Full Glass Empty Clip

Living First Person

stavrosthewonderchicken — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 04:37:10 +0000

It’s 1977. I’m 12 years old. It’s a gorgeous Northern BC summer day, one of those glorious fleeting perfect days that are all the sweeter in the frozen north, because the memories of mud and slush barely fade before the leaves have already begun to turn again. Utterly pure blue sky, sun warm on the skin, grass a deep impatient green, a light breeze off the lake that is so invigoratingly packed with oxygen and piney perfume it might as well be cocaine. I’m playing third base, it’s what we’d call little league if we called it that in Canada back then, I’m just beginning to feel the awkwardness of adolescence, but the sheer pleasure of being alive and standing on that dirt under that gigantic bowl of sky on that day is more than enough to let me ignore my self-consciousness. I’m a big, strong kid, and even if I’m more bookworm than jock, I enjoy sports.

One of the kids on the other team strikes out, and our gang begins to jog back to the chickenwire fence behind home plate for our time at bat, where there are a few parents hanging out, maybe drinking a beer or three in the sun. I get about three or four loping steps along the baseline before my left leg folds up, with no warning whatsoever, and I go down into the dirt. I try like hell to get up, but my leg just doesn’t seem to want to bend correctly. I don’t remember it hurting as much as I remember being confused, trying to figure out why my leg suddenly didn’t do what I told it to do any more, and then horrified and embarrassed, when my stepdad came out onto the diamond, picked me up, and carried me off.

Turns out that I had Osgood-Schlatter syndrome. I was just growing too damned fast, apparently, and bits and pieces of me couldn’t keep up. The doctor told us that I’d have to have the left leg put in an ankle to hip cast for six months, and then the other leg — once again, ankle to hip — for another six months after that.

That was pretty much the end of sports for me, at least team sports. That was the beginning — after that long, itchy year, when my first my left and then my right leg emerged, atrophied, pale, and, to my horror, looking like a limb grafted on from a much smaller, sicklier young man — of my lifelong habit of riding bikes with my headphones on down empty highways. And that summer, when the doorway to baseball and swimming and many other things I loved closed, at least temporarily, that the door into computers and the games you can play on them opened. When I learned that it was possible to go places without actually going anywhere. That was the summer my parents bought me my first computer, a TRS-80 Model III.

Over at MefightClub, there was a conversation over the past few days about how many of our members enjoy games that include a lot of spreadsheets. Literally, or figuratively — games that require you to think hard, USE BRAIN, to crunch numbers and test hypotheses. One of the most active threads recently, into hundreds and hundreds of posts just in the last week or two, is about a spreadsheet game called Economies of Scale. And it got me to thinking — because those kinds of games just don’t appeal to my sense of fun, even a little bit — about how and why my taste in gaming developed.

There’s a pretty narrow spectrum of Game Genres I Enjoy. I don’t have very much time for gaming — odd as that is, as someone who runs several different gaming-related websites, I admit — and so my limited taste is probably for the best. I try everything I can find time for, but I inevitably gravitate back to a certain format. I’d call it the First Person Shooter, but that’s not entirely accurate, because even though I love the shooting and exploding and showering in the blood of my enemies and all that (have a look at some of my previous posts here for long paeans to some of my favorites), one of the games that has hit me the hardest in recent years was Dear Esther, where there’s not single hyperblaster or rocket launcher to be found.

I just love going places.

It’s 1992, I think, and I’m walking up a gentle slope, through a traditional village called Bena, perched on the shoulder of the volcano Inerie, in south-cental Flores, Indonesia. It’s oppressively hot, and the black volcanic dust floats up as we walk slowly uphill between the ngadhu ancestor-worship totems. The 45-degree slope of that enormous conical volcano rises up to the right. It’s all a bit dreamlike, but I can almost literally feel the memories of this burning themselves into my brain, pictures being recorded in my memory, because I’m way too deep into the moment to pull out my camera.

We reach the top of the slope, and pull up short, because falling away before us is a sheer cliff, hundreds of metres above the jungle treetops below, and we find ourselves gazing gobsmacked out over a vista that stretches, green and glorious, all the way to the distant sea.

I’ve stepped into an entirely alien world. This was the reason I shouldered the backpack in the first place.

My decades of travel came naturally, I think. I grew up in a tiny, isolated northern town in British Columbia. It was, and still is, a place of surpassing natural beauty. It’s nestled among mountains, at the end of a deep, cold lake that stretches 60 kilometres to the west, into wilderness. It’s clean and quiet and sits under a magnificent dome of dramatic sky, and forces on the people who live there a kind of respect for nature, a feeling of clinging to the edge of the vast hairy back of mother nature and an awareness that we could be thrown off at a whim.

I got out as soon as I could, but I still love the place.

Part of growing up isolated and insulated, for me at least, was burning curiosity about Other Places. Ever since I could remember, every new thing I learned about the world out there filled me with ever greater desire to see it for myself. I avidly read science fiction until my teenage years to satisfy that hunger, I read encylopedias, I dreamed. And, eventually, I gamed. Back in those days, with no internet, two radio stations and two television channels, no bookstore (but, praise be, a library), information was precious. Pictures weren’t drowning us in a continuous stream of imagery in the way we’ve become accustomed to these days, where the truly spectacular and heartstoppingly beautiful makes us pause for a second or two in our cruising the stream at MLKSHK or Flickr or some new Tumblr blog we’ve found, then move on. Evocative pictures of strange new places were totemic then, captivating, and great ones could, for me at least, set me dreaming for days on end.

The games I was playing back then left almost everything to the imagination, too, but even then, I was keen to explore places I had never been. To be there, somehow.

