Courne Supremacy

Some old animations I did while I was still a student at the University of Southern California. Now they are here for your enjoyment. I could put them on YouTube, but why would I do that? Oh, well I guess I could do that so you don’t have to think “do I have the right codec to play these animations?” But to be a bastard, I won’t. Links as follows:

Abstract Animation

http://www.paradiseworld.net/animation/abstractperspective.avi

Albino Learns How to Fly

http://www.paradiseworld.net/animation/albinofly.avi

Alice vs. Albino For a Sandwich

http://www.paradiseworld.net/animation/alicevsalbino.avi

And now my Number One All-Time Favorite Game. Get ready, it’s not a game you’ll find on any console, hell it’s not even made or produced by a third-party publisher! Not the company I work for, not anybody, and it’s the best goddamn game I ever played, and you know what, in a way, you could say it was a licensed game. It’s based off of a movie/television franchise that’s now endured for 40 years and inspired any number of people into the field of science and engineering for the betterment of humanity. This was my World of Warcraft, my Evercrack. I played it straight for eight years, spent a ton of money on it (okay, my folks did), looked forward to it more than anything, and had more thrills than any other game I’ve ever played. And, I got quite a lot out of it in return.

Oh plus, I’m a huge fucking Trekkie. That’s right, it’s a Star Trek game, but it could easily be any other television drama you can think of, and there were other ones based on the X-Files, Star Wars, Babylon 5, and even Sherlock Holmes in it’s heyday. I’m sure this type of game is still going on in some of the backalleys of IRC and various other chatrooms around the Internet. Maybe there are versions of this game based on 24, Lost, and Battlestar Galactica.

Anti-climatically, this game doesn’t even have a proper name, not a jazzy one either. So we’ll just call it this…

1. Chatroom Roleplaying Game. We also called it a “sim” as in a simulation not as in the other game that goes by the word “sim.” How’s this game work? Like a stripped down version of Dungeons and Dragons. No complex rules; no dice; none of that bullshit – I could never stand it anyway. But to each his own. For our Star Trek themed game, players were recruited in (Starfleet) Academy sessions where they would learn the basics of the game — how to denote actions, dialogue, and follow a chain of command to immerse into the game world. There wasn’t much to know and having fandom in Star Trek was a huge plus, but unnecessary. Once graduated and on a “ship,” you’d meet at a regular designated night during the week and roleplay for an hour or more. You’d start out as an Ensign in a department of your choice and you’d work your way up to Lieutenant Commander. The Commanding Officer (CO) and Executive Officer (XO) were special positions for the game masters (or dungeon masters for you D&D’ers) — on AOL the game masters were people who were trained by AOL much like there are guides on EQ that are trained by SoE, but really, for our game, anyone with good enough experience and a strong imagination could lead their own ship. That’s the technical side of the game.

The story side goes like this: The CO would lay out a mission and everyone would have their part to play. As individual players your character interacted and formed a tangled web of human relations with other characters. This might lead to two people writing short stories together, and if they really liked one another, you might see them on different ships playing different characters but writing with one another. Sometimes it lead to more. In my case, I made a great deal of friends all around the country and every so often I still keep in touch. Yes, at the same time, you do meet your share of weirdos and drama queens, and they amply show their true colors.

So, how do you get promoted or moved up to the next experience level in this game? It’s not based on gaining X number of experience points or collecting a bunch of wigdets or what-have-you to prove you’re better than anyone else. It was partially social politics, but being the fair- and merit-minded seeking person I am, I’d like to say that you were promoted based on how creative you were — as I often times was, and when I ran my own ship/game, that’s how I promoted my players.

On an aside, this is also why I can’t stand the Final Fantasy “roleplaying games” that Square-Enix churns out. They aren’t roleplaying games, because, you don’t play a role. You don’t play a role as in you don’t act out the character or interact in any human intelligible way. Those games are really just Microsoft Excel spreadsheets dressed with pretty 3D graphics that take 80 hours to finish. They really ought to just make movies, but after watching Advent Children and Spirits Within, maybe they shouldn’t.

