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!

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?

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

My rib cage is deformed

I've been feeling a dent in the right side of my rib cage for as long as I can remember. All this time, I thought that it was normal, and that's how rib cages are supposed to be. To be more exact, one of the bones in my right side isn't as far out as it's supposed to be.

That was until yesterday, when I had the extraordinary idea to actually compare the two sides of my ribs. And what do you know, the left side didn't have a dent.

The first thing I did was laugh my ass off for being so stupid. How the hell could I NOT have noticed it for so many years?

Next thing I did was some research on the internet. I didn't find much, except that rib cage deformities of that kind (there are some other more severe cases) aren't so uncommon, and most of the time it's just the way the rib cage has grew for some people. There is no need for treatment except in the case where there are chest pains and/or respiratory problems (cause it can limit lung expansion). I don't have any of these symptoms so I think I'll be alright.

I also found a video from a guy who seems to have something similar. Although mine is less visible.

Still Life review

Story: 5/10

The year is 2005. You are Victoria, an FBI agent on the tracks of a serial killers whose victims are prostitutes. After investigating the crime scene of the 5th victim, you decide to go over your dad's place to relax. It's there where you discover an old chest containing your grandfather's personal items. Among the items, you find his diary, and upon reading it you discover unsettling similarities between your case, and a case that he was working on in the 30s in Prague. Coincidence? Unfortunately, Still Life fails to deliver its promise of a strong story, and that's mainly to the reason that the game's story is incomplete, as posted to a forum by a alleged member of the game's developing team. The company apparently had financial problems, that led to its closing just before the game was released.

Quote:

-- but I'm curious as to what you had planned and what might have been scrapped due to time / budget / reality constraints. Any chance you can tell us what was supposed to happen at the end?

There was the entire part in LA 1954 and 2005 and Chicago 1932 and 2005. We played Gus again but in Chicago of the 30s; Gus chasing Mark. This part would introduce LA 54. The LA 54 part would explain the link between the murderers. Look closely at the painting “The Pupil”. In the original script, there were two endings. It was more of a choice really. The player could choose between arresting the killer or putting a clip into him. Now that’s closure. The player decided the fate of the killer. I really liked that idea simply because I thought it could be fun to empower the player with how he or she wanted Vic to end her story. -Se7en

Graphics: 8/10

The game's graphics are on par with other Adventure Company titles. Beautiful prerendered backgrounds and satisfying 3d characters. I especially liked the water and fog effects, they really gave the scenes life. As for the characters, despite their basic design, they appropriately blended with the backgrounds. The only problem I noticed were some funky "skin-toned" lines around Vic's hair when viewed from a distance.

Sound: 6/10

I don't have any complaints about the music. The "electro-mysterious" style fitted perfectly on those moments when you are close to a startling discovery. The sound effects were also satisfactory. The voice acting on the other hand, was mediocre to terrible. Vic sounded more like a college girl than an FBI agent in a serial killer investigation. On a particular scene, after having a fight with the killer, she falls unconscious. When she wakes up, I expected her to sound nervous and dizzy. I nearly laughed when I heard her talking like she was shopping at the mall. Gus was even worse, as he sounded exactly like he was reading his lines straight from the script.

Puzzles: 6/10

Here's where Still Life falls flat on its face. Almost all of the puzzles are there just to increase play length by stalling the player. Rarely does a puzzle have any relation to the plot. Most of them are some kinds of slider puzzles which take less time to beat by trial and error than by plan. The rest are inventory puzzles, and while some are interesting by having to examine them in 3d in your inventory for example, there are some that are made easy, if not completely given off, by the fact that the game signals you when you are standing next to something upon which you must use an item you carry. The best puzzle of the game, the lock-picking, was too difficult, but was actually the only one that required planning. All in all, it gave a good feeling of achievement after solving it, and it was one of the two memorable puzzles of the game. The other one was the cookie baking puzzle, although for completely different reasons. This puzzle was probably the worst player-stalling, totally unrelated to the plot, puzzle I have encountered in any adventure game in my entire life.

Gameplay: 7/10
The gameplay is smooth. There are no path-finding problems, and fortunately the characters can run by doubleclicking. The character you control alternates between Vic and Gus in each new chapter. Controls aside however, there is a major problem that is much common to new adventure games. There are a lot of transitional-only screens. You can't click and examine anything while on those screens, and once you pass them you don't return to them again. It's more than just a waste of artistic design. The lack of items/hotspots to click upon and examine, getting the feedback of the character you control, while making the game somewhat easier by most of the times leading you exactly to what you need to do, actually halts character development, and seriously reduces the player's connection, empathy and identification of/with the character. Extending further from those transitional screens, the only items you can click on on regular screens also, are those closely related to the plot. For example, just imagine what Sam & Max would be if you couldn't click on anything else than other characters and items you can pickup and use, without the random comments about everything you encounter.

Conclusion
Still Life left me expecting more. I can't easily recommend the game. If you are an adventure junkie, and want to solve some puzzles while engaging in an interesting, yet somewhat incomplete story, then you should probably get it. But if you're looking for a strong story-driven game with great character development, you'll be disappointed.

