Asserted Review: Monster Hunter Tri (recap)

Hey children, I will be writing a review of the upcoming game Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate in the next few days. The review will be a "sequel" of sorts to the following review of Monster Hunter Tri, which I am providing to you, free of charge! Enjoy!

Snowman here, and let us start this blog in force with Monster Hunter Tri, a Wii exclusive!



Now, anyone who's been paying attention to my personal life in the past few months will know that I simply adore this game. In fact, I can safely say that Monster Hunter Tri (also called Monster Hunter 3, MH3) has everything I was looking for in the game, and it delivered so much more. The music is good, the gameplay is smooth, and it is simply fun to play. This Wii exclusive is, in my opinion, the first game to use the console's full potential and is definitely a game you will not regret having in your collection.

Before I get too deep in this review, let me talk about the only really bad thing about this game. This game allows you to play using either the Wii Remote and Nunchuk or by using the Classic Controller (CC). In fact, in most gaming stores, you can buy a copy of MH3 that comes with a free Classic Controller. Do just that. The controls for the Remote+Nunchuk are simply horrible, and they are amazing with the Classic Controller. My advice: for the same price, get the one with the classic controller.

Monster Hunter (MH) is an extremely successful Japanese video game franchise; in its native country, MH is a household name like Pokemon or Yugioh. With MH3, this franchise has gotten the solid attention of the world. Like in previous games, you take on the role of a Hunter, a mercenary hired by the "Hunter's Guild" to... well... hunt monsters. In particular, the Lagiacrus, a giant sea Leviathan-class monster, is terrorizing a small village, and it is your job to (eventually) kill it. The first few quests are pretty mundane, such as collecting mushrooms or delivering raw monster meat (yum.), but they get pretty epic pretty fast.

You will not face the Lagiacrus, MH3's flagship monster and "adorable" troublemaker, until very late in the game. These hunters are certainly trying.

Speaking of epic, these monsters are massive. Realistically massive, but massive nonetheless; most stand two or three times taller than you, and some are simply too big for me to give an appropriate scale. The visual style of the game lends itself well to that effect. I can honestly say that this is the best looking Wii game so far. Granted, the graphics aren't what you would see on the PS3 or Xbox 360, but they definitely take full advantage of what the console is capable of. And while we're at it, the soundtrack of the game is as epic as the game itself. All these factors contribute to making every fight memorable, every defeat bittersweet, and every victory gratifying.

This game also requires a great deal of planning and strategy. Let me tell you something that happened to me while playing. I had become a hunter full of pride, having defeated several large monsters, some with ease, some with difficulty, and I was well on my way to defeat the dreaded Lagiacrus. Everything was going well, and I was brimming with confidence. Then came Barroth.

Oh crap.

Barroth (which I had affectionately nicknamed B*tchballs after a hilarious video describing it as a "b*tch with balls") is like a sledgehammer, but without the charm. It rams you for massive damage, it's hard to hit and pretty much impossible to block. Not only that, but his body is covered in mud which he flings around, and if you're unlucky enough to get hit, you cannot attack for a little while due to being covered in grime. It took me 3 failures before giving up. That's when I decided to start forging armors (forging your armors and weapons is an integral part of the game) to pass the time.

So there I was, forging new armor sets, when I realize that one of the herbivores present in Barroth's area, the Rhenoplos, gives materials for a set of armor which grants immunity to Barroth's mud-flinging attacks. After lots of farming and herbivore-murdering, it was time to face Barroth...

...and fail miserably. It took me very careful planning, a touch of luck and a total of about 7 tries to beat the beast. But oh how it felt good to kill that mother f*cker.

But that doesn't mean the game is all serious all the time, oh no. The game can be very light-hearted and cute at times, and the game's pace is simply amazing, with a good balance between humor and urgency. In particular the NPCs are lovable, and some of the monsters you meet make you want to cuddle them instead of murdering them.

They're cute now, but wait until they steal your sh*t. Also, compare these monsters with the ones shown above. This game has a good mix of light-hearted comedy and blood-chilling action.

Alright, this review is dragging on, so let's wrap up. The free online multiplayer supports a solid peer-to-peer network, a thriving online community, and an easy to use game lobby. The game itself definitely has over 60 hours of gameplay (online and offline combined), and is definitely worth the price. In short, I can say that Monster Hunter Tri is definitely one of the most memorable games I have played. If it endures the test of time, maybe it will even get into my top 5 favorite games list.

