fwaggle.org

After seeing a response to it on Twitter, I read the piece “Who cheers for war” on Kotaku, and honestly I think it’s a little misguided. I’m not attributing that same malice to the author, but it certainly smacks of the same misguided assholes like Hillary who think that games like MW2 are “training simulators for killers” – FPSes have been putting up with this shit since Columbine.

Those people gasping in silent awe at the trailer for MW2, saying things like “fucking awesome”? Show them real footage of war with similar events, telling them that it’s real footage and not a game nor a movie, and you’ll find very few people who you get the same reaction out of.

The fact is that it’s a game – no matter how realistically it might portray you sticking a semtex to someone’s head, the average well-adjusted human being is going to comprehend that it’s still a game. It is not the same thing as sticking semtex to someone’s head in real life, and almost everyone knows that. The few who don’t? They need help anyway, and yanking the violent video games away from them isn’t going to stop them (we had serial killers and mass murderers long before video games came along).

Tying the popularity of violent video games into the deplorable manner in which journalism presented the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is just silly. The reason for the presentation (with the missile stats screens reminiscent of a football game) was to maintain public support for what was essentially a corporate money-grab on contracts work for the rebuilding and security process. They’re about as related as Tiger Woods’ extra-marital activities are to the latest EA Sports golf title.

Find the most top-ranked (in terms of XP and hours) MW2 player online, assuming he has no prior military experience, and drop him into basic training and then into Iraq, and I’d wager he’d fare about the same as every other kid who left his summer of dog days and wound up in basic. The idea that he (or she, to be fair) would be better prepared for real warfare in any measurable sense after playing a video game is just silly.

It’s just a game. When I “kill” someone in an FPS, they come back. Maybe it’s in 10-15 seconds (Call of Duty, most common modes), maybe it’s next round (SOCOM, most common modes)… but they come back. Try selling a massively multi-player warfare game where if a person was killed, they couldn’t ever play again… see how well that sells. Heck, try even selling one where a person’s character grows with XP (a la MAG), but when they’re killed once they have to re-roll, I bet that doesn’t even sell so great.

For all the talk about “realism”, the fact is that that’s basically the last thing gamers want. Arguably the most realistic multi-player mode on MW2 – Hardcore Search and Destroy – isn’t, from my experience, on of the most popular modes. The game enforces hardcore rules, which removes the HUD and makes bullet damage more accurate to real life scenarios (two in the chest with most weapons is enough to stop almost anyone), and when you die it makes you sit out until the next round. I happen to like it, but sometimes I have a rough time finding a game of it. Most gamers don’t want that realism to get in the way of the fun.

Awesome graphics, realistic physics, that feeling that you just might be the hero that turns the tide of war – that’s the realism gamers want. When it gets a little too real, it ruins it… I would also hazard a guess that a fair portion of the MW2 audience isn’t even pro-war, so I think drawing any kind of social commentary out of the fact that MW2 is one of the most popular is taking some pretty grand leaps.

Every so often I hit up the MapleStory fan-forums just to see all the bullshit I’m missing out on now that I’m rehabilitated. Apparently lately there’s been a bug in a few of the donation NPCs that have basically allowed packet editors to generate garbage items in unlimited amounts in seconds, which you can then sell to an NPC to effectively generate massive amounts of in-game currency out of thin air.

The perpetrator of this action decided to go through and buy up everything in several of the in-game markets, effectively crushing the economy but also drawing attention to his/her actions. What’s interesting is the publisher’s response, which appears to indicate they have some kind of an item/transaction log now, and are working to reverse all the broken transactions. It sucks for people caught up in it, because many of them were very adversely effected, but at least they obviously have a way of telling what is going on with your items other than just the current state of your inventory.

Ages ago when I lost some $300 (that’s real currency, USD) worth of imaginary shit, there wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it. It’d be nice if they had a way to return that to me, but they basically won’t ever do it, particularly since I liquidated all my stuff and quit. It was a bitch tracking down someone willing to buy gold online from a complete stranger, but once I did the transaction went smoothly. Imaginary property and imaginary currency paid for my kid’s stroller, so it’s all good.

School’s out, the bell’s silent, the school furniture‘s all put up, the halls are empty and there’s a noticeable absence of books in your kids’ lives. What are you to do with them?

Put ‘em to work grinding up video games, that’s what. I made err.. let Nick play Guitar Hero 5 today on career mode. Because GH5 is the first guitar hero game that doesn’t require you to go through and play the entire game before you get to play all the songs, we never really bothered with career mode, but I wanted some of the trophies.

Now, about 6 hours later of us taking turns, I’ve gotten to the end of the career mode and plucked most of the low hanging fruit from GH5′s trophy bush.

Oh and mini-review, GH5 isn’t actually terrible. Rock Band 2 has the upper hand with regards importing music (and DLC too, I think) but you can end up with a good 60-70 extra songs if you own World Tour and Smash Hits. You may hear that the soundtrack isn’t much to sneeze at, but honestly it’s not bad – it’s just not obvious, like GH3‘s soundtrack was.

Plus the guitar that comes with it is quite possibly the best rhythm game peripheral available right now.

