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Let's Play... Screw the Banks!

Maybe you've been vacationing on Pitcairn Island since the beginning of April and you haven't gotten news yet, but a month or so ago millions of documents were leaked to the press from the Mossack Fonseca law firm in Panama. These papers reveal how hundreds, or potentially thousands of wealthy individuals have been using offshore companies, banks and law firms to avoid paying taxes in their home countries.

Leaving aside questions of whether or not this kind of shit should be legal at all, the probability is that some of it is not. I personally think tax avoidance (the legal optimization of your finances to minimize your tax payable) kind of sucks to begin with - for the simple fact that it disproportionately benefits people who already have lots of money and can hire lawyers and accountants to help them pay less tax. Tax evasion (the illegal concealment of income to avoid paying tax) is an actual crime - the crime that got Al Capone sent to prison. Money laundering is the transformation of money made through criminal enterprise (such as dealing in arms, slavery, drugs, conflict minerals, etc) into 'not-illegal' money. Law firms like Mossack Fonseca, and the offshore banks they work with, and the shell companies they create, explicitly, openly and legally help wealthy people avoid taxation. Unfortunately the same systems and structures they use to do so can (and are) used for tax evasion and money laundering. I think that sucks.

Anyway, the Prime Minister of Iceland was already forced to resign because of his involvement in this mess, but his is only the highest profile head to roll so far. Acting and former Heads of State and their immediate family members from over 40 countries appear to be named in the leaked documents along with many other wealthy individuals and public figures. Apparently on Monday, May 9th, a giant list will be published of all the people connected to the couple of hundred thousand offshore companies that have been created through Mossack Fonseca for the purposes of doing international business, avoiding taxes, evading taxes, cleaning the bloodstains off their cash, or hiding the fact that they simply stole it outright from the budgets of very countries they are supposed to be running.

While all of this has been going down, I got to reminiscing with Mathieu Berube, who I work with here at Ubi in Toronto. Mathieu was a level designer who worked with me back on the first Splinter Cell, and was the LD who built the Panama Bank level of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, which I personally think is the best Splinter Cell level ever made. In the story of the game, MCAS Banco de Panama was the financial middle-man able to conceal the people involved in the arms-for-information transaction between Displace International, Zherkezhi, and Peruvian revolutionary-wannabe Hugo Lacerda. Mathieu and I joked about how, when you work on these kinds of near-future political thriller kinds of games, you often end up predicting the future: the Bank level in Chaos Theory was ultimately about the power of offshore banks to make these kinds of illegal transactions anonymous.

After talking about it, we realized that it would be cool to see if we could get the game up and running and play through the level again while talking about how we designed and built it. It would also give us a chance to rant incoherently about our frustrations with all the shitheels who are screwing the rest of us by not paying their fair share. So that's what we did - we dug up a 360 (SCCT was on the original XBox, but was made backwards compatible) and did a run through and talked about some of the decisions we made.

So we made a Let's Play...



PS Making this video is not in any way intended to imply we are working on any particular game. What we're working on is unannounced. The fact that we're talking about Chaos Theory is a coincidence related to current events and nothing more.

41 Days Down

So, after a doctor's appointment this morning, I have been cleared for a part-time return to work, starting tomorrow.

For the time being, I'll only be working four hour stretches, three days a week. That will leave me all the time I need for my physiotherapy, osteopathy, and acupuncture, along with swimming, cycling and whatever else I can squeeze in there that might speed my recovery - without overdoing it and injuring myself.

For those not already in-the-know, it's a herniated disk between L5 and S1, and the base of my lower back. The herniation was compressing the nerve down my left leg in classic fashion and limiting movement considerably. It was also extremely painful except when lying down, and much to my own disappointment, the prescription calls for stationary bed-rest... and they mean it for real (and they're right). I tried to resist it for the first couple weeks, but that proved itself pointless - so instead I basically got to sleep 12+ hours a day and play videogames the rest of the time. That actually turned out to be a big plus, because I missed so many of last years games, I thought I was never going to catch up. I got to play Fallout 3, Dead Space, EndWar, Bully, Left 4 Dead (with Tom and PY mostly),  Naruto, Chinatown Wars, and a lot of Drop7, and now my intimidating list of games-to-play is a lot shorter.

