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A Brief Look at Harnessing the Power of the Crowd to Drive Investment Decisions
A Brief Look at Harnessing the Power of the Crowd to Drive Investment Decisions
Disclaimer: None of this constitutes financial advice. I have no formal training or education in anything related to finance, accounting, investments, etc. Everything in this post is purely for entertainment. This post is going to be a bit longer than your average Reddit post. I have tried to make it interesting to read, or at the very least entertaining, and I would encourage you to read all of it. But if you just want to skip my pontifications and head straight to the pretty graphs, see the Results section. Estimated read time: 15 minutes.
Introduction
Some of you may have already seen my u/asx__bot. Also for those that missed it, here is what I have planned to do next with it (this image was entirely auto-generated). The u/asx__bot version evolved from several different things before it came to be in its current form. Although before we go any further, this write-up will not discuss the current ASX Bot. But instead, my experiences in a previous iteration where I tried to use sentiment analysis to build an investment portfolio. I will refer to this version as Bot 1.0 or otherwise just the bot. I will repeat this once again. This write-up will not focus on the existing u/asx__bot but instead a previous iteration I was working on. Initially, I decided to embark on this journey because I was inspired by this post here. Despite the applications being completely different, I was intrigued by the idea of using programming to augment investment decision making. Secondly, I was also somewhat inspired by this u/BigJimBeef post about doing proper due diligence and not just listening to what is most popular or what has 🚀🚀🚀 next to it. I was curious to find out what would happen if you just listened to the crowd hype. Lastly, I needed a real-world problem to practice several things I wanted to learn. If you are getting deja vu reading any of this, it is because I already posted some results from Bot 1.0 in a thread a few weeks ago that got like 20 upvotes. But it did not include a full write-up, it was kinda shit, and I deleted it.
Method
Let me preface this section by saying that Bot 1.0 was very stupid. But I am yet to scratch the surface of what may be possible with it. This was an early prototype, and it was more about seeing if what I wanted to do was technically feasible. The term bot is also quite disingenuous and gives it an air of sophistication that does not exist. In reality, the code looked like the Python version of this or this. But it operated like a fucking Rube Goldberg machine. I overwrote a lot of the code half by choice and half mistakenly. I should have done a better job with my version control, but I really had no plan coming back to this project, so I was being a bit careless. But since a few people were tagging me and wanting to get various tidbits of information I have picked it up again. I have learnt that people really ❤️ data. Which would explain why those Spotify yearly wrap-ups are so popular or why someone who can wrangle data to create reports for executives and such will have a long and successful career. Bot 1.0 begins by analysing sentiment for all comments over a given period. It uses a very robust library called VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner). This library determines how positive or negative a sentence is. From this data, the bot ranks which stocks more frequently appear in positive sentences and then creates a portfolio based around these. At the end of the given period, the bot then readjusts based on the data it has monitored over the previous period. That is it. As you can see, it is very primitive. I loaded it up with a modest sum of $100 million, I also set it up to take the top 20 shares of the given period. The period, in this case, was every calendar month.
You can see when shares get dropped in favour of the latest and greatest. You may even notice top performers getting dropped just because the bot did not consider them to be hyped up enough anymore. So with a starting sum of $100 million, the bot managed to double its money. Take that VDHG and VAS!
Discussion
I was honestly quite surprised. In this case, the crowd was not as stupid as you might believe. Initially, a part of me was expecting (and hoping) the bot would lose 50% to 100%, so I could conclude that listening to investment advice from this subreddit and other online forums (I am looking at you too HotCopper) is ill-fated. And it is in your best interest to just log out, leave it to the pros, and cop that S&P 500 ETF. But no matter how many times I tweaked settings and re-ran it, I never saw the bot finish any lower than a few percentage points and most of the time it was in the green. It reminds me of something a maths teacher told me, and that was that an individual is usually quite bad at estimating. But if you take the average of several estimates, you may be surprised with how accurate it is. An example of this is the classic competition where one must guess how many lollies there are in a jar. A strategy to win these competitions is to take an average of everyone's guesses. This assumes that most of those guesses are people trying to win. The same is true for this subreddit, this bot only works on the assumption that most people here are trying to make money, even if their portfolio says otherwise. I think that is a fair assumption though and when there is money on the line, people behave differently. The person who hypes XYZ in a thread every day (I may or may not be talking about u/SlaughterRain) would most likely only be bothered to do so because they rationally (or irrationally) believe their shares in XYZ will make them money. Even if XYZ is going nowhere anytime soon. To further tie this back to my original point, much like the lolly jar competitions, if you ask an individual to pick the top stock that they think will moon, it will probably be a dud. But if you could aggregate everyone's picks, the likelihood of making money goes up significantly. For Bot 1.0, the sentiment analysis seems to work best over four weeks. I tried periods of one to eight weeks. A period of one week was way too volatile, as the bot could not gauge sentiment nearly as well and it would be all over the place. Whereas eight weeks seemed too slow and it was way too late to the party. I will talk more about this in Limitations. Every time I did run it though, there have been some big gains but hardly many big losses. The biggest losses I have seen over any given interval were usually like 15% to 20%. The biggest gain I saw was a flukey triple bagger over a couple weeks or a month (APT related I think).
Limitations
Failing to Understand Nuance
I did not get time to do as much inspection of comment data as I would like. But I did see the bot producing a considerable amount of false positives and false negatives. A notable one was a sentence like “fuck yeah cunts! XYZ is going to the moon!”, which was associated with negative sentiment. Due to the words “fuck” and “cunt”. As Australians, I feel like either of those words can be positive depending on the context. For example, "fuck yeah cunt" compared to "fuck you cunt.” A free and open-source sentiment analysis library (like VADER) will expectedly fail in some instances at understanding comments made on an Australian investment forum focused on memey micro-cap stocks. There is also the issue of someone saying something like “fuck my life, I should have bought more XYZ.” This will be considered a negative sentence due to the tone. But is this really the case? The user is saying that most likely because the stock is performing well and they regret not getting more when it was cheaper. Because of this, it may be best to categorise comments from here myself. Then train a model on this data to predict the sentiment. Compared to just using a publically available library.
Sometimes the crowd is not always right. When people stop thinking for themselves, the house of cards falls down. If everyone here blindly believes XYZ is next to rocket because HypeBeast69420 said so, then the bot will crumble in on itself. But with Reddit and the Internet usually being a place of anonymousness and openness, it provides the perfect environment for people to speak their minds. Of which those same people may be less likely to do so in real life. Such as at a work meeting or during dinner with the extended family. On the Internet, for every HypeBeast69420, there is at least someone dying to prove them wrong.
Chasing Rainbows and Being Late to the Party
There was no guarantee Bot 1.0 would not liquidate its entire portfolio at a 50% loss to chase the latest and greatest hype. Then slowly lose more and more money as the rockets fall down to Earth. Repeating the process until it has $10 spare and can only trade pennies stocks. The rainbow chasing and volatility became a lot more pronounced when I used either a smaller fund size (three to five stocks) or made more frequent trades, i.e. making decisions off less data. But regardless, since the bot was always basing investment decisions off the previous weeks or months, it was guaranteed to be a little bit late. So at the moment, I have two ideas to combat this. The first idea is to have the bot leverage the crowd data as well as market data. So the bot might get a list of stocks that are generating interest, it then takes these stocks and uses market metrics to determine if it should buy or sell. For example, the penny miner that has shot up 50% in a week might not be a smart play. Although, when it comes to valuing a stock and deciding when to buy or not, there are many different schools of thought. Such as the Buffet-esque value investor who sifts through financials and actually does proper DD. The brah who makes sure his chakras are aligned before he bases his decision on what his tea leaf reading says. Or the chartist who creates their own take on some sort of modernist art and manages to rival the likes of a Basquiat or a Picasso. So deciding how to value stocks and what metrics to consider would require further thought. Which is not where my expertise lies. Now, the second idea is in contrast with the previous paragraph. The bot would purely be using the data generated by this sub to form its decisions. All the bot is doing is understanding what it is being told and then buying/selling accordingly. Which means efforts would need to be heavily concentrated in making sure sentiment is analysed correctly. More accurate sentiment analysis and greater comment volume will allow the bot to make decisions more accurately and more frequently. Trades could occur weekly, bi-weekly, or daily as opposed to monthly. The low volume of daily and weekly comment data during periods of 2020 was also an entire limitation in itself. But with the sharp increase in total comments being made, it seems my prayers are being answered.
Unrealistic and Simplified Trading
The buying/selling functionality was not very realistic. Much like a politician's Cayman Islands shell company, this bot was not paying any taxes. Furthermore, it was not paying any sort of brokerage fees. As mentioned above, the bot just liquidates its entire portfolio and then tries to rebalance its portfolio on the same day. Obviously, this is not very realistic. It is not looking at market depth or volume either. It just takes the open price of any given day and buys and sells at that price. The bot was just buying and selling shares of ASX listed companies. It was not involved in anything like short-selling, derivatives, or using leverage. Nor was it trading instruments like bonds, foreign currencies, cryptocurrencies, or ETFs. These may or may not be limitations depending on how you look at it. Furthermore, stuff like stock splits/consolidations and long-term trading halts (fucking DOU) really screwed with the bot. I have not implemented a way to handle stock splits or consolidations. So I just ignored companies that have had these during the 2020 period. There are probably a few more gotchas I have not considered either.
The Rollercoaster Year of 2020
Nine months of comment data is not that much in terms of financial markets. I would honestly love to have 10 to 20 years worth of data. Or even data leading up to the covid dip of last year. But this year was such a fluke in many respects too. Some shares lost about 30% of their value over a few weeks. But returned to where they were by the end of the year like nothing happened. On the other hand, others are still yet to recover from 2008, let alone 2020.
Determining Ticker Codes
I saw WOW coming up a lot at the start of the year. Which kind of made sense. Because during peak covid, supermarkets never had any specials but were selling like crazy and could barely keep up with demand. After looking into it a bit further, although there were a few mentions of Woolworths Limited, mainly it was just a lot of comments with people exclaiming “WOW”, a la Owen Wilson. In addition to this, when the sentiment analyser sees WOW, it sees this as the word wow. Which it considers very positive. So if someone is actually just referring to Woolworths Limited, it will skew the data positively regardless of the actual sentiment behind the comment. So I think I just ended up filtering out WOW. This was similar for acronyms like ATH (all-time high), UBI (universal basic income), and TGA (therapeutic goods administration). All of those three-letter acronyms are ticker codes used by ASX listed companies too. If you view the portfolio breakdown, you may even notice some acronyms I have missed.
I started this to practice a bit of Python and AWS. I am a bit of an all-rounder but machine learning and the science behind all of it is far from my area of expertise. If it helps, my knowledge is more so situated in the red circle here. But I spent more time reading about the other parts of the pyramid, then what I had set out to learn in the beginning. This was fun, but it could get quite tedious at times. And it exposed where my skills are lacking. I am also even further away from my area of expertise when it comes to investments and finance. Truth be told, I am a basic bitch retail investor. I make my investment decisions based on macro themes, ensuring a company and its directors are not complete shams, then I hold my rosary beads during each trade. Truth be told, I have put together 10-leg NRL multis with better DD than some of my investments in days gone past.
Slow Runtimes
The library that I was using to retrieve data from Yahoo Finance was incredibly slow, which I ended up having to cache a lot of this information. But retrieving comment history was even slower. To download all 200k comments (this number is probably 250k now) from this sub, it took about two hours. I also cached these comments too. But it put a bottleneck on my development because small changes in my code could render cached data useless. This slow speed was one of the reasons I had thrown in the towel. During Bot 1.0, I spent time looking at ways to speed it up. But I couldn't crack it.
Conclusion
I am at a crossroads with the development of this project. The current u/asx__bot is a simple extract/transform/load process with some sprinkles on top. But there seems to be a demand for some of the features that were present in Bot 1.0, such as sentiment analysis and market data. If this is the case, I will need to really nail down what I need, because some foundational design decisions will have to be made before going forward. I am becoming more convinced that the crowd can generate quite useful information. The Internet is Gutenberg 2.0. And like the Printing Revolution, less and less knowledge is being hoarded and controlled by the 0.1%. Instead, it is being disseminated amongst the masses. The real challenge for anyone, particularly myself, will be figuring out how to harness this increasingly decentralised knowledge.
The "monster lockers" come across as another step, like the elevators, in the "fake it" direction. A monster locker is a door with a small closet behind it where NPCs can be spawned and despawned out-of-sight, without any restrictions as to the number of NPCs that get spawned, or the spawn rate. Previously, the main driving direction has been for all NPCs to have a full life cycle, have a job at the station as a security guard, shop keeper, repair technician, etc, sleep in a hab and have free time to move around and make use of the facilities. The agent system of Quantum holds the promise of extending this plan to the greater universe, shipping people, pirates and traders around the 'verse, simulated at high efficiency when out of a player's scope, but still moving each individual NPC as an individual agent. Potentially, a player would be able to follow any individual NPC, e.g. a trader as they join the crew of their trade ship, take off and fly somewhere else, land and go about their business in general as they move around the 'verse. I dearly hope we would even be able to sneak aboard the NPC trader ship and see the crew go about their full lives aboard the ship as they run their trade route! Maybe even reveal ourselves as a stow-away and have an impromptu adventure along with the traders of the previously non-descript NPC ship, depending on the personalities of the captain and the crew.
CIG Chad McKinney@CIG_ChadMcKinney The spawn lockers are indeed going to be part of the long term solution of the game, but there are some key details you may not be aware of. First, there is an assumption here that the entities spawned by these lockers are completely blank slates and when they despawn will never be seen again. This isn't going to be the case for all of the NPCs as there's at least two mechanism we are going to use to which would result in a similar behavior to what you are looking for. First, there will be a class of NPCs of higher importance that will have some amount of virtual simulation even when no players around. These NPCs could be part of a mission for example, and their schedules and movement through the verse will be simulated in the backend. When you encounter once of these they may spawn or leave an area via a spawn locker depending on the circumstance, and you will likely see them again later. Another case is that the backend will actually track entities that have been created via a character archtype creation service, and each of these entities will have various properties and tags that can be used to pattern match against future requests. That means for example if you possibly steal something from a shop or try to mug somebody and security gets called in dynamically, there's a chance the same security officer may bust you later or get called in for back up at a traffic stop. Given the scope of the world we are trying to create it would be actually impossibly to simulate all their schedules and every detail of their life, but we can split the difference by using a combination of dynamic creation, virtual simulation, and pattern matched reuse to bring the kind of gameplay you are looking for. Spawn closets/spawn lockers are simply a way to get entities into/out a place, but they aren't the progenitus of that entity in our game world, instead the character archetype system is what will track these, so their scheduler may have them board a train, go to work, come back, get dinner, go to sleep etc.. and yes in some of those movement points there maybe be a spawn locker involved, but it doesn't mean that every NPC you see is only probabilistic. The idea is that quanta and the other systems like the dynamic mission system will be able to use spawn lockers to facilitate to help move entities throughout the world, and when there are surges necessary (security backup etc...) have a way to get NPCs in the necessary areas without breaking immersion. Also keep in mind the spawn lockers won't be the only way this can happen, as when you're out in the middle of space or in a random area on a planet other mechnisms can be used, like QT spawned NPCs or drop ships.
