Announcing - the end of the polygon era in computer graphics.

Popsci is reporting a major graphic breakthrough by a company called Unlimited Detail. The nutshell is that Unlimited Detail has come up with a way of dispensing with polygons and the ever increasing need for more and more of them to render life like graphics. What Unlimited Detail has done instead is switch to a system of using points of color, much like paintings from the pointillist school of modern art. With points of color, instead of a plane of color, rendered objects look more naturally rounded then when using a high number of polygons. This idea has been around for a long time, but it never made any headway before because it took a prohibitive amount of processing power per frame to render objects as points instead of planes. The break through that Unlimited Detail has made is to render only the points that are actually in view in a given frame. That approach dramatically cut the amount of processing power per frame.

And here's the real kicker: the method uses software and not hardware.

At a stroke, Unlimited Detail (catchy name) has forever ended the polygon count "arms race" between the major graphics card companies.

And what computer graphics dreams may come now? The detail will be, er, unlimited?

Here are some youtubes by Unlimited Detail. Commence salivating.

5 and 12 reasons you still need a gaming PC.

http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/5-reasons-you-still-need-a-gaming-pc/5-reasons-you-still-need-a-gaming-pc/1389019

http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/12-reasons-pc-gaming-is-better-than-consoles-485178


Recently, I've been lamenting the fact that the PC sections of all my local game stores (mostly GameStops) have gotten smaller and smaller or discontinued altogether.

I thoroughly despise game consoles. To me, they always seem to work counter-intuitively, doing the exact opposite of what I intended to do. To me, the keyboard, the mouse, and the joystick are the only proper interfaces for a seriously meant game.

And lets not forget that all games, no matter how thoroughly they've been tested, ship out broken or unbalanced in some way which only a mod or a trainer can fix.

And don't get me started about games that came out first on consoles and were then implemented on the PC. That has been one great body blow to PC gaming because it is causing the games that end up on PC to be considerably dumbed-down because of the console limitations of their original platform Exhibit A is Mercenaries 2.

No,no, give me a PC everytime. PCs forever! Death to consoles!

A course change for this blog.

After some due consideration and soul searching I have decided that game reviews will not be a major part of this blog's business. I have decided this for the following reasons:

1.) They not a major part of this blog now, which means I have no inclination or patience for writing them. I have to go with what my inclinations tell me.

2.) I cannot afford to keep up with the technology treadmill required to keep up with the hardware upgrades each new game requires.

3.) Game reviews and criticism right now are a very ephemeral form of writing because game technology has never plateaued.

Games are not interoperable across technological platforms the way films are. Most people can still appreciate and enjoy the film criticism of 1942's Casablanca even with Blu-ray DVD technology because that new technology does not preclude being able to enjoy the film. And it looks like that will continue on even with the technology to come. The general interest in film criticism seems to drop off with the silent movies.

By comparison, I recently tried to play the original StarCraft and found the old graphics and RTS formulas it used were too creakingly old for me after I'd been playing the thoroughly graphic and immersive Company of Heroes and the even more thoroughly graphic and immersive Supreme Commander.

Games are not yet at the point where their content is interoperable across technological platforms, and therefore of more long term benefit as an art form. With games, technological upgrades like the move from silents to talkies seem to occur every 18 months. There are a lot of old games that might just as well had never existed as far as popular culture goes.

4.) And, therefore, the only value a review has is its timeliness. By the time I've thoroughly played a game, its already been out for a month or two, and in the meantime, several other new games have come out.

5.) There are already enough websites that provide reviews of current games. There are so many now that there are now sites like gamerankings and metacritic that summarize the reviews of all these websites. There is no reason for me to "me too" that effort.

But that does not mean I will not write about games anymore.

What I'm going to do is switch to writing about games I already know about in order to highlight what I believe are the principles of good and bad game design. I am still bothered by the number of new games coming out every month that are what I call "if-only games." Games that almost-but-not-quite work that require a third party trainer or mod or even a cheat code in order to be at all enjoyable.

My goal in writing such posts will be to eventually come out with a book of principals of good and bad game design that will be from the perspective of a game user and not a game hacker. A book about how to make games that will be truly enjoyable to game players. I think such a book would go a long ways towards preventing the constant reinvention of some very bad wheels.

