Magic Online continues to be a mild obession of mine.  While usually I stick just to "limited" play, which means game formats where your card pool is generated randomly at the beginning of the event, lately I decided to see if I could get anywhere in "constructed" play, which is the archetypical "best deck money can buy" kind of environment.  So what the heck, I did a little research and bought the cards I needed to play a deck that seemed reasonably competitive and that I could learn to play in a reasonable amount of time.

There was a big "4x" prizes open tournament today, so I set aside a few hours off of my schedule and jumped in.  I'd spent a few hours every evening the past few weeks practicing with my deck, and it did pretty well in the "tourney practice" room.  I thought I was all set.

Wow, did I get crushed.  I went 1-4 before I dropped out of the tournament, hat in hand.  Ouch.

I think the short answer for why I got so crushed was that I couldn't resist the temptation to tweak around with the decklist I'd researched.  I'm not at all convinced my changes were for the best.  Admittedly, 1 or 2 of those matches I would have won if events had gone slightly differently, but really, I'm not fooling anyone. :)

MTGO uses a an "Elo" style rating system, where you start at 1600 and are adjusted up and down based on your performance in tournaments.  This is fairly standard, chess federation type of stuff.   As I write this, my limited rating is 1639, and has reached the high 1600s at various points in time.  Given that MTGO involves playing against world class pro players fairly regularly, I'm pretty happy with that.

My constructed rating, on the other hand?  1503.  I'm struggling to keep it above 1500.  I'm sure both ratings are pretty accurate measures of my performance, but constructed rating seems much harder to get a grip on for me.  In limited play, sometimes I get a good card pool, sometimes a weak one but overall I feel like it represents my play skills fairly effectively.  In constructed, on the other hand, if I don't have a competitive deck (which involves a fairly deep understanding of the metagame of what other decks are out there), I just get crushed rapidly and repeatedly.  As I've learned, what people play in the "practice" room isn't a good representation of what they play in tournaments.  So I guess I just need to belly up to the bar and drive my constructed rating down even further and learn where the bottom is before I can start winning games and climbing my way back up...

My 2 yr old son has decided that none of my old PC games belong on their shelves, or with their proper contents intact.  So I will commonly come home to find all my 3.5" discs of a game like, say, Tie Fighter, distributed across the front entry way.  I attempt to patch the damage best I can, but I'm quite sure that reference cards and discs are now in entirely the wrong boxes.  What I find interesting is that I care more about the manuals than the discs at this point.  Heck, the discs are highly unlikely to even be readable now, even if I had a drive to read them on... I can imagine reading the 3.5" ones, but the 5.25" discs?  Highly unlikely. 

I have a bit moral opposition to some of the content on sites like the Underdogs, but they do serve a useful role of maintaining archival bits from games that are effectively lost to modern times.  What we really need is for something like the Library of Congress to maintain copies of games, like they do for books (and I think, films) but that seems quite unlikely until another generational shift or so. 

Of course, even if you get a game to run, more and more games now have a meaningful online component that has a limited lifepsan as well.  This was really driven home for us when we discovered that the Zone was discontinuing service for our games hosted there (AOE and AOK).  Here's the announcement, and we are updating our web page when we have a more concrete plan for how to handle the transition.  I'm not personally involved in this process but I do know there was a lot of people running around the office this week figuring out how to best handle the situation and keep the games alive.  From what I hear you can still find 4000 people or so playing those games on the Zone on any given night, so it's not like either of them has passed on to the great digital void yet.  Heck, we still sell more copies of AOK than many recent releases do!

I know there's whole sections of the web dedicated to the issue of digital preservation but sometimes the clock is ticking faster than we think...

So the basic way new art gets into the game is that the concept artists will discuss the general idea (or, dare I say, concept) with the designers, then iterate on a number of sketches.  Once we settle in on concept that is generally well liked, it gets handed off to modelers, texture artists, animators, etc.  So usually the first time anything in the game really "comes to life" is when the concept art is done. 

3D technology is now getting good enough that often times once a given piece of art has made it through the pipeline, the artist will send out a screenshot of the in-game asset and it is an incredibly close representation of the concept art.

The artists usually send out screenshots of their stuff as they get it done.  Afternoons like today I'll see 3-4 pieces in a row come into my inbox.  It's very motivational, as our artists do some amazing work.  I love my job.  :)

Nintendo Wii?

The mind boggles.

The internet is abuzz with photoshop mockeries and discussion. If the goal was to generate discussion, it's certainly doing that.  NeoGAF, my favorite place for super-hardcore forum discussions, was basically taken offline by the traffic. 

