Down With Numbers

A couple of days ago, Rockstar’s new game for the Xbox 360 came out. Being Rockstar, you expect it to contain heaps of gratuitous violence and many, many weapons. But no - they made a table tennis game. Rockstar Presents Table Tennis, to be precise.

So what have they done to bust the genre wide open? Well, nothing much, really. It’s just table tennis, with an odd Matrix-style focus mode thrown in. To counter this, they’ve made it cheaper than all the other Xbox 360 games out there at the moment, going for £25 on Amazon as compared to the more usual £40.

I’ve had it since yesterday, and I’ve played it for a few hours. You know what? It’s actually quite good. It isn’t setting the gaming world ablaze or anything, but it does well as an example of a fun, (relatively) cheap, simple game on a next-generation console.

One thing is for sure: it’s got an insane level of polish on it. The interface is slick, the models are excellently detailed, the clothing fabric moves just as you expect it to - they’ve clearly put a lot of work into the immersion. It works, too, because you really start to get into it as you desperately try to win a 70-shot rally.

But enough of that sort of positive stuff. You can read all that in any decent review of the game. Positivity leads to happiness, and we shan’t be having any of that here, thank you. What I do want to talk about are a the problems I’ve encountered which didn’t immediately present themselves on first playing the game.

It quickly becomes apparent is that the skill difference between the easy and medium modes is massive. It doesn’t take you long to get familiar enough with the controls to win an easy-level match without losing a single point. As soon as you switch to medium, however, you’re fighting like hell. Nearly every point is a struggle, and while I’m sure that I’ll improve with practice, it’s a bit of a shock to the system.

If you have to struggle for each point, you want the controls to do exactly what you expect. Unfortunately this isn’t always so. While you won’t have many problems if you’re playing a slower opponent, you’ll find it decidedly tricky to actually get your player to do what you want if you’re up against someone who powers the ball at you. Sometimes you lunge for the ball, sometimes you don’t, and I haven’t figured out just what controls exactly when you can and can’t.

These niggles aside, it’s a fun game. Not earth-shattering by any means, but simple and enjoyable. Just how games should be. I look forward to getting around to trying it on Xbox Live.

The demoscene has been around for years, and is still very active. For the uninitiated, a demoscene demo or intro is an application which presents an entirely non-interactive, real-time rendering of all manner of odd graphical scenes and effects combined with a synchronised music track.

The fact that they are done as real-time renderings means that they evolve with the technology available, so the demos made for the Amiga fifteen years ago are very different from those made today for the latest and greatest PCs. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re better, though. Anyway. I present to you a selection of interesting demos.

Let’s start with one group. mfx are very well-known and have produced many things in the past. Their demos tend to be rather abstract, and demonstrate their programmers’ insane graphics programming abilities. Good examples are (in descending order of preference) Predator, Deities, Aether, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky.

All demos don’t have to be on the order of megabytes in size, though. A popular category is that of the 64k intro, being a demo which only takes up 64k of space in its entirety. Creating one requires a lot of skill and knowledge of just how executables work so that you can squeeze out every last byte. I don’t follow 64k intros as much as demos, but some fun ones I’ve seen from the last few years are Zoom 3 (by AND), The Prophecy (by Conspiracy) and Kings of the Playground (by Equinox, as an invitation to a demoparty).

You’ll notice that all of the demos I’ve given make intensive use of hardware-accelerated graphics, usually via OpenGL (for some reason the scene doesn’t seem to like Direct3D much). However, not all demos are hardware-accelerated. For examples of software rasterisation, try Leitmotiv (by Lunix), Discloned (by Haujobb, originally a DOS 64k intro in 1999 but ported to Windows) or moralhardcandy (by Blasphemy). For real-time raytracing, try Heaven Seven (by Exceed) or anything by Federation Against Nature.

While I’m mainly sticking to products made in the last 5 or 6 years, the demoscene has been going for over 15 years. I know little about the great demos from pre-2000, but what I do know is that two you should watch are State of the Art and 9 Fingers (by Spaceballs) for the Amiga (use WinUAE or WinFellow).

