Skyrim
I used to wait like a month between writing two blog posts. Then I took an arrow in the knee.
Or maybe, it had more to do with a temporary lack of inspiration and a general not feeling like writing something. I don’t know. Either way, I’m going like crazy – this is the second post that is actually being queued up when I’m writing it (this is when I set it not to publish immediately but some time in the future, in this case, a week in between posts so that I don’t burn through material too quickly – up until now I’ve never done this, actually).
Anyway, I used to play Skyrim, like you. Then I took an arrow to the knee.
Or maybe, it had more to do with the fact that I got fed up with it.
Don’t get me wrong. I played Morrowind for waaaay too many hours, and loved it. I played Oblivion waaaaaaay too much, and I loved it. And in many ways, I love Skyrim, but in some ways…
To start off positively, Bethesda is still a major champion in terms of open-world RPGs. I just love to be able to say, screw you fate of the world, I’m going home, or somewhere else, and do whatever it is I like to do next. A big world with lots of places to visit, plenty of NPCs to talk to, lots of side quests (and often pretty good ones too, not the overly generic ‘go drop off/pick up this item’ or ‘talk to this guy’ and you’re done), and so on is something that I appreciated back in Skyrim’s predecessors, and I can certainly appreciate it a lot in Skyrim.
Compared to Oblivion, the main quest (or, as far as I got with it) is much better. Oblivion’s main quest sits in memory as being very repetitive: you have to close a bunch of Oblivion gates, and each of them is pretty much the same. It’s uninteresting, to say the least. There’s more to the game than that of course, but it kinda sticks. Skyrim does a way better job at it.
But as great a game as Skyrim can be, it lacks. It’s pretty good, but it just misses on the final details, the finishing touches, the last little bits that would have made it really great.
The engine, for instance. Things like their Radiant AI and such are awesome (in short, NPCs wander around, they go to their homes and sleep and go somewhere else to work, stuff like that – they have lives, rather than just standing at their shop or wandering the same bit of street for all eternity), but in other details, Bethesda could have paid a little bit more attention. For instance, when you swim underwater, the screen gets a sort of color overlay to show that hey, this is underwater, it’s more difficult to see here. Which is great, except that it suddenly appears when the camera is submerged under water a certain amount (and up until that point you can see underwater as clear as you can see above it). This flaw dates back to at least Morrowind, and back then it was perfectly acceptable for a game, but in 2011, I think they should be able to do better.
The game’s controls are horrible. You get used to it, and once you do it’s managable, the controls are very annoying and un-intuitive. They are console-controls on a PC, but mapped to the wrong keys. Not great.
Then, bugs. Especially with a game that is as big and complicated as Skyrim is, there’s bound to be a couple of glitches now and then. If I ran accross such a glitch when doing some obscure side-quest I wouldn’t mind that much and just carry on. The thing is, I had several major problems with the main quest. One NPC’s dialogue was missing (apparantly a very common problem, you have to use some tool and unpack a datafile to fix this – the NPC is quite important and without doing this, he says nothing, you have no idea to what you’re responding, and all dialogue involving him gets terribly bugged). Several times I had to resort to using the console to get past a point that was impossible to complete by playing normally. In a sidequest, I can understand, but having several of these issues in the main quest…
It actually got to the point where I just got tired with having to switch back and forth to a web-browser (which reminds me: it doesn’t handle alt-tab’ing well, which is pretty much unacceptable for a 2011 release, if you ask me) in an attempt to find a workaround for some game-breaking issue in the main quest. As a result I just shut the game down and decided I was done with it.
Bethesda, did you test your game? At all?
(I used to be a playtester like you. Then I took an arrow to the knee. Yeah.)
Another thing – which has evolved into a bit of an internet meme. All of the guards in Skyrim have a small combined pool of lines that they’ll say if the player gets nearby. It turns out that a lot of the guards in Skyrim used to be an adventurer, until their fate brought an arrow on to a collission course with their knee. It’s fine the first time you hear this line. After hearing it from five different guards…
Well. Yeah.
My overall thoughts on Skyrim: it’s good. In many ways, its pretty damn good. But with a little bit more effort, it would have been so much better.
And now, back to playing Tetris.
Game of Lies
I’ve been bored a bit, recently. And what website do people go to when they’re bored?
Exactly. Facebook.
Yeah, I know Facebook is a piece of privacy-unfriendly crap (in friendly terms), and personally, I don’t really use it anyway. But it has games, and those games tend to be kind of addictive, and marginally entertaining.
One game I’ve been playing a lot (and getting quite good at) is Tetris Battle. For those educated folks who aren’t familiar with it: it’s tetris, except that you play it against other people. In the basic variant, you play against a single other person, and your goal is to knock the opponent out (ie, making his playing field fill up so that he can’t place any new blocks). To do this, you clear lines yourself, which puts ‘garbage’ lines at the bottom of the opponent’s playing field. If you receive those garbage lines yourself, there’s one block in that line, of you place another block yourself that touches that particular block, the garbage line clears away. There’s also a four-player variant, where the goal is to clear 40 lines as fast as you can.
Anyway. You’re supposed to be playing against other players. If you have friends on Facebook who play it, you can invite them so you can play against eachother. But other than that, the game is a load of bullcrap. You’re not playing against actual people at all.