A while back ago there was a book out by Vincent Flanders and Michael Willis called Web Pages That Suck: Learn Good Design by Looking at Bad Design I'd like to write something like that for computer games, only it will include games that don't suck as well as those that do.

Here's to that, and a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

I'm thankful.

I'm thankful that Mercenaries 2 has a trainer available on the web. Now I can actually enjoy the game without the stupid, pestiferous mission timers that are absolutely unnecessary. As unnecessary aggravations to players, they are right up there with the Nan Yanoi stronghold in Dawn of War Soulstorm. (Nan Yanoi is Tau for "annoy the player.")

The Fakeness of the Cake (how to buy computer games)

http://xkcd.com/606/

XKCD has humorously pointed out that there are two fundamentally different ways to approach the purchase of computer games. You either buy them hot off the presses, or you buy them a good deal later. There are pluses and minuses to each approach. And they are mirror images of each other.

With Hot Off The Presses, multiplayer is usually red hot as everybody and his brother tries out the new game. And, as the XKCD cartoon points out, you get to participate in any immediate cultural references that leak out of the new game. There's also the plus of real time forum comradeship as players explore the in's and out's of the new game and swap game play tips.

But there are minuses to Hot Off The Presses. With hot new games , you usually get The Bug Parade. You and your impatient brethren are the guinea pigs for the final shake out that will result in patches coming out later on. Your forum comradeship will quickly turn into a daily meeting of the Royal Gripe and Moan Society (take a peek at the Empire Total War forum sometime. Its very educational.) And if a game turns out to really bad, you are the one who's discovered this before the review websites have done their jobs. Hot Off The Presses is usually the choice of the younger guys because they've still got the disposable income to pay the full release price and make any hardware upgrades that are required.

Then there's Some Time Later. STL is usually the province of the older guys who have families to support and therefore less disposable income. The older guys have older machines because they can't afford to stay on the technology treadmill. These are the guys you see in Gamestop stooping down on their knees to look over remainder racks for the four hundredth and seventh time. They're the ones who check each game against the MetaCritic and GameRankings websites. They only buy when its a game they can run on their machines, and when the price has finally dropped to $20. Hey older guys! This ones for you! http://www.gog.com

With STL you get the following benefits. Almost 50% off the initial sale price. If you buy in a physical retail store instead of on the web, you get the advantage of something called "shelf space" As games get old, they start to clutter up the physical shelf space of a store, so they need to be replaced by new games, and so markdowns take place. I've seen some games that were really popular in their time going for as little as $2.00. The ultimate price drop is when an anthology like Medal of Honor, or Delta Force comes out. There you get all the games in the series for the price of only one of them. Another benefit of STL is patches. By the time you finally buy the game, its been fully patched, or almost so. And there's mods. Sometimes the mods that come out later actually fix most of the problems the original game had. UFO Extraterrestrials came out with a lot of dumb problems that were later corrected in mods created by the player community. Another benefit is getting a complete body of game play tips, strategy guides, cheats, and walkthroughs - provided the game was popular enough to leave a lot of forums behind after its initial public splash.

But there are downsides to STL. As you're learning the game and visiting websites related to it, you get the definite feeling of a parade having gone by. Yes, you've missed The Bug Parade. But you've also missed a lot of the camaraderie that even bugs can engender. And you are still using old technology and graphics. If your game is even older than your machine, there might be emulators out there. But there is a limit to buying old games. I started playing the original Heavy Gear II at about the time I got Bioshock and found I just couldn't get involved in HGII because Bioshock was sooooooo much better to look at. Sometimes you can wait too long to buy a game. Another minus is mulitplayer. If you buy an old game, multiplayer may be dead. Or the only ones still playing are the hardcore players who have invested a lot of time in mastering the game. Are you ready to experience life in the life of a noob? And of course, as XKCD points out, you'll miss being able to say things like "the cake is a lie!" in public.

Which am I? Very early on (way before Metacritic and Gamerankings), I was a HOTP man. But I was burned so many times by buying games that turned out to be lousy, that I switched over to STL. But having taken up blogging about the games I play, I've had to start participating in HOTP again. Bioshock was a lucky find. I have mixed feeling about DOW II. And it took me a long time to decide that Empire Total War was good.

