Tag: Crew

The Mist

Reviews

One day, long ago, I picked a random book off my older brother’s shelf and started to read. The book happened to be Skeleton Crew, a collection of short stories and novellas by Stephen King. There were a number of cool stories in it, but the one that stuck the most was The Mist.

Later, when the family would go and purchase our first PC, a Leading Edge 8088 with 512K RAM and a 20MB hard drive (yeah, Megabyte, not Gigabyte), we would also pick up a handful of games. The Black Cauldron was one, and Stephen King’s The Mist was another. The game differed from the book a little, but that was okay, it needed to because as good as the book was, it wouldn’t make for much of a game. It was a text adventure, and that means I spent hours and hours trying to figure out the right combination of going North, East, South, West, every direction in between, picking things up and using them, in order to not get killed.

But I always wanted them to do a movie… and now they have. Frank Darabont, the man who did The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, took a crack at it, and I have to say, I’m very satisfied with the result.

This movie perfectly captures the mood of the book of people trapped in a country grocery store surrounded by a think mist. There are monsters in the mist, and inside the store isn’t going to be safe forever. The tense building of the religious cult as people take sides on what just might be the end of humanity is well portrayed.

Like the old text adventure, the movie strayed from the book, which in this case it didn’t have to do, but where it did it worked. Especially the end… the end of the book haunted me, and part of me hoped to see the same ending because I felt it was so good, but the movie has a new ending, but its haunting just the same.

Overall, two thumbs up from me. Worth the money to see in the theater.

The Illusion of Virtual Reality

Gaming

Over at the MMO Round Table boards, we’ve got a lovely little thread going about what people hate about MMOs in general or one MMO in specific. One of the points brought up by Kendricke is the lack of NPCs on boats, which reminded me of the one and only time I ever got to speak with an MMO game developer (read the thread to see my post).

This has lead me down a train of thought about illusion is games. World of Warcraft has admitted to doing it, and spectacularly I might add. Ever flown the griffon? Some of what you see isn’t really… real. That’s why there will be no flying mounts available in the original game, only in the new expansion lands. Because if you could fly in the old world, you’d be able to fly right up to those matte paintings that make you think you are really seeing what you aren’t seeing.

Other games inexplicably, haven’t used it in places I would consider pretty obvious… like the boats. In just about every game I know that has boats, the boats have no crew. The reasons are simple enough, crew = NPCs, and NPCs can’t do things like zones, and boats, being objects themselves, can’t have pathing lines on them. Essentially, the boat itself is an NPC (usually just not targettable or fightable), and the game doesn’t support having NPCs ride other NPCs. But it doesn’t have to. The boat is a model. The model has moving parts (sails, rudders, oars, whatever). So why not fake the crew by making them part of the model. We are talking advanced stuff here, just tiny things like putting a captain at the wheel, a guy in the crow’s nest, a couple of guys in the rigging, maybe a cook down in the mess/hold area, perhaps a swab scrubbing the deck. Why not? Would it really be that hard?

Once you start down this road, it opens up so many new ideas… like, you know those buildings in town that are there just for effect? The ones you can’t go into? What if, instead of being just dark and lifeless, during much of the day and early night, have an NPC “spawn” in front of the window of another window, only this one with an animated texture that occasionally shows a person walk by, or flickering light… or if the normal window texture is a closed shuttered window, the new window NPC could be a matte painting of an open window that shows the interior of the room.

So many things, so many little touches, could be added to a game to make them feel more alive instead of the rigid merchant filled ghost towns they usually are.

EVE: Worlds Collide

Gaming

I have been playing EVE Online again. This time a bit more aggressively that before. I’m doing more combat, and only doing mining as an AFK task when I have better things to do. One thing I really enjoy about the game now is that they have added more agent missions to the game since I last played. Before it was either “Do this supply run.” or “Go here and kill a few pirates.” Now the missions have a little story.

One of them, and one of the more infamous ones, is Worlds Collide. Two cartels are fighting and a supply ship has been caught in the middle. They want you to rescue the crew from the disabled ship. And most people will tell you that this mission is nearly impossible. Which is it, if you get it “too soon”.

However, one of the main reasons people find it so hard is that the mission is actually a departure from the usual stuff you do in the game. Even with a little more story, many missions are still of the “take this there” or “kill these guys” types. So when you are told the story of two cartels at war and the disabled ship, most people’s first thought is to kill them all and save the crew of the disabled vessel. But if you read the story, if you pay attention to the details, your contact tells you that concerning the two warring cartels… they don’t care, they’d sooner just sit back and watch them destroy each other, except for that stuck crew.

When you approach the mission point, the first one, you find yourself with two gates to choose from and a half dozen or so fighters on each side. The key here though is that you are between the gates, and while the gates are 45km away, the fighting factions are 90km away. Its a race. You could fight them, but you don’t have to. You can just run to the gate and warp to the next area.

Either gate you take warps you into a shit-storm. One side is admittedly easier than the other, but both sides are still rough. With the frigate that most people are likely to be piloting at the point in the game where they get this mission, fighting isn’t really an option. In fact, surviving at all isn’t that high on the probability list either. But, while you do warp into a hornets’ nest, you also are within 16km of the next gate. Again, you don’t have to fight. Just defend and run.

If you make the next jump, the final area is your disabled vessel with about a dozen fighters flying around… but these aren’t the rough customers of the last area, in fact, these hijackers are the kind that practically explode if you breathe on them too hard. Make your moves, draw them out, fight them, its a fairly easy win.

And that’s essentially what your agent tells you to do… rescue the crew, forget the cartels.

One of my favorite missions so far. Strategy over brute force.

Perfect Inefficiency

Random Thoughts

I dropped by the local branch of Bank of America last week to do some banking. While I was waiting for them to open at 9 AM, I sat in my car and listened to music and watched the road crew continue to work along side Satellite Blvd.

They’ve been digging up the side of the road for a while now, either laying some new cable or preparing to widen the road or something, I’m not sure. So there is a crew of six guys there. Five of the men are literally leaning on their shovels, while the sixth man operating a mini-backhoe is thrashing around trying to align himself correctly in order to use this machine to put dirt into a two foot hole. It took him over thirty minutes to complete the task… a task which the five guys with shovels could have completed in under two minutes.

I just don’t understand why people would want to deliberately work so inefficiently. The gasoline alone that it must have taken to operate that thing for over a half hour… It hurts to see my tax dollars wasted.