Best games - The Outfoxies Wanna play a game? Sure what you got for fighting games? Fighting games. Let’s see. Street Fighter, more Street Fighter, Tekken, Mortal Kombat …

Well that’s a finished story. I think there might be a lot of editing left to do, and maybe I will add a few more paragraphs, but that’s it. It’s complete and might be a jumping off point for another story sometime later. I think there is quite a bit that I could explore in Uniune culture and history, so maybe I will. we’ll see I guess.

I recommend that you don’t read the story now. You could, but it isn’t finished and I’m still changing a lot of it. If you are interested in reading a story in a very scattered condition just to see how or if it comes together, then go right ahead. When I actually do finish it I will make sure to start the post with a note that says so. Don’t worry, you won’t miss it.

This is what happens when a story starts heading off in the wrong direction. like most of these posts, in my original document I have a bunch of half formed ideas, paragraphs that weren’t working, and other notes. In the case of stories, the notes include a short outline. Despite revisions, the outline just wasn’t working the way I wanted. I figured that if I wanted to understand out how to fix it, I would just need to write a bit more. So I did. This is the process, or at least my process. Next time I post progress on this story, I will have gutted, rearranged, and rewritten large chunks of it.

Well, time for another story. I’m going to do the same thing as last time, writing it out across a few posts, editing and revising as I go. I don’t think this one will take quite as long as the last, but we shall see.

many lovely games whirlwind week wondering which dev secret dirt bag

Best Games - The Oregon Trail The phrase “you have died of dysentery” shouldn’t really spark fond nostalgia. The prospect of adhering to a grueling pace on meager rations shouldn’t elicit joy. There is narrow demographic for whom choosing to ford or float across a river while several of your family members suffered from measles and fever was the best part of the school day. Presented as educational fare, I think the only thing that anyone ever really learned from The Oregon Trail was to buy lots of bullets instead of food. Food you could hunt 100 pounds at a time while on the trail. Money was next to worthless west of the 100th meridian but life and death pivot on oxen and wagon axles. Finally, and without exception, all pioneers must float down the columbia river. These are the lessons taught by The Oregon Trail. This was the information that a generation or three retained, extracted from Apple II computers lodged at the backs of classrooms across north america. I played it again today. The Oregon Trail is still one of the best games.

Since I am always anywhere from 6 months to 3 years behind on games, I recently started playing Metal Gear Solid V. So far I find myself in agreement with 90% of popular opinion on this game. I think it is fantastic. That would be the smart place to leave it. Just acknowledge that I like the game and move on. I can go play it, enjoy myself, and not try to overanalyze it. If you have read any of these posts, you know that isn’t how I function. Figuring out why one game is more enjoyable than another game is sort of my jam. Saying things like “my jam” is also my jam. The full extent of the jam. So, getting back to it, this is what I think makes Metal Gear Solid V a good game. It waits. This is a trait in great games that I have written a little about before. The Souls series of games is probably the most celebrated for waiting. By waiting, I mean that the game is happy to wait for the player to initiate play. This doesn’t mean that the game is slow or that it lacks intensity. It means that the design of the game is player reliant. When you start a game of Robotron 2084 your character appears at the center of the screen and a horde of robots converge on you until either you clear the level and move on to the next or they touch you and the game ends. If you start the game and then lift your hands from the controls the robots will quickly close on you and end the game. The game system is player centric, but not player reliant. It will play itself to an end state with or without you. With the exception of a few timed missions, MGSV is pretty willing to let the player take everything at their own pace. Want to lay down by a rock during a mission and research dog armor? Go for it. Want to retry that mission but only use grenades / sniper rifles / inflatable decoys? Not a problem. Want to run one mission over and over until you can finish it in a minute and a half? You can, and the game even expects that you might. This waiting is different from a game that simply has no combat in an area or requires you to move to a new arena passing through an invisible switch that starts the next wave or puzzle. Even fairly sophisticated games that fall under that category, like the Uncharted series for example, really aren’t that much different from Robotron. You move from level to level, often without any indication that you have, and the game presents you with challenges that, in the case of combat, play out with or without your input. Waiting is when a game operates in one state until the player chooses to trigger a new state through interaction. If the game provides a lot of options for how, when, and why the player triggers a new state, manipulating the system becomes the source of fun. This sort of goes back to my theory that fun is when our brains predict patterns from apparent chaos. A game system that waits until poked by a player offers pattern resolving opportunities by the bagful. This isn’t to say that level or wave based games aren’t fun, they can be phenomenal, but they are player centric not player reliant. The player centric system will play out the simulation to an end point regardless of what the player does or doesn’t do. The player reliant system will just run. It’s possible that it would run forever while waiting for the player to interact with it. Even after the player manipulates the system it can keep running and never actually end the simulation. You as the player are required for the system to change, but the simulation is never driving toward any particular state. It just waits. It waits for you. There, I took the time to write this, when really what I wanted to do the whole time is go back to playing MGSV. It’s late now, but maybe just one quick mission.

