Forensic Gaming

Deciding that it might be wise to not put all my Valentine's Day eggs in one basket (wait... eggs are Easter; perhaps I should find a better analogy before I publish this), I got the PC game version of another of my girlfriend's favorite procedural crime dramas: CSI Miami.

At first glance it looks like it will be a pretty cool game; the characters look pretty much like their RL counterparts (though perhaps under the influence of something?) and it appears that this time Ubisoft actually managed to secure the services of all the actual actors for the voices...

...but then I start getting into the gameplay and I realize that this is probably another example of exactly what I've been looking for: a game less suited for a semi-experienced gamer like myself and more suited for my non-gaming GF.

The thing I instantly found disappointing was that questioning witnesses and potential suspects really doesn't require any actual attention at all; if I had a little automated device to click my mouse button for me it would work just as well. The game gives me a single question I can ask and the character gives me a single answer; so like, what's the point? See, if I had designed this game, the player would be given a list of possible questions to ask the suspect and the information the suspect would reveal (or not reveal) would be dependent upon whether or not I had asked the right questions. But alas, such is apparently not the Ubisoft way.

Wait a minute... was that the late Bernie Mac?

Next we have a picture of Calleigh, a dead alligator and a severed human arm. My options are to click on either the alligator or the arm to collect the evidence, or to click Calleigh to ask for her advice as to what to do. I'm bewildered by the choices! They could have at least hidden a piece of evidence under a bush or something and made me look for it, but no such fun to be found here.

Then I get to take all my hard-earned evidence back to the morgue for Alex to examine and tell me what's up. Ooh, the suspense is killing me...

Okay, I'm not going to bore you with any more of this. Suffice it to say that this is another game that can be played entirely with just the mouse and, as far as I can tell so far, requires very little actual thought to play. If my GF can't manage to play through this one, then I might as well give up all hope...

TESVHRTP

Along with Tuesday's hype-heralded Steam release of the SCK (which I hear Bethesda is already releasing patches for) Bethesda also released the "free bonus gift" of a Skyrim high-res texture pack weighing in at over 3 GB. Not one to pass up any free gifts, I decided I should check it out.

Below are a few before-and-after screenshots all taken at 1600x900 resolution. I had a few settings switched off (like FXAA effects, anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, water reflections, et cetera) but all the images were taken at the same resolution with the same settings and at the highest texture detail setting so they should still serve as accurate comparisons as far as the textures themselves are concerned.

BEFORE

AFTER

BEFORE

AFTER

BEFORE

AFTER

BEFORE

AFTER

BEFORE

AFTER

BEFORE

AFTER

If you ask me (which nobody did of course), there's really not much difference to be seen here. I've also read reports that the only real differences are reduced framerates and increased loading times. In my opinion, this is just Bethesda releasing as a DLC something that should have been in the game to begin with and trying to make themselves look generous by calling it a "free bonus gift".

What do you think?

Oh... and before anyone asks... yes, I checked to be certain that the thing installed itself correctly. I even made sure that the BSAs were both registered in both my .ini files:


[Archive]
sResourceArchiveList=Skyrim - Misc.bsa, Skyrim - Shaders.bsa, Skyrim - Textures.bsa, Skyrim - Interface.bsa, Skyrim - Animations.bsa, Skyrim - Meshes.bsa, Skyrim - Sounds.bsa
sResourceArchiveList2=Skyrim - Voices.bsa, Skyrim - VoicesExtra.bsa, Skyrim - HighResTexturePack01.bsa, Skyrim - HighResTexturePack02.bsa

...so, if this is a case of the textures for some reason not showing up in my game, we can give Bethesda another gold star for their fine craftsmanship, excellent customer service and their wise decision to distribute all their products through Steam...

The only real good news here is that the textures are in fact all contained in two tidy BSA files, so if it turns out that they don't work well for anyone, they can easily be deleted...

NCIS Ubisoft Style

Some of you may likely think that I've finally lost my mind here. Please bear with me; there's a logical explanation.

As you may recall, my significant other is not much of a gamer. However, I haven't abandoned my efforts to convert her and with Valentine's Day coming up I'm going to attempt to "kill two birds with one stone" as they say. NCIS is one of the few shows we each can actually tolerate watching together, so maybe Ubisoft's version could end up being a game that we could have in common?

