malvasia bianca

I finished year 2 of Grim Fandango last night (I played it over the course of three nights), and in several ways I didn’t like it as much as year 1.

I spent my first play session getting familiar with the environments; what this mostly meant was that I wandered all over the map, repeatedly. Typically, over the course of one wander, I would solve a few puzzles, which meant that the next time I wandered through the whole level, some other state had changed in some other area, giving me another puzzle to solve there.

By the end of the first play session, I’d gotten far enough that I knew what the three overarching puzzles were, that I’d made it at least a step or two along each of them, and I had a pretty good idea of what at least one later step was going to be in each of them.

My second play session was pretty frustrating. I managed to make a little bit more progress; but I was also starting to get stuck on the puzzles. And, at this point, the environment was getting in my way: I’d run into lots of situations where doing something in area 1 meant that now somebody would have appeared or act differently in area 2 on the other side of the map. So I constantly had this double-whammy of, on the one hand, feeling that I was probably stuck but, on the other hand, having to run all over the map just to make sure that I really did have to solve one of the puzzles that I was aware of, instead of needing to go find some newly-triggered event.

There were also a few red herrings that didn’t improve my mood – e.g. for all I knew, reading poetry was a necessary part of solving a puzzle. And there are a lot of areas that are nice in terms of scenery but useless in terms of gameplay. (E.g. the path to your club.) And there’s that elevator that it’s almost impossible to avoid running into. (Tip: you can hit escape to eliminate the cut scene there.) At some point, I accidentally noticed that hitting shift-keypad-5 teleports you to more or less the middle of most rooms; this can speed up your transit time, but there are at least two rooms (the morgue and the room with the aforementioned elevator) where doing that teleports you to a location that you can’t get out of, forcing you to reload from a saved game.

So on my third playthrough session, I hit gamefaqs early and often. Hmm, I’m trying to get the metal detector out of the cat pit? Let’s try the scythe – it waves around, but doesn’t pick up anything. Am I doing the right thing or not? No more messing around for five minutes experimenting, I’ll just look it up.

In fact, despite the fact that the puzzles in year two are a lot more coherent than in year one, I did a lot worse job of solving them on my own. Part of this is just that there are more puzzles. But part of it is that the puzzles in year 1 are much more localized, and the year 1 puzzles that make no sense at all (i.e. the petrified forest ones) are very localized indeed. The only year 1 situation where I remember running over portions of the map not being sure what to do was when I was trying to steal a good work order; having to do that once is okay (and indeed I managed to solve that puzzle myself), but having to do that all the time wasn’t as good for me. (Hmm, to what extent do I prefer having only one accessible puzzle at any given time? I’ll have to think about that more.)

Don’t get me wrong, I liked the environment, its coherence, the fact that the puzzles were integrated into the environment. But the actual puzzle solving was a bit of a downer.

Glottis really does look dashing in a white tuxedo, though.

In response to my earlier post on puzzles in narrative games, a couple of the commenters noted that contrasting the puzzles in Professor Layton with those in Grim Fandango isn’t fair, because the puzzles in the former game aren’t integrated into the game world in the the same way as puzzles in the latter one are. I wouldn’t go so far as to say, as Daniel did, that Layton isn’t a narrative game at all – we’re not talking Picross here – but it clearly isn’t as far on the narrative end of the continuum as Grim Fandango is.

But, thinking about it some more, something is still bothering me. I was responding to a forum post containing the sentence “Has shooting replaced puzzle-solving as the ‘gameplay’ aspect in narrative games?” So, rather than sticking within the context of games with lots of puzzles, what are narrative games like outside of that genre, and how does their direct gameplay (or “interaction”, to borrow Iroquois’ term) fit in with that?

To take games where shooting plays a prominent role: is Half-Life 2 a narrative game? Is Halo? Is GTA? Is Mass Effect? They all have some narrative aspects; then again, so does Professor Layton. More to the point, to what extent is the gameplay natural within the narrative context?

My first answer to that last question was “a lot more so than in Professor Layton“: in the latter, solving puzzles is quite artificial, while in the former games, shooting people is quite natural. Now, though, I’m not so sure: maybe that reaction has a lot more to do with my constant exposure to the extreme violence in games (and other media) than with anything else? I’m quite sure that if, in real life, you were to act as violently as you have to in GTA, you’d find out very quickly that behaving that way is widely considered unnatural, or at least strongly discouraged in polite society. And, for that matter, I have been in situations, albeit rare ones, where solving puzzles as arbitrary as any in Professor Layton has been essential to my overcoming real-world obstacles, much more so than violence ever has been for me. (Then again, I have a checkered past.)

In particular, let’s consider RPGs. That’s generally considered to be a narrative genre, and I think most people would say that Mass Effect is a narrative game. And it presents a context in which shooting people is a natural way to progress in the environment. To move away from shooting (but staying firmly within the genre), Golden Sun is also a narrative game; there, instead of shooting, you select actions (e.g. the powers given to you by your djinni), but your actions still fit within the narrative context.

Then what about Puzzle Quest? All of a sudden the gameplay feels completely artificial: you’re not supposed to fight monsters by playing Bejeweled, you’re supposed to fight them by choosing attacks and shooting and stuff! Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed the game, but, for me, it flipped over to the artifical, puzzles-not-integrated-with narrative side the same way that Professor Layton does.

But I can’t convince myself that my reaction there is justified: maybe it’s just my conditioning from other games that causes me to think that the fighting in Golden Sun is linked to the narrative in a way that the fighting in Puzzle Quest isn’t. And if we accept that the fighting (or, more generally, overcoming obstacles) in both of those is really a matter of convention, entrenched within the world of the specific game but with a tenuous natural link to either real-world convention or narrative requirements, then isn’t the same true for Professor Layton?