I work on 3D models almost every day. Often I am creating new ones for 3D printing or game assets. Sometimes I am fixing up or prepping ones already created by someone else. I can say with some certainty that there is no right way to create a 3D model. There are techniques that suit certain situations but there is no fundamentally correct way to make a 3D model. None. This is when scores of people authoring hours of tutorials can tell me that I am wrong. They can point out all of the industry professionals that use process Y and how much better and faster and more efficient it is that process X. Complete Rubbish. There is no right way to create a 3D model. There are a lot of wrong ways, I have seen the results of many of them, but there is no right way. I’ve been at this for a long time. Maybe too long. The tools and techniques change, but the end result never really has. If you are creating a model with the intention of animating it there are certain requirements. If you are creating a model to be fed into a cnc system like a milling machine or 3d printer there are other requirements. If the model is for use in an interactive system with controls and physics like a game or simulation there are, again, different requirements. How you build the model, the tools you use, just doesn’t matter. If you are reading this, I didn’t write this for you. I wrote it for me. I just need to remind myself every once in awhile that the tools don’t matter. You can use all of them or none of them and the model that you end up with is the only thing that matters. 

Best Games - Centipede I usually try to steer clear of the classics. Those games that are universally loved. Pillars of the art form. Games like Pac-Man, The Legend of Zelda, Castlevania Symphony of the Night. It’s not that they aren’t up there on the list with the best games. It’s just that those games, the classics, have been discussed so often and dissected so thoroughly that there isn’t a lot of mystery left to them. The whys and hows of their lasting quality is fairly well understood by folks who study games. If I’m going to write about the hundreds, maybe thousands, of games that can be held up as properly wonderful, I may as well choose some that deserve a little extra attention. Centipede is an exception to the rule. Centipede is rightly credited as not only one of the best games of the 80’s but as one of the best videogames of all time. It’s fast, engaging, and beautiful. So why write about it? Why repeat what anyone who follows videogames has read many times before? There is a unique core to the design of Centipede that I don’t think gets talked or written about enough and it deserves praise. Centipede is all about the player. The usual factoids on the design of Centipede center around the choices of Dona Bailey, one of the first women programming arcade games during the formative years of the industry. The vibrant, shifting, pastel colour palette, and the fantastical garden setting are applauded. Centipede is noted for its universal appeal, attracting male and female players equally. Maybe the colors or the rollerball control play some part in the success of Centipede, but I think there is something much more fundamental at play here. Centipede is all about the player. Centipede is, like a lot of the games of its era, an evolution of Space Invaders. You sit at the bottom of the screen and shoot directly up at enemies cascading down. That is the challenge you must overcome. Here is the difference. In Space Invaders and most of the games like it when the enemies reach the bottom of the screen the game is over. You lose. There is a limited amount of time that you are able to play unless you actively assail the enemy. The enemies in Centipede can reach the bottom and they just turn around and start heading back up. Your player character has a limited band that it must stay in near the bottom of the screen but other than that your movement is unrestricted. You can move side to side, up and down, and even on smooth diagonals. Any way you can roll the ball controller, you can move. After it hits the bottom, the centipede will also stay in this band, moving back and forth and stepping up or down with each turn. You don’t have to shoot the centipede. You can dodge forever, never shooting, or you can choose to shoot the mushrooms scattered across the playfield. The game is very difficult and it becomes faster and more difficult as time wears on, but you don’t have to fight. You get to choose when and how you fight. As you play, there are enemies that add new mushrooms to the screen but you can decide which ones you would like to shoot and remove or leave where they are. You can mold the random playfield to your advantage. You decide. Where most of the Space Invaders derivatives test your ability to dismantle orderly columns of enemies before time runs out, Centipede presents chaos and variability that you get to decide how to deal with. You can organize the chaos into manageable groups and lines, or you can let the chaos expand and deal with the oncoming assault on a case by case basis. You can also choose not to shoot, waiting for precisely selected moments to attack. Centipede is one of the best games of all time, but it has less to do with the color palette and more to do with how it treat the player. Playing Centipede, you get to choose what happens next.