Well, you probably see the names, profile pictures and actual statistics of people who are really on Facebook and really play it, but you’re not actually playing against them at the moment. The game obviously doesn’t say this, but there are a bunch of things that give it away.
- First of all, timezones. I’ve played hundreds of games, and lots of them against Asian people. Which is fine, except that most of the time when I’m playing, it’s something like 4 AM over in China.
- Pausing. I can pause the game anytime, and either I have to resume it within 30 seconds, or it continues automatically. I occasionally pause the game to write a message on some instant messaging program or to do some other quick task. In my hundreds of games, it has never happened that the opposing player paused the game.
- Starting the game. Typically, for a multiplayer game, all players have to indicate that they are ready before the game actually starts. However, every time when I click the ‘START’ button, the game starts instantly. This would require that the other player has already clicked ‘START” himself as well (which is unlikely, since I’ve never had to wait for ANY of my 500+ games), or that his START button is grayed out and the game just starts when I click START (which would mean that on occassion I would have to wait for the other player to start the game, which also, never happened).
- In addition to #3, the opposite player appears to have infinite patience. It doesn’t matter if I start the game directly, or wait half an hour. He’ll just sit there and wait until I’ve started.
- Depending on their rank, players invariably use the exact same tactics and perform about equally well. Every single rank 20 or higher opponent that I’ve faced so far uses the same technique where you first build up a lot of blocks in about three quarters of the width of the playing field, and then quickly clear all those lines, so that the opponent receives a lot of garbage lines very quickly. They do this without any variation, and they are always players at rank 20 or above. Players below rank 20 never use it.
- Similarly, in the four player games, it very frequently happens that one or two of the opponents play so incredibly slow and incredibly poorly that it’s a miracle that they ever got to the rank they appear to be on at all. If they play all their games like that, they should hardly have been able to get past rank 5 or 10.
- Regardless of how poor your internet connection is at the moment, or how much stuff you’re downloading at the time, the game never has any lag while you’re playing it (or at least, not unless you play against friends).
In short, the game is a fraud. Unless you actually invite friends to play against you, you just see some random player’s name and picture and the rest is all artificial.
Normal
So, yeah!
It’s been a little while since I last wrote here. If you don’t like it, well, I blame my irregular update schedule (or well, lack of an update schedule, really). As I’ve stated in my little About Me section: it can be a day between posts, a few months, or anywhere in between. Who knows. (I certainly don’t.)
So, yeah!
Normality.
What the hell is it anyway? When are you normal? When are you not?
For starters, being like me would probably put you in the latter category. But that is entirely beside the point.
Wikipedia (oh, how we love thee!) states that ‘in behavior, normal refers to a lack of significant deviation from the average’. This is pretty much how I would define it myself. However, I find this definition a bit unclear.
In order to determine what normal is, we’d need to first find a way to quantify every aspect of a person. Some of these are easy: a person’s age is already counted in years. We can easily count how many times a person has had sex (well, it kind of hangs on how drunk the person usually is when they have sex, but that’s a separate aspect), or how many different bikes they’ve owned as a kid. When it comes to personality traits, it gets a bit more difficult, but let’s assume that we’re able to measure stuff like how well you respond to humor, at what level you’re interested in science, how socially developed you are, and a gazillion other things, on a simple scale of 1 to 10 each. Of course, there are other factors as well, such as what gender you have and how pretty you look.
Now we have the tricky bit. We’d need to know the values for each of these scales, for every living person on the planet. This may be a liiiiiiitle bit problematic, but in order to accurately figure out what ‘average’ is exactly, it’s pretty important.
So, now we know how an exactly average person would be. We know exactly what he/she would look like. Actually, the matter of whether this average person would be male or female is a bit tricky, but since there are slighly more females than males in the world, our person would have need to have a single breast and both a vagina and a penis, but the vagina would have to be slightly larger than the penis (but still of average size of course – you can see why this is a bit difficult). He/she would probably live somewhere in the molten section of the planet’s core (though leaning more towards China than any other area on the planet), have about a quarter of an internet connection, and own something like three quarters of a mobile phone. We would also know exactly how his/her personality is, how well he/she likes certain subjects, and everything else there is to know.
(Obviously, if we take the world’s internet user’s as an accurate representation of the human population, chances are than our average person is a dumb annoying idiot.)
So, yeah.
Now we have a perfectly average person. Problem is, there is probably not going to be any living human in the world who is a perfect match to this average, and besides, we’re talking about normality, which we’ve established to be having a lack of significant deviation.
‘Significant deviation’ is again a pretty vague term. When exactly is the deviation significant?
I’d say, the deviation is significant when it’s more than the average deviation.
Oh boy, we’re gonna need to pull out the numbers again, and compare everyone’s scores against the perfect average, and write down the difference between everyone’s scores and the average scores, and then find the average of that. In other words, we’re calculating the average deviation that people have from the perfectly average person.
Now we have a pretty good baseline: we know what ‘normal’ is exactly, and we know how much you can deviate from ‘normal’ without reaching an over-average (ie, significant) deviation from being normal.
Since our average person is just about halfway between male and female, and pretty much everyone else is either male or female, we all have a large deviation from the average, so you’re probably safe on that count. In other areas… Well, I can’t tell that for you. Not until zeh maths are done.
So, there we go. Normality.
Have a nice day now!