But I'm probably not much better off for going back to HOTP. I find that I get so wrapped up in a new game that I can't blog about it until it initial splash is over.

I thought District 9 would make a pretty good video game. And it turns out that the creators of the movie have already done that for themselves. The movie website has a nice little x-com type game on it. Only two levels but still fun. Enjoy.

http://www.district9game.com/

The movie is acclaimed by the critics and also movie goers - which is rare. But it does take some getting used to at first. In the interest of making the movie seem as real as possible, the film, over all, does not use Hollywood style production values. The actors are not slick-looking Hollywood products. In fact the beginning looks like an amateur production that was done in somebody's basement somewhere in Africa. The central character is something of a dweeb and makes the film seem like its the beginning of a comedy. It is only later in the film, when the aliens weapons and mother ship come in, that the Hollywood stuff shows up. And then there is the ending that isn't quite an ending. This is not your typical Independence Day sci-fi summer block buster. It is, in fact, a Think Piece. Its a meditation on Who's The Real Alien Here. Hence the critical acclaim. The average movie goer will be a little confused by the opening until the Hollywood stuff with the neato alien weapons and carnage show up. Over all, not a bad way to spent a hot summer day.

Empire Total War

Where else can you be A Bloody Madman, a Founding Father, an Expansionist Power, A New Rome, A Veteran Strategist, a Master of the Americas, and be Only Obeying Orders? Why, only when you are playing Empire Total War, of course. Those are some of Steam.com's Personal Achievements I've won playing Empire Total War on Steam's internet-based game access system. I've spent 106.5 hours over the last two weeks obtaining those achievements. I know this (even if I don't quite believe it), because that's another of the stats Steam collects when you play a game over their system. And that should tell you two things. I have a serious mental illness. And Empire Total War is, like The Creative Assembly's other Total War offerings, a highly addictive game. But sad to say, its an addictive game for which you can have a love-hate relationship. With Empire Total War, The Creative Assembly has had it first light brush with the ancient Greek curse of hubris. Icarus descending (though not with quite so steep a drop.) Sad to say, my experience of Empire Total War has been like going into a auto dealership to take delivery on a brand spanking new lamborghini and having the dealer drive it out to the lot to greet me, and then having a ball bearing fall out from under the engine and roll towards me to stop on my left toe. Following on from their great success with Rome Total War, CA's reach has finally exceeded its grasp. But what reach! What grasp! More games should semi-fail so magnificently

First, there's the opening cinematic when the game first starts. By now you've probably seen it just about every where and gotten sick of it. But on first sight I could tell that it certainly deserved the omnipresent exposure it got. It gave me that same thrill I got watching the opening cinematic for the original Dawn of War. So theatrical, it held out the hope that one day video games would come with their own feature-length movies. (What am I saying? The software for the Resident Evil video games has already been used to create a feature length movie consisting solely of the software-generated characters. The age of the synthesbians has already dawned.) This opening cinematic made rich promises for the lamborhini-hood of this game.

And then one of the ball bearings rolled by. If you've played a Total War series game before, then you know the game has two parts: a campaign map for strategic movements, and then battle maps that are loaded for fighting the tactical battles that result from the strategic moves. It took an irritatingly long time for the campaign map to load, and every battle map that loaded took an even longer time to load. I ended up taking quick breaks to do some household chores every time a battle map started to load. (My apartment has never been cleaner or more organized).

And then I saw the campaign map. As beautifully detailed as any Civilization IV map. As you zoom up and away from the sim-world you see little clouds go by like you're on a NASA spacecraft orbiting the earth. As you zoom down to enlarge the details, you see little chimney's with smoke billowing out of them. (Later, when you suffer raids on your cities by enemy factions, you'll see billows of black smoke coming up as they set fire to your factories and dwellings). And seas areas are remakably detailed. They remind me of the wonderful detail of Sid Meier's Pirates 2.

But there's a ball bearing that goes with this beautiful map. If you haven't stayed on the technology tread mill and gotten a new PC every other month, the movements that take place on the strategic map are a little slow. Fortunately, you can tap the space bar and speed things up a little. And sometimes there's a brief hesitation between when you click on something and the view shifting to center on the thing you clicked. I've heard that there is a patch coming up to fix this.