The other good news is that I was smart enough to take the 'opportunity' to change my eating habits so that I wouldn't gain 20 pounds while I was rendered immobile. Even without any exercise (aside from very light stretching in the last 3 weeks) I managed to lose almost 15 pounds simply by tracking my caloric intake versus my (non-existant) burn. For for any of you out there wishing you could lose 10 pounds - if I can do it with a hernitated disk, lying on the couch like a lard-ass all day every day for over a month - you can do it to. Even better - the positive messaging of today's post is not sponsored by Oprah or Wheaties or Weightwatchers or Tracey Anderson or anyone else other than good old fashion arithmetic. Calculate how much you need. Calculate how much you burn, add the two numbers, and count what you eat until you reach the sum and stop. So you know - it means that you have to either stop eating Doritos, Sour Cherry Blasters and One-Bite Brownies or you have a lot of fucking running to do - I chose the former option.

Alas, now the sick-leave that followed my vacation-within-a-vacation that came after my honeymoon that was embedded in my vacation that followed my world tour has come to an end.

Looking forward to getting back to work on that new game I can't talk about.

Goin' Down to the Crossroads

UPDATED -

Frank: ask and ye shall receive

So - even though I am way too busy back at work to be spending my time doing it, I didn't want to leave it unfinished. I just completed my first X360 user map for Far Cry 2.

It is called FC2dev Crossroads and it is now published and available for download for anyone who might be playing FC2 online. It is a large map, supporting 12-16 players and all game types - DM, TDM Capture the Diamond and Uprising. I was only able to playtest it with groups of a few friends at a time. But thanks goes out to Magnum PY, gregvw, XL Burrito, and Final1Option for finding some last minute bugs for me to fix before publishing.

On the whole, I found make an 'urban environment' very tiring. It take much, MUCH longer to populate buildings and structures with furniture and destructible obejcts etc, than it does to make huge fields of terrain that look beautiful. I think if Imake another map with will be a small one. Either that or it will be a much more terrain and landscape focused level with more vehicles. Crossroads is all close quarters street fighting with no vehicles.

Anyway, if you get a chance to play it online, feel free to comment and let me know what you think.

In Sid We Trust

"You say you want a Revolution. Well, you know, we all wanna change the world."

Change the world? As far as I'm concerned, for the first time since Alpha Centauri, Civilization:Revolution [2] has allowed me to do it. More than that, it has, itself, changed the world.

I never played Civ or Civ 2. The first time I had a PC that could really do the job SM:AC was the flavor of the day and I got my first taste of Meierian awesomeness as the Spartans. Locked into an abusive relationship with the Hive, I was unable to do anything except what they demanded for over a thousand years. Until I got the bomb and began stockpiling. I was eventually forced to win that game by carpet-nuking the entire planet, wreacking untold devastation on every enemy city - and even some of my own - spartan concrete and iron cities shattered under the overpressures of proximal planet buster detonations. If the only honorable death is in service of Sparta... I unleashed a lot of fucking honor that day. Only a handful of domed Spartan cities remained - awash in a radioactive sea.

Civ 3... I must have played it ten times and never finished a game. Somewhere around the Renaissance - either at the tail end of the Middle Ages or the dawn of the Industrial Era at best, I would become swamped. With hundreds of units in play and often well over fifty cities, I would not be able to maintain any forward momentum. The sheer weight of Civ 3's background systems would drag the pace of the game down to a standstill. Maintenance, Inefficiency, Unit Support and proper basing, Pollution... all of these factors would fall like a hammer on my growth and mire the game down into turns that would sometimes take me over an hour to execute. My PC would then need to churn away on the turns of the other factions - sometimes for 30 or 40 minutes or more.

I never even considered playing another Civ game after that... until they announced it was coming to console. It was then that I realized there was no way they could even release a game whose turns would take two hours to complete. They would be forced to deliver a game that could be played from beginning to end in that time. The only question was whether or not the game would be fun with all the complexity stripped out? How much simpler and lighter could you make Civ without it becoming too easily solvable or too degenerate.

I've now bought the game twice. Once on DS and once on X360, and I have played the game upwards of 20 times. In almost every case I have finished the game (after having played it 5 to 8 times, I would tend to abandon a fresh game if starting terrain seemed particularly lop-sided either for or against).

So what's so great about Civilization: Revolution?

You will finish every game you start
And you will do it in between 2-6 hours, depending on how you play, which path to victory you choose, and how singular your commitment to your strategy. Playing on DS will be faster as you can skip the animated depiction of combat... cutting quite a lot of dead time from the game.

