Friday, October 24, 2008

Stop picking the skin around your fingernails

I thought I was the only one doing it but apparently it's even a disorder! It's called Dermatillomania (different than Onychophagia since it doesn't involve teeth) and according to its description, it's a form of self-harm driven by stress and tension. It's weird because I'm not a stressful person, but then again it might seem so because I channel it to my skin.

There are several places prone to picking, but my favorite is the skin around the fingers, since that's where tiny strips of skin are regularly found extruding and begging to be gently peeled off. But enough with the grossness. My latest adventure evolved around my left thumb, particulary the skin at the outer side near the nail. It started as something innocent, by "smoothing" out (that's how I call it, it sounds like I'm improving something) irregularities that form naturally and occasionaly bleeding in the process. Usually that's a sign that I've done enough harm and I sould leave it alone. But then another temptation forms... the scabs! Maybe it was the stress from my exams, but whenever I made some progress by leaving it to heal, something happened and I found myself with a thumb that looked like a pizza again. I just couldn't leave it alone. It was the worst picking I've done since I can remember, the scabs had almost reached the connection with the palm (metacarpophalangeal joint - I researched!).

I started looking for a more drastic way to stop this situation because my strong will was clearly not enough. I recalled that the times my skin healed even slightly, coincided with the times I had cut my fingernails. So for the past week, whenever I catch myself fiddling with my thumb, I rush to cut the fingernails I use for the picking, namely my right thumb, index, and middle finger's. I cut them all the way, to the point they even hurt a bit, thus making it impossible to be used for picking. It seems to be working, since I stopped picking ever since and the skin is almost completely healed.

I hoped this helps some people deal with this light form of the disorder. If you pick your head, armpits or something else however, you should better seek professional help!


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Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Still playing Spore?

Spore is a PC game released last month and this post is mainly addressed to enthusiasts who've been anxiously waiting to get their hands on it, expecting a new Sims in terms of creativity and replayability. Now, if after playing for a week or two you start wondering if there's something wrong with you because you're starting feel you're running out of things to do, in other words to get bored with this "limitless" game, then this is for you.

This post isn't a review nor a DRM-hate post. But since I'm at it, I'll express my opinion on that issue in short. Someone asked in a forum how would we feel if the burglars complained to us for installing a antitheft alarm system on our house. I replied that the example was irrelevant, since the antitheft system wouldn't disturb the rightful visitors of our house. In Spore's case however, it's like we installed an machine carrying out obligatory rectrum examinations to whoever enters our front door. Considering that the burglars wouldn't enter through the front door and the visitors wouldn't enter through the windows, who is at loss?

One of my Sims 2 Houses

Back to the subject. I don't know about you, but I keep my Sims 2 installed on my hard drive since it came out and once or twice a year, I place my social life in standby mode and plunge into a demonic state of house building and plug-in hunting. Those who do the same know what I mean... the time crawling through new plug-ins to download is comparable to the time you actually play. Anyway, I play for about a month, get bored, stop and repeat the process after about a year. Another game I do that with is SimCity 4. It's this creativity that builds up over time, month after month, that just EXPLODES when you see a well designed house or a complex interchange while you drive, making you want to build something as beautiful as what you saw ASAP!

A Sims2 club I made

My Sims2 3 take on a 3-story apartment building

Both games were made by Maxis. Coincidence? Of course not. Clearly, Maxis knows how to nail replayability. Therefore, Spore, designed with the same frame of mind by the same people, should easily have all the features that make a game make the players come back to it regulary, even years after they first played it. Does it?

Random shot from one of my SimCity4 cities

Sunset at above the city

After playing through Spore long enough, I have my doubts. In Sims, the thing that makes me come back is that the game provides the necessary tools to transfer with a high degree of accuracy, a construction from my imagination to the game. Same thing for SimCity4. Furthermore, addons made by both games' very active communities add to that toolbox, constantly raising that degree of accuracy with which I can materialize my ideas inside the game. The scope of these constructions are relatively large, and making a house or a town exactly how I want it can take several days or weeks, and it still wouldn't be perfect enough. My task also consists of not only making one building/city, but to create a realistic, seamless group of those objects that look good together and that work. At least that's how I draw enjoyment from these games.

