How To Spot A Psychopath

Pretty much every time a new update appears in the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories RSS feed, I am reminded of my own hateful indolence and miserable lack of talent.

Windell and Lenore have really outdone themselves this time, though.

(I think the next kit I get around to building will actually be a ThingamaKIT. If, that is, you don’t count the trapezoidal loudspeakers and giant box of medieval wood from Ron Toms that’ve been awaiting my attention for lo, these many months.)

The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars are coming out in a few weeks. They’re advertised by a new, and surprisingly amusing, promotional-movie blitz.

(Note also the boring old site at enemyterritory.com.)

These clips are not, I’m sorry to say, up there with the simply fantastic Team Fortress 2 “Meet The…” series. But they still definitely have their moments.

The above embeddable video thingy (which, if you’re reading this long after I wrote it, has probably disappeared) at the moment only lets you view one of the videos and then makes you click through to stroyent.com. And even the one easily-seen video is only available in crappy-res.

So here is the Gamershell download page for that first video. The file is available on umpteen other download sites too, of course.

And here’s a YouTube version of the first video, in case the above one doesn’t work:

There’s also an officially-uploaded-by Activision version here, but they decided to disable embedding for it, because they’d like fewer people to see it, or something.

OK. Here’s the next clip:

(Official Activision YouTube version here, downloadable version here.)

And finally, here’s the main promo video for the game, which applies to the PC version as much as it does to the console ones:

(Official un-embeddable YouTube version here; GamersHell download version here.)

This main clip is called “Monster Truck Style”, for fairly obvious reasons. But this close-miked presentation now, inescapably, makes me think of the Brawndo commercials (and yes, I know).

ETQW itself is, when you actually play it, only mildly silly. It’s a pretty straightforward team-on-team game, obviously descended from its interesting predecessor. It’s got a good amount of class variation, plus vehicles, to appeal to the Battlefield Whatever crowd.

I’ve never played Team Fortress 2 - sorry, not enough hours in the day. I’m sure people will still be playing it a couple of years from now, so there’s no great rush. Besides, I haven’t quite finished with Tribes 2. But I’m still perfectly ready to believe that TF2 is the current king of the team-on-team genre. A million dorks can’t be wrong.

ETQW, though, has distinctly different teams, rather than the different-only-in-colour teams of TF2. It also has vehicles, and slightly, but significantly, lower hardware requirements. So I’d say it’s well worth picking up the ETQW demo to see if you like it, even if you’re already nursing a TF2 habit.

No, you don’t get “points” for driving drunk in Grand Theft Auto IV (via). Driving drunk in the game isn’t necessary, helpful or even fun, but the more serious problem with this claim is that you don’t get points for anything in GTAIV. Like most modern games, it eschews the concept of overall point-scoring altogether.

Neither does GTAIV have “levels”, for that matter, but I’m sure some child-protector out there is very worried about the “drunk driving level”. Points, levels and the sound track from the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man (which celebrates its twenty-seventh birthday this year!) are still commonplace… but only in the depictions of video games in movies and TV shows.

The problem all of the people who’re worried about GTAIV have, of course, is that they have not read Excerpts from The Alarmist’s Guide to GTAIV (do not miss the second page).

(Both pages NSFW, unless you work somewhere where people have a sense of humour.)

Video games are getting more and more realistic, and some of their creators are using that realism to make more and more confrontingly believable interactive depictions of violence, horror and depravity.

While this is happening, though, actual rates of violence among children in every First World nation I know of continue to slowly fall.

That doesn’t make for much of a headline, of course. Much better to claim that when some kid does buck the trend and shoot up his school, it must have been Wolfenstein 3D and Redneck Rampage that made him do it.

These are my Not Very Useful Dice.

The “crooked in every sense” red six-siders are oddly satisfying objects. They’re classic, if rather large, sharp-edged casino dice, except for the obvious.

I haven’t thrown them enough times to see what kind of result distribution the crooked d6s give. In the aggregate they’re probably actually quite fair, since they’re all somewhat close to cubic and they have the proper numbering scheme, with opposite sides adding to seven.