At this point, I’m pretty confused, and I hope some people will be kind enough to comment on this post to set me straight. Circling back to our original contrast of Professor Layton versus Grim Fandango, though, it raises an interesting question: I still agree that you can make a good case that the puzzles in Grim Fandango are better integrated with the narrative than those in Professor Layton.

But if we also accept that there’s at least something to my suspicion that, in most “narrative” genres, the mechanics of the gameplay have only a conventional tie to the narrative structure, then maybe Grim Fandango suggests that puzzles give a mechanic that can actually work uniquely well with narrative gameplay! Again, going back to Michael’s question, asking “I wonder if puzzles in narrative games are a relic of a bygone era of gaming – or are they a necessary ludic element?”, maybe the answer is that they are a necessary ludic element, or at least a ludic element that’s uniquely capable (because of its versatility) of reinforcing narrative gameplay? This may also tie into Iroquois’ comment that puzzles are at a different level in the game design hierarchy than more direct forms of gameplay (shooting, jumping, whatever).

I’m still not sold on the thesis that I’m describing here, but I’m surprised at how interesting the journey is turning out to be. Michael, I don’t want to hold you accountable for your every forum post, but I’m curious: what did you have in mind when you used the phrase “narrative game”? Maybe the next step would be to dig into that phrase a bit more.

(Edit: Fixed a typo where I accidentally wrote “ludic” instead of “narrative”.)

Some thoughts on year 1 of Grim Fandango, mostly culled from my posts on the forum:

• Glottis is one of my favorite NPCs ever.
• I’m really pleased at how well the graphics hold up, I love the art deco style. Looking at Glottis, my first reaction was “wow, that’s not very many polygons, is it”, but my second reaction was “so what?” I mean, maybe it would have been better if each of his teeth had been lovingly crafted out of 100 polygons (instead of existing solely as textures on the face), but maybe not: that might have shifted the designers out of bringing out the humor of Glottis’s size and behavior and into, well, modeling teeth. Not to take anything away from tooth modeling, but it may be harder to present a strong unified style when you’re going down to that level. See also Dan’s recent blog post on graphics.
• About the controls: since I haven’t actually played many graphical adventure games, my point of reference there was “would I prefer controlling this like a text adventure or not?” And sometimes the answer is “yes”: as other people have mentioned, the movement is a bit wonky, and even if it wasn’t, it might be nice to just be able to type “n; e; e; n; w; d; n; e” (or whatever) to get from my office to the balloon guy. The recent graphical adventure games that I have played are the Phoenix Wright series, and I have a new appreciation for the limited number of rooms in those games: it’s not like Grim Fandango is particularly spread out or anything, but it still makes a difference.
• But what I do like is the simplicity of interacting with the environment and managing inventory: it’s very nice to not have to play “guess the verb”. Instead, I just hit enter on the keypad when standing near a point of interest and holding an object; either something appropriate will happen or nothing will happen, and either way I know I’m not missing anything in that interaction.
• Another difference I’ve noticed between this and text adventures that I’ve played (and, for that matter, from the Phoenix Wright games): the use of inventory. In those games, you have a fixed set of items which you (almost always) get exactly one of, and (except for a few red herrings), you can use each one in exactly one place. (One annoying puzzle in Enchanter excepted. ) Whereas, in this game, you can get multiple copies of some of the items, and you can (at times) misuse them, forcing you to go back and get another one. Not a big deal, but I do have to get used to saving a bit more often…
• I was surprised how different the puzzles in the forest were from the puzzles in/near your office: much less moving around, many fewer items to work with. And that limited scope is a good thing, because the puzzles in the forest were crap: there’s no way I would have solved them without help if there had been any more options for me to trigger with. For the tree, the only thing that kept me going was that the wheelbarrow was basically the only thing I had to play with; and I completely agree with others that the beaver puzzle is very unnatural, in that you have to be in the right place to use the right item, even though you should be able to use it elsewhere. I had to look up on gamefaqs to figure out how to get the key; and, of course, in a gap in the game’s weird internal logic, there’s a route between the key and the gate once you’ve gotten to the key but not before then.
• So: not ideal puzzles for me,at least in the forest. (And I don’t think it’s just me.) Still, I’ve had a pleasant journey this far, and the puzzles have, on the balance, added to my enjoyment more than subtracting from it; I’m glad I’m playing this game rather than an alternate reality GF where Manny shoots his way through the forest with a gun. And given the quite different nature of the puzzles in the first two halves of the year, I’m curious how the nature of the puzzles will change going forward.

One more thought I had overnight about puzzle gameplay: they can have a real social aspect. Watching somebody else play a shooter or a platformer can be reasonably entertaining, but if you’re watching somebody else play a puzzle game (which neither of you has played before), then it’s effectively a cooperative game: it’s almost irrelevant who is holding the controller, both of you can give suggestions for what to do next.

And it also sheds a new light on the aggregation technique that I mentioned in my previous post. The idea there was to reduce uncertainty (in this case, of the solvability of the puzzle) by increasing the number of puzzles that you have to solve. But you can also reduce it in another way, by increasing the number of people who have a chance to solve the puzzle.

And this isn’t just a theoretical point: Liesl and I basically played through Zack & Wiki together. I think that made it more fun for both of us, just as a social thing; I am quite sure, however, that there were several puzzles in that game that one of us would have been unable to figure out alone, but fortunately those puzzles were generally different for each of us.

I’m not entirely sure what this suggests to game designers, however: I can’t think of ways off the top of my head for them to actively encourage cooperative play in puzzle games. The flip side of that, though, is that it’s a technique that game players can use without depending on game designers for help at all – the next time you play a puzzle game, grab a friend, have a blast, and don’t be surprised if you find it a lot easier!