The PS3 is finally starting to get some great under-$10 software now (and it’s no longer just relegated to the odd deal and 800 of last-years’ sports titles), so I thought I’d update my wish-list:

• Guitar Hero III (~$4.50) – I already have this, but can’t play it because I only have Rock Band peripherals. It quite possibly has the best sound track of any rhythm game so far, and you can pick it up for under a tenner after shipping.
• MotorStorm (~$5) – I’m hesitant to buy this, because for some reason I have trouble playing games without trophies these days.
• Rock Band (~$5) – I plan on picking this up after I get the second one, for the express purpose of importing all the songs into 2.
• Unreal Tournament III ($5) – I’m hesitant to buy this because I never thought Unreal itself was such a great shooter. There’s been a ton of awesome games built off the various Unreal engines, but I never got into UT at all. It does have trophies though.
• Guitar Hero: World Tour (~$5.50) – I just picked this up for a song, it totalled about $6 after shipping. Not recommended if you don’t have any peripherals for either GH or Rock Band, but if you have GH5, you can import about 30 songs for the cost of the game + $3.50 (assuming the person you buy it from never used the code). Also, no trophies.
• SOCOM: Confrontation (~$5.75) – SOCOM4 is coming out soon, so expect the player base on this game to tank even further. If you’re a die-hard SOCOM fan (or were), I really do recommend this game despite the fact it’s mostly a ghost town. You can still get a game easy, and they’ve fixed all the flaws – it’s almost vintage SOCOM.
• Mirror’s Edge (~$7.50) – The first of our list of games that’ll burn you over ten bucks once you count shipping, Mirrors Edge is beautiful, fun (once you get the hang of the controls), a little frustrating, and way too goddamn short to have paid $60 for. It’s worth the $11 or so though.
• Terminator: Salvation (~$9) – A competent 3rd person shooter that accurately captures the feeling of desperation of the story, and will be the easiest platinum trophy you’ll ever get.
• Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (~$9.98) – My brother in law paid $40 for this not too long ago, and it honestly wasn’t worth it – I’d have been mad if it was my $40. If you really like Star Wars, then it’s worth it. If you don’t mind a reasonable 3rd-person platformer/beat-em-up or want the trophies, it’s probably worth the ten bucks.
• Soul Calibur IV (~$9.98) – I used to love Soul Calibur on the DreamCast, I’ve never played 4 but I’m guessing it’s more of the same, and there’s a cameo by a star wars character too if that’s enough to float your boat.
• Skate 2 (~$9.98) – I almost linked to the original Skate, which is in sub-$5 territory now, but I decided against it… Skate 2 is better in most every way, is trophy enabled, and has more multiplayers on it (for now, until Skate3 wrecks that). If you can get over the weird… I mean “innovative” control system, it’s stupid fun.
• Burnout: Paradise (~$10.50) – an “Honorable Mention” on this list because I haven’t seen it creep under ten bucks yet, but this game gave me plenty of hours of fun and it’s a great multi-player driving experience.

I have an idea for a Playstation Minis game that I would actually spend money on. Boulder Dash! Someone needs to acquire the rights for it, and turn it into a mini – I seriously lost weeks of my life to this game back when all I had to game on was a Commodore 64.

It’s a 2D game where you basically dig around through a maze, collecting diamonds. You can dig through dirt, but there’s also brick walls and other nastiness you can’t dig through. There’s boulders of course, which can fall and kill you, and you can push them around to solve the maze as well.

Timing is everything, snatching loose diamonds as they fall between two boulders isn’t uncommon, and some of the levels it’s only possible to collect all the diamonds if you flawlessly execute a movement through the maze at the perfect time, snatching them all up before they’re buried under boulders forever.

The game mechanics are simple, the level designs are fiendish, and I really think it needs to be ported to the PS3.

After years of halfheartedly resisting the craze, yesterday we happened upon an entire set of Rock band at a yard sale for ten bucks. I was on the fence about buying it, but Sabriena seemed genuinely excited. She never complains about my lack of buying unique gifts for her, and while this wasn’t strictly speaking for her, when she seemed excited about it I knew I had to buy it.

We’re probably going to buy Guitar Hero World Tour on Half.com soon, because the software only is dirt cheap, all our instruments will work with it, and all the DLC we bought for GH5 is actually WT DLC so we can play it with that if something ever happens with Trevor’s GH5 copy.

I’m also going to look at buying the Rockband software for PS3, because the software that was with this set is for PS2, and we lack a working PS2 right now.

… at least, that’s what I have to keep telling people who just don’t grok encryption, and think it’s some magic pixie-dust that you just sprinkle on anything and it’s imbued with magical protection.

I was trying to explain this to some MMORPG folks, who think that just because the communication between the client and server are “encrypted” that they can’t be tampered with. They’re 100% wrong.

Enter fwagglePxE – a proof-of-concept piece of software hacked together over about three days of rage-filled coding, after the company that ran the game in question left a nasty server bug in their software, which essentially robbed me of about $300 worth of imaginary shit. That’s $300 real dollars by the way.