Will you by any chance go back and fix all the Known Issues?
Do you think its possible to make more of an effort to fix all the game breaking bugs before patches go live, or asap? It stresses me when the game breaking bugs interfere with the gameplay, and or cause me to crash the ship and have to reclaim it.
CIG Chad McKinney@CIG_ChadMcKinney It is always a balance we have to strike between bug fixing and feature development (and generally getting movement towards a 1.0 release). We could stop what we are doing and really focus on wiping out the bugs, but then the next patch would be very light on features. Also, when you work on new features often bugs can re-occur or the system that had the bug is modified or even removed, so the issue is you're always aiming at a moving target. Games that don't have to support a live product have the advantage that they can let things be broken in various ways while they're finishing the game and allow room for flux. Towards the end you then have a big push to polish and finalize things off (and often land with a day 1 patch to boot). For live games though you have to keep things afloat while simultaneously try to keep moving forward, so in the end it's just a balance and the more you focus on bug fixing the longer your dev goals may take.
Watching this interesting Apache Foundation video today and every were its like Ignite Cache, which in my brain changed into iCache as Ignite seems to do a lot of the things iCache is describe to be taking care of. Will iCache sit on top of some opensource tech or is it completely homegrown?
CIG Chad McKinney@CIG_ChadMcKinney No the i in icache is not for ignite, it is for item. This is really just a historical anecdotal reason more than anything (There's 2 hard problems in computer science: Naming things, Cache Invalidation, and off-by-one errors). In the original implementation of persistence so-called "items" were the only thing that were stored (weapons, armor, power plants, etc..), so ecache for entity cache may have beeen more prescient, but icache has stuck and so it goes. Now to answer your question, will it sit on top of open source? Yes and no. First I'll be a bit more particular and point out that technically the icache service fleet is one part of a larger ecosystem of services and gameside systems for the full global persistence and server streaming architecture. So if we are to just talk about icache itself, then largely it is a custom written solution. That said the backend team does use some open source libraries so it isn't entirely proprietary, but it is definitely not Ignite from Apache. However if you pull back further and look at the wider ecosystem you can definitely find tech that is built on open source technology such as Kafka, Redis, Mongodb, etc... and we are also looking to move parts of our backend to a cloud native architecture including the use of grpc. There's a ton of work that has gone into these projects and where they make sense we will definitely leverage them, though there will always be times that the best solution will be something we will need to make ourselves for a project as unique as Star Citizen.
SSOCS and the ability to populate the world with many locations (caves, mining pits, outposts, settlements, refineries, etc...)
Did SSOCS not work as intented? Do we need to wait for SSOCS v2? Are the assets and tools for procedural location generation not ready yet? Will this stuff be built into the next version of Planet Tech (so that you can "paint" on procedural made settlements)? Have you allocated these resources elsewhere because it's not a priority? Are you waiting for the actor team to build in procedurally generated people to exist within these locations?
CIG Chad McKinney@CIG_ChadMcKinney SSOCS did work as intended and Tony's point is still valid. There are some other reasons why we haven't pushed the envelope on the number of these satellite areas, including work done on the procedural generation tools to make that content interesting and improve the pipeline for authoring it. The move to icache will also help us move in that direction since we can pre-seed the database with the content and not have to store it locally in memory on every DGS like we do now with the current prototype backend ssocs is using.
With a number of features being held back bc of prerequisites, how are resources being used to in the meantime..?
With a number of features being (from my understanding) held back bc of prerequisites (like iCash holding up server messing, Piro, Physical Inventory, etc), how are resources working on the features relinent on said prerequisites being allocated? Are Devs still able to work on them, or do they require the prerequisites to be fully/partially completed first..? If they latter, where are these resources being allocated..? Are they working on something new while they wait or something else. Just curious on how the difficulty on developing this game's technology is affecting the ability to work on other features. Thx
CIG Chad McKinney@CIG_ChadMcKinney Every case is different so there isn't a single answer. In some cases the teams are just working on something else, however there are places where certain parts become available for internal usage and testing so that features can start to be developed against it even though the entirety isn't ready for release.
To what degree is Quantum in operation if at all? I would assume there must be some interaction of it for testing etc. many thanks
CIG Chad McKinney@CIG_ChadMcKinney It is in heavy development, in fact I just saw a really cool demo one of the designers threw together to show off progress, however we aren't ready to show that publicly yet. More to come!
will this be connected to a visual map rework on the mobiglass? based on the building blocks set up?
CIG Chad McKinney@CIG_ChadMcKinney There won't be a full visualization or availability of everything quanta is simulating available to players, though we definitely are wanting to open up certain parts of this. The thing to consider is that it both breaks immersion if we just expose everything (how is it that you know all the movement and behavior of an entire universe?) and also it breaks gameplay related to data and exploration. So while we want to try and help players understand the relationships between the underlying simulation and the side effects that result, we don't just want to hand you a raw quantum feed.
I have been flying my Carrack and logging out in space, on planets never having to go to a station BUT every few days my ship and I end up in the Stanton Sun and not where we left off at. Is that part of iCache? We should be able to do this at this stage.
CIG Chad McKinney@CIG_ChadMcKinney icache and global persistence should definitely help with the bed logout and give us the architecture we need to go beyond that. The problem with the system now is that since we don't really have global persistence yet there's a kind of rube goldberg machine to save off and reconstruct the parts involved to make it work. With global persistence that goes away and instead of using a very round about mechanism everything is persisted spatially, so it becomes the common case.
Do any of the devs in SC use rubber duck debugging? If so what do you use as a rubber duck? I know it's not particularly related to SC, but may generate some fun conversations.
CIG Chad McKinney@CIG_ChadMcKinney Mark Abent famously has a literal rubber duck on his desk for exactly this! But yeah rubber ducking is very common and often times I'll have someone call me or walk over and ask me a question only to stop themselves halfway through and say "thanks!" then walk off.
Will the new elevator panels support "Quick-Press F"?
The current inner thought system has a function where the top most alternative is a default that gets selected automatically if you quick-press F. This means you don't need to click any option at all, just quickly activating, then releasing F will select the default. This is very useful, in particular for things like calling an elevator. However, the new elevator panels do not seem to support this feature. Will it be added in the rework?
CIG Chad McKinney@CIG_ChadMcKinney This is a consequence of moving to a UI based implementation instead of the interaction system which has this quick interact feature. The UI framework could have this added optionally, partially it is a design question, and then there's a bit of though that would need to go into how you dictate the default choice, then the existing implementations would need to be updated, but it is possible. I may run it by the UI team and see what they think.
You're on fire this morning.
CIG Chad McKinney@CIG_ChadMcKinney Still Sunday night here, I will defy Monday as long as I can! Thanks!
The Future of Star Citizen in Relation to PlayeOrg Interaction
In the future, will we be able to buy/rent hangars/apartments/areas in the verse for ourselves or our organizations?
Buying and renting spaces has long been part of our vision, though icache and global persistence are key to make that possible.
have there been any changes to these ideas and if so, could you tell us what they are?
Yes I'm sure there have been changes over the years depending on who you asked and what quote you are referencing, so it would be hard to say exactly. That said if I could generalize it I would say that with procedural plants and global persistence we've afforded ourselves the possibility of being much more ambitious with these ideas than was originally thought possible.
I haven't been in the community for long but its clear that planets are still not orbiting each other. I heard that there are some blockers that need to get removed before starting this. But I never got full detail on what needs to get done for planets to start orbiting. Is this also to do with icache and server meshing being needed to support this?
CIG Chad McKinney@CIG_ChadMcKinney Hey, here's at least one thing I get to say at least does not depend on icache haha. No in the end there's many smaller issues that crop up when you turn on orbiting (which we've been able to do for years actually!), as it causes problems in many gameplay systems. One example: Navigation. Imagine you want to plot route to from a satellite to an outpost on a moon across the solar system. Depending on your ship this may take quite a while and by the time you get part way through the jump the route you took can become invalid as it may be blocked by something that moved into view. This isn't an insurmountable problem and we have plans on how to deal with it, but we just haven't done the work yet.
This is something that is mostly relevant to long distance travel ( i.e. travel between planets ). The simple solution would be to put the arrival coordinates at the planet to the outskirts of the planetary group. This would also have the benefit of allowing more direct travel to moons, since the planet would not block half the system. However, if you’d want to reach the planet you’ll have to do a second small jump.
CIG Chad McKinney@CIG_ChadMcKinney Everyone is bike shedding way too much on the navigation issue
I already said we have a solution to the navigation issue (also people are not really understanding the full problem which is more complicated than you realize considering routes with many intermediate jumps)
I said it was one example, not the only problem, and there are many other bugs that crop up when orbits are enabled.
The bugs are solvable, we just have prioritized other work.
A few random questions regarding the pop-ups: Are these missions only available to accept > before the popup goes away? Or, do these missions show up in the Contract > Manager? Can we get an option to "hide" these pop-ups if we > want to ignore them? Are there any plans to improve the HUD pop-ups/notifications for contracts etc.?
CIG Chad McKinney@CIG_ChadMcKinney The service beacons and contracts are something we do plan on revisiting including better handling for the notifications. We have scheduled work for a new notification system that will allow for queueing into a mobiglas app so that we don't have to just rely on spamming players, as well as have configurable filters for muting types of notifications. The service beacons and other gameplay systems will be ported over to this new system and hopefully you'll get some peace and quiet!
Why can't we use our Mobiglass when in range to spawn or store ships?! This seems like a common sense, value add that exists today with rental car companies.
CIG Chad McKinney@CIG_ChadMcKinney There are plans to address the state of spawning and hangars including from where these operations can be invoked. I don't want to go into too many details yet, as I'm not entirely certain what has been made public, but the goal is to improve here.
Quantum and Quanta. Is the 9 to 1 NPC vs player ratio no more?
In the recent AMA with Chris Roberts, Todd Pappy and Tony Zurovec, Mr Zurovec said, regarding Quantum and Quanta: "We’ve spent a lot of time and effort optimizing the simulation and are now doing tests with as many as two million quanta, but it looks like we won’t need more than 100K per system to get the desired effects." Does this mean that it is not neccessary to have a 9 to 1 NPC/Player ratio? What will happen if there are 100K players in a system (not impossible, specially in the first days after official launch)? Will players be able to take over the economy in that system since there are as many players as Quanta? And how will the random encounters work if the NPC/player ratio is no longer 9 to 1?
CIG Chad McKinney@CIG_ChadMcKinney What you consider the ratio is going to get very fuzzy because of quanta, probabilistic generation, virtual AI, and missions. In some ways you could view it as way beyond that ratio, just depending on what you count as an NPC.
Understanding 64-bit coordinate system and possible integration with server meshing
Do the planet and the bottle share the same coordinate format?
Our coordinates are implemented using a nested zone system where a zone host can be a celestial body, a ship, a transit car, or a space station. A zone host itself is an entity so has coordinates in the zone that host it, all the way up the tree until you hit the root zone which is the only zone host that contains itself (and never moves). As entities move through the game they will enteexit various zones and their coordinate will update accordingly. If a zone host moves all the hosted entities "move" relative to it (though technically they don't move at all because their position is just relative). Really you can think of an entity existing in a tree of zone hosts in the world where it's absolute world position is the accumulation of the transforms of each zone host above it with its own position added at the end. We don't usually access t his world position in code as usually gameplay is local and therefor most often is dealt with in a single zone space.
Then in a future will come new star systems. How will be managed to not mix coordinates? Each one starting in 0,0,0 at main star center and a code preceding those coordinates for each system?.
Each solar system will use the full 64bit range, and we will use a unique zone for each of these solar systems to differentiate coordinates from various systems.
Last question and more important. Is there any theory or plans in taking advantage of server meshing like technology to improve/susbtitute the 64 bit tech?
With our zone system implementation this is not necessary.
List of Spotify/Last.fm stats websites (and not just stats) 2: Electric Boogaloo
This has been long time coming. Many new sites popped up, many old were discontinued. I see no point in updating the last post that is over a year old now. So I created this new one.
Notes
I definitely forgot some, some I might not even know about. Just comment or DM me those sites and I add them in edits. More than once I use the phrase "data different from Last.fm". That means, that the data site/app shows about your listening are not "clean". Let's take Top artist in 6 months as an example. Last.fm takes how many songs by certain artist you heard in 6 months and shows the artists in descending order. Artist you listened to 50 times will be over the artist you listened to 49 times and so on. Spotify has different approach and uses some algorithm to calculate Top artists, where the amount of songs you heard is not the only parameter. I don't know the algorithm but I guess user interaction (like how many times you search for certain artist, did you like the artist or not, etc.) is taken in account too. That's why artist A with 50 songs will always be over artist B with 40 songs when using Last.fm data, but it can be switched when using Spotify data. Mobile friendly means the site is optimized for smartphones. Tested on Google Chrome for Android.
