released, so I had to be there. I suck so bad at this, but I keep playing. For those who don't know, Spring is an open-source remake of Total Annihilation, the Greatest RTS Ever (according to Gamespy). Yes, better than StarCraft (which is the Second Greatest RTS Ever). Spring converts old TA into a fully 3D game, and makes it goregeous as hell. The problem is that Spring isn't 100% compatible with old TA - there are a few differences, most notably that units can't shoot through each other. This means that the heights of your gun towers is really important. Properly laying your units out so everybody can get a shot (tall ppl at the back, mortars in the right place, etc) means that a lot of old units didn't work quite well. As a result, the original TA rules don't work perfectly, so everyone plays mods - the default one is XTA, which is very different from normal TA - bigger units are much more expensive but much more powerful.

I was kinda disappointed with the XTA mod, but fortunately Caydr just ported my fave mod for TA, called Absolute Annihilation. AA took an old rebalancing mod for TA called Uberhack and added a whole buttload of new units and nicely polished them. Normally, the "lets add new units" mods are designed by people who think like a kid in a candy store - they just add shininess carelessly. Usually theres one or two units that hopelessly overpower the rest, making the massive variety a moot point because everybody builds the same damn thing. AA is different - it's well balanced and every unit is useful. The Spring port is buggy as all hell, but I still love it. Got myself thoroughly trounced online and enjoyed every minute.

Only problem - Spring is not a game for laymen.  It is hard to learn - the game adds somewhat to old TA, and doesn't have a single-player campaign to play through.  TA was never particularly user-friendly anyways, and Spring is even less so.  Basically, the only way to learn is to read the tutorials and either get schooled online or play against AIs.  The AIs are new and buggy, so for training against the AI the main option is to use a script called "random enemies" that just bum-rushes you with increasingly difficult baddies.

So nfotxn has linked to me. I am now visualizing hordes of burly gay men squeezing through the doorway and looking around. Doubtless they are all critiquing the flaccid decor. Kevin sez:

Well, lucky for me I went to Cub Scouts. So I know exactly what to do if we come across a grizzly... or some women!

On a completely unrelated note, I just finished Kirby's Canvas Curse. This is the first game I've played through start-to-finish since Serious Sam, so that says something. Although the gameplay is completely different, the game somehow reminds me of oldschool Sonic the Hedgehog. Good fun. And of course, even after done the game the "status complete" thingy on the file taunts me with 33%, pushing me to find all the secret coins and play through the time trials and such. Note: an incredible rarity, the game's time trials are startlingly enjoyable; they're short, fun, and well designed. Plus, if you fail you can retry real quick, which is always a big plus in such things. The game is halfway to a crack habit even after I finished it... but maybe it's just because I haven't played a platformer in a long time. So, any recommendations on what DS title to pick up next?

I've also been getting back to my hobbyhorses. I've been colouring some of my old drawings in Photoshop and working on a fun little arcade game. Neither of these hobbies I expect to go far, with an impending move, legal mayhem, and a wife who is rapidly being driven insane by the workload of being a new teacher.

While I've gone through a lot of PC games, the one I really played the hell out of was Unreal Tournament. And even as solid a game as UT is, my love for it mainly came from the mods - UT's mutator system allows you to mix and match mods any way you liked. Where UT's multi-mod system ended, meta-mods like WORM, the weapon-chooser and *cosmic unreal*, the playerclass-maker began.

Even then, my love for mods depended on having a single place where they were all conveniently laid-out and reviewed. That was ModSquad, which was the single thing that set UT apart from Q3A and Half-Life. Mediocre dev-oriented mod-news sites and Planet*'s MOTD simply do not compare. Modsquad gave detailed reviews of everything that came their way, and stored it all in a pleasant searchable DB.

So really, I played ModSquad. It rocked. Unfortunately it didn't really adapt to UT2kX as the reviewers got lives, so modsquad.beyondunreal.com is pretty much a ghost town now. Damn shame.

So the failure happened when the reviewers dried up, or can't keep up with content submissions (skin sites, starcraft scm sites suffer from this). In that case, the solution is obvious: user-driven cms systems like k5 and slashdot, but for game content and ratings.

I'm looking into a cms system called Drupal. I hope to apply it to Cube maps, mods, and packages.

Odd note: Union Station bus terminal restroom is astonishingly clean.