I suppose in the modern gaming world a guild would be the same thing as one of our roleplaying leagues. If so, the first guild I was in was called Starfleet Online and it was hosted by America Online. Back in the day, that was the best Internetz you could get, and we paid a subscription to it for ages just so I could play this game. Later, Paramount didn’t like us using the word “Starfleet” and due to copyright infringement AOL community leaders had the name changed to “Spacefleet Online.” I later joined another group called Celestial Prime Alliance because my friends were in that “guild.”

“This game gave me more than anything I could have ever spent my time playing.” Remember I said that in the opening lines of this post? Aside from meeting a decent bunch of people, that I would have otherwise never met, I also developed my creative writing skills. I wrote a lot of stories — not the emo shit that flies on livejournal, but I really tried to write what I thought were fun and cool sci-fi stories. I even ran a few of the game sessions myself. My ship was called the USS Intrepid — I inherited it from another guy that created it and left. I’d like to think that in the end, I did a fair job and learned something about wrangling people and sharing other points of views.

So, why did I quit this awesome game? I outgrew it (sadly). With Star Trek’s popularity waning, the new recruits weren’t as dexterous in their imaginative ability or writing. We ended up getting a lot of writers that replaced Star Trek’s upbeat view of humanity with teen angst and drama queen shenanigans. We all had an emo tear in the end – okay, I was really pissed and flamed the shit out of the kids with reckless abandon. No regrets on that either, and eventually I left, and my friend, the Admiral of the Celestial Prime Alliance group, abdicated sometime after that leaving the ships to fend for themselves in the wild of teh Internets.

In terms of greatness, that era of game playing is long dead now that we can have 3D graphics for everything. Turn your imagination off and buy a Geforce 8800 GTX and enjoy the generic run of the mill Lord-of-the-Rings games we’ll be getting from now to eternity.

Almost done!

5. Half Life 2 (PC).

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The Source Engine drew me to this game first. Like many other gamers I salivated over the physically deformable crates, the gravity gun action, the explanation of linking the physics, shader materials, and vox all together into creating a special material class that 3D objects could now possess. Okay, maybe I was the only one that salivated over the last one. I was even willing to get a new graphics card just for this game. The other big draw for this game was the storytelling. I never played Half-Life 1, but that’s because I never had a powerful enough computer to run it, but I had seen and even “played through” the Black Mesa monorail intro a couple of times to know that what I was getting in for would be epic. I like how Valve handled storytelling in HL2. You’re the main character of the movie, the characters talk to you, there are no cutscenes, you’re in the center of the action, and if you didn’t witness something happening nearby, then tough shit. Hearing that Valve had to delay Half-Life 2 because some moron thought the best way to expedite Valve releasing the game was to hack their server and steal the code to prove once and for all that Valve wasn’t finished and holding out, was heart breaking. The game itself was a slight let down in that the environments weren’t fully destructible and the AI acted like idiots always standing in your way. I suppose you could say they revered Gordon Freeman so much that they would be his meat shield. The shooting in the game was solid, and the super gravity gun, fun as hell. I wished you could play with it outside of the Citadel level. Half Life 2 Deathmatch was also a nice multiplayer addition – being able to kill someone by throwing a toilet into their head. Priceless.

Aside from that, at USC, I worked very briefly for the Annenberg School of Communications whilst I was helping Jenova finish Cloud, and Annenberg wanted to use the Source Engine to make a mod of a World’s Fair set in Russia to showcase various elements of Russian history. There really wasn’t much of a game behind their idea, nor did they need to use the Source Engine to built it, but they did. I eventually had to relinquish the job because being dragged between school, Cloud, and Annenberg was stressful. I opted for the job where I wasn’t getting paid jack-shit: finishing Cloud development. Ultimately, that was the right choice, and I don’t regret that. As for the Annenberg project, well…I think it got somewhere but I never followed up on it.

