The Fresh Prince of Persia, or: animation over matter

Have you ever considered what makes a game look good? Maybe it’s the backgrounds, some will say it’s the lighting, others yet the texture work. Well, we could make a case that it’s about all of that together. But perhaps the most important thing is the quality of the animations.

Think back to the 80’s. The Atari 2600 was on its way out, and the IBM PC was about to conquer the collective minds of humanity with its… uhm… 16 colors and no hardware scrolling. Okay. So at the time, animations weren’t really a concern. If your game had graphics at all, you were probably in a good place. King’s Quest let you move your little dude Graham! Amazing stuff. Even a powerhouse such as the NES wasn’t really concerned with animations. Difficult to hold several frames when your cartridge was filled up by a few lines of code. But 1989 eventually arrived and it was time for something more. It was time for… Prince of Persia.

That looks like a white leotard, actually?

A standard walking animation must be easy to make. Like, you make a standing sprite, then a sprite with the left leg forward, and then another one with the right leg forward. Mix them up a bit and you get a walking animation! (disclaimer: I have no idea how sprites creation works, I imagine it’s pretty hard actually). So when people saw the life-like running and jumping of the prince, they were amazed. He didn’t just look so realistic – it was also impressive that he would flow from running to jumping in a natural manner. What was that? Did they just waste their entire development budget on animations? Surely this was the future.

Sword duels in 2D!

You could argue that such a big focus on making sure that the animations would flow smoothly, meant that there was no way you could make a responsive game. If you need to make your characters jump in a realistic manner, then instantaneous jumps such as those seen in Mario and Sonic are impossible, right? Well, the future would eventually disagree, but we’ll go over that later. For now, let’s gape in amazement at those sword duels. In 1989, there was little better.

If you want to combine videogames with the gold era of cartoons, your animations better be up to par. Cuphead delivered.

Of course, animation being important is not news, and not just for games. People often think of Disney’s renaissance era movies and marvel at just how good the animation quality was back then. And if you remember Robot Carnival, one of the short stories had such detailed animations for its characters that it actually crossed the uncanny valley. A great-looking cartoon will be praised… but nobody will ever say that Arnie in The Running Man had such great running quality. That would be ridiculous. Because you see, a cartoon is 2D, and real life is 3D. Nobody expects anything other than life-like movements in real life. And said real life was coming fast in the videogames world.

Of course, there was the opposite approach too. Myst was barely animated. And it was glorious.

It wasn’t as sudden as I’m making it sound. Another World was a 2D game, but it used actual polygons to great effect. Just like Prince of Persia, that game prized itself on its animations that looked way better than what you could achieve with sprite-based work (but notice how it was equally unwieldy). And of course games like Alone in the Dark on one hand, or System Shock on the other, did a great job of mixing 2D and 3D. But we were reaching a conundrum fast. The movements in AITD were great for its time, but barely acceptable after a while. And nobody cared that the aliens in Duke Nukem 3D had maybe ten frames of animation total. But true 3D was a different matter.

That looks like a cool backflip, although also totally useless during actual tomb raiding.

When your entire world is 3D, you have to keep up appearances. And Tomb Raider showed the world what smooth animations meant in the 3D space. Lara Croft might have been defined by her pointy chest for many, but for many others she jumped and ran and grabbed ledges and somersaulted. Yes, the last bit was too much, but it all helped. It was also important to see that, just like Another World, the animations weren’t just good by themselves, these actions all flowed into each other quite naturally, of course given the limits of the era. And now that was the new standard. You can get away with iffy animation in 2D games. Maybe some early 3D stuff such as Quake would also get away with relatively few frames for its models, and people were too busy shooting fiends to notice. But an adventure game in 3D? You better had good animations, or you were going to get laughed out of the classroom.

Sword duels, finally in 3D!

So what about the originator, Prince of Persia? When it made the jump to 3D, it knew it had to deliver on that regard. And Prince of Persia 3D is… interesting. I’m still going through it, there’d be much to say about this ambitious yet broken mess of a game, but here and now I’ll just point out that it even one-upped Tomb Raider in how the titular prince moved. All actions follow each other in a natural manner. Sword fighting is quite a sight, a flurry of dramatic poses and blows exchanged, with light trails and tense music for good measure. Yet the game inherits the same problems as its predecessor and even amplifies them. There’s so much lag in your actions, a running jump requires a great deal of momentum, and to be fair even the sword duels don’t really work outside of the supposed spectacle. Prince of Persia 3D wanted to do too much, but Tomb Raider was already skirting the limits of what was deemed acceptably slow controls. And thus, our prince failed.

Sure, lifting yourself up like this might be realistic, but it is slow. Even slower than Lara, and she was already slower than my grandma.

Modern technology eventually gave us motion capture (although it was pioneered super early by Virtua Fighter 2, it didn’t become popular until the PS2 generation). Suddenly life-like animation became the norm, and devs also started seeing the value of snappy controls. Compare Shadowman to Tomb Raider: less precise maybe, but much more playable. In fact, there’s actually something to be said against the search for the most realistic animations (it is one of the reasons why Red Dead Redemption 2’s controls feel so heavy: you gotta wait for your characters to actually complete his actions).