Then I saw my first battle map in one of the tutorials, and I was utterly blown away. The detail! The texture! The color! The realism! The animation! Smoke! Fire! The sounds of battle! Bulidings that fall apart when cannon fire keeps hitting them. Though the little soldiers are clones, they are realistically detailed enough that from a little camera distance (camera angles!) they look like a troop of real people. When they are standing in a line waiting for orders, I've seen them shift from side to side and scratch themselves. There are realistic animations of the soldiers of this period (the 1700's) going through the detailed motions of priming their muskets, raising them to aim, and then firing. The artillerists go through the motions of priming their cannons and finally firing it. (There's no drama quite like that of a row of cannoneers preparing to fire cannister rounds as enemy infantry advances towards them in a bayonet charge.) Remember when you were a kid playing "cowboys and indians" or "war," and you wanted your friends to fall down when you shot at them, just like you saw soldiers go down in the movies? Well, in Empire Total War you get that itch scratched very thoroughly. The troops have very convincing animations of getting hit and falling down dead as a door nail. Every streak of blood lust you have is fully satisfied here.

All this is wonderfully addictive stuff to watch, but its also beautiful beyond description. When you turn your camera angle and look at the grass at ground level, you'll see waving grass that has hints of purple in it just like you've seen in someplaces in real life. The battle maps for India are just the most dramatically beautiful things I've ever seen in a computer game. You begin to understand why this ground worth fighting over. And there are wonderful little period touches with the various buildings and other objects on the battlefields. This is where you realise Empire Total War is in the lamborghini category of computer games.

And that was just the land battles. The big innovation in Empire Total War is the tactical sea battles. Previous Total War games did not have the option to go to a tactical battle for sea units. Empire Total War does. And what a thing it is! I was absolutely amazed the first time I saw the sea battle in the tutorial. The lighting! The reflections on the water! The waves! The weather! And then there were the ships. Galleons. Indiamen. Sloops. Brigs. 1st through 6th rate ships of the line. They are magnificent and magnificently detailed. Fans of the fiction for this period (Patrick O'Brien, C.S Forester) will be in hog haven just for this part of the game alone.

And this last is where I think The Creative Assembly so magnificently over reached. I believe some of the loose ball-bearings this lamborghini has is due entirely to the fact that CA attempted to create one game and ended up working on two games at the same time. I'm thinking that the land part of ETW was already an ambitioius undertaking. Adding this wonderful sea part probably taxed their resources to the limit. There were initially a number of complaints about how hard it was to control the sea battles. If a sea battle had more than a few ships, things got very chaotic indeed. You couldn't enjoy the battles because of all the micro management that was needed to keep from getting slaughtered by the AI that was very good at micro-management. There has since been a patch which has alieviated much of the problem, and I now find the sea battles very enjoyable.

But there are still other little irritations that give you the impression the game has been rushed into release before being quite finished. The earlier Rome Total War had nice touches that demonstrated it was very much a finished game. In the campaign and battle tutorials, the in-game tutor-characters introduced themselves before launching into the tutorial.

In Empire Total War, those little touches have gone slightly awry. The campaign tutorial is combined with a story driven set of five episodes about the American Revolution called "the Road to Independence." But its not really identified as a tutorial. You start it thinking its a special campaign for the American faction, and then you find youself being given story line cut scenes of the ruminations of George Washington that segway aburptly into tactical battles, and later on are interspersed with mini-campaigns that are interlaced with tutorial advice that seems out of order in some way. The mini-campaigns themselves have features removed from them so that they are introduced episode by episode, but without these episodes being identified as a tutorial, they give the impression of something being wrong with the game. And given the long load times, this setup can experience some problems. The first time I clicked for the Road to Independence, I found the load time so long I thought the game had hung and started tapping some other keys. When the load finally completed, this caused the game to jump me from the first cut scene right into the first tactical battle without any explanation. This gave me a bad first impression.

The tactical battle tutorial is in two parts. One for a land battle and another for a sea battle. The land battle is listed first, so most people will click that first. But the problem is that the tactical battle tutorial character, a haughty British admiral, introduces himself in the sea battle tutorial. So when you start the land battle tutorial first, you get this haughty, distainful British twit talking at you without introducing himself.