4. Katamari Damashii/We Love Katamari (PS2).

Dad gets drunk. Dad busts up the cosmos. Now it’s up to you, the pint-sized Prince, to rebuild the stars out of garbage. Bing Gordon lovingly calls this the “Garbage Game.” It’s derogatory, but true; it is a game where you roll a ton of garbage into a ball and hurl in into space after all. What’s awesome about that: You can’t do that in real life. We just have to settle for global warming and dumping our shit in third world countries. Political views aside, it’s a unique, simple, wacky, and funny game. I first saw this game in blurry videos on Gamespy and knew right away that this was my new Tetris. I played the Japanese version because the Interactive Media department had a copy for their Japanese PS2. When it was announced for a US release, I was there. We even found a way to get the original soundtrack. I would play levels over and over just to perfect my strategy of rolling the largest katamaris in the least amount of time. I still think this game would make for interesting speed runs, and maybe there are but I’ve never looked for them. Video game hipsters like to think of this as an indie film in the gaming world. I also loved how people could never pronounce this game correctly. Bing Gordon tried on several occasions (when I met him at USC), and another guy I knew called this something along the lines of “Calamari Domicile.” Genius. The sequel is more of the same as far as I’m concerned. The story is absurd and awesome, and We Love Katamari has my favorite level: the one where you roll up everything in the world (the elephant one).

Oh yeah, the photograph above. It was taken at the Game Developer’s Conference 2005. I attended a talk on the making of Katamari Damashii and got to meet Keita Takahashi. That photograph was taken by Brandon Sheffield of Insert Credit, and Vince Diamante told me that it gained some Internet notoriety by being on Joystiq. Want to see more of Game Developer’s Conference 2005, because you’re so damn retro, here’s some photos on my Flickr account. Oh, something funny…if you do an image search on Google, you’ll see this picture right up there at the top. How fucking hilarious is that shit?

3. Dr. Mario (NES).

I’m like a robot at this game. When I first bought this game, I didn’t know how the hell to play it. I don’t even remember why I bought it, but after watching the computer demo how to properly play the game, I was hooked. I also had the Gameboy version to play against friends. Killing germs became my thing, and every time I hooked the NES back up, this was the first game to go in. The Dr. Mario cartridge didn’t always work though, and it required hours of blowing into the circuitry and even “defibbing” (i.e. banging the shit out of) my Nintendo to accept the game. Hours and hours of summertime fun. I always wanted the game for SNES because it was a graphical upgrade, but never bought it. Who needs good graphics when you have robot-zen inducing gameplay?

2. Tetris DS (NES, NDS).

It’s a toss up between Dr. Mario and Tetris. Really it is. I loved these games equally, but one must prevail, and in the end, I choose Tetris. Without Tetris, I probably wouldn’t have gotten into Dr. Mario. Tetris, as they say, is the gateway drug, and Nintendo makes the best Tetris games. Back in 1989, my family was going to relocate to Santa Barbara for a month, because my dad was jumpstarting a computer shop there. Of course, being nine, I had to bring my Nintendo. I wasn’t going to spend a month without it. It was packed and we lugged it with us to the airport and only there did I discover my grave mistake: I didn’t pack a single game. If not for that mistake, I wouldn’t have gotten Tetris. To make up for it, we went to a computer store and bought it as soon as we got to Santa Barbara, and it was on. I learned the ins-and-outs of Tetris, and later with my Gameboy and now my DS, I “pwnz0r” people left and right. I haven’t met someone who can match me yet, but I would love to play it against Utada Hikaru. How is she a cool pop star? Out of 30 Tetris battles, she kicked 26 people’s asses. When was the last time Britney Spears did that or anything intelligible other than show her crotch?

On another side note, over the weekend there was a documentary on Tetris, called Tetris: From Russia with Love on the Science Channel. It discussed Alexey Pajitnov’s creation of the masterpiece back in the good ole USSR, and then the various companies that were vying for the rights to it. It’s a fairly sordid history between Andromeda Software, Maxwell, and a guy named Henk Rogers who worked to secure the rights of Tetris for Nintendo. What’s interesting about how Nintendo got the rights is that the Russian computer government agency, ELORG, found a way to make Andromeda Software walk away from the table with only the PC rights by focusing the negotiations from rights to the game to the harsh penalties they owed the government for not upholding their side of the contract. Nintendo swept in and got both the handheld and console rights with Henk. How did Henk get the rights? He befriended Alexey, the chatted about game design, and Alexey felt that he was the better man to do business with. Nintendo was able to issue a cease-and-desist to Atari Tengen’s version making them the exclusive owners of Tetris for the NES and Gameboy. Talk about a coup d’etat. And yes, in all my geekiness, I found that quite riveting.