I'm thinking that this might actually work out because the gameplay here is actually rather pedestrian by my standards. For one who often needs her reflexes and hand-eye coordination at their peak to avoid being slaughtered by Arch-viles, NCIS could become boring fairly quickly; for my girlfriend who seems unable to use the mouse and keyboard simultaneously, this might actually be a fun game.

From what I've seen thus far, the entire game can be played with just the mouse. Click spots on the floor to move a character around, when the cursor changes to a magnifying glass click to look at a piece of evidence, when a meter changes color click to perform a given action... well, you can see where this is going. Furthermore, the constant on-screen instructions and icon cues like the magnifying glass or a pointing finger could lead even the simplest of children through the game I would think. Sounds like just the thing for my non-gaming GF.

Probably the only major selling point of the game that will save it with NCIS fans will be that the characters are reasonable (though in my opinion imperfect) rendered facsimiles of the actual actors.

But Ubisoft screwed it up, most likely because they're simply too cheap to pay what the stars required to do the job. They actually managed to get David McCallum and Robert Wagner to do the voices for their characters from the show, yet the rest of the characters are voiced by stand-ins that don't even attempt to imitate the voices of the actual actors. This lack of continuity in the voice actors was thus frustrating to me; I would rather have heard all impersonators rather than two of the actual actors mixed in among a cast of stand-ins.

Anyway, that's the plan for Valentine's Day. I'll come back and let you know how it goes and whether or not I was able to get away without actually buying flowers.

Skyrim Creation Kit Released

The Skyrim Creation Kit has been released.

Yay! Hip hip hooray!

The only legal way to get it is from Steam.

Boo! Hiss hiss! Boo!

PROPAGANDA

Nehrim v1.5.0.8

I've been meaning to do a post on this for quite some time, but somehow I always manage to get distracted by something else. Today however, I received a reminder on this in the form of a request from a fellow Nexus member. Apparently there is a "new" version of Nehrim out and my only mod for it needed to be updated in order for it to work at all. (The most recent version was actually released in June; like I said, I get distracted...)

What, you might ask, is Nehrim? It's a total conversion for Oblivion that's so huge that it really is a whole new world.

If English is your only language, be prepared to do a lot of dialog subtitle reading; this project was created in Germany thus all the spoken dialog is in German. Apart from that minor language barrier, I've quite enjoyed playing this mod and have been quite impressed. I hesitate to call it a "mod" though; as I said, it's a "total conversion" and as such is virtually an entirely new game.

There of course are some differences between Oblivion and Nehrim. Level advancement is handled by experience points, for example, and many encounters, dungeons and quests are set at static levels rather than changing with the player's level as they do in Oblivion. Which brings me to my little Nehrim mod. By default in Nehrim you can't fast-travel... EVER. Thus I created a simple little Nehrim fast-travel mod which enables you to do so once you've "discovered" a location (like in Oblivion). As mentioned above, I've updated the mod so that it will now work with the latest Nehrim version.

Apart from such differences in gameplay mechanics, some things will look and feel familiar. Old forts, caves and towns, for example, really aren't so different. Overall, Nehrim to me feels like a big German Oblivion DLC, but its size and scope puts any Bethesda DLC to shame.

Oh, and I should mention Nehrim's easy installation. Unlike some game total conversions, Nehrim is really risk-free. It installs into its own folder and uses copies of the Oblivion executable and data files, so there's no worries about any of your Oblivion stuff getting overwritten by this. If you install it and decide you don't like it, uninstalltion is just as simple and again does not affect your Oblivion files. (Darn spell-checker; "uninstallation" is indeed a word!)

So if you miss playing Oblivion and want to explore a totally new Oblivion-style world, I highly recommend Nehrim. It's one of the most epic Oblivion projects I've ever seen and is definitely worth a look.

MY DOOM LEGACY

Not to be confused with the classic Doom sourceport LEGACY, this is the page where I intend to leave an often-updated and thus ever-growing list of download links for my favorite Doom maps and map sets. Sooner or later too many cigarettes and Reese's Cups are going to do me in (or I'm going to get hit by a bus) and it just seems to me that it would be a shame for me to have put a lot of work into collecting quality maps and creating custom MAPINFO lumps and the like only to see them be lost forever and never be enjoyed by anyone else. Thus I will continue to post here links to all my uploaded projects for use with the ZDoom and GZDoom sourceports (and any others that support MAPINFO lumps). This is in no way any kind of attempt to take credit for the fine works listed here; I merely do this to share these works with other players who otherwise might have missed them. Like my page of general game-related downloads, a link to this page will always be present in the blog's sidebar.