Final Score 6.4/10

Most ridiculous adventure game puzzle

And the award goes to... Still Life and the Cookie Baking puzzle!

That's right! What do you do after a long and hard day chasing serial killers and interrogating suspects? Why, bake the cookies your dad asked you to bake using your grandma's recipe, of course! But it's not so simple as it sounds, as grandma's recipe is written an a cutesy style, for example: 1 cup of love, 1/2 cups of sweetness etc. So you have to figure out to which normal ingredient each cute thing corresponds. What a twist! Seriously, I can't think of a better puzzle to progress a serial killer investigation plot, than baking cookies. The producers hit bull's eye!

More details on the game on a review I may or may not post.

My Ashen Empires (formerly Dransik) Map

Welcome back. Today I'll tell you about when I created a map for a mmorpg map making contest.

The year was 2003. Angelo's first year at the university. Of course, being at the first year, Angelo was looking for all sorts of distractions to excuse himself from studying. So instead of going out in the sun and play with the other kids, he decided to stay on his pc and do something that really matters. That's right, he started playing an MMORPG. The game was called Dransik back then. It was pretty addictive, and it wasn't long before Angelo forgot what color the sky is.

A couple of months after he started playing, the developers of the game, a company called Asylumsoft, decided to organize a map making contest. The deal was this: whoever created the best map, by using the official map editor of the game, would have his map implemented into the game world. Thrilled about the idea of having his own piece of work inside an MMORPG forever, Angelo downloaded the 35mb map editor with his 56k internet connection, converted his room to a fallout shelter (complete with canned food and water), switched off his cell phone, and started mapping.

Being a huge fan of house and city building games, such as The Sims and SimCity, and having a pretty solid idea of decoration and making the most out of empty spaces, he was determined that he had enough skill and patience, to flirt with the first position of the contest.

1. Landmass - At first he crafted the landmass, using the editor's pre-made chunks of beaches, forests, mountains, rivers and open grass. It was a tri-island area. A huge main island, and 2 smaller ones.
2. City Planning - The first part was quickly over, and it was time for the fun. He designated where each city would be built, and started planning each city's buildings by laying down dirt tiles. Each city should have some standar accomodations, like a bank, a general store, a blacksmith, etc, and some special structures depending on each city's purpose, for example a prison at the "evil" city. After that, he enclosed each building with walls, and upgraded their dirt floors with more appropriate floor tiles. That was a pretty lengthy procedure, as the walls and floors had to be placed one tile at a time.
3. Decorating - At the time there were 5 cities. 3 on the main island, and 1 on each of the smaller 2 islands. All with empty buildings. It was time to convert those empty buildings to something meaningful. Chair by chair, cupboard by cupboard, the proccess was lengthier than the previous one, but it was the most fun. Also, the outside areas of the cities had to be decorated too. Trees, bushes, flowers, fences, statues... There wasn't a single spot at any city that felt empty. The mindset was to make the cities so beautiful, that even players who grinded for xp and gold all day long, would want to spend time hanging around chatting in the cities, while admiring the scenery.
   
4. Points of Interest - After every city was fully decorated, it was time to add some special points of interest outside the cities. The points of interest should have a purpose, and not be there just for the sake of being there. They should also offer the explorer an enhanced experience when discovering them. For example, while approaching the hidden "evil" outpost, the explorer would see skeletons and corpses (of other supposed unfortunate explorers) tossed on the ground behind bushes, and puddles of blood. This would excite the explorer by making him believe he is about to discover something, but also disturbing him with the thought that it might be dangerous.
5. Scripting - Fortunately, the contest didn't require scripting NPCs and quests, otherwise the time required for finishing the map would skyrocket to several months instead of the 2 weeks it took.

So that was it, the map was ready in 2 weeks of non-stop editing. Angelo submitted the map, and when the results came, he was the winner (archived page of the contest results announcement - scroll down to find it). Unfortunately, his map didn't make it into the game because at that period Asylumsoft had some problems with their publisher, and some main developers left the company. Only a tiny portion of the map made it into the game; a small island with a castle, named "Valinor Island", which serves as a tutorial area for new players. Angelo of course got furious, realizing he lost 2 weeks of his life for nothing, so he decided to develop his own MMORPG, which he later sold to Blizzard. But more of this story on a future post. Anyway, a statue that existed in this castle took the name of Angelo's in-game character "Lorkos", in honor of his efforts. Since then, the game has changed its name to Ashen Empires, and is currently developed and published by Iron Will Games, a group of the original developers as well as some new ones.


Downloads:

• Dransik Map Editor - Download the Dransik Map Editor here, to be able to view my map.
• My Dransik Map - Download, extract, and open it using the Dransik Map Editor. (File > Load package)
  

Relevant links:

• Ashen Empires - The current form of the game. It's going pretty well, and soon a second expansion pack will be released.
• Ashen Empires Developments - Official Ashen Empires developers blog.
• AEWiki - An Ashen Empires public documentation wiki.
  
• Iron Will Games - The developer group currently working on Ashen Empires.
• Lothgar.com - Lothgar was the original designer of Dransik. After he left the game's developing group, he started working on some projects of his own.
• Stygian Worlds - Lothgar's upcoming big project, a new 2d isometric mmorpg.

Coming soon...