It is 'Civ:Lite'... but in a good way
A lot of the heavy underlying systems of previous Civ titles have just been removed. Not consolidated. Not automated. They are just gone. Unit Support? Talk about hidden numbers that have very far reaching effects... this concept is gone entirely. Efficiency? Again - a hidden 'tax' on what a city could produce that diminished the further the city stood from the capitol - it's gone... simply removed from the game. Does this unbalance the game? Now you can support 10,000 units if you want. Now growth is unchecked by efficiency. Isn't that a problem? Well, we could talk about it for hours, these sorts of questions are rooted in fundamental questions about game themselves. In the end, I am pretty certain that the answer we will arrive at is 'no' ... boy I could write 100 pages on that...

It's the same game on X360 and DS (and presumably other platforms)
This is what is world changing for me. In a game development climate where we seem to be trying to release a version of a game on every imaginable platform and we seem to have to do a lot of work and make a lot of compromises and a lot of changes for each platform (often staffing an entirely new team to deliver the game on each platform), Civ:Rev proves that you can release the exact same game on a handheld as you can on a Next-Gen 'living-room' console. Why - oh why - have our DS games tended to be shoddy reskins of other DS games painted up to look like whatever AAA console title we're launching. Why - oh why - do the big console versions of handheld titles seem almost like a joke of an 'up port'? For me - this is the most important statement made by the game. It is the thing that proves Sid Meier still fucking ownz all our asses. It is the thing that calls into question all of the assumptions we've made about game development for this entire generation - even making Will Wright's statements about player creativity and proceduralism, and the 'second processor' and sharing, ranking, rating - seem a bit off the mark. How do we deal with the current generation's 'divide' between the big machines from Sony and Microsoft and the generation-winning machines from nintendo? Sid just showed us.

The Air War
My friend Greg loves kicking people's asses with air-power. From the TIE Defender to SMAC's shard helicopters, nothing can stop him gloating over his air power as he pounds the fuck out of everything with endless waves of aircraft that seem to materialize around him when his singular Goring-esque commitment to air-war pays off at the start of the end-game. Civ:Rev's air-war is different. Civ: Rev wins the air-war thus; there is no better game to play while on an airplane than Civ:Rev on a DS. Period. Trust me. I flew to Africa, Tokyo, Sydney, Shanghai, and then Africa again with Civ:Rev DS. If you don't have a DS and you have a flight coming up, it is worth buying one right now, just so you can play Civ:Rev on it while you fly.

What's wrong with Civilization: Revolution?

It is degenerate
The game is degenerate. Keep in mind, I still had to play the game ~10 times to lock down degenerate strategies, but lack of some of the above mentioned overly-complex balancing features leads to two major problems. The first is that aggressive growth strategies always win. I typically win the game with 20+ cities compared to my next leading opponent having 8 or so, and behind him a cluster of opponents with 4-6. The AI simply does not seem able to keep up with even moderately aggressive player growth strategies.

Another unfortunate degeneration is that the Aztecs simply seem unbeatable. The ability to have units always heal to full, plus the later bonuses that this Faction receives (Temples producing science, reduced cost roads, increased gold production) all stack up to make a faction that is just too powerful.

Geographical Determinism
As I mention above, I tend to restart a game within 50 or so turns if the starting terrain seems too lop-sided. If a kind of bias to a theory of geographical determinism is leveled against Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, then nowhere could this bias be more clearly expressed than in Civ:Rev (note - this is a failing of all the Civ games I ever played, not just this one). The reality is, there are myriad ways in which the starting geography of the game can determine the entire outcome of the game, and after you have played half-a-dozen times, you will probably want to abandon about one game in three after the first 45 minutes or so should the geographical advantages be too extreme.

No customization
A sadly missing feature is the ability to customize - even to a slight degree - the nature of the planet you will play on. The planet tends to always be a fairly similar Pangaea, causing games to often play out in similar ways. In Civ 3 and SMAC you could tell the world generator how much to age the planet, how wet or how dry to make it, how eroded, how old, etc. I miss this feature. For example, I would like to try a very naval focused game playing as the Spanish, English or the Japanese - but the probability of an archipelago-style world being generated by the game is low. Also, you cannot choose which factions you will play against. Having the ability to customize the planet generation parameters and the opponents allows you to play some interesting edges of the game... setting the world up as an archipelago and playing as the Spanish - but offsetting your naval advantages by filling the world with powerful military factions like the Mongols, Germans, and Aztecs forces you to play a game of aquatic commerce and culture, which is very different from the 'typical' game which is imposed by the  degenerate elements. I miss that.