Anyway, the game in question? Basically it uses a heinous modified version of AES-128 as a symmetric key cipher. The server sends IVs for the the encryption at the start of the session, and then the client and server just stay in sync with the algorithm and everything’s good. Indeed if you don’t stay in sync, then the encryption works just fine.

The problem is, if you catch the beginning of the session all the way through until the part you want, the encryption fails horribly. fwagglePxE worked by sitting on my router, which intercepted the connection and handed it to my software. My software then connected out to the game server, and then maintained two encryption states – one for the client and one for the server. If I so desired, I could even use different IVs for the client!

I borrowed most of the crypto stuff from a private server group, I just modified it a tiny bit to make it work the way I needed it (as a client as well as a server). From there it was a simple matter of writing an ncurses interface that included hexadecimal printouts of the plaintext packets, ANSI color printing to make things a little easier to understand, and a simple command parser that included the ability for me to enter hexadecimal strings, representing the bytes I wanted to inject.

I eventually wound up writing parts into the editor that actually understood parts of the game logic, for example in the screenshot above you can see a couple of chat packets (spamming AAAAAAAA for example, and getting ready to spam six “@” characters)… I could do things like train it to ignore repeated messages from a single user that surpasses a certain threshold.

From the outside, it was probably the coolest thing I’d ever written. The feeling of elation I got when I got it to work was probably on-par with the feeling one gets when after hours of cracking, they finally get a “#” prompt on someone else’s machine. Technically it was the most advanced packet editor I knew of at the time, though a couple of people have written things that easily surpass my piece of shit. The code itself is terrible, a mish-mash of C++ written by someone who still thinks in C, and that’s why I never released it.

Anyway back to the rant at hand… imagine encryption as being a giant, impenetrable lead pipe. If the encryption is sound, at any point during the run of the pipe, there is absolutely no way you can see or tamper with things that are flowing inside the pipe.

However, if you can get to the ends of the pipe, there’s no reason you can’t take a peek there. That’s the thing most people don’t understand about encryption, is if you can control either end of the pipe then absolutely nothing can be guaranteed. “All bets are off” as many people like to say.

Which makes this entire rant more or less just a thinly veiled excuse to show off the only remaining evidence of my neato-elito packet editor.

Team Fortress 2 is utterly brilliant. While every so often Valve will release an update that breaks the game balance (every new class update seems to about do that), overall they do a pretty good job of maintaining a balanced game while keeping things fresh and interesting.

When we play (a few times a week mainly), we’re usually playing the control-point maps, which basically entail standing on control points to capture them with the goal of capturing all points and winning the round. I also happen to enjoy the “payload” maps, where you push a cart along a defined track, with a bomb strapped to it, trying to blow up the other team’s base.

When we first started playing, we did nothing but play 2-fort, which is a “capture the flag” map. The flag, in the case of TF2, is a briefcase filled with enemy intelligence. 2-fort was a familiar map from the original Team Fortress game and we literally never left it… for days on end. So needless to say we’re a little burnt out on CTF and 2-fort.

Anyway, on to the subject matter… I usually play medic, and occasionally Pyro or Engineer. I would prefer to get a drop that’s a medic hat, but I would also like the fireman’s hat for Pyro or any of the engineer hats with a preference to the welding helmet.

Two of my friends both play soldier almost exclusively. One of them got a really great medic hat, and eventually grew tired of waiting for the trade function to be implemented so he crafted it into scrap metal.

The other night while playing, I got the brand new soldier’s drill-sergeant hat… it’d only been available for a few hours at that time. We still have no trade option.

Words can’t describe how terrible I am at playing soldier… ironic really, considering that back when I was good at Quake or QuakeWorld (and by good, I like to think I’d have been competitive good back then, if only competitive tournaments existed where I lived) my preferred weapon was the rocket launcher. I remember one time on dm3 running down the stairs from the rocket launcher room and nailing a triple airshot. Granted the range wasn’t huge, but it was still impressive.

It was nothing for me to go into a public game and amass several hundred kills quite quickly… despite it being free-for-all deathmatch, people would actually gang up on me with their strategy being preventing me from getting to where the rocket launcher was.

God I wish I could get that good at a game again.

So a friend of mine (who will remain nameless at the moment) let me in on his beta account so I could check out Starcraft 2, and… well.. it’s a little underwhelming. Of course I think it’s still kind of early in the beta, so perhaps there’s a lot more good stuff coming.

But the 3D effects are almost a waste! You could be forgiven for thinking it’s just Brood War at a higher resolution, the zoom in/out is really limited in scope and unless I was doing it wrong it looks like there’s no ability to rotate. It looks almost like it’s the WC3 engine with SC sprites.

Contrast this to something like Spring/Total Annihilation – which is well over a decade old and has had this kind of stuff all along, and it’s easy to see where I’m coming from. Play some of the cooler spring mods, then switch to SC2 and SC2 is about as exciting as your Uncle Joe’s jeans.

The game itself is pretty though, if you lower your expectations, and it’s classic Starcraft really. If I got a new PC (mine doesn’t quite have enough CPU and freezes periodically during games) I’d probably buy it, but it’s not entirely what I was expecting.