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Déjà Joué

James Tauber just mentioned on Twitter:

“is it bad that I just saw a photo of Stockholm and immediately recognized a stretch of road from PGR2, rather than when I was actually there?”

This is something I’ve been thinking about recently. As game graphics improve, the realism levels become close enough to fool our brains into creating something like “real-world” memories for the worlds we’re experiencing in gameplay.

For example, when I visited California for the first time, I was stunned by the feelings of familiarity I felt in response to stuff I’d experienced while playing the super-realistic Grand Theft Auto: Vice City; little things like the way traffic lights were mounted above the road, the design of the curbs, etc., the level of detail for which Rockstar received a “Designer of the Year” nomination — because of this, the streetscape of a typical Californian street was instantly familiar to me.

The same thing happened this weekend, watching footage on TV of Arizona’s Monument Valley. Naturally, I’ve driven a dirt bike around Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas‘ version of this. ;)

Update: another one is the Pripyat level of Call of Duty 4, which would be extremely familiar to anyone viewing these photos from a real-life visit.

I think this phenomenon needs its own name. “déjà vu” is similar, but different — that phenomenon occurs when the memory feels erroneously that an experience has previously happened, whereas in this case, the experience has happened — albeit virtually.

I’ve come up with a phrase to describe this: “déjà joué”. (In French, that’s “already played”, analogous to the “already seen” of “déjà vu”.)

What do you reckon? If you like it, feel free to use it ;)

11 Comments

The horror! the horror!

Dead Space came out last week, just in time for Hallowe’en. It’s a survival-horror first-person shooter, set in space:

In the bold and often-bloody Dead Space, gamers step into a third-person sci-fi survival horror experience that delivers psychological thrills and gruesome action. Set in the cold blackness of deep space, the atmosphere is soaked with a feeling of tension, dread and sheer terror. In Dead Space, players step into the role of engineer Isaac Clarke – an ordinary man on a seemingly routine mission to fix the communications systems aboard a deep space mining ship. It is not long before Isaac awakes to a living nightmare when he learns that the ship’s crew has been ravaged by a vicious alien infestation. He must fight through the dead silence and darkness of deep space to stay alive.

I absolutely love this genre. If you ask me, Resident Evil 4 is one of the best games ever written; perfectly paced, with some truly terrifying villains, plot twists and tension-laden surprises along the way. There’s no experience in computer gaming quite so viscerally terrifying as the first time you hear Dr. Salvador’s chainsaw revving up in the distance, while trapped in a farmhouse under siege from an army of blood-crazed cultists…

So I got Dead Space last Friday, and have been playing it over the weekend; it’s good. Problem is, it’s not as good as RE4, but then, when you’re up against the best game ever, that’s going to be hard to avoid. Actually, to be honest, the first couple of stages feel very reminiscent of RE4, tending towards derivative. Stage 3, however, comes into its own, with flavours of Aliens. Fingers crossed the upward trend continues…

Reading the comments on a Slashdot thread about the game, I came across this tip:

Call of Cthulhu (Score:5, Informative)

I’d say this is the last game that scared the shit out of me. The fact that you don’t have any health bar, and that your vision, hearing, and even your heartbeat and breathing pace are affected by the situation can really frighten you. I don’t think this game got enough credit. I still haven’t finished the game yet.

Here’s a nice 10 minute video that gives you the general feeling of the whole game. (minus the 320×240 resolution and lossy quality of course). If you get bored skip to the middle.

The video is pretty compelling, so I did some research. It seems the game is still playable on XBox360, albeit with some wonky sound samples during dialogue. Sounds ok to me. I went onto eBay, and was able to find a copy for 8 UK pounds. bargain!

When I twittered about this, I got these responses:

Me: “Call of Cthulhu” 2005 Xbox title, apparently one of the most terrifying games ever written: 8 UK quid on eBay. woot.

Myles at 2:00pm October 23: You won’t be saying woot when your sanity dwindles and you gnaw off your own fingers in an attempt to protect yourself from the Great Old One. [a fair point]

Andrew at 6:56pm October 23: Have you ever played Eternal Darkness for the Gamecube? Really really creepy, and as close to Cthulhu as you can get without paying royalties.

