The Stack

Everyday Shooter makes one really big departure from standard practice in shooters: in most cases, you don’t get any points for shooting stuff. In fact, you never get points just for shooting stuff. At most, shooting stuff releases square chips that you can then collect for points, possibly wasting valuable time or putting yourself at risk in the process — and these chips are the only source of points in the game. But most things don’t even release chips, unless they’re destroyed as part of some kind of chain or combo.

You might wonder why I care. I’m seldom concerned with score, unless it affects game mechanics somehow. Which it does. Certain milestones yield extra lives, of course, and while they don’t come as fast as in Robotron, I always seem to manage to get a few. (The first extra life is at 200 points. I’m not sure how it goes after that. I typically seem to wind up with something over 2000 points per game, but I don’t think I get anywhere near 10 extra lives in the process.)

More important are the unlockables. See, your points build up from game to game, going into a pool that you can spend on stuff. There seem to be three categories of things you can buy: graphical effects that make no difference to game mechanics, additional starting lives, and the ability to play specific levels in isolation without going through all the previous levels to get to it. (For that last one, you have to actually reach the level normally before you can buy it.) Obviously the first few lives are must-haves, but the marginal price seems to go up exponentially. (And I do mean exponentially. That word gets misused a lot, but not on my blog.) I can foresee a point when the single-mode levels become a more attractive expenditure: when I’m having difficulty mastering the most-recently-reached level and want to practice it without wasting time on levels I’ve already mastered.

Because, in the tradition of the arcades of old, there’s no permanent progress within a game. When you run out of lives, all you can do is start over from the very beginning, which becomes tiresome. I suppose the buying of unlockables is an attempt at finding a compromise between this uncompromising design and the more modern approach, where progress is regarded as your right just for playing a lot. And really, it works pretty well, but I think I’d be happier if it worked a little faster.

In the last 24 hours, I’ve been involved in two more office Team Fortress 2 sessions. The first was apparently on the game’s anniversary of release or something: all the characters wore little party hats (on top of any other hats they normally wear), and, when killed, exploded into balloons and confetti.

As a result, I’ve given a serious try to two more character types: the Demoman and the Sniper. The Demoman, master of the grenade launcher, actually seems pretty bad for this small-team stuff. When there’s only three to a side, you spend a lot of time alone, waiting for your teammates to respawn, and the Demoman is essentially helpless when alone: the delay before his grenades go off means that he can’t really kill any but the most oblivious of victims. His value, it seems to me, is more in the threat of damage than in the damage itself — to limit the opponents’ options by placing obvious threats in front of them. I’m told that the use of grenades in real-life combat is similar — that the point of them isn’t so much to kill the enemy as to make them take cover or flee. Anyway, I found the Sniper much more satisfying, even though I’m rubbish at it. Although classified as Support rather than Offense, killing is all the Sniper does.

The first session left me wanting more, so after I got home, I tried running it on my home PC for the first time. Trying out the Developer Commentary tracks, I was alarmed to find that my machine spontaneously switched off, multiple times. This is an unprecedented problem. I’ve seen games exit to the desktop, freeze up Windows, and BSOD, but never just make the machine power off without so much as a beep of warning. Maybe the graphics card is drawing too much power or something?

Everyday Shooter is a title I’d heard before, but didn’t know much about: I knew it was abstract, and it had received some attention around the same time as Portal, but that’s about all I could tell you. Somehow I had got the idea that it had a great many levels, each with its own rules. That’s half-right — there are only eight levels, each more elaborate than I had been led to believe. And yes, each level does work a different way. The controls stay consistently Robotron-like, but they vary in enemy mechanics, and in particular in how you create the chain reactions that clear the most enemies and potentially net the most points.

I also wasn’t expecting it to turn out to be a member of that severely underpopulated genre, the Music Shooter. Instead of zaps and explosions, your shots produce notes, or even entire riffs, played on an electric guitar. These sounds become part of the music playing though the level, always an unaccompanied guitar piece, as abstract as the shooter itself. The underlying songs are linked to the levels’ structure, and in a way that suggests that the song, rather than the level, is the dominant element. Each level lasts exactly as long as it takes to play the song, and changes in what’s going on in the game are governed by shifts in the music more than by anything the player can do. The game’s creator even refers to it on his website as an “album”. I’d almost say that it turns shooter mechanics into a kind of dance, but really, that’s something that’s always been inherent in the genre — particularly in scrolling shmups, which share Everyday Shooter‘s unstoppably flowing nature. All too often, however, those games interrupt the flow by stopping the music and the action when the player gets hit. Everyday Shooter understands what it’s doing too well to make that mistake.