It’s 1981, and we’re half-stepping slowly, carefully through a cold stone corridor. It’s dim and it’s dank, and even by torchlight, it’s difficult to see anything beyond the merest outlines of the walls. We’re legitimately terrified and stop to talk about what to do next every few steps, but it’s one of the most exciting things we’ve done in a long time. I’m staying late in the computer lab at high school with 3 friends, and we’re gathered around the green-screen Apple II computer, exploring dungeons in Wizardry: The Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. The tiny 3-D line drawings representing the corridors and rooms we’re wandering through are quite literally blowing our minds. We’ve never seen anything like this before: we are fully there, fully engaged, and it freaks us out every time we encounter the creatures that threaten to kill our little party, and fills us with pride when we survive those encounters. These crudely-rendered line drawings are a place for us, and for hours, day after day, we return there, and the snowbanks and slush puddles that mark out the limits of our little town fade into the background. I’ll remember those dungeons.

I still do, today.

At the risk of sounding like the old fart that I am, lecturing kids today on why everything and everybody was so much better back then, imagination played a bigger role in the way our brains developed, in the way we built our internal representations of all the vast variety out there in the world we’d never seen. Or at least it did in little, media-starved, frontier towns like the one I grew up in. We couldn’t bathe in a stream of mindblowing imagery, of video recordings of every corner and every aspect of life everywhere, always. We had to take what we could find, and build our internal visions of the world without nearly as many bricks. There are ways in which that was better perhaps — being introduced to the world gradually — but ways in which it may well have been worse. Too little information is rarely better than too much. But I think, back then, that the information drought built and developed some muscles that we might not otherwise have had.

It’s March 2012, and I’m walking slowly and carefully along a narrow cliffside path, climbing above the rocky beach of a storm-scoured Hebridean island. Small pebbles click underfoot, and a breeze out of the west, where the sun is low in the sky and barely able to bleed through the thick cloud cover out over the sea, stirs the patchy grass and scrub. It’s a lonely, grey place, but beautiful in its way, and I only recently emerged from a network of sea caves that literally took my breath away with their beauty. A narrator’s voice is nattering on about a car crash or something, which I find the tiniest bit annoying, because I’m just enjoying the place. I stop and stand on cliff’s edge for a while, just to look out over the sea, share the moment with the seabirds wheeling in the updrafts, and think about this place, make a memory. I don’t press F5 to take a screenshot. I’d rather just remember being here, even though this place doesn’t actually exist. It is restful.

I think much of my love of gaming comes from the same place as my love of travel, my small-town-boy desire to go and see as many places as I possibly could, the impulse that drove me out as soon as I was able with a canvas backpack and set me wandering around the planet 25 years ago, travels that still haven’t ended. I think the same impulse is at the root of the games I play. I love to explore new places, to see new sights. I love to feel myself inhabiting alien worlds, and my brain doesn’t really make as strong a distinction as it might between worlds that are virtual and places that are real. The point has always been to see them, as best I could, with my own eyes.

And my brain has always been more than willing to fill in the details of those digital worlds — even if they were primitive wireframe models that did not even try to approximate ‘reality’. Sure, places like Bena village, or the golden grass waving across the slope of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh, or the whalesharks I swam with in the sea off the Baja coast, or the eucalyptus vista off the Blue Mountains cliffsides of Toowoomba, or the sea of sunflowers turning their faces to the light in south-western Spain, or any number of other the other places I’ve been, sure, they are more real to me, with the full impact of all of my senses and the friendship of the people I was with weaving them deep into my memory.

But I remember Q2DM1 with incredible clarity, too, and I remember the people who played there with me. I remember the mountain rides through the massive world of FUEL and the times I parked the bike on the verge of some particularly impressive precipice to drink some beer and watch the sun track across the sky. I remember scrambling across Afghan mountainsides, almost able to smell the scrub pine and dust, in a Call of Duty game, and I remember the dire gory torture chambers in Doom. I remember with a full complement of imagined sensoria the experience of arriving in City 17 on that train, and disembarking.

Am I saying that the scientists talking me through Black Mesa’s test chamber occupy my memory with the same quality and force as, say, the fat man taking darts to his naked belly outside the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris that cold February day in 1988? No, no I’m most certainly not. They are different kinds of memories, and differently dear to me.

But having spent a little while thinking about why it is that I am mostly interested in games that take me to new places, where I can look through the screen as it proxies my own eyes into new places, even mundane ones, I think I’ve understood a bit of what makes me the kind of gamer I am.

It is the same impulse that set me out on the road and kept me wandering for many years: a hunger for new places, new vistas, new experiences to live through, and, when I feel social, for friends to share those new places with. It’s all one, and I’m not so much a gamer, I guess, as I am, at heart, an explorer.

The aesthetics of blowing stuff up from a first-person vs. top-down perspective

Full Glass Empty Clip Podcast: Technical Peccadilloes Edition

Kasey Kagawa — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 05:20:12 +0000

We return after holidays, work, and the inevitable technical breakdowns, but we persevere to bring you another podcast! This week, we discuss the impossible: Minecraft goes 1.0, the unfortunate: GSC Game Studios and GamePro fold, and the stupid: EA continues their über-ban policy, parents name their kid after a character in Skyrim, Telltale gets caught sockpuppeting user reviews of Jurassic Park: The Game and Ars Technica’s Ben Kuchera supports them, the International Red Cross opens their mouths to say that video games might be a war crime, the other shoe drops on the Playstation Vita, Microsoft makes you sign away your right to class-action lawsuits, and Skyward Sword has an unfixable game-breaking bug. And you wonder where our sunny disposition comes from. Please, Share and Enjoy.