Síofra at 9:06pm October 23: Eternal Darkness – feckin’ brilliant. My first videogame addiction and I remember it fondly. The darkness comes….

So I looked up Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, too. check this review out:

Resident Evil, this game is most absolutely not. What it is, however, to dedicated players who fully explore its length and intricacies, is one of GameCube’s absolute best games, and indeed one of the greatest titles we’ve ever played. […]

There are insanity effects — hallucinations that have a major role within the game. […] if a character’s sanity bar drops too low, strange things will begin to happen. Very strange things sometimes. These occurrences are sure to set the dark mood of the adventure and have an impact on the play experience. Going insane too much can create unwanted obstacles for players and in doing so may also endanger one’s health and magick supplies. Some of the insanity effects we’ve encountered have proven very disturbing. Some even attempt to pick at the mind of the player outside of the game universe.

Apparently the walls drip with blood when you start losing your mind. Awesome! IGN gave the game 9.6 out of 10, Metacritic gives it 9th position, 92/100, “universal acclaim”, on the all-time high scores list for the Gamecube, and of course, it’s playable on the Wii.

Rosco has already promised I can borrow his copy. Sign me up! Looks like I’ll be scaring the crap out of myself for a while to come…

4 Comments

Urban Dead HUD; added Inventory Sorting

I’ve updated the Urban Dead HUD Greasemonkey userscript; it now offers inventory sorting, inspired by Ikko’s userscript (albeit a little different in implementation). Here’s a screenshot:

Right now, UD is reasonably interesting — our team of plucky survivors have been helping out with the defence of Caiger Mall, a major mall towards the north-west of the city. We’ve repulsed the Church of the Resurrection‘s attempts to wipe us out, but that seems to have made us quite a juicy target; there are now no less than three separate Zombie groups ganging up on us. For now, we’re still holding out.

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Urban Dead HUD

I’ve been playing a bit of Urban Dead recently. Urban Dead is a very low-key, web-based MMORPG — you play a 3-minute turn once every 24 hours. It needs some rebalancing and some new features, especially given the organised nature of some of the bigger marauding zombie hordes, but I’m still finding it fun.

To scratch a couple of itches, I’ve written a Greasemonkey user script for UD called the Urban Dead HUD. It adds several nifty features to the user interface:

  • keyboard accelerator access keys for the action buttons, and your inventory — very handy when you’re attacking an enemy repeatedly;
  • an on-page long-distance map of the surrounding squares;
  • a distance tracker, which tracks the distances to “important” locations for you

There’s screenshots on the download page, so you can see what I’m talking about.

Greasemonkey is a fantastic tool, as is Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Greasemonkey, which has repeatedly turned out to be an excellent, well-written reference while hacking this. Thanks guys!

14 Comments

PRNGs and Groove Theory

Urban Dead is a new browser-based MMORPG that’s become popular recently. I’m not planning to talk about the game itself, at least not until I’ve played it a bit!, but there’s something worth noting here — a cheat called Groove Theory:

Groove Theory was a cheat for Urban Dead that claimed to exploit an apparent lack [sic] of a random number generator in the game, [so] that performing an action exactly eight seconds after a successful action would also be successful.

Kevan, the Urban Dead developer, confirmed that Groove Theory did indeed work, and made this comment after fixing the bug:

There is some pattern to the random numbers, playing around with them; “srand(time())” actually brings back some pretty terrible patterns, and an eight-second wait will catch some of these.

So — here’s my guess as to how this happened.

It appears that Urban Dead is implemented as a CGI script. I’ll speculate that somewhere near the top of the script, there’s a line of code along the lines of srand(time()), as Kevan mentioned. With a sufficiently fast network connection, and a sufficiently unloaded server, you can be reasonably sure that hitting “Refresh” will cause that srand call to be executed on the server within a fraction of a second of your button-press. In other words, through careful timing, the remote user can force the pseudo-random-number generator used to implement rand() into a desired set of states!