It’s definitely what I’d call an art game, which is a little ironic, given its origin. According to the author’s notes, it was created to get away from the mistakes of a previous project that he describes as “a ridiculous concoction of self-indulgent, games-are-art-theory-innovation wankery” by getting back to basics. But of course the basics are art. Like those Grecian urns that Keats liked so much, it’s an art born of human requirements. Theory is all very well, but its importance can be overstated.

It’s been over a month since my last workplace Team Fortress 2 session, but we finally managed another one. We ran a private server with only six players, three on each team. Over the weeks since the last session, there’s been some consideration among this group of what game mode to use for small-team play. In the last update, Valve gave us the answer: King of the Hill.

TF2 has several modes based on capturing “control points”, which you do by standing near them for a period of time. (As I understand it, each player within range exerts influence on the control point, pushing it towards ownership by one team or the other. Once it’s pushed all the way to being owned by one team, it remains owned until the opposing team pushes it all the way back.) King of the Hill mode is such a mode, but with only one control point in the center — a variant simple enough that it’s surprising that it took them this long to add it. It’s good for small groups because it concentrates everyone’s attention on a small part of the map. Not necessarily their physical presence, mind you — a Sniper can still stand a long distance away and affect the battle, as one player proved.

I started this session playing a Soldier, the class armed with a rocket launcher, on the basis that the blasts, even when nonfatal, could push people off the hill, as it were. This turned out to not work: the control point’s range is large enough for people to dodge rockets without leaving it. The Soldier was still pretty effective, mind you — I’m told that picking it is never a mistake, regardless of the map. Still, I switched to the flamethrower-armed Pyro after a while, deeming its hard-to-avoid spread of flame a good way to clear the hill of interlopers. It seems to me that a team composed entirely of Pyros and Snipers could do pretty well on these maps. But what to I know? I’m still a beginner at this game.

I’ve been busy these last few weeks, and look to remain busy for a few weeks yet, but I should probably write up a little something about my inaugural experience with TF2. It’s been a long time since I played an online FPS, mainly because there came a point when it was impossible to be good enough to compete without spending more hours per day practicing than I cared to, or could afford to. There was a time when I was office Quake champion, but only because I was the first to figure out the benefits of permanently turning on mouselook (wich modern FPS games don’t even let you turn off). But that was a very short time. It did, however, lead to my first taste of the original Team Fortress, back when it was a Quake mod. I understand that there have been a number of other versions of the game between this beginning and TF2, but I know little about them.

I remember thinking at the time that the whole idea of assigning gameplay-mandated roles had some potential, but that this potential was largely wasted due to the players’ general lack of interest in actually playing as a team and acting in concert. It would be surprising if this had changed for the better over the years that Generation 4chan got online, but I was pleasantly surprised that the dev team had come up with ways to compensate for it, with gameplay modes that really encourage specialization.

For example, on a Payload map (a mode that is, as far as I know, unique to TF2), one team has to push a cart full of explosives along a track to the enemy base before time runs out. The attacking team needs people to stay by the cart and push it and also needs people to scout ahead and clear out resistance. Which you can do most effectively depends on your chosen class — for example, the fast but fragile Scout will find that sticking by the slow-moving cart negates their one advantage. The defending team obviously needs to get people away from the cart, and the rocker-launcher-wielding Soldier class seems ideal for this, as the blast from their weapons can clear people out of cart-pushing range even if it doesn’t kill them. Meanwhile, their Engineers will be taking advantage of the cart’s fixed route by placing automated gun turrets well in advance of it, while their Snipers will be pressing as close to the enemy base as they dare in order to keep people from reaching the cart in the first place. Or at least that’s how it went when I played.

