August 2002
- 28 -
One last thing
I can be on the computer today,
but tomorrow I'm leaving, so this will be my last entry until November.
I went over Azenera level 4 again and found that there were still a few
bugs, so I fixed the ones I found and put together a new version, Azenera
4.18. None of the instance properties of levels 1 through 3 have
been changed from 4.17 to 4.18, so if you downloaded the earlier version
and you're playing one of the first three levels, you can save the new
one over it with no problem.
Well, I don't know if I'll be
able to get on the computer tomorrow, so this might be my last entry for
a while. I've been working harder than ever on Azenera level 4, and
I think it's mostly done. I say "mostly" because I didn't get the
chance to completely test it for bugs and make sure it's balanced.
There might even be some show-stopping bug I missed, but I played through
the level and was able to get through to the end. The new health
crystal system is in place and it does make it more challenging, but it's
still kind of experimental.
I'll be going back to college
really soon, and I probably won't be able to access this site from there.
I've finished putting in all the plants, trees, and lights in Azenera level
4, and now I have to put in the enemies, items, sounds, and events.
The hardest part will be making sure there aren't any bugs. Level
3 had a few bugs and half the sounds were missing the first time I had
it done, so I had to redo it a few months later, and I hope it's not like
that with level 4.
Here I am, doing four things
at once on the computer again. I'm working on Azenera and putting
the plants and cave lights into level 4, sorting my soundtracks, writing
this entry, and reading about promises broken and lies told. It's
not about games, but rather a TV show, but it's still the same idea.
Many people are very unhappy at the writers for a poor story decision they
made, and the writers said they wouldn't do it but they did anyway.
It's different for me than it is for them because every episode of a TV
show is basically set in stone while I'm constantly changing and updating
Azenera all at once, but I still don't want to make any promises I'm not
going to keep. I want to get all 14 levels of Azenera done, but I
don't know if I'll have the time or the patience to do it. I can't
promise I'll get it all done, but I'll try to, and I hope I can do it.
Azenera 4 is well on its way,
but I've been making a few more minor design changes. I've redesigned
the look of the dark unlit caves. They used to just be uniformly
dimly lit so it was better to carry a torch around but you weren't totally
lost if you didn't have one. Now, I've made them pitch black, but
every few steps there's a dim light you can use as a reference point, so
you can see everything in the light's radius but nothing in between the
lights. This way, you can't just turn up your gamma adjustment to
see the whole cave without a torch, but you still won't get lost if you
don't have one because you can navigate between the dimly lit spots.
I should have thought of this when I was making the level Hide and Seek
and all those dark caves in Dragonmech. It's a simple design decision
that works well.
I've added some stuff to level
3 of Azenera. All the hostile goblins now carry a Spellstaff, but
the friendly ones don't, so you can tell them apart that way. Since
some of the Kavoh in the town of Tozoha in level 2 were talking about the
Wartoks taking slaves in the swamp, I put a few Kavoh slaves in the Wartok
camp on level 3. You can free them by killing the Wartok with plate
armor who carries the Great Sword. I also added a weapon called the
Leech, which is a copy of the Tick sword from Drakan 2. You'll find
it near the beginning of the passage with the pools of water.
It'll be time for college very
soon, and I'm trying to get Azenera level 4 finished, but I'm also trying
not to rush it. I've also been going back over previous levels and
adding extra detail. I've moved everything over on level 2 and added
a few lengths of cave at the beginning because it seemed like the layout
of the levels made the eastern part of level 1 overlap with the western
part of level 2, and some people have a very good sense of direction and
they might notice that. It's a minor nitpick, but it wasn't that
hard to change it. When the level is released, don't restore a saved
game from level 2 from any previous versions because everything will be
shifted over 32 level units.
Sometimes my Internet connection
does the most annoying thing. After I've been on for a while, it'll
just refuse to receive any more data. It can send data and look for
web pages, but it never loads them. It works again if I disconnect
and then reconnect, so it's not as bad as it could be, but it's still annoying.