FGEC Podcast Episode 40 (12/10/11)

I Hate You So Much Right Now

Mr Bismarck — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 19:50:22 +0000

Making video game characters with whom I can fall in love takes a cocktail of hard work, genius, luck and Jennifer Hale. It turns out that making video game characters I can hate takes practically no effort at all.

In this short series of articles a small collection of pixels, logic and random events will demonstrate that I am a terrible person.

Men are more ready to repay an injury than a benefit
because gratitude is a burden and revenge a pleasure.
— Tacitus

Third Place : Ralph Freeman. Front Office Football, 2007.

There are several holes in my ideal gaming life, the primary being that I am forced to interrupt playing games for 10 hours each day to earn money to give to Gabe Newell.

Somewhere very close behind is the lack of a decent American Football simulator of the type that Sports Interactive Gaming turn out every year for the spherical version of football.

I have a burning desire to start life as assistant to the Kicking coach at some tiny High School in Canada, knowing that with the right combination of luck and application I could rise to the position of largely meaningless puppet on the sidelines in Oakland, while the ghost of Al Davis commands me who to draft.

There are several pretenders to this vacant throne, with the most valiant effort coming from Solecismic Software’s “Front Office Football,” which contains the right blend of deep gameplan design, meaningful player ratings, solid enough financial model and labyrinthine UI for a game of its type.

Shortly after its release I started a game with the aforementioned Oakland Raiders that would turn into a desperate twelve year chase for the Vince Lombardi trophy – a chase that put forward several candidates for the sort of hate that warms a man’s dark soul, leading to cathartic article writing.

Strong and obvious front runners were Quarterbacks Tom Brady and Carson Palmer. Brady’s Patriots were secretly keyed by a ferocious pair of Defensive Ends drafted early in the game, but it was galling to hear the final gun sound year after year on another 31-3 Patriot victory, Brady marching off the field in a still-pristine white jersey, while a collection of my own passers had to be scraped off the turf and reassembled, Frankenstein-style.

As Quarterback of the Cincinnati Bengals Carson Palmer put together a flawless 7-0 record against the Raiders over twelve years, including a week fifteen, one-legged, off-the-bench effort as a 39 year old backup, in which he led his team from 21-3 behind to a 31-28 win that denied the Raiders homefield advantage through the playoffs.

No doubt Palmer cackled loudly as the silver and Black subsequently suffered a road AFC Championship game defeat for the third time in four years.

But these choices would be too obvious, their annoyance too routine. Our winner comes from the much more mundane ranks of backup Offensive Linemen. He only played a single game for my Raiders and yet earned a degree of ire that still causes a bad mood years later.

Ralph Freeman was a three hundred pound offensive lineman out of the University of Nebraska. Selected in the fifth round of the 2012 NFL Draft by the Denver Broncos he subsequently spent three years on the fringe of their starting roster, earning playing time in 27 of the 48 games in that period, including two starts when more favoured players suffered injury.

And it was injury that brought Freeman to me.

The 2015 season suggested much promise for the Oakland Raiders. The virtual Al Davis had shuffled off his virtual coil, we stole the Superbowl-winning Saints’ Offensive Co-ordinator to be our new Head Coach and then the Raiders went 4-0 in the pre-season.

Everything was in place for a real return to relevancy for the Silver and Black when the big red injury rock fell onto my roster from a great height – by the end of week four of the regular season the Raiders were 1-3 with eleven starters sidelined by injury, including four of the five starting Offensive Linemen.

Desperately scratching around for replacements I came across the happy circumstance of divisional rival Denver’s release of Ralph Freeman. With his punchy run-blocking style he seemed to be the perfect stopgap pickup for the team that featured number one overall Halfback Philip “J” Fly.

To make roster space I sent Cornerback Kendrick Zulkowski onto Injured Reserve, (thereby disqualifying Zulkowski from playing again that season), and snapped up Freeman on a one-year deal that included a $400,000 signing bonus.

Freeman didn’t sign in time for the defeat that left us 1-4, but he saw some snaps in the following week’s 41-7 drubbing at the hands of a certain Mr. Palmer’s Bengals. With the season now on the line we needed all hands to the pump in a singular-minded push for recovery, so it was a little disturbing when Freeman didn’t show up for practice on Monday and was missing again on Tuesday.

Finally Freeman’s agent Randy Carlson called to inform us that Mr. Freeman was suffering from “severe anxiety attacks” and we should consider him injured.

Barely a week after we handed Freeman $400,000 he announces he’s not coming to work anymore! Because he is anxious.

After snapping the arms off my office chair in anger my first reaction was to cut the guy, (actually my first reaction was to pan him in the face with one of the chair arms. With nails through it), however, under the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement cutting an injured player requires payment of an injury settlement. Freeman’s agent let us know that his client would accept termination of his contract for just an additional $570,000.

Somehow he said it with a straight face.

With the guaranteed $400,000 I had already handed Freeman this meant he was asking for very nearly one million dollars for his ten days on the team – Almost $100,000 for every play he had been involved in. Following release he would, of course, be free to recover from his anxiety and take someone else’s signing bonus.

Apoplectic with anger at this point I asked Mr. Carlson to inform his client to try sex and travel and went back to solitary fuming. There was no way on earth I was going to give Freeman $570,000 to go away less than two weeks after I’d given him $400,000 to show up, but placing him on injured reserve would mean having to pay him his weekly salary for the rest of the season while he sat at home playing XBox.

As I was right against the roster limits and needed to find a way to make space to bring in another offensive lineman I was forced to pick my poison.

After a while spent wondering if “murder” was viable I bit the bullet and sent the NFL confirmation that the Oakland Raiders were placing Offensive Guard Ralph Freeman on Injured Reserve and then signed street free agent Guard Todd Herremans in his place.

