Thief

I really wanted to like Thief - and so, in a way, I did.  But it helped not to think of it as a Thief game but rather more Batman - if Batman couldn't fight and also was a relentless kleptomaniac.

The game is a quick eight chapters, some better than others.  For example, one takes place in a brothel, and is so predictable with its silly attempts to be lurid that it's laughable.  Another takes place in an abandoned asylum and is actually unnerving.  The deeper into the game you go, though, the more pat the levels are, the less finished they feel, and the less engaging they are.  And the less you care because the character development is so lackluster, and the dialog so poorly written, that you cannot get involved in the story, even if you want to.

Things I Liked

Smirky the Thief
Garrett still has some wry wit here and there, and a couple of his lines made me chuckle.  Overall though, I liked old Garrett better.  The new one just tries too hard to be Mr. Broody Man, and it's a bit disappointing.

There's also some wit sprinkled throughout the story.  I particularly enjoyed a bit where Garrett needed to trail a drunk named Lenny on a side mission.  I really wish the game had more of that.

Figuring It Out
There are a few puzzles to solve and, though most are far too easy, a couple are actually interesting and take some keen observation to work. They were very enjoyable.

Difficulty Customization
I was entertained with how hard I could make the game for myself - turning off options for take-downs and kills, and for upgrading Garrett's equipment, and the like.  The game felt better once the difficulty was upped significantly.  It is possible to play utterly stealthy, with no help, and still get through it all, which (to me) is the strongest point in its favor.

Graphics
The graphics look great and there's fantastic atmosphere in some of the levels.  The graphics don't need to be as good as they are, but it makes some stuff interesting to look at and explore - but I'm afraid that the other side of that is that the great graphics might why the levels are so small and there are so many, many load screens.  I'd take less great graphics over less time spent watching things load.

Stealing Everything
Yes, this is fun.  I like looting and scavenging games, and perhaps that says something about me, but there's a lot of in here, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.


Things I Didn't

The Tiff-Taffing Language
Taff is gone, and that's incredibly sad.  One character mentions it, wondering what the word means, but in general the NPCs use "adult" level language and like to drop the f-bomb.  It feels unnecessary and gratuitous in a Thief title, and didn't lend anything to the game.

Besides that, they needed a good editor.  There are grammatical mistakes in everything from the loading screen tips to the dialog, and sometimes they're weird and glaring (such as people asking a question in one tense, and being answered in another) and sometimes just distinctly non-native speaker in phrasing.  I expect more from a company this large.

The Story
The story makes a kind of sense.  Sort of.  But what it feels like is five different people wrote five different stories with different subtext and meanings, then they cut the different stories into strips, put them into a hat, and drew parts out as they needed something else for Garrett to do with his time.  There's no unifying voice at all, and there are some times you just go "That makes no sense whatsoever." The end is beyond unsatisfying, so don't look for any resolution or epiphanies there.

The Boss Fight
No one plays Thief for a boss fight, you taffing idiots.

The Sound
I don't know what they did with the sound for this game but it's an utter failure.  Half the dialog is either very loud, or so muffled you can't hear it at all, and distance to the speaker doesn't seem to make any difference - subtitles are pretty much a necessity.  Even then, the game is plagued with conversations amongst NPCs that repeat ad nauseam, often so quickly that the same NPCs are having the same conversation four times simultaneously.  Even if whatever they're talking about is something you've already dealt with and you really want the game to stop telling you about it.

Be prepared to hear that "Jebediah Chokes is a right prick" so often that Garrett (that's you) may snap and kill every NPC in the zone just to MAKE IT STOP.  Not that that's what I did, or anything.  Nope.

E is for Everything
Playing Thief, I got incredibly sick of mashing the E key.  E is, variously: open a chest; open an armoire; open a door; open a drawer; pick a lock; pick a pocket; read a document; pick stuff up; peer through a keyhole; open a window; pry with your crowbar; enter a zone transition; enter a "squeeze point"; move a beam; unscrew some bolts; open a grate; cut out a painting; disarm a trap; hide behind something; open a safe; set a pin while picking a lock; enter a cabinet; rappel - and likely about fifteen other things I've missed in this list.

About half the time, the pressing of the E key seems wholly unnecessary.  For example, if you want to open a window, you long-press E.  Then Garrett will look around the window and get out his crowbar (the same animation every time), and then it wants you to tap E to cause Garret to pry the window open.  Except, why does it matter?  There's no way to "fail" opening the window, no way to make noise while doing so, no way to jam it if you don't use the right rhythm or anything, you just tap E repeatedly and it opens.  Why am I tapping E again?  Is this some trick to make me think I'm doing something when really all I want is for the animation to end and let me move on already?