The game’s style is one of exaggerated, cartoony slapstick. Humor in games seems to be one of my recurring themes this year, and I’ve mentioned before how TF2 has been credited with creating a resurgence of humor in the industry. And it does it without a lot of explicit jokes — mainly it just gives the players the tools for inflicting absurd harm on each other and standing back. Much has been written about this already, but the really interesting thing about the slapstick here is that it’s even identifiable as such. I mean, the action really isn’t all that far separated from that of any other FPS. The whole genre has always been proudly over-the-top, from Wolfenstein 3D onward. So why does this game come off as more of a comedy than most? The caricatured character art and animations are of course a large part of it, but this is not sufficient in itself to leave a humorous impression. I think the pacing helps. Let’s say an enemy Heavy ambushes you, and you return fire, but you die first. This takes about the same amount of time to happen as it takes to read that sentence aloud. Which is to say, it lasts just long enough for the player to fully register that it’s happening, and doesn’t drag on beyond that moment. Obviously not everything is like this, though — in particular, two of the classes, the Sniper and the Spy, specialize in killing the enemy before the enemy knows they’re there. And apparently there’s a tradition of rivalry between these two classes.

One thing I’ve been uncertain about is how this game fits into the Oath. TF2 isn’t winnable, and it keeps adding more content — even now, nearly two years after its release, it keeps getting special bonus items as updates. This puts it into the same category as MMORPGs. Also like MMORPGs, it requires other players online, and thus won’t necessarily be easily turned back to after a delay of years. In short, it doesn’t fit within the model of the Stack. Nonetheless, I’m willing to call this game Complete once I’ve spent a nontrivial amount of time trying out each of the character classes. So far, I’ve tried the Scout, Heavy, and Soldier. Six more to go.

The scene I abandoned at the end of my last session is in fact the final combat sequence of the game, and quite a scene it is — by far the most satisfying fight in the episode, full of fiero and adrenalin. Let me describe it in detail.

First of all, as I said in my last post, Striders are marching on your base, which is located on a lushly-wooded mountainside dotted with rustic cabins. The cabins hold supplies, including dispensers for a kind of sticky bomb that you can lob at the Striders with your Gravity Gun, then shoot with a pistol while they’re stuck to destroy the Strider instantly. The bomb dispensers are important because you can only carry one bomb at a time. The Striders more or less ignore you, but they’re escorted by their smaller cousins the Hunters, which don’t. So right away there’s a tradeoff in where you devote your attention: you can’t ignore the Hunters, but it’s bad to let the Striders stay alive too long too, especially since they can blast apart the cabins where you get your bombs. In addition, Hunters have weapons that can disintegrate the bombs you’ve tossed (without detonating them), so if you’re going to try to kill a Strider before demolishing its escort, you have to at least make sure the Hunters are distracted or too far away to do anything about it — which is actually pretty easy to accomplish, because the Hunters will break off to chase you while the Strider just keeps on walking.

Except if you wind up in a running battle like that, you’re probably going to wind up too far away from the bomb dispensers to attack the Strider. The battlefield here is large, and what’s more, too heavily forested to see more than a small part of it at a time. You have a car: it lets you get around faster than you could on foot, it’s equipped with Strider-detecting radar, and if you have room to accelerate, it makes a pretty good anti-Hunter weapon. But it’s not as maneuverable as you might like on those rough mountain roads, and you can’t launch bombs from it, so you have to get out sometimes, and it’s all too easy to get separated from it when you’re dodging Hunters.

So there’s a whole mess of conflicting motivations that you have to sort out on the fly as the situation evolves: attacking the Striders vs defending yourself, staying maneuverable vs getting places fast, going where the enemy is at the moment vs staying where you can get more bombs. It’s all a mad scramble. There are friendly soldiers stationed here and there to help you through it, but, since they don’t have any anti-Strider weapons, their main role in combat is distracting the Hunters. Their real purpose in the game, though, isn’t tactical at all, but emotional: they’re there to give a sense that you’re not fighting this battle singlehandedly (even though you pretty much are), but that you’re all in this together. Whenever a Strider is downed, they let out hearty yells of triumph and congratulation. The whole level would feel very different without that detail. Where most of the combat scenes in the series are designed to give a sense of calamity or panic, this is the “Oh my god we’re actually winning” level.

Afterwards, all that’s left is some staged scenes where plot events occur around you as you walk to the final room, where there’s a dramatic reversal and a cliffhanger. And now, for the first time since I began HL2, I have to wait along with everyone else for the next episode.

Time to get the numbers down. Time to try a game that I can reasonably expect to finish in a weekend.