One more to go. It’ll come online tomorrow after the season finale of 24.

Here we go…my top ten favorites and the diatribes to go with them!

10. Shadow of the Colossus (PS2).

Gorgeous game. A great fable. You can really feel for the guy as you battle your way through all these colossi. He’s doing this all for the girl he loves, and with every monster he takes down it corrupts his soul. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is. The world is immense, but mostly empty except for lizards you can eat to increase your health or stamina — I forget which, but goddamn that LOD terrain shit they’re doing is amazing. The fur on the Colossi is doubly amazing. If you refuse to believe me, then get the game, or check out this article on the making of Shadow of the Colossus. Climbing the beasts is a mixture of fun and frustration, but the controls mimic very well what you would expect the guy to be doing as he hangs on for dear life. You’re literally clutching the controller and sweating it out with him. Finding out how to take down a beast and then doing it is a strong sense of accomplishment, but just remember you can’t save during the middle of a fight, and this has led to some frustration on my part. I really shouldn’t blame it on Team ICO for the lack of saves, but rather my “just one more before bed” drive to play the game. I blame Team ICO for making a game that makes me want to play it. Not many developers can be blamed for that, and that’s why it’s in the top ten of my favorites.

9. The Sims 2 with Open for Business expansion pack (PC).

Or, as I like to call it, Sims 2: Open fo’ Bidniss. The Sims has always been a unique game in my eyes, but for the first game, I got tired of it after two weeks of being the deity telling virtual people where and when to pee. The second game’s got more of the same, but now in true 3D and you can zoom right up to the action (i.e. while they pee). Open For Business is by far the best expansion back, because it’s gamy (gamey? Game-y?). There’s a business tech tree that lets you earn abilities as your business grows a customer base. You can literally turn anything into a business. Want to turn your house into the cathouse? Put a fun-o-meter (or whatever it’s called) outside and charge money for entry. I have a house where my two sims live and they run a piano lounge that costs money to enter and inside there’s a small robot shop where I’ve actually sold robots. I’m trying to expand the wife into having a small cafe in the back patio. It’s too bad there aren’t many Sims 2 expansion packs that focus on adding more gameplay of this kind into the Sims 2 base game — not that I can, at this very moment of writing, think of anything that might further the gaminess (game-iness?) of the Sims 2. Oh yes, the image for this game…is actually from my Sims 2 Family.

8. Command and Conquer: Red Alert (PC).

I loved the alternative history setting that Red Alert took place in. The game plays out in an era where Einstein kills Hilter and creates a power vacuum in Europe just in time for Stalin to push in. Who doesn’t wet their bed dreaming of that historical timeline playing out? Even more, I enjoyed the multiplayer settings, there were two types of games we played. One was based on a mod called “Nurple” that basically put both players into a M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction) scenario. You could build a fuck load of cruisers, tanks, and nuclear trucks for dirt cheap and you had a vast field of crystals to supply your bases with. Battles would begin with 100 cruisers, 50 nuke trucks, and companies of tanks and end with nuclear waste irradiating the map as the nuke trucks blew up in domino fashion while your cruisers and tanks duked it out at point blank range. Even after hours you would get nowhere. Fun, I say. The other mode we enjoyed I called “World War I style.” No mechanized units, no planes, just fresh meat, an MCV, and a bunch of harvesters. The land gets littered with pill boxes and fire turrets and massive infantry waves get crushed under the wheels of your harvesters. Prepare for Glory, bitches. Command and Conquer is still my favorite RTS game, but Starcraft is better, you say? Much as I love Blizzard’s attention to detail and wonderfully built games, I just never got into Starcraft. Maybe that makes me “lamez0rz.”Maybe I just need more of a Korean influence in my life. Maybe Starcraft 2 will finally get me into the game.