Finally, what about demos that’re just plain enjoyable? There are quite a few about, although you have to sift through some of the pretentious nonsense that’s appeared in the last few years. My current favourite is Fair Play to the Queen (by Candela), with past favourites including The Popular Demo (by Farbrausch), We Cell (by Kewlers), Ion Traxx (by mfx and Kewlers) and A Significant Deformation Near the Cranium (by Kewlers).

A couple of days after my last Geometry Wars-related post, I stopped playing the game. It suddenly became boring, which was no surprise since the same had happened before. As expected, a few weeks later my interest was rekindled and I started playing again. Thankfully I wasn’t all that worse for the lack of practice.

Anyway, to cut a short story even shorter, I have a new high score. 2,022,915!

I also attained the “Multitastic” (get to x10 multiplier, i.e. stay alive for quite a while) and the “Quartermaster” (collect 9 bombs, most easily done by not using a bomb for the first 600,000 points) achievements, although the former was in a previous game from the score-shattering one. Unfortunately, the high scoring game had a dark, evil lining.

As I was playing the game, I found I’d got to 950,000 points without having died once. “‘Ello ‘ello,” thinks I. “The highest score I’ve survived so far is 550,000. Looks like I could get the survive 1 million points achievement here. That’s the only one I still don’t have.” But you already know what I’m going to say.

I drove straight into a green square at 965,000 points.

There are some genres of game which I am more inclined to play than others. First-person shooters make up the bulk of my paltry collection, supported by a few third-person action games. However, one genre you won’t often find me engaging with is that of strategy games. While I do own a couple, they aren’t the more traditional war-’em-ups; they’re games like Black & White, or SimCity.

Given this, you can understand it was with apprehension and a sense of foreboding that I engaged in a round of Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour (at the incessant prodding of some random internet person). See, while I have played a number of different war-’em-ups at different points in time, there has been one overriding theme: I’m useless at them.

They do say that practice makes perfect, though, so I jumped in. And you know what? It was actually quite fun. To begin with, my opponent laid off me for a while so that I could learn the ropes (and boy are there a lot of ropes), then eventually started to get more aggressive. Eventually he ploughed through my base and that was that. But the seed was planted.

While I won’t say I’m now a convert to strategy games, I do find it interesting. The thing that makes Zero Hour different to other games I usually play is that I feel physically and mentally tired after a game, like it was a full mental workout. It is quite an exertion to get yourself into a good strategic position, especially when your opponent has been playing for half a year and you have been playing for half a week.

Since then I’ve played a few more games against the mysterious opponent and lost horrifically in each. In a fun way though. I survive a little longer each time, gradually learning the right order to construct things at the start and just how cautious to be. It appears the most important thing, however, is to grab as many of the resources in the map as possible, to the extent of building a barracks first just so that you can send men out to the oil derricks.

The most obvious indicator of my gradually increasing skill, however, is the most important one. Instead of sending two men out to certain death at an already-established base around a previously captured oil derrick, I now find myself sending men out to do battle with another two men in the process of capturing it. I may even capture one myself for a while. Until giant Chinese tanks plough through my make-shift secondary base.

D’oh.

These are my favourite formulae for π (which I have memorised to 26 decimal places). Why did I choose them?

The first one is easy to derive with calculus and very easy to understand. Unfortunately it’s absolutely useless because you have to add an insane numbers of terms to get even close to a good approximation.

The second one is very cool. I just like things which involve nested square-roots. This one is also fairly easy to derive if you know about the trigonometric functions.

The third one is a rearrangement of the formula for my favourite number, π²/6, the sum of the reciprocals of the square numbers. There are many ways to derive that result; some are relatively easy, some use very advanced mathematics.

The fourth one does not posess any kind of mathematical beauty to my eyes. However, it too is very cool, since its existence means that with a lot of jiggery-pokery it is possible to derive an exact formula for any digit of the hexadecimal expansion of π. No such formula exists for the more popular decimal expansion.