Another problem I had while playing "the Road to Independence" was that while playing the tactical battles I sometimes encountered one particular tune of background music that was a littlle too zippy and unserious for the forground proceedings going on. It was my ill luck that caused this tune to be playing when I started some of my tactical battles in "the Road to Independence." This was another bad first impression.

These are little touches that have gone awry and given the game a lackluster over all first impression. But there is no reason to despair. I still enjoyed the game immensely (and immoderately!) And The Creative Assembly has been coming out with a series of patches that have been gradually improving the game. I submit that this game is so good that its developers and distributors know this game will be a long term source of revenue. So they have every motivation to continue to improve the game. For example, new Down Loadable Content (DLC) has recently been made available. And I believe we can expect to see more of that later.

Warts and all, Empire Total War is still definately a game to get.

An open apology to computer video game creators everywhere.

This is my standard open apology to computer video game creators everywhere. It is an apology in the usual sense of "I'm sorry I did that to you." But it is also an apology in the ancient Greek sense of the word apologia - a defense. While I apologize to computer game creators everywhere for picking on their creations, I also defend the task I've set for myself: criticism of computer games.

That fact is, every time I criticize a game for something, there is a part of me that winces in sympathy with the creators of the highly sophisticated software that I am using. The average game creator will likely yell back at me: "Yeah, well lets see if you can do any better!" And I wince because, as it happens, I have tried and done quite a bit worse.

My first career was in Information Technology (or "Data Processing," as it was know then.) I have a bachelor of science in computer science, and for twenty years I was a computer programmer who worked for large retail and insurance companies, programming their (now obsolete) mainframes.

Since that in itself was a challenging career, I had to sit mostly from the sides lines and watch the personal computer world grow up from Steve Wozniak's basement into Bill Gate's friendship with Warren Buffet. But I did make one stab at participation. At about the time that Roberta William's lo-res "Mystery House" was out, I attempted to write a hi-res game I called "Toad Wars" for the APPLE IIe using the threaded interpreter, FORTH. I had the idea that it would be like "Asteroids," only instead of asteroids coming at you in a 360 degree circle., it would be these toads I wanted to animate. (With "Mystery House" being such a big deal for such a lo-res game, you could set your sights a lot lower back then).

That was a learning experience in the disguise of failure.

Number one, I found out why most games have a display of "credits" the same way the end of a movie does. Even at that early stage of computer video game creation, several very diverse and specialized talents were needed to put a game together in time for it become obsolete a month or two later. I was not a graphics maven, and my toads looked absolutely sick. I was also not a physics maven, so my animations were very jerky and didn't look right. And there were likely several dozen other things I was not that would have made for a professional looking game. Computer video game creation is not for those who want to be a one-man band. You have to form a band to make a game.

Number two, I learned about the just mentioned rapid obsolescence. It was in fact a month or two later that a spectacularly high res version of something like "Space Invaders" came out for the APPLE IIe. When you make a game, you have to move as fast as you can, because the technology is always changing. I have recently installed the original Cossacks on my hard drive to try out gaming the 18th Century. The recent advent of Empire: Total War has considerably cooled my desire to play Cossacks.

Three: I later learned that FORTH was not the best language to use for creating games. It was a stack language, and if your programmed subroutine forgot to the clear the stack before returning to the main routine, that would cause bugs in someplace other than where you made the mistake. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get a tons of mysterious bugs out of the game before giving up. The tools you use make a big difference, and even they are subject to rapid technological advance.

Number four: If you want to create a professional computer game from scratch, you can't give up. Ever. Computer game creation is not for the faint of heart nor the uncommitted. The whole computer game industry runs on people who have no relationships except with their PC's and their team mates.

Five: No man can serve two masters. If I wanted a career as a computer video game creator, I could not also have one as a mainframe computer programmer. And I had just proved to myself how successful I'd be as a computer game creator.

A sixth lesson I learned from my career as a mainframe computer programmers. I learned that computer games have some of the most incredible user interfaces that have ever been designed. The interfaces I'd seen in the business world - Optical Character Recognition documents, punched cards, CICS screens, etc, were all pitiful child's play compared to what computer game designers come up with everyday. If corporate IT really wants to learn something about intuitive graphic interfaces they can do no better than studying computer video games. They are the apex of the art.