(I think they’re actually likely to throw a bit low, since the smaller sides on four of them are all ones, plus one two and one six. Frankly, I just want to try sneaking them onto a craps table some day. If you want some of your own, try searching for “crooked dice“; a set of six shouldn’t set you back more than $US15 delivered.)

The other three dice are perfectly fair. Just… not very useful.

The blue one’s a d24, a tetrakis hexahedron (one of two possible shapes for a d24 - the other is, of course, the deltoidal icositetrahedron). In gaming, you actually can use a d24 to quickly determine on which hour of the day some random event takes place. But you can also do that in various other ways on the rare occasions when you have to - like, for instance, a d4 to determine the quarter-day and a d6 to pick the hour of that quarter.

So the d24’s appeal remains… specialised. Dungeons and Dragons used to use d24s for a few things, but it doesn’t any more. (D12s seem to have been similarly deprecated.)

The larger polyhedron is a rhombic triacontahedron, a d30. It’s the big brother of the surprisingly antiquitous, famously malicious, icosahedral d20 that’s become the very symbol of gaming nerdery.

I think the d30 has a certain… machismo.

“Oh, you roll twenties, do you? Well, I beat that a third of the time.”

It’s hard to top that, if you don’t have big brass ones.

The d30 can also be substituted for by other dice, though I don’t think there’s any terribly elegant way to do it - perhaps a rolling-pin d3 (itself substitutable by a halved d6) for tens, plus a d10 for units. This isn’t something you’re likely to need to do very often, though, since d30s are almost as unpopular as d24s. People use them now and then to represent some sort of boost (lucky artifact, you’re the son of a god, you bought the DM a pizza) for what would normally be a d20 roll. That’s about it.

The red sphere is a more commonly seen item; it is, of course, Lou Zocchi’s hundred-sided “Zocchihedron“.

Lou is probably royally sick of the sight of his d100, since he spent ages trying to make the darn thing work right, and it still doesn’t, really.

The main problem with a 100-sider is that it’s basically a golf ball, and so any sort of fair roll will take ludicrously long to settle compared with the normal “d100″, which is just a pair of d10s, one for tens and one for units.

To address the rolling-across-the-room problem, Lou made his d100 hollow and partially filled it with teardrop-shaped metal weights, which slow its roll considerably, and also make it usable as a very small maraca. The d100 is still really only a curiosity, though, and may or may not be biased in favour of the more-widely-spaced numbers nearer its equator.

Companies like Chessex, Koplow Games and Lou Zocchi’s Gamescience make a number of other impractical novelty dice. The d5, d7, d14 and d16, for instance, and even the majestic d34. Unfortunately, though, most of the weird-numbered dice that I don’t already own are of the pyramids-stuck-together trapezohedron type, which as the side-count rises makes them look more and more like a spinning top rather than a die. The d34 has a particularly severe case of this disease.

I’m still tempted to acquire them, though, so I can have a whole Crown Royal bag full of dice that nobody can use.

If you’re at all interested in the aesthetic appeal of dice, by the way, allow me to highly recommend slight-of-hand wizard Ricky Jay’s book “Dice: Deception, Fate, and Rotten Luck“, a slim volume which alternates gambling - and cheating - history with a lot of gorgeous pictures of decaying six-siders.

Ben Croshaw does not like “The Witcher”.

That was an outcome you could pretty much see coming three years ago (and again), just because of the game’s idiotic name. But this is one of the better Zero Punctuations nonetheless.

And this time there’s an extra piece on the end of the review.

It’s a bit rude.

Last year, I briefly mentioned the strange but surprisingly compelling game Dwarf Fortress.

Here’s a most excellent archived version of a Something Awful thread about a relay of people playing the game.

By the time it got to StarkRavingMad’s managerial tenure, I injured myself laughing.

The Forged Alliance expansion pack for the CPU-gobbling Real Time Strategy monolith of the moment, Supreme Commander, is rather good.

First up: It’s a stand-alone game. And not a terribly expensive one - sixty Australian bucks delivered from eBay dealers like the one I used, forty US bucks from Amazon).