Over in the Vintage Game Club forum, Michael posted an interesting question, “Do modern gamers still want puzzles?”:

I’m working on a blog post focused on this, but I wonder if puzzles in narrative games are a relic of a bygone era of gaming – or are they a necessary ludic element? Has shooting replaced puzzle-solving as the “gameplay” aspect in narrative games? Is there still an audience for puzzle-solving narrative games? Why not just play a game like Professor Layton and the Curious Village if puzzles are your thing?

(He’s also posted a related blog post.)

Actually, to be honest, my first reaction to this was more that it was a ludicrous question rather than an interesting question, but I started to come around after thinking about it a bit more. Of course, shooting is far too restrictive as a gameplay concept, but say we expand that to include other methods of directly manipulating your character/environment in ways that don’t depend too much on the details of the environment at that particular moment: jumping, pressing colored buttons on a plastic guitar simulacrum while strumming, rolling a ball around the world to suck up items. (Obviously the last two don’t show up so often in narrative games, though now that I think about it, I rather like the idea of a narrative game that you can play with a guitar controller! Like Gitaroo Man, only better.)

If we call the above “direct gameplay” (a lousy name, somebody please give me a better one), then there are real differences between direct gameplay and puzzles. In the “direct gameplay” side, it’s a lot easier to judge the difficulty of any particular situation: if you have two rooms in a shooter, one with twice the number of enemies or three-quarters the available ammo or whatever, you can predict relatively easily how much harder one of those rooms is going to be compared to the other room. Also you can train players to do a better and better job, so that they can reliable successfully make it through situations after playing the game for five hours that would have them dropping the controller in frustration if they’d seen that after five minutes. And you can even tune the difficulty level, so that players of different skill can be presented with appropriate challenges while still getting the same narrative payoff. (Or, as I find myself doing increasingly, players who care more about skill than the gameplay mechanic can turn down the difficulty level.)

With puzzle-based mechanics, though, none of that works: person A may find puzzle 1 obvious while running to gamefaqs (or giving up in frustration) when being confronted with puzzle 2, while Person B may have exactly the opposite experience. I suppose “none of that works” is a bit of an exaggeration: we have intuitive ideas about what puzzles are easier and what are harder, and I pretty much agreed with the difficulty ratings for puzzles in both Zack & Wiki and Professor Layton. And it is possible to train people to some extent in puzzle-solving games: Zack & Wiki again provides an example of that. But it is true that your ability to predict whether or not people will be able to solve your puzzles is much lower than the corresponding prediction in direct gameplay, and that matters: if there are 20 puzzles and you can only predict correctly 90% of the time whether or not people will be able to solve them, then that means players are going to have to run to gamefaqs a couple of times during your game. And I suspect that most game players (and game designers) would rather avoid that.

Having said that, this argument doesn’t run entirely in the “direct gameplay is good” direction: the nice thing about running to gamefaqs is that it reliably works. I’d prefer to never have to go to gamefaqs, but it doesn’t bother me too much if I have to do it a couple of times over the course of playing a game, and at least I can be confident that I’ll be able to finish any puzzle-based game should I chose to do so. Whereas, in direct gameplay games, if something really is too hard for me, then I’ll just stop right there: I can think of a few games (Metroid Prime 2, Final Fantasy VI, Final Fantasy X) where I found the gameplay to be so annoying as to be insulting, and even if I could have finished the game (which I’m sure was the case in those three instances), I had no desire to go through the last few bits of gameplay if that’s the way the designers felt like treating me, despite the potential narrative payoff at the end.

Of course, the boundaries between these categories of gameplay elements aren’t sharp; unsurprisingly, the fuzzy categories can suffer from both problems. Boss battles in direct gameplay games are the best example of this: those are situations where you typically have to both do some puzzle thinking (to figure out the boss’s weakness(es)) and also to be quite good at the relevant direct gameplay techniques. If the game doesn’t balance both of those right, then you can have the double-whammy of the player running to gamefaqs to figure out what to do and also pushing the buttons in just the right way to carry out that plan. (And, indeed, boss battles were my downfall in the three examples I mentioned above where I gave up on the game.)

So, where does the above rambling leave us? I appreciate Michael’s question more than I did when I first saw it, but I still don’t like the suggestion at all: my gaming world would be much much less rich if designers avoided puzzles entirely. And, as he admits, it wasn’t posed completely seriously:

I’m obviously playing devil’s advocate a bit here, but Ben’s frustrated exit from Grim Fandango made me think about these questions and how modern gamers would respond to them.

But if we accept the (to me) obvious fact that game designers need to have puzzles in their gameplay toolbox, that ghettoizing puzzles only impoverishes us all (well, only is too strong a world, given the massive heap of awesomeness that is Professor Layton), what should they do about the above issues?

One obvious suggestion: hints. My first reaction is that that’s a lousy suggestion, that it’s really hard to have hints work well. But if I’m remembering correctly, I didn’t have to go to gamefaqs a single time when playing through Professor Layton to solve a puzzle. (I did have to do that to locate some of the puzzles, but that doesn’t bother me at all.) And, while I would generally prefer to solve a puzzle without hints, they did a good job of giving hints that pointed me in the right direction while still leaving me with a bit of creative thinking to do. So, done right, hints can do a lot to alleviate this issue.

Of course, they’re hardly a panacea: I’m sure I would have felt differently about Professor Layton if I’d needed to look at the hints for half the puzzles instead of a tenth of them, and I’m also sure that, for many of the puzzles in Grim Fandango, you wouldn’t be able to give hints without completely spoiling the puzzle. This is a real constraint on game design, it demands creative solutions, and if the conclusion of this line of reasoning is that the puzzles in Professor Layton are better-designed than those in Grim Fandango, that’s a conclusion that I can accept.