A seventh lesson I learned from my career is how hard it is to bring a vision into reality. I'd found in my mainframe career that the end users of the programs that run on the mainframe are always at odds with the programmers and designers of those programs. This was sometimes to the level of actual white-hot hate. The industry had come up with the idea of another category of beings called "systems analysts" or "business analysts" just to have a layer of insulation between the end-users and the programmers.

From my perspective as a programmer, it seemed to me that this layer of insulation was actually contributing to the problem instead of solving it. It looked to me like the whole problem was about getting close enough to the end user to learn what it really was they wanted their systems to do. The real problem, it seemed to me, was that there were too many viewpoints and outlooks being taken into account in the design of systems. The end result was supposed to be about something somebody was going to use as part of his or her daily work. The end result very often was about something very much other than that. And the people who were trying to do their daily work were being systematically driven crazy every day. I'd always thought that if it was just me and just the end-user in an impromptu meeting, things would work out.

Then one day over a holiday weekend, I was sitting at home with my PC and I had an idea for a simple game that would be fun to play on the computer. I remember that it was some kind of a business game. It wasn't a game I intended to offer to the public. It was just a simulation game I wanted to play that I though the computer would make easier for me to play. So I started to program it on the computer. "Design At the Key Board" (DAKB) in all its glory!

And a very interesting thing happened. After an hour or two of work at the computer, I came to realize that the game I had created was actually less fun to play then the game I had had in my imagination! Here it was, the loop between vision and creation completely closed and contained within a single mind, and a design failure had resulted! I discovered the difference between having an idea for a computer game in your imagination and having the actual game fully implemented on the computer. These two things are not the same thing. They are very different.

And here I discovered the key pitfall of what I had been doing for a living up to then. Even with the best situation there could possibly be (vision and implementation within the same mind) there will always been a profoundly disappointed end-user. The hate-hate affair between the programmers and the end users will always be there no matter what. The whole problem is tied up with that elusive, abstract thing we all strive for and mostly can't get: happiness.

This, in essence, is what every computer game creator has set him or herself as a task: to deliver happiness of some kind to the human race. And it is as illusive a thing for a computer game creator as it is for God eternal. In a computer game, there is some itch that must be scratched. But what is the itch? And what is the scratch? Different strokes for different folks?

So there I was, early forced from being a computer game creator to being a computer game consumer.

And what a maddening time that was!

There was the early low-res "Sun-Tzu's Ancient Art of War," which I found to be quite horrible. My previous experience with war gaming was the hexagon worlds of Simulations Publications Inc. (SPI) and Avalon Hill. The lo-res sprites of "Ancient Art of War," and their limited play, was not the scratch for the itch I knew I had. This was my first experience of buying an expensive computer game that ended up being a big disappointment. More was to come.

I missed the birth of the Command and Conquer series (which I now regret), but I came back to computer war gaming with War Craft II. This was my first hard-core gaming addiction. And it was definitely the scratch for the itch. And it was absolutely perfect. It had all the classic elements of Real Time Strategy gaming: base building, scissors-paper-rock unit differentiation, a series of world maps, and a campaign game with a continuing story line. And the action took place in white-knuckle real time. No "game turns" and "dice."

Later on there was the dueling robot factories of Total Annihilation, which had realistic looking physics. Whenever a base's wind-mill thingy blew up, I could see the propeller blades whirl in the air as they came off! Here is where I found I absolutely couldn't live without computer games. It was a big transition in which I went from totally passive entertainment (like watching TV) to totally interactive entertainment. When you are the general of a little pixel army, you are the one who must drive the story. You are the one who must make the decisions. You are the one who suffers the consequences (even if only virtually.)

As this addiction began to take hold, I bought other RTS games to scratch the itch. And here I encountered disappointment. I did not realize that RTS games had just come through a long evolution which (at the time) had just ended with War Craft II and Total Annihilation.

