We tried out the co-op multiplayer in Portal 2 last night…

There’s a nice little interface that allows you to invite your Steam friends to a co-op game.  Much nicer than simply being paired up with a random stranger, or having to wade through a server finder, or something like that.  I’m sure there is some kind of matchmaking system out there…  I can’t imagine they’re going to force people to only play with folks on their friends list.  But I didn’t use it, so I can’t say much about it.

Seems like the person who sends out the invite winds up as Atlas/Blue.  Don’t think I like that too much.  I would have preferred to be able to pick which robot I was when I joined the game.  But I guess there aren’t that many different ones to choose from…  And it doesn’t really matter anyway.

So, we started out in some kind of a training course.  Learned the basic mechanics of playing co-op.

You’ve got some quick commands that let you tag things in the world…  You can indicate where you’d like your partner to stand, or where you’d like them to place a portal, or which button to hit, or what they should look at.  You can even do a countdown to throw a switch together.  Makes communication fairly simple…  Even though we were sitting in the same room, and just talking to each-other, being able to tag stuff in-game was still handy.  Made it easy to place portals and things like that.

You’ve also got some gestures you can do.  They’re completely useless, but fun.  And you seem to be awarded more gestures as you progress through the co-op.  Which really makes me wonder why you’d bother to buy them in the cash store…  But maybe I wasn’t paying attention, and those are different gestures.

Playing with another person is interesting.  You’ve got two pairs of portals.  Orange gets and orange and a red portal…  Blue gets a blue and a purple portal.  The portals don’t cross-link – you can’t go in an orange portal and out a purple one.  But you can chain them together to accomplish some interesting things.  You can use a couple portals to jump off something high and get flung out of an angled surface…  And then a couple more portals to catch you on the other side and throw you down a hallway.

The teamwork is very weird.  After playing through both Portal games all by myself, it seems almost counter-intuitive to have another person along.  Puzzles seem downright insoluble until you remember that you’ve got another person along who can push buttons and open portals and things like that.

And even then, the puzzles are mindbending.  You think it’s hard to think with just two portals?  Try thinking with four.

So…  We went through the tutorial bit.  Then we went to the hub.  It’s a main chamber that links to all the real courses.  And there’s a jumbo screen that shows some interesting information…  How many steps you’ve taken, how many science points you’ve earned.

We did two courses, though I don’t remember what they were called.

GLaDOS is back, and she’s heckling the robots.  Although she seems kind of disappointed that she can’t actually harass you like she could a real human.  I can easily see her growing to miss Chell, and hunting her down for a repeat appearance in Portal 3.

Each course consisted of a number of puzzles set in the now-familiar Aperture Science Enrichment Center.  Moving panels, gleaming which surfaces…  The kind of stuff you expect from a Portal game.

But, after completing a number of those puzzles, we were then sent off the beaten track…  We were sent to a level that looked more like it belonged to the old Aperture Labs – the disused section down below the Enrichment Center.  We were first sent to find a disc, and later some blueprints.  When I found the disc and inserted it into the computer it said something about unit locations…  And when Terri found the blueprints we noticed a sign that said we should not upload the blueprints, right before we did upload them…  I’m wondering if GLaDOS is actually using us for some more nefarious purposes.

There seems to be some kind of basic plot or storyline going on here, with the robots becoming increasingly human (or at least more emotive) as the game progresses.  And GLaDOS seems to have something up her sleeve (again).  I wonder if there’ll be some kind of co-op boss battle when this is all said and done?  Or if we’ll ever find out what exactly we’re doing outside of the Enrichment Center?

Will be very interesting to see…

Terri finished Portal 2 yesterday, which means I can finally post my thoughts without having to worry about spoilers.

All things considered, I think it was a good game.  Good level design, nice graphics, roughly 10 hours of gameplay, interesting storyline…  I definitely think I got my money’s worth.  The folks who are complaining that it’s too short, and they don’t like the cash DLC store, and the ARG was crap…  Well, they can go to hell.