The connection only seems to fail after I've loaded a few web pages, and
I don't think it has ever failed in the middle of a big download.
Some of the sites I visit have slow servers, so whenever there's a delay,
I never know whether the problem is with the site or my Internet connection.
Well, it's time for the final
(I hope) stage in getting Azenera level 4 ready: object placement.
I'm starting with the cave entrances, music switchers, and sky/fog transitions,
and then I'll put in the plants and the gates. After that, I'll set
up the enemies, items, and scripted sequences. I still have to make
sure I've gone back and changed all the grass and health crystals properly
in level 2 and 3.
I've been playing Deus Ex lately
and getting into the story a little. It's the future, and the UN
has set up a global police force to deal with the threats of terrorists
such as secessionists in the United States and organized crime rings like
the Triads. The police force, UNATCO, has stepped up security measures
because there has been a lot of terrorist activity, and there's a plague
going around that might have been created by one of the groups. Also,
there's suspicious activity going on within UNATCO as well. The gameplay
in Deus Ex reminds me of System Shock 2, especially with the character
upgrade system. You start out trained in a few skills, and you can
upgrade them as you gain more skill points after you complete tasks.
I have a few things I need to
get done before I go back to college. I should really finish Azenera
level 4 before I go back. My family's other computer needs a new
hard drive, and I have to get all my books and supplies for college ready
to go. Also, I want to beat Final Fantasy X and see the ending, even
if I'm not powerful enough to kill all the arena monsters yet. My
first priorities are all my real life tasks, but I'll also try to get Azenera
level 4 done.
For my birthday, I got two new
games: Deus Ex Game of the Year Edition and Serious Sam: the Second Encounter.
They're both first-person shooters, but they're totally different styles.
I don't know if Deus Ex would be considered a FPS, because it might have
too much character development, but it's in a first-person perspective
and you can shoot at things so that's FPS enough to me! Serious Sam
2 is just like the first game, but this time you're in the Mayan ruins
instead of Egyptian ones, and I've heard there's a lot more crazy stuff
going on in this game than there was in the first.
Remember my July 24, 1999 entry
where, among other ramblings, I said that the music in Sonic CD was changed
for the Present and both Futures in the American version? Usually
I don't like to be held accountable for things I wrote more than one month
ago, because I like to think that I'm always changing around and evolving,
but this has to do with stuff I'm doing now. Recently, I went back
to the video game music site Gamingforce
and noticed they were back up and their MP3s were available again.
I noticed that one of the albums they had to download was called Sonic
CD Japan. I thought, could this be the Japanese version of the Present,
Good Future, and Bad Future music in Sonic CD? Sure enough, it was!
My search is complete! Just as I suspected, the music for each zone
does indeed sound like variations on the Past music. All the Present
music sounds more rhythmic and upbeat than the familiar Past variation,
kind of like dance music. The Good Future music is in kind of a soft,
melodious techno style, and the Bad Future music is also techno, but darker-sounding.
If I were any other web site
writer, I would jokingly make some reassuring comment that the demo I'm
going to talk about is not about the former vice president, but I'm not
going to fall into the trap of making an obvious lame joke like that.