VISUALS:	10	Best Wii graphics around.
SOUNDTRACK:	10	Epic and memorable tracks, context-appropriate music.
ATMOSPHERE:	10	Simply amazing.
CONTROLS:	8	Horrible with the Wii Remote, great with the classic controller.
MULTIPLAYER:	10	Solid peer-to-peer online multiplayer.
LENGTH:	10	Well over 60 hours of gameplay.
OVERALL:	9.5/10

Monster Hunter Tri is definitely a game worth buying, and I urge everyone who has a Wii to pick up a copy and join the community.

-Snowman

On Learning

Topic: Learning, Programming

Learning: noun the acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience, practice, or study, or by being taught.

This post is for all those struggling, fledgling programmers out there worried about their lack of experience.

Throughout my years as a programmer (which are still minimal compared to my greater peers), I cannot say that I learned many computer languages. At this time, I wouldn't be able to program myself out of a C++ paper bag, Perl sounds like something you put on a necklace, and I still have no idea how to Python myself a program.

With keeping this in mind, what is my worth, I ask you, as a programmer?

To the untrained eye, my economic worth would be quite low; my lack of skills and experience would perhaps make me cheaper than an experienced developer, but my contribution would obviously not be as high.

Let us deviate a little for a moment. One person once said that willingness and desire to learn are the true qualifications for a person. In short, in this extremely interesting article Matt Gemmell discusses the subject of learning and problem solving, and argues that the worth of a software developer (or of any domain really) is in how much that person is willing to learn something new.

Let's get back to the subject at hand; the economic worth of an inexperienced programmer. If we believe what Mr. Gemmell says, then the worth of a person (in a professional environment) is directly related to their willingness and desire to learn. Notice how I didn't mention anything about the number of languages someone speaks, or the number of years of experience they have.

I guess my message would be to everyone worried about their lack of experience in any domain to grow and cultivate a desire to learn new things. It is quite easy to learn in school, when you are forced to do so, but it is significantly harder once you graduate and leave academia. At that moment, your personal growth becomes your entire responsibility, and sadly many people use that as an excuse to stop bettering themselves. But as long as you manifest a desire to learn and to grow, you will notice an exponential growth in your own abilities.

After all, we only stop to learn once we think we know everything.

Stay frosty,
Snowman

Forcing Marriage

Topic: Video Games, Ethics

Choice: noun the right, power, or opportunity to choose; option: The child had no choice about going to school.

Hello everyone, today I'd like to talk about the treatment of women in video games. No, I'm not talking about what they're wearing, I have nothing against that (or rather, I don't want to get into that subject). No, I'd like to talk specifically about relationships in video games.

For some time now, it has been possible to have a romantic sub-plot, or to develop a relationship in a game which has nothing to do about relationships. Most of these games are role-playing games (RPGs), but certain other games allow this also. Usually, these romances are pretty bland, almost going to the point of romancing a plaster wall. The medium of video games has a long way to go before being able to mimic an actual human relationship.

However, the complexity and depth of video game romance is not what irks me; adding a meaningful second storyline can really enhance gameplay experience. No, what I would like to address is the question of choice. To illustrate this, let me take the example of a character which has recently become one of my favorites: Skyrim's Serana.

When Dawnguard came out, the fanboy in me was quick to jump on an opportunity to play the expansion, and almost immediately I was charmed by Serana's wit and her wistful personality. The daughter of a powerful vampire lord, and a powerful vampire herself, Serana shares ideas and opinions with the Dragonborn. She is strong and independent, and yet also displays a lonely interior. It is clear that her designers intended her to be a deep character the players can interact with. I myself enjoy very much having her tag along, suck the lifeforce out of enemies and share aloud her displeasure with the weather.

Like many other characters in the game, she can be asked to marry the player, which she politely declines, mentioning a complicated family history and a dislike for religious temples. I thought this was amazing. Not only was she a unique character, she also wasn't a slave to the player's every whim. This element of "free will" alone raised my respect for this character.

The community did not share my opinion.

After this *ahem* revelation was made to the public, several players complained about not being able to marry the vampiress. In fact, a petition was released to make Serana a marriageable character. At the time of writing this, 4595 people had signed.

Why do I find this disturbing and disgusting? Let us rephrase, shall we? Man falls in love with Woman. Woman states that she is not interested. Man prays to God to change her mind. God destroys Woman's personality and will. Man marries Woman.

See? It's creepy, unhealthy and downright immoral.