Beyond that, with E for everything, you will invariably encounter confusion.  You wanted to snatch that silver flask off that crate quickly and step away?  Sorry, we're going to make you crouch and peek around the crate it's sitting on instead.  This kind of thing gets old really fast.  I've been playing mouse-and-keyboard for a long time and would really like the single action button concession to console-based players to go die an ugly death now, thank-you.

Abandon All Hope
The levels are riddled with points of no return, with zero warning that's what they are.  When this happens, it feels as though the game is punishing you for exploring, which is totally not what a Thief game should be doing.

Loading...
There are way too many load screens.  How a game like GTA can go without them, and you can't get two streets over in Thief without a load screen I can't figure.  The worst part is that you don't always know when you're going to trigger a load screen.  Hey, that window - could be a flat to rob: you'll never know until you sit through the repetitive window-opening animation, and bam! Load screen.  Sucker!  Didn't mean to leave the zone and need to go back to the old one?  How about you sit through that animation and load screen again.  This is fun for you, right?

See Monkey Climb?  Climb, Monkey, Climb!
There are points in this first-person game when suddenly the camera changes to third-person view, and you're forced to maneuver Garrett up some pipes and around some ledges in this third-person view as if you're suddenly playing a platformer.  It's really disconcerting, and I was annoyed every time it happened.  There really didn't appear to be any point to these - there were no enemies to avoid, no jump you could miss, and only one path to take. No idea what these sequences were about nor why anyone thought they were fun or a good idea.

My Recommendation
If you're looking for a game, well this is one, and if you can get it on sale, go for it.  Play it as a stealth game, up the difficulty, and don't even try to get involved in the story.  But if you're looking for Thief, this isn't it.

In Defense

Some of you who know me know that I went back to school to complete some courses, and I happen to be doing that through an accounting and finance program.

This necessarily involves a number of general business classes (hey, no problem since I'd never had any and learning is good) but I've often been surprised over the last year and a half about the general student body's and the instructors' blind faith in "business" and the immense benefit-of-the-doubt it's given to always be doing the "right thing".

I'm not kidding: I've heard defenses of child labour from a "well would you rather they not be able to dig themselves out of poverty or do something useful with their time?" point of view.  It's hard not to sit there open mouthed and gaping.  Harder still not to throw rotten fruit.  At a time when so many are whinging about higher education being a liberal bastion where wide-eyed innocents are brainwashed into no-holds-barred communism, I'm instead being exposed to defenses of everything from modern-day slave labour to fascism.

I've got an embarrassing number of textbooks that (in theory) give us real-world business examples, arguing that these make the material more relate-able, but (actually) reading considerably more like paid product placements (complete with URLs to pages on which to shop).  These have included unabashed praise for the Jared campaign at Subway, and the breathless celebration of an entrepreneur who, it turns out, long ago absconded with the money her customers had sent her.

Recently, in a lesson on payroll, we were reminded of the case in which a major bank was sued by employees for unpaid overtime.  The instructor reminded us that it's possible that the payroll department accidentally overlooked overtime because, perhaps, management hadn't send them the correct paperwork.

Uh, what now?

That's a mighty rosy view, I'd have to say.  How does a payroll department overlook something so hard that the workers involved eventually seek class-action certification?  It seems it would be impossible for something to get so far as court arguments without someone in the payroll department possibly having heard about it.  Gee, do you think it's more likely that there was an active policy of denying overtime pay instead?  I can't see how it could be anything but that; it's not like there was never a request from these employees for the overtime that was due to them — it's that excuses were always found not to pay it, even after the workers said, "You know, I think you're violating labour laws here, and I might have to speak to an attorney about it."  I would think it would be incumbent on a "payroll professional" to know the law, to understand it, and to absolutely insist that it be followed.  I mean, this went on for over 10 years.

I don't know how anyone could look a room full of people in the face, claim such a thing could be a mere bureaucratic oversight due to a paperwork glitch, and expect to be taken seriously.

It's immensely frustrating.  Businesses operating for profit don't need the benefit of the doubt.  We already know their goal: profit.  Society's job is to ensure they aren't out there committing wage theft, putting workers in danger, and being otherwise skeevy in order to push that profit just a bit higher.  The argument that, in general, businesses will regulate themselves — because harming their customers or employees is counterproductive — is plain hogwash, any anyone who has been living on planet earth with open eyes should be able to see that.