The other technique that this suggests is to use aggregation. This is a standard technique for reducing uncertainty: if you have multiple variables with a wide range of uncertainty, and if those variables are uncorrelated, then you can reduce the uncertainty by increasing the number of the variables. (This is why, e.g., long playoff series are good, at least if you want the better team to win.) In concrete gameplay terms: instead of making the player solve three specific puzzles to progress along the narrative, make them solve three out of five puzzles to progress.

And again (surprise, surprise), Professor Layton does that: they give you a zillion (well, not a zillion, but 150 or so?) puzzles to play; and many of the gameplay/narrative gates force you to solve a certain number of puzzles to pass without restricting exactly which puzzles to solve. (Which is hardly unique to puzzle games, of course, e.g. Super Mario 64.) That’s not the case for every gameplay gate in Professor Layton; is it the case that the mandatory puzzles in that game are easier or more predictably solvable (at least with hints) than the optional puzzles? I don’t know, I’ll have to go back and see. (That certainly is the case with the mandatory gameplay gates in Super Mario 64: they’re battles with Bowser, and those depend on relatively generic platforming mechanics.)

If nothing else, writing this has taught me one thing: not only is Professor Layton a massive heap of awesomeness because of its puzzles and because of its art style, but it’s also a massive heap of awesomeness because of the way in which it navigated the puzzle gameplay design shoals. (If it weren’t late at night, I would come up with a Scylla and Charybdis metaphor here – good thing I’m responding to The Brainy Gamer instead of Living Epic.) Hmm, come to think of it, what’s up with that apparent claim of his that Professor Layton isn’t a narrative game? I sure remember a plot in it…

It’s nice that the Vintage Game Club is giving rise to questions like this. Don’t get me wrong, talking about the game itself with people is a lot of fun, but I’m also happy that it’s giving rise to questions that go beyond the boundaries of that one game. And, reading back through this, I realize that I’ve taken the question in a fairly different direction than Michael has, because I’ve completely ignored the question of what modern gamers want. To that end, I’ll just suggest that a million modern gamers do seem to have some fondness for puzzles…

The combined obtuseness of KitchenAid and A&E Factory Service (with a tip of the hat to Western Appliance) has defeated me: rather than getting our broken garbage disposal replaced under warranty, we’ll just call a plumber to take it out and put in a pipe. In retrospect, I don’t know why we bought the garbage disposal in the first place: having one didn’t improve my life in any way, even when it was working…

On a more positive note, we have a new car now, and our experience with Toyota Sunnyvale was, in general, quite pleasant. I don’t know what their regular salesmen are like (though 5 years ago they were normal annoying car salesmen), but the internet sales person we dealt with was pleasant and straightforward.

I’m very glad that Michael suggested Grim Fandango as the introductory game for the Vintage Game Club, because adventure games and I go way back. I can’t remember the exact sequence of events, but I’m fairly sure that I was aware of the Colossal Cave adventure before we even owned a computer: I think my brother got an account (or used our dad’s account?) on the Oberlin College systems, they had a version of it there (a 550-point version, not the standard 350-point version), and he told me about it. In fact, he was once willing to let me “play” it via a typewriter, with him simulating the computer – isn’t he a sweetie?

We didn’t have any game consoles when I was growing up (I didn’t own any until grad school), but we did get an Apple ][+ at some point. (The summer after fifth grade sounds about right, but I can’t remember for sure.) I played quite a few games on that system; probably the ones that stuck with me the most were the Infocom adventure games. (Though the various Ultima games are a close second.) Most people think of Zork when they think of Infocom, but we didn’t have a copy of that (or its two sequels); I’ve played it since, but I’m not sure it added all that much to the Colossal Cave formula. We did, however, have the tangentially related games Enchanter and Sorcerer, and I very much enjoyed those: they present a much more coherent environment than their predecessors, they add a well-done magic system as a gameplay element. And the games were actually solvable without hints, which mattered a lot more in that pre-gamefaqs time. Though I do remember having to bang my head against the stairs in Enchanter a lot – did I eventually figure that out myself or did I get a hint from a friend somehow?

I believe (but I’m not entirely sure, I might have only played it later) that we got the Hitchiker’s Guide game; not one of my favorites, they chose jokes over gameplay and the jokes were a lot better in the books. (At that time, the fact that works in other media rarely survive the journey to video games wasn’t yet burned into my brain.) A game with experimental gameplay that worked better was Suspended, where you had to switch back and forth between six robots with different senses and abilities to explore the world.

Which brings me to the packaging. Those were the days when (the best) games came with real, well-written manuals. Actually, ‘manual’ isn’t the right word, since that suggests something focused on instructions for playing the game: these, instead, were generally artifacts from the world of the game, e.g. a newspaper issue from the game, a one-zorkmid coin, etc. And Infocom was one of the best at this. (Though I also fondly remember the cloth map and ankh that came with Ultima II, if I’m remembering correctly.) Some of you may have seen the grey box editions of their games, but the earlier packaging of the games was even more impressive: I had the edition of Suspended that came with the huge inset plastic death mask and a map with tokens for the robots to move around, and I’m still kicking myself for not having saved that.

My favorite of their games, however, was Planetfall. Great gameplay, well thought-out puzzles; but the reason why the game sticks in my mind a quarter-century is Floyd. I’m probably missing some good examples, but I’m still not sure I’ve run into another video game NPC that mattered as much to me as Floyd did: he was this wonderful childish robot who tagged along, helping and entertaining you, and the scene where you have to send him to his doom (for which he bravely volunteers, if I’m remembering) combined with this later reappearance still choke me up as I’m typing this.