Two weeks later Freeman made a mistake when agent Randy Carlson informed me that his client was no longer suffering from anxiety and would be prepared to come back to work if only I hadn’t put him on injured reserve.

I’m sure this seemed like a tremendously funny joke to Mr. Freeman, except that now he was no longer injured I could cut him immediately without having to pay a settlement.

I called him on the phone…

“Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Not you, you ****.”

I hung up and then terminated his contract.

Four years later at Superbowl LIII on February 3rd 2019 my Oakland lined up against a Washington team featuring a certain Mr. Ralph Freeman. The game was effectively over by halftime and turned into a 34-14 canter for the Raiders.

By this point Freeman was little more than emergency depth and did nothing more than dirty a jersey as he didn’t take the field and retired immediately after the game. Even so, as I stood on the podium with the Vince Lombardi trophy over my head there was only one person I sought out to wave to and it wasn’t my family.

I hate you, Ralph Freeman.

No related posts.

Minecraft Waterworld: Hardcore Mode

johnstein — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 08:39:39 +0000

“Dry land is not just our destination, it is our destiny!”

So sayeth Deacon and so sayeth our Hero, the ever optimistic Captain Blockypants Reynolds (or just Cap’n Mal for short).

Hello and welcome to this introductory episode of Minecraft Waterworld on Hardcore Mode!

Setting: Our hapless hero has [landed, been banished, is stuck in a dream, woke up one day] on a world with nary a speck of land in sight.

Goal: Somehow… Cap’n Mal knows if he finds and kills the [Evil, Vile, Wily, Gorram] Dragon, his quest will finally come to a happy conclusion.

Complication: He only has ONE LIFE TO LIVE!

But first, a bit of background (credentials?)…

I haven’t had a chance to play much Minecraft v1.0.0 yet. I logged onto the MFC Beans server but I just wasn’t feeling it. You know what I mean. You drop into a new Minecraft world tool-less as you were on your first Spawnday, you half-heartedly rip a few logs from some nearby trees, chase down a few chickens to sate your Salmonellaphilia, but eventually realize you need a change of scenery.

I remembered coming across THE BEST SEED EVER in beta 1.8 that dropped you on a tiny deserted island with a single tree. I was originally drawn to Minecraft due to the Survival aspect. I’d played creative mode pre-alpha but it just didn’t keep me interested.

But being stuck on a small plot of land with a SINGLE tree to make my tools?!? Now THAT’S exciting.

I don’t believe Hardcore mode existed yet, or if it did, I didn’t select it. But I tried to treat it as if it were Game Over if I died. The difficulty setting was Hard, so I knew I had to find some food before starving. At the time, though, I didn’t realize Hard = Death from Starvation. I found out soon enough.

I spent days on that island, carefully rationing my logs and expanding the island to plant more trees. I had a depressingly small number of seeds and no matter how long I stared at them, they didn’t grow nearly fast enough into bread (let alone cake!)

The other problem was, no matter how much grass I had, no animals would spawn. I found out later that Minecraft was probably treating the island as an Ocean Biome that would never spawn tasty walking meat… but at the time, I didn’t know that and it kept Hope Alive.

My Hunger bar finally made its way to 3 drumsticks and I realized I needed to take desperate action. So as Fantastic Mr Fox once said, it was time to DIG! (and hope beyond hope to find a Dungeon with a chest full of bread or apples). However, as luck had it, there was an abandoned mineshaft underneath the island all this time… doh!

The problem was, the digging made me hungrier. And even though I could hear zombies and skeletons all over the place, I knew there was a good chance there was a chest SOMEWHERE in that vast maze of twisted rails and tunnels, and I knew it had MY name on it.

So I ran blindly into the darkness, torch spamming like a pro, dodging arrows, smacking the occasssssssional creeeper if one got too close, and running away from the moans, all the while watching my hunger plummet (and all the while wondering if it was better to run to move faster, or not run to stave off starvation… Double Bind Dilemma Indeed!)

But alas, it wasn’t meant to be, and I finally succumbed to the hunger and my stomach exploded violently, killing me in the process. It wasn’t until I respawned on top of the island and sadly looked out over the water that I realized mineshafts have an abundance of cobwebs which would have made a fine fishing pole.

You Live, you Die, you Learn… which brings us back to the topic at hand..

I haven’t had a chance to play much Minecraft v1.0.0 yet, but after my experiences with The Greatest Island Challenge Ever, I realized I wanted to redeem myself. I feel like I’ve learned a lot about Minecraft Survival and with the addition of The End Dimension and the Dragon, I’ve got a natural goal to aim for (and like any island castaway worth his sea-salt knows, you have to have a good goal to keep yourself occupied and out of trouble)

To that end, I managed to find a Waterworld seed for v1.0.0: dovahkiin

(Oddly enough, if you capitalize the ‘d’, Dovahkiin, you get a world with a double-village. Who knew?)

So I created the world, set it to Hardcore, and Cap’n Mal found himself tossed rudely into the middle of the Ocean….

Looks like we’re going to have to swim….

Next Episode: “Squid, squid, everywhere, nor any crumb to eat…”

Join us as we try to prevent poor Mal from starving to death before we can secure a steady foodsource (and bemoan that Notch deigned to deprive us from feasting on all those useless swimming ink-sacs all around us)

Full Glass Empty Clip Podcast: Tacticool Edition (11.11.11)

Kasey Kagawa — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 22:15:29 +0000

As is apropos on this Veteran’s Day, we spend most of this week’s podcast discussing the latest in modern military shooters, starting with our review of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. I ramble for a bit about what I’d like to see in a modern military shooter game, and why the “vision video” concept for Rainbow Six – Patriots is very much not that, Call of Duty Elite is delayed and borked, Battlefield 3 loses first week traffic numbers to a Call of Duty game, Steam gets hacked, and we talk about how Ubisoft and EA will punish us for being good paying customers through DRM. Please, Share and Enjoy.

