About Marill

Typhoon #22 had hit Tokyo the past weekend (Saturday & Sunday). Well, what can I say… after being hit by a 5.7-scale earthquake just 3 days before (Wednesday), the next thing serving up on the list was Typhoon #22.

Not as scary as the earthquake, but it wasn’t a walk in the park either. There were serveral casualties, may their souls rest in peace.

I was out for a while on Saturday afternoon, seeing how it was only a drizzle at that time and didn’t expect to get caught in the thick of the action. The typhoon hit full force by about 7pm when I was walking my 2km route home after having dinner at the GyuDon place. The umbrella was useless, I was drenched from head to toe coz the rain was coming in from all sides. At about every 20-second interval, I had to hide behind the concrete walls of nearby houses because the wind was too strong to safely walk on the road without being blown off your balance – and away (!). This continued on till I finally reached home.

Well, over the course of Saturday, Sunday and Monday when the typhoon was happily going about its business blowing all of Tokyo into a huge mess of fallen tree branches, leaves, garbage cans and other miscellaneous stuff that was not nailed down to the ground, I stayed in the saftey of my room and discovered I had some time on my hands to turn on my consoles and spend some quality time with them.

I’ve been buying games and playing games but had not have enough time on my hands to really sit down and play through the games and finish them. Well, I finally played through Return to Castle Wolfenstien, Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge and Beyond Good & Evil to the end during this period.

I’m glad I did take time out to play through and complete these games. Very often, what happens is that I buy a game, then I play it for a while… probably the first hour or so and then I have to put it down coz reality calls and I realise I got a ton of housework piled up shouting for my attention, I got meals to prepare, I got to get enough rest coz I have to go to work the next day… and in the end, the game that I just started gets left on the shelf collecting dust and rarely gets picked up again to play. When next week rolls around, another new game gets released and I go out, buy it, come home, spend about another hour with it, put it down and repeat the same story from the previous week all over again.

It didn’t used to be like this previously, but I guess when you grow older and have to shoulder more responsibilities, it becomes inevitable that you have less time to devote to your hobby. Well actually, that is one of few the reasons why I have chosen to make a career in the games industry. The main reason is because I enjoy making fun games, of course! (Well, I try to!) :P

OK. I remember someone telling me a few years back that “you’ve gotta make time for the things you enjoy doing”. So here’s my resolution – I am going to make it a point to spend at least 2 hours everyday playing games so that I can enjoy, play through and complete my stack of unfinished games. Reality calls? Sorry, interrupt me 2 hours later, thank you!

Thought of the day: Do you want to live in a world where less and less people actually PLAY games, and instead, more and more people just want to spend some money and then watch some fancy graphics on their TV screens?

Consider this: What if such people (those who are only interested to watch graphics on screen as opposed to PLAYING and interacting with the game) actually join the game development industry and start making such “games”?

Consider this: You love gaming your entire life. You enjoy a game where it engages you with interesting options of play and the entertaining consequences of your interactions within the game world that follows. Such experiences can never be described by just fancy computer graphics alone. You join this industry in the hope of making great interactive entertainment that people can engage in, and have a good time with. And then, you get put in a development team full of people who just want to WATCH fancy graphics in a game. Your programmers think that programming a fancy graphics engine equals making a game, and proceed to do as such. Your artist think that writing elaborate stories and making “super” non-interactive CGI movies equals making a game. What will you do?

What will I do?

Who says gamers have no life? (Note: KIRBYSIM doesn’t count!) While the non-gamers go about their lives busily doing their non-gamer stuff, we gamers are having ourselves a ball of a time within the imaginative worlds of our games. Eating mushrooms, saving a princess in distress, doing kung-fu moves in bullet-time, using superhero powers to play scissors-paper-rock online, saving the universe from Evil – it’s all in a day’s life of us gamers.

But of course, as the little fish from The Wind Waker puts it so well:

We definitely get our daily nourishment before engaging into our games. On the other hand, forgetting to bathe for 60 hours straight is another story altogether.

One of my favourite activities online has been to “0wn” the other team in an Onslaught game of Unreal Tournament 2004. A day’s life of 0wnage usually starts out like this:

Connecting online to the “ttttokyo” server which I frequent a lot. It’s one of the fastest connection from my current location and there are really good players in there that provide a good challenge. Unfortunately, if they pick to be in my opposing team, they will be “0wned” by me pretty soon. :P

Onslaught is a team-based game. Both teams start off at their bases with a Power Core. The goal of the game is to destroy your opposing team’s Power Core with a wide variety of weapons and vehicles. Scattered across the map are several Link Nodes. You have to gain control of the Link Nodes that connect to your opposing team’s Power Core before you are able to damage the Power Core. Needless to say, many battles will be fought at the Link Nodes to gain control over them.

Here’s how to gain control over a Link Node. I happen to be fortunate enough to have a good team with me and so you see them hanging around me and watching over my back to make sure the enemy doesn’t attack while I am taking over this Link Node here with my Link Gun.

And what’s life without pulling some crazy vehicle stunts? Heh heh…

Once all the connecting Link Nodes are overtaken, the opposing team’s Power Core becomes vulnerable. Attack it immediately!

Ahhh…. the sweet taste of victory! When you have a good team with you, it makes the victory even better. Everyone in the team knows what to do at the right time, attacking the Power Core when it becomes vulnerable, and not being somewhere else trying to camp and score lame kills.

Sometimes, we’re able to “0wn” the opposing team’s Power Core so fast that someone screams out “Premature Ejaculation!” I’ve magnified the text from the corner, but it’s still difficult to see. Sorry about that. I bet this is the only context where “premature ejaculation” is considered a good thing, heh heh. :)

But of course, seeing how I am such a l33t player in UT2k4, I still “0wn” the other team pretty well on my own as the following screens will show you. It’s no coincidence that my player name is called “0wn3r” isn’t it?