Sigh.

I didn’t manage to play their later games at the time: Spellbreaker needed too much memory to run on the Apple ][+ (perhaps a blessing in disguise, I played it later and it wasn’t nearly as good as Enchanter and Sorcerer), and I also missed out on Trinity and A Mind Forever Voyaging. I did play a bit of the former eventually, but I still haven’t either finished the former or gotten around to the latter; both would be excellent choices for later Vintage Game Club installments. (As would almost any of the games I’ve mentioned here!)

One other Infocom side note: their games were written in a language that compiled to a virtual machine, the Z-Machine. It has since been reverse engineered, and I wrote an interpreter for it in order to learn C++ when I was transitioning out of academia; if any of you are thinking of learning a new programming language and are looking for a decent-sized project to implement, you could do a lot worse than that.

I don’t recall playing many (any?) adventure games during my undergrad years. During grad school I rounded out my Infocom experience a bit more, and played Myst; I thought that game was excellent, but for whatever reason it didn’t inspire me to seek out more graphical adventures. Maybe I was jaded; maybe (despite Myst‘s phenomenal popularity), adventure games just weren’t near the center of the video game world the way they were in the early 80’s; maybe I was spending too much time learning math, doing research, reading books, and other unwholesome activities. Which was probably the correct choice at the time, but I’m very glad to have this opportunity to fill in a bit of my missing cultural heritage.

The club launches today; please join in! Just play Grim Fandango, hop on over to the discussion forum, and you’re all set.

It’s been a while since I posted a recipe, hasn’t it? Anyways, if you’re looking for a chocolate frosting, you could do a lot worse than this one: one of Liesl’s coworkers used it on a delightful cake last year, we just got the recipe from her (thanks, Amanda!), and tried it out tonight, and it’s great. Very easy (and easy to work with), though it takes a while; it makes a ton of frosting, but if you have any left over, I’m sure you’ll find something to do with it. No idea what the original source of the recipe was.

Whipped Chocolate Ganache

24 ounces semisweet chocolate chips
4 cups heavy cream
1 teaspoon corn syrup

Put chocolate and cream into a medium saucepan. Cook over medium-low heat, stirring constantly with a heatproof rubber spatula, until thick (30-35 minutes). Remove from heat. Stir in corn syrup. Transfer to a large, wide metal bowl. Refrigerate until frosting is cool enough to spread, about 2 hours, checking and stirring every 15 minutes. Use immediately.

I didn’t have much luck getting Grim Fandango working under wine; some of my colleagues suggested VirtualBox, so I thought I’d give that a try. And it worked better (helped by one amazing piece of blind dumb luck); not perfectly, but well enough that I should be able to participate in the inaugural run of the Vintage Game Club.

The steps, as best I remember them:

• Install the virtualbox package, create an image using the suggested XP defaults.
• Run it with an XP installation CD that came with my defunct laptop. Fortunately, the CD turned out not to insist to be running on Dell hardware or anything.
• Click on the window, and notice that keyboard input stops working when I do that. Curse; what is it with these keyboard problems that I’m having when trying to get this game working? Right-control doesn’t work to get out of it, so I switch to a non-X login (Control-Alt-F1), kill virtualbox.
• Try again. Note that keyboard passthrough works fine as long as I don’t click on the window, so I can either use the mouse or the keyboard. Well, the installation seems to not require me to move the mouse, so let’s go with that.
• Except that it does require me to click on the screen where I’m entering user accounts. Sigh. My keyboard has occasionally temporarily lost mouse control – maybe there’s something weird about the PS2-to-USB converter that I’m using? Run out to the store to buy a USB keyboard and trackball. (Incidentally, my hand doesn’t like the trackball that I bought any more than it likes a mouse; I wish non-laptop keyboard with integrated trackpads hadn’t gone completely out of fashion.)
• Come back, plug it in. And have a remarkable stroke of luck: I’d left the computer in the non-X console. When I switched back to the X console, my typing monitor that forces me to take periodic breaks decides to kick in. And it managed to grab the mouse/keyboard back from virtualbox, yay! So: click the mouse on the entry field where I need it, wait for the typing monitor to kick in again, then type in the information I need.
• After that, the rest of the installation completes. And, when I get XP installed, I can install the “guest OS extensions” which allow mouse passthrough as well as keyboard passthrough. So now I can click and type without excessive workarounds.
• Do a zillion OS updates, because I can’t bear to have an old XP install, even if it’s behind two layers of external network protection. Pleased at how the networking stuff Just Works in virtualbox.
• Install Grim Fandango. Seems to work, but no sound? Ah, I forgot to tell virtualbox to provide a sound card to XP; when I do that, I get sound.
• But the sound is choppy. Grumble, but there’s not much I can do about that, and it’s not so bad as to make the game unbearable.

So I’m ready to go; I’m looking forward to the game club kickoff on Monday. Hmm, why didn’t we start on a weekend? This weekend is busy, though (Miranda’s birthday, she’s 9 years old!), so I guess that’s just as well.

All in all, I’m pleased with my virtualization experience; the keyboard problem was a serious one, but (unlike with wine), I managed to resolve it, and I’m getting the feeling that there must be something weird about my setup. Given the complexity of what’s going on, I was pleased how smoothly things went other than that.

The other nice thing about virtualization: I saved snapshots of the machine at various points. In particular, if I want to revert to a clean XP install (after applying updates), I can; that might be useful for future games, if I run into weird conflicts.

Not the best week computer-wise. The server that hosts this blog (and that my e-mail resolves to) has been going down daily; I am optimistic that we’ve found and fixed the problem but, well, I’ve been optimistic about that once before in this round, and I was wrong that time.

