How do I know what I mean until I see what I say?

<repvblic> every teenager should be issued a copy of seasons in the abyss

---


Can't wait any longer
To see what you see
When I look at the world

N e w s  o f  t h e  D a y

26 April 2001

How do I know what I mean until I see what I say?
C.M. Forester said that, not me. It's odd how verbose I can be when not updating my own damned webpage. I've been all over the Cosmic Rift boards lately. There's a lot going on with that game and a lot that needs to be addressed, including a few disappointments.

I'm going to keep this update small because I am neurotic about the midnight thing. Hopefully will have something a little more in depth up tomorrow sometime, but there's something important I want to mention here, which is that they are answering the complaints about ship sizes with a new set of smaller ships which apparently go online tomorrow for public testing.

Related to this, Jeff has made the message window and the player listing transparent and easily hidden, so that almost the entire screen can now be dedicated to gameplay.

There should be an open test zone up sometime tomorrow where you can try these out. I urge everyone who gave up on CR because of these problems to give it another try with the new ships.

For now I'll stay off the subject of me objecting to this. :P

One hour in four

<saltygirl> we bombed iraq in time for this weeks snl
<saltygirl> sweet

---


Excuse me, a doormat is good honest work....
Only the bored and wicked rich don't know that....

N e w s  o f  t h e  D a y

20 April 2001

One hour in four
Tritone churchbells and bloody chickensex if I've not spent 18 of the past 72 hours playing Cosmic Rift. Yow! I've been ranting away on the forums a lot so I'm going to keep my remarks here less detailed than they've been elsewhere, if only because I have other things on my mind. I do have a few things to say however.

Most glaring among the negative reactions to this game I've been seeing in the last few days is the unbelievably obvious contradiction in the claim that both 1) Cosmic Rift is nothing but a ripoff of Subspace, and 2) its developers have fucked it all up. To those out there claiming both: Duh? Did you want it to be more like Subspace so you could complain better about the similarities? To those among you making only one of these claims, observe those making the other: Magically, you and they are having entirely different experiences while performing the same acts within the same game.

I urge you to drop some of that old baggage and observe the game as it actually plays: achingly slow, far too dangerous in close combat, not a whole lot of variation among the ships or weapons. I hazard a guess that, after at least eight months of development, these things are not accidents. Are they any fun? Maybe not - but curiously it's the Subspace players who find the game awkward who aren't having any fun. Often it seems they are the same people who can't enjoy more than a few zones within Subspace. Maybe you've seen the face of God but to me it just looked like a computer game. You can get used to a new computer game. Imagine for a moment that this is in fact what you are doing.

We're carrying a lot of baggage on this trip and it's not fitting in the overhead compartments this time.

That aching slowness goes with the dangerous combat. Keep your speed always at a maximum, never be without something to bounce off of. Stay away from your enemy. Those days of coming in close and flirting with death and getting another chance are over. In this game the rule seems to be that you must make the kill or you immediately put yourself at a horrible disadvantage, struggling against your own inertia while your opponent - if he's smart he hasn't yet fired a shot - comes at you with the momentum he's been saving up, bounces off the surface he was choosing while you were eyeing his jugular, and comes at you with an attack you often simply cannot avoid. The outcome was decided when you misjudged what he had to work with and you mistakenly fired your first shot.

The pacing seemed less slow once I came to notice these things. I realized that those slow turns and hesitant moments were part of the fight, and in accepting that I noticed something else: The best War Zone and Turf Zone games and the sneakiest Chaos Zone tunnel hunts often are made up from long periods of suspenseful quiet punctuated by explosions of violence. Cosmic Rift seems to follow this principle on a micro level, so that the dogfighting can even become relaxing. So often though the kill is sudden, unexpected, and even shocking. In failure I am surprised at my inability to act; in victory I am amazed at my brutality. The highs and lows are high contrast, uncommonly satisfying. The pacing is as alien here in one direction as the lightning fast intricacies of Quake rocket fights might be in the other - the pacing in this game is a conscious act of defiance.

The other things on my mind went away. What I want to do now is play the game. But my DSL is broken again, and so I think I need to take a walk.

One hour in four

<saltygirl> we bombed iraq in time for this weeks snl
<saltygirl> sweet

Excuse me, a doormat is good honest work....

Only the bored and wicked rich don't know that....

One hour in four
Tritone churchbells and bloody chickensex if I've not spent 18 of the past 72 hours playing Cosmic Rift. Yow! I've been ranting away on the forums a lot so I'm going to keep my remarks here less detailed than they've been elsewhere, if only because I have other things on my mind. I do have a few things to say however.

Most glaring among the negative reactions to this game I've been seeing in the last few days is the unbelievably obvious contradiction in the claim that both 1) Cosmic Rift is nothing but a ripoff of Subspace, and 2) its developers have fucked it all up. To those out there claiming both: Duh? Did you want it to be more like Subspace so you could complain better about the similarities? To those among you making only one of these claims, observe those making the other: Magically, you and they are having entirely different experiences while performing the same acts within the same game.

I urge you to drop some of that old baggage and observe the game as it actually plays: achingly slow, far too dangerous in close combat, not a whole lot of variation among the ships or weapons. I hazard a guess that, after at least eight months of development, these things are not accidents. Are they any fun? Maybe not - but curiously it's the Subspace players who find the game awkward who aren't having any fun. Often it seems they are the same people who can't enjoy more than a few zones within Subspace. Maybe you've seen the face of God but to me it just looked like a computer game. You can get used to a new computer game. Imagine for a moment that this is in fact what you are doing.