Enjoy!

EDIT: 05/07/2012

Well, that's what I had intended to do, but unfortunately file servers can't be relied upon to keep my files around for very long. So, instead of sharing convenient map compilations as described above, I'll just have to be satisfied with sharing my favorite Doom content by providing download links to the individual files. Sorry, but that appears to be the best I can do for now. Don't worry, though; I'm still looking for great sets of maps and will add more to this list periodically.

SOURCEPORTS and Accessories

ZDoom by Randy Heit
GZDoom by Graf Zahl
DRD Team SVN Builds
ZDoom Launcher (various versions and authors)
UNLEASHED by Martin Allen

Editing Tools

DoomBuilder by CodeImp
SLADE 3

OBLIGE random map generator by Andrew Apted

MUSIC

PlayStation Doom Music WAD (Aubrey Hodges)

PSX music WAD at DOOM DEPOT



N64 Doom Music WAD (Aubrey Hodges)

Doom 64 music WAD at DOOM DEPOT

PSXSM (PlayStation Style Music)


Herculine's Doom Upgrade: Anniversary Edition

My very own monster and item randomizer for use with ZDoom and GZDoom. You can read more about it HERE.

The most recent version of the mod can be downloaded HERE or from the DoomWorld/id Games Archives.

BLIND ALLEY by Gene Bird

A set of 15 well-crafted Doom 2 maps, some of which are famous for their inclusion in the popular Community Chest map compilations.

BLIND ALLEY DoomWorld/id Games Archive search results.

TAB by Michael Contorno

53 often overlooked and underestimated Doom 2 maps from a prolific mapper.

TAB DoomWorld/id Games Archive search results.

MONOLITH by Richard Wiles

The complete Monolith and "Dickie" map sets for a total of 16 challenging levels of Doom 2 carnage.

Dickie and Monolith DoomWorld/id Games Archive search results.

CAOS by Antonio Moreno

10 interesting Doom 2 maps for the intermediate player.

CAOS DoomWorld/id Games Archive search results.

AXE by Anthony Connor

8 spacious maps from 1997, including a tribute to the band Metallica.

AXE DoomWorld/id Games Archive search results.

SOPA & PIPA

I generally try to stay out of politics, so this deliberately will be brief; but I also try to stay informed on issues regarding gaming and the internet, so I just wanted to take a minute to bring this up on the off-chance that somebody out there hasn't heard of this stuff already.

SOPA and PIPA are two congressional bills that could be passed into laws here in the U.S. and potentially affect the internet on a global scale. I won't go into a long diatribe here, but suffice it to say that these things were conjured up by politicians and corporate lawyers who believe that such laws will eliminate internet piracy and protect copyright holders -- basically new forms of DRM. In reality, however, I foresee that  (like the other forms of DRM already in use) these laws wouldn't eliminate piracy at all but instead just make things more inconvenient for honest gamers and game modders.

So, if you haven't heard of these or don't know much about them (and especially if you're here in the U.S. and have the ability to vote and write to congressmen) you might want to take a minute to investigate them further. I believe these laws could potentially change the way the internet works and largely limit the few freedoms we have and thus should be opposed as much as we are able. Here are a few reasons why...

EDIT: 01-17-2012

I just noticed an announcement that Wikipedia is going on a 24-hour strike in protest of SOPA and PIPA. (Just FYI.)

And here are some more facts from our friends at Google. (Sign the petition!)

And in other news, MegaUpload has been shut down by the F.B.I. permanently. (Suppose it was really only a matter of time...)

YOU'RE FIRED!

Today's DoomWorld News Headlines point to this article confirming Bethesda/ZeniMax "layoffs"* in the id Software department responsible for the game RAGE.

I guess you can't release games full of bugs and keep your job, after all...

*In quotes because the last job from which I was "laid off" like two years ago has never called me back to work and the building is in fact now a pile of rubble. In today's workforce, "laid off" has simply become a gentler way to tell workers they're fired.