FGEC Podcast – Episode 39 (11/11/11)

Full Glass Empty Clip Podcast: Who Are You People Edition (11.02.11)

Kasey Kagawa — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 03:44:39 +0000

After a long absence, we have returned! Work and life may interfere, but nothing will stop us from nattering inanely into your earholes about beer! And games! Always with games.

After reviewing what we’ve been doing while we’ve been away, we dive right into the news with descriptions of the new Portal 2 Puzzle Creator, Battlefield 3 sells 5 million units in the first week and simultaneously destroys my faith in humanity and sets EA up for massive disappointment when Modern Warfare 3 inevitably sells that much in a day, the most unexpected Halloween special DLC pack we’ve ever seen, Blizzard jumps the shark and steps in it, and more, in this week’s hopefully final return of the Full Glass Empty Clip Podcast. Please, Share and Enjoy.

FGEC Podcast Episode 38 (11/02/11)

Intro Music: Caravan Palace – Crash

Full Glass Empty Clip Podcast: We’re Horrible, Horrible People Edition (09.15.11)

Kasey Kagawa — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 01:50:08 +0000

And once again, we return to you belatedly and with sadness in our hearts. Real life stupidly keeps on intruding into our efforts to bring you our particular brand of meaningless babble, and so here we are. This week, we cover such late-breaking news as Ubisoft removing the DRM from From Dust, freeing us to wonder why you would want to buy the game in the first place, EA continues making up for lost time with their dickery, the PC is resurgent while Nintendo continues to watch the bottom fall out of their business models, and we promote two things worthwhile: One, a pre-release beta of Minecraft‘s 1.8 Adventure release (which, due to our timeliness, is already out officially), and a Kickstarter donation page for the NASA astronaut sim MMO game, which is still ongoing and can be found here. Please, go forth and donate to a worthy cause, and remember to Share and Enjoy.

FGEC Podcast Episode 37 (09/15/11)

Full Glass Empty Clip Podcast: Imposition of Regularity Edition

Kasey Kagawa — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 20:14:28 +0000

For reasons that are entirely unknown at this juncture, the podcast is going up a day late. Still, after enjoying the last blast of vacation before the end of summer, we’ve got a decent amount of news, both good and bad, to share with you today. The full majesty of EA’s idiotic plans with Battlefield 3 have become manifest, Ubisoft pisses off just about everyone, Epic Games hints at a return to PC-focused development, Sony decides to make the Playstation Vita possibly worth owning, and Bethesda decides they own all the scrolls. Plus, a very timely review of Fallout: New Vegas. Please, Share and Enjoy.

FGEC Podcast Episode 36 (08/24/11)

The 36 Stratagems of L4D2

TheMadJuggler — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 02:11:41 +0000

The 36 Stratagems is a Chinese essay, derived from various written and oral accounts, offering Machiavellian advice in the realm of warfare and politics. The stratagems are presented as parables, making them flexible enough to apply to modern situations such as business, education, or… killing zombies.

To that end, I present The 36 Stratagems of Left 4 Dead 2, a guide that brings wisdom and cunning to the apocalypse.

All excerpts and translations courtesy Wikipedia.

Chapter 1: Winning Stratagems

Deceive the heavens to cross the ocean
Prepare too much and you lose sight of the big picture; what you see often you do not doubt. Yin (the art of deception) is in Yang (acting in open). Too much Yang (transparency) hides Yin (true ruses).

Versus matches pit four infected against four survivors. As a survivor, you want to lessen those odds. Deceive your opponents by rushing forward into a dangerous area and retreating as they spawn. Once they enter the mortal coil, their gurgling and churning will alert you to their presences. This is especially useful coming out of the safe room!

Besiege Wèi to rescue Zhào
When the enemy is too strong to be attacked directly, then attack something he holds dear. Know that he cannot be superior in all things. Somewhere there is a gap in the armour, a weakness that can be attacked instead.

In the first level of Dead Center, take an incapacitating class (hunter, jockey, smoker, charger) to the doors past the stairwell. Slash them open to create a fiery trap for the survivors.

Kill with a borrowed knife
Attack using the strength of another (in a situation where using one’s own strength is not favourable). Trick an ally into attacking him, bribe an official to turn traitor, or use the enemy’s own strength against him.

As a boomer, rely on the strength of others to distract and draw survivors to you. As a bubbly mass of goo, you need others to take the heat. Have a jockey/smoker pull survivors in one direction as you spawn from the other side.

Leisurely await for the laboured
It is an advantage to choose the time and place for battle. In this way you know when and where the battle will take place, while your enemy does not. Encourage your enemy to expend his energy in futile quests while you conserve your strength. When he is exhausted and confused, you attack with energy and purpose.

If survivors are not rushing through the level, there is no reason to attack until you have all for special infected ready. You determine the battleground by spawning all together.

Loot a burning house
When a country is beset by internal conflicts, when disease and famine ravage the population, when corruption and crime are rampant, then it will be unable to deal with an outside threat. This is the time to attack.

When a survivor falls to about 20 hit points or less, he or she becomes a priority target. Coordinate to bring that first survivor down. When someone is incapacitated, that is when you need to put the pressure on. Every incapacitated survivor is one less gun pointed at your bilious snout.

Make a sound in the east, then strike in the west
In any battle the element of surprise can provide an overwhelming advantage. Even when face to face with an enemy, surprise can still be employed by attacking where he least expects it. To do this you must create an expectation in the enemy’s mind through the use of a feint.
The idea here is to get the enemy to focus his forces in a location, and then attack elsewhere which would be weakly defended.

