9/5/2008 - Lame Video Game Endings

When you complete a video game, especially a hard one, you expect to be rewarded with a decent ending. You want a kind of ending that makes you say to yourself that it was all worth it -- the bottomless pits, the cheap deaths, the game-overs and the continues. Sometimes countless hours of playing result in nothing more than frustration. If you are able to overcome those obstacles only to get some congratulatory text that has misprints, then it makes you feel like your time has been wasted. Not all great games have great endings, however. Super Mario Bros. had a pretty lame ending compared to today's standards, but you forgive it because the game itself is so great and you understand the limits of the programming back then. Now with full-motion video CGI cutscenes and loads of disc space, there is no excuse. I wouldn't go overboard like the Metal Gear Solid games, but something around 10 minutes would probably be enough. And it has to be epic!

It's sort of gamble to get a game and not know whether or not it has a good ending. No video game magazine would publish game endings, after all. So it's a great public service that this series of videos feature notoriously lame video game endings. The fact that some of these games are very bad only makes you more glad you've already seen their endings first, instead of torturing yourself by playing through the games only to be disappointed.

2/9/2008 - Assassin's Creed Guard Love

It's amazing to see how far artificial intelligence in video games have come. I've heard that in the original Pac-Man, there would be a pattern in the way the ghosts move and that you can play a perfect game by simply knowing the pattern. Obviously, if this was the case, then there was no sophisticated A.I. in that game, even if you thought that the ghosts were scheming against you.

Even in the side-scrolling days of gaming, there would always be a pattern to the enemies and that the way they could beat the human-controlled characters would be to have quicker attacks or programmed with inherent advantages like better weapons. When fighting games came around, this lack of true artificial intelligence meant that the computer-controlled characters would "cheat". I see this prominently in the Street Fighter II games where the computer would immediately respond to one of your attacks with the only attack that could counter it. This may be possible within the design of the game, but the split-second manner in which the counter-attack is pulled off is humanly impossible. The computer would also "cheat" by pulling off charged special moves without charging, something that definitely could not be done by a human.

Despite these advantages, the computer can be beat because eventually you will start to recognize the pattern and take your own advantage. These patterns are actually deliberately programmed into boss characters and it gives you a kind of satisfaction to recognize them and using it to beat the game.

A.I. in video games made its biggest leap when first-person shooters came around. In the more difficult single-player campaigns you'll see the enemy use cover effectively and try to surround you. Perhaps because FPS's take place in a 3-D environment, you are less able to discern any patterns that are programmed into the computer opponents. However, it is a necessity to make the enemy smarter in these games, otherwise the difference between playing against the computer and another human being would be far too great. For a real challenge, nothing will ever beat going online against the hardcore gamers.

Still, with the tremendous processing power of today's consoles it is getting to the point where computer-controlled enemies will be programmed with artificial intelligence that make them more natural and almost human. Take the next-gen video game Assassin's Creed, for example. Your character is in the middle of an entire city packed with computer-controlled characters that are doing "everyday" things like shopping at markets, conversing with one another, and even committing petty theft. They do so in such a naturalistic way that the experience that it all really does seem like real life. In fact, it's a little scary to see how some characters behave:



It just proves that bots have to get off too...

12/1/2007 - LHB | Cartoon/Videogame Show | 2004

So were the members of the Cal band who performed that brilliant halftime show plagiarists? I don't know, but here is the University of Texas Longhorn Band performing a very similar halftime show based not only on video games, but Saturday morning cartoons as well. This was performed three years before the Cal band did their show, though, and I can confidently say that Cal learned a thing or two from this performance and generally improved over the LHB. I think that the theme of this performance does serve to prove the point of why Saturday morning cartoons died. When video games exploded in popularity in the mid-90's, kids were no longer satisfied by the animated stories they were watching... instead they controlled their digital avatars to create their own adventures, breaking through the confines imposed by cartoon scriptwriters.