As this perl script demonstrates, the output from perl’s rand() is perfectly periodic in its low bits on a modern Linux machine, if constantly reseeded using srand()the demo script’s output decrements from 3 to 0 by 1 every 2 seconds, then repeats the cycle, indefinitely.

I don’t know if Urban Dead is a perl script, PHP, or whatever; but whatever language it’s written in, I’d guess that language uses the same PRNG implementation as perl is using on my Linux box.

As it turns out, this PRNG failing is pretty well-documented in the manual page for rand(3):

on older rand() implementations, and on current implementations on different systems, the lower-order bits are much less random than the higher-order bits. Do not use this function in applications intended to be portable when good randomness is needed.

That manual page also quotes Numerical Recipes in C: The Art of Scientific Computing (William H. Press, Brian P. Flannery, Saul A. Teukolsky, William T. Vetterling; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992 (2nd ed., p. 277)) as noting:

“If you want to generate a random integer between 1 and 10, you should always do it by using high-order bits, as in

j=1+(int) (10.0*rand()/(RAND_MAX+1.0));

and never by anything resembling

j=1+(rand() % 10);

(which uses lower-order bits).”

I think Groove Theory demonstrates this nicely!

Update: I need to be clearer here.

Most of the Groove Theory issue is caused by the repeated use of srand(). If the script could be seeded once, instead of at every request, or if the seed data came from a secure, non-predictable source like /dev/random, things would be a lot safer.

However, the behaviour of rand() is still an issue though, due to how it’s implemented. The classic UNIX rand() uses the srand() seed directly, to entirely replace the linear congruential PRNG’s state; on top of that, the arithmentic used means that the low-order bits have an extremely obvious, repeating, simple pattern, mapping directly to that seed’s value. This is what gives Groove Theory its practicability by a human, without computer aid; with a more complex algorithm, it’d still be guessable with the aid of a computer, but with the simple PRNG, it’s guessable, unaided.

Update 2: as noted in a comment, Linux glibc’s rand(3) is apparently quite good at producing decent numbers. However, perl’s rand() function doesn’t use that; it uses drand48(), which in glibc is still a linear congruential PRNG and displays the ‘low randomness in low-order bits’ behaviour.

8 Comments

JFK Reloaded

Games: OK, JFK Reloaded is very, very wierd.

Read the insanely detailed FAQ and boggle at the author’s obsessive research and fetishistic recreation of the events at Dealey Plaza, November 22nd 1963.

Quite worrying, to be honest!

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Playing US games on a European PlayStation 2

Games: when I moved from Ireland to the US, I brought along my PS2; I hadn’t had it that long, and I wasn’t going to leave it behind (despite many offers to give it a good home ;).

Of course, Sony include plenty of trade-restrictive features in the PS2; European games won’t play on a US PS2, and vice versa. So until now, I’ve been playing the few games I brought along from Europe, with the help of a YPbPr VGA converter, allowing the PS2 to display on a VGA monitor, and a transformer to transform 110V US current to 220V.

But that was before the superb japanese craziness of Katamari Damacy came along, and with GTA: San Andreas due out next month, something had to be done.

So — after a little shopping, I found the solution — rather than get into serious stuff like soldering, I got this — the Slide Card. It’s a 1.5-inch long piece of plastic, with a carefully placed notch. It requires one piece of PS2 modification — you first of all have to remove the front of the CD panel. This just requires popping out one screw and a couple of clips, painless. You can then leave it off — it’s purely cosmetic — or stick it back on if you really want to, at a future date.

Then, when you want to play an import game, the protocol goes like this:

  • put in the Slide Card boot DVD, power on the PS2
  • wait for the Swap Magic splash screen
  • insert the little plastic Slide Card, and slowly drag it left-to-right until it hits a piece of plastic internally
  • use it to pull out the CD tray, place the import DVD into the tray, and push it back in
  • use the Slide Card again, grabbing a little internal peg part with the notch in the card, and dragging the card right-to-left to load the CD into place.
  • hit ‘X’ on the PS2 controller, and the game boots!

