Matt Tarbit's Weblog

I've been playing: Bioshock (Xbox 360)

I put off getting this after downloading the demo from live and having a bad experience with it. If I remember correctly, they'd added a security camera into a room in the demo where there isn't one in the final game, presumably to show off some of the extra interactions it brings. Unfortunately the room it was added to was largely lit in red making it hard to spot its field of vision. Consequently I found myself overwhelmed by multiple splicers and security bots at once, which is not something which suits my style of play. But what I found on making my way deeper into the game proper was that getting overwhelmed is all part of the fun.

What Bioshock introduces into the standard FPS recipe is a twist on the usual combat model. My normal approach would be to edge through levels an inch at a time picking off enemies one by one, safe in the knowledge that nothing is going to creep up behind me. In Rapture that's not quite so effective. Enemies crawl out of walls, wander the corridors, and will think nothing of chasing you from room to room. The environments tend to be broad and intertwined rather than long and linear, and the route you take through them is rarely enforced.

But the most colour is added by the variety of ways in which any problem can be attacked. For any one entity in rapture there are a multitude of ways of dealing with it and turning it to your advantage (in contrast to the average FPS where there are things to kill and things to pick up, and not much more to speak of). It's dizzying just to list what's on offer:

• Enemies which attack only when provoked, or which can be made to attack each other, or which can be made to protect you.
• Weapons which can be upgraded and which take several types of ammo, some of which can be made by collecting materials.
• "Plasmids" which are effectively magical powers which add even more complexity to the interactions.
• "Tonics" which are effectively skills or physical enhancements.
• Security cameras, bots and turrets all of which can be hacked to protect you or destroyed for pick-ups.
• Vending machines and health stations which can also be hacked for price reductions or destroyed for pick-ups.
• The hacking itself which is performed via a pipe-mania style puzzle game but which can be circumvented with auto-hack tools or bought out.
• Researching enemies by taking their photograph for various bonuses.
• Environmental hazards like oil which can be set on fire and water which can be electrified.

If you multiply everything together to find the number of available combinations implicit in that list you'll find that it yields a pretty impressive realm of possibility. Which leads to the fun in being overwhelmed which I mentioned earlier, sparking some of these interactions and standing back to see what happens can be pretty entertaining.

There are some odd bugs and some iffy UI decisions, and there's the failure of nerve in the final portion of the game that's been discussed elsewhere. But take the web of interactions I've talked about above and add to this some beautiful graphics, a great storyline, fantastic voice acting (spoilers) and you end up with a really great game, deservedly topping the metacritic charts. There's also enough tiny little fun scripted moments and bits modelled into the environment to show that the development team were enjoying themselves too. Something which always puts the cherry on the cake for me.

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Colophonic Irrigation

In the interests of transparency, and because I've been a sucker for them ever since I first stumbled across one in the back of an Oreilly book, I've added a colophon to my about page.

It's also largely due to Mr. Willison putting the idea in my head this morning. He even advocates stuff when he's not intending too, the poor fellow!

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I've been playing: Fahrenheit (Xbox)

A rough diamond that I missed out on the first time around, given a second lease of life by the Xbox Originals download service on the 360.

It's a right little charmer filled with fun little bits of innovation and some obvious loving care from the developers. The driving plot doesn't take itself too seriously (although yes, it gets downright silly in places, throwing in every supernatural plot device it can think of), and the incredibly simple control scheme gets out of the way of the gameplay allowing it to be fairly freeform and unformulaic. It even makes a little bit of headway into the idealistic territory of "interactive cinema" that the developers were obviously striving towards.

There are definitely aspects that don't work so well; the much-maligned QTE sequences, the always terrible semi-fixed cameras, and the afore-mentioned farcical plot twists. But for every silly mistake there's a wonderful success. Not least of which is the ability to play multiple characters off against each other, and the mental state health bar which has you caring for your characters' well-being.

There's also a couple of firsts for gaming maturity by my reckoning: first non-camp gay character? first non-puerile (though slightly gratuitous) nudity?

I could go on about all of the above way more than would be seemly, but for now let's just finish by saying that Fahrenheit is a super fun game that you should have no hesitation in trying. My curiosity is piqued for Quantic Dream's upcoming Heavy Rain now, even if the teaser did sport the uncanniest valley I've ever seen.

p.s. I totally didn't realise it at the time, but it looks like I may have subconsciously stolen my blog's colour scheme from the old-style xbox boxes. Oops?

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Deploying Web Frameworks

There was a lot of chitter-chatter this last week about the new web frameworks and the situation with regard to their performance and ease of deployment in shared hosting environments:

• A Dreamhost employee bemoans the lack of support for shared hosting in Rails.
• David Heinemeier Hansson responds with his standard "scratch your own itch" riposte.
• Alex Payne chips in with the view that shared hosts are toy environments anyway.
• James Bennett points out that this is indicative of a broader issue which also affects Django and the like.
• GNU VInce adds some particulars about Django's deployment situation. He also hints at the problem of game-changing technologies making it difficult for n00bs to climb aboard.

I've been waiting for a while for the hype to die down so we could have a sensible conversation about all of this. It seems to me that the vast majority of the Rails naysaying has been hinged on a misguided comparison between it and PHP, and complaints about it's performance. There's clearly an issue there, but the issue doesn't seem to me to be with Rails in particular. The "it's hard" and "it's slow" complaints both seem to be missing the fact that Rails, Django et al are solving a much larger problem than PHP.

The new web-development technologies are insta-frameworks, they come with all your professionalism and all your infrastructure in place from the outset. And the necessary baggage of memory overhead and complexity come along for the ride. The old familiars that we've been used to; PHP, Perl and the like come from the direction of shell-scripting-land where the most common case is the most basic. There are 100 hello worlds for every 1 webapp with all mod-cons. In contrast, the new web frameworks have the giants of Java-land in their sights. They say: we expect you to use url-rewriting, ORM, granular caching, TDD, asset servers etc. They'll make it as easy as humanly possible to do so, but as part of the bargain they'll expect you to step up and fulfill your side of the contract as a modern web professional.

And therein lies the crux of the problem I think. The new web frameworks shine a harsh critical light on the yawning gap between how we all started out and where we all should be. It seems like the majority of "I tried it, I didn't like it" stories are from people who burnt their tongue on the first taste and realised their skills weren't up to it. And the cries of "deployment! performance!" are from those who are aghast that they should understand anything about the servers and environments their apps are running in.

When a framework solves all the problems you were familiar with, it's humbling to find that the problems you're left with are those you know the least about.

Yes, there's more to it than that and there is the odd complaint that's valid and well considered. There's certainly room for improvement, but these technologies are very, very young. If we can just support new ideas, give them a little breathing room, help investigate the new bottlenecks and understand that no technology can be all things to all men, then we might just see some progress.

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