Of Meat Bicycles and Men

This is my fourth attempt at writing a blog post about Borderlands 2. It's not for the lack of things to say about the game, I've definitely been singing praises about this game to anyone I can for the last few weeks. The bigger problem is that in order to write a blog post about Borderlands 2, I need to stop playing Borderlands 2. And every time I've tried, I think to myself, "I'd rather be playing Borderlands 2." And so I go play Borderlands 2.

I have played Borderlands 2 to the point where not only did I finish the main game, but I restarted the game in the hard mode, I restarted the game as a different character, and I would gladly do both again given the opportunity to do so, perhaps if ever I can rope more friends into playing it. (Edit: As of my fifth attempt at writing this blog post, I have started a third class.) This game has so much personality that even on the second or third time through, I'm still cracking up at gags I've already seen and loving every mission I re-encounter.

Before I sound too fanboyish, I should stress that if there's one thing Borderlands 2 sorta drops the ball on, it's bringing new players up to speed with the world of Pandora. The tutorial seems to be written backwards, where you're vaguely instructed to do a certain thing, then you have to figure out the bulk of it yourself, then after you've done the objective, a window pops up and says, "Hey, you just did X! You can do that again by pressing Y." Through an uncomfortable portion of my first runthrough, I died a lot because I didn't know that I could buy or equip a shield or open up a special menu that boosted my stats, until a friend (his name is Nate, I'll be referencing him a few more times in this post) told me how. Also, the plotline relies on you being familiar with characters and elements from the first Borderlands game. Unfortunately, some of these references went straight over my head until Nate pointed them out to me. And that's especially sad because looking back on it, there are several moments which would have been far more poignant and impactful if I was familiar with the context from the first game, but instead they were wasted on a thicko noob like me.

But those moments of awkward cluelessness aside, Borderlands is still a very accessible game. Unlike hyper-realistic military FPSes where you seemingly need to spend hours memorizing the statistics of every gun available in order to find the one that suits your play style, then playing with that gun for days until you unlock every possible doohickey and never changing your arsenal because there's no need to and it's in fact disadvantageous to ever step outside your comfort zone, Borderlands 2 hands you a gun, shows you a number that tells you what it can do, and lets you take it or not. Sure, you might be used to trying to experience a certain "feel" with some guns, but for someone gun-inept like myself, just being able to say "that number's higher than this one" makes the whole gun system a lot easier to digest. I've become comfortable with a wider range of guns here than I ever did in any Call of Duty game, and I think that's a testament to how well the game teaches you to play creatively rather than formulaically.

Also, Borderlands 2 is incredibly well-written and hilarious. It helps that I'm a fan of lead writer Anthony Burch's web series "Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin'?", and a lot of that breed of quick-witted, occasionally juvenile humor carries over here, but there are many scenes, even non-funny ones, that as I'm playing through on repeat runs, I'm still excited to play through again. Most games I play through have only one or two moments like that, but Borderlands 2 has at least a dozen, maybe a couple dozen at that. I repeat that there are some hurdles with the missing backstory as mentioned above, but particularly if you have someone that can fill in the details for you, the story is worth experiencing multiple times.

Let me throw some numbers at you: As I write this post, Borderlands 2 is on sale for $30 at Best Buy (link), the same sale price I bought it for a month or two ago. If you think of it in terms of a brand new $60 game (we're ignoring the fact that the regular price is apparently now $40), that's a savings of thirty dollars... which I would recommend you reinvest in purchasing the DLC Season Pass, which has three extra playable campaigns available now (and a fourth coming in June). Then, plop another $20 down on the extra character classes for even more fun ($10 each, one available now, the other coming in May). Honestly, this game has provided more fun per dollar than any other game I've played in a long time, and that's even after I keep shelling out for the expansions.

