HELP STATION | RASPBERRY PI Pressing the button connects that pin to GND and changes its state to LOW (down, 0, False) and we use that as a trigger to play a tone. buttons = [machine.Pin(pin, machine.Pin. IN, machine.Pin.PULL_UP) for pin in button_pins] Set the buzzer GPIO pin to use PWM (pulse width modulation), enabling us to set the tone’s frequency. buzzer = machine.PWM(machine. Pin(buzzer_pin)) Create a function, play_tone, which takes two arguments – the frequency of the tone and its duration: def play_tone(frequency, duration): Inside the function, we set the duty cycle (how long the signal is active) to 50% and then set the buzzer frequency using an integer value. This is the value returned from the frequencies dictionary. buzzer.duty_u16(512) buzzer.freq(int(frequency)) Set the sleep time using the duration argument, then set the duty cycle to 0 to turn off the buzzer. utime.sleep_ms(duration) buzzer.duty_u16(0) Now we move to the main loop. This uses a while True and a for loop to constantly check the status of the buttons. while True: for i, button in enumerate(buttons): Inside the for loop is an if conditional test that checks for each button press. The default state of the GPIO pin for each button is 1 (True, high, up), but when we press the button it changes to 0 (False, low, down). if button.value() == 0: When the button is pressed a variable called note is created and in it we store the key (the Solfège syllable) and then get the frequency value, storing it inside a variable called frequency. note = list(frequencies.keys())[i] frequency = frequencies[note] Using a little string formatting, we print both the GPIO pin reference for the button press and the Solfège syllable: print(“Button {} ({}): Playing {}”.format(i, note, note)) We then play the note using the play_tone function. We pass the frequency and duration to the variable. For shorter bursts of sound, reduce the duration (500). We found that 200 was a good choice. Lastly, outside of the if condition and for loop, but still inside the main loop, we add a short delay to prevent debounce. Debounce is when the loop is so quick that it thinks we pressed the button twice. Adding a very short delay reduces the chance of this happening. play_tone(frequency, 500) utime.sleep(0.1) Save the code to the Raspberry Pi Pico and PI-ano.py, and click Run > Run Current Script (or click on the green play button, or press F5) to run the code. Now press the buttons and perform your own concerto. MAKING MUSIC WITH PICO Making music with microcontrollers is not limited to mere beeps and boops. Even the humble Pi Pico can make rich pieces of music, with a little help from its friends. The MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) standard is a means in which a device, say a Pi Pico, can send instructions to a real instrument. The instruments are largely electronic, such as piano, synthesiser and drum machine, but we can send instructions from a Pico and hear the output on such devices. In normal operation, there is a controller device, which leads the group and sends instructions to a drum machine. But with clever coding or a MIDI digital audio workstation, we can compose entire pieces of music and send the instructions to the machines. CircuitPython, a fork of MicroPython from Adafruit, has a MIDI library that makes sending MIDI instructions as easy as Python code. All we need to do is tell the controller what note to hit, how long to hold it and when to release. Adafruit also has a MIDI FeatherWing (an add-on board for its Feather range of boards, including the RP2040), which enables direct connection to musical devices, no hacks required. More details can be found at https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-midifeatherwing/circuitpython-midi-example. There are a lot of wires to this circuit. Follow each one carefully and double-check your work. Even we missed a wire for sol. Buzzers come in all sorts of forms. Simple piezo discs, active buzzers (black) and an amplified piezo buzzer (white). MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 101
102 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024 Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora transcends its progenitor series Far Cry with awe-inspiring presentation, a captivating world and tense combat, but at present it’s buried under a mountain of technical trouble and it could take months to unearth a genuinely great game with patches and driver support. When it’s working, navigating Pandora is a total joy: sprinting at mach five across the forest floor and parkouring across the serpentine tree roots that connect dense jungle brush to rock formations suspended in zero gravity. Avatar’s psychedelic colour palette meets Starship Troopers’ industrial sci-fi look is translated beautifully from film to game, and the skyboxes especially are some of the best I’ve ever seen. The sheer density and variety of reactive flora and fauna is stunning. For me, the gorgeous presentation has been undercut by the usual suite of technical issues that accompany big multi-platform releases – frequent hitching, fps drops and blurry FSR3 scaling, which Ubisoft originally attributed to a fruit from a tree will yield higher quality resources, which can be donated to the communal baskets at the various Na’vi clan hometrees in exchange for rare materials and unique rewards. Remember the mech suits from the first movie? Those are most of what you’ll be fighting across Pandora, though they’ll occasionally be supported by light infantry and air support. They’re total pushovers if you can isolate one, but having to deal with even two at once was enough to get me to start thinking about combat strategically. Your experience may differ: one person at APC using a GeForce RTX 2080 Super says that the game has run fine for him. I’m not the only one experiencing crashes, though: other players have reported the same issue on different hardware . lack of a day one driver update. That driver update has come, though, and the issues haven’t subsided. My time with the game has been consistently impeded by a frustratingly common suite of game-breaking bugs and performance issues: we’re talking full-on system crashes, consistently poor performance, and bizarre progress-erasing interface bugs (namely a perpetually greyed-out ‘continue’ button that only works again after the game is deleted and subsequently reinstalled). For these reasons, getting sufficiently immersed in Frontiers of Pandora is extremely difficult. My wings denied to me, I spent most of my time in Frontiers of Pandora stalking across the lush jungle floor. Resource gathering by means of foraging and hunting is the primary means by which you source special ammunition and crafting materials for new gear, but Frontiers of Pandora puts an environmentally conscious twist on what would otherwise be a purely extractive approach to harvesting. Killing a deer quickly or gently removing the A Pandora’s box of technical issues. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora PRICE $99.95 PLATFORM PC, PS4/5, XB1/S/X, Luna WEB store.ubisoft.com VERDICT The stunning presentation and world design are failed by atrocious tech issues. Noah Smith 1 Pandora’s bioluminescent flora and fauna is never not eye-catching. The games we play The Human resistance feels really out of place – don’t expect to see it appear in the movies.