And then I did my weekly e-mail spam folder scan, and discovered that gmail’s spam filters have been on overdrive the last few days; I get the feeling that it’s been rejecting a third of the mailing-list mail that I received, and a few important pieces of non-mailing-list mail. Sigh.

As regular readers are aware, I’m a big fan of JapanesePod101. On the off chance that any of my readers are thinking about learning a bit of Japanese, I wanted to let you know that they’ve just started new seasons of most or all their shows: in particular, they published the first episode of a new Newbie season (starting from scratch) yesterday.

Incidentally, don’t be confused by the naming, the Beginner series isn’t quite for raw beginners, that’s what Newbie is. (Well, the first Beginner season was. But the later ones weren’t.) Also, the buttons at the top of the web page don’t include the later seasons of the show: if you want to browse by category, use the ones on the right side. The free feed only contains the last week of lessons, but older lessons are all available on the web page. (Or via the feed for the paid subscriptions; if you do commit to learning the language, I recommend signing up for one of the subscriptions, I’ve found the reading practice from the PDFs to be worth the Basic subscription price alone.)

I was all excited to start playing Grim Fandango, so when my copy arrived today, I figured I’d spend the evening getting wine to work.

Which took a little bit of doing, enough to create a blog post out of, but ultimately I got to where I could launch the game and go through the opening movie.

Which ends: ah, I’m in control now! I hit an arrow key, my character moved. And then no other arrow keys did anything.

I repeated a few times; in later attempts, I couldn’t even move once. I could hit F1 during the cut scene to get to a menu, but the arrow keys didn’t work there. So: the first keystroke works, nothing after that? Not good.

Sigh, I am frustrated. One of my coworkers mentioned VirtualBox; I guess I’ll give that a try next? I really don’t want to have to drag my old Windows machine out of retirement…

Apparently I’m not the only person who feels like playing through old games and talking about them with other people: Michael Abbott and Dan Bruno noticed my throwaway comment on the subject, and, a weekend of e-mails later, the Vintage Game Club is formed.

Our first game will be the classic LucasArts adventure Grim Fandango. If playing through that and talking it over with other people sounds like fun, then go find a copy and get ready! We’ll get started on July 21; Michael has graciously offered to host the discussion, so go to his blog to chime in.

I’ll save what few other thoughts I have on the game until the start date. My first challenge actually will be making sure I can actually play the game at all, which I will spend a bit of time poking at over the next two weeks: it looks like it shouldn’t be too hard to get the game working under Linux, but who knows. (Hmm, I guess I haven’t actually thrown away my old Windows laptop yet, but I’d really rather avoid using it: the screen is held on with duct tape, the power supply and batteries are flaky, it’s been a couple of years since I’ve even tried to turn it on…) I just hope that, if it’s broken under Linux, it’s obviously broken: I will be unhappy if I start playing and run into a serious bug 10 hours into the game…

I spent a little while yesterday poking around with getting Japanese input to work on my home Linux machine, since I’ll need that for entering vocabulary cards into the memory program.

To make a long story short: largely, it Just Works. (At least under Ubuntu 8.04.) I was a bit confused at first by the wealth of possibilities: in particular this page talks about UIM (better but less standard?) versus SCIM. I compared the pages that it pointed at (both for 7.10), and then I found this page which was an updated version of the SCIM recommendation for 8.04; reading through that, it seemed like some of the UIM advantages had gone away, so I decided to go with SCIM and follow the steps listed there.

I made it as far as turning on Japanese language support (including the support for entering complex characters), and got confused at the next line on the HOWTO: it was directing me to edit a file in my home directory which didn’t currently exist (so why not ask me to create it instead?), and it was telling me to edit it via sudo, which didn’t make any sense. While I was googling to make sure I wasn’t about to do anything stupid, I ran across this page on SCIM, which claimed that things should work now with no further configuration.

So I tried typing Control-space, and up popped a SCIM window; a bit of typing later, and I had both kana and kanji appearing! Pretty cool. And the input method does seem quite usable; I didn’t have to do to much experimentation before I felt like I could enter characters fairly reliably, without too much extra typing. One thing which I might want to tweak is using a key combo other than Control-space to enter it, because I use that a lot in Emacs; fortunately, SCIM only recognizes the actual control key instead of the caps lock key that I have remapped to control (perhaps related to this bug), so the default mapping isn’t interfering with Emacs use; if it starts doing so, it should be easy enough to change.

The upshot is: under Ubuntu 8.04, Japanese input Just Works, as long as you have it turned on! I wish I’d found that latter page first, rather than the longer page. For now, I’m not doing anything more with the longer page (and am considering removing the extra repository it had me add); the next thing on its list is a handwriting recognition system, which sounds cool but which I have no particular desire to use.

I am considering following its font instructions; in particular, I agree that it’s annoying that kana look blurry at small sizes. Having said that, for now I’m holding off: my main planned use for Japanese input is in the memory project, and I’m planning to use larger font sizes for the flash cards there, so it may not be a big deal. And these days, I’m generally in the mood to go with defaults whenever possible: I have other ways that I’d rather spend my time than fiddling with system configuration.

One thing which it pointed out which is useful: go to System / Preferences / Appearance / Fonts and turn on subpixel smoothing. (It also recommended clicking on Details and making sure hinting is set to ‘full’, which was already the case on my system.) That noticeably improved the look of my (roman character) fonts on my monitor; if you’re using an LCD monitor, you might want to check that your system is configured that way, even if you don’t care about Japanese at all.

Edit: I’m no longer so convinced of that last sentence: fonts started looking a bit green when I did that. It’s worth trying, but I’m thinking of going back to ‘best shape’ instead.