A hunter is an invaluable tool for distraction. Just crouching and growling can draw the survivor’s attention away from a prospective boom. If you miss a big pounce, head for high ground and stay alive as long as possible. The more guns on you, the fewer on commons and your teammates.

Chapter 2: Enemy Dealing Stratagems

Create something from nothing
(無中生有／无中生有, Wú zhōng shēng yǒu)
A plain lie. Make somebody believe there was something when there is in fact nothing.
One method of using this stratagem is to create an illusion of something’s existence, while it does not exist. Another method is to create an illusion that something does not exist, while it does.

Enabling “alltalk” on the server opens the path to one of the more hilariously evil strategies. As infected, call out blatant lies about enemies lying in the wings, false directions, or being smoked far behind in the safe room. Gamers are generally poor at voice recognition.

Openly repair the gallery roads, but sneak through the passage of Chencang
(明修棧道,暗渡陳倉／明修栈道,暗渡陈仓, Míng xiū zhàn dào, àn dù chén cāng)
Deceive the enemy with an obvious approach that will take a very long time, while surprising him by taking a shortcut and sneak up to him. As the enemy concentrates on the decoy, he will miss you sneaking up to him.

There are many opportunities to deceive special infected in L4D2. Getting zombies to spawn early is always advantgeous, but you can also pscyhe them out when you reach a fork in the road. For example, at the beginning of No Mercy, survivors can begin by the stairs or through the skylight. Faking one direction then heading another can often prevent the specials from spawning at the right time. If even one gets lost navigating from the bedroom to the stairs, that makes your job 25% easier.

Watch the fires burning across the river
(隔岸觀火／隔岸观火, Gé àn guān huǒ)
Delay entering the field of battle until all the other players have become exhausted fighting amongst themselves. Then go in at full strength and pick up the pieces.

When a player is incapacitated, zombies tend to follow their biological imperative and throw themselves upon the victim. A smart zombie tempers his enthusiasm and wait until the last possible second to attack before the survivors pick up their comrade. This gives invaluable spawn time to the other special infected. A kamikaze attack of three simultaneous specials is quickly repelled. Take turns preventing pick-up!

Hide a knife behind a smile
(笑裏藏刀／笑里藏刀, Xiào lǐ cáng dāo)
Charm and ingratiate yourself to your enemy. When you have gained his trust, move against him in secret.

Always congratulate your opponent on a good pounce or a good charge. Then destroy him with great vengeance.

Sacrifice the plum tree to preserve the peach tree
(李代桃僵, Lǐ dài táo jiāng)
There are circumstances in which you must sacrifice short-term objectives in order to gain the long-term goal. This is the scapegoat stratagem whereby someone else suffers the consequences so that the rest do not.

If one survivor in your party is getting hammered and has already lost their health kit, sometimes it’s best to let them die. Move quickly for points while his killer is occupied with his brains.

Take the opportunity to pilfer a goat
(順手牽羊／顺手牵羊, Shùn shǒu qiān yáng)
While carrying out your plans be flexible enough to take advantage of any opportunity that presents itself, however small, and avail yourself of any profit, however slight.

If you are aware of how many specials are alive or spawning (always communicate which specials spawn and die), you can take some risks seeking “treasure” (pills, shots, throwables). Know where items spawn on a map, and never seek them alone. Either go in pairs or all together.

Chapter 3: Attacking Stratagems

Stomp the grass to scare the snake
(打草驚蛇／打草惊蛇, Dá cǎo jīng shé)
Do something unaimed, but spectacular (“hitting the grass”) to provoke a response of the enemy (“startle the snake”), thereby giving away his plans or position, or just taunt him. Do something unusual, strange, and unexpected as this will arouse the enemy’s suspicion and disrupt his thinking. More widely used as “[Do not] startle the snake by hitting the grass”. An imprudent act will give your position or intentions away to the enemy.

In wide open areas, psychological warfare is sometimes safer than direct attack. Spawn as a boomer behind the survivors and out of harm’s way if you have no good vantage points. The immediate gurgling will startle them and hopefully slow them down.

Borrow a corpse to resurrect the soul
(借屍還魂／借尸还魂, Jiè shī huán hún)
Take an institution, a technology, a method, or even an ideology that has been forgotten or discarded and appropriate it for your own purpose. Revive something from the past by giving it a new purpose or bring to life old ideas, customs, or traditions and reinterpret them to fit your purposes.

The new special infected of L4D2 provide a huge range of strategy for separating, blinding, and confusing survivors. However, some of the oldest strategies from L4D1 hold true. There may be no more quad caps, but a perfectly timed tri-cap is more effective than any charge/boom/spit combo. If you have three incap classes, work together to spawn and attack at the exact same time. Your team should have a good sense of where you will be able to spawn when the time is right.

Entice the tiger to leave its mountain lair
(調虎離山／调虎离山, Diào hǔ lí shān)
Never directly attack an opponent whose advantage is derived from its position. Instead lure him away from his position thus separating him from his source of strength.

Half of all tank battles are mental. You want to do whatever you can to have the tank engage you directly. The faster he comes down from on high, the faster you can light him up. Arrange with your teammates to feign a run for it. So long as you are covered, you don’t risk being picked off by special infected. With any luck, you’ll draw the tank into the fray with a lot of firing distance for your team.

In order to capture, one must let loose
(欲擒故縱／欲擒故纵, Yù qín gū zòng)
Cornered prey will often mount a final desperate attack. To prevent this you let the enemy believe he still has a chance for freedom. His will to fight is thus dampened by his desire to escape. When in the end the freedom is proven a falsehood the enemy’s morale will be defeated and he will surrender without a fight.