I mean, I could continue trying to crunch the numbers to illustrate why you should play Borderlands 2. I could tell a bunch of stories about, if not the events that happened in the game (which would be very spoilery), then how Nate and I loved watching them play out. I don't want to go melodramatic and stake my left kidney on the fact that you'll enjoy this game, but I hope that the mere suggestion of such an event is enough to persuade you to at least give it a go. Please play Borderlands 2, and with friends if you can. It's an amazing experience, and I don't know how else to convey it to you without repeating myself further, so I'll stop writing now. (So I can go play some more Borderlands 2.)

Ight Nams to Rmmbr

You're welcome, Internet.



Here's the source for this. The caveat about "place names (cities, towns, villages, boroughs and Census Designated Places)" makes the entire thing slightly inaccurate (depending on how loosely you define a "city"), but figuring out a quick-and-easy solution to the ridiculous Facebook game was an itch I just had to scratch. There were a couple other cities on the Wikipedia page that met the "no E" requirement, but weren't necessary to hit every state (one of which was Franklin, which would have knocked off the greatest number of states). In the back of my mind, I still wonder, can this still be done with seven cities?

Also, well done to Illinois, Ohio, and Wisconsin.

I Should Like To Teach You The Dance Of My Peeps

...Peeps? Crew? Homies? I dunno.

I haven't touched Dance Central (1) in a long time. I got myself into a rut of trying to conquer one song at a time, working from the easiest songs to the hardest songs (more of the songs I was interested in were up front anyway), and within each song, from the easiest mode to the hardest mode. As it turns out, methodically trying to perfect the game from front to back is a pretty bad way to play it. So I barely made it out of the first or second bracket of songs.

Aside from seeing it at PAX East last year, I know little to nil about Dance Central 2.

My sister got me a copy of Dance Central 3 for Christmas. ("I really liked the comment you put next to it on your Amazon Wish List... 'Don't judge me.'") Just as before, I started with the top bracket of songs ("Y.M.C.A.", "Better Off Alone", and "The Hustle"). But as I started to look down the song list, there were some interesting songs that caught my eye (mostly disco stuff, but also newer things like "Moves Like Jagger"), plus other intriguing songs I hadn't heard of before ("Mr. Saxobeat", "Stereo Love"). So I played through them. In some cases, I just threw myself straight into the song (on the easiest level) without even touching the Rehearsal mode. I even spent some of my precious Microsoft Points to purchase "We No Speak Americano" (you know, that song).

And you know what? I'm having fun with it. In approaching the game from a slightly different angle, I've found that Dance Central 3 can be stupid amounts of fun. I'm getting over my need to be the perfectionist who goes for all achievements on the first run through, and I'm just enjoying the game. I find myself even ignoring the flash cards and just trying to mirror the on-screen dancers with songs I've never touched before. Because it's that fun. I don't care if I fail (well, I get a bit miffed if I don't get at least five blue stars), I just want to play the game.

But tonight I tried the Story mode for the first time. Sweet mother of Carl Kasell, it is AMAZING.

I should confess that as I started to work my way through the beginning of the Story mode, I was laughing hysterically at how ridiculous the premise is. You're invited to a secret underground dance party, which turns out to be the initiation for an equally secret underground dance FBI agency (I guess). And then you're sent back in time (yes, TIME TRAVEL, IN A DANCE GAME) to unlock dance moves from different eras in order to stop "Project Lockstep" and... See, now you know why I was laughing so hard. It's absolutely ridiculous, but amazing at the same time. I think the game knows how crazy it is, but it doesn't acknowledge it at any point in time. It doesn't matter anyway. It threw me into a couple songs I never tried before, but it made the experience so awesome, I have no regrets about my less-than-perfect performance. I can't wait to play through it more.

I'm not very far into it, but if you have a Kinect, I strongly recommend you pick up a copy of Dance Central 3. It's my favorite dance-based game so far, partially because of its good song mix, partially because of the more enjoyable atmosphere it brings that DC1 seemed to not have, partially because it's just plain fun. On the other hand, it's entirely possible that I have crap taste in music and it's just grimacing and nodding as I flail in front of my TV, but I don't care. It's so much fun. Just play this game.

Huge 2012 Year-End Blowout Inventory Clearance Blog Post!

