The Exploits of Plouj

Today I’ve finally received the Sintel movie package in the mail:

The first time I heard of Deamon’s Souls game for PS3 was when my co-workers made a joke about the tongue-twister pronunciation of its name: “Demonses Soulses”. Other than that, I got the impression that the game had some unique ideas (eg: other players playing the same level showing up as ghosts in real time) and an high difficulty level – my co-worker hasn’t beaten the first level before he had to return the rental. Overall, I had pretty low expectations when another friend lent it to me among a stack of other of PS3 games. In fact, I even left playing Demon’s Souls to the very end, when the other games failed to keep me entertained and the weekend was coming to an end. All that to say, as you can guess from the title, that I ended up getting hooked on this game. I played almost non-stop for 7 hours straight (it was not fun waking up for work early next morning). Since then, I haven’t had more time to play the game, but I did brainstorm various reasons why I couldn’t put the controller down. Here is the list I came up with:

• As the Gamespot review alludes, the fighting mechanics start out simple and smooth, but soon reveal a more complex and rewarding quality. Combat got more and more fun as I learned various tricks and became more proficient at it.
• Multiple, intertwined paths through a hand-crafted world
• Magnificent views from the tall points in the castle
• The ability to retrieve dropped souls at the place of death appealed to greed for more game points and provided a reason to continue playing even after dying numerous times, sometimes even on the way to collect the souls.
• Various parts of the game reminded me of other video games I’ve played:
  • The first thing that popped out to me during the tutorial was the foggy mountain range in the background. It portrayed the same lonely feeling as the Phobos skyline in Doom 1.
  • The Boletarian castle with its colour schemes, ambient sounds and zombie-looking bad guys looked like it could be one of the medieval themed Quake 1 levels. The Nexus hub was a more complex version of entrance map in Quake. The Phalanx enemies were similar to the Spawn.
  • The only other game I know with an equally unforgiving set of enemies right from the start is Ecstatica.
  • Oblivion was my previous experience playing in a non-linear fantasy world with real-time melee fighting.
  • The meele fighting on its own reminded me of games like Rune and ChaosUT2 Duel.
• Lastly, I could play as a knight in shining armour!

I wastedspent today’s evening playing around with Quake1 which I installed on my brother’s Wii through the Homebrew channel. One cool thing that I managed to get working relatively painlessly was demo recording.

Since there is no keyboard support in Quake1 yet, I had to add the following bind to the /id1/config.cfg file on the SD card using a desktop computer:

bind "UPARROW" "disconnect; skill 3; record wii; map e1m1"

This allowed me to simply press the up arrow button on the Wii remote and Quake1 would start recording a demo of me playing the first level of the first episode on Nightmare difficulty.

So far, I haven’t been able to play the game as quickly and as precisely as I can on a computer with a mouse. Not that I’m a great Quake player to begin with. However, I still had a lot of fun, especially after I started using the Wii Zapper. It gave me a nice sensation of holding boom stick, but didn’t improve my aim.

Here is the actual demo bzip2 archive for those who really want to watch me get owned by zombies from another dimension for a few minutes. This demo should be playable with most Quake1 engines and original (full version or demo) game data from ID. I used my personal favourite – Darkplaces:

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These screenshots sort-of show that I’m shooting at stuff which is not directly under my cross-hair because of the way Wii remote look works. In the actual Wii Quake, the gun model also moves around the screen.