Anyway, that's my review of Civilization:Revolution for the XBox360 and Nintendo DS. I highly recommend you try one or the other (or both).

Happiness is...

Learning that your last game has been selected to be made available for download as an XBox Live Original. Thanks Major. I'm super proud to be a part of such an illustrious line-up, and I can't wait to play it again. And I think much of the team - at least the ones I spoke to today about it - were all very happy to hear the news.

It's been a couple years now since I fired it up. If you ever decide to give Acheivement Points for XLO titles, and you need someone to design them - hey, I could make time for that.

The Olsen Saga - Part VIII - Olsen vs Mr Freeze

So I was getting a bit worried having not received my shipping container to send Olsen back to the repair center, but it arrived today. Three days. Totally acceptable considering that Montreal was nuked by like 30cm of snow Tuesday night and is still recovering. We're expecting another 30cm Saturday, and I assume the storm is engulfing most of the Central/Eastern region. It will probably delay the shipment to the repair center, and back... so I'll consider 3 days additional transit in the whole equation due to Act of RROD... I mean God.

Anyway - the set-up was EXACTLY the same as last time. In fact - the foam padding seems a little less firm and seems to be rubbed off on the edges. I wonder if they are recycling the packaging? Regardless - as of this writing Olsen is en-coffin-ated and ready for hearsing off to Purolator tommorrow AM.

The Olsen Saga - Part VII - RROD

I feel like Frank Herbert or something... after the first triology becomes two trilogies, and we think it's all finished, I have to suddenly write another trilogy.

I came home from work today at around 8:00pm and turned on my new improved Olsen so I could pipe some MP3s over my wireless to play through my 360 connected to my sweet home theatre. Alas... RRRRRRRRROD!. Sure enough, Red Ring of Death, and my heart is filled with sorrow.

So I open the relevant support page on XBox dotcom and confirm the issue.

• 3 flashing red lights - CHECK
• powersupply light is steady green - CHECK
• turn it off, wait for 10 seconds, try again - same result? CHECK

He's dead.

Well, this saga begins very much the same way the last saga did (ironically both of them started in the same time frame - right around GDC - I wonder if there's a correlation there?). I phoned 1-800-4MY-XBOX at 21:20, March 3, 2008.

I spoke with the automaton 'Max' who had me in a Support call queue by 21:22.

I was on hold for about seven minutes until Jarred answered at 21:27

I explained the problem, confirmed my contact info, gave him my serial number, and had him politely remind me that although my original coverage had expired, due to Microsoft's generous extension of the warranty, I was still covered under the new 3 year plan.

I explained the steps I had followed to troubleshoot already, and Jarred put me on hold for another 3 minutes until 21:30. Then he came back on and told me (surprise) that I had a hardware failure and would need to send the box in for repair.

A shipping container like this one should arrive from Purolator (probably tomorrow or Wednesday if what happened last time is any indication) and then I can pack up poor Olsen and ship him off.

I have my handy reference number and they say it will two to three weeks. Let's hope they fare better than last time.

The Olsen Saga - Epilogue

So four months after poor Olsen kicked the bucket, and six weeks since Mark and Syed got things moving and shipped me a replacement 360, Microsoft finally has to bite the bullet.

They're extending the warranty on the 360 to three full years, and given it's only been just over a year and a half since the 360 shipped, that means every single 360 in the world is covered again. Of course, the coverage is retroactive, so I should be getting $168.00 back from MS for the repair bill on poor old Olsen. That's like 200 beer or so, so lounging around playing games just got a lot more fun.

Of course, it's costing MS a billion frikkin' dollars, which ain't no joke. I wonder what the design and development budget for a new console is? I'm guessing - completely out of the blue - that it's probably in the neighborhood of that much. So maybe the X360 is going to be a ten-year console after all...

The Olsen Saga - Part VI - Done

Olsen arrived this morning just as I was about to leave for work. I didn't have a chance to post about it today, and it took me a few hours to get it up and running again.

No explanation, really, but they just sent me a completely new box. Maybe my old one was permanently toasted or maybe Syed couldn't get information fast enough and just went down to his local Futureshop and bought one and had it couriered to me. Who knows.