The original Smash Bros. was a mind-opener for me. It (and its sequels) may still be, in its own way, my favorite multiplayer game; I’m admittedly not much of a fighter aficionado, but I haven’t seen anything else with quite its brand of chaos. (Well, maybe Power Stone 2 (and presumably its predecessor, which I haven’t played) matches it.)

Also, it had one gameplay feature that, in my opinion, should be standard fare for all competitive multiplayer games: automatic handicapping. When playing the game with friends, I’m usually better than they are (not that I have great skills, I’ve just played the game a bit more), but that’s no big deal: we turn on automatic handicapping, and after about 10 minutes, we’re all winning the same number of matches.

So of course I had to give the Wii version a try. Unfortunately, I’m not currently in the habit of inviting people over frequently to play video games, and Miranda wasn’t particularly in a Smash Bros. mood at the time. No problem, the game has a good-length single player mode, I’ll just give that a try: I’ll have some fun, and I’ll unlock all the characters.

Unfortunately, that mode (Subspace Emissary) isn’t very good. It’s a platformer, and a bad one: in particular, using up on the stick to jump works fine when fighting on a stage, but is lousy when exploring a level. And there was rarely anything particularly interesting about the level design; I was just slogging through levels, hoping to reach the end. Really, it felt a lot more like a vehicle for cut scenes than anything else; the cut scenes were fine, but not worth the gameplay that I had to put up with. (I played through most of it single player; I did a bit of it with a friend, and it was even worse that way.)

At least that’s the way I felt most of the way through that game mode. And then I got to The Great Maze; I’ve heard other people complain about it, but in my mind this is the best part of the mode. The reason why others complain is that it has you replaying sections of earlier levels, but they’re handled in a completely different way: rather than slogging through a long level to make it to the fight/cut scene at the end, it instead has snippets of short platforming sections, punctuated by fights against each of the different characters. (Plus a few enemy bosses.) The platforming is short enough to not grate, the maze design lets you do a bit of exploration, and you spend lots of time doing the core fighting gameplay. Also, you can chose your character, and I find the platforming a lot more pleasant with some of the characters (Kirby in particular) than others.

So I ended the mode feeling well-disposed to the game, much more so than I was the previous weekend. I had happy enough thoughts that I started poking through some of the other modes, and I’m glad I did. The game is certainly best enjoyed by having a few friends over and fighting against each other over and over again, but there are a lot of other options there as well. The Event Battles are a pleasant set of challenges (have I blogged about that aspect of Perfect Dark?); the Challenge Board is a good mechanism for focusing your game play, if you want suggestions for what to do or want help unlocking stuff. (I won’t go into it here, but there’s a lot of stuff to unlock.)

So: a pleasant single player game, seriously marred by the most prominent single player mode. I don’t want to mislead people who haven’t played the game, though: this is a great great multiplayer game, one which anybody with a Wii and friends should own. (At least local friends; I haven’t tried the internet play, but apparently it’s pretty bad.) The above talks about my recent single-player experiences with the game; that I can take or leave, but it’s largely tangential to what the game is really about.

I’ve been going through the back episodes of the Brainy Gamer podcast, and I must say that I am extremely annoyed with Mr. Abbott. The problem is his game recommendations: he has the most infuriating way of talking about games that I was aware of and favorably disposed to and turning them into games that I really have to play Right Now. Or at least Very Soon.

Just how much time do you think I have, Mr. Abbott? Sure, I can probably squeeze in a few hours to play Rez HD—if I’m remembering correctly, the original wasn’t that long—and I should be able to play A Mind Forever Voyaging when I’m on vacation, but but how on earth am I supposed to find time to play Persona 3? Or seriously explore Burnout Paradise? I hope No More Heroes isn’t too long, and I think I’ll manage to resist the lure of Odin Sphere, but I do have a day job! (And, on a more mainstream note, I’d like to play BioShock soon. And GTA IV. And I’m trying to avoid saying the word Oblivion too often.)

If my coworkers report a rise in my “working from home” at some point, you’ll know whom to blame. Good thing I only have one and a half podcasts left to listen to; mercifully, he only records one every three weeks or so, and at that rate I shouldn’t get into too much deeper a hole. But there’s no way I’m going back and looking through his older blog posts.

(Hmm, a more serious thought that this sparked: how about the idea of a video game club? Like a book club, a group of people who play the same game at the same time and talk about it. I realize that this happens all the time with new games right when they’re released, but how about trying it for older games?)

One frustrating aspect of my Rock Band experience: account management. Maybe all of this makes more sense to people with more multiplayer Xbox 360 experience, but here’s what I’ve gone through since buying the game:

• First, we played anonymously, because there didn’t seem to be any way to create characters from the multiplayer screen. (At least in non-world-tour mode, we weren’t interested in starting a band yet.)
• Then I read the manual, and figured out that you had to create a character in solo mode. So I created two characters, David and Miranda.
• Then we started to play; she could sign in, I couldn’t. Hypothesis: we were both signed in under my account, maybe it only lets you use one character per account at a time?
• So then I figured out (first time I’d done this) how to get different accounts signed in on different controllers, and we created a new Miranda character under her account. But I still couldn’t use my character?
• That was all last week; when starting a band, this seemed important to sort out. In world tour mode, it was willing to let me create a character; but when I did that, it said I already had a character named David. So why wouldn’t it let me use it???
• I went back to my account in solo mode, and noticed the microphone icon next to my character. Ah: I guess the character is linked to an instrument? (Or pair in the case of guitar/bass?) So I deleted the old character, and created a new character who was a guitarist. Using the very annoying d-pad on the guitar, where up and down did the opposite of what I expected.
• After that, we were all set, and had a lot of fun. But now, I’ve just linked to my Rock Band portal account, and my band doesn’t show up! And the old characters do show up, but not the ones I created today?
• Maybe it only updates some of that once a day? Seems odd. But, turning the game back on again, I now doubt the band will ever show up, because it turns out that we created it using the (regular non-instrument) Xbox 360 controller, because it’s by far the most natural one to use. And that’s the one that is linked to the microphone, hence the one that was logged in to Miranda’s (non-Xbox-Live) Xbox account. Or something like that, I can only try to reconstruct what must have happened in retrospect.
• Grumble. Should I ask Miranda if we can start a new band, linked to my account? Probably not, I’d prefer it to be linked to my account, but realistically I don’t think it matters much one way or another, given that we’re only using it locally. Still, it would be nice to show off our progress to the world…

