Post PAX Impressions

So I got to check out some interesting things at PAX East 2014, in addition to just enjoying basking in the geekery.  Without further ado here are some highlights:

The Evil Within
Bethesda brought a gameplay demo of the new Shinji Mikami game, The Evil Within, to the expo hall.  I was a bit disappointed that it wasn't a playable demo, but just consisted of sitting in a darkened theater area while an employee played 2 short levels of the game.  The whole thing lasted about 20 minutes.

The first demo was of a bright outdoor area of a crumbling city populated with zombies of some sort that the protagonist had to fight and light on fire using a quick command.  The terrain actively shifts up and down, buildings move in on the player to create alleys and threaten to crush the character.  I'm going to operate under the assumption that this is some sort of nightmare dreamscape rather than a city being wracked by violent and highly specific earthquakes.  It was pretty odd given how brightly lit it was, but maybe in context the variety is welcome or this is some sort of lead-in before the atmosphere shifts to something darker and more claustrophobic.  Unfortunately, there was no indication given of when in the game either level was.

The second level was a more traditional survival horror environment, which actually felt very similar to the environments in Silent Hill 2 and 3.  It was some sort of dank sewer or industrial area with lots of pipes and valves.   Oddly, lots of fences and caged areas.  But most strikingly was an epic, constantly regenerating, enemy.  According to some reading, this guy is called "The Keeper", but we just called him "Safe-head guy". See, his head is inside of a locked safe wrapped in barbed wire.  This guy is relatively easy to put down, but he has a tendency to regenerate himself.  In one cutscene he rips his own head off in order to regenerate on the other side of a fence.  He looks a lot like Silent Hill 2's Pyramid Head with the apron, strange headpiece, and oversized weapon.  Safe-head Guy could represent the same things as Pyramid Head did for James, but I don't know enough about Sebastien to make a good guess.  There's also symbolism in that the head is trapped inside of a safe, so if we're to take the levels as nightmares then it could be something Sebastien is trying to protect from himself.  But again...it's conjecture.

The demos leave me wanting to see more of the game, so that I can put the shown levels into context.  While nothing in the demos suggests the resource starvation that made early Resident Evil famous, it could still end up that way.  The game itself appears to be based on The Last of Us's engine, just more streamlined towards combat, which could go either way.  I hurt for resources a lot in Last of Us which made it very tense, but the streamlining of it may indicate a more combat focused game than the stealthy takedowns that made Last of Us so much fun.  The obvious use of nightmare sequences and unreality definitely makes me excited that we could get something really good, but without more of the game there's no context and in horror context can be everything.  There's plenty of opportunity for them to Dead Space the game and place too much focus on combat and action, removing any tense lulls. Or constantly putting that unkillable enemy up your butt, reducing the game to a frustrated sprint trying to get to whatever checkpoint makes the monster go away.  But I hope they don't.

The Evil Within releases in US on August 26th for PC, Xbox One/360, and PS 3/4.

Murdered: Soul Suspect
This is a new game developed by Dark Void and Quantum Conundrum developer Airtight and published by Square Enix, hereafter referred to as Squenix.  This was a playable demo of the first major mission of the game and also all the opening exposition cutscenes.  The main fault was how heavily it relied on cutscenes to convey really simple things that probably could've been done via gameplay.  I thought the main opening which described the life of the protagonist through his tattoos was great, but when it descended into cutscenes after that I felt like the message could've been put out in a more interactive way.  Though there were times when the opening was interactive that felt way too pointless and should've been breezed through in a second or two of cutscene.

The basics here are that you play as a Detective with a crime family past in Salem who's just been killed by a local mysterious serial killer.  Depressed by the death of your wife (?), you decide to check out a lead without backup like a dumb and the killer kicks you out a window then shoots you in the middle of the street with your own gun.  The gameplay here was really interesting, as there was a brief moment between cutscenes where you got to play as your disembodied spirit that didn't realize it was no longer in your body.  After officially dieing you go to limbo where your wife's soul tells you that you can't cross over unless you return to earth and resolve your life's unfinished business.  It's a decently executed setup, though a bit stock.