At any rate, because it needed to re-detect my PC, and because there have been upgrades to Windows Connect and to Windows Media Player (I play all my music by streaming it over my wireless network from my PC to my X360) I needed to get the latest version of Media Player and jump through a bunch of annoying hoops in order to get it all up and running again, but now it's up, and Cmdr Greedo is back online.

For you suckers who thought you were going to catch up on me, I went and quickly nabbed 15 Achievements playing Frogger... just to make sure I could log a few points to get back on the charts.

Anyone who just took advantage of my little lull to edge past me better watch their ass. I got SC:DA and Vegas still in the plastic, I'm about one third of the way into Gears, Project 8 is screaming my name, and I have Viva Pinata waiting to go. Spideman 3 comes out tomorrow, and Guitar Hero is only one shopping trip away.

Prediction: 1200 Achievement point gain for the month of May.

On the whole, while the delay and the complete info blackout was unacceptable, once the matter was raised the problem was solved within 48 hours.

Thanks to Jessie, Michelle, Dave, Mark, Syed and Max the bot who made what could have been an even more frustrating experience bearable by being polite, courteous, cheerful and always genuinely concerned. Maybe Microsoft learned something about the value of keeping their employees motivated and invested in their job from working with game developers.

I wonder how this whole mess would have turned out if I had not told them who I was once things turned bad. I hope that a simple expression of serious unhappiness at the situation if they mishandle it would get anyone the same treatment. I hope so. I sure as shit hope that someone who has my game sitting in the plastic on their shelf doesn't have to wait to play it.

In the end, I will say I am fairly satisfied with the process because the service I recieved from the people at the call center outweighed the frustration and hassle of the delay.

The Olsen Saga - Part V - Syed Says

As Mark, the Service Center Supervisor who I spoke to last night promised me, I received a call at 13:22 this afternoon from Syed.

I guess Syed is Winston Wolf of the Service Center. After reconfirming all the details of the issue, Syed told me he would get to the bottom of it and find out what was going on with poor Olsen. He gave me his direct line number and a new reference number and told me I would not have to deal with anyone but him until I had my X360 plugged in and working again.

He then told me that it was going to take him a few hours to figure out what had happened, and apologized that it would possibly take a week and a half to get the entire issue resolved. He then reassured me by saying that "the one thing I can promise you is that I am on top of it and it will not get any worse from here on."

Fuckin' A Syed, show 'em who's boss.

He told me he was off to find out everything he could and that he would get back to me in a couple hours and in no case later than end of day.

Once again, nothing but positive feedback for the attitude and professionalism of every single person I have dealt with in this entire process: Jessie, Michelle, Dave, Mark, and Syed (and Max, well, he's okay, but he's no Olsen).

I do some work.

At 16:40 I pop online to check my webmail and lo and behold I have an automated message from the Service Center. The body text reads:

Dear Customer,
We have received your Xbox at our service center. It is our priority to process your Xbox in a timely manner and to get it back to you as good as new.  We will contact you as soon as we are finished so you can get ready to get back into the game!

Thanks,
Xbox Customer Care

Note: This is not a monitored e-mail address.

There is some kind of code number in the Subject Line. Having no idea whether this is being sent to me because of some action Syed has taken, or because someone found my X360 sitting in a corner and logged it into the system or what, I decide to call Syed and give him the code number in the subject line in case that will help him expedite things. I get his voice mail and leave the code number for him.

I do some more work.

At 17:53 my phone rings. It's Syed. He tells me Olsen is fixed and that he just handed it off to Purlotor and I should have it in 2-5 days. I have a new Purolator Tracking Number.

Syed tells me that he will call me back once I have recieved it - meaning he has configured the Purlotaor site to email him notifications, so he's keeping up on his promise to make sure I am actually playing it before he is done. Sweet.

As of this post it has cleared the sorting center in Toronto.

2007/05/02 21:04 Left TORONTO SORT CTR/CTR TRIE, ON   
2007/05/02 17:46 Shipment In Transit   
2007/05/02 17:04 Received at Shipping from SHIPPER of TELEPLAN 101 COURTLAND AVE CONCORD ON

Syed is the man. I better get that dudes Gamertag, because I sure wanna have him on my fucking team next time I'm playing GRAW.

I'll (hopefully) be able to post the conclusion to the Olsen Saga as early as tomorrow, or Friday.