Instead, I'll just indirectly make the joke by smugly stating that I'm
not going to make it, and then I'll try to bail out of it by recognizing
that I'm making the joke after all, just indirectly. Now let's get
on with the mini-review! The Gore
demo contains a few levels from the full game, and I think it has multiplayer
support too but I haven't tried that. The single player game has
a rather familiar story: it's the future, you're a member of an army that
has been trained by a virtual device called the Meat Machine, which trains
soldiers to be super-soldiers, and you're up against a huge criminal organization
that wants to steal or destroy the Meat Macine so your army can't make
super-soldiers anymore. To do this, the criminals send out a legion
of generic thugs who yell things like "Die, die, die!" and "Not while I'm
drinking!" to run around buildings and shoot and punch you. You start
out by finding out the criminals' plan to steal your database, so you have
to run through hallways and rooms shooting thugs and picking up their weapons
for more ammo. Then you meet a really crazy but fast guy who holds
a glowing thing in his hand, which I guess is the database, and he yells
"Neener neener I've got your database, ha ha ha!" or something like that
while running away from you. He runs up to the rooftops, where you
have to run across a bunch of cables and fight thugs who shoot at you from
helicopters. The demo ends sometime later, after all the rooftop
action. I think it's when you've arrived at another building that
looks like the first one you were in except the lights are red instead
of blue. Gore's gameplay is your standard first-person shooter fare,
but it has a few new things. There's a stamina meter, which is depleted
when you run or jump, and it recharges when you're standing still or walking.
When your stamina is low, you can't run as fast or jump as far. It's
kind of like the fatigue system in Morrowind. The graphics have lots
of specular lighting and reflection effects, as well as colored lighting
that brightens up the levels but isn't overused. The sound effects
are good, but the voices in the demo sound kind of low-quality. This
demo only has two levels, so it might not be worth the download time if
you have a slow connection. If you have a fast connection speed or
a CD with the demo on it, and you like first-person shooters, you might
want to try it out.
You can probably tell by now
that I mostly like 3D action games. Well, the Duke
Nukem: Manhattan Project demo has 3D graphics, but its gameplay is
in the style of a 2D console action game, like Pandemonium or Klonoa 2.
I'm pretty sure this game is a console port like Batman Vengeance, or maybe
it was produced for the PC and consoles at the same time. The demo
consists of the rooftop level from the full game. There's a menu
at the beginning where you can change the usual graphics, sound, and control
settings, and when you begin a new game, a cinematic introduces you to
the story. The evil Mech Morphix is using a chemical called G.L.O.P.P.
to turn people into mutants, and only Duke Nukem can save them. In
the demo, you'll have to fight enemies such as the pigs from Duke Nukem
3D, exploding homing mines, and a helicopter at the end. The level
is divided into three sections, and in each one, you have to free a babe
strapped to a bomb and collect a key to get to the next section.
Along the way, you can collect health and ammo, and if you find ten Nuke
items in a section, your maximum health and ammo increases. The graphics
in this game are pretty good, with nice explosions and animations.
The sound effects are good too, but the music is just your average techno
beat, and Duke's one-liners are kind of predictable and they can get irritating
sometimes. Of all the demos I've played so far, this one seems to
have the most content and replay value, but it's still not the best out
there.
It was my birthday today, and
it's also another Demo Day. Today, I played the demo of a game called
Tsunami
2265. It's an action game with giant anime-inspired robots.
Like Auryn Quest, this is a game that puts you right into the action without
starting from a menu screen, and also, you can't change the key assignments
or mouse sensitivity. Fortunately, the default controls were the
ones I usually use for 3D action games, but there aren't very many things
to do in this game. You start out running through narrow canyons
and fighting other giant robots and wall-mounted turrets, circle-strafing
to avoid their shots, and that's pretty much all you do for the entire
level. You only have two weapons, a gun and missile launcher, and
they have infinite ammo. There aren't any powerups in the demo except
for the occasional health restoration item. This game really doesn't
have much to it. You never really feel like you're piloting a giant
robot rather than just walking around in a space suit, and the only real
challenges are making sure you have room to circle strafe and trying not
to get lost. Like the last two demos I played, there aren't any quicksaves
in this one either. The sound and music, like the game itself, are
kind of repetitive. The canyon textures mesh well with few obvious
seams, and the cel shading is often effective, but there isn't enough variation
in the design so it all ends up looking the same. If this demo were
much smaller, like under 10 MB, it might be a fun diversion for a while,
but as it is the file size is just too big for what you get. I've
heard the full game is pretty much like the demo, but I don't think more
than one level like this could hold my interest.