Sword duels, in 3D… but also 2D… it’s come full circle.

But what about 2D? It may have become old news after polygons rocked our collective socks, but many devs didn’t stop using it. And then, eventually, Abe’s Oddysee showed that it was possible to make a game similar to Prince of Persia actually responsive. Abe runs and jumps like how you wanted the prince to run and jump. And then, possibly inspired by that game, the Prince of Persia Classic remake comes out in 2007. It’s almost a different game: even though the levels layout and basic gameplay loop is the same, the Oddworld feel permeates the whole thing. Now it’s the prince who runs and jumps like Abe did. Admittedly, it makes for a more playable experience (also because you get some quality of life enhancements for a much easier time), even if the graphics were old-looking and the animations at that point didn’t wow anyone anymore.

And he shall be the smoothest prince at that.

I’m in a Prince of Persia mood right now. I still have to get through POP3D. I want to try and finish it, despite its issues. And then I’ll have the 2008 game and the DS spinoff… quite the haul. Who knows if those modern games will have had the same effort put into animating the prince’s movements. However, given the predecessors, I’m hopeful. If nothing else, that my player character will move in a manner that befits the Prince of Persia.

S3 Savage IX on trial

While browsing for old cards (as usual), my eyes landed upon something called Savage IX, the first of S3’s attempts to breach into the laptop market. While I had read about the IX in the past, there was little to no info about it, other than some very basic specs, which might or might not be correct. The card itself was cheap enough, so I thought, why not see if I can clear the confusion? So I went and ordered it. As it turns out, things are never so easy.

Here’s the culprit. Notice the lack of heatsink, this was supposed to be a laptop part after all. Memory is integrated into the package itself. The backside looks very simple, presumably because of that.

The card was shipped in its box. As you might expect from an old laptop product, the packaging was the tackiest thing ever, and I especially loved the manual in broken English that contained information about every possible card, except the one you just bought. Of course. I don’t know who the vendor was, but even they didn’t want people to know they had just bought a Savage. Figures.

Trouble started immediately, by the way. Upon installing the drivers and rebooting, Windows 98 would seemingly become unresponsive. After a long time scratching my head and deleting drivers from safe mode, I finally noticed that Windows wasn’t unresponsive, rather it was in extended desktop mode. Yes, for whatever reason my monitor was set as secondary monitor (even though the card has no TV-out…) and even reinstalling the drivers didn’t change it. Laptop heritage? Either way, I was ultimately able to fix it from registry. In case anyone is actually interested in testing this card, I’ll save you the trouble and tell you what you need to change. Go to: “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Config\0001\Display\Settings”, then to the device subfolder, and set the string AttachToDesktop to 0. And just to be sure, change the string AttachToDesktop in the main folder too.

So let’s finally check the card. One final thing before we start: results have been inconsistent sometimes. At one point, 3DMark 2000 would give me a fillrate of 90MT/s, then the next time it would drop to 62MT/s. I thought maybe the chip was overheating, but it’s not even warm to the touch, despite the lack of heatsink. I can only assume the drivers are terrible like that. Also, vsync can be disabled from S3Tweak, but the framerate still seems capped and the resulting flickering is reminescent of the Savage 3D, albeit not as bad. Just for the sake of testing, I disabled it.

And of course, the specs: Pentium 3 450MHZ, 128MB SDRAM PC100, i440BX-2, Windows 98, 60hz monitor.

Powerstrip first. Well, it kinda bugs out. The core clock is rated at 14Mhz and you can’t even see the memory clock. It also says the data bus is 64-bits wide. That sounds more believable. I read some info on the internet that the data bus could be 128-bits wide, due to having its memory integrated in the package. But based on my results, I don’t believe that. Or perhaps, it’s true but makes no difference. Now, S3Tweak is slightly better, since it correctly recognizes the card and says the memory clock is 100Mhz. Could be, could be not. Unfortunately there’s no indication of the core clock, but we’ll get to that. MeTaL support is apparently present with version 1.0.2.5, but Adventure Pinball reverts to software rendering when I attempt to enable it. I’m going to assume it’s non-functional, like many other things on this card.

Check out that botched texture filtering. No surprise that it runs horribly in software mode, maybe they should have just kept to point sampling.

Checking out System Info on 3DMark reveals a horrible truth: the card doesn’t supported multitexturing at all, and Z-buffer is only 16-bits. Doesn’t look like a Savage 4 to me, then. What’s worse, it doesn’t even support S3TC. Why they would take out that kind of feature, I don’t know. It doesn’t support edge anti-aliasing either, but that doesn’t surprise me. Still, for a laptop card that was supposedly aimed at gamers, you’d think they would try and attract attention with some of their more popular features.