Well crap. It's been three months since my last blog post, which finally breaks my streak of having at least some sort of new content every calendar month since this blog started. The last few months have been busy with work and family obligations, and... Oh fine, I've just been too lazy to write. Too much gaming yielded too much to write about, too much to write about yielded too much procrastination, too much procrastination yielded too much gaming. It's a horrible loop.

At the very least, I wanted to share a little end-of-the-year blog post with you, reviewing some games that recently debuted that were featured in my PAX East post. I have bought my pass and booked my hotel for next year, and I'm counting down the days until I get to do it all again (after I somewhat slagged it off as not something I should be doing last time). I started writing this blog post in October (honest), and I wanted to start the ball rolling on what should hopefully be a new year of anti-crastination.

Rock Band Blitz
Xbox and PS3, reviewing Xbox
Probably the most mainstream of the games I've checked out, Rock Band Blitz is a casual take on the rhythm game franchise. You play all of the instruments, although only one at a time, and with only two buttons to hit in a usually-alternating fashion. The challenge of the game is leveling up all of the instruments together to increase your scoring potential. You have to be familiar with how each song plays out, so you can anticipate what instrument to level up more quickly before it drops out of the song. Failure doesn't mean you lose, it just means you score less.

That said, the game seems to run on a very convoluted economic system. For each star you earn while playing (read: "For each scoring milestone you pass"), you earn 100 coins (plus "cred," which seem to have no value whatsoever). These coins can be spent on purchasing three types of power-ups, which cost 250, 200, and 100 coins each. Generally, you'll need three power-ups in some combination to get a high score, but if you do the math, you're spending 550 coins to do so, which means you need to hit the highest score bracket (five gold stars, worth 600 coins) to make any sort of profit. Mind you, you get double coins on your first playthrough of any song, and the payout system has been tweaked since the game was released to favor the player a bit more, but it still feels backward that anytime you play, you almost always have to take a loss.

The game comes with 25 songs, most of which I'd never heard of before. You can purchase additional songs from the in-game store for $2 a pop, which feels like a fair price, but I can't see myself splurging on many songs to flesh out this game more. Maybe if there were a way to use those hard-earned coins to purchase songs, I'd be more comfortable with the game on the whole, but without that option, Rock Band Blitz just feels like a social game where the more you play, the more the developer wins. Mind you, it's still a good game overall, but it's wrapped in an overall unappealing way.

Retro/Grade
PS3
Across the indie divide, we find Retro/Grade, a rhythm-based avoidance game, where you must undo entire space battles by un-firing your lasers and re-dodging backward-moving missiles from your enemies. If you make a mistake, you can un-rewind time to fix it (yeah, wrap your head around that), but you have a limited amount of un-rewind time per level. Ideally, if you rewind each level perfectly, you'll lower your score back to zero, though part of this relies on some luck with power-ups, so just know that a lower score is better.

In the main campaign, there are ten songs, which unfortunately get old somewhat quickly. It doesn't help that there are six difficulty levels with which to play the game, so you've got a lot of replaying the same songs for completion. A lot of the game's eye candy appeal (some really nice scenery and excellently-animated boss enemies) are lost to the fact that you have to keep focusing on the bullets in the foreground, which is sad.) However, there's also a separate choose-your-own-path adventure mode where you play the same songs with little challenging tweaks (faster speed, no color assistance, playing facing the opposite direction, etc.) bring the game back to life in an oddly intriguing way. In the end, the interesting gameplay tweaks compensate for its repetitiveness, and I'd say Retro/Grade is definitely worth a go.

Dyad
PS3
Other reviewers that have tackled Dyad claim it's impossible to describe it in one sentence, so here's my go: It's a racing game with color-matching elements. See? It's not hard, guys. Just stay away from the "magic shroom" metaphors and it's quite easy. In each level you travel through a tube, hooking on to enemies ahead of you to get a small speed boost. Hook two similarly-colored enemies for a larger speed boost. Some enemies may also leave short trails you can hop on for an extra speed boost (after you've dodged their attack). A good portion of the levels are straight race-against-the-clock rounds, while many others require you to grab a certain number of enemies or power-ups, and other interesting challenges where you're trying to hit the fastest speed possible or maintain power-up-edness for as long as possible.