When I said that the story was finished before, I lied. I had always intended to have a sort of twilight zone style coda on the story. If you read the semi uplifting ending I had before, that was sort of a fake out. So here is a completed first/second/third draft. I promise next week will be something new.

We have an ending. Is it THE ending. Maybe, maybe not. I haven’t 100% decided. Let me know if you think there should be more. We called it the forest. It was only a few hundred trees along the riverbank. If you stood in just the right spot and looked at just the right angle you could see clear through them - from the stubble field on one side to the ripening durum across the river. Surrounding the forest for as far as you could see was mile upon mile of sun blasted, wind swept prairie. For us this was the forest. By 10 am, the baking heat would be unbearable. The trees might not have been much, but they stood thick enough to provide a little shade. Bing was riding his Kuwahara. Chrome silver with black accents in liquid smooth powder coat. I had a rust spotted CCM bmx frame adorned with a mish mash of parts pulled from dead bikes. Bing’s bike was the envy of all the local kids but I prefered my frankenstein bike. It could hit a jump in just the right way. A smooth launch, a little give on the landings. The Kuwahara had footpegs, better hand brakes, and a brand new chain, but it felt a little too unforgiving. Antagonistic. It confronted the ground rather than rolling over it. Also, Bing was always on it. The sun hadn’t really gotten going yet so the air was still a little cool. Wet streams drifted to the corners of my eyes as my feet spun the pedals. We didn’t talk but I could hear Bing breathing hard off to my left. We hadn’t really discussed it but we both knew where we were headed. Since late spring we had been building a jump in the forest. Greg Stevens had swiped a shovel from his garden shed and left it out there last summer. He had some plan for digging a WW1 trench and camping in it. His shovel caper resulted in a pit about two feet deep and four feet across. He couldn’t even lay in it without crunching up his legs. Greg decided not to bring the shovel back since his dad had blamed the neighbor and bought a new one. Now it was our primary jump construction tool, and the trench was our main excavation point. We would all take turns scooping up some dirt from the trench and adding to the jump. Over a couple of weeks, it had gone from a small bump crowning the edge of a natural ditch, to a loose kicker a couple feet high. We had ridden over the Jump dozens, maybe hundreds of times, but only the center had packed down properly. The rest of the jump was a pile of loose, soft dirt. Hitting it too fast or not dead center could end your run real quick. You might spin off to the side, dump the bike right there, or stop dead and go over the handlebars. Honestly it was hard to tell what might happen, except that it would probably be bad. We would bang on the jump with the shovel, or ride over it slowly, but without some rain to really tamp it down, it was just too scary to hit the jump properly, at full speed. I made it to the edge of the forest where our jump was under construction and locked up my brakes on the loose dirt. I leaned hard, kicking out my back tire, planting my inside foot and sliding to a tripod stop. Bing, right behind me, did the same, but maybe not with quite as much style. I gave the ramp a quick once over to see if any work had been done on it in the past couple of days. Swimming lessons had prevented me from making the ride to work on it but there were about five of us that regularly came out here who also knew where the shovel was stashed. From the landing slope all the way up to the crown the ramp was devastated. It was all deep gouges turning up the soft soil underneath. “If they are gonna ride on it, they should at least stomp it down” Bing griped between winded huffs. I silently agreed and made a sour face. Older kids had been coming out at night with BMXs and an 80cc dirt bike. The BMX tracks weren’t that noticeable but the dirt bike had left the ramp in an unusable state. They might as well have run a rototiller over it. I stepped off my bike and let it fall to the ground in disgust. I had been hoping to take a couple of slow runs and maybe catch a little air before doing any construction work. Bing shoved out his kickstand and stepped off. He rhythmically slammed his hightops into the soft earth while I fumed into the forest to retrieve the shovel.

