I can't hear you

I’ve noticed a bad trend in the FPS these days: I can’t seem to hear what the hell is going on. Oh, I can hear the action all right. The sound of the gun rattling off. That grenade detonating right next to me (whoops). Those I can hear just fine. But that guy standing next to me giving me important plot details? Mumble mumble mumble. The guy on my radio telling me what to do next? No clue what he just said.

There are two main causes of this:

1) 3D Sound

Sounds fancy, doesn’t it? Games have this sound engine to make sure that when a rocket whizzes right by your virtual ear you hear the path via your speakers. Cool for rockets, bad for dialogue. If there’s some guy in-game talking to you, in many shooters you won’t be able to hear what they’re saying unless you’re standing right next to and looking directly at them. I don’t know about you, but I’m capable of hearing someone talking to me even if they’re behind me and across the room. Our ears are actually very capable receivers. And optimizing over the whiz bang effect leaves a poor experience for dialogue.

I appreciate now the wisdom of Bungie for putting Cortana in the Master Chief’s head.

2) No independent speech volume control

It’s so simple. It’s a knob in settings that assigns a volume level for speech and only speech. Most games already have a category for “Music” versus “Effects”. And to be fair some games were smart enough to call out a “Speech” category. But far too few.

Maybe it’s my sound setup. It’s true, I had to neuter my 7.1 sound setup to 7.0. I live in the city, where neighbors are separated by walls, not fences. Removing the sub woofer wasn’t quite enough - I also have to keep the volume at a reasonable level while I game. The catch is that people have a much higher tolerance for continuous sound over burst sound. That’s why alarms beep in intervals to wake you up. Speech fits in the continuous sound bucket, which is why it’s possible to tune someone out even as they’re talking to you (not a good idea to let them know, however). The sounds of TV are accepted much more by neighbors than the sporadic explosion. I could happily crank up the speech volume in the game while leaving the rest of the sound low and not disturb anyone. If only someone gave me the option.

Another option is subtitling. Which is certainly functional, but it has the side effect of being the most anti-immersive thing ever. Plus nothing really highlights the poor voice acting in so many games like being able to read the script side by side with them.

The saving grace is that most shooters are light on plot as is, so you’re probably not going to have your experienced ruined by missing out on the dialogue. But that’s a trend I’d wouldn’t exactly encourage. Either do it right or take the silent cue and do it Gordon Freeman style.

How to make WoW even more addictive

My name is Chris, and I’m addicted to WoW.

There, I’ve said it. At least I’m not alone; WoW is up to eight million subscribers. We’re all willing participants, but there’s no getting around the fact that we are also addicts.

It’s not like WoW doesn’t put out. Aesthetically WoW is very satisfying: the world is pleasing on the eyes and the monsters look appropriately fierce. By RPG standards the gameplay is actually pretty deep and entertaining. And there’s certainly no end of things to do.

But WoW is just a glorified Skinner Box, and we’re all sitting there pulling the lever hoping for another pellet. I know this. So why is it that lately I’ve been thinking of how great it would be to combine two of my addictions?

WoW, meet Achievement Points. Achievement Points, meet WoW.

One of WoW’s main problems is that everything boils down to gear. You kill stuff to get better gear so that you can see new places and kill bigger stuff. Your ability to proceed through the content of the game is gated by how good of stuff you have. Skill has something to do with it, definitely. But you’re dead in the water without good gear.

So what’s the problem? Well, not only is gear the means to explore new content, it’s also your reward. For a little while after you finish an instance, you’re so excited to troll around with your new thingamajig so that everyone can see where you’ve been. But inevitably you’ll go somewhere cooler and your fancy thingamajig will become obsolete. You have to throw it away. Where’s your memento of journeys past? The game actually discourages you from holding on to the nifty stuff that you collect along the way. Gone is your visible badge of honor that you slew the mighty whosiwhatsit.

This is where achievement points come in. WoW needs non-gear related rewards for special achievements. Nothing that affects gameplay; just a badge of honor that says that you successfully downed Hogger. It’s probably just another tab on your character sheet - nothing fancy. But that little piece of permanence would motivate many players (myself included) to drill into a larger percentage of the content that the WoW developers worked so hard on. Sure there would be a achievements for the obvious things, like finishing some major instance. But things get really fun when you pull out the really in-depth achievements, like soloing a boss, clearing an instance under a time limit, getting a killing spree in PvP, or exploring every zone. Blizzard has already taken some interesting ideas like this and turned them into quests, but the problem is that there’s nobody to appreciate that you finished that quest except for yourself. Which is totally missing the whole point of us all playing this RPG together.

C’mon Blizzard. Give me something else to shoot for, because I’m growing tired of the endless cycle for “better stuff.”

All my love to G.Love

Last night I went down to the Showbox to see one of my favorite bands, G. Love & Special Sauce. It was my first time seeing them in person, and they didn’t disappoint. Yes, they’re a motley band of dorks, but that’s how I like my musicians. Few bands that I know of put out such irresistibly danceable stuff as G.Love. And I love how in their crazy blues/hip-hop genre (which I’m pretty sure there isn’t a lot of competition over) they manage to sing about stuff that matters. G.Love tells us about how he likes his beverages cold, sleeps in his jammies, knows the best way to get downtown… you know, earth-shattering important lyrics. Which I’m all about. I don’t need my music to be negative and angry. Unfortunately if you look at the music charts I seem to be the minority.

