Two Weeks Later

I haven’t been blogging regularly, so… here I go.

For the past 3 or 4 months, I have been quite busy with my assignments and projects, which made me to worry for my GPA. Although I still worry for my GPA, I have been enjoying quite a few of my modules, as well as trying to make sense of others. Two more week to go before the school term, as well as Year 1, ends.  I am really thankful for my GPA for my first semester, but I really hope that I can at least maintain it, if not increase it, though I feel that it will drop.

As the last two weeks of the school term creep in, assignments and lab tests begin to rear their heads, some which I’ve prepared while others which I did not prepare much. I just really hope that I can do well in them and then hopefully, I can at least maintain my GPA.

There are my Object-Orientated Game Programming and Computer Architecture lab tests, my two CDS assessments, Innovation Principles and Practice and Public Speaking as well as three assignments/projects: Game Design GDD presentation, Introduction of Human-Computer Interaction assessment and presentation as well as the big daddy of all, my Object-Orientated Game Programming assignment.

All these in two weeks… Hopefully, I will be able to complete them in time, as well as stop playing Football Manager 2010 too much… Then I can concentrate on my Computer Architecture exam… After that, my first academic year will be done… and the holidays will arrive …

For those who managed to get whatever course they wanted from whatever poly or JC, I congratulate you. For those who could not, just give your best and work hard in it… who knows, you might like it in the end… hopefully.

Zhi Xiang

Mass Effect 2

There just isn’t any stopping the BioWare juggernaut. Hot on the heels of their critically-acclaimed RPG Dragon Age Origins that was released just a few months ago, Mass Effect 2 – the second in a planned trilogy of sci-fi CRPGs – was just released for the Xbox 360 and the PC.

The second game in the series sees players back in the role of Shepard, ex-Spectre and commander of the space frigate Normandy. The opening cut-scene though sees the destruction of the Normandy while on hunting for the remnants of the race of sentient machines, the Geth, from the first game. Shepard is technically (?) killed, but his body is reconstructed and consciousness restored by the powerful pro-human group, Cerebus, and headed by the secretive Illusive Man, voiced by the veteran actor Martin Sheen from The West Wing TV-series.

Convinced that the Geth were acting as proxies for a more dangerous threat, the newly restored Shephard is tasked with first finding and recruiting companions, most new but some old and returning from the first game, then investigating the disappearance of human colonies that eventually reveals the galactic threat.

Most of Mass Effect 2 worked well for me. The voice-acting is back in top form, with a couple of easily recognizable voice actors, including aforementioned Martin Sheen, Battlestar Galactica Reimagined alumnus Tricia Helfer and Michael Hogan, and even Michael Dorn from the Star Trek: The Next Generation series. Funnily though, Jennifer Hale’s voice delivery of the female Shepard is more nuanced and make for better listening and story immersion than Mark Meer’s delivery of the male equivalent. So, if you have no compunctions playing the female version of the hero character, that’s the way to go for a better overall experience.

Several of the old companions are back in the story too, though not all will join your party. Old favorites include the ex-Turian C-Sec operative, Garrus, and also the Quarian Tali. It’s somewhat of a mixed bag as for the new characters who can join Shepard’s squad. Some aren’t terrifically interesting, like Grunt, the Krogan super-soldier who’s born out of lab, or ‘Jack’, the tormented product out of Cerebus’ bio-experimentation. But that’s balanced by others which are: including the pick of the bunch, the Salarian Professor Mordin Solus. Solus is one of the most engaging and consistently fun to listen to characters in CRPGs. He’s fiercely logical yet eccentric and hyperactive at all times. Sort of like a Star Trek Spock on Steroids and in overdrive mode. There’s also an Asari Justicar named Samara, and a loner but religiously-inclined and dying assassin Thane. Both get really interesting story arcs and character side-missions.

Combat has also gone through an overhaul, and this aspect of Mass Effect 2 plays more like a third-person shooter than the previous game. Much of the combat is duck-behind and pop-out of cover to fire fests. If you’ve played the recent Uncharted games, this is familiar territory – and it works pretty well.