If you only have Forged Alliance and not the original Supreme Commander (now only $US29 at Amazon!), you can still play multiplayer games against anybody else who has Forged Alliance, with or without SupCom. But the only side available to FA-only players is the new one, the weird alien Seraphim.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. The Seraphim, once you get past the bizarre names and shapes of their units, are actually simpler than the other three sides. They’ve got slightly fewer units available, but what they have combines the features of multiple enemy units.

So, for instance, they’ve got a very annoying “combat scout” unit, which has the wide view and radar coverage of everybody else’s scouts, plus a decent gun (the other scouts either have no gun at all or a gun that does nearly no damage), and an automatic cloak feature that makes the scout almost completely undetectable if it’s told to “hold fire” and doesn’t move.

Forged Alliance’s typically lousy storyline revolves around the Seraphim, whose weirdly-named units all look fantastic (those giant chicken-walkers in the picture above are “Ythothas”. Or possibly Ythothae). Often asymmetric, always shiny, and usually with some parts that just hang there in the air with no connection to the rest of the machine.

This ultra-tech does raise the question of why the Seraphim units are roughly equal in power to those of the three human sides, but the answer to that is of course “because otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a game”.

FA has a short, but rather difficult, single player campaign in which you can play any of the three original sides against the Seraphim. (I, of course, would have rather liked the opportunity to play the Seraphim in the campaign and crush the miserable hominids, but we don’t always get what we want.)

Forged Alliance is not just a unit pack. The whole game’s been dramatically rebalanced, so if you’ve never played SupCom before you may be surprised to find yourself actually winning against someone who’s been playing for months, but is now trying to do the same things they did in the original game.

It is, for instance, no longer economically sound to build vast resource farms full of generators and mass fabricators. Massfabs are much worse value than they used to be, so you can’t just button yourself up in a self-sufficient base and not bother trying to control territory.

And veterancy - units getting tougher as their kill count rises - has been dramatically revamped. You used to practically never see a veteran unit except when something got to shoot at a factory that had a long build queue, so the attacker got credit for a kill every time it blew up the latest 1%-complete unit-in-progress. Now, most units get their first veterancy level - and some more hit points, and slow hit point regeneration - at five or ten kills. Little level 1 units veteranise even faster.

What this means is that, although tech-level-one units are more useful in FA, it’s now a very bad idea to just spam hordes of tech one tanks at the enemy base. The defenders, including the enemy’s all-important Commander, will very rapidly become rather buff at your expense.

(All we need now is Kingdoms-style gold highlights on veteran units!)

People are, of course, still finding things to bitch about, most notably the fact that FA is an even bigger system hog than “vanilla” SupCom, even after you turn off certain features that really pound frame rate down.

Pretty much any dual-core CPU and moderately recent video card is good enough for small multiplayer games of FA at reasonable resolutions (on one or two monitors!), though, so this isn’t a You Must Upgrade Your One-Year-Old Computer game (like, say, Crysis).

I recommend it.

So, I’ve got that DirectX Acceleration Not Available problem again. DirectDraw Acceleration, Direct3D Acceleration, AGP Texture Acceleration; all Not Available. Direct3D was available until I tried turning it off in dxdiag, then ran dxdiag again to see if all of the options were back.

Nope, that trick doesn’t even work once, any more; now they’re all gone. Again. Graphics card allegedly has “n/a” memory on it, et cetera et cetera.

The last time this happened I tried all kinds of things, not a one of which worked, and ended up reinstalling Windows. But somebody mentioned that this was exactly the kind of problem that Windows XP’s System Restore (which I of course did not have turned on) was created to solve.

So in this Windows installation, I left System Restore turned on. And when DirectX screwed up yesterday, I used System Restore to roll the system back to its status of about a week ago.

And hooray, the problem was solved!

For about twelve hours.

I’m not crazy about the idea of restoring my system to that save point once a day for the rest of my life. I can see no other option, though, unless I get a whole new computer. I know for a fact that cleaning out all of the drivers and DirectX files before reinstalling will not help at all; all that does is take a long time and require a large number of reboots.