We're carrying a lot of baggage on this trip and it's not fitting in the overhead compartments this time.

That aching slowness goes with the dangerous combat. Keep your speed always at a maximum, never be without something to bounce off of. Stay away from your enemy. Those days of coming in close and flirting with death and getting another chance are over. In this game the rule seems to be that you must make the kill or you immediately put yourself at a horrible disadvantage, struggling against your own inertia while your opponent - if he's smart he hasn't yet fired a shot - comes at you with the momentum he's been saving up, bounces off the surface he was choosing while you were eyeing his jugular, and comes at you with an attack you often simply cannot avoid. The outcome was decided when you misjudged what he had to work with and you mistakenly fired your first shot.

The pacing seemed less slow once I came to notice these things. I realized that those slow turns and hesitant moments were part of the fight, and in accepting that I noticed something else: The best War Zone and Turf Zone games and the sneakiest Chaos Zone tunnel hunts often are made up from long periods of suspenseful quiet punctuated by explosions of violence. Cosmic Rift seems to follow this principle on a micro level, so that the dogfighting can even become relaxing. So often though the kill is sudden, unexpected, and even shocking. In failure I am surprised at my inability to act; in victory I am amazed at my brutality. The highs and lows are high contrast, uncommonly satisfying. The pacing is as alien here in one direction as the lightning fast intricacies of Quake rocket fights might be in the other - the pacing in this game is a conscious act of defiance.

The other things on my mind went away. What I want to do now is play the game. But my DSL is broken again, and so I think I need to take a walk.

A funny thing happened on the way to the soapbox

<[null]> Ted Turner is going to kick Steve Case's ass
<[null]> too bad they don't have a way to make that a PPV event

Now some of us are weak, and some endure

And some people live their lives with a violence that's pure and clean

But I saw a man cry once, down on his knees

In the corner of a darkened cell, and his pain meant nothing to me

But I was younger then, and young men never die

When i walked out in the sun, I was strong, clear minded,

 and blind

N e w s  o f  t h e  D a y
9 April 2001


A funny thing happened on the way to the soapbox
It's clear that I don't enjoy doing this anymore, and I missed both my recent opportunities to Retire™ - the most recent being my 4th Subspace birthday, which I completely forgot about - so it appears as though we're stuck with each other until this coming December 1st. Mark it on your calendars.

So here I was, all ready to tear down 90% of the history of multiplayer gaming, when - you know at the end of The Grinch Who Stole Back Christmas, when the Little Whos Down In Whoville are having their evil pagan ritual commemorating their faceless Who-god, and our friend the Grinch has endeavored to teach them what exactly the fuck Christmas is for, when a portal to Hell opens up and the Ghost of Holiday Giftgiving jumps out, possessing our hero long enough to break his spirit and turn him into One Of Them?

It was like that, only BETTER. Inspired as I was by the unprecedented horribleness that is Tribes 2, I was making a list of bad games, and good games gone bad, and checking it twice, when something divine touched me, and before you could say "hey e let's bring back Turf / Jackpot Zone again" I was enjoying match upon match of the marvelous Quake III Team Arena, strutting my bad stuff at the top of the frag list not because I have any skill, but solely because - just like those Good Old Days - I was a Team Player. An army of one, if you will!

It took this long for that high to wear off, and now I'm afraid I've forgotten what in the hell I needed so desperately to say. But I will say this. After some tweaking and fiddling I finally got Tribes 2 to run well, and it's still pretty damned dismal. Not horrible, in all honesty, as much as I might wish to call it horrible. Just dismal. Claustrophobic and chaotic and visually the polar opposite of eye popping. It is missing all the vast, epic grandness of the original game as well as the cloak & dagger layout of its interiors. Things I experienced the day Tribes 1 hit store shelves - receiving objectives and waypoints from other players, painting targets for mortar fire, actual fear of flying vehicles - still haven't encountered them yet. It's not there. The teams don't communicate, people don't respect the vehicles, and the command interface is even less useful than the original. Far less useful, in fact. I couldn't believe this when I read it in the context of a positive review, but it's the case. Tribes 2 has just about the most miserable team interface a person could hope to come up with. There are many other aspects to this dead horse but I don't think I am going to kick it. Suffice it to say this long awaited sequel to the one game that really challenged Subspace in the greatness category during Subspace's heyday - nut uh. It aint there.

Other games have come close over time, most impressively Allegiance. That game in many ways topped the original Tribes, and offered unique experiences that rivaled what Subspace had accomplished. I'll revisit that game here sometime soon. For now all I can say is it continues to amaze me that developers dozens of team members strong, fueled by millions upon millions of dollars, still can't beat our game's basic oldschool charm - and not even because it is oldschool. Subspace's real strength has never been in how much less flashy it is, but in how honestly more advanced it is, than these new games.

I am actually very angry that I forgot my dumb 4th birthday, because I had intended to put up my first new map in maybe half a year, for whatever that gesture was worth, and I guess I've blown that. It'll go up soon just the same, within the next week or so, as I more or less retire the present SCF map originally made for The Dark Zone. Anyway stay tuned if that sort of thing interests you.