It's time for another demo mini-review!
Today's game demo is Batman
Vengeance. First of all, I should mention that this game is a
console port, and it shares all the familiar console port flaws.
The control can be frustrating because you often have to switch between
two control systems. In third-person view, you have no control of
the camera, and the movement keys move you and turn you based on your current
position on the screen, like in Super Mario 64. But when you press
the "gadget" key, the game switches to first-person mode, and you control
the game almost like a first-person shooter on the PC. This control
system takes some time to get used to, and it can get frustrating.
You get to play four levels in the demo. One is a training level
to get you used to the control, two are levels where you beat up enemies
on foot, and one is a shooter level with the Batplane. The graphics
are appropriately cartoonish, and the frame rate is pretty smooth.
If you like console action games, you might want to try out this demo.
I've been playing a few game
demos over the past few days, and now I'm ready to tell you what I think
of them. The first demo I tried was the one for the game Auryn
Quest. It looked interesting from the screenshots, so I decided
to try it first. As soon as I started it up, it let me select a resolution
and screen bit depth, and then it went right into the game without any
menu at the beginning. A voiceover and a display box explained the
controls, which are WASD for movement, shift to run, space bar to jump,
and mouse to look around. The mouse is in inverted mode by default,
but you can switch it to regular mode by pressing F12. After the
control explanation is done, you can walk around the central area which
in the full game connects to all the levels, but in the demo, you can only
get to the lava dungeon. The object of the levels is to collect ten
energy balls and accomplish objectives to get to the end. There is
no combat in the game, but there are plenty of jumping puzzles that require
precision. There's no way to quicksave, but there are checkpoints
you can go back to if you miss a jump or get hit by a hazard. The
graphics and sound are okay, but they're not the best. I would say
this demo is only worth downloading if you're a big fan of the precision
jumping puzzles, but not the combat, in first-person shooters.
Drakan doesn't support volumetric
fog. Traveler's Quest, which uses a newer version of the engine,
supports it, but not the original Drakan. There's probably no situation
in Azenera where I'll need anything like it, because I already handled
the swamp level by making it a separate level with a lower maximum fog
limit, but it's still fun to experiment with effects. I decided to
try to emulate volumetric fog in Drakan using only models. Now, I
know you can't just make a box with a transparent texture and call it volumetric
fog. You have to make a bunch of transparent planes inside the box,
too. My first experiment was to make a series of intersecting planes
at right angles, so that the whole pattern looked like a grid of cubicles
with semi-transparent walls. This worked out better than I expected:
Unfortunately, there are a few problems with this fog. If the planes are too dense, it hurts the frame rate because of all the geometry on the screen, and if they're too transparent, they won't work correctly in 16-bit color mode, which a few misguided people still use. It's typical of anything that involves alpha textures and requires precision and fading out of other textures, like in Quantum Arena. I remember when the original background for Quantum Arena was a solid dark blue with an alpha map so that it kept textures on the screen for a while and faded them into the background. It worked perfectly well for me, but imagine my surprise when one of the testers said that he liked the "phoenix lair" background. At first I thought he was crazy, but then I had an idea and tried it in 16-bit color mode, and sure enough, the textures didn't fade correctly, leading to all sorts of weird background patterns. Sure enough, the tester was running the level in 16-bit color mode instead of 32. With all this worrying over configuration and making everything work for everyone, I'm about ready to join the dark side and look into Playstation 2 development, where all systems are equal and I don't have to worry about different processor speeds or color depths.
I've decided that the grass in
Azenera levels 2 and 3 doesn't look as good as I want, so I'm changing
it to an actual model instead of a bunch of particles. But since
I want it to retain the appearance of swaying in the wind, I'm experimenting
with morph objects to make the grass move back and forth. You can't
see the animation in this picture, but this is what it looks like so far:
The grass is arranged in three circles around a central point. It only has a single 256x256 resolution texture stretched over the top, but it doesn't look too bad. It's not really professional quality, but it's better than the old grass.
