Nuggetty Goodness

"Lara Croft is parachuting again. She whips in an ungainly fashion from side to side, bouncing off a few spiky twigs with noises of urgent discontent, before slamming full-force into a tree and impaling herself on a large branch. She gurgles brokenly and dies. This isn't the first time this has happened.

It's something like the sixteenth. I splutter angrily and set the controller down. I know this bit isn't supposed to be difficult. It's supposed to be exciting. Someone on the Tomb Raiderdevelopment team came up with the idea that rather than simply transition from one area to the next in a cutscene, it would much cooler if the player were to guide Lara, parachute-bound, through a gauntlet of deadly trees.

It's not cool. It's exasperating. The player suddenly has these brand new 'parachute controls' foisted on them, with no indication of what these new controls actually are. You're given about three seconds to try to work out how to steer before Lara is hurled brutally into an instant-death tree.

You fall back on videogame logic. Left stick steers. OK. But is it inverted on the horizontal axis or not? Wham. Dead. Okay. Right stick does the camera. But is that also controlling the direction she faces, or…? Wham. Dead. God. Right. I think I can steer her now. Am I supposed to aim over there, or…? Wham. Dead.

I almost stopped playing Tomb Raider at this point. What made me persevere was, again, videogame logic. This section is only a small set piece, like in so many games these days, a brief if pointless diversion before I can get back to the real gameplay. The gameplay where I understand the rules and the controls.

So I persevered. I kept playing. But it was touch and go for a moment there. Had I not been so versed in what to expect from videogames, Tome Raider would've been irreversibly shelved. It's not like I don't have other things to do with my free time, after all.

It occurred to me that this is what every game must feel like for people who are new to games, those who aren't versed in their inscrutable logic. You're given all these sticks and buttons and a brief, impenetrable set of instructions (left stick moves the guy; right stick controls where he's looking, and also the gun; right trigger - that's the squeezy one at the back - shoots the baddies, but only if you hold the left trigger first) then you're hurled into this unfamiliar world full of things that hate you."

Accessibility & the Folly of Exclusivism, Tom Battey, Gamasutra

"Games, especially the more “core” games, have this notion that they should be arbitrarily hard, that they shouldn’t hold your hand -- and that the ensuing exclusivity is a good thing.

That’s bullshit.

Over time, we’ve come to isolate ourselves. We put ourselves in the strange position of locking away the secrets of gaming knowledge from those who aren’t physically capable of playing them. While it is true that a blind man will never be able to see a film in quite the same way that most can, or that a deaf woman will not ever be able to hear a song, those experiences aren’t locked away by choice. I’ve never seen a book printed with obnoxiously small font just to keep people from being able to read it at all. This is something completely unique to videogames, and even there it’s far from universal.

[...]

I have plenty of friends and family whose opinions I deeply respect and value, but because videogames are inaccessible to those who haven’t been playing for a good chunk of their lives, or those who have a disability, I can’t share all of the great stories or experiences games have to offer.

[...]

More and more core gamers decry the fact that the casuals are playing simple games instead of the big beefy manly ones that they happen to think are intrinsically superior. At the same time core gamers howl at the idea of “easier” modes or options that remove combat entirely. Instead of encouraging broader options for new players, we’ve collectively continued to wall ourselves off and push potential fans away.

A while back, I wrote a little piece about how my mom’s rheumatoid arthritis kept her from being able to ever play Mass Effect. I called her last week to talk about some of the games I’ve been playing -- Antichamber, Tomb Raider, BioShock Infinite. With each one I was as descriptive as possible because I knew she wouldn’t get the chance to experience these games for herself. No matter what, some narratives are locked away; forever lost to her.

She’s not the only one either; especially when we start thinking about everyone in our lives that we care for. Friends, family, lovers -- they will never know the depth of our medium, unless we start opening it up. This isn’t about being taken seriously by the outsiders, this is about connecting with the other people in our lives."

BioShock Infinite's problem is not violence, Daniel Starkey, Destructoid

-----------------------------

This is also why I won't buy point-and-click adventure games that I cannot find walkthroughs for prior to purchasing them. I don't enjoy solving point and click puzzles at ALL. Myst-type games leave me cold. I'd much rather enjoy them as interactive movies. 

Luckily for me, almost all the adventure games I've been interested in recently have had walkthroughs.

The most amazing ones are the Book of Unwritten Tales, and Machinarium. The Longest Journey nets an honourable mention as well.

They are wonderful games, I can't praise them enough. Book of Unwritten Tales, especially, is way up there with Day of the Tentacle and Monkey Island. It's just that good. But the things I enjoy have changed, and without walkthroughs, I have neither the time, the patience, nor the inclination to solve arcane puzzles just to enjoy a good, interactive visual story. Quite simply, if you give me a choice between solving some crazed random puzzle (Gabriel Knight, I'm looking at you) in a point and click, and wandering off to an RPG or MMO to kill things, I'll pick killing things any day.

So it's wonderful for me that walkthroughs for point-n-click are so widely available, and there (doesn't seem) to be a chorus of 'omg looser'! that goes up in association with them. How nice it would be if other game genres were equally accessible and welcoming.

"The JRPG protagonist is just a convenient placeholder for a dynamic group of resolute individuals who are greater than the sum of their parts. The player isn’t controlling one hero with several non-playable sidekicks. They’re guiding the whole. As each member of a party gains levels and becomes stronger, each character’s role in combat solidifies, and they specialize in a given class, while the story brings the characters closer together as people."