When two or more survivors are incapped, resist the temptation to throw everything you have against your remaining foes. In the heat of battle, they are hyper-aware of special spawns and will pre-fire any spawn point before picking up. Lull them into a false sense of security by holding off on your attack until the last possible second.

Tossing out a brick to get a jade gem
(拋磚引玉／抛砖引玉, Pāo zhuān yǐn yù)
Bait someone by making him believe he gains something or just make him react to it (“toss out a brick”) and obtain something valuable from him in return (“get a jade gem”).

Use the hubris of survivors against them. If you’re a fast class like a hunter or a jockey, peek out from around a corner. Sometimes you may convince an opponent to go out of his way to hunt you down. That is when you strike.

Defeat the enemy by capturing their chief
(擒賊擒王／擒贼擒王, Qín zéi qín wáng)
If the enemy’s army is strong but is allied to the commander only by money, superstition or threats, then take aim at the leader. If the commander falls the rest of the army will disperse or come over to your side. If, however, they are allied to the leader through loyalty then beware, the army can continue to fight on after his death out of vengeance.

Often, one player on the team completely overpowers his teammates. In this case, all attacks should begin with him. Few players can lead effectively lying prostrate with a pistol.

Chapter 4: Chaos Stratagems

Remove the firewood from under the pot
(釜底抽薪, Fǔ dǐ chōu xīn)
If something must be destroyed, destroy the source.

Molotov cocktails seem impossible to misuse, but a wise molly can really save a game. For maximum effect, throw them into choke points behind your party and dash ahead while the source of your troubles burns away.

Disturb the water and catch a fish
(混水摸魚／混水摸鱼, Hún shuǐ mō yú)
Create confusion and use this confusion to further your own goals.

Boomer bile is more difficult to use, but it works best when you don’t stick around to clear the fresh horde of zombies. Check to see if everyone is fast enough before you toss, then make a break for it. If you have an embarrassment of throwables, toss some fire onto the bile horde for good measure.

Slough off the cicada’s golden shell
(金蟬脱殼／金蝉脱壳, Jīn chán tuō qiào)
It’s a stratagem mainly used to escape from an enemy of superior force. Mask yourself. Either leave flamboyant traits behind, thus going incognito, or just masquerade yourself and create an illusion to fit your goals and distract others.

During a finale, every second of survival earns you points. When the chips are down and little chance remains of killing the tank, split up and find the tightest, most obscure parts of the map to hole out and bide your time. This kind of separation guarantees your destruction, but it often takes a long time for four distinct incapacitatig classes to spawn and track you down.

Shut the door to catch the thief
(關門捉賊／关门捉贼, Guān mén zhuō zéi)
To deliver capture the enemy, you must plan prudently if you want to succeed. Do not rush into action. Before you “move in for the kill”, first cut off your enemy’s escape routes, and cut off any routes through which outside help can reach them.

Make tank battles easier by defining the battle ground. If you have extra molotovs or gas cans, create boundaries the tank can not cross. If the opportunity arises, surround him with fire so that he can’t escape to high ground.

Befriend a distant state while attacking a neighbour
(遠交近攻／远交近攻, Yuǎn jiāo jìn gōng)
It is known that nations that border each other become enemies while nations separated by distance and obstacles make better allies. When you are the strongest in one field, your greatest threat is from the second strongest in your field, not the strongest from another field. This policy is associated with Fan Sui of Qin, circa 269 BC.

Cooperate with common infected, however inferior they seem. Some of the best jockeying and smoking happens when you can drive your victim into an oncoming horde. The smoker is nearly powerless without them.

Obtain safe passage to conquer the State of Guo
(假道伐虢, Jiǎ dào fá Guó)
Borrow the resources of an ally to attack a common enemy. Once the enemy is defeated, use those resources to turn on the ally that lent you them in the first place. See Duke Xian of Jin.

Sometimes a clown can be your best friend. Melee the clown’s nose to concentrate zombies in one place. Don’t panic and unload your clip right away. Once zombies have clustered, a couple well placed shotgun blasts can clear the whole room.

Chapter 5: Proximate Stratagems

Replace the beams with rotten timbers
(偷梁換柱／偷梁换柱, Tōu liáng huàn zhù)
Disrupt the enemy’s formations, interfere with their methods of operations, change the rules in which they are used to following, go contrary to their standard training. In this way you remove the supporting pillar, the common link that makes a group of men an effective fighting force.

Negotiating spawn points is one of the key components of high-level Left 4 Dead play. The best survivors look for danger around corners and above ledges. Give such obvious spawn points a wide berth. Moreover, position yourself in line of sight with as many spawn points as possible. This may require a small amount of separation from your team, so stay aware of them as well.

Point at the mulberry tree while cursing the locust tree
(指桑罵槐／指桑骂槐, Zhǐ sāng mà huái)
To discipline, control, or warn others whose status or position excludes them from direct confrontation; use analogy and innuendo. When names are not used directly, those accused cannot retaliate without revealing their complicity.

Never call out your teammates for mistakes. Players get better when they are confident enough to think about strategies, not when their team gets frustrated. Instead, create plans for attack and refer to the roles of specific infected classes, not specific players. For example, “That might have gone better if the charger went before the jockey” or, “How could that have gone better?”

Feign madness but keep your balance
(假痴不癲／假痴不癫, Jiǎ chī bù diān)
Hide behind the mask of a fool, a drunk, or a madman to create confusion about your intentions and motivations. Lure your opponent into underestimating your ability until, overconfident, he drops his guard. Then you may attack.

Talk trash. Act silly. Then attack.

Remove the ladder when the enemy has ascended to the roof
(上屋抽梯, Shàng wū chōu tī)
With baits and deceptions, lure your enemy into treacherous terrain. Then cut off his lines of communication and avenue of escape. To save himself, he must fight both your own forces and the elements of nature.