Some interesting results here. The card seems definitely closer to a Savage 3D than a Savage 4. Fillrate makes me think the SIX is clocked at 100Mhz just like its memory. Nevermind the high texture rendering speed on the S3D, that was probably due to vsync issues that caused heavy flickering. Polygon scores are higher on SIX, maybe some architecture improvement? But trilinear rendering is a lot slower. Now granted, many cards of the time weren’t doing real trilinear. However, the SIX apparently isn’t even attempting that, and doing something else entirely. Luckily that only happens in 3DMark, and the games seem trilinearly filtered.

Mipmapping? Where have you gone? At a glance, this is just bilinear filtering without mipmaps, which explains the sudden lower score.

As you can see, rendering quality is much closer to the Savage 3D than the Savage 4. There are however some issues with textures or maybe lightmaps. Luckily I haven’t noticed them anywhere else.

So much for 3DMark 99. Some quick info about 3DMark 2000: scores are very close to the Savage 3D (again), but actually higher all around. My S3D is probably an old model for OEM sellers, presumably running at 90Mhz. I’m sure it’s nowhere close to those 120Mhz Hercules chips. If the SIX is truly running at 100MHZ, then the higher results check out. Final Reality isn’t really worth checking out either, especially because I lost my detailed S3D scores, but I can say that just like that card, the SIX has some serious issues with the 2D transfer rate.

And did I say that 3DMark 2000 at 1024x768x16 gives out higher scores than the Savage 3D? Well, PC Player D3D Benchmark running at 1024x768x32 gives me 28.3fps, far lower than the S3D at 35.9fps, or the S4 at 41.5fps. That 64-bits data bus is looking right at the moment.

But enough with the syntethic benchmarks, and let’s have ourselves some game tests. The cards I included were as follow: Savage 3D and Savage 4 for obvious reasons. Also the Savage 2000, just for fun. Two more cards are included: the first one is the Rage LT Pro, a common laptop card for the time, albeit obviously older. The other is an Ati Rage 128 Pro Ultra. See, I kinda wanted to try and see how the Savage IX compared to the Mobility 128, another potential laptop card of its year. Unfotunately it’s quite expensive. So I went for the next best thing: looking at the specs, the Rage 128 Pro is too fast thanks to its 128-bits data bus, but the Ultra variant for the OEM market is only 64-bits, which corresponds to the Mobility. Everything else is very close, except for the 16MB of memory, but for my tests that shouldn’t count too much. As a whole, it should be a decent surrogate, I hope.

Sorry about the terrible chart. My OpenOffice skills are showing again.

If nothing else, the SIX supports OpenGL, and it’s even the same driver version as the S3D and S4. So we can try Quake 2 and MDK2. Results don’t look flattering to start with, however. Without multitexturing, there’s only so much the card can do. At 1024×768, it even falls behind the S3D despite its supposedly higher clocks. The Ultra is looking quite fast at this moment, and considering the Mobility 128 came out not much after the Savage IX, that didn’t look like good news for S3. Maybe it was more expensive though. The Savage 2000 is in a league of its own, expectedly.

Exciting times for S3. in MDK2, the SIX manages to actually beat the S3D by a sizeable margin, more than the higher clock would suggest. I’ll chalk that down to architecture improvements. But the drop at high resolutions is steep, which further convinces me that the data bus can’t be 128-bits. At any rate, the Ultra isn’t far ahead here, but the Savage 4 can’t be even approached. Check out the bottom… poor Rage LT Pro.

Things get muddier in Direct3D, because as I said before, disabling vsync can show some strange flickering, plus it doesn’t even seem to work all that well, as framerate in Incoming is still capped at 60fps. However, the average is higher, and it doesn’t appear to be double buffered. I’ve disabled it for the time being, meanwhile let’s cross our fingers.

Nevermind the Turok results, because T-mark was always an incredibly unreliable benchmark in my experience (a Matrox G200 beating the Geforce 2 GTS, really?). Let’s take a look at Incoming instead. The three bottom cards are stuck with vsync, so the results are probably not good for a comparison. Even so, we can take a look at the Ultra and the SIX. At 640×480, there is too much flickering, and I’m afraid it’s actually impacting the results. At 800×600 and 1024×768, things are much more bearable. Still, seeing the Ultra beaten by the SIX despite its dual texturing engine is quite the sight, and a far cry from the OpenGL results. In fact, even the Rage Pro can actually compete with the Ultra at 640×480.

I decided to spare the Rage LT Pro the embarassment here. Or maybe I just forgot. What would you expect anyway?

Let’s switch to 32-bits rendering and things are a bit muddier, especially at higher resolutions where vsync doesn’t factor in as much. The SIX actually falls to the bottom of the pack, while the Rage 128 architecture proves itself more efficient than the competition. Either way, even with vsync disabled, I don’t think the SIX could have beaten the S3D.

Again, the SIX and Rage LT are vsynced. However, as far as I could tell, the 128 Ultra was not. Despite this, you can see that it doesn’t perform very well. Maybe there are some issues with D3D, since in OpenGL the card is comfortably ahead of the old Savage line. Comparisons between the SIX and the Savage cards are impossible due to the refresh rate lock, which is a shame.

Somehow I don’t think vsync is disabled.