So, this is a nifty solution; it basically works around the disc-replacement logic in the PS2, without any soldering or hackery required. And I’ve successfully used it after a night at the bar on several occasions, so that’s the true test of how twiddly it is ;)

Unfortunately, by now I’ve probably spent nearly as much on hardware to play US PS2 games with a European PS2, as I would have if I’d just bought a US PS2. But hey…

4 Comments

Katamari Damacy

Games: Katamari Damacy (roughly translated as ‘Clumpsoul’) is a game where you roll around various landscapes, making a giant ball of ‘stuff’.
Here’s a review. It looks like sheer genius; here’s hoping it gets a US/Euro release!

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The True Story of Monopoly(R)?

Games: Anti-Monopoly: ‘A professor and a freelance writer are determined to set history straight on the origin and theft of a favorite American pastime’.

Details how Monopoly(R) is very similar — and allegedly based on — The Landlord’s Game, a socialist educational game from 1904, which was introduced as follows: ‘the object of this game is not only to afford amusement to players, but to illustrate to them how, under the present or prevailing system to land tenure, the landlord has an advantage over other enterprisers, and also how the single tax would discourage speculation’.

Apparently, once Monopoly(R) was set to succeed, this original was bought out and buried for $500. Here’s some more links that seem to back that up…

MonopolyCollector.com says ‘the Landlord’s Game was very similar to Monopoly(R), with the purchase of properties, utilities, a public park square, and a ‘Go to jail’ square. Many feel Darrow just added items to this game and improved some features.’

This article and its second part provide lots more detail.

Here’s a description of ‘The Landlord’s Game’, and another.

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Degenatron!

Games: The DEGENATRON Archive and Gaming Page — amazing. The Degenatron is the games console advertised, and occasionally featuring in radio phone-ins as to the violent behaviour of ‘kids these days’ and the like, on the in-game radio stations in GTA:VC. This faked ‘homage’ page is perfect; right down to the animated rainbow horizontal-rule divider.

Be sure to check out the playable emulators! Smash the green dots inside the mysterious red square!

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Freedroid

Games: Commodore 64 old-timers may remember Andrew Braybrook’s classic Paradroid, easily one of the best games for that platform, and a classic by any standards. Here’s a copy of the Zzap! 64 review from 1986. Many thumbs up, and the bottom line was that Paradroid ranked as ‘THE classic shoot-em-up’.

Paradroid trivia: in the days before .plan files, Zzap! 64 published a development diary by AB! Here’s the birth of one of the game’s key mechanisms, the ‘transfer game’:

Tuesday May 21: An average morning’s contemplation until …ZAP WHIZ POW ! An idea for a game within the main one, fighting for control of a new robot. Instead of just a graphical sequence showing the takeover of a new robot, why not have to play for it, you against the robot’s brain? Base it on logic circuits and use some existing routines. A whole new game segment in a small space!

Cool.

The authors’ company, Graftgold, has a website, detailing its history. Sadly, it maps the decline of the 80’s-style small games company, and ends on this note: ‘I would recommend the games industry to anyone wanting an exciting career buts its certainly not an easy ride. Most publishers we worked with either went bust, sold out or simply did not publish the game to our expections despite tight contracts. The trouble is the developer does their bit first then the publisher can choose the level to do their bit. Unless you can get real commitment by way of big advances you cannot rely on a publisher.’

Shame. Anyway. I’m not the only Paradroid fan out there — it seems a bunch of fellow enthusiasts have come up with FreeDroid, a homage to Paradroid which seems to be evolving into an RPG! It’s quite impressive — the gameplay is virtually identical to the original. Fedora Linux users can install it using apt-get install freedroid.

BTW, related: here’s two attempts at a canon for computer gamers, at costik.com and the Ludologist (of which I’ve played 121). What I find interesting about them is how clearly one is American and Apple-II-based and the other European and Commodore-64/Amiga-based. Stay tuned for the third, Spectrum-based canon. ;)

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