G.Love did not disappoint, but once again the Showbox did. The venue is actually pretty nice inside - that isn’t the problem. It’s the people. Somehow, magically, regardless of the artist performing, the Showbox manages to attract all the stereotypical concert assholes into one place. There was “Girl-Whose-Boobs-Make-Her-Ticket-Worth-More-Than-Yours”, “Guy-Who-ODs-And-Falls-On-You”, “Mrs-Talks-Over-Music”, “Homophobic-Giant-Bobblehead”, “Mr-The-World-Is-My-Trashcan”. And of course they all make me have to become “Elbow-Ninja” in order to protect what little square of space I have left.

Why do people go to concerts? Please, tell me. I know why I go to concerts (hint: it has something to do with music). I just don’t understand the rest of the crowd who all insist on gathering in one place to ignore the show and be rude to each other.

In my mind, there are three acceptable purposes for live music:

• Dance: You enjoy the presence of some great band by getting your groove on
• Listen: You sit and listen to the music while watching the band, but doing nothing else
• Ambient: You are doing some other activity (dinner, talking, whatever) while a band makes it that much more pleasant

Unfortunately, these can not all coexist. For example, the white noise caused by Ambients can ruin the experience of Listeners. Likewise the space required to support Dancers leaves no room for Ambients. And to make things even more difficult, there are those people who don’t fit into any logical category. In no way does standing yet not dancing for hours make any sense. If you’re doing that out of some confused notion that you’re there to see the band, here’s a hint: that works much better if everyone sits, not stands.

I’d think you could solve the problem by partitioning the space based on people’s intentions, but it only takes one confused person in the wrong place to completly disrupt the rest of the crowd. The Showbox seems to always result in the worst situation through some combination of no seating plus cheap tickets (which amplifies the number of directionless drop-ins). But despite my dislike of the Showbox, I’ll probably end up there again. Because who doesn’t like seeing their favorite bands for cheap?

Quake 4

Played on Xbox360

Considering that Quake 3 opted out of a singleplayer campaign entirely, I wasn’t expecting much from the Quake 4 singleplayer campaign. But it wasn’t half bad. It’s a title you’d want to rent, not buy, but at least I was entertained the whole way through.

The aspect that keeps Quake interesting is its variety of fun weapons. I’ve been on a FPS singleplayer kick lately, and I’ve gotta say that the weapon selection in the games out there is boring me to tears. I don’t care if the rate of fire is different and the clip size is larger - it’s still just another freaking machine gun! Quake 4 has a machine gun, but it only has one. And it’s got a lot of other weapons that are, you know, fun.

Killing someone with lightning is fun. Creating a dark matter vortex is fun. Gleefully lobbing grenades everywhere is fun. Shooting hundreds of tiny exploding nails is fun.

Well, it’s not all fun. Getting stuck with a crappy save where you have 25 health is no fun. I’m not sure why in this day and age shooters are still struggling with health/armor systems. Halo solved this problem years ago: give the player regenerative shields. As long as you survive an encounter, you’re reset to a known-good state of health. It makes game balancing way easier, and less obvious for that matter (“Hey, here’s a big unattended cache of health packs and armor! I wonder if there’s a boss encounter coming up…”). The downside of course is that with no health system at all (as Halo 2 opted to do) you lose the sense of being “worn down” over some long epic encounter. I’m not saying ditch health entirely - I’m saying get with the times and start thinking about “out of combat” health resets/regeneration. And obviously “shields” don’t fit into every shooter’s lore, but the same idea can be applied anywhere. Hell, if you’re already in the business that saying that health packs can heal the protagonist’s bullet-riddled body, you should be flexible on spontaneous regeneration.

But ignore the antiquated health system and long load times (which you may get very familiar with due to said health system). I applaud Quake 4 for not trying to be too serious. Sure the whole space marine motif is almost as tired as WW2 shooters. But at least Quake 4 doesn’t waste effort trying to make too much sense. These are games people, not combat simulators.

The one inexcusable aspect of Quake 4? The frame rate. This is a console, not some random PC with a bargain bin video card. Get with the program.

So You Think You're America's Next Top Idol

I finally got around to watching the Seattle auditions for American Idol. I generally don’t follow the show, although I have caught a couple other season’s audition portions. When the show starts becoming about actual talent, I lose interest. Which may seem odd, because it’s the same format as So You Think You Can Dance, which I enjoy. But it turns out that dancing is infinitely more entertaining to watch than singing.

Anyway, I was recently having a discussion with a friend about whether the fact that the show was just a thin cover for making fun of these people was okay or not. I say… yes?

These judges are not coming to you while you sing in the shower. Nor are they even criticizing your performance in Karaoke Revolution (although if you get the latest PS2 version, maybe they will). They’re not even heckling you at your favorite karaoke bar. No. You decided that you were such hot shit that you flew from Kansas to audition on television in front of them, full well knowing that they got famous for saying nasty things to people just like you. The real problem? A lack of self awareness.

The people auditioning for American Idol come from a generation that has grown up under the curtain of political correctness. In this fantasy world nobody ever says anything mean about anyone else. Ever. Somehow in the land of free speech unwelcome opinions have become the next WMDs. The result? Mobs of people whose self perception is so unnaturaly inflated up that they fly thousands of miles to audition for a singing competition where they’re expected to be good enough to inspire millions of voters in order to win.

For next time, here’s your pre-flight checklist:

• Have you ever sung in front of other people before?
• Did these people enjoy your performance?
• Are any of the people who enjoyed your performance not your mother?
• Do you have friends who think this is a good idea?

The show’s name is American Idol. As in something worth worshipping. If you’ve got the balls to claim that you’re worthy of America worshipping you, you’d better be ready for some criticism. Alas, it seems that 90% of our would-be demigods are freakishly disfigured trolls with no social awareness, no taste in music, think being on key is “subjective,” and can’t tell that everyone else is laughing at them until some English guy says something mean.

More laughing at ourselves, less taking everything too seriously.