I reckon the problem is elsewhere now; Leakage of some sort. How something can run this perfectly on anything BUT iOS baffles me a little bit.

http://archive.org/details/ntt066

Good news, transition was basically painless. All my animations, everything, totally fine, and performance is better out the gate Very happy!

One thing that bummed me out is that I'm still apparently stuck drawing my scrolling backgrounds with offset, repeated bitmap fills. Anyone more versed in nme, like +Joshua Granick or +Philippe Elsass got ideas on how to best implement a repeating scrolling texture for games?

Here’s the trajectory of our development so far:

We are making a 2d vertically scrolling shooter. We started with an air 3 game but did primary dev on desktop. The intent was to have a “simple” game running on desktop, then optimize as we went mobile. Basically we philosophise that it is better to go in with the mindset that you will compromise, rather than be constantly disappointed in having to cut back.

First engine was plain displaylist. Performance on Galaxy S2 was nice, but sort of rotten on Galaxy Nexus. Didn’t test that build on Nexus S. At this point I personally was opposed to using Air at all; I’m historically a strong advocate of going native wherever possible. However, we intended to deploy to iOS eventually, and I have to concede that writing three engines, one java, one objc and one for desktop was more time than it was worth. I also concede that writing a single engine in cpp is a total pain in the ass, and not worth MY time. Life’s too short for cpp.

Second engine was post Air 3.2, built on nd2d; I eventually dug into the nd2d source to further simplify shaders and how it works with collections internally. I’m really strongly aligned with nd2d’s structure, and it’s my go-to on desktop, but for mobile I found it almost a little too pragmatic. Mobile needs kickflips to be cool.

At this point our engine was running with a scrolling background, single touch input, and bullets being fired almost every other frame update, with about 50 or so enemies max on screen. This is the extent of our pooled objects, and the intent was to push the engine quite a bit. Collisions were handled with rectangles, points, and spatial hashing. Entities that die are not instantly removed, but stacked, and then removed in a batch at the end of every game update. We don’t create any objects during gameplay, but use object pooling extensively.

Performance on desktop was, as expected, golden. Performance on Galaxy Nexus was around 40fps, which became, for me, the signal that we should limit to 30fps. However on S2 we got 60fps with occasional stutters (gc, though I can’t figure out what there would be to collect other than linked list internals). At this point we had not tested on iOS yet (we are 2 windows devs and 1 osx dev).

One night I decided to port our engine to haxe/nme, for kicks. It was less a port and more of a rewrite to make better use of haxe features such as generics, and it also allowed us to use the excellent polygonal data structures libs. The big difference here is that our nme build doesn’t use hardware acceleration consciously. It’s all plain display list, with sprite sheet animation implemented with scrollrect on sprites.

NME performance on android is spectacular. Rock solid unwavering 60, with 100s of enemies and bullets, collision detection, explosion animations. Just everything I would want from a game like this. I post the APK, and the team sort of collectively agrees NME on android is badass. So we try on iOS.

Oof. NME on iOS nowhere near as smooth. Actually totally unacceptable with the same code base. Adding insult to injury, we build our original nd2d AIR build for iOS, and what do you know; Rock solid performance.

Huh.

So now we’re left strategizing almost where we started: Do we really have to choose a “lead” platform again? The hope with nme was that our lead platform was simply nme, much like we were hoping air would have comparable performance across devices. In a sense we are now choosing between middlewares, which might as well be the same question we asked originally; Should we go native?

It appears, for now, that we will go with two branches; A haxe branch for desktop/android, and an air branch for iOS. Our engine will instead be data driven and thus allow us levels, behaviors etc described in json or other, and we can share that among engines.

Big takeaway for me is that it fucking sucks having to place trust in middleware for performance issues. When air underperforms on an android device, all I am left to do is say ok, that’s what air thinks so I guess that’s our limit. Same with nme on iOS. It’s uniquely frustrating as a developer to have to accept such compromises.

But compromise is what you get when you go multiplat anyway, right? I’ll keep writing about new findings. My hope is that the iOS nme performance is just us fucking up our build somehow. I was real ready to just go all out haxe/nme for multiplat.

FlashDevelop 4 and free Flex SDK

It is my modest opinion that if you are a Flash-developing Windows user, there is no god damn reason on this earth not to work in Flashdevelop. Super fast, light weight, does everything, and if it doesn’t you can MAKE it do everything. Also, hey, it’s rock stable and totally free, with a truly awesome team of developers that will give you super mondo rad support on Twitter. Tweet anything with “Flashdevelop” in it and someone will respond. Wow. I write AS3, JS, Haxe and XML in FD, and while I’ve flirted with SublimeText, I return to FD for most of my basic text editing.

The free SDK is a true gift from Adobe that just keeps on giving. Free Flash development tools guys…  An entire industry spins along with its developers not paying Adobe a dime. It’s never been better to do Flash dev.

@ChevyRay’s AssetBatcher

AssetBatcher is a quick and simple AIR utility that takes a selection of files and spits out an AS3 class with class variable declarations and embed metatags. I’m hoping this will be built into FD eventually, but for now, if you have a heap of assets to embed, this tool will save you lots of annoying busywork.

Doomsday Console 2 and SLF4AS

Shameless self-promotion here but I *always* use SLF4AS and DConsole2. They’re simply indispensable tools for me, letting me get right to implementing functionality in models and services without worrying about the views until they need to get done. If you’re writing a MVC app, you can pretty much leave the V out and tie the controllers into the console. Tied into RobotLegs I get shit done so damn fast now it’s not even funny.

RobotLegs

I’m one of those jerk developers that would rather roll my own than trust someone else’s library, but RobotLegs really won me over once I actually put it to use. I’ve always favored writing lots of simple classes rather than build large and complex ones, and RL fits that philosophy like a glove. I do end up with a hell of a lot of classes, but once I get going I feel RL is there with me every step of the way to let me tie things together in a sound manner. I think it’s the best AS3 MVC framework out there.

Tonfall

Andre Michelle’s Tonfall framework is a tight general purpose audio processing framework for AS3, and it takes a lot of the frustration out of writing audio code for Flash. If you are ever going to be writing something like a music sequencer or instrument or audio effect in AS3, Tonfall is at the very least an excellent starting point. I’ve used Tonfall for all my work involving Flash audio sequencing, and probably will for the foreseeable future.

Nd2D

Of all the Stage3D 2D rendering frameworks out there, Nd2D feels the most aligned with my coding style, which has always been sort of gamey. I’ve used it for every application where I’ve needed hardware accelerated 2D, typically for large horizontally scrolling images or games with lots of sprites. The current game I’m working on is an experiment to see what kind of performance I can wringe out of AIR on my Android phone, and I’ve been working with a customized branch of Nd2D with solid results. For those moments you do have to go in there and add or remove or otherwise mess with the framework internals, the code is clean, readable and intuitive. Highly recommended.

TortoiseSVN

I always loved SVN and never had any of those apocalyptic hate-storms of SVN fuckups that I keep hearing so much about. On Windows at least, TortoiseSVN makes working with version control sharp and enjoyable. Having a hard time seeing myself transition to Git or Mercurial anytime real soon, though Mercurial is looking interesting.

Eclipse and Android SDK

Some people hate a lot on Eclipse, and I have to admit, I still don’t understand why. Performance has been good, it’s just rock solid for Java dev, and I have practically no complaints. When I pay nothing, I have a lot of lenience for the user experience side of things, but like with FlashDevelop I don’t feel Eclipse really compromises. I’ve tried NetBeans, but Eclipse remains my go-to Java IDE.

I use Eclipse for Android application development, and sometimes just messing about with Java to learn more. It’s just one of those languages I want to be better at.

VirtualDub

VDub is an open source video editor perfect for basic editing, joining and encoding videos. I often use it for making h264 videos from tons of still frames rendered from Maya or VVVV, but it’s also helped me lots in simply fixing busted aspect ratios and other such dull business. A wonderful tool, with both a GUI and a commandline client if you want to integrate it in your pipeline (that sounds dirty).

VVVV and PureData

VVVV and PD are modular visual programming tools, or “patchers”, both free for non-commercial use with VVVV offering a fair (IMHO) set of licensing options for commercial application. While not as superficially slick or popular as something like Max/MSP, I find them super satisfying to work with, and endlessly inspiring.

VVVV is focused on high performance visuals with built in support for distributed rendering and a frankly stunning set of modules for signal analysis and processing. It’s also THE best way to get stuck in and learn how to write HLSL shaders that integrate well with a larger application.

PD offers some visual processing, but is philosophically more aligned with audio processing, and offers a ton of modules for both creating musical instruments, and also for processing live audio.

Both VVVV and PD integrate well with Flash and others through tcp or udp sockets; I’ve used PD for pitch detection analysis for an exhibit where users sang into a mic and the recording was turned into midi data that played back a chosen instrument. I’m still learning VVVV, but plan on using it much more in the future. This is a toolkit where you can load a flash movie and draw it to a texture you can use in a shader on an animated 3d model in just a few clicks. It’s pretty radical.

Renoise

Renoise is the best music tracker in town, if not the only one worth keeping tabs on. A truly professional music sequencer built around the tracker paradigm, with all the latest bells and whistles, including bonkers things like a full on LUA API. I’ve been using it for almost a decade now for most if not all of my music and audio editing, integrating well with Ableton Live through ReWire for specific uses (mostly working with vocal tracks). Dirt cheap, awesome, cross plat.