Here’s also Shadows of the Empire, just for kicks. None of the cards manage to render the fog properly, which is quite an achievement. Even then, the Ultra is clearly punching under its weight. What’s going on? Some early bottleneck during D3D rendering?

That’s all? No, there’s another small surprise. Let’s move to a DOS enviroment and try a few different resolutions in Quake. Mmh, what’s this? No matter which resolution you use, the monitor will be set to 640x480x60. Even 320×200, which every single other card I own renders as 720×400 and 70hz, as is proper. In fact, setting a resolution higher than 640×480 will cut off part of the image. I have no idea what could be causing this. Maybe it’s yet more laptop heritage? Or maybe it’s somehow decided that my monitor is actually a NTSC TV. This happens even on real DOS, without loading any drivers. Whatever the reason, it means the card is no good for DOS games. When I try to play Doom, it’s not as smooth as with other cards that run it properly at 70hz. It’s more like playing one of those console ports. Maybe it would be good for Normality, which switched between different resolutions between gameplay and inventory. But I can’t think of much else.

Well, there we have it. Conclusions? this looks like a slightly overclocked Savage 3D, yet there are clearly some architectural improvements. It fixes some of the bugs of the Savage 3D, after all. I’m still very hesitant to call it an off-shoot of the Savage 4, as I’ve read around. It lacks too many features, it’s slow, and there was no point for S3 to drop the texture merging feature of their more successful chip. The lack of S3TC is equally disappointing for a card supposedly aimed at the gamers market, even if we were talking about the budget-conscious ones. I also don’t believe the data bus is really 128 bits. On the other hand, even with vsync enabled, the card does look like it would have outperformed the Mobility 128 in D3D, despite its lack of multitexturing. OpenGL shows a different story, however, and the Ati architecture is indeed stronger on paper. It’s still weird that the card manages to be slower than the S3D in Quake 2, and drops further at higher resolutions in MDK2. That’s hard to explain. Maybe data bandwidth is lower. I should mention that Powerstrip set itself to 60Mhz when I tried to check the default clock, but I didn’t want to risk enabling it. Besides, the fillrate score from 3DMark 99 doesn’t seem to support that idea.

I wish I could have disabled vsync properly, since all other Savage cards let me do it. But I suppose things never go as planned. This was still an interesting card to test, with a few surprises along the way (and some swearing too). I don’t think I would have wanted to find one in my laptop though.

Terminal Velocity Review

Apparently, Saturday was “Review A Great Game Day”. Never heard of this before. But I’m not one to let these things slide. So let’s see… it’s still Saturday in Honolulu. I guess it still counts, right? Right. Let’s try and review something a bit less famous than usual.

This is actually quite representative of the game itself. What a rare sight.

Terminal Velocity was developed by Terminal Reality (can’t be a coincidence…) and published in 1995 by 3DRealms, back when they were still relevant. You probably remember the developers for pearls such as Kinect Star Wars and that Walking Dead shooter, but ages ago, they were also fairly big in the early Windows scene, making games that were at least trying to take advantage of the newly-fangled Direct3D technology, including Hellbender and Monster Truck Madness. I pity them, because by all accounts, early Direct3D was terrible.

Terminal Velocity is, for my money, still their best game (though admittedly I haven’t played all of them: I heard pretty good things about Nocturne). In case you couldn’t notice from the cover, it’s a space shooter, a very common genre in the mid 90’s, thanks no doubt to the amazing success of Descent, which had spawned several clones. But TV breaks the mold somewhat by letting you fly on large planets, making it less claustrophobic and far less nausea-inducing. Interestingly, you can still fly your ship in complete freedom, so it’s actually possible to go far above the clouds and near the atmosphere even. Good luck spotting your targets from there.

There are three camera modes: first-person, third-person, and a weird fixed camera third-person mode that is near unplayable but probably very cool for screenshots.

The structure is fairly similar, if somewhat repetitive: you get objectives to complete (usually flying to a spot and then destroying a target base), weapons to collect (lasers, missiles, your typical arsenal), enemies to kill, bosses to survive. Since everything takes place on open terrain, you are usually free to take the route you want, and exploration is even encouraged by hiding powerful weapons off the beaten path. You’ll also get attacked from all directions, so keep wary. Sometimes things can get overwhelming.

In order to retain a sense of purpose, you are often asked to fly through underground tunnels. These are presented as point A-to-B voyages where you need to dodge doors and destroy ships who just love ramming through your own. There’s a vague sense of Descent in these 3D metal tunnels, but with completely straight paths, it’s a bit more like a rollercoaster. For extra fun, try using the afterburner in there, and see if you can survive.

With the small radar pretty much useless, you’ll quickly learn to play with the super-imposed radar constantly on. Turok didn’t come first, guys.