A region shot showing two interconnected cities

Now which of these abilities does Spore offer me? Let's see... I can shape creatures, make some buildings out of building blocks and some vehicles out of parts. Now, the shape creature part is like Create-a-Sim, only the sim is like dough and you can mold it to whatever you like. In sims this proccess takes at most an hour if you're really anal. Same thing for Spore, since someone who's played a video game before can finish the first two stages in perhaps less than an hour. Actually it's not bad. It's pretty good actually, considering the fact that you still wanna fiddle with it even after you realize that the different placement of the same part has no impact to its abilities. After the 2nd stage you're no longer be able to modify it, except for some difficult-to-snap-on-your-creature "clothing". From then on though you'll never see your creature up close again since the action takes place in a wider scale, except for some dialogue windows which show a moving portrait of your creature, which will probably turn you off since the clothing you "snapped" on it will probably twist in weird angles, bend and clip through your creature as it makes bodily expressions.

My terrible Spore creature

Next we have the buildings. This doesn't need half as much analysis as the creature part, since it's clear that after the otherwise entertaining process of constructing them, they attain a less than minor role due to the fact that again, you don't have an incentive of zooming into them; something that adds to that problem is the low resolution textures they have in the game after you exit the creation screen. As for me, I want my creations to have a feedback mechanic, to show me if they work or not, so that each time I have a problem to solve. That is, how can I make the thing I have in my mind, with a given set of tools, be actually functional when transferred in the game. The same applies to vehicles. My first war vehicle looked like a hedgehog, with cannons extruding from everywhere. I expected a fountain of bombs flying around it each time it fired, but little did I know. The most purposeful design actually is that of the spaceship, since that's what you'll be looking at most of the time, not the creatures nor the buildings. So you have to make it nice.

My attempt at a Spore human

Finally, let's expand on the subject of the space stage, which is the actual game. Because, let's not fool ourselves, the other stages are there to teach someone who hasn't played a game before, how to press the buttons. From a creativity aspect, the space stage has the least to offer. Terraforming? The tools effects are so random that you'll probably crack the FBI database codes before you make a river the way you actually want it. Secondly, you may be playing for days and still be missing more than half of the terraforming tools, since you have to go and find them among 49876497 star systems. From a gameplay aspect, there are undoubtedly many things to do. But after some time you'll feel you've done almost everything. Terraformed planets, destroyed colonies, completed missions, conquered/bought systems, defended planets and reaching the center of the galaxy. They're sure to keep you busy for a certain amount of time. If you're a completionist, you'll start new creatures, each with a different evolution combination for getting all different abilities. You'll then proceed to complete all achievements for each of your creatures. Surely, doing all this will keep you busy for several weeks. After you do everything though, possible but time consuming, you'll stop playing. The point is whether you'll come back to play again after a year or so.

The sharing of content doesn't add to replay value in my opinion. Sure, it's fun to have a universe populated by other people's creations, but it's not an incentive to replay the game in the future, like you would with the Sims or SimCity. Also, unless you consider user creations as "mods", Spore doesn't have any obvious modding possibilities like the other two games have, that being another thing undermining the replay value.

These were my thoughts on whether Spore succeeds in offering the level of replayability Maxis' previous games offered. In my opinion it does not. Do you see yourself coming back to play Spore in a year or two from now?


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Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Game Review - Dracula: Origin

Dracula: Origin is an adventure game released by The Adventure Company, a company that unsurprisingly released only adventures. Of course, through the load of games they publish in very short intervals, few are those that are worth playing more than five minutes. Is Frogware’s game one of those? Let’s find out.

Story 7/10
The player assumes the role of the popular vampire hunter Van Helsing. The story begins when a frightful letter arrives at his office, sent by Jonathan Harker, a friend and colleague of his. Jonathan had traveled in Transylvania under disguise, at Count Dracula’s castle, in an attempt to approach and destroy him. Not only he failed, resulting in his capture, but he also gave information about his wife Mina, making Count Dracula particularly interested in her and wanting to travel to London to make her his.

With this letter Jonathan reveals to Van Helsing his curse and he begs him to protect Mina. But instead of doing just what he’s been asked, Van Helsing takes the initiative and starts to chase after Dracula, whose arrival there is proclaimed by several murders and is already looking for Mina. Of course, everything goes wrong and the adventure begins.

Graphics 7/10
The graphics of Dracula: Origin is perhaps its best part. This of course doesn’t mean they’re perfect. Being a classic point’n’click adventure, it offers many pre-rendered locations, from London and Vienna to Egypt and Transylvania, the quality of which are undoubtedly very good. The colors are accurately as vibrant or as dull as they need to be depending on the location. A nice surprise comes in the form of animations in the background, like leaves and bushes moving by the wind, which bring the scenes to life.