Autodesk  Maya

Maya is such a god damn joy for me… I’m not really interested in what 3D package is “better”, but Maya is the one that spoke clearly to me from the start. The big realization was that Maya is really a pretty small executable with a shit ton of scripts attached, and all those scripts are something you can mess with or add to. From the smaller things like splitting a joint into a forearm twist, automatically pre-scripted to self manage its rotation, to ridiculous idiocy like writing little games running in the editor, Maya scripting makes (and often breaks) the software. It’s one of the most personal tools I use, because I’ve invested much in making it personal. Few packages are so willing to give up their identity, but Maya is glorious anarchy.

I’ve been lucky to be able to talk my employers to buy me licenses (they are expensive), and I’ve used it since 4.5, for anatomically correct rigging and animation of human characters, 3D asset creation and texturing for games (it plays so nice with Unity, oh boy), and also some procedural geometry generation. I can’t wait to start building stuff for VVVV <3

Aw yeah, more poorly dressed jerks exploding fools

Cautiously picked up Prototype 2 on PS3. The first one was one of my favorite games of 2009, and that game in turn was pretty much a rehash of one of my favorite sandbox games of all time, Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. Guess what: Prototype 2 is more Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. Just massive, unending chaos and destruction. If you want some pure focus to your open world violence, Prototype is still the wildest it gets. High five Radical.

The problem here is, of course, that it’s more of the same. At $60.

It’s not hard to see the amount of work that was put into this game, and it’s not hard to understand why these guys want to go full price. But Prototype is a “B-game”, no two ways about it. It’s always been an indulgent, superficial toybox of stuff to waste your time with. In vaguer terms, Prototype isn’t “important”. We unfortunately live in a time where some games are important and some are not. Games have progressed this far, and Prototype is “dated” insofar as it has no purpose other than to entertain you.

I am having an absolute ball with Prototype 2, but I can’t recommend the $60 purchase to anyone, at all. It’s just too much. At $30 or $40, this would be so much easier to push on friends, and to be honest, Activision would probably make more money back from a lower price point.

I’m just talking out of my ass here, regarding the profit margins, but anecdotally games simply sell more when they aren’t full price. Why do publishers still insist on the $60 mark for games that clearly aren’t big tentpoles with established audiences?

I’m a military aviation enthusiast, and a ridiculously dedicated gamer for over 20 years, and I still don’t think it’s cool to watch what is essentially military snuff footage, and I don’t think it’s cool for video games to exploit the power fantasy FLIR gun cams and heavy artillery can inspire. It’s just a sickening warping of the reality of war.

Youtube should be blocking this shit, or at the very least age gating it. And people drawing parallels between reality and BF/CoD should be starkly ashamed of themselves. Epic compassion fail.

Update 2: Surprised by some of the comments, and the leniency towards Adobe. There seems to be a misunderstanding that Alchemy/C++ and the use of fastmem are not one and the same; They are. Suffice to say that while I understand the *corporate* politics behind the strategy Adobe has adopted, I still consider it a real dick move in essence. Like Mark Griffin said to me yesterday, if Adobe had announced fastmem/Stage3D as premium features in public beta right from the get go (the combination of these two features and the certain specific circumstances under which they are “taxed”  make this particularly awkward), there would never have been a controversy at all. It’s a huge PR blunder, and all my ire is, in the end, directed at how Adobe have ended up talking to its most dedicated user base. It’s just not well done.

Original post follows:

Keith Peters made the joke on twitter yesterday that hey, remember when we were all up in arms about Adobe’s bundling of the Yahoo toolbar with the Flash player?

It’s funny to think of things like that in hindsight, but I still think what they did then was wrong. The argument then for me was that the toolbar was opt-out, not opt-in. It was less about what the actual Yahoo toolbar was, and more about what Adobe were saying to its user base.

So, while we’re throwing a whine party, I can look back and laugh at my own rage back in the day, but I can’t deny the bits about Adobe’s latest and greatest that poke me in the side in much the same way. We’ll see how it pans out, but this is where the rub is for me:

1. The first taste is free

Though never formally announced as a product, Alchemy has essentially offered the world a free “first taste”, which has enspired enterprises to explore the platform, resulting *directly* in technologies like UnrealEngine3 and Unity running in the player. Worse, Alchemy makes a strong kind of sense to the most technically inclined among our community, allowing technologies like haXe to leverage new low level Flash Player functionality to attain performance levels that have required C++ conversion through Alchemy otherwise.  I’ve never actually used the fastmem opcodes in any form, but when Joa Ebert and Nicholas Canasse assure me of their importance, I’m inclined to take their word for it.

So what has happened here is that Adobe, hot on the heels of Joa Ebert’s now infamous FOTB09 session, where he tore the player apart from a performance point of view, has not only failed to improve the flash player in these critical fundamental ways, but have added new features on top of it, in some cases, as with Stage3D, escaping the performance issues with the Flash Player altogether by relegating much of the execution to the GPU. At its core, the issues intrinsic to the player remain the same, to the chagrin of any of us NOT inclined to jump on the GPU bandwagon until absolutely necessary. They have, apparently, ignored or pushed back fundamental improvements to the compiler that would make the use of fastmem opcodes natural, rather than an artificial “hack” to attain acceptable performance for uses such as DSP.

Bear with me here, but isn’t it kind of a dick move to take an improvement to the player that could benefit everybody, and artificially tax its usage?

2. The 9% cut.

It’s not a big cut. Actually, it’s negligible. I have accepted way worse deals in the past. So the number attached to the cut is not important. It is natural for Adobe to want to monetize their platform, especially considering how many free open source tools can build for it; they simply can’t rely on their tooling to pay for the platform development, and I think this is fair.

What bothers me is that this cut comes attached to functionality I feel should be intrinsic and thoroughly interwoven with the Flash player. Adobe tells me if I use these two technologies that allow low level access to hardware (memory and gpu), I am a special case, and I should expect to have to pay. I think low level access to hardware should be the absolute base line. I think stage3d and fastmem should be marquee features of the player as it evolves, and everyone should come to the player and not have to think of these two things as somehow “heavier” to implement. Stage3D and GPU integration should be a weighted optimization the developer can choose to implement versus his or her budget (time or otherwise), not a long term caveat. The 9% adds an unnecessary rub to the joy of implementing high technology that I personally feel is more akin to Adobe sneaking some fingers in the cookie jar just for the hell of it. The small size of the cut they are taking somehow makes it even worse; what kind of money are they actually  hoping to earn here?

The shitty thing for anyone offering anything for free, is that people get used to having them for free, and at that point, taking the thing away or attaching a price to it feels like a gip. It’s a textbook recipe for a community and PR backlash. Adobe could not win here, there would be outrage regardless, even if the cut was %1.

But even if Stage3D and fastmem are philosophically “separate” technologies to traditional Flash development, I can’t shake the feeling that this is just Adobe trying to monetize what they already have, rather than offer something genuinely new to justify the premium, or tax, or whatever you want to call it.

What I would personally have liked to see from Adobe is genuine premium features, such as the use of a unified Xbox Live style backend for Flash games, with leaderboards, multiplayer, friends list and the like integrated on a low level in the player. Done well, this would be a genuine premium feature, where they could offer functionality and performance its free competitors could not, in a package that nonetheless would be easy for developers to ignore should they not require it.

Adobe profess a dedication to games, but what they have done here is penalize the hardest core of game developers, no matter which way you turn the dime; A prospective penalty is still a penalty.

It’s a shame they couldn’t announce genuinely innovative premium features for Flash game developers, and instead chose to ride on the coat tails of the developments  of its most dedicated and driven community members.

Joshi decides to make his argument against the conservative right by establishing a rogue’s gallery of public conservative figures, including blithering crazies like Ann Coulter (who I suspect may just be an incredibly tenacious troll) and Sean Hannity, before spending a frankly obsessive number of paragraphs tearing their arguments apart one by one. The general argument, and purpose of the book, is that the conservative is by its nature doomed to compromise, and parodically prone to end up defending the ideals it once fought tooth and nail against. “The liberalism of today is the conservatism of tomorrow”. By examining the history of a writer’s output, Joshi demonstrates a historical drift towards the left for even the furthest right.

Being Norwegian, I have somewhat of a skewed perspective on the subject matter: Over here, the American conservative right is commonly seen as kind of crazy, and few if any right wing commentators with any actual clout would be caught dead exhibiting some of the views that are expressed by some of the people torn down in this book. Then again, being a social democracy, it’s baffling to see the conservative fear of “socialism” reach the frenzied level it does. It simply lacks a basis in reality, and has little nuance. Character assassinations on people that spend the most part of their lives being absolute d**kheads is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel, and some of the chapters here drag on as Joshi presents insane quote after insane quote that require little more than common sense to debunk, and then flowers up his debunking with more quotes and analysis. In short bursts, this approach is delightful, as Joshi possesses a dry wit and penchant for insidious sarcasm that frankly made me giggle with joy at times just from the sheer pleasure of the writing itself. But for a full book, this begins to grate… I found myself having to stop reading at times simply because the pattern was repeating too much.

It’s also a pity that Joshi’s personal views can obscure his objectivism at times. While I think the force of language used in most of the rhetoric he examines to be unconstructive at best, there is still room for discussion on certain topics, though Joshi is so enraptured with taking down his mark that he can write off arguments that, while clumsy, still could stand up to some debate. In a sense he doubly proves his point; The fury and stubborn tenacity of the conservative makes debate a sisyphean undertaking to consider; You can’t take a discussion seriously the moment you start accusing the opposition of wanting to kill anyone that disagrees with them (this is a quote from the book), and the liberal point of view – though to be honest I don’t fully understand what “the liberal” means although I assume I’m one of them – becomes cloyingly defensive in return. It’s just a terrible environment for discourse.