Look at Massey Energy, who kept two separate log books for their mine — one to show inspectors and one of the actual conditions — with the end result being the death of almost thirty workers.  "Massey managers appeared to have pressured workers to omit dangerous conditions from the official books … workers who tried to report risks were intimidated."  But wait, there were regulations in place here and the company was already violating them so, obviously regulation alone is useless.

But if there had been regular, surprise, physical inspections of that mine rather than remote inspections of the fake logs management had created, then the actual conditions would have been better known and the deaths of 29 workers, perhaps, prevented.  The answer is better regulation, not this quasi-self-regulation that seems to be in place.

The problem is a distinct lack of will among politicians to give enforcement agencies the funding and teeth required to actually make committing fraud, theft, and homicide unprofitable — because, if they can kill an occasional worker or two but still make a profit, you can bet there will be more than a few companies who will be OK with that.

It's not OK

Get Paid when you Work

There will always be people with chutzpah, and some who will have so much that they expect you to work for them for free.  Not only do people need to stop agreeing to do this, but they also need to name and shame the people and companies who dare to even ask for it.

There is no reason anyone should work for free, and it doesn't matter whether the one asking is just a dinky start-up trying to get a game idea off the ground, or a huge multinational with millions in profits every year.  They'll all ask, and the answer should always be no.

I mostly see the complaints about this coming out of fields like graphic design and marketing, but this is not limited to creative fields (though I think they see the worst of it).  Sadly, in most fields now there are people who will ask you to work on spec, for the "exposure", for the "great experience" you'll be getting, or for equity (if their idea ever makes money).  Don't do it.

On one side of it, people don't value what they don't pay for and if you work for free, they won't value you, either.  On the other side: you often get exactly what you've paid for.  I have some personal experience on both sides of this.

A while ago I worked for a small company whose management decided to have the marketing plan drawn up (for free) by a group of students who were doing "real world" marketing plans for their MBA marketing project.  The final plan was late, incomplete, disjoint, and  inaccurate.  It completely ignored the briefing materials we'd put together for them.  It was a prime example of a school-based group project.  It was cover-to-cover trite phrases and worn-out jargon.  It was -- make no mistake -- utter garbage, and they should have received a failing grade for it (but I doubt that they did).  We'd really have been better off asking an eight year-old to focus our marketing efforts because at least they may have come up with something novel we hadn't yet thought of ourselves.  That eight year-old might also have been considerably more forthright and left out all the padding and bullshit, which would have been pretty refreshing by that stage of the game.

(Later, the same manager also asked a graphic designer to work on spec; the designer sent work that I could only perceive to be a giant "eat shit" message considering the level of the other work in their portfolio.  Seriously: the image was of a man covered in brown smears surfacing out of a toilet.  The manager remained clueless.)

And I've also worked, essentially, for free.  Twice I've been involved with very large MMOs that had programs by which regular users could assist other players.  We were given rudimentary training; a toon with extra powers to reset quests, load a few objects, and shift players who were stuck in the scenery; and access to the CSM system the players used to file help tickets.  We were to spend a few hours every day deciphering the kinds of notes frustrated players write when they think no one will ever read them, then trying to assist them (or trying to methodically reproduce the bug and write a report for the devs).

In exchange, we were "given" the prestige of being in the program which, technically, we weren't actually allowed to tell anyone about. (No joke: for one of the programs I was asked to sign an NDA that specified I could not even tell my spouse that I was in the program.  The NDA was so ridiculous that I was also prohibited from keeping a copy of it for myself.  Definitely sounds legit!)  For a mere 5 to 15 hours a week of customer support (depending on your "rank" in the program), we were "given" subscription-free access to the game, and free expansions when they came out.  So, for 20 to 60 hours a month, we were compensated with something that would otherwise have cost us $19.99 a month, and, about once a year, a bonus equivalent to about $40.

Now one of those programs gave me lifetime, subscription-free access to the game after I spent a year in it, and I still have that (but I have also not used since leaving the program).  The other has gone "freemium" in the mean time so basic play is always free in it now, anyway.