The setting is a bit jumbled.  First, the Salem Witch Trials actually took place in nearby Danvers (originally called Salem Village), but I won't dock them points for going for the Salem reputation.  Then your character is an Irish cop named Ronan O'Connor, but could just as easily be Jame Generic-Accent.  They go through the trouble of implying Ronan comes up through the Irish mob before going straight and becoming a police officer, but don't give him a lick of characterization in the voice.  But then the other cops have Boston accents, so the whole setting becomes this sort of amalgam of Eastern Massachusetts stereotypes and references.  Nothing terrible bad or distracting, but I did find it a bit amusing.

Gameplay here is really slick and quite fun, though sometimes jiggering the camera to just the right angle where you can interact with certain people is annoyingly tricky.  The tutorial has one or two clunky moments where the game just has to say "Do this now, because.", but for the most part is nicely interactive.  In game you can possess other characters to make use of their eyes and ears, influence them by bringing up memories, or read their minds.  It's a bit LA Noire-like collecting testimony and other clues from the area, but there are no interrogations and failure if you use the wrong memory to influence a character isn't as spectacular as Cole going off the handle.  In addition to investigating clues to solve mysteries, usually revolving around your death or the death of some other trapped spirit, there are demons which roam the ethereal plane looking to eat you.  Dealing with the demons is stealth or bust.  You can sneak up behind them and perform a takedown, but if they see you all you can do is hide by running away or vanishing into some sort of floating soul remnants which you can travel between à la Batman on Arkham Asylum's gargoyles.

All indications here are that this will be a pretty decent game, but probably won't make any headlines as some phenomenon that people talk about.

Murdered: Soul Suspect releases in the US on May 3rd for PC, Xbox One/360, and PS 3/4.

Others
Race The Sun is a gorgeous looking game in which you race a solar powered vehicle against the sunset on a daily randomly generated and minimalistically rendered course until the sun either sets or you crash into something.  It responds fluidly and is really fun to play.  The game sports Oculus Rift support.

There Came an Echo is an isometric real time quad strategy with a well known voice cast.  The game is notable for using voice commands to control the squad.  And it's actually pretty good at it, even in the noisy expo hall I was able to issue commands with accuracy.  The mouse controls also exist but are definitely lacking and my first attempts to play before I realized how to use the voice controls met with a lot of frustration.  The game is clearly almost done but definitely needs some usability spit and polish before release, which should be in mid-2014.  Should be fairly fun for a while at least.  I was amused that the voice commands basically preclude making a Let's Play of the game...

I would add finally that I was a bit disappointed that there was no really good showing in indie horror, like Outlast at last year's PAX East.  The enthusiasm for horror tailed perfectly into the release of Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs.  This year the only real horror game around at all was The Evil Within, and that demo left me nowhere near as excited as I was for Outlast.

--PXA

The Last of Us experience

Ok, so this isn't the video game writing I normally do, but I felt like I needed to write something about my experience around this game.  I'm still working on another beer article, but motivation is scarce.  This has been on my mind a lot lately and I wanted to get it out there quickly, so this is a barely editing accounting of my experience buying and playing The Last of Us.  I'll admit to not being very far in the game, but there's a reason for that.

So The Last of Us is a Playstation 3 exclusive game developed by Naughty Dog, and it was released in the US on June 14th.  I ordered the game on June 15th via some odd configuration of eBay and newegg which I saw posted on reddit.com/r/gamedeals.  I'm generally a patient gamer but the hype around the game and the fact I could get it for an entirely reasonable price made me go for it.  I got the game on the 18th with plans to play it the evening of the 19th.

Knowing the game was going to need to be updating immediately, I put the disc in and told it to download and install the patch.  My 6 months of PS3 ownership have taught me that the PS3 is now going to be absolutely useless until it's done which could be upwards of an hour from now.  So later that night I went to check on the status and it was done.  It was too late to play, so I turned off the console.

The next day, I went to play the game after work only to discover that my PS3 controller had run down its battery.  I'm told that keeping a USB hub near your sofa to charge your PS3 controllers is all the rage nowadays, but I've apparently not kept up with the times and the closest place for me to charge my controller is the PS3 itself using the 3 foot cable that ships with the console.  My hopes dashed, I plugged the controller in to charge and played some Mass Effect on Xbox.

The next day I went again to play using my freshly charged controller.  Starting the game yields a loading screen for a few minutes before bringing up the menu which was peaceful, yet sparse and showing signs of decay.  Selecting new game yields another loading screen.  This one is all black apart from some sparkles that look like they could turn into the PS3 main menu at any point.  After a minute or two some "Loading..." text appears in the bottom right corner with a percentage that slowly climbs.  When the percentage finally reaches 100%, the loading screen starts it again.  A few more 0-100 runs of the "Loading..." text and the opening cinematic finally begins.