The controls work fairly well for such an early game, so you shouldn’t have too much trouble with that. Even the graphics are quite pleasant for their time, once you get used to the giant pixels. Since you know I’m a 3D accelerators aficionado, I’ll also tell you the only “accelerated” version was made available for S3 Virge cards. Of course, in exchange for texture filtering, it actually runs slower than the base version. Don’t cry. Also, as was standard procedure for the era, there are not many music tracks in the game and the few available ones are repeated very often. Still, they are quite catchy, so I’m not complaining all that much. There are also vague hints of a story somewhere in there, presented at the start of each mission, if you can be bothered. I don’t think the developers cared that much either though.

A tunnel. It looks better in motion, I swear. The pixels aren’t attacking your eyes like thousands of small knives, for example.

There’s the distinct feeling that terminal Velocity could have been an all-time great, but it’s somewhat held back by its repetitive structure. With nine different planets and three stages on each, it would have taken a lot of variety to keep players interested throughout, but the game just doesn’t have that. The different tilesets are nice to look at, including giant volcanos places (maybe a Venus expy?) and snowy landscapes (before Skyrim made them all the rage), but I don’t know how many people will have the willpower to see it through to the bitter end – and bitter it was, if I recall some of the later bosses were an utter pain, made worse by the lack of saving during missions.

So, the game was repetitive, much like my reviews. That shouldn’t deter you too much though, because while one might not last long enough to see the ending, at least there’s fun to be had for quite a while. Besides, most 90’s games didn’t even have a meaningful ending, so what do you care? Get on that ship and fly to your heart’s content. The game is easily available on GOG and Steam. Did you know there’s even an Android version? Never tried it, but just to be sure, I’d steer clear of it. Besides, I still have the old disc. Fun times.

Wink to the Past

Some days ago, my motherboard died. Or so I thought. See, when your PC only turns on without beeping or showing anything on the screen, my first thought is “reset the CMOS”. If that doesn’t work, “try a different power supply”. Only if that doesn’t work either, I change the mobo. Unfortunately, in my haste, I skipped the second step.

So after changing the motherboard and noticing it still didn’t work, I tried the power supply. That made it! Except… the computer was now turning on with the different motherboard. Too late, I didn’t think about it. Windows 98 suddenly got messed up, and after a couple reboots where things seemed fine, it stopped seeing almost every peripheral in the computer. And that was the chance I needed to reset everything.

Microsoft advertising OpenGL? It was more likely than you think.

For a change, I put Windows 95 again. Nothing against Windows 98, but I do remember it was slightly harder to run DOS games properly on it for some reason, even though both 95 OSR2 and 98 run the same version of MS-DOS.

I even put a Virge in the case during the installation process, to make sure everything would go as smoothly as possible. I don’t think there’s a more supported card than the Virge out there. And sure enough, the installation was smooth and flawless. I also found a really good USB driver, called XUSBUPP, which was a lot easier to install than Microsoft’s own driver. I remember that one would completely ruin your Windows installation if you messed up.

After tweaking the Autoexec and Config files. These are the kind of sights I love.

Well, there’s just one problem. Ok, a few problems. First one is, the mouse wheel doesn’t work – perhaps I can look into fixing it. Another problem is just how rough the thing feels at times – you can’t choose which version of the driver to install from an INF file, it seems.

The other problem is 3D Mark 99. I thought it would just work the same, but it turns out it won’t recognize my Pentium 3 as a Pentium 3. Perhaps that required Windows 98… anyway, I’m stuck with basic Intel optimization, which means my CPU score went down from 7000 to 4500.

(that also shows us that there isn’t much difference at all between Pentium 2 and 3, aside from the higher clocks, if you aren’t employing some optimization. The P2-350mhz scored roughly 3500, which perfectly matches the 4500 scored by the P3-450mhz)

This would make further card testing partially useless, depending on the card employed. More powerful chips like the TNT2 and Voodoo 3 obtain a fairly lower score. Of course, it would not affect other game tests, since nothing else in my benchmark suite had those P3 optimizations.

Nor, it seems, does it affect less powerful cards in a meaningful manner. The Trident Blade 3D – which I momentarily elected as card of choice due to needing something that could install quickly and painlessly, much like the Virge but less crappy – had its score going down from 2850 to 2750. That sounds like the GPU is bottlenecking the CPU instead. The G250 also went down a measly 50 points, from 3050 to to 3000. And weaker cards should be even closer. I do have an interesting 1996 thing coming up, and also waiting to see if my bid on a SiS 6326 gets through. So those should be safe for testing.

The last problem? I forgot to back up my old 3DMark database results. Sigh.

Cover Fascination

There’s something utterly engrossing about the unknown. I remember shopping in video games stores many years ago, when 3D was still new, a basic bilinear filtering seemed like a miracle, and Sonic was still cool (not that I’d know, I was a PC player at the time). With so many boxes on display, there were a few ones bound to capture my imagination.

Covers of Myst clones always were especially nice to look at. They better be, since the whole game is spent staring at fixed screens. By the way, I got to play this one recently, and didn’t like it. Maybe my younger self would have appreciated it nonetheless.

It’s a weird feeling, being spell-bound like that. You suddenly think that the game must be an amazingly engrossing experience that will result in your life improving in an otherwise impossible manner. If I actually bought the game, which didn’t happen all that often because boxed games were usually expensive, perhaps the spell would be broken. Perhaps not. Your resistance to suckiness is far higher when you are a kid. I remember some horrible crap quite fondly.