The carrot that was always dangling here was an actual job with these companies, doing something you loved doing.  There was always the implication that if you did a great job, there was the possibility that you'd eventually be hired, when they had the budget to do that.  The truth is that they always had the budget to do it, but they had no plan to ever hire for positions they could get filled for free by dumb-asses like me.  That horrid piece of patriarchal advice about the cow and the free milk?  Turns out it's not so true with dating, but totally true with jobs. If that company can get you free, why the hell would they go to the expense of hiring you?  You've already told them, in no uncertain terms, that what you do isn't worth a paycheque.

And it can be hard to say no.  Last term in school, another student in my class emailed the professor asking for help with their project and the professor told them that I knew how to do it, so they should email me.  I said no -- because I'm not being paid to instruct the class.  Yes, I felt bad about it and I think he genuinely needed some help, but I wasn't being paid to instruct the damned class, and I had enough on my plate as it was.  The help I gave him was "make her tell you what she expects from you on this -- that's her job."

It happens everywhere.  I'm active in gaming spaces where requests to provide tech support are rampant.  This is support that, frankly, the game maker should be providing but doesn't -- the current state of affairs is that, instead of support, game publishers set up a "community" that's supposed to help each other because we all paid our real money for the same broken game and that makes us all comrades-in-arms or something.  These companies would do better to pay a few sensible people to answer actual questions from actual users with actually useful information and advice, but meh -- crowdsourcing is so much cheaper!

And hell, I'm guilty here too.  After I troubleshoot a problem, I write down how I fixed it and make the solution available to others, for free.  But of course, the means that two or three times a week (no kidding) I get requests for real-time voice chat support to help someone troubleshoot a game or hardware problem.  They often seem angry, upset, or baffled when I ask how much they're paying.  I am supposed to schedule a block of time with a stranger to hold their hand through troubleshooting a technical issue, for what?  Love of the game?  No, sorry, I'll be over here playing the game, instead.

No matter what it is:  If it's worth getting someone else to do it -- either because you can't or because you don't want to -- then it's worth paying them to do it.

B is for Block'hood

I generally try not to buy games that are in the Steam "Early Access" program.  They are, after all, just what they sound like: unfinished, with no promises that they won't cease development entirely or that they won't become a different game completely, and yet ballsy enough to still ask for cash from the people who are, essentially, troubleshooting the game.  But I was feeling whimsical the other day and took a chance.

working on a challenge to create
Consumers in Block'hood

Block'hood is a city builder - well, more accurately, a neighborhood builder - in a limited amount of space.  It looked quite pretty; the reviews to date were "Very Positive"; it was only $9.99 US.

I wish I could say that I got $10 of enjoyment out of it.  I still might, but as it stands right now, I've little desire to play.

It's in very early stages right now.  There is a tutorial, a sandbox mode, and short series of challenges to play through.  But the game is hampered by a lack of clear instruction and a definitive description of game mechanics.

Access and Decay matter a lot in the game.  Access is whether the block as it has been placed has a clear path to at least one edge of the surface it's built on, but clear path actually means a connected path of other blocks which also allow access.  Some are obviously for that - such as the Corridor blocks - and some just function that way.  Access also doesn't mean what one might assume - that people need to be able to get from this block to other important blocks (e.g., from their apartment to the cafe); it only seems to mean that the blocks are "connected" in the right way which is no more than matching up the arrows on their sides to flow in the right direction.

Decay is a scale between zero and eight.  As near as I can tell, a block begins to decay when it does not have the resources it needs; if it decays eight times in a row, it falls in a heap and is destroyed and useless.  A fully decayed block can't be recovered - it has to be deleted.  (This is a problem if your decayed block is under another block, because blocks which are under other blocks can't seem to be deleted.)

This is where it becomes frustrating.  Blocks begin to work and so to decay (if their needs are not met) immediately upon placement.  If a block has multiple dependencies, getting those up and going (each with their own dependencies) before the block decays and becomes useless can be a real challenge - especially since you can neither place a block, nor browse the block catalog, while the game is paused.  Best to plan well ahead, I suppose.

But that mechanic robs me of quite a bit of fun.  It means I can't really place things in an attractive way a lot of the time, nor re-arrange things once I've got the basics going.  Other things which niggle at me include a number of misspellings and the like in the game text, and some graphical issues.  For example the "Wind Mill" which I'd really call a wind turbine, is two blocks tall, but does not stop you placing another block atop it; instead it merely sends its blades whirring through that apartment upstairs.

There choices I'd never make (fine, it's not my game), but which feel sloppy to me as well - for example, the "Small Apartment" is actually called  a "Small Apt".  It just seems that, you know, that might be spelled out since it's an important game piece.  That's me though; I despise abbreviations and acronyms where they seem to be wholly unnecessary.

