Control consistency, guys. Come on.

So I'm playing Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. I have my Y-axis inverted, since I do everything with inverted Y. Yes, even third-person shooters. It's just what I'm used to. It's working fine up till now, as long as in the game's opinion all I'm doing is moving the camera. Suddenly, game puts me in a ship, and gives me a gun cursor, and I'm supposed to shoot down the enemies. Guess what! No Inverted-Y. So I can't aim for spit. Great.

I don't understand where developers get this idea that they can do the Invert-Y thing in a half-assed manner. This is Insomniac we're talking about here; they've sold millions upon millions of games. As an example of how it should be done, take Warhawk. It allows you to set Invert-Y separately for on foot, in tanks/jeeps, and in warhawks. Some people expect Invert-Y on a hawk since it's a plane, while still expecting non-inversion while on foot since they're just controlling a cursor and not a plane. Other people always Invert-Y if they're aiming something (like me).

Yes, it incurs menu design and programming overhead. But it is fundamental to a player's ability to control a game that they be able to Invert-Y as they are accustomed.

Echochrome Demo

So I've been looking forward to Echochrome on the PS3. Though having seen the video of this interesting puzzle game, I thought, "This will either be really awesome, or just really irritating."

Well, I tried the demo. It's nice, but there's a serious issue. The way the game works is that you alter the layout of the playfield by changing the camera angle. One play mechanic is to hide holes in the paths behind posts, then the hold disappears so you can walk over it. But a hole can only be crossed if it is completely hidden. So if you're off by 1 pixel, you fall through the hole. THAT is not fun. So for me, the game in its present form falls on the side of irritating, though I wouldn't say really irritating.

So give the demo a try. If you like it, I suspect $10 for 56 levels is a good value.

Devil May Cry 4

Right, I played DMC 1 through once. The upgrade/item system annoyed me then, and it annoys me now in DMC 4. Plus I find boss battles irritating. In DMC, these two issues combine to be REALLY annoying.

So I'm fighting this frog thing. Having some trouble. So I buy a green star (which regenerates health) to use during the battle. I still fail, despite having more time to try to beat the thing. Now, the price of the NEXT green star is higher, even though I gained no real benefit from the first one since I failed. Now I have to restart the entire level to reset the star price, since a higher star price just means more difficulty later. So this game gets harder if you're not good at it; that's really stupid. It also gives you more upgrade points when you play really well. I can understand that from a rewards perspective, except it makes the game easier for people who are already good at it! That's also really stupid.

DMC's system that allows the player to fall behind or get ahead of the difficulty curve makes no sense to me. Not that this kind of thing never works; I've seen that done right in Diablo II. When you got ahead of the curve, you'd go into areas designed for higher level characters, and you ended up always fighting things that were at your level of competence. With DMC's strict mission system, you can't rush forward to the tougher sections without continuing to earn more power.

I'm not sure how much further into this game I will go.

EVE-Online: First day of the war

Not much to report since I was away during the battles, but we got some of them, they got some of us. Here's one of them:



I did get to do some scanning for bad guys earlier, there just wasn't any fighting at the time.

EVE-Online: Fallout from the Gniess op

Right, the previous post talked about a load of Gniess I found. Well, turns out that the belt was in the system that's the HQ for Error666, a pirate corp.

After mining about 53 million ISK worth of Gniess, I logged off for a few hours for some RL art appreciation. I came back to find an alliance mail:

2008.05.04 19:05
The pirate corp error666 showed up in the gniess field, that Norjia found, in stealth bombers, took out a typhoon and a hulk. Recommend everyone avoid the spot now.

So, unfortunate members of the alliance have lost a 60 million ISK battleship and a 150 million ISK mining ship. We take our losses, and go about our business.

That was yesterday. Today, I log on to find this:

2008.05.06 16:28
Error666 has declared war on Apoapsis Multiversal Consortium.
After 24 hours fighting can legally occur between those involved.

So now we're at war again; it's been over a year, but still it's unpleasant for an industrial corp. So I'm in the freighter, hauling 5 Brutix battlecruisers back the HQ to sell. I didn't want to flood the market with 10 where I also put up 20 cruisers and some strip mining modules for sale. The war starts in 16 hours, so I still have time to get some industrial business going before the shooting starts.

At this point, we only have hearsay that smaktalk from one (or both) of the pilots destroyed in the gniess belt. Pirates take smaktalk very seriously in this game, for some odd reason. So if you're ever killed, DON'T bitch at your killer. I did once, but that's another story.

EVE-Online: Gniess going!

Right, Exploration as a profession arrived in EVE with the Revelations patch a while back. It's a system that spawns useful sites in hidden places, and with a certain set of skills and equipment, you can find them.

I heard that you could find better rocks in hidden asteroid belts than are normally present at a given security level. But the way to find them is by using scan probes, which have a default scan time of 10 minutes. Now, this wouldn't be so bad, except the scan system takes many, many scans. First, you scan with a multispectral probe, which tells you with 100% accuracy if there's anything in a solar system to hunt for. We know that any site will be no more than 4 AU (astronomical unit = distance from earth to sun) from any planet or moon. The probes with the largest range (and weakest strength) have a range of 4 AU. So you plant these probes around the solar system, attempting to cover as much volume as possible, since you can't have a probe within the scan range of another. Then you scan with those. If you don't find anything, scan again. If you find something, it will have a reported accuracy. You warp to the blip and plant a the probe with the smallest range that still covers the deviation reported (there are probes with ranges of 4, 2, 1, and 0.5 AU, each one stronger than the last). Scan again. If you find nothing, scan again. Eventually, you scan with the 0.5 AU probe, and it tells you where the site is.

This could take upward of 25 scans for a weak signal. That's just not acceptable at 10 minutes per scan. So you have to train skills and get equipment to reduce the time. After almost 2 months of training, I had the time down to 240 seconds, which is much better than 600. But then I found out these site are not instances; anyone can find them. So if you find a nice roid belt out in low-sec, anyone else can still scan for you and come smak you. In fact, once you're there mining, I suspect it's easier for them to find you since they can scan for your ship instead of the roids. So I lost interest.

A few months later, a member of our alliance found a monstrous Gniess belt with 1.2 million cubic meters of ore. It was worth around 400 million ISK, which is a lot. It took 7-8 people 3 4-hour long ops to get it all. Then I hauled it in our freighter (2 trips) to a place where it could be refined without loss. Big team effort, lots of money, good fun. So I regained interest, as he left the alliance to head out to 0.0.

My first attempt to find something failed. Partially because I didn't have time to keep trying. Then I tried again today, with two rigs added to reduce my time further to 191 seconds. After 2 hours of scanning, I found another monstrous Gniess belt, which I am currently mining in another window. These site disappear after 72 hours of being entered, so we don't have much time. So I've called in the alliance, and any alliance member can come mine; I just ask a 5% contribution to my corp as a finder's fee.

Then I found out there's a probe launcher with a base time of 450 seconds instead of 600; so I bought one for 42 million ISK. For me, that's a small price to pay to save 55 seconds per scan, which might have saved me 20 minutes today. That will add up if I continue to do exploration; I could also sell it again if I decide to.

I find exploration irritating, but if the designers are going to make the sites special in some way, they have to be hard to find. And since EVE is not dexterity based, that means making it require patience and equipment. The nice part is that the magnitude of what you can find is beyond what a single player can deal with. Again, EVE's attraction comes down to the necessity of working in groups. There aren't more than 2 or 3 people in the whole alliance equipped to explore, so it's a nice feeling to be the one who found this site for everyone.