Unfortunately we can’t say the same for the characters. While their 3d models are better then average, they completely dead. They’re not only expressionless, but they don’t even move their mouth when they talk. The only time they show expression is in the videos between each chapter but even those are few in number and almost all show the protagonist talking in his head (which means he doesn’t move his mouth there either). Their animation (walking for example) is satisfying and sometimes even funny, if not exaggerated, like for example Dracula’s minions.

Sound 3/10
This is the section where the game fails. From the first seconds you’ll come across with perhaps the worst voice-acting of all times in a video game. I’m talking about the hero’s voice in particular. He tries so hard to assume the role of the wise and fearless vampire hunter that the result achieved is downright tragicomic. Three things can happen at that point. You’ll either get so annoyed that you’ll quit the game and never play again for an indefinite amount of time, continue with the sound turned off or continue as is by taking it as a joke. You’ll under no circumstance be casual about it though, since it’s so bad that even a deaf guy would be turned off.

His dull and hoarse voice contains absolutely no color nor feeling. The only passion you’ll hear from him comes at completely irrelevant situations, like for example when you encounter a locked door. His full of complaint exclamation “Closed!” in these moments sound like it’s the first time a locked door is found in an adventure game! The other character voices come as a relief since, contrary to the hero, they’re just uninteresting.

Van Helsing and Dracula are curiously voiced by the same actor, undermining the second one’s image as an important figure. Fortunately, the Count only delivers five lines at most throughout the whole game, so the loss is cut. Besides, why would Frogwares hire another actor for five lines?

The music is where the game fails even miserably. It’s comprised of looped orchestral pieces played not by a real orchestra of course but through a synth instead. This by itself would not be much of a problem if the actual music was remotely connected to the plot and the atmosphere. A good example is that when you explore a secluded cemetery for Dracula’s traces, the feeling you’ll get from the background music is that you’re fighting the orcish horde outside Mordor’s gate. Or when you’re gathering information from the locals in a Egyptian plaza, you’ll feel like being in Prince of Persia slaying sand monsters.

Gameplay 7/10
Hopefully, the game’s gameplay is decent and contains several smart puzzles of many sorts. There are of course some standard illogical puzzles, inventory-based in particular, that you’ll most likely solve only after trying to combine every item you have with each other. In the other hand, the game offers a wide range of puzzles, like item hunting and combining, clue hunting in documents and classic Myst-like shape, color and word puzzles.

The help the game provides to the player could be a little more than necessary, since it never allows him to even try a keylock combination for example, if he hasn’t previously gathered all the clues required to figure out the solution.

Except the inventory screen, the player has access to three more screens throughout the game. The first one is the document screen, where all the newspaper clips, notes, letters and anything readable is saved. Then there’s the dialogue screen which contains every previous dialogue for future reference. The last one is something like a quest log, designed to help the player keep track of his current goals and to provide a summary of previous events.

There are no useless transition scenes in Origin, that is, locations you can only walk through, lacking any objects to interact with and only serving the purpose of making you admire the artist’s work and adding length (and frustration) to the game. I every location you can and you have to do something and when the action leads you somewhere else, the game changes to the new screen automatically. For example the destination of a trip through the desert is only a loading screen away and you don’t have to cross fifteen useless screens to get there (like you would in Sinking Island).

An appealing feature that has become the latest trend in recent adventure games, is the capability of revealing all the clickable hotspots of a location in the press of a button. This solves the problem of pixel hunting. Besides, people who think this makes the game extremely easy, have the option not to press this button (space in this particular case).

Conclusion
In the end, Dracula: Origin is an average to relatively good game, if we don’t take the sound problems under consideration. Two more negative parts of the game is its short length and its ending. The final confrontation with Count Dracula under no circumstance corresponds to the tension built throughout the game. You just approach him… and everything is done automatically. I think today’s adventure game writers should pick up the Monkey Island series from their dusty top shelf and study the epic battles against LeChuck in the ending of each game, where he dragged you like a sack of potatoes from one location to the next and you had little time to figure out how to devise a trap using your surroundings. Do we ask much?

Pros
-Beautiful Backgrounds
-Smart and well designed puzzles
-Good Story (based on a book and all)

Cons
-Sound from another planet (planet Failure)
-Deflated ending
-Some illogical puzzles

Final Score 6/10


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