Spotify
Sites, apps and programs that use your Spotify account, Spotify API or both. Spotify sites: Obscurify: Tells you how unique you music taste is in compare to other Obscurify users. Also shows some recommendations. Mobile friendly. Skiley: Web app to better manage your playlists and discover new music. This has so many functions and really the only thing I miss is search field for when you are managing playlists. You can take any playlist you "own" and order it by many different rules (track name, album name, artist name, BPM, etc.), or just randomly shuffle it (say bye to bad Spotify shuffle). You can also normalize it. For the other functions you don't even need the rights to edit the playlist. Those consists of splitting playlist, filtering out song by genre or year to new playlist, creating similar playlists or exporting it to CFG, CSV, JSON, TXT or XML. You can also use it to discover music based on your taste and it has a stats section - data different from Last.fm. Also, dark mode and mobile friendly. Sort your music: Lets you sort your playlist by all kinds of different parameters such as BPM, artist, length and more. Similar to Skiley, but it works as an interactive table with songs from selected playlist. Run BPM: Filters playlists based on parameters like BPM, Energy, etc. Great visualized with colorful sliders. Only downside - shows not even half of my playlists. Mobile friendly. Fylter.in: Sort playlist by BMP, loudness, length, etc and export to Spotify Spotify Charts: Daily worldwide charts from Spotify. Mobile friendly Kaleidosync: Spotify visualizer. I would personally add epilepsy warning. Duet: Darthmouth College project. Let's you compare your streaming data to other people. Only downside is, those people need to be using the site too, so you have to get your friends to log in. Mobile friendly. Discover Quickly: Select any playlist and you will be welcomed with all the songs in a gridview. Hover over song to hear the best part. Click on song to dig deeper or save the song. Dubolt: Helps you discover new music. Select an artist/song to view similar ones. Adjust result by using filters such as tempo, popularity, energy and others. SongSliders: Sort your playlists, create new one, find new music. Also can save Discover weekly every monday. Stats for Spotify: Shows you Top tracks and Top artists, lets you compare them to last visit. Data different from Last.fm. Mobile friendly Record Player: This site is crazy. It's a Rube Goldberg Machine. You take a picture (any picture) Google Cloud Vision API will guess what it is. The site than takes Google's guess and use it to search Spotify giving you the first result to play. Mobile friendly. Author of this site has to pay for the Google Cloud if the site gets more than 1000 requests a month! I assume this post is gonna blow up and the limit will be easily reached. Author suggests to remix the app and set it up with your own Google Cloud to avoid this. If your are able to do so, do it please. Or reach out to the author on Twitter and donate a little if you can. Spotify Playlist Randomizer: Site to randomize order of the songs in playlist. There are 3 shuffling methods you can choose from. Mobile friendly. Replayify: Another site showing you your Spotify data. Also lets you create a playlist based on preset rules that cannot be changed (Top 5 songs by Top 20 artists from selected time period/Top 50 songs from selected time period). UI is nice and clean. Mobile friendly, data different from Last.fm. Visualify: SImpler replayify without the option to create playlists. Your result can be shared with others. Mobile friendly, data different from Last.fm. The Church Of Koen: Collage generator tool to create collages sorted by color and turn any picture to collage. Works with Last.fm as well. Playedmost: Site showing your Spotify data in nice grid view. Contains Top Artists, New Artists, Top Tracks and New Tracks. Data different from Last.fm, mobile friendly. musictaste.space: Shows you some stats about your music habits and let's you compare them to others. You can also create Covid-19 playlist :) Playlist Manager: Select two (or more) playlists to see in a table view which songs are shared between them and which are only in one of them. You can add songs to playlists too. Boil the Frog: Choose two artists and this site will create playlists that slowly transitions between one artist's style to the other. SpotifyTV: Great tool for searching up music videos of songs in your library and playlists. Spotify Dedup and Spotify Organizer: Both do the same - remove duplicates. Spotify Dedup is mobile friendly. Smarter Playlists: It lets you build a complex program by assembling components to create new playlists. This seems like a very complex and powerful tool. JBQX: Do you remember plug.dj? Well this is same thing, only using Spotify instead of YouTube as a source for music. You can join room and listen to music with other people, you all decide what will be playing, everyone can add a song to queue. Spotify Buddy: Let's you listen together with other people. All can control what's playing, all can listen on their own devices or only one device can be playing. You don't need to have Spotify to control the queue! In my opinion it's great for parties as a wireless aux cord. Mobile friendly. Opslagify: Shows how much space would one need to download all of their Spotify playlists as .mp3s. Whisperify: Spotify game! Music quiz based on what you are listening to. Do you know your music? Mobile friendly. Popularity Contest: Another game. Two artists, which one is more popular according to Spotify data? Mobile friendly, doesn't require Spotify login. Spotify Apps: uTrack: Android app which generates playlist from your top tracks. Also shows top artists, tracks and genres - data different from Last.fm. Statistics for Spotify: uTrack for iOS. I don't own iOS device so I couldn't test it. iOS users, share your opinions in comments please :). Spotify Programs: Spicetify: Spicetify used to be a skin for Rainmeter. You can still use it as such, but the development is discontinued. You will need to have Rainmeter installed if you want to try. These days it works as a series of PowerShell commands. New and updated version here. Spicetify lets you redesign Spotify desktop client and add new functions to it like Trash Bin, Shuffle+, Christian Mode etc. It doesn't work with MS Store app, .exe Spotify client is required. Library Bridger: The main purpose of this program is to create Spotify playlists from your locally saved songs. But it has some extra functions, check the link.
Last.fm
Sites, apps and programs using Last.fm account, Last.fm API or both. What is Last.fm?
Last.fm is a site for scrobbling. Scrobbling means saving every song you listen to in chronological order. The ultimate purpose is to end up with a huge history of your music listening. The raw data can be then used to visualize you listening habits, find new music you might like and many more.
Last.fm sites: Last.fm Mainstream Calculator: How mainstream is music you listen to? Mobile friendly. My Music Habits: Shows different graphs about how many artists, tracks and albums from selected time period comes from your overall top artists/tracks/albums. Explr.fm: Where are the artists you listen to from? This site shows you just that on interactive world map. Descent: The best description I can think of is music dashboard. Shows album art of currently playing song along with time and weather. Semi-automatic Last.fm scrobbler: One of the many scrobblers out there. You can scrobble along with any other Last.fm user. The Universal Scrobbler: One of the best manual scrobblers. Mobile friendly. Open Scrobbler: Another manual scrobbler. Mobile friendly Vinyl Scrobbler: If you listen to vinyl and use Last.fm, this is what you need. Last.fm collage generator, Last.fm top albums patchwork generator and yet another different Last.fm collage generator: Sites to make collages based on your Last.fm data. The last one is mobile friendly. The Church Of Koen: Collage generator tool to create collages sorted by color and turn any picture to collage. Works with Spotify as well. Musicorum: So far the best tool for generating collages based on Last.fm data that I ever seen. Grid up to 20x20 tiles and other styles, some of which resemble very well official Spotify collages that Spotify generates at the end of the year. Everything customizable and even supports Instagram story format. Mobile friendly. Nicholast.fm: Simple site for stats and recommendations. Mobile friendly. Scatter.fm: Creates graph from your scrobbles that includes every single scrobble. Lastwave: Creates a wave graph from your scrobbles. Mobile friendly. Artist Cloud: Creates artist cloud image from you scrobbles. Mobile friendly. Last.fm Tools: Lets you generate Tag Timeline, Tag Cloud, Artist Timeline and Album Charter. Mobile friendly. Last Chart: This site shows different types of beautiful graphs visualizing your Last.fm data. Graph types are bubble, force, map, pack, sun, list, cloud and stream. Mobile friendly. Sergei.app: Very nice looking graphs. Mobile friendly. Last.fm Time Charts: Generates charts from your Last.fm data. Sadly it seems that it only supports artists, not albums or tracks. ZERO Charts: Generates Billboard like charts from Last.fm data. Requires login, mobile friendly. Skihaha Stats: Another great site for viewing different Last.fm stats. Jakeledoux: What are your Last.fm friends listening to right now? Mobile friendly. Last History: View your cumulative listening history. Mobile friendly. Paste my taste: Generates short text describing your music taste. Last.fm to CSV: Exports your scrobbles to CSV format. Mobile friendly. Pr.fm: Syncs your scrobbles to your Strava activity descriptions as a list based on what you listened to during a run or biking session, etc. (description by u/mturi, I don't use Strava, so I have no idea how does it work :)) Last.fm apps: Scroball for Last.fm: An Android app I use for scrobbling, when I listen to something else than Spotify. Web Scrobbler: Google Chrome and Firefox extension scrobbler. Last.fm programs: Last.fm Scrubbler WPF: My all time favourite manual scrobbler for Last.fm. You can scrobbler manually, from another user, from database (I use this rather than Vinyl Scrobbler when I listen to vinyls) any other sources. It can also generate collages, generate short text describing your music taste and other extra functions. Last.fm Bulk Edit: Userscript, Last.fm Pro is required. Allows you to bulk edit your scrobbles. Fix wrong album/track names or any other scrobble parameter easily.
Edits log
I'll be keeping a track here of what got added when and who suggested it. I will try to add new suggestions once a day. Note that there is this exact same post on lastfm (link), so some suggestions will be from there 20.7.2020 Web Scrobbler - u/hjbardenhagen Musicorum - u/Maath__ Last.fm Time Charts - u/pidiy8133 ZERO Charts - u/TacoPires Playedmost - u/webnerd 23.7.2020 Run BPM - u/mturi Pr.fm - u/mturi Shikara Stats - u/routhwick Spotify Buddy - found myself here Updated Spicetify description on behalf of u/ig919 29.7.2020 Fylter.in - u/TundraBoy94 Dubolt: u/TundraBoy94 Last.fm Bulk Edit - u/Rudey24 23.8.2020 musictaste.space - u/Emilia_88 7.9.2020 Opslagify - found myself here SongSliders - found myself here The Church of Koen - u/Koen_Mang
List of Spotify/Last.fm stats websites (and not just stats) 2: Electric Boogaloo
This has been long time coming. Many new sites popped up, many old were discontinued. I see no point in updating the last post that is over a year old now. So I created this new one.
Notes
I definitely forgot some, some I might not even know about. Just comment or DM me those sites and I add them in edits. More than once I use the phrase "data different from Last.fm". That means, that the data site/app shows about your listening are not "clean". Let's take Top artist in 6 months as an example. Last.fm takes how many songs by certain artist you heard in 6 months and shows the artists in descending order. Artist you listened to 50 times will be over the artist you listened to 49 times and so on. Spotify has different approach and uses some algorithm to calculate Top artists, where the amount of songs you heard is not the only parameter. I don't know the algorithm but I guess user interaction (like how many times you search for certain artist, did you like the artist or not, etc.) is taken in account too. That's why artist A with 50 songs will always be over artist B with 40 songs when using Last.fm data, but it can be switched when using Spotify data. Mobile friendly means the site is optimized for smartphones. Tested on Google Chrome for Android.
Spotify
Sites, apps and programs that use your Spotify account, Spotify API or both. Spotify sites: Obscurify: Tells you how unique you music taste is in compare to other Obscurify users. Also shows some recommendations. Mobile friendly. Skiley: Web app to better manage your playlists and discover new music. This has so many functions and really the only thing I miss is search field for when you are managing playlists. You can take any playlist you "own" and order it by many different rules (track name, album name, artist name, BPM, etc.), or just randomly shuffle it (say bye to bad Spotify shuffle). You can also normalize it. For the other functions you don't even need the rights to edit the playlist. Those consists of splitting playlist, filtering out song by genre or year to new playlist, creating similar playlists or exporting it to CFG, CSV, JSON, TXT or XML. You can also use it to discover music based on your taste and it has a stats section - data different from Last.fm. Also, dark mode and mobile friendly. Sort your music: Lets you sort your playlist by all kinds of different parameters such as BPM, artist, length and more. Similar to Skiley, but it works as an interactive table with songs from selected playlist. Run BPM: Filters playlists based on parameters like BPM, Energy, etc. Great visualized with colorful sliders. Only downside - shows not even half of my playlists. Mobile friendly. Fylter.in: Sort playlist by BMP, loudness, length, etc and export to Spotify Spotify Charts: Daily worldwide charts from Spotify. Mobile friendly Kaleidosync: Spotify visualizer. I would personally add epilepsy warning. Duet: Darthmouth College project. Let's you compare your streaming data to other people. Only downside is, those people need to be using the site too, so you have to get your friends to log in. Mobile friendly. Discover Quickly: Select any playlist and you will be welcomed with all the songs in a gridview. Hover over song to hear the best part. Click on song to dig deeper or save the song. Dubolt: Helps you discover new music. Select an artist/song to view similar ones. Adjust result by using filters such as tempo, popularity, energy and others. SongSliders: Sort your playlists, create new one, find new music. Also can save Discover weekly every monday. Stats for Spotify: Shows you Top tracks and Top artists, lets you compare them to last visit. Data different from Last.fm. Mobile friendly Record Player: This site is crazy. It's a Rube Goldberg Machine. You take a picture (any picture) Google Cloud Vision API will guess what it is. The site than takes Google's guess and use it to search Spotify giving you the first result to play. Mobile friendly. Author of this site has to pay for the Google Cloud if the site gets more than 1000 requests a month! I assume this post is gonna blow up and the limit will be easily reached. Author suggests to remix the app and set it up with your own Google Cloud to avoid this. If your are able to do so, do it please. Or reach out to the author on Twitter and donate a little if you can. Spotify Playlist Randomizer: Site to randomize order of the songs in playlist. There are 3 shuffling methods you can choose from. Mobile friendly. Replayify: Another site showing you your Spotify data. Also lets you create a playlist based on preset rules that cannot be changed (Top 5 songs by Top 20 artists from selected time period/Top 50 songs from selected time period). UI is nice and clean. Mobile friendly, data different from Last.fm. Visualify: Simpler replayify without the option to create playlists. Your result can be shared with others. Mobile friendly, data different from Last.fm. The Church Of Koen: Collage generator tool to create collages sorted by color and turn any picture to collage. Works with Last.fm as well. Playedmost: Site showing your Spotify data in nice grid view. Contains Top Artists, New Artists, Top Tracks and New Tracks. Data different from Last.fm, mobile friendly. musictaste.space: Shows you some stats about your music habits and let's you compare them to others. You can also create Covid-19 playlist :) Playlist Manager: Select two (or more) playlists to see in a table view which songs are shared between them and which are only in one of them. You can add songs to playlists too. Boil the Frog: Choose to artists and this site will create playlists that slowly transitions between one artist's style to the other. SpotifyTV: Great tool for searching up music videos of songs in your library and playlists. Spotify Dedup and Spotify Organizer: Both do the same - remove duplicates. Spotify Dedup is mobile friendly. Smarter Playlists: It lets you build a complex program by assembling components to create new playlists. This seems like a very complex and powerful tool. JBQX: Do you remember plug.dj? Well this is same thing, only using Spotify instead of YouTube as a source for music. You can join room and listen to music with other people, you all decide what will be playing, everyone can add a song to queue. Spotify Buddy: Let's you listen together with other people. All can control what's playing, all can listen on their own devices or only one device can be playing. You don't need to have Spotify to control the queue! In my opinion it's great for parties as a wireless aux cord. Mobile friendly. Opslagify: Shows how much space would one need to download all of their Spotify playlists as .mp3s. Whisperify: Spotify game! Music quiz based on what you are listening to. Do you know your music? Mobile friendly. Popularity Contest: Another game. Two artists, which one is more popular according to Spotify data? Mobile friendly, doesn't require Spotify login. Spotify Apps: uTrack: Android app which generates playlist from your top tracks. Also shows top artists, tracks and genres - data different from Last.fm. Statistics for Spotify: uTrack for iOS. I don't own iOS device so I couldn't test it. iOS users, share your opinions in comments please :). Spotify Programs: Spicetify: Spicetify used to be a skin for Rainmeter. You can still use it as such, but the development is discontinued. You will need to have Rainmeter installed if you want to try. These days it works as a series of PowerShell commands. New and updated version here. Spicetify lets you redesign Spotify desktop client and add new functions to it like Trash Bin, Shuffle+, Christian Mode etc. It doesn't work with MS Store app, .exe Spotify client is required. Library Bridger: The main purpose of this program is to create Spotify playlists from your locally saved songs. But it has some extra functions, check the link.
