Shadows of Doom

By now the game Doom 3 is old news to most PC gamers. But since my primary gaming platform is a Playstation 2, and my computer is a Mac, it wasn't until the Doom 3 Demo for Mac was released that I had a chance to try the game out. (I once played for a few minutes on a friend's X-Box, but that wasn't enough to get a well-informed opinion.) So, I played the demo for an hour or so to see what the game is like. The verdict? Doom 3 is dark. Really dark. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly dark it is. You might think that the back of your bedroom closet during nighttime is dark, but that's just peanuts to Doom 3.

Now, I'm not talking about the atmosphere, or the theme; I'm talking about the graphics, i. e. the color palette. And that's a problem. I realize that the purpose of making the game dark, with a lot of shadows and dark corners, was to make the game creepy, and to increase the player's sense of tension and foreboding. The point is to put you in the proper state of mind so that you'll jump out of your seat when a monster suddenly pops up out of nowhere. But that's not the effect it had on me. All it did was make me frustrated and angry.

The problem is that you just can't see where you're going. Simply navigating a room is much more difficult than it should be. I should be able to just walk from one end of a room to the other and find the door that I have to go through, but this was a tedious ordeal, and I would often get lost or turned around and find myself inadvertently retracing my steps. And I'm not talking about trying to do this while running around fighting monsters. I'm talking about the beginning of the game, before any monsters show up, when I'm just supposed to be reporting to my commanding officer and getting my gear.

Here are some unretouched screenshots I took while playing (click to enlarge):

See that narrow catwalk I'm walking on? Me neither.

A typical room.

In the preferences screen, you can adjust the brightness. But even turning the brighness all the way up doesn't help, because that just makes the lights and other bright objects too bright, without brightening the dark areas at all. So you're effectively adjusting the contrast, rather than the overall screen brightness.

One item you have in your inventory is a flashlight, for use in "dark areas". At one point in the game, near the beginning when you're still learning things, the lights go out, and a message pops up on the screen telling you to use your flashlight. This is obviously done just as a tutorial, to give you an example of when you'd need the flashlight. The funny thing is, by that point I had already figured out how to use the flashlight, because I needed it long before then. Even later in the game, when there were actually monsters running around for me to shoot, I often kept my flashlight on while walking around. Then when a monster popped up, I quickly switched to my gun, shot the monster, then switched back to the flashlight. Clearly, this is sub-optimal from a survival standpoint.

And a word about the monsters. Having played the Doom board game, as well as having seen various promotional materials in print for Doom 3, I'd seen what a lot of the monsters look like. What struck me is how much originality and creativity went into the design of the monsters. It's just such a shame that in the computer game, because of the darkness, you can't actually see the monsters to appreciate this.

So, I've played enough of the demo of Doom 3 to know that I'm not interested in buying and playing the full game. But lest you think that I find nothing redeemable in the whole game, let me assure you that there is at least one bright spot (pun intended); and that is Super Turbo Turkey Puncher 3.

Musings on "Firefly"

Someone should call up Joss Whedon and tell him that his obesession with the word "serenity" is unhealthy. The upcoming Firefly movie is called Serenity. This means that there are now two Firefly movies with that title, since the pilot episode, which was of course movie-length, was also titled Serenity. The ship is called Serenity. And the battle at the beginning of the pilot episode was called something like "The Battle of Serenity Valley". And "serenity" is the last word of the last verse of the series' theme song.

I find it strange that the upcoming movie doesn't have the word "Firefly" in the title. The obvious title of "Firefly: The Movie" would probably have been a bit boring, but I see nothing wrong with preceding "Serenity", or whatever else they might have come up with, with "Firefly:". I saw a commercial for the movie on TV the other day, and I probably wouldn't have known it had anything to do with the series Firefly if I had never seen the show. And the only reason I've seen the show is because my girlfriend recently lent me the DVDs. I had heard of the show back when it first aired in 2002, but I never watched it until now.

In case you're not familiar with Firefly, allow me to describe it. If you've ever watched Star Trek: The Next Generation, you may recall episodes in which they visited other planets that were members of the Federation, and the people on these planets lived in clay huts and wore tunics. Now, I'm not talking about primitive civilizations; I'm talking about actual members of the Federation, who had spaceships and other advanced technology, but the technology was not prominently visible in their culture. So they lived in clay huts and wore tunics. And flew spaceships.

Firefly is sort of like this. It takes place in a future in which humans have spread out to dozens of other planets, but all of these planets are the Wild West. Complete with floppy hats, gunfights on dusty plains, cattle rustlers, and train robberies. And twangy music. Lots of twangy music.