I’d recommend this book to anyone I know, though I assume the conservative rightist would implode if attempting to scale it. It’s not perfect, but an entertaining, smooth read with lots of neat anectotes.

Amazon

You could start at the final book of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, but I would recommend against it; As it is, that book, taken out of the context of the epic story it concludes, is practically pointless literature, particularly as knowing the conclusion to that particular tale will vividly color your experience throughout the preceding books.  But it is okay, and accepted, to release a pointless book. Customers know what they are buying into when the cover reads “book 7″.

It is not okay to release a pointless video game. A video game is a mechanical object, an engine and a process, and it is typically expected that you can jump into a trilogy and catch up, or get a tailored experience. In games, a higher number tends to mean “more and better”, unlike films where it tends to mean “more and worse”.

So looking at Mass Effect 3, a game that is at once a video game sequel, and the conclusion to a long, intricate and epic journey undertaken by followers of the series, the two perspectives clash. As the final moments of the game passed, I was elated. I was not only satisfied by the conclusion (and boy does it conclude), but I was made to reconsider the three games as a single object. I’d look back on everything I’d done up until that point, and memories of every fond moment I’d had washed over me. It was a true ending to a truly epic story, and (for the most part) it felt like I’d had significant influence on it. It felt like a real moment.

Moments like these are rare in video games. Bioshock’s twist was one such moment, our “6th sense” if you will. These moments stick with you in a way moments in film typically can not, because when we play games with a strong narrative element it is typical to project; You don’t say “And then Mario jumped over Bowser, hit the switch, and then Bowser fell in the lava”. You say YOU did those things.  Looking at the end of Mass Effect 3, I have a hard time imagining anyone on this planet having had the same journey as I did. It feels special, and bigger in a way games typically don’t dare to go.

So it is a strange feeling to be so enraptured by the ending and idea of a game I’d spent most of my time with actively disliking. In hindsight, furrowing my brow in my best attempt at an objective perspective, I don’t think I enjoyed much of Mass Effect 3 at all.

The first game was bewildering; It threw every idea it had at the wall and hoped most would stick. It was a joyously ambitious game, filled with locations to explore and generous helpings of intricate lore to indulge in. It was the least confident game, but by far the most exciting one to experience as a pure science fiction spectacle. It was the pilot episode of a show with so much potential it was bursting at the seams, and it was easy to forgive for its mechanical shortcomings.

The second game was confident, sharp, and focused. It shaved off so much fat that the question rose whether it could even be called an RPG anymore. Rock Paper Shotgun coined the phrase “Guns and conversation” to describe the genre that ME2 begun, and it’s still the most apt. ME2′s masterstroke was in its emphasis on individuals. The galaxy is in peril for sure, but the moment to moment game was about exploring the lives of individuals living in it. Getting to know the rogue’s gallery of aliens and crazy people you gathered on your ship as you worked for a bunch of creepy space racists is the absolute high point of the series, and where the player’s influence on the story became truly evident. Though some of the changes it made to the universe and technology were harder to justify in story terms than they were in game design terms, it was still one of the best games of this generation.

Mass Effect 3 is a Mass Effect bored with itself. It is a game that has a full deck of cards, and needs to figure out a way to get rid of them all by the end. It is a game where nearly every character you encounter is someone you already know, nearly every location is somewhere you’ve been, and every system is one you’ve experienced before. It is a gorgeous, competent shooting game, a fundamentally flawed role playing game, and an absolute grind otherwise.

It’s not hard to think of things that the game does right. The voice acting ranges from good to great, with standout performances from Martin Sheen, Keith David and Freddie Prinze Jr (!). The soundtrack consists of what feels like a giant helping of music from the past games, paired with some new, suitably sweeping synth-infused pieces, though the one club track this time around was bad enough to make me dread going into that place. It’s generally an artistic tour de force; These are some of the best environments you’re likely to look at for a while.

It’s a shame then, that the best music remains cribbed from past games, that the locations are refurnished places you’ve been before, and that the paths you can take through each environment is more cramped than ever. For all intents and purposes the game is a corridor shooter with pretty backgrounds. Many of the environments are re-encountered as multiplayer maps, and it can be difficult to guess which came first. Weapons, ammunition and health is strewn around the world as though it’s a Doom level, and does little to make you believe in locations as real places. These are gameplay spaces first, places to visit a distant second. There is little wonder or journey here.

It is good that the shooting is now meaty, loud and intense, because you are doing a whole lot of it. It is rare to go on a mission that doesn’t require you to kill a whole lot of space people. The game does a fairly good job of upping the ante, though no shooter can last for 30+ hours without cracks showing. The cover system is finicky in a bind, requiring you to reorient the camera with the wall you’re trying to hug, rather than simply push against it. It can lead to a few too many deaths, or attempts to go into cover turning into rolls out into withering turret fire. After a while, repetition begins to grate, as yet another manshoot is conducted in yet another multiplayer arena, your only reward being a few more points on your “galactic readiness bar”.

Yep. Your chances of having a good ending is measured in terms of a progress bar. The entire game consists of talking to and/or shooting dudes and dudettes to increase this bar. From the very first moment you are made to look at how tiny and insignificantly empty your bar is, and the game trusts MMORPG-type tactics to keep you working at it. While the majority of it is filled by completing shooty missions, side quests of the most abysmal sort must be completed to make proper progress. These must be found by, I kid you not, randomly overhearing people talking about things they need, and are typically completed by endless bouts of some of the most painful, player-exploiting non-game design I think I’ve ever seen Bioware do; Scanning planets.

That scanning

Scanning was tedious in Mass Effect 2 as well, but this is something else… Let me walk you through the process.

1. Look at the star map; Does a star cluster have a reaper icon on it? Put your cursor on it. Does the cluster name have “100%” next to it?

2. If not, go to cluster. A cluster contains multiple systems. Each system has one or more hidden items. Let’s search for treasure!

3. Fly circles around the system, intermittently hitting the left trigger to launch a scanning pulse of sorts. Every time you do this, a reaper awareness bar fills. If it fills completely, reapers jump in and awkwardly home in on your ship. At this point, you have to run, or it’s game over. Simple as that.

4. Don’t worry! Allow them to kill you! The game auto-saves when you enter a system, so just make notes of the stuff you found last time, scan it again, and scan for more until you’re confident you’ve found it all! Item locations aren’t random, so all it takes is more of your time.

5. Should you find an item on a planet, go to the planet. Ignore the vast reams of text about the planet’s history, because it has absolutely no value. Wait. Start your scanner. Wait. Move your scanning cursor along the pointing line until you find a glowing spot. Hit the right trigger. Congratulations! Some quest you probably don’t even know exists is now ready to be completed!

This system is incredibly grating. There is absolutely no skill or sense of exploration, only guesswork where failure is punished with lost time. All you need is perseverence to scan every system on the star map; And why wouldn’t you? Don’t you want to fill your bar and get the “good ending”?

And there’s the kicker. This game exploits the galactic awareness bar to make you undertake a painful array of boring activities, going as far as to funnel you into the horde-mode multiplayer mode, which can offer a bar multiplier of sorts. It’s smart to do this, because it accelerates your bar by a whole lot.

Shame then, that the multiplayer mode is filled with free2play tropes, such as offering in-game rewards for real world cash. Bioware has taken your want to see the best ending for the game, a game which you might have 5 years of play and wait invested in, and made you go into a setting where you, more than likely, will shop for progress. Because early progress online is brutal; Players rely on one another to succeed, and being a low level player tends to mean you get booted out of a game for being a liability. It’s an insidious, cynical design.

Another core piece of narrative content is hidden behind a pay-wall; The From Ashes DLC, which introduces one of the best and most fascinating characters in the game, if not the franchise. I’m glad I paid to unlock him early on, because he colored the rest of my experience, and gave me insight into the lore I don’t know how the game would cope without. It’s a baffling omission, and another cynical decision from EA.

It strengthens the sense that the game was designed by committee, not with a unified vision. Which brings me to the biggest issue I have with it, and what all but killed my enjoyment.

That writing.

I’m making the assumption that the game was written by a team, or even several. Teams faced with vast, vast amounts of content to write to cater to every minute decision the player has made in the past. As a body of work and engineering of authorship, it’s pretty stunning.

But it is simply poor science fiction writing. Lines are repeated, the obvious is stated, there is a heavy reliance on exposition and the game has a predilection to tell and don’t show. It reaches the point where when you are actually shown something of significance occur, you are surprised. This is a game where the universe can be reorganized off screen, a character’s exposition being our only indication of the event. A character “revealed ” a part of his past history to me twice, Politics nor technology appear grounded; Characters and groups contradict past behavior. Cerberus, not a good lot to begin with, have here become the great Satan himself. From a group that ostensibly saved the universe from a horrible threat in the second game, they are now vile space nazis and they must all die, never mind what they are doing that we don’t understand; Don’ truss’um!