When a site goes subscription,
they are dead in my eyes. Well, I guess there's some stuff on Salon
that's fairly interesting, but to me it's still like looking upon a neatly
dressed corpse and admiring the work of the undertaker. I hardly
ever visit Gamespot anymore, so I don't need to have the link there on
my front page. The Sine Wave is not a link farm! When you have
one unnecessary link or button, then you won't be able to stop yourself
and pretty soon you'll just be another generic site that has the obligatory
column of buttons leading to Something Awful, Fark, The Onion, and about
a dozen similar sites. I still look for demos and patches on Gone
Gold sometimes, so that link stays.
It looks like Film.com is no
more. I was wondering why I didn't see any of their reviews listed
on Rotten Tomatoes, and now I know why. How long have they been gone,
anyway? The site just redirects to the Real.com guide now, and everyone
already knows about RealPlayer and all that, so I don't need the link anymore.
Now there's just one movie review link, so I made the title of that section
singular instead of plural.
It's getting harder to try to
work with my Drakan levels and make them the way I want them. I've
encountered problems with all the damage effects so far. The freeze
effect cancels out the armor piercing property of weapons, and if you use
it on a death mage that teleports when you hit it, the death mage will
freeze when it dies, but when it thaws, it becomes stuck in place and doesn't
disappear. I wish it were more like the Drakan 2 freeze effect, which
actually makes weapons better instead of making it so you have to hit them
an extra time. The poison effect works pretty well, and I don't mind
the fact that it doesn't work as a melee weapon damage effect, but it seems
that if you hit an enemy with the burn damage effect and then try to hit
them with poison, the poison won't stick to them. This makes the
Gas Cloud spell less effective if you use it after Fireball or any other
burn-damage weapon. And then there's the fire damage effect.
For the most part, the fire effect has been reliable and bug-free for me,
but I just stumbled upon a bug that's kind of irritating. The problem
is that when you hit an enemy with a fire damage effect, then all subsequent
fire damage effects you hit the enemy with will have the same duration
and damage per second as the first one. That means if you hit an
enemy with a Torch of Slight Burning Sensation, which has a fire effect
that lasts 1 second and does 1 damage per second, and then you switch over
to a Sword of Ultimate Flame, which on its own does 5 damage but it adds
a whopping huge fire damage effect that does 200 damage per second, the
sword will burn the enemy with the same weak burn effect as the torch,
negating the entire point of having the sword in the first place.
Likewise, if first you hit a tough enemy with the sword and it doesn't
die right away, then you can just use the torch that's supposed to be weak,
and every hit from the torch will burn the enemy just as badly as the sword.
The first burn you give the enemy will be the only kind of burn it can
ever get. If you use different textures for the two burn effects,
they'll still appear correctly, but the duration and the damage per second
will be the same as the first one. This bug is annoying, but it's
not too bad, because I can just make all the burn effects do a similar
amount of damage and it won't be too damaging to the game. It wasn't
a problem in the original single player game because the only burn effects
were small and medium fire damage, but I wonder if the problem with the
fire axe secondary not working all the time in multiplayer is caused by
someone getting hit with a weak burn effect first and then not being able
to be burned badly by the ring of fire.
Well, it seems like I'm not the
only one who has encountered the problem in Morrowind where you make Sul-Matuul
mad before you're supposed to talk to him and then he just attacks you.
In the latest patch, one of the quest fixes makes Sul-Matuul stop fighting
you when you talk to Zabamund as part of the main quest. I solved
this problem before the patch by using the console to cheat and set his
fight rating to 30, but now that won't be necessary anymore.
Remember when I told the tale
of Maulgak getting killed after three hits from the Earth Blade secondary?