This is probably a cliche thing to say about a racing game, but sometimes I felt like it was all moving too fast. Between the frantic music and the seizure-inducing colors, it was often hard to play the game well, or well enough to reach upper-echelon achievements. The game seems to be aware that some may use random button-mashing and penalizes players appropriately. Still, if you can focus hard enough, each level can be conquered, and it feels rather satisfying when you do. This one is also worth picking up, even if you don't do drugs. In fact, don't do drugs. The More You Know!, etc.

Runner 2
Runner 2 hasn't released yet, but I feel like I have to give it a mention here. In the past, I slagged off the original BIT.TRIP RUNNER as unenjoyable since the controls didn't seem to correspond with the on-screen actions in a weird lag-plus-rhythmic-dissonance sort of way, but for reasons I can't put my finger on, I'm somehow excited for its sequel to eventually come out. I've been checking up on Gaijin Games' blog, and something, maybe the new music (which I love), maybe the less pixeled, more cartoonish style, something jumps out at me. I hope good things come of it.

Happy New Year!

Pick a Number, Any Number... So Long As It's Four

Just for the fun of it, today I went back and played Tepiiku, a dice game I reviewed way back when for JIG. It's an interesting game for three players (you and two AI) where the player with the lowest-scoring hand has the obligation to either pay the highest-scoring player a forfeit, or attempt to increase their hand's value at the risk of paying double the forfeit for failing. There's a major flaw in how the wagering plays out, since the game will not allow you to attempt to reroll if you can't pay the potential double forfeit; sometimes your opponents will boost the stake between them, and by the time it passes to you, you're forced to pay up without ever getting to play. Sure, it could result in interesting tactics if you could find a way to work it to your advantage, but more often than not, it's just frustrating.

That was a flaw I pointed out in my review, and it was echoed by many of the commenters. Later on, the creator of the game stopped by to acknowledge the flaw and explain his reasoning for it. Which is awesome. I love it when the developer stops by to discuss the development of their game.

But that's not what this post is about. This post was sparked by what was the very first comment left to the game, by an ever-so-popular visitor named Anonymous.

"Mmm-hmmm. Just like I thought. Just like every other dice and card game in existence, apparently, once you get out of the practice round, it's absolutely nothing but consistent crap for you, and perfect hands/rolls for all AI players, every single hand. No thanks. How about at least faking some random fairness for once, developers? Maybe?"

The developer addressed this comment by assuring Mr. 'mous that the dice rolls are "fair and random" and that there were no shenanigans at hand. Streaks of bad luck, perhaps, but no foul play. That didn't stop 'mous from insisting that the game was clearly still rigged, and even going so far as to accuse the developer of ignoring him and the "evidence" that the game is rigged.

This, for reasons I don't understand, is a trend in a lot of dice games I review or see reviewed; the game is cuh-learly rigged because the player doesn't win once or twice. It happened with Tepiiku. It happened with Pigalator 2k5; the developer also addressed complaints about randomness there (but they still continued). It happened with Zilch, and the developer not only addressed the griefers but also released the code for the random number generator. Is it so hard to accept that streaks of bad luck happen, and that hopefully you'll hit a good streak if you keep playing? Or, heaven forbid, could you just not be good at the game?

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Bear with me on this sudden change of topic: Last week, I started working my way through Codecademy, a website that takes you through the basics of coding in HTML, JavaScript, Python, and other programming languages. I'm obviously not a coding genius, but if my experiences with this website and SpaceChem are anything to go by, I might be a bit of a programming addict. I'm about a third of the way through the JavaScript Fundamentals track, which, if I am to take the authors' interpretations of "next week we'll talk about..." literally, is supposed to be a 26-week course... Whoops.