There is an absolutely painful reliance on hero’s journey clichèes; Tell me how awesome I am one more time and I will PUNCH YOU, space lady. This is a universe where everyone is falling over themselves to congratulate the player on his or her awesomeness, and team mates who have risked life and limb to ensure the galaxy survives are more than happy to give good old Shepard the honors. Because he’s the man! There’s a creeping sense that everyone is just fucking with you, after a while. Like Shepard is the gun-carrying savant and everyone is just having a laugh.

Axiomatically, that means they are having a laugh at my expense. Because when I play an RPG, I do project. When I imported “my” Shepard into ME3, I was greeted with a face that was not the one I made back in ME1. An incredibly stupid bug, and one that threw lots of players for a loop. It was the first time I felt Bioware didn’t really care that much about the character I made back then, and that feeling was quickly exacerbated. This is not “my” Shepard; This Shepard is defined. He is a character of his own. He has his own emotions, his own motivations. He does things I would never do. That “my” Shepard would never do. This Shepard has stupid hokey dream sequences and wake up crying at night. It’s baffling.

This game will throw dialogue at you that could not matter less. Conversations can be boring to the point that I began actively skipping through them at one point. You can only hear “We have to stick together, it’s the only way we’re going to stand up to the Reapers” so many times before you decide enough is enough. I came to ME3 off the heels of Syndicate and Shadows of the Damned, and I have more memories of the writing in those two plain shooting games than I have of much going on in ME3. That Shadows of the Damned (where the lead character’s name is Garcia “Fucking” Hotspur and his gun is called the Boner) challenges a Bioware RPG for writing skill is super depressive.

There simply isn’t focus here. Characters are bland, emotions are shallow, and I found it incredibly hard to feel anything as I was going through the game, which is a bad thing when the game makes such strong and consistent attempts at emoting.

Yet I persevered. Begrudgingly. Because I had invested already; I was already neck deep in the universe. I was a part of it, and I needed to see it to its conclusion. I was trapped by my investment, and as such I “had” to buy the DLC, I “had” to buy stuff to get through the multiplayer grind. It’s been a long time since I felt this poorly treated by a game.

The end

It was a good ride while it lasted, though the end was bitter sweet. As Jeff Gerstmann put it, Mass Effect deserved better. This is a monolithic undertaking that went places games typically don’t dare to go, but Bioware promised more than they could keep, and they exploited their fans financially. It is the slickest game in the franchise, but the one that is the hardest to love. It made me think of going back to the start; Play the original again, try to do things differently. But I don’t think I would do things differently, because I project too much. I invested of myself in the series, and in the end, the payoff was good. But I don’t think I could invest in it again.

It’s not a 10/10. Eurogamer are crazy. 10/10s are recovered from the shattered fragments of magical space meteorites once a decade at most. But I could live with an 8/10. But what do I know.

This is unacceptable.

See, I actually like going to the cinema. I like the focus it gives me, the way I can just forget myself and anything else, turn off my phone, tune out, and do nothing but absorb the film. It’s nowhere near as bad here as it is in the US, where going to the cinema might as well be open mic night; It’s legitimately a nice place to experience a film.

Perhaps someone can enlighten me as to the wildly complex nature of things, as I’m looking for reasons here why a film takes two months to propagate from one first world nation to another.

Is it localization? I literally don’t know a single human being over the age of 18 that doesn’t know enough English to converse, and if international TV piracy has shown us anything it’s that people tend to not give a flying frog about subtitles. Quite the opposite, I know Norwegians with greater command of the English language than native speakers. Subtitles here are kind of a nice thing for the intellectually handicapped; When a AAA animated feature is released here, we get simultaneous dubbed and native language versions (unsubbed). So this happens.

Is it the rating process? I understand the BBFC is a heinously complex beast to work around, but the film I’m interested in saw a simultaneous UK/US release, so my take-away from that is that if the studios give a shit they can make it happen.

It just baffles me that they have the gall to complain about piracy in the same breath as they ask a huge number of potential customers to wait for months, all the while pirates peddle copies of varying quality. At some point, once the publicity reaches a certain pitch, the question of quality versus satisfaction becomes very real.

I’m not condoning piracy. I’m saying I have money here, I’d like to give it to the industry, but they are actively making my customer’s experience unsatisfactory. They are making second-rate citizens of something like 50% or more of their consumers.

You’d think after enough time and punishment, these dudes would start putting 1 and 1 together and figure out the cause and the effect.

For shit’s sake Hollywood, understand your product has a profitable release window and put it to market.

Angry Birds is just shit.

Angry Birds is like a full orchestra playing out of tune, and receiving a standing ovation. It is a charmless black hole of design, with lame character art (with precious little actual character, rivaling what Sonic Team have been doing for the past few years), a lousily tuned physics engine, dull audio, and a “puzzle framework” that all but enforces designs driven by endless trial and error. Oh, and the trial and error is shit too, because the basic motions of launching an object into another, an action made so satisfying and so intuitive in games like the early Worms titles or Scorched Earth or any random pick of the hundreds of knockoffs those games spawned, is a detached and remote experience.

Have you fucking seen how these birds impact things, how anything intended to be an “explosion” is more of a wet fart through a pillowcase, how every force and response is low-passed to the point of hopeless anonymity? How, when a structure is impacted, the response is rarely a decisive, enjoyable defeat, but more often than not the sensation that the falling block just.. Gives up?

God damn is this game and all of its iterations ever unsatisfying to play. Drawing the slingshot isn’t fun, because there is no tactile elasticity. I’m sure there are people making use of “the full range” of that thing to make precision shots, but I’m willing to bet 99.9% of users just yank it back and toss, because you know what? The game isn’t designed around elasticity. It isn’t designed around interacting with physics beyond applying a largely anonymous impulse to a standing structure, a structure often designed around weak points and a specific collapse sequence. It is like they put this rudimentary physics sandbox together, put the least possible effort into building a game around it, and then added a bunch of shit on top that vaguely alters the formula to give an illusion of progression.

Compare this to something like World of Goo, or Burn the Rope, games where the physics implementation are so deeply ingrained in the game design there couldn’t be one without the other. Structures in WoG sway with the wind, bend under weight, you bite your lip as you add that extra structure, hoping to dear god it’s not going to be the final straw to break your plan. Every swipe of your finger in BtR is a calculated manipulation of a simple but perfectly tuned physics engine. You don’t fuss with the physics engine to see what happens; Your actions are integrated all the way through.

Now on its own terms, Angry Birds is clearly not a particularly offensive game. It is stable and performant, and for the most part free to play. Its mind boggling success is where questions start forming in my head, and this is less an indictment of what Angry Birds is, and more of what the gaming public has allowed the game to be.

There are so many superb, simple little games on mobile platforms. Tiny Wings is a delightfully satisfying game that makes perfect use of its one-button design. It has been a success in its own right, of course, but why for the love of god does Angry Birds keep ballooning forth in its lazy mediocrity? As I play it, I literally feel my hands itching for something to strangle as the flaccid, impotent mess slumps across the finish line with a shrug and a middle finger to anybody that gives a shit about what makes a game feel good to play.

It makes the art form look bad and it indoctrinates new gamers as to what they should demand from their games.
For Jebus’ sake, kill it with fire.

Bear with me. I don’t plan on making this sort of thing a regular affair, but I’ve somehow become embroiled in a big ol’ Twitter discussion about a Norwegian celebrity’s “right” to make entertainment from her coping with depressions and anxiety. I’m going to be a dick and not post any of that; a) It’s in Norwegian, and b) The minutia are frankly not very interesting.

However, it did make me acutely aware of my own perspective on certain aspects of my mental condition that I’ve considered intimate to the extent that they are character defining traits at the very core of my soul, and with an effect I feel is apparent in everything I’ve done for most of my adult existence. As such, I thought it was time to share my thoughts and experiences, and perhaps someone out there would get something out of it as well.

Without beating around the bush, I’ve suffered from social anxiety for as far back as I can remember, and I suffer from regular bouts of deep depression. Once, I would characterize it as crippling. The notion of walking to the general store and buying supplies would be gauged against the pain of hunger, and for the most part I’d prefer the hunger. Those of you that know me know I’m a skinny man. Part of that is my body type, but food quickly proved to be the primary reason I’d have to deal with strangers, and as such, I taught myself to avoid having to buy it.

Long time friends will remember me refusing to buy my own food when we went out to eat, them having to take my order. I’d play it off as though it was some weird quirk of my personality, that I was doing it to annoy them or god knows what. To be honest I don’t know what I was thinking, but the shame of asking my friend if he could order my food for me was nothing compared to the idea of talking to a stranger.

I couldn’t buy my tickets on the tram or on the bus. I’d rather suffer the prospect of getting caught without a ticket than have to get in that line and pay the man. I couldn’t take taxis, because I’d have to tell the man where I was going, and the silence in the car during the ride would give me cold sweats thinking about what would happen if the driver tried to strike up small talk. I’d rather walk across Oslo on foot than do a more sensible thing, and I did, many times.
I got tremendous exercise from all the walking I did, so I guess that’s something.

School.. Man, I had 75% absence in my last couple of years of high school, before I escaped that whole thing altogether. I hated walking into the room, sitting down, being around the other kids. I didn’t learn shit, because I was too busy thinking about my own condition and, I suppose, what they might be thinking of me. I wasn’t even skipping school properly. I’d be in the hall reading, or drawing, or just staying away from other people.

I loved programming work because I was left alone for the most part. I’d show up, sit down, run down my task list. My first development job was wonderfully anti-social. I’d get up, get dressed, listen to music under a hoodie on the train (unpaid, got away with it 90% of the time), go into the office, nod at the producer, sit down, and do my best, because if I delivered, no questions were asked.