The devs of the game do seem to care, and do seem to be active, though, so I will keep an eye on it.  As for providing bug reports and the like from my play, I doubt that I will - I think that's a one of those jobs that should be a paid one, or for which, at the very least, the testers shouldn't have paid to play the game they're working to improve.

Only Mostly Dead

I've not been dead, I swear.  Only mostly dead.  I have 21 credits this term, so that's roughly 21 contact hours per week plus a supposed 63 hours per week spent out-of-class on reading, papers, assigned busy-work, and projects.  That "projects" category is the worst: it includes seven group projects this term, two of which involve "short" (i.e. 15 and 30 minute) presentations.

And of all the projects, I think only one qualifies as a proper "group project".  I wrote one of my papers (for which I got to choose any topic I'd like) last term on how to properly structure group projects so that they do what's intended, that is, get students working collaboratively and better learning the materials.  (Note that, of course, this presumes that the real purpose of the project is to help students learn, not to reduce the number of papers the instructor needs to grade by roughly 80%.  I suspect most projects actually fall into this latter category for one reason or another.)

Anyway, that one project is a comprehensive financial plan.  That's actually challenging and takes us working together to get done since not a one of us is an actual CFP.  Meanwhile, everything else is "group paper", "group paper", "group paper", zzzzzzzzzzz.  To quote one of my sources for that paper about properly-structured group projects: “writing is inherently an individual activity,” and in a group paper, “the only real group activity will be deciding how to divide up the work."

I also caught a horrid flu in week 6 of this term.  Had a little bit of a ticklish throat set in at 8:00 on a Wednesday night, and woke up at 5 AM Thursday with a fever, vomiting like crazy.  I had two mid-term exams on that Friday, which I somehow managed to take (all hail anti-emetics!) and which I should likely not have gone to, considering how contagious I'm sure I was.  But with the college policy being "no misses without a doctor's excuse" my choice was either: go out on public transit for a while and then sit in a doctor's waiting room for an hour or two to get the excuse and then have to arrange make-up exams and the whole rigmarole, or go out on public transit a while and sit in a testing lab for an hour or two and be done with it all, I took option two.  It took nearly a month for the cough and chest congestion from that thing to finally clear up.  I'm clearly too old for this shit.

Anyway!  Been playing Borderlands 2 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution lately, alternately, depending on whether I'm on the Steam Link (Borderlands 2) or the actual desktop (Deus Ex).  This switch is mostly because I've been wanting to play through Deus Ex but I find it too difficult to play with the controller, and its interface is insanely difficult to read on the huge TV across the room, even if I adjust the resolution downward.

It's funny: I've been PC gaming so long that while I'd assume a controller is a much easier way to game, I'm finding it ridiculously difficult to re-learn.  (I've not had a console for 20 years now.)  The Steam controller has at least 15 different input methods (some buttons, some triggers, some touch-pads, a stick, &c.), and some of those are context-sensitive (e.g., in Borderlands 2, the X button is variously "use" or "reload" depending on what the camera's pointing at) as well as having different inputs themselves (such as the stick, which in this game is directional movement, but is also the button for "mark inventory item trash/favorite" when pressed; or the right trackpad which is camera or, when pressed, "trigger special skill").

All up, though, I love my controller and Steam link.  If I'm totally wiped out by a day of death-by-PowerPoint in-class, and group meetings out-of-class, sitting down to a few sniper shots as Zero really helps brighten my day.

Things I Learned This Week

I hadn't really realized it before, but it turns out Canada actively prevents a two-tier health care system (such as the one Australia has).  It's illegal to provide private services or insurance for anything covered by the universal system.  Let me just say: !!!!!

I really had no idea, but I've had to research it all for a project.

In essence: Australia and Canada have what are (at the root) very similar systems - federally-funded, regionally-administered universal health care coverage.

But Australia allows (and encourages) a private system alongside that federally-funded system, so people can get private insurance to do things (such as) have more control over what doctors they see and have shorter wait times for elective care.  Canada actually prohibits that.  The numbers aren't looking (as) good for Canada either, results-wise, but I'm still reading.

Meanwhile, the #2 thing I learned this week is that it's entirely possible to enter a three-question, short-answer midterm for a class with an overall 96%, and come out of it with an 86% for the course and ... have no idea why as there is no feedback (at all, whatsoever) on the exam.  Grrrr and >:-[