So if you’re itching for an Onslaught match in Unreal Tournament 2004, drop me a line and get ready to be 0wned in the “ttttokyo” server!

Recently, I went about re-discovering the fun of old skool 2D games. This was triggered by my dabbling into some programming of the GameBoy Advance machine. As I was coding up a library to handle 2D sprites and a sprite animation system, I found respect for the game developers who make games on 2D gaming platforms.

My goodness, those machines were so limited in their hardware capabilities and yet, the game developers were able to work with the limitations in order to create wonderful worlds that so many players have enjoyed.

For example, the Nintendo Famicom machine was only able to support 16 colors to display on screen, out of which, only 12 colors were effectively usable. And the game developers had to work with only 12 colors in order to make their game world come alive on screen!

But did that prevent them from making great games for the Famicom? Nope. We had the great Super Mario Bros, Final Fantasy I, II & III, Legend of Zelda, Dragon Quest, Pacman, and countless of others that kept us playing and make us believe we’re living in the world that is in our TV screens.

So anyway, I went out on an inspiration hunt for old games. It resulted in me acquiring a brand new dirt cheap WonderSwan Crystal bundled with Final Fantasy IV and Front Mission, and the recent release of Mother 1+2 for the GBA. So here’s the lineup, I took some pics just to show you I really got the stuff:

Both FF4 and Front Mission were great! Man, this is what GAMES are about!

Anyway, what really blew me away was this really old and charming game “Mother”. “Mother” is a direct port from the same game released for the Nintendo Famicom in 1989. And boy, it was a blast to play! It’s a RPG game, but not your usual fantasy setting. It’s set somewhere in modern times with psychedelic long-haired hippies fighting you as enemies, a crow holding a cigarette, and a fat version of John Lennon appearing somewhere along the way.

The game’s so fun that I’ll tell you a story of my strange little visit to the zoo. Okaayyy…. I hear you, yeah, not another boring story again? How about I throw in some “12-color” pics so it won’t put you to sleep in about 5 seconds?

So we start out by popping the cartridge in the GBA and after the title screen, here we go!

That’s me in the middle of the screen, wearing that red cap, and you see, I just had a nice hamburger lunch in that building to the left and heading my way towards the zoo, yippie!

Hangin’ with the locals and saying hi to old granny on the top. If you notice, Elvis lives here too, he’s at the bottom corner. Okay, time to go!

So, following the road out of town, I stop by the little river to do a ‘lil business. And youch!, a snake attack!

Followed by a dog and that long-haired hippie!

After shoving some grass up the hippie’s nose, I finally come to the gates of the zoo.

See the poor captive rabbits. One of them was so excited by my presence it went into a blur frenzy.

The monkeys were equally excited and one of them started to blur as well.

Some animals got so excited that they broke out of their cages.

The pandas, however, were calm.

Nothing ever touches the flamingoes, ever!

The penguins, ditto.

Now, things started to get more interesting with this Singing Monkey. Yup, you read it right, it’s the only one here in this zoo and it sings! Hmm….. I wonder what song it sings…..

Whoa! Now things are really getting psychedelic over here! What the hell is happening!!!?!?!

Awww.. ain’t that sweet? The monkey sang a song!

And to end it all, the smoking crow attacked. You don’t see cigarette coz Nintendo saw it fit to remove the cigarette from the crow for this GBA release of the game.

So well, that’s my story of a strange little visit to the zoo.

A friend of mine asked me this question when I bought a 2nd hand PlayStation 1 console. “Don’t you find the graphics of the PS1 dated?” as he was curious how I could have spent money on a machine that doesn’t produce good graphics.

Well, yeah. I do agree with him totally about the absolute ugliness of the graphics that the PS1 can produce. I mean, when I see the textures in Metal Gear Solid “popping” and “swishing” around like no tomorrow in absense-of-perspective-correction-heaven, I wanted to puke my lunch out!

But after the in-game credits have disappeared, and you’re sneaking around in full 3D environment playing the cool-ass Solid Snake character, you don’t even care about “popping” textures anymore. The game draws you into the game world and the game character that you ignore the other unimportant shortcomings. That is the mark of a good game.

Graphic capabilities are an important consideration, no doubt about that. Graphics are the immediate link that connects the player to the game world, but not the only link. Music, sound and controls play equal importance in the role as links to connect the player to the game. The player uses the controls to manipulate the world, and the effects are comunicated back to the player through music, sound and graphics. Having good quality “connections” will definitely improve the game playing experience for the player.

But “gameplay” is the true meat of any game. Gameplay is about the set of possible situations that the player can affect in the game world. It’s about the methods the player can use to affect the game world, and also, it’s about the results that the player can see happening due to the player’s interaction in the game world.

It is the thing that makes sense of why the player is actually trying to kill this highly-textured, high-polygon, motion-captured, bump-mapped monster, and why the player needs to hide under the cool refraction-mapped, reflection-mapped water surface.

What is the reason Solid Snake knocks out some guards, hangs over the ledge and shimmies across to the other side in Metal Gear Solid 2? In order to see the real-time cloth animation on his bandana? When that novelty has passed, what is the thing that will make the player continue the game? Gameplay.

Yup, so why did I buy the PS1 console? I didn’t buy it for the graphics, that’s for sure, I bought it for the games. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was the game that made me plonk down money for the console. Is it so difficult to realise that the gameplay provided by the game is a more important consideration than its graphics?