Perhaps a new video card would do it. This GeForce 7800 GT is pretty old and dusty; perhaps the problem does in fact have something to do with the video card failing some kind of obscure internal test, as when hard drives drop back into PIO mode.

The graphics card does still work just fine, as far as I can see; 3D mode is A-OK when DirectX is, you know, working, and OpenGL 3D is A-OK even now. I just ran OpenGL Quake 2; everything’s fine, and the video card fan ran up to higher speed as it’s meant to.

But perhaps the card didn’t give Windows the right password yesterday, or something.

I could try digging up another graphics card, but I haven’t another PCIe card in the house, and this computer’s too young to have an AGP slot. So I’d have to find some ancient PCI card, and I think the only one of those I’ve got is in the file server.

God damn it.

Shamus (of the now-superseded DM of the Rings comic) has a post up about the joy of X-Com, a still-excellent game that you can now play for free on a $5 computer.

I managed to avoid the various X-Coms entirely, but I sank quite a few hours into X-Com’s predecessor Laser Squad.

I made a sort of Zen meditation out scenario 1, “The Assassins”, with the evil industrialist and his tame Daleks hiding in his house. My first move was usually to blow the front wall away with a bazooka. Sometimes, this ended the game immediately, because the bazooka shot went through the one-pixel gap between the leaves of the front door and blew up against an interior wall, close enough to the evil industrialist to kill him.

(Laser Squad has now begotten a modernised, proper multiplayer version of itself, Laser Squad Nemesis. It’s commercial software, but it only costs $17.)

I just installed the brand new v163.71 Nvidia drivers (the last non-beta release was v162.18), and benchmarked Supreme Commander before and after. There’s a small but significant improvement.

I’m tired of seeing articles about AMAZING NEW DRIVER IMPROVEMENTS OMG and then discovering that there’s only any difference if you’re using a GeForce 8800 on Windows Bloody Vista.

I’ve got a 32-bit-WinXP computer with a 2.2GHz (at the moment) dual core Athlon 64 and a 256Mb GeForce 7900 GT.

That’s probably still faster than the average, but it’s pretty far from the current cutting edge. (Only two cores, dahling? However can you cope?)

Driver tweaks aimed at the super-expensive dual-slot super-cards won’t help me at all. I’m guessing that they won’t help most of you, either. Tweaks that help a GeForce 7900 ought to be some use for various other current affordable Nvidia cards, though.

I’ve also got an effing big monitor, so I ran the tests in 2560 by 1600 resolution. That’s practical for fullscreen Supreme Commander if you’ve got some flavour of 8800 (ATI aren’t really in the very-high-end race at the moment), but it’s actually very playable if…

…you split the monitor between the normal view and the easy-to-draw topographic-view map.

Running the standard “perftest” benchmark in that resolution guarantees, despite Core Maximizer, that the game will be video-card-limited most of the time.

The Supreme Commander benchmark reports total frames rendered, “sim” performance (how fast the game calculates everything-but-graphics), “render” performance (graphics alone) and a “composite” score that roughly represents overall performance.

In this graphics-heavy test, my “render” result increased by nineteen per cent with the new drivers. The giant resolution and less-than-incredible video card meant that, in the peculiar jargon of the perftest benchmark, the “render” score only improved from minus 1029 to minus 863. But trust me, that’s still good.

The logged-frames difference was +0.7%, which probably means less than experimental error and definitely means nothing you’d ever notice. The sim score improved only slightly more, at +1.6%. But the composite score improved 4.7%, from 5794 to 6065.

You probably wouldn’t actually notice that in play - it’s a general rule of thumb that differences of less than ten per cent aren’t noticeable. But almost five per cent is not a bad improvement to get for free.

Complex Supreme Commander games are almost 100% CPU limited. Smaller games, though - and even complex games when you can’t see much of the enormous map you’re playing on - don’t give your graphics card much time to breathe, especially if you’ve taken advantage of SupCom’s still-rare ability to make use of a second monitor. So I don’t think I’m lying with statistics, here.

(I’m not, to be fair, actually playing much Supreme Commander at the moment. I got ETQW yesterday, and intend to Strogg 4 Life for a while before getting back to the direction of vast robotic armies.)