OddThinking

The last gaming console I ever bought was the Sony PlayStation. Maybe I am really missing out, but the PlayStation was so disappointing, I never felt the urge to move away from the PC-based video-games again.

Shallow

I tried a few dozen games, often hiring them for the weekend. Most of the games were shallow – oh, cute to look at, but hardly capable of keeping up their side of the conversation. They would have been great fun when I was 12-year’s old, but they couldn’t sustain my interest as an adult.

For example, it is a great mystery to me is how the developers ever persuaded the producers to fund a string of sequels for Need For Speed? The mind-numbing original was just-another-driving-simulator, and not worth the money I paid for it.

The game called V was recommended to me, so I tried it out. It was great at setting the scene with a horror-film vibe… it grew the suspense well, with incredible animated cut-scenes between every move. Except the pace didn’t speed up… it just dragged on. The cut-scenes were everywhere, and they didn’t go any faster the tenth time you saw them. Tell me: If “Go North” didn’t take more than a second on Zork running on a Commodore 64, why would an equivalent movement it have to take over 30 seconds on a Playstation?

When I came up against the final boss in V, I was given two options to proceed. I naturally chose the wrong one, and the game basically said “Too bad, you died. Start again.” Retracing my steps almost bored me to death – I shouldn’t have bothered.

Fatal Flaws

Many of the games I hired contained fatal flaws that should have been picked up during the game play testing.

Like the simple scrolling shooter game, I tried. When you lost your third life, it displayed a blank screen, simply with the words “Game Over”. I was screaming at the developers: “Ooooh, nice aesthetic. The starkness is very elegant! But don’t you think you may have forgotten something? Like telling me what my final score was?” How could they have missed something simple like that during testing?

Not Mech Warrior

I picked up a rental game one evening (I have forgotten the name) that looked like a Mech Warrior rip-off; a typical first-person shooter from the perspective of a two-legged battle-droid.

However, I had judged it completely wrong. It was a programming game – it was a cross between Mech Warrior, Core War and Karel the Robot.

You started by purchasing an appropriate droid and armaments, and were given a circuit board, represented by a grid. In each cell, you could put an tile representing an instruction (e.g. turn, move, fire, etc.) and a cardinal direction in which execution would flow (e.g. after completing this execute the code in the cell immediately below.). Some tiles represented “if” statements; they had two associated cardinal directions depending on the result of the test. So you had to program your robot with a state machine with arcs of very limited length.

Once it was programmed, you could unleash a small fleet of your robots into a little test arena where they would loop around their simple state machines, hopefully having the intelligence to engage the enemy robots.

I had rented this game for one night, and realised I would never be able to master it in such a short time, so I made the best of it. I decided to program a crack-squad of suicide bots. I put just enough intelligence in them to find the enemy in their radar, sprint towards them, and if they got close enough, initiate the self-destruct sequence (which was basically to squat down, and count to ten before exploding). Hopefully, I would cause enough collateral damage to take out one or two of the nearby enemy bots).

The limited size of the circuit board, and the strong necessity for “spatial locality” in the code gave me brain-spasms. It was very hard to plan ahead, and the development environment was hampered by being joystick-driven and hence very slow. There was lots of rework as pieces of code needed to be moved around the grid.

After an hour or so, I was getting the basics. My bots were exploding all over the place (generally nowhere near the enemy, who had wandered off during the count-down sequence).

I realised that my bots were carrying huge arsenals. There was no good reason not to discard all caution and fire off my entire supply of rockets immediately at the enemy as I ran towards it. When I ran out of rockets, there was no reason not to fire the machine gun as fast as I could during my sprint. After all, there was no point having any ammunition left during the self-destruct sequence.

I tried squeezing this new tactic into the circuit-board grid. While trying to fix a bug, I found that I had painted my code into a corner. My planned flow of execution lead to a tile in the middle of the grid, and I needed to pass the flow down to the bottom where the instruction was to self-destruct, but I was surrounded on all sides by unrelated tiles, executing different paths of the code. In desperation, I just pointed the flow of execution into the middle of one of the nearby flows. Sheer craziness, but I didn’t know what else to do.

So I had taken my kamikaze warriors, added a bit of bluff by firing weapons off aggressively, then added an element that I couldn’t predict by jumping to random part of my code.

The result? Efficient. Killing. Machines.

I couldn’t believe it, but my bots had stopped flailing around awkwardly and had started dominating the test arena. They were awesome! I quickly saved the game, and prepared to take my new bots into the tournament. If I could kill other bots in a tournament, I could earn more money, get more armanents and purchase bigger circuit boards for even better behaviour.

I restarted the game in tournament mode, and loaded my saved game, ready to rumble… and found myself back in practice mode. I tried again, and the same thing happened. It seems that the saved game didn’t just save the robot design. It also saved the fact that it had been designed in practice mode. Loading the bot put you into practice mode, with no way of escaping.

If I wanted to play it again, I would have to re-“type” my design while in tournament mode. I stared at my design. I did some sums. I estimated it would take at least 45 minutes of flicking joystick buttons before I could run the bots again. I swore loudly, and turned off the Playstation. I returned the game the next day.

I ask the same question: How could you miss that in play-testing?