The cash DLC store has absolutely no impact on the actual gameplay.  It’s all cosmetic stuff.

The ARG has absolutely no impact on the game either.  It was just some marketing stuff to sell more games.  Nothing more than a fun ad campaign.

And the people complaining that the game is too short are doing something wrong.  The first Portal game was so short it couldn’t even be sold by itself – it was bundled in the Orange Box.  The first Portal game was only an hour or two long.  I got about 10 hours out of Portal 2, and I was not taking my time.  If you’re finishing Portal 2 in less than 5 hours you’ve got to be absolutely sprinting through it and not paying any attention to what’s going on around you.

So, ultimately, I think it’s a solid game.  Definitely a worthy sequel to Portal.  Definitely a good purchase.  I’d recommend the game to just about anyone.

It’s very interesting to see how they managed to turn a building into a character.  How the test chambers themselves manage to tell a story.

You’ve got the abandoned, decaying test chambers in the beginning.  They look like something right out of a Fallout game.

Then GLaDOS wakes up and starts putting things back together.  The panels act as extensions of her will…  Like her arms and hands…  And she seems more embarrassed at the state of the labs, than angry at you for killing her.  She’s quickly tidying things up and trying to make the place look presentable.

Then Wheatley takes over and you wind up in the old labs…  The old labs, plus Cave Johnson’s pre-recorded messages, tell you the story of Aperture Science’s rise and fall.  From a prestigious institute partnering with astronauts and war heroes and Olympians to test their products…  To bribing homeless folks to participate in tests…  To mandating all employees participate in testing…

And, along the way, I noticed something odd about the testing…  It doesn’t seem like you were ever really testing a product. In the first Portal game it’s kind of assumed that you’re testing the ASHPD to make sure it works correctly.  But as you make your way through the old Aperture Labs in Portal 2 you discover that they had a portal device (though it certainly wasn’t handheld) back in the 60′s.  So they knew the device worked.

In fact, the tests are more like the mazes you’d send a lab rat through to see if they can get the cheese.

Which makes me wonder what exactly was being tested in Aperture Science through all these years…

You eventually make it back up to the new labs, which Wheatley is doing a great job of destroying.  And it’s interesting to really see behind the curtain, to see how the new labs are put together.  It’s all just panels put together, hanging over a yawning chasm – not actual rooms and buildings.  And it’s kind of disturbing when Wheatley crams different test chambers together, or moves the chamber you’re in, or drops something through a chamber.  Makes the whole facility feel very fragile.

And then you’ve got the fight with Wheatley…  And this is where I got a little annoyed.  The Wheatley fight seemed far too easy, and didn’t make a whole lot of sense.  And then the ending didn’t make much sense either.

Fighting Wheatley seemed far easier than fighting GLaDOS in the first game.  It was very easy to him him with those bombs.  Very easy to grab the cores and plug them in.  Seems like I had a much harder time with GLaDOS in the first game.  Seems like there were time limits, or distractions, or more hazards, or something.  I died several times trying to shut down GLaDOS…  I defeated Wheatley on my very first try.

And then he’s trapped the button, which seems far too clever for him.  We’ve spent basically the entire game hearing about how dumb he is.  About how he’s been built from the ground up to make bad decisions.  And he went and trapped the button.  Which, while it didn’t work quite right, is actually a pretty good idea.

Then you get blown up, and you’re injured, and all you can do is shoot a portal at the moon…

Now, I understand why that works.  I know that conversion gel and all those white surfaces that you’ve been shooting your portals at are made from ground-up moon rocks.  I get it.  But…  How is the moon so readily available when you’re supposed to be deep underground?  I mean…  After you defeat Wheatley and get on the elevator you wind up passing through several more floors before you get to the surface.  So, why is the moon visible right there in the main room?