Sigh. Sure, some of this is my ignorance, not initially knowing about logging into different accounts on different controllers. Though there, Microsoft really could have done a much better job of making that whole setup easier to figure out, e.g. adding a “create new account” item on one of the main menus, instead of requiring the user to think of signing out of the primary account (using a different mechanism) first. But it seems to me that I didn’t do anything particularly unnatural in the above scenario, yet I took wrong turns several times that I only became aware of much later.

Miranda and I formed a band today on Rock Band. We are going by the name “The Brosstones”; perhaps not the best, but I’d neglected to think about possible band names in advance. (Alas, the other Bross has yet to join us; she did spend a fair amount of time this weekend playing DDR, for what that’s worth.)

I assume there is a way to link to some page associated to my band online somehow, but I haven’t yet figured it out. Or maybe I need to register somehow? I did create a page at the Rock Band website; at some point, I’ll link that to my Xbox Live gamertag, and then happy things will happen?

Miranda was on vocals, I was on guitar. Lots of fun was had by all; we went as far as winning a van, so on to Amsterdam and/or London next. I managed to add facial hair, which made me happy. She wasn’t familiar with most of the songs (and, for that matter, neither was I), which can cause problems with vocals, but she did a good job of figuring them out on the fly, and the guitar parts were easy enough that I could go into overdrive periodically to get her out of the danger zone.

At least on Medium, I could; Hard was just hard enough that I couldn’t reliably go into overdrive frequently enough when playing through the songs for the first time. I spent a little while in the afternoon starting to go through the songs on Hard, so I’ll be more used to them. Medium is pretty boring, even on the first time through the songs; either my memory is faulty or this seems easier than the original Guitar Hero was. Which makes a lot of sense, given the multiplayer/party focus of the game.

I still haven’t tried drums. (Or vocals or bass, for that matter.) Maybe next weekend? Probably not, I usually like to finish one thing first, so I’ll probably concentrate on our band and on solo guitar for now.

I haven’t listened to pop music much since around 1989 or so, so most of the songs and artists were new to me, but I quite liked the songs in general. I’m very open to recommendations for downloadable content. And I’m very much hoping that the rumor that The Beatles might be showing up soon is true; I would happily spend the price of this game again, or even more, to get all of their albums…

I’m now two-thirds of the way through my Japanese textbook, and the second third went much more smoothly than the first third did. All but one of the chapters took two weeks each; that one took three weeks and, if you throw in the two vacation weeks, it only took me 23 weeks to go through this chunk.

For whatever reason, the grammar in the middle third didn’t seem any harder for me to learn than the grammar in the first third. And there are actually fewer vocabulary words to memorize than in the first third; I suppose it makes sense that, when starting the language, they have to throw more new vocabulary at you to enable you to read anything.

I’m also getting better at memorizing vocabulary and kanji. I’m now up to 448 kanji on my journey through the joyo kanji; I can reliably learn fourteen a week (seven every three days, actually), whereas before I only did seven some weeks. I still have a hard time believing that I won’t run into a wall at some point during the 1500 kanji that remain, but I could be wrong; if I haven’t run into problems so far, maybe I won’t run into problems later? I still have a good two years of kanji memorizing ahead of me, unless my rate speeds up dramatically, but that trip is starting to look increasingly manageable.

If I could wave a magic wand and fix one thing right now, it would be my retention of vocabulary (and, to a lesser extent, grammar) that I learned a few months ago. I don’t have a magic wand, but I’m hoping that the memory project will solve that problem. (I still haven’t started programming on it—bad David—but I did write my first toy Rails app this evening, so I am taking baby steps.)

It looks like I’m about five months away from finishing the textbook. Which isn’t exactly right around the corner, but it’s close enough that I should start thinking about next steps. Some possible areas to work on:

• Speaking Japanese.
• Listening to spoken Japanese. (E.g. in movies or video games.)
• Reading Japanese.
• Increasing my vocabulary.
• Learning more grammar.

For now, my main goal is to improve my ability to read Japanese, so I’m going to have that drive my next actions. (Though if we decide to travel to Japan next year, I’d want to bump up the priority of speaking Japanese.) I’m getting some pretty good ideas of what I might want to do next in that vein: Japanese volumes of Hikaru no Go, the annotated books I recently purchased, some kids’ magazines that Jim mentioned. (I realized that I’m acting like some of the people mentioned in the NLP book: I want to learn Japanese, so I try to imitate people who learn Japanese better than I do, so I act like a Japanese kid (or an American kid with Japanese parents), so I order Japanese children’s magazines!)

And, of course, reading Japanese will require me to increase my vocabulary and grammar; I’m comfortable with my plan for the former (words that I run into in books, the joyo kanji), and I have some resources for the latter.

All in all, pretty happy. I just need to get off my butt and start programming, so I’ll have the memory program available before I go on vacation. (Or before I run out of blank cards in my vocabulary box!) And I should probably just go and subscribe to a subset of those magazines; I might as well start trying to read some of the younger ones right now.

I’m very glad I ran into this right after finishing Half-Life 2.