So I play the game, and it's pretty well done.  A little heavy on the cutscenes, but still not bad.  Then I start to get into the main part of the gameplay and realize I'm really bad at this.  But I'm not bad at this because I don't understand what to do, I'm bad at this because the control scheme is fucking me up.  I feel like the game really demands I know the controls pretty immediately.  I find whenever I try to be really stealthy I'll be trying to sneak up on a guy and then football victory-check a brick directly into the ground or lunge at the empty space next to someone.  It's pretty frustrating.  And if there's more than 2-3 bad guys I'm generally better off just starting a huge fight and beating everyone to death with a board instead of taking them out one at a time.  I tried to take out that fucking Clicker in the beginning of the MBTA station level right before the Goldstone building like 4 times and failing at it before I just shot it in the head a few times then Molotov'd the mob that ran in.  That pissed me off because that is not how I want to play this game.

Rewinding a bit, a few hours before that point I decided I want to save, in case I was about to do something totally boneheaded and I didn't want to restart the entire section.  Now I stare at a message saying "Autosaving still in progress" for a minute, then an unresponsive options menu for a bit with several messages about Autosaving before finally being allowed to select a savegame file.  It's around this point that my girlfriend casually quips, "This got 10 out of 10?"

I want to bring this up in relation to a 9 out of 10 game that I played on the Xbox 360:  Batman Arkham City.

I bought Arkham City several months after release date from a gamestop and brought the disc home.  I put it into the Xbox and turned on the controller.  I don't think the controller had been dead, but if it had I have plenty of rechargeable batteries around because I use them in: My wireless mouse, other Xbox controllers, digital cameras, digital scale, TV remote control, my brewing thermometer, and a few other things I'm sure I've forgotten.

I intend to play the game tonight, but am greeted by an update screen.  Which is no big deal to me, I know that historically the Xbox will finish updating in under a minute.  My experience has not led me astray and the game is ready to play and at the menu before I can think about how uncomfortable my couch is.  I start a new game and with less than 30 seconds of loading, the opening cinematic starts.  I then proceed to play the fuck out Arkham City and continually revisit the game.

This experience also applies to every Xbox 360 game I have played: Mass Effect, Left 4 Dead, Alan Wake, Assassin's Creed(s), etc, while a similar "Oh Gods I hope it doesn't need to update" scenario unfolds every time I try to play something on the PS3.

Now the point:
I firmly believe that the strength of a console lies in its games.  Graphics and capabilities are generally equal and have been for a generation or two, so the exclusives and online services are where the difference is made.  I am not a Xbox fanboy or part of the PC master race.  But, I find the PS3 and incredibly inconvenient console to use.  It seems like there is no such thing as deciding to play a game and then playing it on the PS3.  The console feels replete with loading screens and saving progress bars.  If there is an update, you might as well cancel your plans.  And the lack of replaceable batteries in the controllers will never fail to aggravate me.  It's a wireless freaking controller, it feels like it's missed the point if I have to plug it in to use it.

I firmly believe the experience of The Last of Us is being hindered by its console exclusivity.  I think the PS3 is holding me back from really enjoying the game and that sucks.  I'm not going to say I'd be able to control it better if I were on a PC or Xbox 360, that's unfair.  But the time and waiting I had to put into playing the game at all, and the time I need to spend waiting for the game to be ready for me to play it every single time I want to really saps the enjoyment.  This is compounded by the fact that the platform seems to continually pull me out of the game whenever I save.

I'm hoping they eventually port this because I'd like to see how it fairs without the PS3 getting in the way because it really feels like it does.

A foray into video recording and editing

I'm fully aware it's been a very long while since I discussed anything technical on this site, and that makes me feel a little sad as that was the original point.  I had been somewhat hindered by the fact that there was very little I was doing outside of work that seemed interesting, and a lot of what I was doing in work was too difficult to make generic enough to not get me in trouble.  However, since I had started doing YouTube Let's Play videos (as mentioned previously) I've got something that's pretty interesting and somewhat technical, so here we are.