Is it over? No , of course not, but it is approaching proper short story length. Maybe 1000-1500 more words or so. We called it a forest. Really, it was a few hundred trees along the riverbank. Standing at just the right angle you could see clear through them. From the stubble field on one side to the ripening durum across the river. Surrounding the forest for as far as you could see was mile upon mile of sun blasted, wind swept prairie. A forest then, at least in contrast. By 10 am, the baking heat would be unbearable. The trees might not have been much, but they stood thick enough to provide a little shade. Bing was riding his Kuwahara. Chrome silver with black accents in liquid smooth powder coat. I had a rust spotted CCM bmx frame adorned with a mish mash of parts pulled from dead bikes. Bing’s bike was the envy of all the local kids, but I prefered my frankenstein bike. It could hit a jump in just the right way. A smooth launch, a little give on the landings. The Kuwahara had footpegs, better hand brakes, and a brand new chain, but it felt a little too unforgiving. Antagonistic. It confronted the ground rather than rolling over it. Also, Bing was always on it. The sun hadn’t really gotten going yet, so the air was still a little cool. Wet streams drifted to the corners of my eyes as my feet spun the pedals. We didn’t talk, but I could hear Bing breathing hard off to my left. We hadn’t really discussed it, but we both knew where we were headed. Since late spring we had been building a jump in the forest. Greg Stevens had swiped a shovel from his garden shed and left it out there last summer. He had some plan for digging a WW1 trench and camping in it. His shovel caper resulted in a pit about two feet deep and four feet across. He couldn’t even lay in it without crunching up his legs. Greg decided not to bring the shovel back since his dad had blamed the neighbor and bought a new one. Now it was our primary jump construction tool, and the trench was our main excavation point. We would all take turns scooping up some dirt from the trench and adding to the jump. Over a couple of weeks, it had gone from a small, bump crowning the edge of a natural ditch, to a loose kicker a couple feet high. We had ridden over the Jump dozens, maybe hundreds of times, but only the center had packed down properly. The edges were still loose enough to catch an errant wheel ending your your run really quick. You might spin off to the side, dump the bike right there, or stop dead and go over the handlebars. Honestly it was hard to tell what might happen, except that it would probably be bad. We would bang on the jump with the shovel, or ride over it slowly, but without some rain to really tamp it down, it was just too scary to hit the jump properly, at full speed. I made it to the edge of the forest where our jump was under construction and locked up my brakes on the loose dirt. I leaned hard, kicking out my back tire, planting my inside foot and sliding to a tripod stop. Bing, right behind me, did the same, but maybe not with quite as much style. I gave the ramp a quick once over to see if any work had been done on it in the past couple of days. Swimming lessons had prevented me from coming out and working on it, but there were about five of us that regularly came out here, and also knew where the shovel was stashed. All I saw were deep gouges running up the landing slope of the ramp, turning up all the soft soil underneath. “If they are gonna ride on it, they should at least stomp it down” Bing griped between winded huffs. I silently agreed and made a sour face. Older kids had been coming out at night with BMXs, and an 80cc dirt bike. The BMX tracks weren’t that noticeable, but the dirt bike had left the ramp in an unusable state. They might as well have run a rototiller over it. I stepped off my bike and let it fall to the ground in disgust. I had been hoping to take a couple of slow runs, maybe catch a little air, before doing any construction work. Bing shoved out his kickstand and stepped off. He started stamping his hightops into the soft earth while I fumed into the forest to retrieve the shovel.

It continues. A little at a time, I tap out this story. Maybe someday soon it will be finished, but that day isn’t today, so fair warning; this story is not finished, and if you hate cliffhangers, maybe skip this one.