This angst, and the introversion I for the longest time felt it forced on me, shaped my career. It made me pursue solitary work. It made me work in a musical genre as narrow and counterculture as they come. It made me so unaccustomed to speaking with Norwegians, my primary relationships came from the internet; I’m still a hundred times more comfortable speaking and writing English than I am my native language. At my most Norwegian, English creeps through.

The aforementioned Twitter discussion started because I read an article about a TV production centered on a Norwegian Z-list celebrity’s dealing with her own depression issues (which are probably entirely legitimate in their own way). My knee jerk reaction was to want her to shut her god damn mouth about it, and I was rightly challenged by others; I’m commonly hyperbolic and talk before my brain’s filtered the idea I’m communicating. You can probably chalk that up other social issues but I’m not going to make any excuses. I can be a real douche.

I’ve been trying to think harder about why I’m so angry about the notion of an entertainment production about a hipster with a biochemical sadness. She describes angst and depression as though it were a “taboo”, and I can not for the life of me fathom where she’s coming from. I’d ask, what kind of bizarre silent reality is she coming from, where people don’t talk to each other about their problems? I couldn’t imagine the world where she was being held down and repressed, because I’ve never ONCE felt like the world has denied me a chance or a place to go for help.

Because I grew to realize, as I grew older, that what I was so damn worried about all the time was an idea of myself, and how my own idea could be challenged by other people’s ideas of my self. My sickness is a combined arrogance, narcissism and irrational fear. Suicide was a very common notion in my head for the longest time, and I flirted with it repeatedly, but in retrospect I see that I was in love with the narcissistic idea of my “self sacrifice”, and I’d obsess about how I’d want others to remember me. If I’d leave a “dent” if I went in this way or that way. I’d listen to Henry Rollins’ “I know you” spoken word piece over Nine Inch Nails’ A Warm Place, and just cry and cry. Oh me. Oh poor poor me and MY pain.

I’m approaching 30 now, and after about 15 years of processing what it “means to be me”, the single most liberating thing was a kind of existential kick in the balls. I’d walk home through the Vigeland Park late at night because, again, I’d never take the tram, and this is going to sound cheesy, but I’d look at the stars and I’d think, man… On a cosmic scale we are so boned. What makes me so fucking special?

I think that’s the only taboo associated with angst and depression; The self centered, narcissistic shame. The constant, self-imposed notion of fictional peer pressure to achieve an internalized ideal self nobody on the outside actually gives much of a hoot about.

So when you go on TV and decide to share your pain because others can learn from it and feel better about their suffering, my response is that you can take that back to your own long critical looks in the mirror, and maybe meditate a bit on what it means to be trapped inside your own head when you find it necessary to do your mental laundry in the public space. I literally can not think of a more self-aggrandizing way to process your own mental health.

My argument has never been to keep mental disorders out of the media. But I know people with real mental issues, chemical mental issues, and boy do they have a real fight. You can keep your body dysmorphia and “suicidal tendencies”. I’ve been there, I know dozens of people who have been there, I know several who ARE there. Hell, I still can’t order a sandwich at Subway without assistance or talk to flight attendants. Being a “special weirdo” is common like the cold. Everybody suffers, and everybody worries; Welcome to planet earth.

Perhaps I’m provoked by the approach, where the idea seems to be to focus on an individual, while the problem is intrinsic to the human condition, and just as varied. Insecurity, self doubt and existential angst are as normal to the human mind as the need to use the toilet. Some think that is a mental challenge too. When you parcel it up for consumption, my brain conjures up images of understanding TV audiences gravely nodding their heads, now with a new found understanding of how Those People feel. And that drives me crazy.

I’d strongly urge angst-ridden depressives to talk to their friends and family, or if that is a problem, make new friends. I have a fantastic girlfriend who is my polar opposite in the social context, but she is totally understanding of my situation and has always been there for me. She couldn’t have been if I hadn’t been open and honest about my irrational bullshit issues. Online forums are excellent if you can’t deal with people face to face. Learn to discuss your suffering objectively, so you can gain some actual insight and not just spin your wheels in your own fantasies. When I was cutting myself in my teens (probably the only habit I still feel some actual shame about), I was doing so as a kind of flirtation with suicide at first, but after a while it became more about exposing myself to pain and simply processing the trauma in a compartmentalized format. I stopped cutting myself, because I’d made it mundane by considering it to the point of tedium.

I wish I’d been taught more about existentialism earlier. Or even what the word meant. So I could’ve seen myself as the small, insignificant dude that I am, and so I could have gotten on with my life sooner. I live so much better knowing that I’m not the center of the universe.

So that’s My Post on that topic. I hope someone out there will get something out of it.

As a result, you have a game that will please practically nobody. Veteran Ace Combat players will encounter a game both severely dumbed down but also fundamentally compromised, and new players will be subjected to a capricious set of quick time events, a bumbling, poorly told story, and gameplay so utterly monotonous the moment to moment experience can become downright maddening.

I’m one of the former category. I’ve been so much a fan of Ace Combats 4 through 6 (including Zero but none of the PSP titles) that it’s approaching some fan’s relationship to Metal Gear Solid. I loved the world Project Aces built, I loved the melodrama, the insane boss planes, the shopping and collection of planes, even collecting *colors* for the planes. It was a series that always got the fundamental joy of flying around firing high tech weapons at high tech things absolutely right, with a wonderfully tuned arcade flight model and a delicious sense of overkill.

I’m also a fairly hardcore flight simmer, so I can appreciate the difference between an arcade sim and a realistic sim. Ace Combat has always straddled the midpoint very well, with serious attention to detail for every plane. Fire up AC6 and note how even the redundant mechanical navigation aids in the A-10 cockpit animate and respond. The games are plane porn.

Assault Horizon is explosions porn. Or at least it wants to be very badly, and it does so at the direct expense of an enjoyable flight experience, and at the expense of the central fantasy sold by the franchise.

Reality sucks dude

The game immediately veers off the path of its predecessors with its story, set in a near future version of our own reality, where a NATO unit is tasked with putting down an WMD-driven Russian military coup before they do evil Russian things to America. I lost interest practically at once, and the story never recovers. The point where it introduces the main villain, a pilot with a shark’s mouth painted on his jet (original) actually made me laugh out loud, as the music kicks in as the camera zooms in on this dude’s face, and we are expected to feel some kind of awe. We don’t. We don’t give a shit at all.

Past AC games have always told bizarre but still engaging stories, because they stood free to do whatever dumb sci-fi nonsense they wanted to. The idea of a massive meteor strike throwing the world into economic and consequentially diplomatic chaos was a wonderful premise, and the games used it well.

Assault Horizon, shackled by reality, puts itself in a position where melodramatic cliches stop being endearing in that Anime storytelling sense, and simply become mundane idiocy. There are twists to the story delivered with earnest that will make you shake your head in disbelief; At one point I looked at a dude’s face and told my girlfriend exactly what I thought that character was going to be doing. 4 missions later I was proven right. It’s abysmal and derivative storytelling, and it only gets to be called functional because of some serviceable voice work.

Reality offers more trouble. In the imaginary world of previous Ace Combats, dozens of planes dogfighting in the sky over a city-cized gun made a sort of strange game sense. Comparable situations set against a real world context seem incredibly stupid by comparison, because we are subjected to how the military operates in the real world. We’ve seen air to ground ops on TV. We know how this should be. Assault Horizon has absolutely no interest in actually capitalizing in any way on its real world setting, and as such feels very poorly thought out.

The story in Ace Combat 6 was similarly terrible, but survived because you could skip every cutscene with no real story lost; Every cutscene was essentially a series of non-sequiturs to the actual story arc the player was involved in, and even if the cutscenes were terrible, the in-flight chatter was entertaining and well done. Assault Horizon gets no such free pass: The cutscenes are long, boring affairs where the player is given slight camera control. To look at what, exactly? Boxes and walls? In-flight chatter is an abject failure. Speech is so processed and distorted by radio noise it becomes impossible to pay attention through the constant racket of heavy metal bullshit techno and explosions. It’s just a constant distorted drone. This is actually the first game I’ve played where the audio mix was directly detrimental to the playing experience.

Actually, screw reality altogether

Assault Horizon doesn’t care about real planes. Where previous Ace Combats modelled HUDs with an eye on reality, Assault Horizon just throws some shit up on screen and hopes it works. There are mistakes in design here that blew my mind. How about a vestigial, duplicate ammunition counter that sits right on top of your aiming reticle, making actually aiming at anything a chore? Or how about removing the machine gun leading indicator altogether, taking out the pleasure of accurately leading and popping a target at long distance and relegating gunnery to an impotent supporting role? How about three camera angles where only one offers you a useful, playable perspective?

Actually, hey, how about we just forget how planes work. Let’s set the default control scheme to an abortion of a third person shooter scheme where roll control is removed? How about we take the skill out of lining up a ground attack, and make players move to a point and press a couple of buttons to magically teleport the plane into a nice vector? Actually, about that…

Scripting engage!