Anyway…  You get sucked out to the moon, and hang on to Wheatley for a while, and then GLaDOS is back in charge and fixes everything and hauls you in.  But I’m a little fuzzy on how exactly that happened.  The first time you did a core transfer it took a few moments…  There were whirs and sparks and GLaDOS was un-plugged and Wheatley was plugged in…  And none of that seems to happen this time around.

Granted, you’re busy trying not to die on the moon, so I might have missed something…  But it doesn’t seem like there’s enough time for the transfer.  Especially when you consider that she’s also had time to fix the meltdown.

Anyway…  You get hauled back in and black out for a while.  You wake up a little bit later and GLaDOS has had time to repair that main chamber.  You’re briefly introduced to the cooperative robots.  GLaDOS deletes Caroline, and then lets you go free…

Which seems a little atypical to me.  Seems like GLaDOS held on to a grudge for an awfully long time just to let go of it at the last minute…  Doesn’t seem very characteristic of her…

You hop in the elevator, go up a floor or two…  And there’s some turrets waiting to shoot you.  I was actually pretty happy to see them.  Thought GLaDOS was up to her old tricks again.  Thought she was going to try to kill me again, or capture me, or something…  And she doesn’t.

Then you’ve got the floor full of singing turrets, which just seemed random to me.  No idea why they were in there.  I recognized the giant, leopard-print king turret in the back…  But I’m not sure what any of that had to do with the game itself.  I don’t really recall anything with singing turrets at any previous point in either of the games.

It kind of feels like they were just stretching out the ending.  Trying to make it more interesting, or epic, or weird.  Like there wasn’t really much point to the singing turrets.

That whole ending-sequence – from the beginning of the boss battle with Wheatley to seeing Chell walk off into the sunset – felt sort of weird to me.  Thrown-together, less-polished, random, stretched-out…  Like they weren’t quite sure how to wrap things up, so they just threw in a boss fight and some kind of ending movie.

Of course that isn’t really the end of the game…  I’ve got the co-op to play now.  Which obviously takes place after the single player storyline.  And I’m anxious to see how that works out…  We put in a couple hours last night, and I’ve got some stuff to say about it, but this isn’t really the place.  I’m getting long-winded enough as it is.

The gels and funnels and faith plates and lightbridges were all neat…  Felt appropriate in the setting…  Made interesting tools…  Changed the game mechanics nicely…

But I felt like too much time was spent on them.  Like the game became too focused on the new mechanics, and the portals got left behind.  To a certain degree, I guess this makes sense…  You need to introduce the new stuff, let people play around with it, get familiar with the new mechanics.  We had a full game to get used to the portals.  So I guess I’d expect to see some focus on the new gels and things, at least for a while.

But it seems like the portals almost became secondary.

You were using portals in solving the puzzles…  But you were basically just using those portals to position the gels, or lightbridge, or funnel, or whatever.  Portals weren’t really the solution to a lot of the puzzles – the gels were, or the funnels, or whatever.  The portals were just tools to make it happen.

Especially if you compare the final boss battles…

GLaDOS is defeated entirely through use of portals.  A couple portals to redirect the rocket into her and knock off a core…  A couple portals to hit the button and drop the core into the incinerator.

The Wheatley fight requires you to cover the room in conversion gel before you can use any portals at all.  Then you use portals (on the conversion gel) to throw the bombs back at him…  But you have to use the repulsion gel to bounce up and grab cores…  The fight would be just plain impossible without the use of the gels.

And that didn’t feel right…  I mean, the game is called Portal, not Coversion Gel.

Still, despite my whining, it really is a solid game.  Lots of fun.  Thoroughly enjoyed myself.  And now I’m playing co-op and going back through looking for achievements.  So it’ll be a little while before I put it away and move on to something else.

Just started playing Dragon Age II, and I’m thinking the title is more than a little bit misleading.

