Way Out Wars is a fun game for casual gamers, and provides the much sought after challenge for veterans of the ‘space chicken music discovery typing shoot ‘em up’ genre.  The game was built in pure HTML5, with some heavily modified impactjs as the core engine.  Lots of long hours spent tuning nanoseconds off particle render times.

My best is 75 tracks back to back for around 44 million.   Go play it at http://www.wayoutwars.com … preferably before reading the rest of this post to give insight.

Some things achieved in HTML5 that were pretty cool:

• Real time usable particle effects engine we had to dumb down because it was just looking too busy (yet awesome).  At one stage we had smoke, jets, trails, explosions, musical notes, and swarms.  Unfortunately you couldn’t see the game.
• Infinite playlist – Depending on your browser, since Chrome mysteriously dies
• Music discovery that’s fun – Songs you hate, songs you like and songs you don’t know, that you can review and purchase.

Some pleasant discoveries:

• HTML5 rocks.  It’s definitely a platform for the future, however it’s not necessarily the be all and end all.  But the game has no browser dependent coding.  It does however have code that checks for issues that may occur in some browsers, there isn’t any code that goes ‘if IE do this, if FF do that’. 
  NOTE: This does happen for audio however since Firefox hates MP3.
• Impactjs rocks!  In the end we probably didn’t need it as much as we thought, but it did so much heavy lifting in the beginning it allowed us to experiment and play around with ideas.  We simply wouldn’t have had a product as far advanced without it.
• HTML5 benchmarks don’t coincide with real world scenarios.  Simply ignore them until real world tests turn up.  Every benchmark I do IE9 doesn’t come out on top, but all of our experience with the game has been IE9 is way out on front, with no IE9 specific tuning in sight.  Someone who is familiar with graphics pipelines who understands the concepts behind draw calls, fill rate etc.  needs to give HTML5 the same treatment.
• As such, IE9 rocked, and we were pleasantly surprised.
• Opera is amazing, although I’ll probably still never use it.  It came in 2nd performance and stability wise.
• Firefox and Safari were stable, however their performance lacked.
• Chrome was fast, however it’s stability lacked.
• Hardware acceleration rocks.  Browsers without it will die slowly as user experience becomes encumbered by poor performance.
• The iPad did load it once, but it got too big for it.  This however is promising for HTML5 moving forward when the processing power of these devices steps up. 

Some discoveries that were as fun as being jettisoned into the sun by space chickens:

• Having lots of <audio> elements on a page can cause issues. Clean them up, delete them, and do everything you can to remove any trace of them. This was common for all browsers, with the impact having different results in each.  But cleaning up the audio elements makes all the browsers behave.  And whilst Chrome will still go silent after about 100 songs, without doing this it will crash after 57. 
• Oh, and be careful deleting i.e. ‘delete obj;’ audio objects in Chrome, you can crash the browser and all open Chrome windows will stop working.  I think Chrome tries to do garbage collection on audio elements no longer in use.  A quick check ‘if(obj != null) delete obj;’ tends to be stable.
• Any browser that doesn’t support MP3 needs to fix that.  It is a bug, not a feature. If every music site in the world has to re-encode their audio to OGG, they will ignore browsers that require it, or simply be ignorant to it. Firefox needs to wake up.  Media companies are going to be staring at mobile devices, and Firefox is the last thing their IE and Safari based offices will test in.
• Firefox 3 is antique, Firefox 4 feels like a classic, that still goes well, but won’t keep up for long. A shame.  This feels like a Firefox bash, but it has just been the reality we’ve been dealing with.
• Chromes instability.  Chrome is fast, yet buggy. We discovered a critical error that would happen on the 57th track crashing Chrome. After writing a universal piece of code that wouldn’t crash Chrome, we found that at some point, chrome refuses to play audio, and kills audio across all chrome tabs and windows, with no error message.  This came as a surprise to me, and over the coarse of 3 weeks Chrome has been superseded by IE9 now as my default. 
• Safari underperformed.  Of the big names it was the worst performer. 

Street Fighter IV arrived on my coffee table last month.  I can’t stop playing it.  There are too many reasons why.  Being addicted to Street Fighter II when it came out, I had been waiting a long time for the game to evolve significantly.  Everything post Street Fighter II until now has felt like an experiment in what to do next, and with Street Fighter IV being released, it has finally stepped up.

3D is a big aspect graphically in the game, but fighting is still 2D.  Ultra moves/combos when in action allow for some camera play, as it zips around giving a truly dramatic feel.  In game music is excellent, and the sound FX are top notch.  I would however pay for someone to mute the announcer, and the boy band that plays during the title screen.

Where SF4 really shines is in online multiplayer.  Create a lobby, wait a minute, bam, you’re online kicking but with your leet skillz.  The best online feature is being able to play arcade mode, and still having a lobby available online for people to join, meaning that during quiet times online you can dive straight into the game practise pulling off your 94 move combo.