I was not aware that the attractive traits of Call of Duty included “tight linear scripting”, but apparently Project Aces thought that was the absolute bomb. Assault Horizon is linear to a fault. Gone are branching missions, multiple operations, plane/upgrade purchases, even squadron orders. On that basis alone, replayability is at zero. Double this with a campaign so tightly scripted it regularly wrests control from you at a rate that becomes alarming. This is a game where a particular enemy plane can NOT be shot down with missiles no matter how long you try. You HAVE to fly up to it and engage one of Assault Horizon’s many gimmicky minigames, called DFM (Dog Fight Mode, geddit?). In this mode, your plane is on a rail, and so is that of your opponent. Within moments, you’ve subjected him to enough punishment to kill a bomber, but no. The game doesn’t want you to kill him yet. See, you have to see him fly under this exploding building first. THEN you can kill him.

Or how about a plane that just won’t go down, and you pound it with all your special weapons ammo, only to realize later that oh, the scripting was set up such that you couldn’t kill him; He had to fly into a building as part of a scripted sequence. Thanks for making me waste all my special weapons ammo!

It extends to ground assaults, done through a similar minigame. Here’s a ship that you can shoot at for hours, but it won’t take any damage. Not until you fly to a preset point and engage a minigame. THEN you can kill it.

The irony is that the dog fighting system has some merit; Planes can counter your DFM, and you can counter theirs. And you can counter their counters. Against the normal planes that aren’t tied into any kind of stupid rollercoaster animation for you to watch, it’s actually enjoyable. Then you encounter a boss enemy and realize that even though the game mockingly insists you should stop him as soon as possible, the game will literally not ALLOW you to stop him until it’s good and ready for it. This entails a frustrating, long chase where your life hangs in the balance, and your enemy remains essentially invulnerable.

The game just feels hugely out of control. The aforementioned ground attack sequences will occasionally interrupt your carefully adjusted angle of attack to show you an explosion somewhere, and then return you to a plane on a totally different course. Every time you feel the least bit invested, the game yanks you out of it and makes it absolutely clear that you are watching more than playing.

For a player out for a fair skill-based experience, such as those offered by past Ace Combats, games that remain playable and enjoyable at the highest difficulties, it’s like a cruel joke.

A/V

Visually the game is fine. It’s not a huge leap over AC6, which I replayed in preparation for Assault Horizon’s release, and that game still looks and sounds superb. Assault Horizon has a gritty, high contrast look to it that sometimes works and sometimes don’t at all. Some missions take place in an Apache helicopter, and they take place a little too close to the ground than the relatively low resolution satellite imagery making up the ground textures can handle. One mission in a dense city requires you to fly at street level, and it’s during these sequences the game looks its absolute worst. It’s a shame, because the apache sequences, hampered by two camera angles so unhelpful it boggles the imagination, are among the least gimmicky the game has to offer, feeling like a totally serviceable shooter.

The audio fares much worse. This is a dense, noisy affair, and it comes off as simply ugly, with a mixture of overly compressed metal guitars and breakbeats. One mission has what sounds like a disco theme thrown in for good measure. It’s pretty weird. The voice work would probably be fine if you could hear any of it through the game’s muddy mix.

If it ain’t broken…

Some perceive Ace Combat as fundamentally busted games, because all you do is shoot at dots in the distance. The reality of it is that flight combat IS shooting at dots in the distance, while managing a good sense of spatial awareness between yourself, the target, your allies and the terrain. Flight combat is never going to be palatable to those without a real fundamental urge towards it.

Assault Horizon attempts to drag the player closer to each kill and, through a more intense audiovisual experience, be more engaging for those turned off by past titles’ relative sterility. The result however is a game that steals control away from you on so many occasions and in such a haphazard fashion it becomes nearly impossible to maintain any such spatial awareness. One moment you are facing one direction, two button presses and you’re on a completely different altitude and vector, with the camera shifting to another position. You’re shooting a tank, but suddently the camera cuts to a soldier being shot somewhere. It’s nuts, and it robs you of ever feeling like you were on top of the situation, one of the primary joys of any combat flight sim.

It’s hugely ironic that instead of being a game about shooting dots in the sky, Ace Combat is now a game about moving icons and circles around and timing button presses. You stare intently at moving icons on your hud more than you look at what you’re trying to shoot.

Summary

Assault Horizon can, in this Ace Combat fan’s eyes, not be seen as anything other than a failure. It’s a charmless, derivative game with a severe identity crisis. Ace Combat vets will pine for more control and more to do, while newbies with a moment’s alertness will see through the game’s thick layer of capricious rules and scripting to reveal an action game experience that is painfully shallow and contrived.

I have two hopes at this point.

First, that Assault Horizon is an offshoot, and not a reboot. The lack of a number in its title makes me tentatively glad, because this is, so far, the lowest point of the franchise: A flight combat game where neither flight nor combat is satisfying. If this is the future of the franchise, we’re in the shit guys.

Secondly, once I’ve had a chance to try the multiplayer, that the player versus player dogfighting will be more satisfying than the scripted nonsense the campaign puts you through.

I should probably point out that I have no experience with Korg’s previous analogue toy, the Monotron, but from what I can tell it seems completely useless to me, so I’d be the wrong guy to ask anyway.

Initial impressions are both good and eyebrow-cockingly puzzled. The box contents reveal a short manual (uncharacteristically rife with typos and errata), 6 AAA batteries and the unit itself, about the size of a hefty pocket book – By which I mean one of those pocket books no pocket on this planet would hold. I was sort of disappointed no DC9V adapter was included, but I understand, as with most things Monotribe, concessions were made to keep the price in check.

The front panel is chock full of switches, buttons and pots. While there are certain features I’d be desperate for (more on this later), I don’t see where exactly those features would go in terms of physical space. This kind of unit lives and dies on its commitment to simplicity of use, and from past experiences with “groovebox” type devices – lord how that term makes me itch – an excess of features at the expense of live programmability can be a creative death sentence.

Every function on the Monotribe is available with a wonderful immediacy. The pots are smooth with wonderful resistance, the switches are pronounced and chunky, the buttons have a satisfying travel and in general the device is very inviting to touch. There are no menus to navigate. There are a pair of shift-key type interactions though these are both dead simple and never got in my way. Having a setup filled with somewhat esoterically laid out synthesizers, being able to ignore five-deep nested menus and value-skipping digital endless pots and simply tweak the parameters right where you want them is the kind of experience that makes me reevaluate my fetish for deep and abstract patch programmability. I’m looking at you, Blofeld.

Sidenote: While I feel that Roland’s modern lineup is dull as dishwater and hopelessly bound to fashion, their front panel designs have been not much short of stellar. A HOTAS philosophy where you are allowed to build a muscle memory of your instrument is, I feel, a really noble cause, and I’ve even ogled the SH-201 just for the sake of having an R3-like instrument with that programming immediacy. But don’t worry R3. You are the awesomest.

The Monotribe has a signal path so simple it’s practically unique. A single self-tuning(!) voltage-controlled oscillator with saw, triangle and square waveforms is available, which you can mix with a white noise generator and pass through a single 12db voltage controlled resonant low-pass filter. The filter and pitch can be controlled either individually or in unison by a single LFO, running at speeds up to 5khz for some warbly frequency modulation if you’re so inclined. Finally the whole shebang is run through an amp envelope generator.

It’s all fine.

Viewed in isolation, every component of the Monotribe can be described as “fine”, perhaps with the exception of the filter, which is really quite lovely.  There is no pulse width modulation for the square waveform, so beyond tuning the osc there isn’t much in the way of motion. The amp envelope has three preset attack/decay shapes (decay, flat and fade in), but no temporal adjustments beyond that. The filter is probably as dynamic as you are going to get, but with only a single LFO the complexity of motion you are going to get out of a “patch”, if you can call it that, is extremely limited if you intend to do any oscillator frequency modulation. All in all, the synth section is obviously designed to be messed with and tweaked on the fly, not “programmed” and played like a traditional keyboard.

In fact, you might even question the innate musicality of the Monotribe. The ribbon pitch controller is recessed so deeply in the panel my girlfriend couldn’t play it effectively with her long nails, and nailing any pitch across its short width is a real test of patience. There is a range switch for flipping between a wide band and a shorter one-octave band, as well as quantizing to notes, but no matter of practise here makes the ribbon particularly comfortable to use. It feels ironic that the main musical input mechanism of the unit is so woefully inadequate for generating actual musical notes with any precision.

The sequencer part is, in a word, rudimentary. A row of 8 buttons, each with their own LED, makes up the step sequencer shared by both the drum and synth sections, though they operate somewhat differently; The synth sequencer keeps some properties “behind the scenes” to offer more resolution, and also offers some glide between notes, but using these features in any intuitive or precise manner is hit (at best) and miss (for the most part).

The Monotribe incorporates a three-drum analogue rhythm section, offering a kick, a snare and a hi-hat, none of which are user-editable. They all have their own 16-step (double the synth sequencer resolution)  tracks, and they all pass through the same amp circuit, so you have no individual velocity control over drum hits. The best you can do is balance the entire drum section against the synth section. All the drum sounds are “fine”. The kick is nice and deep with a pronounced click, and the hi-hat is a.. hi-hat. If you’ve used the DS-10 or MS-20 for patching drums before, you’ll know what kind of sound to expect here. The snare has too much low and mid for my taste and not enough punch to cut through either the synth or the kick, so I’ve tended to avoid it for the most part.

There is no MIDI, but there is a sync input and output with variable edge triggering for the input, so you could theoretically run a metronome from your DAW through it to sync it up. It seems to me that Korg has envisioned setups of multiple Monotribes daisy chained together for greater ensembles, but I haven’t tested this functionality nor do I have any interest in it, so I can’t rightly comment. The flashing tempo knob and tapping to set bpm on other devices is working fine for me.