Of course this cannot happen anymore nowadays. If there’s some midly interesting-looking cover, I’ll be on the internet faster than you can say “reviews”. So this is all nostalgia. But, my early years have been quite long, and there are some games I don’t even remember looking at. Just seeing the cover on the internet by random chance, would be enough to make me remember. And then I’d have to check that game out, and break the spell. It happened often, and it will happen again.

This cover doesn’t look that good. But it still seemed strangely interesting to me. Maybe it was a sign that my discerning skills were getting better, because the game was, and still is, amazing.

In a way, feels like I’m purposely hurting myself. But then, it also means that my curiosity is stronger than my nostalgia. That’s a nice thought. Makes you feel young, doesn’t it?

Everlasting life means everlasting frustration

My current job came to a close last Friday, which means I have a lot of free time (of which some will have to be spent looking for another job… such is life for my generation here).

Apparently today is Quake’s 20th birthday. Have a look at some of the amazing texture work. Wouldn’t you want a gate made out of human bones in your garden too?

So of course I’ve had time to play games this whole week. The one game that has captured most of my attention has been Forbidden Siren. Yes, you know the one that was remade on the PS3? Well, I already played that one ages ago. I’m talking about the PS2 version here. I didn’t know what to expect, but after finishing it, I now find it a fundamental step in stealth and general game design. Most importantly, the two lessons to take are as follows:

1- stealth works pretty well when you don’t have full visibility over your enemies. You can sightjack Shibitos to see what they see, but you can’t actually move their viewpoint, so often you’ll have to understand on your own where the player character is. Overall, it comes together as one of the most engaging takes on stealth I’ve ever played.

2- please, please,give your players good hints on how to proceed. I actually kinda liked the repetitive design of missions, since it eventually made you learn all the ins and outs of the relatively few maps. But I could have done with something a bit more specific than “hide this character in a special place” and “search the house and the well”. Does that sound vague enough? I bet they could have made it even more vague. Maybe “look around”.

This music cover is a lie. If you tried moving around with the flashlight on, you’d get Shibito on your tail almost immediately. Don’t do that.

In the end, I had to play almost always with a guide. And what’s the point of survival horror played with a walkthrough?

Analysis on biological population in Quake

How much entertainment can you derive from numbers when you are bored? Judging from the hours I spent making this post, quite a while. Most of it was due to my horrible spreadsheet skills, but anything counts.

So having just finished the Quake expansions, I got to thinking – could you learn biology from Quake? Or at least statistics? Jurassic Park, at least the book version of it, taught us that even a mathematician can become a biologist in a matter of hours. So, with my degree in economics and therefore lack of a soul, clearly I’m the best candidate to learn about living beings. The focus today will be on the Hell Knight, or Death Knight as they also call him.

Spoiler: the Hell Knight tends to pick up fights with Ogres pretty often. Spoiler 2: the Hell Knight usually wins.

Why the Hell Knight? Because he’s the coolest monster, so sue me. That aside, he’s also one of the most ubiquitous, second perhaps only to the Ogre, who mostly disappears in the fourth episode anyway. So we can probably learn something about population if we analyse his appearances. So let’s get started with the graphs, which took me a long time because I really suck at formatting cells in OpenOffice. The monsters numbers were obtained from the Quake Wiki, a very good resource, and required read if you’re a fan.

Ok, so this is the number of Hell Knights in each level of the main game. As you can see, he doesn’t appear at all in the first episode. Clearly he’s deemed too badass and dangerous for starting players – better pit them against Fiends and Shamblers instead! Could also be that he hadn’t been created yet when the shareware levels had been made. But this mundane a theory is not fit for a complicated analysis such as this one.

Granted, the total number of monsters doesn’t tell us all that much. We need some relative numbers, such as percentages! After all, you can’t call yourself a scientist if you only work with absolutes.

Better now. Hardly readable, but this is the best I could muster for now. It’s worth mentioning that I’ve put the secret level for each episode as the last one in these tables. Reasons vary: the secret level is usually more difficult, and since the difficulty of the levels in Quake tends to follow an upward progression (I’m making words up as I go here), it makes sense to put them last. Also, the name for the maps (ExMx) always have the secret level as the last one. As you can see, science is always right.

Now we have some numbers. How do we make them a little more understandable? Why, with graphs. And pretty pictures. A picture is worth a thousand words, so a graph must be worth a thousand numbers. Let’s translate all of these arab numericals into bars.

Great. Look at all those bars going up, to the sky, like a shuttle aiming for infinity and beyond. Putting this graph on any degree dissertation is guaranteed to score top marks. So uh, now we can analyse a bit. The first level never has any Hell Knights, because they don’t appear in the military bases. And then, you can see they are numerous in the second episode in particular. Not so much in the third one, and then they return for the final episode.

Let’s try and look at the graph for the relative distribution, just because it’s the last one missing.