Last.fm
Sites, apps and programs using Last.fm account, Last.fm API or both. Last.fm sites: Last.fm Mainstream Calculator: How mainstream is music you listen to? Mobile friendly. My Music Habits: Shows different graphs about how many artists, tracks and albums from selected time period comes from your overall top artists/tracks/albums. Explr.fm: Where are the artists you listen to from? This site shows you just that on interactive world map. Descent: The best description I can think of is music dashboard. Shows album art of currently playing song along with time and weather. Semi-automatic Last.fm scrobbler: One of the many scrobblers out there. You can scrobble along with any other Last.fm user. The Universal Scrobbler: One of the best manual scrobblers. Mobile friendly. Open Scrobbler: Another manual scrobbler. Mobile friendly Vinyl Scrobbler: If you listen to vinyl and use Last.fm, this is what you need. Last.fm collage generator, Last.fm top albums patchwork generator and yet another different Last.fm collage generator: Sites to make collages based on your Last.fm data. The last one is mobile friendly. The Church Of Koen: Collage generator tool to create collages sorted by color and turn any picture to collage. Works with Spotify as well. Musicorum: So far the best tool for generating collages based on Last.fm data that I ever seen. Grid up to 20x20 tiles and other styles, some of which resemble very well official Spotify collages that Spotify generates at the end of the year. Everything customizable and even supports Instagram story format. Mobile friendly. Nicholast.fm: Simple site for stats and recommendations. Mobile friendly. Scatter.fm: Creates graph from your scrobbles that includes every single scrobble. Lastwave: Creates a wave graph from your scrobbles. Mobile friendly. Artist Cloud: Creates artist cloud image from you scrobbles. Mobile friendly. Last.fm Tools: Lets you generate Tag Timeline, Tag Cloud, Artist Timeline and Album Charter. Mobile friendly. Last Chart: This site shows different types of beautiful graphs visualizing your Last.fm data. Graph types are bubble, force, map, pack, sun, list, cloud and stream. Mobile friendly. Sergei.app: Very nice looking graphs. Mobile friendly. Last.fm Time Charts: Generates charts from your Last.fm data. Sadly it seems that it only supports artists, not albums or tracks. ZERO Charts: Generates Billboard like charts from Last.fm data. Requires login, mobile friendly. Skihaha Stats: Another great site for viewing different Last.fm stats. Jakeledoux: What are your Last.fm friends listening to right now? Mobile friendly. Last History: View your cumulative listening history. Mobile friendly. Paste my taste: Generates short text describing your music taste. Last.fm to CSV: Exports your scrobbles to CSV format. Mobile friendly. Pr.fm: Syncs your scrobbles to your Strava activity descriptions as a list based on what you listened to during a run or biking session, etc. (description by u/mturi, I don't use Strava, so I have no idea how does it work :)) Last.fm apps: Scroball for Last.fm: An Android app I use for scrobbling, when I listen to something else than Spotify. Web Scrobbler: Google Chrome and Firefox extension scrobbler. Last.fm programs: Last.fm Scrubbler WPF: My all time favourite manual scrobbler for Last.fm. You can scrobbler manually, from another user, from database (I use this rather than Vinyl Scrobbler when I listen to vinyls) any other sources. It can also generate collages, generate short text describing your music taste and other extra functions. Last.fm Bulk Edit: Userscript, Last.fm Pro is required. Allows you to bulk edit your scrobbles. Fix wrong album/track names or any other scrobble parameter easily.
Edits log
I'll be keeping a track here of what got added when and who suggested it. I will try to add new suggestions once a day. Note that there is this exact same post on spotify (link), so some suggestions will be from there 20.7.2020 Web Scrobbler - u/hjbardenhagen Musicorum - u/Maath__ Last.fm Time Charts - u/pidiy8133 ZERO Charts - u/TacoPires Playedmost - u/webnerd 23.7.2020 Run BPM - u/mturi Pr.fm - u/mturi Shikara Stats - u/routhwick Spotify Buddy - found myself here Updated Spicetify description on behalf of u/ig919 29.7.2020 Fylter.in - u/TundraBoy94 Dubolt: u/TundraBoy94 Last.fm Bulk Edit - u/Rudey24 23.8.2020 musictaste.space - u/Emilia_88 7.9.2020 Opslagify - found myself here SongSliders - found myself here The Church of Koen - u/Koen_Mang
I replayed (almost) all Metal Gear games... Here are all my thoughts on them!
Background: Given the current state of the US and the world as a whole, it is not a good time to be a college student. Academic institutions have stopped to a grinding halt and have uncertain plans for the upcoming school year. Despite this, I have had no shortage of things to do. Even though I just finished my summer classes, I still have a lot to do. I continue to work remotely for my school's IT department and also do research with my professor in artificial intelligence (yes, Metal Gear influenced my career choice). My intent is not to flex my credentials or anything, but to explain my motivations. I realize how lucky I am to work on the things I love and build my career when many others can't at this moment. Still, I occasionally feel like I'm more active than I'd like to be. This is where Metal Gear comes in. I grew up with the series and haven't touched many of them in years. I was planning on revisiting the series for some time now too. Since I was at home and needed a way to destress, I said fuck it and decided to revisit all the games. I'll be explaining my thoughts with some version notes and the difficulty I played on in release order. I hope this is an entertaining read! Metal Gear (PS3 HD Collection), Difficulty Played: Original The one that started it all. IIRC, Kojima started development on a shoot em' up inspired by Commando but had to change direction due to the MSX2's limited hardware capabilities. Instead of fighting enemies, your objective is to avoid them. Simple, but a brilliant solution. Thus Metal Gear was born. I feel like this game has aged surprisingly well. It's not incredibly refined, but it definitely has that arcade charm and gameplay. Tactical espionage action at it's simplest. You can even see the origins of many modern MGS classics like the cardboard box, radio team, etc. This game is in desperate need of a Resident Evil-style remake though. The game's design leaves a lot to be desired. There's meaningless backtracking and the way ID cards work to open doors is absolutely moronic. And sometimes it's not really clear how to progress in the game like obtaining the bomb blast suit for example. Guards can only see in lines and the bosses are uninspiring. And despite 30 years of retcons and plot developments, the story is still vague and underdeveloped. FOXHOUND commander Big Boss sends Solid Snake to infiltrate Outer Heaven, also commanded by Big Boss (retconned as Venom Snake) to rescue Gray Fox and spread misinformation to the West (retconned as the Patriots) by... getting captured? Killed? Acquiring a false report? Not clear. And what kind of misinformation? To keep up appearances? To report Metal Gear isn't nuclear armed? Fake Big Bosses' death? Also not clear. Still, it's a humble beginning to a beloved franchise and should be appreciated. Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (PS3 HD Collection), Difficulty Played: Original This is where Metal Gear really becomes Metal Gear. MG2 is an improvement over MG1 in every way. Graphics are better, gameplay is a lot better, and most importantly, it has a coherent story. It's incredibly impressive how this was developed for the same MSX2 system as MG1. And this is where Metal Gear adopts its quirky, goofy yet serious identity. You have dumb shit like "poisonous Zanzibar hamsters" juxtaposed with strong, anti-war themes. Absolutely brilliant. For an 8-bit game, it's very concise and articulate with this message. This game was so good, that the story and gameplay for MGS1 reused many of the ideas present in MG2. I think that if MG2 was remade, it would be better than MGS1 since they are the same game, but MG2 has a more interesting premise. Big Boss as the main villain is already reason enough. Not all is perfect though. The game design suffers from the same issues present in MG1 with unnecessary backtracking, the crappy card system, and confusing progression. I really think that everyone should give this a game a try since it is often underappreciated and overlooked in favor of the later games. Metal Gear Solid (PC Integral), Difficulty Played: Extreme If MG2 created the modern Metal Gear identity, MGS1 perfected it. Kojima and the team really outdid themselves when making this game. This game set a groundbreaking precedent in attention to detail and cinematic storytelling not just for future MGS games, but all video games that came after. To this day, I still think that MGS1 has one of the best atmospheres in gaming. The characters in this game are incredible and in my opinion have the best performances in the entire series. Every single one of them is iconic and memorable. As Otacon says though, "it's just like one of my Japanese animes." Revisiting MGS made me realize that the entire series is basically a long-running, edgy shonen anime based in video game form. You have all the iconic tropes like: a giant mecha, technobabble, superpowered characters, excessive chit-chat with villains and too much dialogue in general, every character having some sort of tragic backstory, some life lesson as a theme, and so on. None of this is bad though. In fact, it enhances the charm. The love of American action movies combined with the oddities of Japanese storytelling is what makes MGS so memorable. Unfortunately, some of the writing in this game is really jarring. MGS has really bad writing at times, but for some reason it was much more painful in this game for me than the others. The romantic elements were cringeworthy, the twists were handled poorly, and Liquid Snake, despite allegedly having an 180 IQ, has no grasp on basic genetics, among other issues. The gameplay isn't much of an innovation over MG2 either. It's just the same thing, but rendered in 3D. It added first-person mode, but that's about it. Regardless, this game is a classic. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (PS3 HD Collection), Difficulty Played: Extreme My personal favorite of the series. Once again, it innovates on the gameplay. Although the controls take an unwieldy, maximalist approach that uses way too many buttons sometimes, it presents you with a lot of options. It's very slick and versatile once you master it. I've seen some people on this sub say that the camera is not conducive with the game design for an enjoyable experience, but I think this is exaggerated BS. I played on Extreme with no radar and did fine. You're given all the tools you need to succeed. The bosses of this game are insane though. Even the more exploitable fights like Vamp and Solidus can still be tricky. The RAY fight on Extreme has got to be my favorite boss from any video game though. It's was incredibly tense with so many opponents who could potentially one-shot you. A single mistake could be fatal. The gratification I had after decommissioning 20 of those assholes can't be described with words. As for story, I can understand how some may not like the postmodern, artsy, almost pretentious approach the it takes, but I love it. MGS2 parodies MGS1 in the most brilliant way possible. It's an amazing deconstruction of sequel expectations and many of its ideas regarding society and technology are becoming more and more relevant. I also liked Raiden as a protagonist because of how well he contrasts with Solid Snake. He also has more noticeable character development. I would like to point out that I was still a baby when this game came out in 2001. Therefore it was impossible for me to get memed by Kojima's bait-and-switch. When I first got into the series, I already knew that Raiden was the main playable character. I can understand why many were/are frustrated with this change or simply just don't like Raiden. But I think the writing just works better in this game than MGS1. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of examples of bad writing and questionable narrative choices in this game. However, while bad writing hurts MGS1, it actually strengthens MGS2. All the incongruities and ridiculousness present in the game build on its message that there is no objective truth. Seriously, MGS2 makes me question everything that I believe in. I've never been more terrified of a video game than the entire Arsenal Gear segment, and this isn't even a horror game. Resident Evil zombies and Silent Hill fog monsters will never hurt me. But censorship, authoritarianism, and misuse of technology can. The real terror is reality. And for that, I treat this game like the Bible. I will say that my veneration of this game is a recent development. It was actually my least favorite until a few years ago. It was after seeing several analyses on this game that my opinion shifted. And since I'm older now, I naturally have a different perspective on life than I did before. MGS2 definitely gets better with age. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (PS3 HD Collection), Difficulty Played: Extreme Over the years, I've had a growing sentiment that MGS3 is overrated. I was glad to be proven wrong. I still like MGS2's existential edginess more, but I concede that this game is the best MGS experience overall. This game deserves every word of praise that it receives. This entire game is an adorable homage to James Bond and other spy thrillers. Seriously, listen to that opening! The story is also the most sensible and best-written in the series. At first glance MGS3 doesn't seem to do anything bold, appearing to be very orthodox and conventional. Despite this, it never failed to excite and maintained that signature MGS personality the entire time. Additionally, the characters are all so likeable. Despite looking and sounding exactly like Solid Snake, Naked Snake has his own distinct personality. He's much more of shit-eating jokester and is a lot more social. And despite the mission he's sent on, he's super unprofessional and I love it. His characterization really adds to the atmosphere of blissful naivete this game goes for. And his chemistry with the rest of the characters is great. You have the radio support team who are also a bunch of lovable, unprofessional jokesters. Then there's EVA, who is an equally awesome female lead. The romance and sexual tension between EVA and Naked Snake actually feels natural, like normal people. It's not painfully awkward like Meryl and Solid Snake or artificial like Raiden and Rose (although that may have been the point with them). Then there's the Boss, who is one of the best supporting female characters in gaming. The contribution her powerful, motherly presence has on the story cannot be understated. The Cobra Unit was pretty shallow to be honest, but they were still memorable and were a fun collection of superpowered weirdos to fight. They didn't really need more than that. Oh, and Ocelot being retconned as a Snake fanboy is hilarious and fitting. There's too many good things about this area of the game and I need to go on. Once again, gameplay innovations! It still has the awkward MGS2 controls, but now you can use them to their full potential. While MGS3 is a super linear game, the number of strategies you can use are limitless. Look at James Howell's FOXHOUND guide on YouTube. He demonstrates multiple methods of entering and exiting the SAME room. Seriously, the dude shows like four different ways to defeat the Ocelot unit and that's barely scratching the surface. Every obtainable item can be meaningfully and that is brilliant... I need to move on but this game fucking rocks. Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops (PC Emulated), Difficulty Played: Normal I gotta say this right of the bat. This shit was not fun to play. I don't really mind if a game has bad graphics, but bad performance makes me want to DIE. 20 FPS physically hurts. Literally. The choppiness gave me a few headaches. I could have increased the framerate, but I read several user reports say that it messes up cutscenes. Plus, I figured I should suffer playing through it in its pure, unadulterated form. The game controlled like garbage and the recruitment mechanic sucked. Still, it's impressive that the development team ported the Snake Eater engine to the PSP. That is an achievement that deserves to be commended. Story wise, it's standard Metal Gear. It's a good time, but I don't really like the direction it took. The inclusion of Gray Fox and Campbell was kinda random and didn't meaningfully develop their characters. They were just there for the sake of being there. Not a good or bad thing, but they could have been totally new characters and the roles would be exactly the same. I also didn't like the implication that Big Boss got the idea and resources for Outer Heaven from Gene. It just rubbed me the wrong way. And what I really didn't like was retconning the entirety of Operation Snake Eater as some elaborate assassination ploy by the CIA because The Boss was "too charismatic" or some BS like that. Like, why? She was loyal to the end. Her being a threat to the US is not consistent with her character. It implies that obtaining the Philosopher's Legacy, destroying the Shagohod, and keeping the Khrushchev administration in power is not enough justification for the US to sacrifice the Boss. It's an unnecessary complication of the story that sets a bad precedent for using "the Bosses' will" as a convenient MacGuffin to explain character motivations or conflicts. Good thing the game is considered semi-canon so I can pretend these parts didn't happen. Still, I appreciate it for what it is. It's proof that a Kojima-less Metal Gear can still be Metal Gear. Not to mention, "Calling to the Night" is an incredibly underrated theme. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (PS3), Difficulty Played: The Boss Extreme The greatest movie game I've ever watched. It's such a shame that this game never got an official port outside of the PS3 because this game is stunning despite the meh performance. The 30 FPS didn't really agree with me, but it wasn't headache inducing like Portable Ops. I have a pretty beefy PC rig so I could've used the custom RPCS3 build to play it at 60 FPS, but I wasn't willing to gamble on the program's stability especially when the cutscenes are so long. Just like Portable Ops, I had to experience it in its raw, unadulterated form. I really wanted to hate this game for being a fanservice disaster... but I couldn't do it. This was the first Metal Gear I completed start to finish. This is the game that got me into the series. I was like 11 or 12 at the time and I had no idea what was going on, yet every little piece of lore kept me wanting to know more about the rest of the series. Nostalgia aside, this game is the most endearing trainwreck I've ever experienced despite the clear disdain and borderline self-hatred Kojima put in while making this game. MGS4 was always going to happen, but Kojima’s involvement was uncertain. I’m genuinely curious what direction this game would’ve took if he quit the series back then. MGS2 alone is already hard to follow up on, and by also having to relate all the events in MGS3, Kojima inadvertently placed the story into a position where writing successive games would become very difficult. I wonder how Murata or whatever writer would approach the story without Kojima’s input. Would it be more or less of a clusterfuck than what it is now? Who knows? Regardless, I think MGS4 is a worthy conclusion to the series. It hits every emotional chord it needs and gives a sense of closure. It really hits you with a feeling that this is indeed the end. The “war has changed” speech gets me every time. In many ways, I feel that MGS4 is as much of a critique on gaming industry trends as it is on the military industrial complex (although it is ironic since this game features so many licensed firearms). Think about it. Forcing Snake (Kojima) back into a life of battle (video games) not because they want to (MGS2), but because they have no choice. The nature of warfare (game development), has shifted from ideology (the messages he tried to tell in MGS 1-3) to profits (fan satisfaction, corporate responsibilities, etc). The war economy strengthens this point by demonstrating how war has infiltrated ever aspect in the MGS universe, like gamer’s seeming obsession with war games like MGS. And the fact that MGS4 demystifies everything with nanomachines or some bloated conspiracy relating back to The Boss is a big middle finger to everyone who clamored for explanations. Kojima was probably like “You couldn’t think of an explanation yourself? Okay, I’ll give you an explanation appropriate for your handicapped intelligence.” In a way, it’s just as postmodern as MGS2 if not more. The metanarrative has always been MGS strong suit after all. But this is one extremely expensive art project in that case. I realize that I also need to be objective in this retrospective. Once you get into this mode of thinking, a literal pile of shit can be interpreted as a gold mine. I am not likening MGS4 to a pile of shit by the way. I’d say that MGS4 did well given what it was tasked to do. All the loose ends are tied up and it (mostly) deals with its characters very well. The characterization of Old Snake is so well done. His depiction as a fallen legend from a bygone era seeking peace is so tragic and powerful. And I really liked Raiden too, but not for the typical reason. I thought he was a good representation of the fans who failed to understand MGS2. Rather than move on and become a better person, he becomes a parody of those who just want to be “cool” and “edgy.” It reverses the dynamic in MGS2. Now that Snake is a decrepit senior citizen, epic ninja dude Raiden is the guy that everyone wants to play as now. And Meryl was excellent too, representing people who were able to mature and move on. She’s all grown up and has found her own purpose in life. It was sad seeing how far she’s moved on from Snake. The whole “marry me Johnny uwu” part was awful, but I suppose it adds to the point of moving on. Liquid Ocelot was a real treat to watch in this game as well. I thought the whole cast was pretty strong. The only character I thought was bad was Naomi. None of her actions make any sense. Even fucking Revolver Ocelot makes more sense than her and he is the king of convoluted conspiracies. She did a total 180 from her MGS1 self for no real reason and she killed herself because? Sniper Wolf and Gray Fox nostalgia? There’s a ton of cheap fanservice in this game but most of those are minor, have some purpose to the plot, or aid characterization. This instance was none of those. And in her debrief video after the virus upload, she never bothered to tell Snake that the new FOXDIE replaced the old one and he could live the rest of his life. Like seriously? This dude almost shot himself to prevent a now nonexistent threat. Plus her hot British accent is gone which is big sad. Also, Sunny contributing to FOXALIVE was kind of jarring. I understand her entire character is to show the new generation inheriting the ideals and problems of the old, but it’s just so random to have a seven-year-old prodigy. She should’ve been a little bit older. She was 11 in Rising and I was totally chill with that. Minor gripe I suppose. As a self-contained narrative, the game isn’t that confusing. However, the way it fits with previous games is super awkward. Big Boss appearing at the end of the game is also very random and has got to be the biggest violation of the “show don’t tell” principle I’ve ever seen anywhere. But given how the Japanese dub literally reconciles real-life father and son, it’s nothing short of beautiful. I prefer this over the original execution ending. Snake has suffered enough. He’s been punished since the day he was born. Personally, I will contend that the twist that the Patriots were the MGS3 support cast isn’t that bad. The identity of the Patriots has been hyped up so much that the answer could never be that satisfying. Would it really be better if they were new, original characters? Considering that they would most likely all be dead anyways, I doubt it. The hive-mind, collective consciousness that MGS2 depicted them was good, but the MGS community has proven itself incapable of abstract thinking after not understanding MGS2 in general. The whole thing would’ve worked better if Major Zero acted more like Colonel Campbell in MGS1, a “trusted” friend who knows more about the operation than he seems and is actively lying to you. The Paramedic, Sigint, and rest are whatever, but Zero wasn’t fleshed out enough to have this huge role. Hindsight is 20/20. They had no idea the plot would go this way. But shoehorning the Bosses’ will as a motivation for everything is stupid. Like I said for Portable Ops, it just became a convenient MacGuffin. There’s a sort of irony here. I could see how Zero’s world government can be traced back to the Boss with “the world can be one again”, but aside from a few throwaway lines he barely has a connection to her. What, did he really hear her entire speech from Snake’s radio? On the other end, I don’t understand how Big Bosses’ warmongering mercenaries can be interpreted from the Bosses’ ideals and he is the one who has a fleshed-out relationship with her. This is where I go “bruh moment” on the writing. Yeah, Liquid Ocelot was also stupid, but the writers had no choice and that kind of shenanigan totally makes sense for his character anyways. This is just an objectively bad cop-out. Gameplay is pretty good. Just the same as MGS3 but now it doesn’t handle like a Rube Goldberg machine. Unfortunately, you don’t really get an opportunity to use the mechanics to their full potential. The game is super cutscene heavy and only act 1 and 2 are truly conducive with experimentation. Overall, I think this game gets shit on too much and I love it. Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker (PS3 HD Collection) This was actually the first Metal Gear game I ever played. My Dad got it for me on PSP close to when it was released. Unfortunately, 10 year old me was shit at video games and rage quit at the Hind boss fight so I put it on hiatus until the HD release came out. Online co-op came in clutch. I don't know why I found this game so difficult back then because now I find Peace Walker to be the easiest game out of all the Solid titles. Even the red skull vehicle missions aren’t too bad as long as you’ve grinded for the appropriate equipment. I have to mention that it was here where I was started to feel burnout from cycling through so many games so quickly. This one took me a bit longer to complete because I needed to extended breaks between sessions. But this game was still a treat. I was really confused with the plot because it seemed like Snake totally forgot about EVA’s debriefing and misremembers his fight with the Boss, but once I realized this game was about him coping with the truth rather than learning the truth, it finally clicked. For me, it cleared up a lot of the baggage left from MGS4. Outer Heaven is less of an interpretation of the Bosses’ will than it is an active rejection of it. When finally accepts the title of Big Boss, he refuses to resign himself to the same fate. That makes a lot more sense to me. Additionally, while it didn’t do that good of a job in this regard, it showed the origins of the alleged conflict between Zero and Big Boss that MGS4 mention. It also did some cool foreshadowing of the Patriot AI. I must mention that this game came out at a super awkward place. It’s post-MGS4 yet it chronologically takes place towards the beginning of the timeline. I also really liked the characters in this game. I was shocked to see how lively and colorful the entire cast was. You could tell they had a great time in the recording booth and most of it was just optional tapes! Unlike Campbell in Portable Ops, Miller is a much more realized character and has depth. He has great business acumen but is also as much of a dipshit as Snake. Then you had the bisexual chad Strangelove. I’m studying computer science, so her tapes were super interesting and relevant to me. I’d love to have her as a professor in real life. Even Cecile, a totally unimportant throwaway waifu, has some great moments in optional tapes. And it’s all very well acted too. Sadly, Hot Coldman was very uninspiring, lame villain. He was just kinda there. But it seemed clear that the real focus was the Boss AI and Cipher. Unfortunately, I don’t like David Hayter’s voice in this game. The Old Snake aesthetic doesn’t suit Big Boss. It sounded too forced to me. I’m not a big fan of Portable Ops, but they should have given Hayter the same voice direction. I am very satisfied with how they decided to expand this “Big Boss arc.” I know many don’t like how they continued the series, but I think this was a meaningful contribution. Although this is when the tech in Metal Gear got weird. Strangelove made an AI that replicated the Bosses’ thought patterns from brief personal experience and a bunch of documents. The best we have in real life is Alexa. It’s too advanced. Sure, there were always nanomachines and nuke tanks but that was all speculative fiction. I didn’t have a problem with the AI bosses. I think they were all fun and engaging. All of you who wished for human bosses are a bunch of homicidal maniacs. Although the breadth of vehicle missions suck. They’re not hard if you grind for equipment, but they are very tedious. And the grinding itself is a huge problem. So much of it is the just the same repetitive junk to farm soldiers or wait out development time. Good thing it’s only side content. I also understand that this was initially developed for the PSP, but the missions are way too short even if they are supposed to be bite-sized. Most of them can be completed in five minutes or less. But I appreciate the effort needed to put this much content into the game. Peace Walker is a great game. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (PC), Difficulty Played: Hard This whole game is a meme and I live for it. This is the only hack-and-slash I’ve ever played so I don’t consider myself super qualified to talk about its merits. But with what I’m given, I’ll say that the gameplay is slick and well-polished. Very fun to play and on top of the power-metal soundtrack, it was an adrenaline high the whole way through. It momentarily cured me of my burnout. Rising also made me to buy Devil May Cry for more of the same. Eventually I will get around to playing those games. I felt like the writing of this game was weak. To me, it was so unfocused with what it wanted to do. It went all over the place from child soldiers, free will, patriotism, and a whole bunch of other things. This game touches on a lot of interesting topics but it’s so haphazard with how it deals with it. It’ll mention some new topic and then barely develop it. It’s a shallow ocean. And it seems like the writers weren’t really sure what they wanted to do with Raiden. His “Jack the Ripper” persona is so inconsistent when it manifests. He’ll be totally normal in the game but then you call the codec and he’ll do this gravelly voice and talk about how he loves fighting or vice versa. He just has this weird multi-personality disorder that I don’t think was fully intended. But considering that this game is spinoff and a parody of the series, I give it a free pass. Raiden’s character development from MGS4 may have been completely invalidated, but since it was so over-the-top and wasn’t afraid to make fun of itself, it doesn’t offend me. All the characters from Raiden to Armstrong were all so colorful and lively. Even the radio support team has a ton of good codec moments that give a good laugh or provide good worldbuilding. It’s a blast to experience it all. And I think it’s all because Platinum nailed the tone for this game. The level of edginess in Rising was the perfect balance of both cringe and cool. And come to think of it, it barely has anything to do at with the rest of Metal Gear aside from Raiden and Sunny. Yet, it perfectly uses that Metal Gear aesthetic and fits into the universe. It feels like it “belongs” in the series. I seriously want a Rising 2. Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (PC) I skipped this game at launch because even 14-year-old me knew it was a cash grab (and I had no money anyways lol). Funnily enough, I finally played it in like 2018. There’s no way to sugarcoat it, this game is just tech demo. An excellent tech demo, but a tech demo nonetheless. The Fox engine is a marvel in both graphics and performance. Easily one of the best game engines in recent years. And I’m not sure how, but I have over 30 hours on this game recorded on Steam. I probably idled the game overnight on accident, but I’m not sure. Still, it has a deceptive amount of content. I’d say it’s about the same as your average DLC. As for story, it’s a good transition from Peace Walker to MGSV. It effectively establishes the tonal change between the two games. And I really liked the little “side quest” of collecting Chico’s tapes. The way the plot unraveled itself even after you complete the main mission is a neat storytelling trick. And obviously I have to address the huge change that occurred in this game... The voice actor change. I like Kiefersnake. As much as I love David Hayter, Kiefer Sutherland’s voice really suited the character in my opinion. He sounds much more natural and gives a better impression of a non-accelerated aged man. I’ve heard some people say that it just sounds like Jack Bauer to them. This wasn’t a problem for me since I don’t watch 24, but after watching some clips of it I think this is a totally valid frustration. Anyways, decent game. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (PC) I call this one “Blue Balls: The Video Game.” I love this game. In fact, I’ve 100%ed it twice. However, my franchise fatigue got really bad at this point. I wanted to be done. My burnout was so bad, that I just skipped missions non-essential to the story. And the fact that I was able to do this what I think is the game’s biggest weakness. Many of the missions are inconsequential and only tangentially related to the main story. I really wish the whole story followed the example of missions 28, 29, 30, and 31, which comprise the segment where you meet Code Talker, cure the parasite outbreak, and then confront Skull Face. You had a little bit of cutscene and exposition before the mission, and then a little bit of cutscene and exposition afterwards. Sometimes there isn’t even a helicopter ride in or out. It doesn’t even have to be that much, just enough to ensure that a consistent and comprehensible story can be told. Basically, just follow Peace Walker’s example. If it were up to me, I would restructure the story entirely. I would have most of chapter 1 hype up this bombastic, lofty, hate-filled crusade against Cipher and Skull Face. Then, missions 28, 29, 30, and 31 happen as they did normally. Huey still kills Skull Face. I think that a boss fight with him misses the entire point of what this game was going for. The end of chapter 1 should remain dissatisfying and anticlimactic to preserve the message that revenge is a wasted effort. Then chapter 2 is where you put all the mundane missions like mission 10: rescue some guy or mission 15: get rid of these Walker Gears. Juxtapose these basic “job” missions with all the misfortunes like the second outbreak, Quiet’s sacrifice, Eli stealing Sahelanthropus, etc and you strengthen what chapter 1 was going for. After the characters get their “revenge,” life just goes on for them. The major threat is gone and all there is to do is to keep doing more jobs. And that’s when you realize that they really haven’t solved anything, and nothing has changed since this new state of normalcy. And finally, you learn the truth after becoming far too entrenched in the body double ruse to ever find a way out. Not to put myself on a pedestal since this is my idea, but I think this is a better way to tell the story. It preserves the writer’s intent but reordering it in such a way that it’s not a disjointed mess. It’s such a shame since I think that MGSV has a cool story with a lot of great ideas but is hampered with a botched presentation. All that stuff about language really grabbed my attention. It really got me thinking. And where MGS4 had too many cutscenes, MGSV had too little. Which sucks since the cinematography is so well done. Not only that, but I don’t like how the tapes were handled. In Peace Walker, they were entirely optional and provided additional context or characterization while the voice actors goofed off in the recording studio. Now, some of those tapes hold important plot points that easy to neglect due to the formatting. And when you do listen to them, you’re probably half paying attention since you’re also doing a side op at the same time and then you get Ocelot’s daily reminder to hide from a chopper or some other distraction. You could listen in the ACC or on base, but that hurts the pacing of the game since it forces unnecessary inactivity. And a lot of this information should’ve been better integrated into the cinematics. But objectively, the content of the tapes are interesting and well-performed. But again, botched presentation. This “audio diary” method works best in games like Bioshock that make heavy use of atmosphere and environmental story telling. MGSV was not well-designed with those in mind given the open world. And it really failed to capitalize on the cast’s talent. Especially Kiefersnake who was such a wasted opportunity. He doesn’t need to be super talkative, but I would’ve liked a little bit more than what we got in the game. The characters are a weak point in general. Kaz is a one-dimensional. Ocelot is still a devil’s advocate kinda guy but it’s a lot more subdued. Quiet was alright. And Volgin, Liquid, and Psycho Mantis honestly didn’t add anything meaningful. Huey and Skull Face were fantastic though. Huey being an absolute piece of shit actually enhances the Otacon and Solid Snake bromance. It gives them a shared trauma of wanting to absolve the sins of the father and illustrates how much better they are than their predecessors. Plus, despite how despicable Huey was, many of his accusations towards Diamond Dogs were very valid. So even is the good guy anymore? And Skull Face was epic. He is an amalgamation of many MGS villain traits. He’s got Volgin’s cruelty, Ocelot’s cunning, Solidus’ charisma and idealism, etc. He’s a delightful cocktail of evil. Too bad he didn’t show up more. Kojima claiming that his absence as well as other things to enhance the “phantom pain” just comes off as an excuse to me. I also really like the body double twist. I made a comment on another post addressing this so I’ll just copy paste it here: MSGV’s ending is not an acknowledgement to the fans and is a brilliant inversion of MGS2’s ending. In MGS2, Solid Snake encourages Raiden to break free and form his own identity separate from the Snake persona as well as the player. In MGSV, Venom Snake’s identity is completely erased and replaced with that of Big Boss. The title of “Big Boss” is extended to Venom and is depicted like some kind of “gift.” What kind of deranged, mentally ill person would accept ever accept a gift like that? 9 years and your entire identity lost while becoming a human shield just to get some lousy recognition. Big Boss has to carefully word himself so you don’t completely lose your mind. While Raiden became his own man independent of the fans, Big Boss and Venom (you the player) are now one in the same. You’re just an expendable tool doomed to a life of eternal warfare. I think it’s Kojima’s way of saying “Thank you for you contributions... Wait, you’re not satisfied yet? Here, you can be Big Boss too. You get no peace now, keep fighting these meaningless proxy wars (video games).” I interpret it as a final “fuck you assholes!” that Kojima disguised as a compliment and I love it. The dude has always had a tumultuous relationship with fans. But again, we must do an objective analysis. My only problem with it is that I feel like it wasn’t incorporated well into the story and it’s somewhat obvious from the beginning. In comparison, MGS2’s twist is handled with a lot more care, with it slowly unraveling throughout the whole thing rather than character creation, a couple throwaway lines, and then boom you remember the prologue differently. And in general, the reveal itself is not handled well. Mission 46 is exactly the same as the prologue aside from the beginning and end of it. I wish there was more effort to differentiate them from each other. Maybe play as Ishmael? The overall mission would play out the same, but it would be enough difference to justify replaying it. Anyways, gameplay is easily peak of the series. If you let go of tranquilizing everything and start formulating weird, unorthodox strategies you can have a lot of fun with this game. It sucks to have to budget your resources, especially with the higher tier equipment, but it’s manageable. The main ops are all pretty good, just wish that they hall had perfect stealth, subsistence, extreme, etc. But thank God for PC modding. The side ops a trash though. Peace Walker’s had issues but at least they had variety. MGSV’s are all the same thing. Overall, I think the game was too ambitious. The gameplay is phenomenal, but the story comes off as a less elegant MGS2 to me. Still like it though. They tried. Metal Gear Survive (PC) I actually skipped this game on release and have not played it until now. I actually planned on stopping at TPP, but this game was like $7 on Steam sale and I wanted to experience all its shitty glory for myself. It's not great..., but not terrible either. Just very mediocre. I don't know why I should invest my time into this game when I can go play Resident Evil or Fallout instead. The story is meh and the characterization is laughably terrible. I chuckled when Nicholas said he would miss Dite if we left, as if I had any attachment whatsoever to the location or characters. I had a soft spot for Miranda though since she looks and sounds like a girl I used to date, but that's about it. And you thought Venom didn't like talking? I think the Captain says less than five words the entire game. The silent protagonist thing doesn't work well here. Admittedly I spent way too much time making the player character look like me. Finally, a Filipino video game protagonist lmao. Anyways, the gameplay itself is not satisfying. I found it boring and repetitive. Doesn't help that the world is uninteresting and a pain in the ass to explore. Everything looks the same and the way that the map works is an inconvenience that doesn't add any challenge or depth. It was also depressing to see all MGSV assets so blatantly and lazily reused. I screamed when I saw Luftwa Mansion. And nanobot zombies is such a stupid and novel idea, so why didn't the devs at least have fun with it? This game had some serious potential to be a hilarious meme loved by the community like Rising, but it's too lifeless and dull to come even close. I don't know why the game was directed this way. I could see how this game could be a good co-op experience, but the underlying experience is so unimpressive that I don't want to invest more time into it. A total waste of the FOX Engine and the team's talent. It's such a shame since the intro of the game hooked me by showing the aftermath of Ground Zeroes. They should have made a game where they followed MSF remnants continuing operations in Central America, a sort of Peace Walker-lite. Or they could have made a game following XOF with Reeve as the main character. Anything above those lines would have been better.
Hello. This is another entry of my series regarding Yandere Simuator code from programmer's perspective. Today I am going to cover his coding style. TL;DR:this twitter post Longer version: This is a programmer's overview about the mistakes done in Yandere Simulator and how it went this way. Over the course of those posts, I shall be re-developing Yandere Simulator from ground up (not really, I am only going to pretend that I am doing it), because it is better to learn from others' mistakes than from your own ones. Despite my target audience is probably only programmers and software engineers, current ones or future ones, I'll try to explain everything in easiest terms possible. If you have some time to read, fasten your seat belts: there will be no stops along this route. Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/Osana/comments/i4fazm/why_osana_takes_so_long_programmers_point_of_view/ Part 2: https://www.reddit.com/Osana/comments/i77hnc/why_osana_takes_so_long_pt2_project_planning/ In previous part we've done with the analysis and preliminary design phases, identifying the things which can go wrong along the development. Now it is alright to start with designing the actual code architecture. But, to not bore you out to death already, let me answer the question «Why the hell one might want to do that though?» first. You see… I won't resort to leaked source or reverse engineered source, but he provided this example himself, so… (closer look). He probably took some of his time to find a place in his code which looks decent, but still ended up in badcode (proof). What do you think is bad in this code? No, it is not the chain of else if's, and no, switch statement won't look any better here right now. One important thing to clear out. Don't be mad at me, I am a C person and I am not familiar with C# or JavaScript/UnityScript, but I am 100% sure that C# has enumerations too. Everything I am talking below is about C code, since this is a field I am quite familiar with, and it should more or less apply to C# too, maybe with different techniques, function names and common practices. What is the difference between Schoolwear 1 and Schoolwear 2? They can look quite obvious for you when you work with this code, but you should be setting this variable somewhere else, and to remember what Schoolwear 2 means, you need to either
Keep those values in mind, which is not possible for more than a week if you are working with a huge project, or
Always look up this particular code snippet when working with Schoolwear variable, or
Have a sticker attached to your display which reminds you that Schoolwear 2 is a swimsuit and Schoolwear 1 is a school uniform.
will really, really ease your life regarding this particular variable? Only then it is okay to turn this into the switch statement. Why switch here is better than a chain of if's? Let me show you the thing which can really hurt the developer. Suppose that one day you decided to add Schoolwear 4, say, for participating in the gardening club. Let's add this to the enumeration above and rebuild the program. Here we go:
1.c: In function ‘main’: 1.c:8:2: warning: enumeration value ‘SCHOOLWEAR_TYPE_GARDENING’ not handled in switch [-Wswitch] 8 | switch (Schoolwear) { | ^~~~~~
This error means that switch statement somewhere deep in the code is incomplete. Switch is usually used to execute one of the code branches, and if we are handling a variable with enumeration type, but fail to supplement all the possible values of said variable, compiler tells you that we are probably doing something wrong. It does not happen if you provide switch statement with default branch, since adding default branch explicitly tells our compiler that we only want to execute some code for some cases, and for the rest we want to go with the default route, even if it is empty. This also does not happen if you are going with if statements, since they are the equivalent of the switch statement with default value always added on, empty or not. Just in case one wants to reproduce that: you need to enable -Wall gcc flag (-Wall = show all warnings) to get this output, but are there any reasons of not having it turned on in the first place? However, even switch statement is not 100% necessary in that case. Check this out:
if (Schoolwear == SCHOOLWEAR_TYPE_NAKED) then stuff1(); else if (Schoolwear == SCHOOLWEAR_TYPE_SCHOOL_UNIFORM) then stuff2(); else if (Schoolwear == SCHOOLWEAR_TYPE_SWIMSUIT) then stuff3(); else if (Schoolwear == SCHOOLWEAR_TYPE_GYM) then stuff4(); else die("Not all the cases for Schoolwear are handled."); // Magic happens here
You can implement die routine as you want to, but you probably want to include file name and current error line to your report. assert(0) isn't a bad idea either, since assert won't crash your game during the release build. The difference between those approaches is that the former error happens during compilation - when you are building your game - while the latter error happens in runtime - when the game is running and when some Schoolwear variable gets into the new state you haven't properly handled. Schoolwear is quite easy to test out, but sometimes some variable can get into some invalid state extremely rarely. Also, running your game even one more time, especially considering your long loading times, is just a little bit inferior to the switch approach, but still ten times better than not having any stub in case if enumeration has changed. Now imagine what a nightmare it is if one wants to change Schoolwear 2 from swimsuit to gym outfit. Such adjustments happen constantly during the development. Are you still wondering why Osana isn't here yet? One might argue that it would have been even better to use Schoolwear class here, and while it can be true in some cases, let me disagree here. Classes, while being incredibly flexible, are quite verbose and long to code, and over-engineering your game is another extreme you do not want. Do you really need to turn each and every switch statement in your code into the strategy pattern? As far as I can see, this particular use case is very short, using classes here is pretty much an equivalent of Rube Goldberg machine. Just forget about it by now. Even better, leave a comment above, something like that:
// Replace with strategy pattern if this code starts to grow up in the future
On the other side, this is probably a very different story. You can clearly see how one can implement this via classes. However, since this post is already quite large, I'll probably leave the design stage to the next one, just saying that planning things before embarking would have solved spaghetti code problem by itself, at least partially, since careful evaluation of class hierarchy (or module hierarchy if you use non object oriented language like C) will serve as the foundation of your engine, and it is hard to mess up that badly if you have solid foundation underneath your structure. Let's finish up with the spaghetti code instead. Recently I discovered a very peculiar screenshot with else if / switch situation addressed by Alex himself. Alex compares the code
if (Health == 0) { Dead = true; } else { Dead = false; }
with
switch (Health) { case 0: Dead = true; default: Dead = false; }
and says that the problem with the latter one is that it does not read like an English sentence at all. Every time Alex uploads anything code related, it makes me cringe so much. First of all, have you noticed that the switch code does the very different thing than the else if code? I have literally no idea how a programmer with at least six years of experience can be so clueless and unfamiliar with the language he is working on. The latter code always evaluates to Dead = false no matter the Health, because he forgot to add break statement, so case 0 evaluates to
Dead = true; // Set here Dead = false; // only to be immediately rewritten right afterwards
And by six years of experience I mean literally that, because JavaScript switch statement works exactly the same. It is not like Ruby's case when .. default .. end construction, which actually does not fall-through and therefore does not require break. But hey, everyone can make a mistake, right? Especially in a Discord post. Let me show you my take on the situation instead.