No qualms with the story too – which while is all space opera-ish sustains its tension well from start to end. During character dialog, you can choose between ‘good’ (which I took on my first play-through) and ‘evil’ dialog options, though the effects of those dialog choices seem less story-changing than what I observed in Dragon Age Origins. And some of the most irritating elements from the first game – specifically driving in vehicles – has been removed.

There’s stuff though that’s either changed for the worst or hasn’t improved. Inventory is significantly dumb-down. And the game feels… shorter and linear. Most of Mass Effect 2’s missions involve member recruitment of your squad or their individual member side-missions to gain loyalty. These can be done in any order once they are triggered, with the actual story campaign missions comprising just a small number of the overall game mission count. Map zones also feel somewhat small, with missions mostly comprising heading from point A to B with minimal sideshows, albeit with clever scripting at key locations.

You can also import your old save games from Mass Effect 1 into the new game, which will result in story references as you play to decisions you’ve made in the first. I didn’t exercise this option though as I’d deleted my old save games – duh – so can’t tell exactly how different is the experience in this regard compared to beginning a totally new game in Mass Effect 2.

On balance though, it’s still all good, and I enjoyed the about 30 hours I spent in this game (space-key advanced through some of the dialog LOL) so far. Enough for me to replay the game all over again, this time exercising all the ‘evil’ dialog choices.:)

Pictures from Gamespot.

How to Build and Market a Role-Playing Game

GameSpy has a hilarious if also satirical guide to how an RPG can be built and marketed. It’s full of fun quips especially if you’re a fan of JRPGs and Western RPGs, but also replete with insights on the things that matter in both types of games. Excerpt below:

One way Japanese RPGs stand apart from their western counterparts is character design. First and foremost is the hairstyle of the characters. If you’re going the Japanese route, your protagonist’s haircut is arguably the most important decision you have to make. Luckily, you only have to choose between two: spiky, and very spiky.

…

Finally, pick a medieval weapon for him or her and make it 10 times bigger. Better yet, imbue it with some sort of elemental power: a gigantic mace is great for clobbering imps, but make that gigantic mace home to the disembodied spirit of the fire deity Flameus and you’re set.

Rest of article here.:)

The Sims 3: World Adventures

7 months ago I posted a mini-review of The Sims 3, Electronic Arts’ newest iteration of the life-simulator game from the series that’s sold millions of copies. There’s no sense in not continuing to milk the successful franchise for all it’s worth, but the newest and first significant expansion to The Sims 3 called World Adventures surprisingly offers a lot of new content and new game play that nicely outweighs the SGD43.90 you have to fork out for it.

For want of a better descriptor, World Adventures is really Tomb Raider, but with your Sims 3 character packing the fedora and leather jacket instead of shorts, pistols and tights. Installing the expansion adds three new large locations, each with their unique community lots, excavation and ruin sites, geographical terrain, places of interest, and residential homes.

Each location extracts popular elements of three important places around the world: China, France and Egypt, and there are oodles of context-specific visuals and gameplay that’ll immerse you in each locale. In China, houses look suitably Asian with Pagoda-like roofs. There’s authentic Chinese cuisine to learn and prepare, books to read, Martial Arts to learn, Terracotta tombs to explore and relics to collect. And in Egypt, you get huge pyramids to explore!

To get to any of the three new locations, you’ll need to fly your Sim over. And in a very nice touch, the length of period you can stay depends on your Visa level. Once you arrive, an almost RPG-centric element takes over: you look for quests on the job advertisement board, and accept to get started on them. And the quests aren’t typically of the courier pigeon sort. Some involved lengthy and multiple steps, including looking for resources, convincing locals (time to start working on your Sims’ charisma) to do something, exploration of huge ruins and underground tombs, solving puzzles, and avoiding the undead! Some of the lengthier quests will even involve you traveling between the three country locations too.

Early on you’ll get just three days of visitation. To extend the period you can stay for each visit, you’ll need to chalk up enough Visa points by completing quests. And after each visit, there’s a coo ldown period too before your Sim is ready to travel again. I imagine there’ll be some players that’ll dislike this gameplay element, but I actually like it a lot. It stops players from going on an infinite-period visit to farm everything off a location on a single visit, and instead forces players to progressively earn their right to stay and makes them plan for each visit.