So, uhm. The Hell Knight is most prevalent in the second episode, but also most uneven. The third episode seems to show a downward trend overall, implying perhaps that stronger monsters start to take its place. The return for the final episode might be thus explained: as Ogres start to disappear, the Hell Knight takes their place as the standard mook. That also would fit well with the relatively even distribution.

Some statistics, but not much biology, I’m afraid. The first graph shows, in the fourth episode, something that looks like a gaussian distribution, a typical phenomenon in living systems. But this is not a living system, right? So I’m not actually sure what I wanted to say, but uhm. I’m actually just making all this stuff up as I go.

Anyway, statistics also say that 3 rockets are enough to gib a Hell Knight, and by the third episode you’ll be using the rocket launcher a lot. So that’s a lot of pieces flying around, and biologically speaking, with no more corpses for Quake to resurrect (does he even resurrect bodies?), maybe you can make them go extinct?

Or maybe… life finds a way.

Expansion packs for people with low standards

Imagine being in the late 90’s. Your game is a hit, perhaps unexpected, perhaps not, but anyway you find yourself wanting to monetize on it. Internet is still budding, DLC isn’t even an acronym yet, and if you tell someone about “microtransaction” they’ll look at you weird. But that doesn’t mean companies didn’t already have a way to make money on a successful game. They were just called expansion packs.

Aside from the obvious chance for a quick sequel, which might have been unfeasible depending on the time available, any developer could just put together a few levels and sell them to the players. Sometimes they could even simply license other people to sell levels for their games! The most curated of these expansions could change a game radically: look no further than Malice for Quake. If they didn’t feel like going through that much trouble, they were usually just level packs with a few different models as a token effort.

The final boss of Scourge of Armagon looks a lot like a Strogg. Considering this pack came out when Q2 was still many months away, you have to wonder if it was influenced by its development, or vice versa.

But one problem arises: these expansions often weren’t nearly as good as the original game. Not even officially licensed packs were safe from this rule. Reasons are varied: for example, they were often more difficult – the logic being that a player who buys the expansion has already finished the main game and thus wants a bigger challenge. But using Scourge of Armagon (picture above, except that the final boss is the only easy part of the game) as an example, they often went overboard with it. Sure, put me in a room full of Fiends with just a nailgun at my disposal. Perhaps it was an attempt to go back to its Doom roots, but Quake isn’t as well suited for that kind of gameplay.

Another issue is just how gimmicky many of those levels feel. Understandable: if your players have already seen all a game has to offer, you can only surprise them with something new, and everyone will have differing ideas about them. Unfortunately, many of these gimmicks are just that, gimmicks. And adapting the levels around them feels incredibly forced. There is one cool bit in SoA where you have to escape from a spiked wall trap, but that’s just about the only one I can remember: and in 15-something levels, it’s not a lot.

Well, I have a second expansion pack ready to be played, so I guess not.

Presumably, people wanted to play more of the game so badly, they were willing to put up with this. And to be fair, among the really bad levels included in the packs, you would sometimes find a gem. It was quite rare though. But without internet, one could only rinse through all of the levels on the disc and hope to at least get their money’s worth of it, and relive some of the magic of the original game. Despite being officially licensed, Scourge of Armagon doesn’t scratch that itch.

I remember even at the time, reading through games magazines, that it got mixed reviews. Still a youngster full of hopes and dreams, I was crushed by this: how could more Quake not be an amazing thing? They must have been biased – maybe they hated Quake to begin with! Despite that, I never picked up the expansions for one reason or another, so I couldn’t see my folly. I do now, all too clearly. I have better hopes for Dissolution of Eternity, but going in with tempered expectations will help.

Random quest for a random guy, with a side of random rewards

A case could be made about procedural generation in games. Most titles today use it, to a more or less successful degree. When it works, you have what is probably the ultimate selling point: no playthrough is like the previous one! This should, in theory, offer you unlimited replayability.

Maybe we live in a world of illiteracy. Or maybe it’s a glitch in the Matrix.

At times, however, it doesn’t work. And if there’s still some rough patches today, imagine back in 1996, when very few developers actually did it. Already in 1994, The Elder Scrolls: Arena (one of my favorite games despite everything) decided to jump over the familiar concept of pre-made maps in favor of completely randomized dungeons and cities. Only the main story dungeons were baked in advance: everything else was made on the fly.

Very convenient. I wonder why it is that every mission in this game must have a time limit (most of which is spent travelling to the location).

It worked somehow: while I have already mentioned the repetition in dungeon floor layouts, overall the game masked its randomization well enough. You could start walking from one city to another and never get anywhere because the game would simply generate more terrain. And then you’d probably hit a memory overflow somewhere and the game world would glitch out. Well, everyone just used fast travel for this reason. And who can forget entering a city and finding it full of monsters, then leaving the city, then returning and opening the same house again, only to find a different interior. It was glorious. An everchanging world.

Rats or bats. Again, very convenient. In case you are not invested in the TES lore, this is pretty much the basic starting quest for the Fighters Guild in just about every game in the series.