What..? Why?

Some bits of the Monotribe seem utterly bonkers from a design point of view. The Monotron was apparently known for letting you pipe in external audio and use its filter as a signal processor; A great way to get a cheap analog 12db lowpass. The Monotribe offers this as well, but doesn’t disable the gate when the feature is engaged, meaning you must play a synth key to be able to hear the external audio through the filter. Why this seemed like a good idea to ANYONE at Korg is a real mystery, as it effectively kills the entire usefulness of the function.

Further, the device has a gate envelope with no release; What this means is every time a note stops playing, it “snaps” quiet with an audible pop. When notes are played in close succession, this is not an issue, but when played from the ribbon it means you can’t trigger notes independently of the envelope; Release that ribbon and POP, no matter what envelope shape you’ve chosen. Adjusting the note gate time from the ribbon is possible, but shortening the gate time for a sequence results in a sharp series of these pops that are very unattractive.

This is particularly frustrating if, like me, you intend to run the Monotribe through an external effects processor such as the Mini-KP. These pops introduce high end where otherwise there should be none, so reverbs and short delays with high feedback sound horrible, when they could have sounded smooth and luscious.

Summary

It probably sounds like I’m really down on the Monotribe, but in fact I don’t regret my purchase one bit. I’m disappointed in it in the same way I was disappointed in the DS-10, because it is so close to being very special, and makes some embarrassingly idiotic decisions on the way there. I’m disappointed in it because the sequencer offers way, way less than I had made myself believe it would, and because the zero-release gate feels like someone clicking their tongue in my ear while I’m trying to make rad sounds.

The thing is, the Monotribe is a piece of garbage if you want deeply expressive musicality, or a travelling workstation for sketching out your next track. It’s not that kind of unit. What it IS is a playground where you can experiment very freely and very intuitively with the core principles of analog synthesis. It’s easy, when you’re patching a Nord Modular G2 with dozens of oscillators and LFOs, to forget how much can be done with a single oscillator and a single LFO, and the Monotribe gives you the ability to not just make crazy noises (you can), but also to *understand* what makes these noises.

I’ll go as far as to say I didn’t understand how to construct an FM patch until i spent a while on a couch with the Monotribe simply experimenting with the musicality you can get from subtle shifts in modulation.

No, this is a wonderful little gadget, and you could even argue that its blatant deficiencies shave a strictly unnecessary layer from your ambitions, and let you simply play with sound with no pretensions. It’s a synth and sequencer my girlfriend picked up and had fun with instantly, and with a few more sessions it could be her first real entry to analog synthesis in a very tactile package.

Still I’d strongly recommend giving a demo unit a spin before committing to the purchase, as I can imagine the Monotribe easily ending up in some forgotten cupboard gathering dust. Me, I’m happy making clicky, random monophonic acid techno at 3am when I can’t sleep.

The past couple of days have been, in a word, dreamlike. It’s taken at least a full day for the reality, and gravity of the situation to sink in. But I want to start at the beginning.

The preceding week was all upside down. I came down with a cold and fever on Monday, and my girlfriend followed soon after. With the requisite cough-driven sleeplessness, our clock spun uncontrollably. We’d go to bed at 7 in the morning and wake up at night.

This Friday afternoon, we were shaken out of our sleep by a violent bang and our slightly-ajar bedroom windows shaking so hard in their frame we thought they might fall out. In that sleep state, we were obviously shocked awake, but we didn’t fully understand what had happened. For all we knew, it was just an unusually hard rush of wind, which of course turned out to be the case. We made jokes about our enormous cats attacking the windows to catch flies and went back to dozing.

The sirens soon followed. Sirens aren’t uncommon as we live downtown. There were a lot of them though, and I sleepily made the dumb joke that “I guess them done found themselves a negro!” It didn’t stop though. More sirens. Police sirens, ambulance sirens, fire sirens. Even a siren I don’t even know what is. I dug out my phone and looked up the news, and read the first report of a large explosion downtown.

Now we live literally 3 minutes walk away from the site in question. It’s a street I walk frequently, where my friends walk frequently. It’s around the corner, up a hill and take a left. Now I was being confronted with images of that well known, safe and quiet area in a state I couldn’t even begin to comprehend.

Terrorism is a constant topic in Norway. There’s a distinct Norwegian undercurrent of somehow being entangled with the US, and following 9/11,  as we are close allies having partaken in joint armed conflict, the fear that Norway could become a target for Jihadist terrorism has been a frequent topic. Personally I have thought the notion was ridiculous. If anything, Jihadists should LOVE Norway. It’s the perfect neutral staging area. Any terrorist attack on Norway would be, I think (perhaps naively), condemned even by the Jihadists: They have too much to gain from us remaining unaffected.

So when I’m being shown a terrorist attack on my city, my brain flies into analysis mode. Perhaps that’s the programmer in me; I take refuge in abstract thought and problem solving. A block away, people are dead and dying, and I’m instead sitting safe in my beautiful home, considering what kind of explosive might have been used, why the location was picked, why  there’s so much office-supply debris if the detonation happened street level. My brain simply treated the situation the same way it did during 9/11, when I was trying to figure out how on earth the towers could fall.

Friday was spent in disbelief, watching the news, flicking between CNN and Norwegian media, even making jokes about inaccuracies in the international pronunciation of Norwegian names.

(As a sidenote, on Twitter, someone became enraged that people were making jokes, and I was livid. Don’t you dare tell me I can’t make jokes when I’m nervous and uncertain, you self righteous moralist prick. )

Gradually as the scope of the event became clearer, we were glad so few had passed, and that whoever carried out the attack had chosen such a bad time to cause damage. Relatively speaking, we felt we had got away cheap.

Then the shooting was reported.

The shooting changed everything. As the situation on Utøya escalated, my state of disbelief reached almost a critical state. I became obsessed with theories. I got into heated debates on Facebook and Twitter about socio-political questions of perpetrator identity.

(Many were making assumptions that this was an Al Qaida attack, which I would openly ridicule and make light of. Further, perp ethnicity became a topic, and it was driving me insane. A pet peeve of mine is prejudice and assumption; I believe strongly that people need to eat the world with their own teeth, so to say.)

There was no way for me to bodily walk up and see the site. All I had in reality to make me *feel* the situation was how all traffic in the area had been directed down my street, resulting in a cacophony of engines and sirens outside our windows. The discussion and theory-crafting became more real to me, as the situation’s gravity escaped into the virtual space of news reports and anonymous discussion online.

As more details of the shooting surfaced, I remembered  how small Norway is, and the time interval between the attacks. Me and my girlfriend concluded early and confidently with practically everything that is now known about the perpetrator short of his name and address: We knew this was the bomber, we knew he was Norwegian, and we KNEW he was right-wing. It made too much sense, and I’m ashamed to admit, I was even gloating at the prospect of all those making racially-prejudiced comments against people of foreign ethnicities  in the Oslo streets having to take a long hard look in the mirror and examine their assumptions about the world, and the gray scale of politics.

Armed forces stationed outside parliament

As I was proven to be correct, the “fun bubble” finally popped. The death toll on the island rose as night fell, and certain details such as how this scumbag pretended to be a police officer, deliberately using these desperate kids’ need for safety to murder more of them and how they were targeted for something as mercurial as an interest in politics.. It finally broke me in to realize that this wasn’t just happening. It was happening in my home, to people like me, with my language, my past, my future, and it made me acutely aware of my nationality.

If you’ll allow, I’m going to get a bit new-agey here. There’s something about sharing a “spirit”. We like to think that when a bomb goes off in Iraq and several soldiers are killed, we all empathize equally, but I don’t think we can. Unless we share spirits with those affected, we can’t relate fully and bodily to their experiences. The sadness and grief is always tied to those left behind, and if we can’t put ourselves *precisely* in their place, then I humbly don’t think you can experience the connection as primal as it can get.

I’m a jaded, fatalistic cynic. I’ve been shocked and depressed by terrorism in the past, but I’ve never felt touched by it. I’ve been safe, in my “fun bubble” of analysis and anonymous discussion. Even as we lit candles on our balcony for the victims, we were still discussing and debating the events more than we were genuinely feeling them.

Yet I couldn’t sleep last night. I laid restlessly watching the news over and over again. When the news broke that the Utøya death toll exceeded 80, I thought it had to be some kind of bad joke, or a typo. As the number spread through the news and was confirmed further, I reached a kind of numbness. It wasn’t interesting anymore. It was just painful. A horrible, deep, grinding pain that made the world gray and brittle. It made food, games, literature, everything immaterial.

How can you enjoy anything or even think of anything else when somewhere someone’s mom isn’t answering her son’s calls? When a child warns her parents not to call her for fear that a murderer might notice and find her? When kids swim in ice cold water in the night, trying to pull their wounded friends to safety? When perhaps over 80 families whose lives mirror your own are irreversibly broken, and for what? One man’s belief?

We went for a walk today. Everything is cordoned off, so there wasn’t much to see other than people, rain and armed army personnel. All stores were closed, so everybody outside were in the same confused, curious and disbelieving daze. There was a soft quietness to the city I have never experienced in my life, and as we made a wide circle around the perimeter, I felt both pride and grief. Pride in being born into a country that congeals and gathers to heal itself so whole heartedly, a country where the government takes a back step to the fates of the victims, and a country where, and I really believe this, something like this can happen without breaking our spirits.