I had purchased a earlier RTS game called M.A.X. And as I went through the documentation and learned all the in's and out's of the game and its units, I loved everything about it. Everything except the first time I played the single player mode. There I was, spending up to an hour or so, carefully building up my base, sending out reconnaissance patrols, ramping up my research, and all the other things Sun Tzu said a good general must do.

And when I finally found the enemy and was ready to do battle, I discovered that the enemy was --- two hundred or so artillery units crammed together in a hole in the corner of the map, not doing anything in particular. M.A.X.'s Artificial Intelligence was absolutely brain dead.

It was here that I encountered for the first time an "if-only" game. And "if-only" game is a game that is basically good that you would really like to play, but doesn't work well enough to be enjoyable because of one or two things that are seriously wrong with it. You say to yourself, "if only the game didn't xxxxxx." Or "if only the game did xxxxxx instead of xxxxxx." An "if-only" game has, in the words of Maxwell Smart, "missed by THAT much." Almost but not quite. And that's a crying shame.

Its a crying shame not only because a creative and artistic misfire has taken place, but also because once an "if-only" game is released, it is often accompanied by a degree of consumer fraud. M.A.X. should have been released with a warning that it was really meant to be a multi-player game. There are newer "if-only" games I've heard of that have packaging very similar to very popular, well-constructed games. "Me-toos!" from minor players. And very often new games are as buggy as the Arkham Asylum bug house.

But then again, what are you going to do if you are a company that publishes computer games? When some developer first presents a "vision," checks are already being cut and money is already being spent. The way advertising works on human psychology ( "loud enough and long enough") requires that the advertising campaign be started before the design of the game is even finished. The number of people involved in the project (the credits page, remember?) virtually guarantees the original vision is going to be changed for the better or for the worse. And the time until release date must be carefully budgeted and scheduled because an over-long development cycle can cause a game's underlying technology to be obsolete by the time it comes out.

And since the checks have already been cut and the money already spent, you cannot give up if things start going wrong. No, not ever. In Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine, the development and release of a new mini-computer is documented. We hear the project leader explain to Kidder that all technological development projects go through a "lets start over and do it right phase." The choices that are made early in the project start to constrain the choices that can be made later on in the project. Ugly patches and design compromises are then made to move the project through to the final stages for release. The closer the release date gets, the uglier the patches become as the design compromises become more hideous. You can never "scrap and go back." You must move forward no matter what happens.

As with the list of credits, its like making a movie. We've all seen bad movies that should never have been released but were. Didn't the producers know it was a bad movie that had come out the other end of the development process? Yes, they did. But the checks had been cut, the money had been spent, and its now time see what little money, if any, can be recovered from the fiasco. Woody Allen has said that he's never really liked most of his movies. He finds that as he is making a movie, his vision of what he meant his movie to be gets lost in the realities involved in actually making a movie. Every time he makes a movie, its not the movie he originally imagined. But does that stop him from putting the movie out? No. It doesn't. Because the checks have been cut, the money has been spent, and anyone who does anything creative knows that you can never completely control the outcome of a dynamic creative process no matter how hard you try. The realities of life in the computer industry only put the icing on that particular cake.

Computer video game creators, I do understand some of the forces that have forced your hand when your new game has come out and it is obviously not every thing it could have been. I know you're probably as sad, exhausted, and disillusioned as Woody Allen is when he finishes a movie. But my intention in criticizing your game is not so much to be the guy who says, "hey, you missed a spot,." but rather to be a cheerleader for the next game you come out with. After all, the checks have been cut, the money has been spent (and sometimes its my money too!) And the only thing we can all look forward to is the future.

And so here I am, a lover of computer video games, and critic for the sake improving future games so that they do not miss mark by so short a margin. My goals is to try and and stem the number of "if- only"s and "Coulda been's" . Computer game creator, if I have trashed your sweat-borne creation and wounded your creative spirit with my words, believe me that I do feel for you and what it was you tried to accomplish. But I must have my say if the administration of happiness is ever to improve. I am a critic who seeks the betterment of the art, and the opportunity to enjoy it better each time.

Dawn of War II - It's here! It's here!!

Yes, it's finally, truly, here!!! I just bought it at Best Buy and I'm about to wet myself!!!! (And I just finished learning how to play Universe At War. I'm also going to pop a gasket.) See you later, folks!

http://www.dawnofwar2.com/