Dragon Age: Origins did pretty much exactly what it said on the tin.  It was the first game of the series, of course…  But it also explained the origins of the “Dragon Age”…

That “II” in Dragon Age II implies that it is a sequel…  But it isn’t, really.  Yes, it is the second game they’ve released, but it’s only tangentially related to the first game.

DA2 starts out during the Fifth Blight, shortly after the battle at Ostagar…  You’re a refugee of sorts, fleeing from the Darkspawn.  You make your way out of Ferelden entirely and wind up in Kirkwall.  Your character has nothing to do with the Grey Wardens, or the Darkspawn, or the blight, or any of the events of the first game.  In fact, if you do import your save file from the first game, all it does is change some of the background.  It doesn’t do anything to your own character or party.

So it seems a little misleading to call this game Dragon Age II, when it has so little to do with the first game.

I’m also a little annoyed at the lack of choices in character creation.

I thoroughly enjoyed playing my dwarven rogue through DA:O, and was looking forward to playing her through a second game…  Or at least another dwarven rogue…  But, instead, I’m stuck playing a human of some sort.

This also means that the dramatically different opening chapters, which I thought were absolutely amazing, are all gone.

Also – since when do Qunari have horns?  Wasn’t Sten, in DA:O a Qunari?  He didn’t have horns…

I’ve always found that part of what makes a game good is the community surrounding it.  Even if it’s a single player game that doesn’t allow any kind of modding or expansion or anything…  It’s still fun to hop on a forum and chat with other people who are experiencing the same things you are.

And if the game actually supports some kind of modding, a good community can turn a merely decent game into pure gold.  One of the best things about NeverWinter Nights was the community content.  All sorts of new quests and monsters and items and whatnot.  Truly fantastic stuff.

But these days the idea of the “community” seems to be changing…  Forums seem to be filled with fewer fans, and with more whiners.  Rather than folks gathering around and talking about how they managed to defeat some big demon with only a single surviving party member, they’re gathering around to talk about how horrible everything is.

They complain about the lack of updates…  And then something gets updated, and they complain about the update…  They complain that some platform isn’t supported…  They complain that the graphics aren’t good enough, or the game is too short, or the missions are too hard, or some character isn’t cool enough or whatever…  And it really seems like absolutely nobody is having any fun.

Which isn’t true, of course.  People are having fun.  And if you dig through all the whining and complaining you’ll find a few gems here and there…  Somebody talking about a cool encounter, or some new mod, or whatever.  And if you really dig, you can usually find a thriving mod community somewhere underneath all the crap, even if the game doesn’t officially support modding.

It’s really easy to see the difference if you take a look at the Dwarf Fortress forums, and then compare them to the Minecraft forums.

The folks over at the DF forums eagerly await each update.  When it comes out, and inevitably breaks things, they helpfully post bug reports and instructions on how to re-create it.  Mods and texturepacks are updated as quickly as possible.  Folks ooh and ahh over the new goodies.  And then everyone gets back to playing the game and having a good time.

Over on the Minecraft forums, you’ve got a nonstop litany of complaints.  All sorts of folks clamoring for this bug to be fixed or that feature to be added.  Everyone whining about how slowly Mojang updates things.  And then the update comes out, and mods break, and everyone screams…  But you don’t see too many people helpfully reporting buts and documenting how to re-create them.  And the volume of complaints hardly changes as those bugs get fixed and a new version gets rolled out.

I mention those two games specifically, just because they’re such polar opposites – they make good examples.  But you can see similar things on STALKER forums or Dragon Age II forums or Dead Space 2 forums or wherever you feel like looking.  Folks these days just seem to like to complain.

I can’t imagine being a developer and actually reading any of these forums.  I feel like I’d just give up and stop writing code.