Daggerfall does away with that. The world was generated at random during development, then printed onto the disc itself as it had been generated. Meaning that the world as the player sees it, is not actually random. You can enter a dungeon the first time, then leave it and return days later for a different mission. The layout will be the same (but curiously, your automap will have been erased). Missions themselves, however, are randomized. And sometimes you will be sent to the same dungeon two times in a row, looking for a different objective (or why not, even the same one as before). And then you’ll have to explore the whole dungeon again, because quest locations are a handful.

Imagine wading through endless corridors that all look the same. Now imagine doing it all over again because the game doesn’t save the automap between quests.

This is made even worse by another issue – all of the quest dungeons are incredibly confusing. Aside from being utterly huge, so much that you just get bored of going around after a while, they also have ridiculous features such as bricked walls that transport you to an entirely different room, or switches that activate something on the other end of the dungeon with no indication as to what exactly they just did. Actually, I’m not sure if any of these things are bugs, rather than intentional. Either way, it gets boring fast.

Good thing nobody cares about the bloodthirsty grizzly bear right next to them in the attic. Of note: nobody ever explains why there is a grizzly bear in their attic.

And get bored you will, because almost every quest I’ve been given, involved going to a dungeon like those. You’ll also learn that effectively all the locations in the map are made up of two words choosen from a pool, such as “The Tower of Ashhart”, “The Ruins of Ashtower”, “The Tower of Hardhart”, and so on. Way to break the immersion. And it’s not just the location, everyone seems to have the same name. Woodsley must be the most common surname in Tamriel. You will see more heretics with green-dressed lovers than you’d wish. Sometimes, if you are lucky, the lover will be dressed in blue. Now that is shaking things up.

This is like System Shock all over again, but you can’t pick up those heads. Too bad. Throwing heads around was a great time waster. I like to think even SHODAN was appalled.

In short, you can see why Morrowind did things the way it did. A curated world just allows for more possibilities, but especially, it avoids stuff like this. And honestly, even the only advantage of this approach – the huge world – doesn’t seem that much of an advantage if you always have to fast travel. In fact, the continuous repetiton makes the world of Daggerfall seem ridiculously small after a while. And that, my friends, is the biggest failure of all.

When only the dagger falls

Going back to the biggest map in the history of videogames can feel pretty damning, but that feeling isn’t always evident. Morrowind started you out in a small village to make you feel a little less lost. While Arena thrusted you immediately in a big city. Daggerfall goes even further and tells you to choose any city to begin with, and then spreads out its giant map for you. Starting is a little heavy.

I’m a big fan of Arena, but I wanted to really see if Daggerfall was better than I remembered it. So I made up a barbarian character, and once I got out of the training dungeon, I decided I wanted to venture into a real dungeon!

I came out of the Privateer’s Hold during a snowy day. Just moving around a bit makes you feel how much better it looks compared to Arena. My first decision was “let’s head to the closest city, and without using fast travel”.

Well, it took me around 8 minutes of running to cover roughly one millimiter of map. But I made it! And to be fair, I didn’t have much to do. I could have taken up a few quests, but I really wanted to do some dungeoning by myself first. Especially because I remembered that the quests in Daggerfall often have a time limit.

So I once again set out, this time for the closest dungeon. It takes me another long while, and in the meantime, I got to see some nice night-time views. This really reminds me of Loom for some reason. I’m sure this sounds heretical. I won’t say it again, I swear.

Finally I reach the dungeon spot. There is a lot of tombs. At least in the Daggerfall region, many of the dungeons are graveyards. You have to wonder why the people bury their dead so far away from the cities. It must be a hard job for the carriers. But considering how many skeletons you find around, perhaps they are just wiser than us. I know some people who have graves in their garden! Don’t they think about the risks?

Oh boy, my first dungeon in the game. I’m so excited.

Well… that was disapponting. I killed a giant rat and a bat, picked up some 50 gold and a crappy weapon, and then it was done just like that. This was kind of an anticlimax.

One of the biggest problems in Arena was the dungeon design. Not that it was necessarily bad, but the random generator was very primitive: essentially, almost every dungeon would have exactly the same layout as the previous one. There were maybe 9 or 10 floor layouts the game would choose from. So after just a little while, all the dungeons floors would start to look the same. Daggerfall does away with it in favor of corridor layouts, which decreases the feeling of dejavu (note: it doesn’t quite remove it. Corridor pieces are still finite and recurring. My favorite but is the “Y-shaped corridor filled with water”); but it may also result in smaller and less exciting dungeons like this one.

Of course, I then proceeded to enter another dungeon, which was several times larger, and got lost in there quickly. The automap system is ridiculously bad, so good luck finding the way out again. At this point, you start to think that maybe games like Morrowind had a point in going for a smaller but more focused design. For now, let’s just pick up more quests and see how far I can take this barbarian. And hey, getting lost in a dungeon is still better than doing exactly the same investigation quest two times in a row, just with slightly different names and places. Don’t make me regret choosing you, Temple of Stendarr.

Just a very small section of the second dungeon. The automap will make you want to cry.