Welcome to terror-stricken Oslo

If there is a Norwegian spirit, I think I know it better now than ever before. I’ve never been a flag-waver, even so far as actively avoiding any flagging of any sort: I believe in people more than I believe in borders. But the Norwegian spirit is resoluteness. The ability to be smacked in the mouth, take it and stand proud still. Because we know we are good, and you simply can’t prove us wrong. No matter how many of our innocent young you murder over your petty, infantile “beliefs”.

Norway is small.  Norwegian poet Nordahl Grieg once wrote this. “Vi er så få her i landet, hver fallen er bror og venn”. We are so few in this nation, every fallen is a brother and friend. In 2007, 32 murders were committed in Norway. 90 or more dead in a day is unthinkable.

I once lived in the same block as the murderer, and worked nearby for years. A friend of my girlfriend’s went to high school with him. Her brother once beat him up. Norway is too small for this to happen. We don’t have the “luxury” of bodily mass or distance to cope with such an event. Every death is physically felt. Today, as we saw interviews with trembling, crying kids who have experienced one of the worst and incomprehensible events of violence in Norwegian history, I finally broke and cried.

We won’t change though. That’s not what we do. We don’t raise our fists, if not for rebuilding.

The pitiful mass-murderer, who armed his cowardly self against unarmed children, in the safest most peaceful country on the planet, will experience the horror of anonymity, as his memory will go quietly into the fog like a bad dream. We are better than to give him his due. He will go to trial, and he will spend the rest of his life among people who hate him. His eventual grave will be forgotten and uncared for. His family will cry bitter tears over how he has smeared filth over the gifts they have given him. His chapter is done.

Our chapter begins now, and our job is to defy his will and that of those like him. We’re too good.

I want to tell those who are left behind that I’m there with you to the best of my ability. We’re all together in this, though some of us have carried an unfathomable burden. The rest of us will be there with you, those who passed will never be forgotten. You have become symbols of what we are in this nation, what we fight for, and you won’t be disgraced.

About 50 minutes worth of massive, dark and melancholy ambient to go with your coding session.

Featuring tracks by Bruno Sanfilippo, Tim Hecker, Murcof, Cliff Martinez, Inade, Jackson C Frank, Max Richter and Christoph de Babalon.

Music for Programming is an ongoing collection of mixes designed to aid your brain activity in moments where blocking out the outside world is imperative. It’s currently a collaboration between myself and Datassette.

Microsoft and its partners are making babbling cavemen out of people, and trying to sell it as though it is the future. It goes right against everything I feel is central to being a modern human being, so much so I actually feel it’s an anti-human movement to try and spread this philosophy among consumers.

Language is about symbols. Words are a mechanism for describing a symbol, and the spoken word is a physical abstraction. Throughout human history the ability to convey concepts and ideas effectively have been at the vanguard of the evolution of human society; The ability for a people to carry and learn from their history is why we are where we are today. The abstraction of symbols and the ability to argue their meaning is literally what separates man from other animals, and as we’ve become more and more modern, the natural evolution is one of further abstraction; The evolution of language has been about efficiency and precision, and in generalizing language to the point where the symbols themselves need little translation to be understood across borders. In spite of all snobbery, the smiley face is a genius invention of written language, and it happened organically. A symbol for sarcasm, for disdain, for sadness. You can convey so much information with so little effort.

Programming is a wonderful metaphor as well, giving you not only the power to engineer complicated mechanisms from symbols, must allows you to define the symbols for yourself. It’s an art of pure language, and every seasoned developer knows the typed words are a means to an end; The more you do it, the less you want to type. You just want to get right at those symbols and craft.

Controllers are a generalized, efficient method of interacting with the symbols of the virtual game space. The symbols of alphabetized buttons, the control stick and the digital pad have, with the history of video game culture, matured to the point where a player versed in the symbology can make assumption as to their meaning within a given context. When Halo revolutionized the twin-stick control scheme now common to first person games on consoles, it was the dawn of a new dialect. A new configuration of known symbols that would enter our common language.

There is a purity, a beauty to the evolution of the game controller, because it has evolved alongside the demands of game developers and game players, with occasional mutations bringing about change. If you want signs of true divergence between the major players in the console scene, look no further than how they have handled their controllers. Whenever a new system comes out, the question is always; How will we talk to it? For me, personally, the hope is always that the controller will become less noticeable, for the sake of immersion. I want a beautiful, seamless experience.

But the Kinect is an absolute aberration in this regard. Never in the history of video games have players yearned for less responsiveness, less feedback, and more exertion, yet Microsoft seem to think removing nearly every sense that makes us human is the future of immersion. The idea that taking  the player’s physical space into the virtual brings an experience closer to reality is an absolute insanity, because as much as the brain wants to make the body believe, the body simply will not. Ask a piano player to play a beautiful piece of music on a piano that plays the keys 100 milliseconds after they are hit. No matter how much mental conditioning you go through, the shift in perception will never, EVER make for a natural experience.

But the latency is the innocent tip of the treacle-slow iceberg of hopeless bullshit Microsoft are attempting to foist on us. Voice control, another fallacy and fantasy of hopeless technicians and scientists without a vibrant soulful bone in their bodies, not only drags us kicking and screaming back to the spoken word, but it actually makes the spoken word worse. You are now expected to speak in a stilted made-up inhuman dialect that would only be made acceptable if it came from a particularly excellent Christopher Walken impersonator.

Today’s Star Wars Kinect demo, where a player shouts in an unnaturally enunciated voice, “light saber, on!”, sums up the futility of the spoken word in a context where tactile response and immediacy is the key to every possible shred of immersion the experience has to offer. Bioware’s demo of voice recognition in Mass Effect 3 was a staggering display of stupidity; Who are these blithering idiots who believe I want to introduce even an lighting flash of a second’s worth of my own physical body into a video game role playing experience? Stephen Totilo asks; What if I’m playing a female character? Consider too that you are holding the controller in your hands as you are expected to say these words, in the slow enunciated fashion the technology requires. You are a BUTTON PRESS away from making a statement and getting on with your life, immersion intact.

(It’s all I can do not to break down and lose faith altogether. I thought game developers and designers were smart people! When I was a kid I thought those guys and gals were wicked space wizards who wanted nothing more than to blow my fucking mind, and here you are, making yourself, and your audience, look like bumbling morons. Game developers need to take a stand here.)

But Kinect goes below and beyond perverting an art form. As designers make moves to craft custom experiences that “make the most of the hardware”, the true weakness, and true evil of the technology, becomes apparent: There is not a single Kinect-centric experience now, or upcoming, that does not reduce its users to cave men. Without fingers, a sense of touch, a sense of feedback, and without the ability to even communicate like normal human beings in the language of our choice, Kinect reduces us to invalids, unable to attain mastery beyond the confines of a technology that operates primarily on guesswork and heuristics.

Kinect is a devolving necromancy,  old discarded tissue brought back like a cancer to slowly poison a beautiful, pure language that has evolved organically since the very beginning of the industry. While I love working and playing with the hardware on my PC, as a gamer for most of my life, and especially as someone who loves language, I fucking hate the Kinect so, so much, and everything it stands for. It’s fucking vile. If there is any Darwinistic justice, this experiment will be aborted and discarded like the weakening mutation it is.

Back when I was a paperboy I started out being pained by the whole ordeal of lugging all those papers around and running up and down all those stairs. Can you imagine dragging a cart up and down hills and running up and down stairs during the Norwegian winter? Jeez. With time though, I was seeing pretty sharp benefits. My physique got awesome (holy hell do I believe in the Stairmaster now), I was making my own money, but best of all, I got extremely skilled at manipulating newspapers one-handed. From rolling them up with a figure-8 flick of the wrist, to throwing them long range horizontally like a Frisbee to softly land right on the recipient’s doormat, every new delivery was like a challenge to figure out the longest possible distance from which I could hand them the paper with the least amount of energy.

Screw the money. Feeling that I was not only mastering a task but actually feeling like I was making innovations in it were the best memories from running all those paper routes. To this day, I think the best thing you can get from anything is that sense of mastery. This is partially why video games that are poorly balanced at higher difficulties piss me off so much, because they’re denying the player the chance to master something that initially feels insurmountable; The best thing you can possibly get from video game mechanics. It’s also why I have a deep respect of anyone doing any job that put in a little extra effort. I watch garbage men and McDonalds register workers and it makes me just warm inside whenever I spot a new “technique” someone has come up with to make their job easier.

I’m a firm believer in programming as an art form. It’s engineering with a sprinkling of genuine authorship. I think a developer’s individual touch is as important as the resulting product, so seeing students be taught Java conventions drives me up the freaking walls; Isn’t the whole JOY of programming the manipulation of language to describe a complex structure? Coding, to me, is about individuals working together, and when I join a team I will bring my individual quirks with me; My naive belief is that individuality will strengthen the group and the project simply by virtue of individuality spawning creative mastery in a way that schooling won’t spark.

I have some features as a developer that I’m very proud of. The biggest pride is that when I write a UI, dimensions are always simply parameters. I feel an itch every time I type in coordinates or rectangles literally. My UI will always flow to the size of the canvas; I make no assumption at a locked resolution. 80% of the time this isn’t very important. But sometimes there is nothing more comforting than knowing that the form factor of the screen displaying the product can comfortably be an unknown variable.

Anyone else out there have developer “quirks” or habits they feel proud of? Specific facets of your “developer’s mastery” you feel makes you a definitive asset?