I'm obviously not a coding genius, and I don't know how much JavaScript goes into programming Flash games, but I've picked up a few things from the course. In the lessons I've had so far, I've learned the basics for simple random events, such as rolling a die or picking a card. In fact, here's what rolling a die looks like:

var roll = Math.floor(Math.random()*6+1);

To break that down:

• Starting inside the parentheses, Math.random() generates a random number between 0 and 1. I don't know how specific the number is, but in the printouts I've tried, it's generally extended out to something like twelve decimal places, like 0.728027699732 (and yes, I did pull that number from random.org).
• Since there are six sides on our die, we multiply that random value by six. That will give us something between 0.000000000006 and 5.999999999994. Our random value is now 4.368166198392.
• Dice are usually labelled with the numbers 1-6, not 0-5, so we add one to our result. Now we've got 5.368166198392.
• But what sort of die gives us a decimal as a roll? Math.floor() rounds down the value to the highest whole number below our value, which is 5. So there you have it, I just rolled a 5.

It's a long explanation, but that one line of code is all it takes to roll a six-sided die. (Well, you'd also add console.log(roll); to print out the number.) But can you imagine the coding it would take to rig a die so it rolls one number more frequently than another, for example, more low numbers than high? Walk with me through this idea.

• In theory, while you'd be visually displaying a die with six sides, you'd probably program it as something with more than six sides, with extra sides representing more instances of the numbers you want to occur more frequently. We'll keep it simple by secretly rolling a 10-sided die, where the numbers 7-10 give more weight to outcomes of 1 or 2.
• We could start out with a similar line of code to the one above and substitute one number: var rollStack = Math.floor(Math.random()*10+1);
• On a regular roll of the dice, we would just return the value of roll as a result. But since we're stacking the deck, we need to add more coding. We need to add an if/else function statement that checks if our result is 7-10 and tweak it so it gives us a 1 or 2. (This was implemented in an exercise involving making a blackjack game, such that jacks, queens, and kings, with the values 11-13, still return a value of 10.) In the end, you'll end up with something like this:

var rollStack = function() {
var die = Math.floor(Math.random()*10+1);
return die;};
var die = rollStack();
var getValue = function(die) {
if(die===7 || die===8 || die===9)
{return 1;}
else if(die===10)
{return 2;}
else
{return die;}};

Slap a console.log(getValue(die)); on the end, and you've got yourself a stacked die that gives 1s and 2s over half of the time. I've got to confess to you though, the above coding took me about two hours to figure out, and I ended up having to go back to the blackjack exercise and lift a decent portion of the code from there. In the end, by my writing (I'm sure someone could probably reduce what I've done down by a couple lines), it takes you about a dozen lines of code to rig a die, and a slender single line to play with a fair die.

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I went through all that coding hell to illustrate this point: Coding a fair die is so much easier than coding a stacked die. To think that someone would intentionally suffer through coding a stacked die to make a game unfair, rather than using a simple fair die, is just stupid. If anything, I would hope that if someone wrote a game with a stacked die, they would wear it as a badge to show you how much work they went through (like something by RRRRThats5Rs, or The Binding of Isaac). Plus, people would flock to it in greater numbers knowing that it's a deliberately unfair game against them.

Coding a cheating game isn't logical. Next time you play a game that "seems to hate you," just accept it: You suck. But you can change that! Play some more. Develop new strategies. Find out how other people beat the game. It's entirely possible that you might've had bad luck once or twice or twenty times, but automatically blaming that on the game being rigged is narcissistic lunacy. After all, if you won every time, it wouldn't be much of a game, would it?

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Edit: Well, that didn't take long. As zxo points out in the comments, all it would take to change the fair die roll to a stacked die roll is to square the value of the random number, giving much greater weight to lower numbers. He suggests it could be done by adding two characters (I'd imagine ^2), but the shortest addition I can find is Math.pow(). So all of a sudden, my brick of stacked code looks like this:

var roll = Math.floor(Math.pow(Math.random(),2)*6+1);

And my entire argument has already been obliterated. Not that it was even a strong argument to begin with, I confess. But can we at least agree that people who complain about random number generators need to shut up?