I thought Dreamcast and Xbox 360 were pretty awful names too, so maybe I'll get used to this one also.  But I'm really having a hard time picturing myself going into EBX and asking for the Wii version of anything... heck, I can't even imagine the audience at the Nintendo E3 conference keeping a straight face about it.  But it sure doesn't appear to be an elaborate hoax or anything...

Names are powerful things.

So I've been moving more towards online ordering of games, and had recently put in an order for a copy of Metal Saga.  Apparently it comes with a demo of Steambot Chronicles (another game I'm looking forward to).  Normally I might have expected it to actually come with the game, maybe as an embedded second disc or at least just shipped in the same online shipment.

Instead, today I got 5 copies of the demo, and no actual copy of Metal Saga.  At first my reaction was that they somehow had sent me a bunch of demo copies instead of my game, but I'm still holding out hope for the correct version to arrive later this week.  But 5 copies?  Packing error or viral marketing attempt?  Who knows, really...

Man, came home last night and almost instantly passed out.  Accordingly, no post but here's a morning short one...

The pre-E3 trailer websites are starting to hit:

Mercenaries 2?

Love the title, "Everybody Pays"... brilliant.  Already looking forward to this.

Debugging is kind of a crazy thing.  I find it a fascinating mental challenge, and actually quite enjoyable though like any good puzzle it can be quite a head scratcher for a long while.  But what's really weird to me is that I have a job where I can literally spend all day feverishly working at my computer, at the end of the day call it a good day's work, and the total change that I made to the codebase?  4 characters.

Yep, I changed a "FORE" to a "BACK" in some DirectX code to match a similar change I had made for quite an arcane and unholy set of fixes a few last week, and suddenly some camera code that was in a functioning but strange and erratic state is suddenly ready for deployment.

Code is just funny that way.  Actually the days where I have a mostly undisturbed day to just really drill in on programming are becoming less rare (and will get rarer as the team grows).  So really despite having a day's work summed up in 4 characters, it was still pretty enjoyable...

I just got back from seeing Silent Hill.  It's getting ripped by the critics but it's easily the best videogame-to-movie translation I've seen.  It's very faithful to the spirit and aesthetic of the game, which translates to some effective movie moments.  As for the script, well, it's not the best but it serves well enough as a basic vehicle for the cool Silent Hill vibe throughout.

What struck me most at the end though was how un-scary it was compared to the Silent Hill games.  Not that it wasn't a scary movie; for a movie it's probably up there in the top 10% that I've seen.  But when I was playing the game, especially Silent Hill 1, I was experiencing dread and fear at a much more fundamental, primal level -- literally in SH1 there were times when I was talking myself out of exploring rooms in the elementary school level because I was afraid of what I was going to find.  A movie simply can't connect in the same way.

Be warned if you do see it, if you aren't into gory movies, stay away from this film -- it's probably the goriest movie I've ever seen.  Which makes it all the more horrible to me that people were bringing their 10-year old children to see it, but I guess that's a rant for a different day...

Ah, System Shock.  As mentioned a few posts ago, I have great disdain for games that aren't willing to teach the player how to play them, and I'm sad to admit System Shock 1 is among them.  A poster rightly pointed out that SS1 did have the integrated help system in the first few rooms in addition to the unwield "giant screen of UI tooltips".  For a game of SS1's interface complexity and relative uniqueness, those tools were just vastly insufficient to the task.

There are two things that I kick myself over every time I think of SS1 development. 

The first is how blind we were to the interface problems the game had.  Fairly near the end of the game we brought in a bunch of our friends to blind-test the game.  Being that we were almost all MIT grads, our friends were the same.  They came in and played the game for a few hours, and at the end of it, only a small few had made it out of the first few rooms.  This should have been a giant warning klaxon of danger to us.  If MIT students can't figure out your UI, you have a huge problem.  I can't believe that we didn't see it, but we were just too close to the problem.

The second is that we totally dismissed the possibility of mouselook.  We even discussed it, but at the time we were so worried about people understanding how to navigate a 3D world at all, we thought that introducing the mouse would be too complex and stuck with the tried and true method we had from the Underworld games.  Also at the time the mouse didn't have the same market penetration that it has now.  None of those is a good reason though -- mouselook is an incredibly intuitive interface for looking around a 3d space, and we missed it.

Ah well, hindsight is 20/20.  I certainly have learned a whole lot about interface design and the importance of usability since those days.

I've been playing more Auto Assault... I have to admit I initially didn't like the game very much.  But it is growing on me.  Their economy is well tuned, and there is always plenty of stuff to do to make progress.  The combat is fast and fun, and the sense of the world is pretty good.  It's really unpolished though, and the art is, uh, not so great.  The interface is little better.

But despite it's flaws, I sat down to play for just a few minutes and next thing I know, it's 4 hours later.  Usually only deep strategy games like Civ 4 suck me in to that degree, so clearly Auto Assault is doing something right...