There’re also three new major skills to learn: martial arts, photography, and nectar (wine) making. All three are interesting in terms of what they let your Sim too. The martial arts ability – acquired and first learned in China in the game – lets you spar with opponents, and if so interested, you can even go on a tournament circuit. Beat enough opponents and you’ll even get a title.

At the martial arts highest skill’s i.e. level 10 mastery, you’ll also gain the ability to consistently defeat the undead mummies when you go about tomb exploration. That’s an important advantage by the way: because if mummies trash you in a fight, there’s a chance you’d get cursed by the mummy, and if you fail to remove the curse in time – which involves snake charming (LOL) or completing a quest – your Sim will expire, and it’ll be the reload save game screen for you.

There’re a couple of grouches with the new expansion though. The most severe one is that the expansion adds a degree of instability to the overall game. In the about 30 hours I took to about complete all the major and most of the minor quests, I’ve experienced at least half a dozen game crashes to desktop, invisible Sims, corruption of game saves, or flat-out refusal to recognize downloaded content at the Sims store at the game launch screen. There are players in the online discussion forums complaining angrily about poor bug testing in particular. There’s also some lengthy loading time involved when transiting between countries, but thankfully once you arrive in a location, there’s no more such.

Still, all said and done, I really enjoyed my time in World Adventures. It’s added exciting and varied visuals and new game play to the original release last year, and the skills and associated additional challenges for each require a lot of time to attain and complete. Highly recommended for fans of the series.:)

Pictures from Gamespot.

Game Development: Games and Knowledge

I’m going to touch upon a relatively interesting topic in the development of Video Games and that is one regarding the integration of information in video games.

Video games are largely regarded as an entertainment medium in society nowadays. However there is a relatively obscure fact about video games that not many people realise and that is that video games are a veritable library of knowledge. Now, before you start thinking ‘Educational’ games, I am not talking about games whose primary purpose is to teach children (ages 5 and up) about the different types of animals out in the African Savannah, or any other edu-tainment games.

What I am refering to is that fact that many games contain much information that we would not have come across if not for the fact that we are playing those games and learned some stuff from them. An example would be about how I know about the many different types of siege engines used in medieval times. (Trebuchet, Catapult, Ballista, etc…) Also, not to mention the variety of different types of swords there were back then. Who would have thought that the claymore and zweihander are different?

Katars are not swords

“So you’ve played a lot of Age of Empires! But what has knowing all that info got to do with today?” you might say. Well, the same rules applies. There are volumes of information out there in games today.

As big a fan of the castle age as I am, anyone who has played a lot of ‘modern day’ fps games would most probably know quite a bit about the different types of armaments the soldiers of today carry. Civilization fans will know about the Manhattan Project. C&C fans would have learned of the Tesla Coil (not that it could be used in such a way but at least they’d have a rough idea what it was).

At first it might seem that all this information could be considered ‘useless’ but that’s really up for discussion. Besides, it never hurts to know more. However, as GET students, there is an interesting outlet for all this ‘useless’ information. That’s right. Back into the games we make (or will make one day). The amount of knowledge you possess and that you put into your games will directly add depth into it. It allows you to create a rich game world filled with a vast history.

So go out and grab a game that interests you today! You might be subconsiously learning something new!

GET @ Open House 2010

The last three days have been a real rollercoaster ride for the 10 GET staff and 15 Senior Year Student Guides for Temasek Polytechnic’s Open House. The IT school alone received about 9000 visitors over the three days, with a large number visiting our GET demonstration booths and showcase rooms.

We were operating in three areas: the Mission Darkstar projects at Concourse, Course Advisement at Level 5, and our own game demo and play rooms at the Learning Space. With the Learning Space room, we had staff providing career and course advisement, PS3 play with staff and students, demonstrations of RPG creation using the Obsidian/Electron Toolset, and the video montage and showcasing of conceptual art and project documents for the GET/MAS Offshore Project.

The next couple of days will the continuation into JAE, though it’s primarily going to be driven by staff providing course advisement and counseling for the students who’ve just received their “O” Level Results.

Ok; enough talk. Here’re some pictures taken by students and staff who helped themselves to my D300. There’re plenty of other pictures taken by the half-dozen roaming photographers during the days for the school, and I’ll post them up when they become available.:)

 

GAMBIT

Today, we had Mr Philip Tan to talk to us about GAMBIT. He is the Executive Director of the US Operations of GAMBIT. GAMBIT, by the way, is a collaboration between Singapore tertiary institutions and MIT(Massachusetts Institute of Technology) where students from the US and Singapore come to MIT to create games.