Well, I've been testing out different strategies and I think I've found
a really cheap and easy way to kill Maulgak. This might be a spoiler,
so if you don't want to know about it yet, stop reading now. From
what I've seen, the Earth Blade can indeed kill Maulgak instantly, but
it's really unreliable. Sometimes it kills him on the first hit,
and sometimes it takes many hits, but most of the time it never kills him
even if you use all 10 charges. I guess I was just lucky during my
no-skills game. But even though the Earth Blade isn't reliable, there's
a similar way to defeat him that has worked for me every time I tried it.
To do this trick, you need to have the Impale spell. Mine was at
level 3, and I don't know if it will work with a level 1 or 2 Impale, but
since the Earth Blade secondary is a little less powerful than a level
3 Impale spell and even it doesn't kill Maulgak instantly all the time,
you'll probably need it at level 3. Before you begin the battle with
Maulgak, equip the level 3 Impale spell. Then when the battle begins,
just use Impale against him once, and he'll drop over dead. Even
though he has way more than 50 hit points, he'll still be killed.
I wonder if there are any other bosses with similar weaknesses. Maybe
the speeches they give before they attack you have subtle clues, like the
Earth and Steel clue, that I haven't picked up on yet.
I saw the movie Signs today,
and then there was a big thunderstorm and I thought I would be doing something
later, but I didn't. Still, I didn't have much time to play Drakan
2 today, and I was busy with computer stuff, so I only got to fight the
ice golems. You know, one of the items you get on the Zeggoro quest
is really nothing but a big tease. You go through a Wartok lair,
deal with a Wartok who appears and disappears all over the level, and then
you finally defeat that blasted Wartok and you get this item that has a
really inviting name: the Invisibility Bracers. These are what made
the Wartok disappear, and surely they should also give you the power to
go invisible without using any of those potions, right? Wrong!
All the Invisibility Bracers do is sit there in your inventory and look
pretty until you go to the Northmen camp and trade them for the solid gold
sword you need. Those bracers, if they worked for me, would save
me a lot of anguish while fighting the Ice Golems. Maybe they have
a limited amount of power, and the only time you can successfully defeat
the Wartok is when the power runs out. And the gold sword is another
big tease, because you can equip it in your hand like a sword, but when
you press the attack button, nothing happens! Maybe Serris was right
about it being a really crummy sword in battle, and when you try to attack
with it, Rynn's refusal to swing the weapon is just her own way of calling
you a dumb fool who doesn't listen to people.
The Soul Steal spell wasn't too
impressive at its first level. It didn't do much damage to enemies,
and it only restored a tiny amount of your health. But Soul Steal
at level 2 and 3 is much better. The magic display might say that
the spell doesn't do much more damage at higher levels, but what it doesn't
tell you is that the spell hits more than once. It goes out, takes
health from the enemy back to you, and then it goes out again. At
level 3, Soul Steal can hit an enemy three times, and you can cast it twice
in a row if your magic is full, making it hit an enemy a total of six times,
restoring your health each time it comes back. Also, level 3 Soul
Steal restores a lot more of your health than at level 1, providing a nice
alternative to using fireballs all the time and repeatedly casting Rejuvenate
if you take too much damage. It's not as good as the Mournbringer
sword (but then again, what is?) and fireballs are still better against
large enemies or distant groups, but it's a good spell that works better
than I thought it would.
Well, I got the Tick sword down
to 0/30 durability, which means it can't be repaired anymore. I took
it to the Surdana blacksmith but he told me the sword was junk and that
I should throw it away, but instead of throwing it away, I sold it to him
for a tiny amount of money, certainly less than it took to repair it nine
times. Can you believe it costs the same amount to repair an originally
300-durability weapon at 0/60 as it does to repair it at 0/300, even though
you only get 30 durability points back instead of 270? The Tick always
cost 132 to repair whenever it was completely broken. I'm up to level
7 now, so I can use third level Soul Steal, which actually works pretty
well.