It's not a bad show, just very different from most sci-fi space shows. Which is probably why it's so popular: because of its originality. But it's also a little weird, so I can see why a big network would cancel a show like this, because they didn't "get it" or whatever. Personally, I could take or leave it, but I will go see the movie when it comes out.

And I'll probably see the inevitable sequels as well: Serenity 2; Serenity 3: Serenity; and Serenity to the Power of Serenity.

Get Your Rules Straight

I like board games. I also like game systems, i. e. sets of game components with which you can play multiple games. Although fancy, modern game systems such as Icehouse and the Piecepack are nice, old standbys such as an ordinary deck of playing cards or a set of dominoes have stood the test of time, and often allow one to enjoy playing games with people who aren't hardcore gamers.

The problem with these older game systems is that, with games having been passed down over time by word-of-mouth, and with games evolving as they spread from region to region, a single game often ends up with many subtle variations. If you ask a person to play a particular game with you, that person may say "Yes, I know how to play that game", but it turns out that the rules that you're familiar with differ slightly from the rules that the other person knows. So you have to negotiate on the finer points of the rules before you start playing. Or in the worst case, you don't negotiate on which rules to use until the differences arise during game play, by which point the two of you had already been making strategic decisions based on different rule sets.

When I learn a card game from a group of friends, I will usually take the time at some point afterwards to look up the rules in some sort of "official" reference. But there are multiple such references, and they do not always agree. For example, the rules for Gin Rummy as described at pagat.com differ slightly from those presented in Play According to Hoyle: Hoyle's Rules of Games in the area of scoring. Specifically, Hoyle specifies a Gin bonus and an undercut bonus of 25 points each, while the pagat page specifies a Gin bonus of 20 points and an undercut bonus of 10 points. The pagat page does, however, list the other option as one of several common variations.

However, I'd now like to turn your attention to dominoes. There is one dominoes game that I like in particular, in which a player scores points if, after playing a tile, the open ends of the structure all add up to a multiple of five. I have seen several names for this game, and several different variations as well. Let's take a tour, shall we?

• The Game Cabinet calls this game Five-Up, but lists Muggins and All Fives as alternate names. It states that the start player is determined before the draw, and that the first double played is a "spinner", i. e. the ends can be built off of. It does not state whether the ends of the spinner are counted for scoring before they have been built off of.


• The aforementioned Hoyle book calls this game Sniff, but uses the term "muggins" to refer to points scored. It states that the first player is determined by lot, independent of the draw. The first double played is a spinner, but can be played either endwise or crosswise; if played crosswise, the unsprouted sides do count for scoring.


• The Domino Plaza has rules for Muggins, in which the start player is determined before the draw, and there is no spinner, thus the layout always has only two ends. This site also has rules for The All Five game, also known as All Fives or Five Up, which it states is the same as Muggins except that all doubles played are spinners.


• The Macintosh shareware game Dominoes by Allgood Software has a game called Muggins, in which the start player is determined after the draw, based on whoever is holding the highest double. Also, the first double played is a spinner, but it behaves strangely. It is always played crosswise, but after its second side has sprouted, each of its ends does not count for scoring until sprouting.


• Last but not least, the Puremco company's Domino Rules page has separate rules for six different such games (assuming I haven't missed any): All Fives, Five-Up, Merry-Go-Round, Muggins, Seven-Toed Pete, and Sniff. I'm not going to bother to list the differences among them and the ones listed above, but suffice it to say that they're all slight variants of the same game, and each one lists several variations of itself as well.

I'm going to assume for now that the Puremco site has the canonical versions of all the game rules, since it is the most comprehensive, and doesn't claim that any two games are exactly the same but with different names. The company also publishes a book, called Puremco's Great Book of Domino Games, which presumably contains all the same game rules as on their Domino Rules web page. However, I suspect that the content of this book is exactly the same as that of Great Book of Domino Games, considering that the title, author, and page count are the same, though the latter book's cover price is $3.00 less. I'm guessing that they bought the publishing rights to the book, and then rebranded it.

So, the next time I want to play a dominoes game with friends, in which a player scores when the ends of the structure add up to a multiple of five, which one will I suggest? I have no idea. The one I'm most used to is the one in the computer game, but the rules for counting the ends of the spinner for scoring are weird, and aren't the same as any of the other rule sets listed above. The Hoyle rules for Sniff allow you to have the same effect by playing the spinner endwise, but it's up to the player whether to do so.

Maybe I'll just go alphabetically, and choose All Fives. Using Puremco's rules, of course.