Philip first talked about the GAMBIT program, about what interns over there are doing, such as being quality assurance leads, programmers, artists, game designers, audio designers and producers. He also discussed about MIT, about Boston as well as talking about how interns spend their time during the weekends which include visiting New York and Niagara Falls. Philip went on to tell us about what MIT is looking for in people, with one of the prerequisite being not being a jerk, and that we, as interns, will not be treated as students, but instead as employees. He informed us on the prerequisites applicants need to have before applying for the positions on offer, such as portfolios, tests and interviews that applicants would need to undergo before being selected for GAMBIT.

To me, I believe that it is a great opportunity to learn about the actual work and lifestyles of the people working in the game industry and also to learn more from the MIT staff. Also, you get paid, lodging and travel for doing what you like (hopefully). Isn’t it cool? However, you have to be 18 by June 2010 and if you’re not, you would have to try next year. For those who will already be 18 by then and want to apply for it, good luck for your tests and interviews.

For more information on GAMBIT, the link is here.

Zhi Xiang

iPhone App Development

James Fang, a GET Senior Year and also reviewer for New Era’s Gamers’ Choice magazine, forwarded the following link to me. It’s an interesting article about how two guys did application development for the iPhone, with an excerpt below:

“How 12 Hours, 2 Guys, 6 Cups of Coffee = 1 iPhone App”

“For the longest time, we’ve played around with the idea of creating an app for fun. After discarding a couple of good ideas (because they were too complicated or a quick search in the App Store showed that someone else already does it well), lunchtime lands us on a simple, fun idea to help people stuck between decisions.

But while most people want to create a great iPhone app, my friend and I go one step further, making a pact to finish the project within a weekend—or realistically, our app would never get completed.”

Christmas and O’ Levels

First of all, just want to wish all you readers here a Merry Christmas.

As Christmas  has come for all of us, I am reminded by the fact that unlike secondary school students, TP students have to go back school next week. For the past 3 weeks, I think I have not been doing my projects and assignments, though I think I’m still okay with them. I have no idea why the school doesn’t extend the holidays till the end of the year, though I know there will be a few reasons, which I think one of them will be that if the break is increased by 1 week, our semester break will be shortened by 1 week, (I think).  Hopefully, I’ll be able to complete my assignments and projects and still remain in one piece for the semester holidays after Chinese New Year.

This time also reminds me of last year, when, as someone who is awaiting for the O’ Levels results to be released, I was like researching on which poly would have the best curriculum for me. (At that time, I’ve already decided what kind of course I’ve wanted.)

A few weeks more and the O’ Levels results will be out. Continue to have fun while you still have the time, because once you reach tertiary education, it’s going to be a completely different kind of game here than secondary school, whether you’re going to poly or JC. Hope to see you at TP for the Open House and I wish you a Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year and good luck for you O’ Levels .:D

Zhi Xiang

Lecturing in Japan

Since last Saturday and at this moment, I’m in Kumamoto, Japan lecturing college students at the Kumamoto National College of Technology Software Engineering in a week-long program comprising 30 hours of lecturing, which hopefully explains the absence of gaming-centric posts here on the GET blog.

It’s a very different experience teaching Japanese college students – who’re the equivalents of Polytechnic students and at the same age. And despite the language barriers – they know basic English but because of a lack of frequent use in the language, can’t speak it very well – they’re disciplined, keen to learn and are all unfailingly polite.

I haven’t taken many pictures of the college and surroundings yet, but it’s a terrific experience so far. Oh yes – there’re four Temasek Poly IIT students here, including one from GET – Yong Jiahao, a Senior year GET student – who’ve been here since October and on a four month internship program. If you know them on Facebook, you can see the pictures they’ve taken so far, and life in Japan as an internship and exchange student.

The Japanese college and TP-IIT have close collaboration in a number of exchange programs, so if the opportunity opens again for students from TP to go there on either a short exchange program or as a much longer internship/attachment student, do go for it!

OK; pictures to come soon.:)