Slashdot | Americans Favor Moratorium On New Nuclear Reactors

While a drop in public support for nuclear power would be expected after an incident like the Fukushima reactor crisis, the nuclear disaster in Japan has triggered a much stronger response among Americans. When Japan — the nation that President Obama held up as an example of safe nuclear power being used on a large-scale basis — is unable to effectively control its considerable downside, Americans are understandably leery about the same technology being used even more extensively in this nation. And safety concerns about the existing nuclear plants also deserve serious attention.

I was just waiting for a story like this to pop up…  I knew it’d happen before too long.  Americans are irrationally afraid of nuclear power at the best of times, and it doesn’t take much to throw them into a panic.  Now we’re talking about a straight-up moratorium…

Remember that image I posted a few days ago, showing various doses of radiation?  Notice how a coal burning power plant actually gives of more radiation than a nuclear power plant?  And then you’ve got all the extra pollution that a coal power plant spews out, that a nuclear power plant doesn’t…  But somehow coal is perceived as safer than nuclear.

Those reactors at Fukushima were commissioned in 1971.  They’re 40 years old.  They were hit with a huge earthquake and then a tsunami.  Granted, they’re leaking radiation and I wouldn’t want to live too close to there right now…  But they still haven’t failed catastrophically, and nobody has actually died as a direct result of those reactors yet.

Do you really think a pile of 40-year-old coal or oil power plants would’ve weathered this any better?  You don’t think there’d be any raging fires, or spilled fuel, or toxic clouds of pollution?

And we’re talking about power plants that have been up and running for 40 years.  New power plants are designed better, with more safety features.  You could expect them to be even safer than what’s in Fukushima right now.

But we’re talking about a moratorium…  Because radiation is scary…

Right now, today, the US gets about 20% of its power from nuclear reactors.  All of those reactors are old and overworked.  Many of them are operating beyond their original specifications…  Many of them were scheduled to be decommissioned, but they were kept on-line because there was no replacement available.  What are we going to do when we finally have to start shutting them down?  Where are we going to come up with 20% of our power if we aren’t going to use those nuclear power plants?

If we were at all serious about “energy independence” we’d be rolling out pebble bed reactors here in the US.  We could drop micro nuclear reactors into various rural locations rather than having to pipe power across the country, and our infrastructure would actually be more resilient to disasters and attacks.  And any spent fuel that was still radioactive enough to worry about could be fed into a breeder reactor and used to make useful fuel…  Until the only waste left wasn’t radioactive enough to worry about.

Instead, we keep giving lip service to “green energy” and things like that…  While powering our entire economy off of various fossil fuels – most of which are purchased from countries that really don’t like us much.  And all of which belch tons (literally) of pollution into the atmosphere, and will eventually run out.

But those very real threats are too distant and abstract…  Not like all that scary radiation heading for the west coast.

The Pre-Christian Origins of Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday is a relatively late addition to the Christian liturgical calendar, first surfacing in the tenth century according to accounts written in the eleventh.  (To put things in perspective, Ash Wednesday is older than the Crusades or the Norman Conquest, younger than Charlemagne and Islam.) At least, its Christian practice dates to only a little more than a millennium ago.  The Norse practice of Ash Wednesday goes back several hundred years earlier, when it was done to celebrate the deeds of Sigurd, the hero of the Volsung Saga, a character perhaps better known as Siegfried from the Ring of the Nibelung.

Sometimes I wonder if there’s anything original in Christianity…

CNN | Hepatitis A Warning Issued After Christmas Communion on Long Island

Hundreds of people might have been exposed to hepatitis A while receiving communion on Christmas Day, Long Island officials said Monday.

Only hundreds?

I was under the impression that Roman Catholics believed in transubstantiation.  Which would mean that they were literally drinking the blood of Jesus.

If that’s the case, then Jesus himself was exposed to Hepatitis A…  And anybody else who takes communion, and drinks his blood, is also therefor exposed to Hepatitis A.

So we’d be talking about literally every single Roman Catholic who took communion after that one Christmas mass.