"The (often silent) protagonist isn’t there to keep conflicting personalities in check. They’re just an excuse to bring them together. They’re a body to hold the adventurers in while they adventure. In these games, the player doesn’t have a virtual surrogate through which they experience the world; the player is the group. All control that the player has over the game is blanketed across the whole party. Cooperation is built into every layer of these games."

- We Are One: JRPGs, the Group Journey, and the Mechanics of Cooperation, Mark Filipowich, Gamasutra

I love calligraphic cards, posters, and logos. My handwriting's pretty bad though, so I've always ended up looking enviously at the work of those designers who can do such things, and wishing that my feeble attempts would turn out as well.

Enter Livebrush, the cheat's way of creating beautiful, hand-drawn, flowing calligraphic text.

While I don't think Livebrush was actually made for this purpose, it is *amazing* at it.

Me of the horrible scribbly writing came up with these bits of 'calligraphy' just by using a Wacom tablet, and the settings I've shown above.

Oh, and Livebrush is available both as a free, and as a commercial (but cheap!) version.

If you've ever drooled enviously over the work of leet calligraphers, go and play with Livebrush. Do eet nao.

Sooo.... I discovered no-churn, no-ice-cream-maker icecreams over the weekend, and promptly went a bit mad. :( Now my tiny freezer has 5 types of icecream in it! 2 store-bought, and 3 nugget-crafted.

You only need 3 ingredients and it's incredibly easy to make, because you just whisk them all together until they become fat and fluffy (form soft peaks).

1st Experiment: Dark chocolate icecream with raspberries and dark chocolate chips
Nice, but with an oddly chewy, grainy texture. I think it's because the dark chocolate had to be melted, and despite my mad whisking, it didn't all incorporate fully.

2nd Experiment: Green tea icecream

Ooooh. This turned out PERFECT. Similar in texture to the green tea icecreams I've had at Japanese restaurants - and as good as / indistinguishable from store-bought icecreams.

Ingredients
3 parts thickened / whipping cream
2 parts condensed milk
Umeshu to taste (and to make it stay nice and soft once frozen)
Green tea powder to taste (not instant stuff - use the stuff the ninja tea ceremony assassin chicks use)

Steps

1. Put it all in a bowl together
2. Whisk until soft peaks form
3. Transfer into an airtight container
4. Plop in freezer for 6+ hours
5. Serve and eat while squealing madly

3rd Experiment: Vanilla icecream with lemon curd ripple

Ingredients
3 parts thickened / whipping cream
2 parts condensed milk
Vanilla essence (just a leetle bit)
Some kind of drinkable alcohol (To make it stay nice and soft once frozen - I used chinese cooking wine cause I ran out of everything else.)
Lemon curd to taste (I used a nice store-bought brand)

Steps

1. Put everything but the lemon curd in a bowl together
2. Whisk until soft peaks form
3. Transfer a third into an airtight container
4. Glop in lemon curd in a quantity that makes you happy
5. Transfer the next third into the container
6. Glop in more curd
7. Transfer the last third
8. Stir the whole thing with some kind of stirring implement. The more you stir, the less big and fat your ripples of lemon curd will be
9. Plop in freezer for 6+ hours
10. Serve and eat while squealing madly
    or
    Make someone else eat it while squealing madly
    or
    Do it together!

Tera Online
Combat is as good as outfits are silly - feels like the gorgeous lovechild of Guild Wars and Torchlight. On level of combat 'funness', this is up there with Street Fighter and Infinity Blade I & II.

As I ran around (badly) whapping things, it struck me with a pang that *THIS* is what I expected GW2 combat to be. Especially since Tera has collision detection. Collision detection is one of those things that you don't realise how much you love until it's taken away.

Tera is also the only reticule-based game I've played that doesn't give me motion sickness.

Age of Wushu (Pure open-world PvP, no PvE servers)
Waddling around Age of Wushu is like being in a wuxia epic - other than the fact that the entire area chat is filled with goldbot spam.

Combat feels like virtua fighter, the combat animations are all based on motion capture from real martial artists, making it look incredibly realistic and beautiful.

Environment is extremely true to culture, right down to how the non-quest NPCs talk about their lives when you poke them! Oh and buildings have insides. ALL buildings have insides. I don't think I've ever seen that in an MMO.

Oh yes, and they're both beautiful games. Screenies to follow.

Icons inside the applications themselves should be simpler and more graphic rather than realistic, like so:

Update:
BLAH! So it turns out WPF can't easily handle raster images, so the in-application icons cannot be the style shown above. The style shown above requires pixel art...which is, by nature, raster.

I also tried redoing a raster in pixel style (eg. 1x1px squares...) but that still doesn't look good, and apparently takes quite a bit of processing power to render.

Vector vs Raster Icons at Small Sizes (original file cabinet icon)

Pixel Art Requires a New Level of Abstraction
This is something that doesn't seem to have been covered in the comments, that anyone who does pixel art at the tiny sizes it's ideally suited to knows.

Guess I'll Make 'Em Fancy Vectors
Sooo... in-app icons will have to be fancy and realistic too. Oh well, at least there aren't many of them. At least, I'm planning them not to be. Not too fond of icons inside applications that scream LOOK AT MEEEEEE.

Here's a LOOOKATMEEEE icons so far. ._.

(Just to be clear, that is their default hint text - I didn't type it.)