Let's Drink to Gaming is a Let's Play show with themed cocktails.  I wanted this to be a little more interesting than just playing a game and narrating what's going on, so I decided that I would play with a rotating cast of guest hosts over the internet.  This leads to a somewhat interesting challenge of broadcasting the game video to the other person while simultaneously recording it.  It also raised the question of how to record multiple audio sources, and broadcast multiple sources.  I needed to hear and record their voice, they needed to hear me and the game.

I did some wandering around Google and tried: XSplit, FFSplit, Fraps, Taksi, Bandicam, and I think "GameCam"?  Eventually I settled on Dxtory.  It's paid software but it has a lot of features that were really important in my situation that only really XSplit also mirrored, and since XSplit uses a subscription pay model Dxtory is technically cheaper.  The most important features Dxtory has are:

• The ability to record an arbitrary number of audio streams.
• The ability to stream the video it's recording to several DirectShow contexts.

Almost every other program only recorded 2 audio streams, if that.  They're really well setup for traditional commentary recording where you want the game and a microphone, but I was obviously biting off a bit more.  Since starting I've recorded up to 4 tracks at once: Game audio, my friend Tim and his fiancée over Teamspeak, myself on a headset mic, and my girlfriend on another local mic.  Being able to isolate all these lets me mix everything independently while I'm editing the final video so I can do some EQ and noise removal, basically make a run through and try to clean up the audio as much as possible.

Streaming via DirectShow is the way most webcams work, so since Dxtory can do that, I have a lot of options for video conferencing or streaming software.  I tried Skype first since it's super-easy, but the video quality is awful.  Skype uses 640x480 streams.  We've been trying to get RTSP with VLC working for some time can't quite get it over the internet.  I have a sneaking suspicion Verizon may be blocking RTSP.  I had also briefly toyed with the idea of using a game streaming site like Twitch and maybe making the channel private, if that's possible, but the lag on my stream was unbelievable.  I just recently found out this was because one of the utilities which came with my motherboard, a bandwidth prioritization utility, was devoting almost all my network resources to a Synergy server.  So maybe this is an option again.  I should also revisit the VLC tests in case bandwidth was an issue.

Audio mixing for the live feed was still unanswered.  This market is unfortunately less varied and most of it is paid software.  I tried without success using PulseAudio for windows, Jack for windows.  Eventually I bought Virtual Audio Cable.  VAC lets you create virtual audio devices on your PC and also arbitrarily route real and virtual devices.  This has been really important when we've played non-co-op games and had my girlfriend in the room with me.  I can use VAC to combine both of our microphones, and the game audio into a single device and make Teamspeak use that as its microphone while not affecting my ability to record all 3 of those sources alone.

So once I recorded everything I end up with a few gigs of x264 encoded AVI files with separate audio streams.  All the post-production work is done in Linux.  The software for windows I bought to record and stream was pretty cheap, and they were the only programs I saw with the featuresets I wanted.  Video editing software, however, is really freaking expensive.  I tried some free programs for windows, but they were all terrible.  Nothing could even match the feature set of of Adobe Premier Elements or Windows Movie Maker.  So I went to Linux where there were at least a few programs for me to choose from: Cinelerra, KDEnlive, and OpenShot.

I made my first video in Cinelerra but it was clunky, old looking, unstable, and couldn't export quickly or easily.  I wound up rendering the audio separately, and the video into a ludicrously large MOV, 80 gigs or something, then muxing the two together and reencoding on the command line.  Since then I've been using KDEnlive and it is much much better.  It still crashes and it has some clunkiness around certain tasks or filters.  I'd love some project templates and previewing animated title cards has some problems.  Also, it had this super-strange audio glitch that made creating the clip show utter madness.  I may try OpenShot soon, since it looks really good but I have nothing on it now.

I have a shell script that invokes ffmpeg to extract all the audio streams from the video file so I can work with them in Audacity.  Audacity seems like the go-to cross platform audio program, so I use that to import all the tracks, then run noise removal and run a pre-amp on anyone who seems too quiet.  Then I basically listen to the entire project covering up bits of keyboard noise or other unwanted sounds and if anyone talked over anyone else, bring out whoever said something better.

Anyway, that's the basic setup:
VAC to setup the audio so everyone can hear what they need.
Dxtory to record all the audio to independent data streams and output video in a usable format.
Google Hangouts to stream video to the remote commentators.
Audacity to clean and mix the audio into a single track.
KDEnlive to put everything together into the final video.

Yeah, this is long winded, but at least I'm talking about software again.  Maybe I'll post the bash script next time I boot linux to do some work.