After my first multi-hour session of HL2E2, I’m well into the sixth of its seven chapters, facing what amounts to the Half-Life version of the Battle of Hoth, trying to repel a dozen Striders marching on the rebel base. Striders are the immensely tall things that I’ve referred to before as “tripod robots”, but by now I’ve had enough opportunity to see them close up and realize that they’re not robots at all. They’re three-legged alien cyborg crustaceans. Most of the Combine war machines are at least partly organic. One of the new monsters for this episode, the loping tripodal Hunter, doesn’t have any visible organic components, but its behavior is animal-like enough to suggest that it at least has an organic brain.

The other new monsters this time around are the luminescent acid-spitting variants of the Antlion. Much of the midgame is spent in their warren of glass-smooth tunnels, helping the Vortigaunts on an errand that would have been a lot easier if they still knew how to use pheropods. I found the new antlion grubs particularly disquieting. They’re about the size of your forearm and completely non-aggressive. There’s some evidence that they’re fed on human meat, but they basically just sit there glowing and occasionally wiggling, waiting for you to squish them. If you don’t want to squish them, tough. You’re going to squish some whether you want to or not, because they’re often on the floor in places where you want to walk. The worst part is that when they’re squished, they emit a little glowing crumb that, when picked up, restores a little bit of health. Is Gordon eating something that came out of a dead alien bug? Intellectually, I know that I’ve eaten worse things in Nethack, where consuming monster corpses in order to gain their powers is a pretty important part of the game, but it’s all very abstract there, without the visceral revulsion you get from graphics. Still, you get used to it, just like you get used to the violence and gore.

Even taking full advantage of my infinite continues, I can only manage to get to a level somewhere into the early-to-mid 40’s. At that point, I simply stop making progress.

To understand this fully, you have to understand a bit more about the game than I’ve yet described. First of all, dying even once means you have to start the level over from scratch. Things you killed before you died are resurrected along with you, and any powerups other than warp tokens are lost. (On the plus side, dying recharges your superzapper, the kill-everything weapon that can be used once per life per level.) Thus, the only way to make lasting progress within a game is to actually finish a level, and, although you’re given three lives (to start with), you have to do it within the span of a single life. To make progress within a series of games, however, you have to finish two levels (not necessarily with the same life). This is because of an odd limitation on the levels you can continue from — that is, you can only continue from the odd levels.

Now, there’s a substantial luck factor in this game, and not just because the granularity of crucial events is beyond the ability of humans to control, predict, or perceive. Powerups are very important, and (apart from the first one on every level, which always gives you a “Particle Laser” ¹OK, actually it’s a little more complicated than that. If you manage to grab a powerup while sliding down the web on completing a level (the “Avoid Spikes” phase), your first powerup in the next level will be an AI Droid.) completely random. And some of them are much more useful than others. If you manage to get an AI Droid powerup, it’ll wander around shooting things for you so you can concentrate on defense, and on picking up more powerups. Even better, the rare Outta Here powerup simply ends the level immediately.

So, even when you’re out of your depth, there’s some chance that you’ll have an easy time of it, but it’s a crapshoot. In fact, since the entire state of the level resets when you die, each life can be regarded as an independent trial with the same probability of success. If it weren’t for the odd limitation, the number of lives you have would be unimportant. No death would have any impact on the next life’s ability to result in permanent progress. If you have a 25% chance of passing a level, it’ll take an expected 4 tries, and so will the next level, more or less (the difference in difficulty between successive levels being insignificant), for a total of 8 tries — more than you get in a single continue. But since you need to pass two levels at a time in order to get anywhere, it makes a big difference whether you have 8 lives in reserve or only 3.

Now, in the early part of the game, at the easier stages, one tends to accumulate lives. This gives the player a certain momentum. You eventually reach a point where you’re losing lives faster than you’re gaining them, but your reserves catapult you onward. Consequently, when the game finally ends, you’re not at the limit of your ability, but well past it.

Probably because of what I’ve been reading lately, I keep thinking of Tempest 2000 as some kind of experiment into human visual perception. There’s always a lot going on, only some of which is visible at any given moment. In extreme cases, you can lose a life to something that hasn’t even been displayed yet.