Dead = (Health == 0);
Does this reads like an English statement? I have no idea. The only thing I know that you can write a comment above it if it does not and still end up with five less lines on screen! Of course, one can argue that Dead = (Health <= 0) or even C-style Dead = !Health is better, but those are details and preferences. One can also say that this was only an example, but in this case this is a horrible example. His original code in fact reads like that:
ComparisonResult = (Health == 0); if (ComparisonResult == true) { // Sing along with me! Dead = true; // If comparison is true, Dead should also become true } else { Dead = false; // If comparison is false, Dead is also false, hooray! }
The shorter your code is, the more code you can keep on screen — the more effective you are while working with it (up to a certain point, of course: you are not just another Perl hacker, after all). For instance, going back to his previous code snippet, one can rewrite
ID = 0; while (ID < CensorStream.length) { CensorStream[ID].active = false; ID++; }
with something like
for (ID = 0; ID < CensorStream.length; ID++) CensorStream[ID].active = false;
because this is exactly the situation why for loops were invented. Even better, I am pretty sure that you can go with some form of foreach instead. You are a programmer, you should be able to understand those very very basic programming standards familiar to everybody who has done 99 Bottles of Beer exercise. Of course you are free to do everything you want. You can work with literally any code by just throwing more person-hours onto it (in fact, I highly suspect that this is how AAA game industry handles bad code problem nowadays). Just don't complain when modifying code like this:
if (StudentID == 13) Stuff1(); else if (StudentID == 17 && StudentID == 18) { Stuff2(); if (StudentID == 18) Stuff2AdditionalThings(); } else if (StudentID == 21) { if (DayPhase == 1) Stuff3(); else if (DayPhase != 4) { Stuff4(); Stuff5(); } else Stuff6(); } else if (StudentID == 47) Stuff7();
And this is what YandereDev does on a daily basis. Still wondering why this game is a complete mess? Speaking of which. Nobody asked me about this opinion, but, since Osana is almost out (at least as it seems to…), I think I should ask the community. I plan to submit to Osana (ahem…) two more times: architecture design for part 4 and AI design for part 5. Would it be alright to go with «Why Osana took so long» or is «Why takes so long» better? Just as a prediction about the current situation,
Osana is a «wow!» moment, as significant as a signal from space, and his project is an ultimate success, which is very unlikely considering his codebase,
Osana is so bad that even patrons like Adolfin decide to stop their support. In fact, I would be very glad if Adolfin starts supporting me instead. I can code and I can even draw a little bit, you won't be disappointed :> Being serious though, this is an unlikely variant too, albeit a little bit more likely than the previous one,
Osana would be delayed again because gremlins go brrr. By the way, am I considered gremlin already? And, last but not least,
Osana would be «Meh». And nothing will change. Alex's fanbase will still be supporting him nonetheless, and we gremlins will continue to be gremlins. And this is my bet. Despite his claims, his AI is actually very simple in comparison to what it could have been, and something which he perceives as an accomplishment is actually quite trivial if AI architecture was done properly back then. I'll explain AI problem in details in the last part of this series.
P.S. For all the programmers here. I have intentionally made a mistake in my StudentID example above. And you should have found it without me pointing that out here. Have you found it? By the way, this error is actually present in the leaked source code too. Have fun debugging it one day!
Continuing Time passed: winter changed into spring, spring changed into summer ... and winter gave spring and summer a miss and went straight on into autumn... until we decided that it was the proper time to host a housewarming party for all our new friends and colleagues here in Russia. But first, I had to take several relatively short trips to Western and Eastern Siberia. To Kazakhstan, to Uzbekistan, to Kalmykia, to Dagestan, to Chechnya, to Ukraine, to Georgia, to Latvia, to Lithuania, to Tajikistan, to Estonia…didn’t get a lick of work done for my company, but sure met one hell of a lot of folks and got info on many, many different projects. It was basically ‘pump-priming’, or ‘testing the waters’, or whatever the hell you want to call making initial contacts, spending huge amounts of company money on flights and ‘entertainment’ expenses. As well as meeting people from well over 1.6 million different countries. I had a most burgeoning Rolodex, not Rolex, as if anyone here would remember those things. I carried a brick-like satellite phone which was monstrously expensive so I used it as much as possible. Had binders full of business cards and I had more visas for more different countries…strange thing, though. With my red Diplomatic Passport, I could sail right through the vast majority of border control points. I guess they were still jittery after the not-so-amicable breakup and were loath to cause any ‘Diplomat’ any grief. I got away with such shit those days. Smuggling? “Of course not! I’m a Diplomat!” Are those rocks of any value? “Of course not! I’m an international geologist and those are but shiny, faceted, green, blue, and red crystalline hand samples!” Are three cases of vodka really just for ‘personal use’? “Of course not! You’re right. Let me get another one to stuff into the Diplomatic Pouch.” So, one bright spring day over bilberry-jammed blinis and freshly Samovared-coffee, Esme and I decided that since the kids had such good friends in the complex, we’d farm them out on one Friday night. Then we’d throw a house-warming party for all our new Muscovian friends. The party was to include several of my Siberian friends and some actual real Muscovites; who we had to strangely invite via registered letter so they could be allowed entrance to our compound. That was one of the things I didn’t care for in compound living. But, that’s the way it was; and nothing I could do, even grouse about the rules, would change anything. Esme had invited her entire American Women’s Club, which was composed of North and South American women. They would be bringing their husbands. We made it sort of clear that this was an adult’s night out. As much as we loved their little ankle-biters, carpet-crawlers, and curtain-climbers; they all needed to take this one as a time out. It was parent time in the Motherland. I already had ordered up 3 half-barrels of beer and an equal number of cases of vodka. This was not a time for puberty, it was time for adultery. No, wait. That’s didn’t come out right…it was parent time. A time for parents... To socialize. To get to know each other. To eat, drink, and act like a bunch of goofy teenagers. You get a general idea. Anyways, there were going to be Russians, Siberians; and yes, there is a difference, Czechs, Brazilians, Scots, Americans, Canadians, Dutch, Brits, Australians, Moldovans, Chinese, Nepalese, several from various Stans, Botswanans, Danes, South Africans…ah, hell, there were going to be a lot of the globe represented. All united by the common threads of bar-be-que, free beer, and ample smokeables. Luckily, it was fairly equable outside, weather-wise, and we were in-between the seasons of the Spring *Rasputitsa *, or mud season, and the early summer thunderstorms. I had arranged for several large tarps on poles to be erected over the front dais of the house and even more in the back yard. The back yard would hold all the troughs full of ice, beer, and soft drinks. There would be a separate one for the vodka, cognac, and sweet girly champagne that the local women seemed to really enjoy. These tarps also covered the bar-be-que grills I had made to order a few months previously. One of the oilfield service companies took some 8 foot-long sections of 42” line pipe, sandblasted them and sawed them in half lengthwise. They were hinged together in back and handles were welded front and back for transport. Set on four stout pipe legs, interior racks were repurposed from some Russian appliances of one sort or another. The ends were welded shut with caps and suddenly, there were a couple of very Texas-sized bar-be-que grills in my backyard. The company had stuffed the grills into their industrial autoclave and heated the things to 2 or 3 million degrees C. to burn off all the nasty oilfield schmoo. While they were still warm, they were powder coated with electronegative paint, and re-kilned. The result was the grills and racks were surgically clean and coated in a blast-furnace-heat resistant covering of melted porcelain-like glass. One was red, of course, and one was blue. They were works of art and are still with the service company that created them as I willed them to the company when we left some years later. Now, bar-be-que and outdoor grilling might be as dull as dishwater to us Norteamericanos, but it was absolutely thrilling for most of our new friends. Many knew of cooking over an open fire, but only during camping, hunting, fishing, or times of natural calamity. To cook outdoors when it wasn’t really required? Such Western decadence. This was all something thrillingly new and potentially dangerous. I had arranged for some charcoal to be flown in from Finland, as the stuff available locally just couldn’t cut the mustard, so to speak. It was more loamy and peaty than charcoal-y. The Finnish stuff was as hard as anthracitic coal. We were going to grill up a half-side of cow, several small suckling pigs, a load of pike-type fish, and just because, a couple of locally sourced briskets, some ‘gamburgers’ and hot dogs. Just because it was a barbeque. Of epic proportions. Of Rocknocker-esque proportions. Esme tried several times to reign me in, but after the truck showed up with an entire side of beef, she realized it was a lost cause. “Rock”, she cooed to me as I tried to stuff the side of beef into our tiny kitchen, “I knew that sooner or later, you’d twist off. You’ve been under a lot of stress lately and I guess it’s finally arrived. I just want to let you know, I love you greatly and if I should disappear, I wouldn’t have gone far. I just don’t want to get caught in the crossfire.” “What’s that, m’dear?” I asked while I tore the kitchen apart looking for the Old Bay spice and Dave’s Insanity sauce we smuggled in on our last trip. “Oh. Nothing, dear.” Es smiled, “Go nuts. But please, be careful.” “Oh, sure. Yeah. No worries.”, I smiled as I found that ceremonial Gurkha knife, “This will work a treat in cutting up the beef once it’s done.” as I swung the massive thing around like Darth Vader confronting a Rebel contingent. “Kids”, Es called, “Isn’t it time to go to your friend’s house?” This all started on a Tuesday afternoon. Es and I had to prepare the menu and then I’d get after what needed getting after. Besides a half-side of beef on the bar-be-que, as I mentioned, we’d have some stuffed and grilled pike, hot dogs, ‘gamburgers’, a few suckling pigs, a couple of big, meaty briskets, currently corning in the kitchen, and maybe some form of poultry or two. It’s a meat-heavy menu for a meat-heavy diet round these parts. I took care of the beer, vodka, champagne, cognac, and gin, well, there’s were going to be some Brits in attendance, soft-drink mixers, and ridiculously expensive citrus fruits. I had the country store on-site crank up their ice machine and had standing orders for all the excess ice they could produce over the next few days. Roger, my Texan neighbor, confidant, and mechanical engineer buddy who kept to a work schedule which closely mimicked mine, decided he couldn’t let this hapless Baja Canadian handle these whole two grills on his own. Truth be told, Roger was a major help in fabricating the necessary rotisseries and pipework to spin the pigs and side of beef above the fire. He was keen and adept at drawing things up on paper, but pretty worthless in translating them from two to three dimensions. That’s where my adroitness and past experiences with a pipe cutter and welding torch, again, ‘borrowed’ from the oilfield service company, along with their pipe-rack truck, came into its own. He designed, we both cut the appropriate metal, and I metal-glued them in place. Roger ‘located’ a couple of large electrical motors, one capable of turning the 300 pounds of cow on the one spit and one efficient in handling the ‘pig basket’ of about 250 pounds of young piglet that was going to be prepared. Each was several dozen horsepower in displacement and heavy as a motherfucker. They stood alone on the ground, while Roger fabricobbled up a drive-train system and electrical controls for each. What began as a simple ‘C’mon over for a back yard bar-be-que’ had turned into something of which NASA would have been proud. Picture this: 2 eight-foot-long, 42” diameter pipe grills, one gleaming red, one shining blue, with a Rube Goldberg set of pipe contraption A-frames making a pair of rotisseries; one driven by a 30HP 3-phase electric motor, the other by one only churning out 20 HP. There was a separate control tower Roger ginned up which contained the start-stop switches and rheostats which controlled the rotation of the beeve and baconators. With all that, we still had room for four stuffed pike, each at least a meter in length, my briskets, a few butterflied chickens, hot dogs and ‘gamburgers’. “Nothing succeeds like excess”, I said to Roger as I toasted him with the second or eighth beer of the morning. He agreed with me and stole yet another cigar. The beef was turning slowly over a low fire of finest Finnish hardwood. This was calculated to take at least 2.5 days to complete. The suckling pigs I’d start the next morning. If all went to plan, we’d have everything ready for dinner by 1700 that Friday. Well, the meat’s taken care of, as were the drinks. Esme and Linda, Roger’s wife, grabbed Valosh and made a trek into downtown to Stockman’s Pantry for some typically American repasts. Cans of baked beans, fresh lettuce, rocket, radicchio, romaine, and other salad-y makings. Several varieties of fresh fruit, Emmenthal cheese and melting Dutch chocolate for the fondues that Es set up every single time we had a gathering. It was a tradition. We’d source much of the remainder of the party munchies locally. There was a bakery just around the corner of the compound and after buying our bread there for months, we got to know the proprietors quite well. We explained the concept of the “tortilla chip” and damn if they didn’t create a very passable Russian version. We created our own flavorings for dusting over them, and I think we were the absolute first to come out with a caviar-flavored chip. Potato chips were easy enough to make, as were soft tortillas, but we were coming up shy on dips. Substituting unflavored Greek yogurt for the more usual labneh back in the Middle East, I converted some of our imported biryani masala, lamb masala, curry mix, and other Middle Eastern spices into chip dips. You haven’t lived until you’ve had Red Caviar flavored Russian tortilla chips with a healthy dollop of garam Masala and yogurt dip. As Emmanuel from Argentina sniffingly said: “It’s a brilliant antihistamine.” I contracted with a batch of local school-aged kids to pick fresh mushrooms for the party. Russians are just crazy over mushrooms. However, as we were to find out, they will only eat them cooked; having them raw for dipping or in salads really gave them pause. Ah, just another twist on the usual house warming party. The cow continued cooking, the porks were happily spinning along in their private horizontal merry-go-round and the Finnish cooking wood was holding out well. The smells emanating from our corner of the compound had many, many people wandering over wondering who was opening the restaurant. Thursday slid into Friday. I took the car and made a mad dash for the Mitino Ramstore to replenish our butter, paprika and vodka stocks. Seems all those Russian bottles had holes in them… I was actually using a good supply of the stuff in cooking. Take a cup or so of good vodka, taste-test it, just in case, restore to proper measure and heat it gently as to not incinerate your eyebrows. Add a cup or so of berries, and a cup of sugar, and a smidge of molasses. Heat until just right. Repeat until you have enough drunken berries to fill a pie crust; graham cracker or otherwise. You can freeze this and serve it with whipped cream frozen or bake it until the berries bubble; then you can serve it with ice cream. I made homemade ice cream as well for the evening’s festivities. To a standard vanilla base of sugar, egg yolks, and hot heavy crème, you whip this stuff until it can’t take it any longer and it goes all custardy. Then you add your flavorings and churn the hell out of it over rock salt and ice. Result? Mint chocolate chip with Cornish crème de menthe. Rum raisin with Jamaican dark RUM. Watermelon ice and spirit. Spirt is homemade Siberian rocket fuel. Pretty close to 200 proof as one can get. Rocky road with pecans, marshmallows, caramel, chocolate truffle, and Napoleon cognac. Bourbon vanilla with fresh Madagascar vanilla-bean vanilla. “You can’t get booze to freeze in ice cream!” I hear some wag yell. “You can if you freeze the stuff with liquid nitrogen!” I yell back. I have access to all sorts of fun, sciency stuff. Liquid nitrogen is as much a cooking staple as is liquid oxygen. We’ll save the Great Grill Meltdown story of 2002 for a later date. Friday morning, as I was out tending the grills, several of Esme’s friends from the compound showed up to help set up for the evening’s festivities. “Great”, I thought, “They’re in there, I’m out here with the vodka and beer. All is right with the world.” There was a flurry of activity as each of Esme’s friends busied themselves with a different portion of the party. One was handling the desserts, one was preparing the salads, one was setting out the plates, cups (first time for red Solo Cozy Cups in Russia), and silverware. It was going to be a very informal sort of party, but evidently, there was a certain protocol to follow. Flowers appeared from the Babushka Mafia; where we had a standing order. A