January 2012

Following last year's tradition, I'll take a moment to review the topics covered in 2011.

• Extensive deconstruction of the mechanics of the obscure Genesis game Battlemaster.
• Examination of the critical hit system in D&D: Shadow Over Mystara.
• Updates to MacroLua, adding as-yet useless analog support.
  • Needs maintenance for the new emu versions.
• Short piece examining in-game vs. streaming video framerates and how to reconcile them.
• Indexed all the hitbox work into a wiki page.
  • It needs an update.
• Short guide to wrangling the NeoGeo BIOS in emulators.
• Developed codes to remove the backgrounds from the hitboxed games, to aid in box- and sprite-ripping. Also improved the mutecodes for CPS1.
  • You can more easily use all of them with the updated mamecheat pack now. Thanks to Pugsy for accepting them.
• Mostly comprehensive breakdown of turbo-speed frameskip and its consequences in Capcom games.
• Completion of the Mayflash arcade stick modding project.
  • Ill-advised in retrospect—I haven't gotten to enjoy them and probably won't.
• Updated an informational HUD script for the SNES version of SimCity.
• Assorted SF2 discoveries: throwboxes, obscure mechanics, bonus-stage combos, and damage formulas.
• Updated an old frame data collector script.
  • But it's turning out to be more trouble than it's worth when a hitbox script can do much of the same more intuitively, or you can use MacroLua to do it manually.
• Made some minor contributions to some combovids that were shown at evo2k11 and Season’s Beatings: Velocity.
• Updated an old OSD script for fighting games, including 3S.
• Screenshot maps of the Genesis game Sub-Terrania.
  • They were never granted publication.
• Developed various hitbox scripts from scratch, and helped move CPS3 forward.
• Added throwboxes, with a MAME-rr debugger workaround.
  • I am trying to convert over to new FBA-rr Lua functions implemented by mz.

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Obviously, November and December were disappointments. This is always a bleak time of year, very difficult for me, and it can have a paralyzing effect on productivity.

Whenever I complete an objective, I don't feel accomplishment. I feel the facepunch of disappointment that there are no avenues available to use my energy and ability to solve real-world problems. My work is constrained to this virtual world. It's good to help players see what could never be seen before, but no amount of research will ever help people in real trouble—or me for that matter.

To anyone who isn't into video games, which is all of what is considered polite society, what I do is no different from some neckbeard grinding away in WoW. I will never be able to tout what I do to advance myself. The point of choosing games as a field of research was that it's basically free, with no need to elbow aside sycophants or grovel to bureaucrats. But ultimately it's the elbowing and groveling, not actual achievements, that get noticed and rewarded.

Add to that the difficulty of just getting published on gamefaqs, tasvideos, or vgmaps. Even with no cashmoney at stake, there are still petty, arbitrary barriers preventing earnest work from seeing the light of day. I never mentioned the time last March I tried to set up a Vimeo account, in order to stream my current and possibly future TASes at full framerate: All the videos were taken down and the account revoked, on the grounds that video games are dumb.

These factors, on top of the inherent difficulty of coaxing sense out of inexorable, uncaring computer programs, make VG research a deeply demoralizing and unrewarding pursuit. I urge anyone considering this hobby to dismiss the idea immediately. There is nothing on this road but degrading, self-perpetuating stereotypes, a practically fruitless search for IRL people who aren't nerds (thanks to the previous point), and perhaps some wage-slave prospects in the development industry. The kindness, thanks and encouragement that I get from readers can't change any of this.

In any case, I'll continue the ongoing work for the time being. Also, there are some emails I need to reply to.

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December's banner was from Alone in the Dark 2, the second of the trilogy by the French developer Infogrames (later known as Atari Europe) from 1992 to 1994 for various PC platforms. They run well in DosBox.

The games star Edward Carnby, a private detective in 1920's America, going athwart Cthulhu mythos and satanism, Haitian Voodoo, and Native American animism respectively, although in the last case it's portrayed as a source of good-guy power. Although the first falls squarely into the then-nascent survival horror genre, the sequels progressively emphasize more puzzles, less fisticuffs. The 2001 and 2008 reboots and Uwe Boll film were developmentally unrelated.

Alone in the Dark was one of the first games to place 3D models on static, hand-drawn backgrounds. This served the dual purpose of allowing pixel-artistry to coexist with polygons while also cranking up the tension by depriving the player of control over camera angles. The technique would be seen again prominently in Capcom's Resident Evil (1996), with the autoaim so badly needed with this kind of view added in Resident Evil: Director's Cut.

Typical of Western PC games of this era, the background music is played sporadically rather than constantly, interspersed with ambient noise and sometimes nothing. Besides a respectable selection of original tracks, Alone 2 features a few pirate-relevant melodies from the public domain, including Overture of The Flying Dutchman and Danny Boy.

With no in-game or cutscene dialogue, most of the exposition is in the form of books and papers found and read from the player's inventory. Redbook audio of in-character voice actors narrate the text, thus expounding on the backstory and providing clues to the puzzles. The player sometimes has the choice of dealing with opponents either the correct way or the violent way. Still, some of the puzzles are kind of obtuse, like the part where you can wear a Santa suit to avoid alarming a sentry.

Comments

[Jedpossum]

hey man haven't heard from ya in awhile. I'm in the process of porting stage palettes from vsav2 to vsav1.

[Jedpossum]

SFEX2+ Locations PS1 Version

Player 1 Selected Character
1E7FD2

Player 2 Selected Character
1E984E

Character
00 Kairi(Player)
01 Hokuto
02 Nanase
03 Doctrine Dark
04 Pullum Purna
05 Sharon
06 Skullomania
07 Shadow Geist(Player)
08 Cracker Jack
09 Guile
0A Dhalsim
0B Garuda(Player)
0C Ryu
0D Ken
0E Chun-Li
0F Zangief
10 Blanka
11 Vega
12 Kairi(Boss)
13 Shadow Geist(Boss)
14 Garuda (Boss)
15 Bison(Player)
16 Sagat(Player)
17 Darun Mister
18 Vulcano Russo
19 Area
1A Bison(Boss)
1B Bison II
1C Sagat(Boss)
1D Cycloid
1E Hayate

[dammit]

Thanks. I hope to use this some day.

You know you can glean a lot of game engine info by looking over the xml files in the mamecheat packs. (But it's obviously not much help for console versions.)

[Jedpossum]

Yeah, I know it helped me a little bit on the character order. I have the listing for EX+Alpha also just ask when you need/want it.