Update: Wow, some info about Nurple Maps… I didn’t even think that the Nurple Maps still existed, but apparently they do. Just check out the Urban Dictionary entry for Nurple. I would link to the Nurple site itself, but it’s also a Warez site. Nice.

7. Wii Sports (Wii).

For years I’ve always thought, if you wanted to play football, why don’t you just go outside and play it? I’ve never been a big sports game fan. The 8-bit simulations weren’t satisfying and I never cared for watching sports on television, which translates into my disinterest in the subject as a video game genre. I did enjoy playing sports, but not in a highly organized fashion. As kids we played tackle football using our front yards, we played kickball in the street intersection between Karen Drive and Thomas Road, and we played whiffle ball in my hilly backyard and jumped the fence and trampled my neighbor’s magnolias to get our ball back. That was more fun to me. The moment my parents enrolled me into Little League, I became disinterested. Where was the fun in playing? Everyone was so goddamn serious, and if you have to be serious about something that’s “fun” then it’s not worth playing. I digress…Wii Sports merges the best of both worlds. You get to move around as you would be if you were playing the sport and you get to play a video game at once. Just like DDR even. It’s not totally realistic – Wii Bowling won’t make you better at real bowling, but it’s incredibly fun and intuitive with the wii-mote and that’s why I love it. I never had so much fun flailing around like an idiot. Even people who get hurt playing this game are smiling. How Nintendo managed to pull that PR off is pretty damn incredible.

6. Starfox (SNES).

This was true 3D on the SNES and it was cool at the time. Not that Mode 7 sprite rotating bullshit, which was neat in its own way, but this was neater. The FX chip was something embedded into each SNES game cartridge that required it. I think Nintendo made the only two or three FX chip games for the console. I only remember this one and Stunt Race FX. Starfox was, to me, the 16-bit era’s Star Wars, and you know what, the Starfox theme is more bombastic than the Star Wars one. Take that Star Wars fanboys, John Williams, and your orchestra too. I knew this game was good because I replayed it over and over just to hit 100% in the completion score. I think I managed it because I took a blurry picture of my accomplishment for posterity.

15. Max Payne/Max Payne 2 (PC).

The comic book presentation, the over-the-top monologues, the slow motion bullet time, and Max Payne’s forever constipated face of agony make this game great. You could tell the actors were having fun when reading the cheesy, noir dialogue. How could you forget Max sneering that his kung fu was strong, like a ninja as he headed in for the battle with the final boss. This guy was Jack Bauer before Jack Bauer and he left a higher body count in one level than Jack Bauer leaves in an hour of 24. The second Max Payne added physics and motion blurring, which are both welcome additions to the non-stop mayhem. My best memory of this game is watching Sin City, realizing it was Max Payne 2, and going home and having my own Sin City shootout. The only thing missing: an army of hookers dressed in lingerie shooting dual uzis, but I guess we can’t have it all. Yes, we could; I could mod this game, but honestly, all the effort…

14. Front Mission 3 (PS1).

Front Mission 3 let you customize mechs and fight turn-based battles. I suppose it’s like Final Fantasy Tactics, but with mechs and a Tom Clancy-esque political drama. But don’t take my word for it, read the indepth wikipedia article and enlighten yourself to all the varied and sundry facets of the game’s political drama. Each part of your mech was interchangeable — arms, legs, the body, the weapons, the color of your machine, all fair game for change. It determined the HP of each individual component. There was some strategy to the turn-based fighting, how you oriented yourself from other enemies, and how you’d take them on with your team of walking robots. The story was also a colorful political drama which is a huge plus to me and kept me going through the game. I didn’t make much use of the virtual Internet, but I liked that the creators fleshed out the world with that kind of richness and depth. On a side note…we used to call the lead character of the game, Kazuki, the Last Angry Man. If you ever saw his face in the game it usually looked like he was ready to fire out a major doodie.