Drawing players to the witch is a difficult, but essential strategy. The smoker is best suited to the task, but often you will need more cunning to get players in the general vicinity. Boomers can attack from disadvantageous routes in hopes that the horde will divert survivors toward the witch. Chargers can be invaluable at moving survivors close enough for another special to finish the job in pulling the player into her.

Deck the tree with false blossoms
(樹上開花／树上开花, Shù shàng kāi huā)
Tying silk blossoms on a dead tree gives the illusion that the tree is healthy. Through the use of artifice and disguise, make something of no value appear valuable; of no threat appear dangerous; of no use appear useful. This stratagem is identical to that of the Potemkin village.

Players have little sense of how healthy a tank is. If you are about to die as a tank, retreat completely. Survivors will not advance if a tank is still alive, giving your specials extra opportunities to attack.

Make the host and the guest exchange roles
(反客為主／反客为主, Fǎn kè wéi zhǔ)
Usurp leadership in a situation where you are normally subordinate. Infiltrate your target. Initially, pretend to be a guest to be accepted, but develop from inside and become the owner later.

Typically, the hunter, smoker, and jockey must wait for general chaos to occur at the hands of a boomer or charger. Sometimes, however, you can take initiative and track down a reckless survivor on a solo hunt for treasure. Know when to break rank and deviate from the plan.

Chapter 6: Defeat Stratagems

The beauty trap (honey trap)
(美人計／美人计, Měi rén jì)
Send your enemy beautiful women to cause discord within his camp. This stratagem can work on three levels. First, the ruler becomes so enamoured with the beauty that he neglects his duties and allows his vigilance to wane. Second, other males at court will begin to display aggressive behaviour that inflames minor differences hindering co-operation and destroying morale. Third, other females at court, motivated by jealousy and envy, begin to plot intrigues further exacerbating the situation.

As infected, honestly inform your opponents of particular items that lie just out of the way. Often you can exploit their lust for pills and drugs.

The empty fort strategy
(空城計／空城计, Kōng chéng jì)
When the enemy is superior in numbers and your situation is such that you expect to be overrun at any moment, then drop all pretense of military preparedness and act calmly so that the enemy will think are setting an ambush. This stratagem has to be used sparingly and only after one has first developed a reputation for military prowess. This also depends on having a clever opponent who, in perceiving a trap, may over-think his reaction.

OK, I’m stumped on this one. Anybody?

Let the enemy’s own spy sow discord in the enemy camp (反間計／反间计, Fǎn jiàn jì)
Undermine your enemy’s ability to fight by secretly causing discord between him and his friends, allies, advisors, family, commanders, soldiers, and population. While he is preoccupied settling internal disputes, his ability to attack or defend, is compromised.

Trash talk with intent. For example, you can challenge your opponents to make rash moves like a low-probability death charge.

Inflict injury on oneself to win the enemy’s trust (苦肉計／苦肉计, Kǔ ròu jì)
Pretending to be injured has two possible applications. In the first, the enemy is lulled into relaxing his guard since he no longer considers you to be an immediate threat. The second is a way of ingratiating yourself to your enemy by pretending the injury was caused by a mutual enemy.

Choosing not to heal can be a psychological tactic to force specials to spawn quickly and out of sync with each other. So long as you get cover from teammates, you can create disorder and simultaneously appear to be a badass.

Chain stratagems
(連環計／连环计, Lián huán jì)
In important matters, one should use several stratagems applied simultaneously after another as in a chain of stratagems. Keep different plans operating in an overall scheme; however, in this manner if any one stratagem fails, then the chain breaks and the whole scheme fails.

Even if it feels overwhelming, your team should always be communicating about the next attack. It’s rare to be so in tune with other’s strategies that you don’t need to verbalize them. Realistically, you should announce what your plan is and when you’re attacking.

If all else fails, retreat
(走為上／走为上, Zǒu wéi shàng)
If it becomes obvious that your current course of action will lead to defeat, then retreat and regroup. When your side is losing, there are only three choices remaining: surrender, compromise, or escape. Surrender is complete defeat, compromise is half defeat, but escape is not defeat. As long as you are not defeated, you still have a chance.

Going in for a suicide scratch/spit/boom after your initial attack is not always wise. Spawn times are significantly longer than recharge times. Run backwards until you can respawn with ‘E’ so that you get another chance. The boomer’s recharge is a little longer than a spawn time, but it’s well worth it since the boom is so much more important than other classes. A suicide boom may lead to a quicker spawn, but with a non-booming class.

L4D2 NPC’s and Infected Rejected Out Of Hand

Full Glass Empty Clip Podcast: Easily Distracted Edition (08.04.11)

Kasey Kagawa — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 05:39:59 +0000

We’re back from vacation this week, and as a consequence, we’re a little…loopy, and not just from our customary alcoholic beverages. Many tangents are had, odd routes followed, and a higher-than-average amount of movie references made, especially for an episode where so much actual news is imparted. Defense of the Ancients 2 will be revealed to the world at Gamescom in Cologne, the Humble Indie Bundle 3 is here, Australia makes serious steps towards an R18+ rating, and everyone decided to be stupid while we were gone, with Blizzard basically sticking a knife into the heart of their fanbase for Diablo 3, Ubisoft returning to always-on DRM for Driver: San Francisco and more, EA getting Dragon Age 2 pulled from Steam with their “me-first-gimmie-gimmie” approach to DLC, and Nintendo almost halves the price of the 3DS in an attempt to get people to buy their newest shiny toy. Please, Share and Enjoy.

FGEC Podcast Episode 35 (08/04/11)