One person can argue that the person affected is a video game character, and thus is not eligible for this kind of moral analysis. However, just what values would we be promoting if we allowed this kind of behavior? Gamers like to be in control of their environment, true, but at what point should we shatter the barrier between control and morality? If we allow this, then we are saying that it is okay to force unwilling persons into activities they would normally refuse to partake in.

The designers clearly thought of marriage when creating Serana, and they clearly chose not to allow it. Was it to preserve her personality? To make her unique? To give her a semblance of free will? Whatever their reasons, we should respect them. After all, they provided us with a character people clearly love dearly; why should we change her?

Stay frosty, readers,
Snowman

When Games Die

Topic: Video Games

To Mourn: verb to grieve or lament for the dead.

Hi everyone, welcome.

Please, have a seat. Some warm coffee or hot chocolate, maybe? Just get comfortable, as we're going to get into some heavy stuff here. Okay, maybe not heavy for you, specifically, and that's fine. As long as you can accept that this affects a number of other people, that's fine. In fact, we're just happy to have you here with us, and I mean that.

The concept of death applied to inanimate objects, and sometimes concepts, is nothing new. You often hear of a TV franchise dying, or of the death of a character in a movie, or the oft-uttered curse "my [insert object here] just died". We accept this, and acknowledge this as being not the litteral death of a thing, but rather as a feeling of grief brought forward by the end of something enjoyed and cherished.

I don't think I'm bringing anything new to the world if I talk about video game death. However, I would like to discuss the concept of a video game's lifetime for a moment. The way I see it, a video game goes through stages of "life" in a similar way a person does.

Young games are extremely dynamic and are constantly changing, either through active development (indev) or through its community. Here, the temporal age of a game is irrelevant; some games, such as UT2004 or Counter-Strike remain dynamic through their active communities even to this day. In a way, these games always bring something new to any player no matter how long they've been playing.

Some games, however, are very old (but still very much alive). They do not change, and the community rarely "awakens" from its years-long slumber, but people consistently revisit those games. Oldies, such as Super Mario Bros. fall into this category. Either due to their nostalgic value or their simplicity, some games will remain old forever, continuously revisited by people of all generations. They do not bring anything new necessarily, but people cannot in all honesty say "I will never play that game again".

So how does one really define a video game's death? I, for one, believe that a video game dies when it becomes obsolete for a player. Let us take the example of the Halo franchise. How many people still actively play Halo? Probably quite a few, though more because of its nostalgic value than anything else; it was the original, the beginning of the story. Halo would be an old game by the standards defined above. But what about Halo 2? How many people still played it when the third game came out? For that matter, how many people still played Halo 3 when Halo: Reach came out? Not as many, certainly. In fact, when the "new and improved" version of a game comes out, the community of the old game, in most cases, goes quiet. Sure, some people still play the game, but the enthusiasm is no longer there.

The movie is no longer in theatres. The hype is gone. And all your save files will eventually become stagnant swamps of meaningless 0's and 1's.

That game is dead.

Most gamers have had to face that problem at some point. There comes a time where the game stops being new. The urge to play again, to explore and learn from the world, simply isn't there anymore.

In a way, a game's death is a deeply personal thing. Let us take the example of one of my personal favourites, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. For me, that game is immortal. I don't play anymore, and certainly don't plan to in the near future, but I know that the next time I will re-enter Vvardenfell, I will feel at home. Morrowind is still very much alive for me. However, is this true for other gamers? Some people I know believe they're done with this game for good and will probably never play it again; for those people, Morrowind is gone.

Let me tell you a story of my own recent experience with video game death.

I've recently (less than a week ago) discovered Terraria, a Minecraft-like game where you take control of a little 2D sprite and explore a world filled with monsters and wonders. You build your fortress, survive hellish encounters (zombies, Cthulhu's eyes and killer unicorns to name a few) and explore valleys, deserts, jungles and caves in complete freedom. You have to craft your own gear from materials you gathered and use this gear to explore even further reaches of the world. Those who know me well know that this is the kind of game I usually enjoy for a long time.

Recently, before I've started playing, Terraria's developers announced that they would stop developing the game. This means that no new content would be delivered to us, and that's fine. A developer cannot continuously work on the same game forever, and those who were angered by this announcement need to realize that game developers are not subject to each gamer's every whim. Terraria will stop growing, certes, but it will still be alive, at least for me.

I'm not eactly sure what exectly happened (I've read various conflicting accounts), but at some point Terraria's devs announced another game, Starbound, described as being "Terraria in space, but much, much bigger".