This isn’t even just because of particle effects covering things up, like I described before. Unlike the original Tempest, the camera moves around a little to follow the player, but doesn’t move as quickly. Sometimes part of the web is offscreen. Some of the webs are crinkly, with segments folded tightly around each other, so that, depending on the camera placement, some segments will be hidden from view. In either case, you can actually be on part of the screen that’s not being shown. On the other hand, when you get killed without expecting it, it’s hard to tell exactly why. Maybe it was something that was hidden from view by a crinkle, maybe it was hidden by an explosion, maybe it wasn’t hidden from view at all and you simply failed to notice it.

So, you basically never have complete visual information. On the other hand, that’s true anyway. The human eye isn’t nearly as perceptive as it seems; only a small region of the retina, covering about 6 degrees of arc, has the acuity we associate with normal vision. We get the illusion of a larger visual field from involuntary movements of the eye. The brain is really good at piecing together the fragmentary data obtained this way, and at extrapolating from it. If it weren’t, playing this game would be pretty much impossible. Tracking things you can’t currently see is a big part of the game, and I suspect that with enough practice, one might learn to see important objects in the game even when they’re completely obscured.

On the other hand, the same phenomena work against the player too. The reason that the brain is good at filling in the gaps is that the eye doesn’t see everything even under normal circumstances. I think the most striking experiment I’ve heard of in this regard is one that involved a system that tracked a person’s eye movements as they looked at words on a computer screen. Whenever the subject’s eye was moving, the words would change. To anyone else observing, the screen was in a constant state of flux, but to the subject, it looked completely stable, just like the words you’re reading right now. Now, think about what this means for a fast-paced game with incomplete information. Obviously the screen isn’t tracking your eye movements, and appears far from stable, but given how much is happening, and how fast, some of it is bound to occur in ways that simply slip past conscious experience, even for a well-trained player.

But that’s what extra lives are for, and the game is pretty generous with them. It’s like Robotron in that respect, only less cerebral.

At level 17, the background music changes and the web changes color, from blue to red. Since there are 16 blue levels, it seems likely that there are 16 red levels as well, but I haven’t confirmed this. All I know is that the next change (to yellow) happens somewhere past level 30, and when it happens, the level shapes start repeating from the beginning, but with more difficult enemies. Obviously 100 is not divisible by 16, so what happens when you approach the end? Does it just continue in the same pattern, or are there four special levels? I don’t know yet, but I kind of suspect the former. There’s some indication in reviews I’ve seen online that reaching level 100 doesn’t even end the game, but just switches it automatically to excessively difficult mode (which is unlocked thereby) and keeps on going.

I haven’t yet managed to get into the yellow without using continues. I’m not considering continues to be dishonorable in this game, but it seems to me that seeing how far I can get without them is a reasonable way to gauge my skill. I’ve managed to get pretty close to the yellow, getting past level 30 at least and possibly up to level 32, just short of the expected transition. But I’m not sure just how far I’ve gone, because the game doesn’t display level numbers, and even when I try to keep track on my own, the bonus levels confuse the issue.

So let me talk about the bonus levels. Here’s how they work: One of the powerups in the normal levels is a “warp token”. After you collect three warp tokens, you get a bonus level. Thus, they have no fixed place in the level sequence, although the content of the bonus level seems to be determined by what level you were at. Bonus levels are unrelated to Tempest gameplay, except in that they seem to all keep the flying-down-a-tube motif in one way or another. For example, the first few bonus levels involve flying through a series of rings. Each ring you fly through gives you a certain number of points, which I frankly wouldn’t care about except for the fact that points give you extra lives. Miss one ring and the bonus level ends immediately. If you manage to get all the way through a bonus level, you get another large bonus and skip ahead five levels.

It’s that “skip ahead five levels” that makes things unclear. Does it mean “add five to the last level you played”, or does it mean “add five to the level you would otherwise be playing next”? I could figure this out by taking notes about the web shape on each level, but I haven’t bothered.

Now, I’ve said before that there’s a distinction between completism and perfectionism in games. I haven’t really articulated that distinction. In most games, it’s pretty subtle — a completist and a perfectionist will, in most cases, pursue the same goals. But this skipping ahead strikes me as one of the few game mechanics that separate them. To play perfectly is to clear every bonus level without making a mistake, which means skipping levels, which means not playing completely. Of course, the fact that the game repeats webs affects this — you’d have to be a pretty extreme completist to complain about skipping content that’s basically identical to something you’ve already seen. But if there actually were 100 distinct webs, and I skipped some towards the end, I wouldn’t be completely satisfied.