13. Chrono Trigger (SNES).

Of all the menu wading, stat building RPGs, this was my favorite. The graphics were crisp, the music beautiful, and the story was fun, but come on, who doesn’t love a good time travel story? My favorite music is still from the Kingdom of Zeal and second to that the theme for the Castle of Guardia. The double and triple attacks were fun to pull off and being able to see the enemies on the screen instead of having random battles was a nice trade up — why go back? The multiple endings were fun as well, especially the one with the developers, and also when you started over you weren’t a n00b hacking and slashing at level 1 but rather you were whatever level you left off at — well at least you had that option anyhow. Oh by the way, Chrono Cross, it’s a sequel to Chrono Trigger, but it’s nowhere as good, and the ending of Cross, well, let’s say it’s best summed up in three pages of text, because that’s literally how they presented it to you. Oh, and Lynx is your father. There, I ruined the ending for you. Now you won’t face to face the travesty that is Chrono Cross.

12. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (PS2).

Parkour is the word that comes to mind when I think of why I love Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. The game’s all about smooth motion and free running across walls and pouncing over giant gorges. The combat system was simple – hit the win button and press directional buttons to do all kinds of Buffy the Vampire flips, tumbles, and sand-snatching stabs. This is another game, like Bully, that I felt was exceptionally well produced. The Prince animated well (with 700 different animation sequences he damn well better!), the combat system was fun, and climbing over everything felt fluid and exciting, but that makes sense coming from the French, they also invented Free Running. The one bit I didn’t like: the fight in the elevator. I forget what the girl’s name was, but she should have found a crack and stayed there. It took me a dozen tries before I overcame that obstacle only to face an anti-climatic boss fight with the Vikar leading to what I felt was a crappy ending. Much as I love time travel stories, reset button endings just leave me empty. So you’re telling me that everything I just did…never happened anyway? Excellent. Of, and if Chrono Trigger ended with a “reset button” finale, I don’t recall it, you don’t need to trouble yourself by reminding me of it, and that’s all for the better. What I can’t remember, only helps to make this a better thing.

11. Halo (Xbox).

The best description for this game I ever heard came from a CNBC documentary on the video game industry, and it goes a little something like this: “your Robocop on Larry Niven’s Ringworld, with the space marines from Aliens, fighting the Predator and a ton of zombies.” That gets a “Fuck Yeah!” Right there. Much as I loved the solo missions, it was really the face-to-face multiplayer. This is one of the first gaming experiences I’ve had where a bunch of guys got together in the same room and played together. That above all else was the power of this game. I had two sets of Halo friends. The first set of friends were my brother’s friends back at home in Downingtown. They played Halo for real and for keeps. Admittedly it wasn’t fun playing with them because of their seriousness to the matter of Halo dominance. Some of the legendary status players actually challenged us to a game of “Helm’s Deep” in Sidewinder that ended with someone grabbing the Ethernet switcher and ripping all the network connections out between the four Xboxes we had there. And you wonder why people murder each other over that goddamn console. Still, it was amazingly fun having 12 people in the same room, 4 Xboxes, and playing Rage Against the Machine’s “Fuck the Police” to a five minute game of King of the Hill with shotguns. Believe it or not, I actually had a deep and interesting conversation over an incredibly long game of one-on-one deathmatch in Hang’em High at around 4 in the morning at one of these get-togethers. My other set of friends is my group in Los Angeles. We made games together; we played games together. When we worked on our first magnum opus, Dyadin, we widdled away late nights playing Halo. It was a great way to vent frustrations that we had with one another. We were more on the level with one another in terms of skill, and even the best of us could be taken down with a well placed pistol snipe from across the level. Not to mention, these guys were much more light-hearted and we laughed ourselves stupid when we weren’t hurling curses through the air.

And there you go…we’re on to the final 10 games of this list, my 10 most favorite games of all time, until at some point in the future someone makes a game better than the games which I thought were the best and usurps the place of one of the top ten. Will Spore be one of those games? Or Bioshock? Who knows, not even I know!