huge centerpiece filled what seemed half the dining room table. A fire was started in the fireplace. Why? Because. Reasons. OK. Me? I just stayed out of their way. Esme started up her fondue pots; ones we’ve had since day one of our marriage. Into one went a four-cheese mixture of Emmenthal, edam, cheddar, and brie cheese, along with some light white wine. Into the other pot went a kilo or so of melting chocolate, imported from the Netherlands or other European someplace. Some very expensive, 45-year-old cognac went into that pot to facilitate meltage. There was some nutmeg, cinnamon, saffron, and other spices as well. Potato salads were made and brought out, covered under chilled cheesecloths as the fridge was hopelessly full at this point. Green salads were made, with and without locally-produced mushrooms. The whole table groaned after a fairly short time from it’s covering of fruits, breads, beans, salsas, salads, and other party fares. The ice creams I had made were up at the country store near the entrance to the compound, We had no room and they graciously ‘rented’ out some of their freezer space. All it cost were a few rubles and a couple of quarts of ice cream. The horse troughs out back were stocked with kegs of beer, tappers, and bottles of booze, all on ice. There was one smaller trough full of Russian soft drinks, juices, fizzy and still waters, and other things that would probably stave off if not prevent total alcohol poisoning. Olga, our house girl, insisted on stuffing and preparing the pike for the grill. She was a wonder. She was teaching the girls, and truth be told, Es and I, Russian and Ukrainian. She insisted on making dinner anytime Es or I wandered into the kitchen looking for a sandwich and generally made us feel like some sort of privileged class. We didn’t want that at all and went out of our way to make certain we treated her like family. She was scrupulously honest, and when we included 250 extra rubles for her first week since all the extra work she took upon herself; she actually chewed us out for being too “credulous”. “People will take advantage.”, she scolded, “I agree to weekly pay, no more. I will not make you more naïve.” I finally got her to take it for payment for the language lessons. She was a real polymath. She helped the girls with homework, ran interference with any local entanglements, and could cook like there was no tomorrow. She was a peach, pure and simple. Plus, she liked my cigars and loved cognac. We got on like a house afire. She also knew her way around a fish. She had those four-meter long critters gutted, scaled, stuffed and trussed as good as any Michelin starred chef in any international seafood house. They went on the grill, just to the south of my briskets. The chickens would only take a couple of hours over this low and slow heat and the aromas of them comingled with the other proteins were intoxicating. Or it might have been the potato juice and beer marinades I was using for the various bits of animal carcass. Vodka, melted butter, smoked Himalayan salt, and smoked Hungarian paprika was brushed liberally over the butterflied chickens. Many times during their grilling tenure. Beer, a tomato reduction sauce, molasses, maple syrup, and cognac graced our rapidly caramelizing roasted piglets. Bourbon, coffee, treacle, and a few secret ingredients made up the sauce for the beef. It went on every 100 or so turns. The brisket and pike were left alone, except for some fish masala for the pikes and Old Bay mixture for the briskets. The grill was closed on these and they were allowed to continue more or less unmolested. The day drew along and it was soon noon. The house was decked out very festively. The girls were going directly over to the neighbor’s after school so it was now T-5 hours to party time. But with all our help, there’s wasn’t much to do. It was all pretty much done. Roger assured me he’d stop over at the country store and pick up the pies, ice cream and extra ice in our amassed coolers when he returned from work, around 1500 hours. So that was taken care of. Esme decided she wanted a shower and nap before the evening’s frivolities, and since everything had already been done I couldn’t agree more. We kissed and smiled at our good fortune and taste in friends and neighbors, as she headed upstairs for a bit of kip. The cow was turning, the pigs were spinning, the pike and briskets were smoking and I decided to grab a lawn chair, fire up a cigar and sit out back enjoying the warmish afternoon in northwestern Moscow. Oh, sure; I nodded off a few times, but made certain my charges were well looked after. Be silly to get this far and have things go south. Roger showed up around 1600 hours and I helped him move all the coolers into the garage, as there just wasn’t room in the house nor kitchen, it was that stuffed with party favors. The meat was approaching that point where it was done to if you’ll pardon the expression, a turn. Roger sampled a piece of the spinny cow and declared it good enough for a Texas rodeo. High praise indeed. He left and would return with Linda in perhaps an hour. I went to wake Es and got her in the shower with a cup of coffee. I decided to forego the shower and helped myself to another pre-party cocktail. 5:00 PM arrived and our guests…did not. Roger and Linda, our only North American invitees showed up around 1730. Es, myself, Roger and Linda sat around chatting and nibbling, wondering where the hell everyone else was. I even motored up to the gate to see if the officious guards were giving any of my local invitees any grief and thus holding them up. No. They hadn’t shown up as of yet. Back to the house, and now, I’ve dealt with the Arabic version of showing up for a meeting, party, or operation. These characters will be late for their own autopsy. I thought punctuality was more prized in the European community. I fiddled around with the grills and turned everything to ‘warm’. I was, truth be told, a bit miffed at all this. I had spent a fair fortune on feeding these characters, you would think… At that precise moment, the doors burst open. The crowds had arrived. All a bit ‘fashionably late’, but with their gird on and ready to party. There was no mention of their unpunctuality, but huge bear hugs, back slaps, and depositions of house warming gifts, all bottles of some form or another of alcohol, typically rare and reflecting the origin of the giver. The party went from absolute silence to incredible raucousness in nothing flat. I still had to man the grills, so I dragooned Roger into being the ad hoc bartender. Esme and Linda were showing folks around the place, making the perfunctory tour before the inevitable feeding and drinking. Roger was busier than a one-handed paperhanger in a windstorm. I helped out best I could by tapping the kegs and passing around the Solo Cozy cups, which made a huge hit among the Western and Eastern Europeans. Of course, the stereo was cranked up. Between Esme’s classical music and my 60s and 70s rock collections, the place began vibrating. Luckily, we had the forethought to invite the neighbors who lived immediately adjacent to us. After the initial drinks were disbursed, it was time for the first rounds of nibbly bits. Being in Russia, one simply cannot have a drink without a nosh. Esme’s fondues were incredible hits. Since fondue is a Scandinavian invention, we figured it’d be more well known here. Evidently not as several folks had to be given instructions as to how to build a cheesy or chocolatey snack. The dips, crudités, amuse bouche, and chips went over very well. We had people from Africa, Asia, Europe, both Americas, Australia and other ports of call not yet mapped. Everyone had their story of foods back home that mimicked our offerings. It was most entertaining to hear stories of the braai, pit roast, chuanr, yakitori, satay, khorkhog, tandoor, and the like. But it was the whole, well, a half grilled cow that boinged everyone’s eyes. The whole suckling pigs, smoked stuffed pike, briskets, and chickens also got their share of gapes. I had some hamburgers and hot dogs in case anyone was about to go hungry. Over more rounds of drinks, I announced that I’d be carving up the meat and setting it out, for everyone to help themselves. Olga shouldered her way through the crowd with my Gurkha knife and a couple of large platters. First off were two of the whole smoked and stuffed pike. These were attacked with abandon, much to Esme’s alarm as people missed the salads and zeroed in straight on the protein. Olga sorted them all out by pointing out proper party protocol and for people to take notice of the assortment of bread, salads, Jellos, and fresh fruits provided to accompany the meals. Properly chastised, some sense of party decorum returned as the beer continued to flow, the empty vodka bottles stacked up and my cigar humidors went, for the time being, unnoticed. I carved off great, bleeding hunks of cow. It was so tender I could have butchered the thing with a pleasant remark. Some were blue, some were medium and some, down the way along the beast, we well done. I carved up huge hunks of each for all to take that which they would please. The chickens came off the grill next, and after a few deft knife swipes, were deboned and ready for consumption. The briskets were resting on a sideboard in the kitchen and Olga assured me she’d take care of them as long as I handled the disassembly of the suckling pigs. Taking a quick restroom break, I was amazed to see one of our living room tables completely covered by bottles of wine, champagne, spirits, and who-knows-what. These were our inevitable house warming gifts from our assembled friends. There was much greeting and handshaking as I tried to make my way to the facilities. I could hear Valosh and his wife somewhere in the madding crowd, but this was simply going to have to wait. Internal pressure was approaching critical limits. I decided to keep station out by the grills as I still needed to handle the roast suckling pigs. I figured that if people were wondering where I was, follow their nose out to the bars and grill; I’d be around somewhere close. Roger dragged a table over from his backyard to give me some room to disassemble the little porkers. He kept up with his bartending duties and I reduced those crispy little pork packets into more eatable size pieces. People had gotten the idea that enough with me bringing in the grilled food, they’d just come outside and get it fresh off the cooker. The party was going into high gear. People were showing up who I didn’t know, and after quizzing Esme, she had no idea as well. Didn’t make a bit of difference; there was no way we’d run out of food or drink, and as long as we’re here, we international ambassadors of general amity. As long as these interlopers behaved themselves, no one had any objections. There was one small incident where some local younger hooligans tried to swipe a couple of bottles of booze off the living room table. Some older Russian gentlemen, Heroes of the Soviet Union all, relieved the hooligans of their ill-gotten gains. Somewhat forcefully. They gifted them instead cuffed ears, kicks up the backside and swats on the back of the head as they admonished them off the property. We learned later these older Russian gentlemen were both maintenance and security for the compound. We were most pleased to make their acquaintance and happy they could join us. The house was packed, the front yard was packed, the back was really packed. Everyone was eating and drinking like there was no tomorrow. And as tomorrow was Saturday, the international day of rest and hangover nursing, and since we’re so far north, we’re starting to get into White Nights territory, this was going to be a long, long night. The pike were gone. All four, consumed. The briskets were as well. I was told they were ‘very good’. I’ll have to take their word for it, I never as much as got a slice. Chickens? Disappeared. Gone without a trace. Piglets? We had about one small half left. The side of beef? Well, there were still a few steaks left, as I carved myself a healthy hunk, but I was amazed at the feeding frenzy we had just witnessed. It was mostly gone as well. Maybe enough for a few sandwiches come the morning. The salads were most appreciated and devoured. Even Esme’s grandmothers bit-o-a-joke lime Jell-O with carrots and peas disappeared. Bread? Mostly gone. Chips and dips? Still holding out, but would never survive the night. Esme and I were glad everyone was getting their fill. Everyone was finishing up on the main courses and all helped pitch in to clean up any trash and do what few dishes Olga hadn’t yet gotten to. There was an actual lull in the gathering as now it was time for a post-dinner smoke and a bit of rest before dessert. Roger and his teenage son went out in the garage and brought back the 4 coolers full of bespoke ice cream. One would think ice cream wouldn’t be terribly relished by denizens of the far north. Au contraire. The locals love the stuff. In fact, I haven’t found a single person who has actually refused a bowl of my homemade nitrogenized ice cream. Esme broke out the plastic bowls and announced that there were homemade pie and ice cream available out back. “Name your poison”, I chuckled. That idiom took some time to explain across 20 or so different languages. There was a problem though. People may be familiar with chocolate, vanilla and strawberry ice cream; but Rum Raisin, Vodkamelon ice, and Crème de menthe chocolate chip? This was ‘terra incognita’ for most everyone. What better way to sort it all out by providing samplers of each of the flavors in one bowl? I froze the plastic bowls in liquid nitrogen then placed smallish scoops of each flavor ice cream in each. “Just a sample”, I said, “So you can figure out which you like best.” It took a bit of translating, but soon everyone got the idea. Once I dished out the mixed-berry pie, there was no clear winner on which ice cream flavor was the favorite. They were all consumed 100%. Some actually came back for thirds. And the pie was good, or so I was told. Once more, after the dessert course, the whole area was policed clean. Food, drink and various fun activities started to take their toll. Things were beginning to quiet down. Then I forgot and went to my humidor and grabbed a smoke. Over a couple of boxes of cigars, impromptu Bocce ball, lawn darts, and corn hole games broke out. I mean, it’s 2200 hours, you have a huge cigar, it’s still light. What better than tossing around heavy metal balls, pointed oversized darts, or bean bags at holes sawn in plywood? Then Laurens-Jan and his wife, Fientje broke out the Absinthe Fountain. An absinthe fountain is not for dispensing absinthe, but rather for dispensing water. A typical absinthe fountain is an ornate vessel with several taps around its central water container, which permits a number of drinkers to louche their absinthe at the same time. On contact with water, absinthe will louche -- or develop a certain subtle clouding that will slowly transform the drink's color from deep emerald into a delightful shade of opalescent light green. They had brought a couple of bottles of King of Spirits Absinth from Denmark with them. Just for a side note, the stuff is 70% alcohol or 140 proof. As if the evening needed another shot in the arm. The Absinthe Fountain louched four drinks at a time. It did so in a mesmerizing and nearly hypnotizing manner so that when the drink was ready for consumption, one could scarcely decline. OK, there was still a half-barrel or so of beer out in the backyard, probably a case or so of spirits of various denominations swimming around back there as well. There was an active absinthe loacher going on in the dining room, cigars were being had by most everyone and games of very little skill were being attempted out in the yard. The party had found its high watermark. People had achieved what we Baja Canadians would call ‘blissed’. It’s that feeling you get, sitting out under a basic roof, at a rained-out ballgame or after trekking all over a country or state fair, sitting with several pitchers of probably somewhat flat and lukewarm beer, feet up and just enjoying the hell out of the universe. It’s a rare condition, but I think we attained it here. Spontaneous card games erupted: cribbage, Schafskopf, Canasta, poker, and spit. The music toned down and was more instrumental than the early electronica synth-pop of dinner. Conversations broke out. Friendships were made and cemented. Bliss had been achieved. One of those friendships came back the very next day to haunt us. Dr. Dumitru Hurgoi and his wife, Dr. Anamaria Stelymes, veterinarians both, showed up at our door early the next afternoon; planned strategically after the girls had returned from school. Seems Dr. Dumitru heard me lamenting the loss of our Lady McBeast a few years prior and how our daughters were missing having a pet or two around the house. Drs. Dumitru and Anamaria ran the local chapter of the Russian version of the Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. They had just taken possession of a litter of little, pure-snow-white Samoyed pups that had been abandoned at their clinic. They made their entrance carefully, making certain the girls saw all 6 puppies as they spilled, oops, out of the box and into our villa. They were about 5 weeks old, very inquisitive and were immediately all over the house. It took us over an hour to round them all up. Of course, at that time, we had a great deal of exposure to each of the pups. Of course, we couldn’t be cads and refuse to take at least one for our very own. It was Khris, already starting her studies to be a large animal veterinarian, that ran each of the pups through her testing scales to see which would be the most appropriate for our family. That all didn’t matter, as Tash glommed onto one little female and refused to give her up. We took the smaller female puppy of the litter. It proved to be the best idea of the time because once she was removed from the bump and tussle of the litter, she really came into her own. So, that afternoon, I signed the papers on the ownership of “Zima”, Russian for “Winter” due to her snow-white countenance. Smart? Like a whip. Clever. Inquisitive? Oh, yes. A footwear thief? Until we left Russia, I never had a matching pair of socks again. To be continued
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