This is not the devs' fault, and I do not blame them. In fact, I encourage this and am looking forward to this new game. But I know that when Starbound comes out (end of Summer 2012), I will stop playing Terraria in favour of its new bretheren. This is no one's fault other than mine, but I know that when the new game will come out, the old game will die for me.

And yet, I still enjoy Terraria a lot. I know that in a few months, the place I instantly fell in love with will be replaced by a "new and improved" version and will effectively die, and yet I cannot stop myself from spending time in it. In a very sad way, I am exploring a dying world. And knowing that it is dying, that it will be dead in a few months, makes me sad.

Gamers are fickle and quirky people. We impatiently wait for a game to come out, then complain that it is not perfect in every possible way (knowing well that no game is). We complain about every little bug, and howl in rage if the ending is not to our liking.

But we love our games, and when they die, we mourn.

Stay frosty, everyone.

Yours truly,
Snowman

On Comments

Topic: Programming

Comment: noun a note in explanation, expansion, or criticism of a passage in a book, article, or the like; annotation.

Today I'd like to spend a little time talking about the controversial artifacts which are known as comments, and my current stance on commenting.

Each programmer knows what a comment is. However, for starting programmers, or people who are interested in programming but don't know anything about it yet, a comment is basically written text in a code file (also known as the source code) which will not be interpreted as code. It is basically text which is not part of the program. In most languages, they are usually marked by either two slashes (//) or a hash character (#). The following is an example:

int x = 0;
// Setting x to 1
x = 1;

As you can see, we are initializing a variable, x, to the value of 0. Then, we set the value to be 1. However, in between we have text saying what we are about to do. That text is clearly not part of the executable code; that text is known as a comment.

Now, the programming community is divided as to the usefulness of comments in code. One side states that comments improve code readability and should be used as often as possible. Using comments will also help new developers understand legacy code much faster, code which may be extremely confusing to read (confuse code). The other side states that comments are completely useless and can be replaced by good programming. The code should be in an of itself clear to understand, and that if comments are needed then the code is bad (bad notation). Additionally, people tend to rely too much on comments and place them in useless places (comment abuse).

Before stating my own opinion, let me show pseudo-code examples that I have encountered of both extremes. First, let us look at an example of confuse code:

int a = Math.sqrt(Math.pow(xValAfterModification, 9));
int b = methodFoo(a);

What is a? What does it represent? What is xValAfterModification, why are we raising it to the 9^th power and why are we taking the square root of that? What does methodFoo do and why are we setting b to this? No matter where this code is found, this is extremely messy and hard to understand. Someone would have to spend a long time looking at this to understand what exactly this is doing.

Here is an example of bad notation:

// This variable will store the current product price
int n = 0;

At first, this seems okay. The programmer is simply specifying what the variable will be used for. However, in this case the comment is completely useless. Why doesn't the programmer simply rename the variable n to currentProductPrice? No one ever confuse something called currentProductPrice with, say, the number of available products. In this case the comment is used instead of good programming practices (specifically using clear variable names).

Finally, let us look at an example of comment abuse:

// Creating x and setting it to 0
int x = 0;
// Adding 1 to x
x = x + 1;
// Multiplying x by 2
x = x * 2;

Ignoring the obvious uselessness of this code (why didn't they just set x to 2?), the comments in this example just state exactly what the code does at every step. However, the comments simply state exactly what the next line is doing exactly as if the person would read the code out loud. These comments are useless since they state the obvious.

Now, what is my stance on comments? Well, I sit pretty much in the middle. I believe that code should be easy to understand without the need for comments. However, let us look at the following example:

x = x + 1;
x = x + 1;

Now, why did the programmer increment x twice instead of simply incrementing it only once?

// x is a control variable. Due to the
// volatile and multiconcurrent nature of this program,
// we need to increment this varibale
// twice instead of just adding
// 2 to it.
x = x + 1;
x = x + 1;

Ah, now the reasoning is clear. Since the program is multiconcurrent, the programmer wants to increment the value twice instead of just once. There might be other questions someone can ask (is x used to view the number of modifications? is x written in another thread?), the comment adds clarity to the code in a way that the code could not do itself.

As such, I believe that comments should not explain the how of code, but should be used to explain the why of design decisions.

Now, I'm curious to hear what you think of comments. Have an opinion? Then leave a comment! (Yes I am a shameless sellout.)

Anyways, that's it for today folks. Stay cool,
Snowman