View Full Album

The new characters are excellent, with 25 characters available (16 available initially, and 9 unlockable characters), and each character feeling just right.  The stories in arcade mode are fun to watch, and the challenge modes provide some extreme combo challenges.  Titles and Icons are a great way to earn some street cred, whilst giving the game more legs.

And then when you think you’re starting to get the new game, you discover focus moves.  Focus moves are the first step in the master part of ‘easy to pick up, hard to master’.  But when you start learning how to use them, watch your online ranking halve overnight.  Moves that were hard to deal with will become trivial, and block turtles now have more to worry about than fireballs and throws.

A game that may not appeal to those who aren’t Street Fighter fans, it’s a must buy for those that were or still are, and it will have you playing online for many months, if not years.

And yes, playing it on a big HD plasma between the two Street Fighter Rubixels is awesome.

Big thumbs up.  5/5.

This enormity has changed my behaviour.  What I have found in Fallout 3 is that I play it for just a few minutes, and walk away at any point.  The game is just so big, that persisting is pointless, and whilst the game has milestones, progression feels analog.  Living with your consequences makes the game very interesting.  For example, my uber hacking-lockpicking-sneaking-melee strategy isn’t going so good.  Why?  Let me point out there are few buildings, let alone doors, and even less computers, and in the vast expanse of the wasteland visibility is 100 miles, and nearly everyone has at least one gun.

Fig 1. Guns > Sneaky

But I’m sick of such large budget games not getting the characterisation solid.  Every second character in the game still feel like cardboard cutouts.  Some major characters are excellent, others feel like someone has wheeled them in.

The other aspect is radiation poisoning.  Radioactive poisoning in Fallout 3 is cool.   From rivers of toxic waste, to inactive bombs, and old war sites.  You start to feel like the entire world is a post apocolyptic Chernobyl.  Every time you eat a piece food, you get radiation poisoning.  Get too much and you start to get sick.  This in turn can be reduced by taking radiation reduction formula.  That is pretty simple.  Regardless, I dub this the ‘did we forget to balance this’ game mechanic.  It constantly feels like a ball and chain slowing you down through the game progression.  I like the fact swimming in radioactive water can make me sick, it is immersive, but I am at a loss as to how eating a kebab somehow makes me more radioactive than swimming across an ocean of radioactive sludge.

But enough of Fallout 3.  It’s good, either buy it if you can’t wait, or borrow it when your mate has completed the billion hours of gameplay or died of radiation sickness.

Second up on the agenda today is Cooking in the Dangerzone .  You can watch it on TV (in Australia) Wednesday November 5th on SBS .  Stefan Gates sets out on his way to Chenobyl, and against his producer’s advice, he eats the local food, with some interesting results.   A short clip from the show below…

A really interesting show, and well worth the watch. And with an 80 year old women eating radioactive food every day of her life, you start to realise how unbalanced that game mechanic really was.

The cardinal sin for any game is the movie, and Street Fighter was no exception.  But when you make a bad movie of a game (and then consequently the game of the movie of the game), what do you do? Apparently you wait 15 years, and hope everyone has forgotten, and make another bad movie.  The Chun-Li movie trailer below is sure to set the scene for what is going to be a must see for 2009.

… and for those who forgot the original, the trailer does not do the movie justice.  It was far worse.

Thank you Mr. Ewer for showing me.

Star Wars – Force Unleashed: Kid, flash forward, adult, bad, slash slash, bad, push push, bad, zap zap, confused, zap zap, good, slash zap pew push slash, boom, vader, confused, emperor, bang bang, the end.

This game was a real treat. Bad camera, quite buggy, emphasis on the controller-in-tv infusing camera, but a real treat.  The game mechanics at a high level are quite awesome.  Your character levels up slowly, unlocking abilities as you go, which is nothing new.  What makes the difficulty slider on the game.. slide… is that every time you die, you don’t lose experience Jedi uber power points. Hence the game gets easier and easier as you bash your head against the wall. This works well for impossibly large groups of gun toting angry wookies, just after you opted for the focus fire and are in dire need of AOE. Boss fights start off impossible at times, and then you figure out the strategy, and away you go. The Darth fight was really well done, and the emperor fight, well, who cares!  I just pulled a Star Destroyer out of the sky!

The downside, aside from the plot, which in essence is needed for the game, SWFU is short. Whilst dodging the store salesperson who was determined to sell me the Wii version with the WiiSaber, I picked up the game amazed they had a ‘pre-owned’ version so close to launch.  “That makes no sense!”… but after playing the game, it made perfect sense. Finished in an AFL Grand Final weekend whilst doing everything else I needed to get done. Other downsides, no multiplayer that I can find, and faux replayability.

Buy it if you are a die hard fan, but otherwise, rent it.