DOWNTIME | GAMES MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 103 Like its babbling crew of outlaws, Gangs of Sherwood tries to compensate for its fundamental shortcomings with a brash persona and propulsive energy. It’s a fastpaced, four-player shooter-slash-brawler with a vividly drawn alt-fantasy world, a knockabout comedy tone, and lively combat. Unfortunately, these colourful distractions fade away all too quickly, revealing Robin Hood rummaging through your purse as he tries to lift $58 out of it. The setting of Gangs of Sherwood takes the familiar Robin Hood tale and plonks it in an alternate, sci-fi history. Generally I’m not a fan of gaming’s fixation with alternative takes on Robin Hood. But Gangs of Sherwood quickly won me over with its vivid combination of steampunk and medievalism. For what is clearly a budget title, Gangs of Sherwood chews through some impressive scenery, with dramatic backdrops and some monumental combat arenas. Combat shows initial potential. Whichever character you play as, battles are about combining light and heavy attack combos to deal massive damage to enemies. For example, Robin’s baseline moveset involves using close-range melee attacks to generate magical ‘star’ arrows that hover in the air around the battlefield. By hitting an enemy with a charged shot from your bow, you can unleash these purple arrows at enemies all at once. So what’s the problem? First, Gangs of Sherwood is far too easy. Your characters don’t just level up across the game. There’s a separate, in-mission levelling system that gradually bolsters your health as you progress through the map. This means missions are always hardest at the start, whereas dying requires active effort beyond the halfway point. Moreover, combat is so formatted around arena-based encounters that it becomes deeply repetitive, and while characters initially have pleasing skill progression, later abilities tend to be less useful or less interesting. The main missions are enjoyable enough to fly through, but little of the story has any lasting impact. And at just five hours long, the game wraps up so fast that you won’t have unlocked all your character’s abilities by the time the credits roll. Gangs of Sherwood Four-player fighting is all too frivolous and all too fleeting. PRICE $58.50 PLATFORM PC, PS5, XBS/X WEB www.gangsofsherwood.com Shows initial promise, but both the script and the systems run out of steam before the end of its brief running time. Rick Lane VERDICT If you’ve always wanted to stare at a murder board, moving bits of string around, this is the next best thing. Tom Sykes VERDICT THE ROOTTREES ARE DEAD SOLVING A FAMILY SIZE MYSTERY. The Roottrees are Dead stands on the shoulders of Tim Sheinman’s Family, a similarly browser-based detective game that had you investigating a music scene and filling in a family tree of linked musicians. In Jeremy Johnston’s Roottrees, it’s a literal family tree, as you’ve been hired by a mysterious client to decipher the complicated genealogy of the Roottree family, and determine who will inherit the family fortune, after a terrible plane crash. You spend the whole game looking at their family tree, but also at your (essential) in-game notebook, collected documents and the ’90s internet. If 90% of detective work is sitting in front of a computer, then this is one of the more authentic detective games. You’ll type search terms into a (deliberately limited) internet browser, scour a library database for relevant books, and hunt through periodicals for any mention of the Roottree family, who are one of the more notable dynasties in the USA. This is an exceptional detective game that will likely consume your existence for several days. PRICE Free PLATFORM Browser WEB bit.ly/Roottrees I didn’t expect the depiction of Nottingham to be THIS realistic. Robin’s Star Arrow ability is a little confusing at first, but can be supremely powerful.
DOWNTIME | GAMES 104 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024 As a puzzle adventure, the joy of Cocoon is in figuring out how to overcome obstacles and progress, but it’s also in the execution. After a short stint wandering the orange canyons of Cocoon’s opening area, you come across a curved groove in the ground. At one edge sits a large metallic ball, which you grab and yank until it reluctantly leaves its rectangular base, yet remains connected by a chewing gum string. Once the gum’s elasticity approaches its limit, the base starts to move too, gliding across the mouth as if you’re opening a zip. It’s all so very tactile. In this way, Cocoon makes incredible meals of its puzzles within vibrant worlds that could have adorned prog rock album covers. When you’re pressing switches and activating bridges here, you’re not simply pressing switches and activating bridges. Even the platform that responds to the zipper is actually an enormous flat robot bug that rears up and embeds its front claws in the canyon wall. In these and many other moments, Cocoon is properly, delightfully surreal. Once you get further into the game, the puzzles become more substantial as well. Mainly that’s down to Cocoon’s star feature, which introduces itself when you reach a kind of round rubber platform, and watch as your beetle person flies up and out of the world itself. Now you’re in a grey environment, and the world you were in a moment ago exists here only as a large orange marble, which functions as a kind of power cell in your new surroundings. With some warping back and forth you might find ways to shift an obstacle in one world with a mechanism in the other. Ultimately, though, frequent world hopping becomes a necessity and Cocoon pushes the concept to marvellous conclusions. Nor does Cocoon ever relax its audiovisual design, which provides the perfect environment for puzzles, making no sense then perfect sense as soon as you toy with it. Cocoon A beautiful, tactile, ingenious puzzle adventure. PRICE $36.95 PLATFORM PC, PS4/5, XB1/S/X, Switch WEB cocoongame.com TOMMY GUN WITCHES BUBBLE, BUBBLE, RECOIL AND TROUBLE. Here we have witches that dress like Payday robbers, hiding the green skin of the witch from The Wizard of Oz. And they use Tommy guns because, well, I suspect because it makes for a catchy title. The urban fantasy of The Dresden Files has been mashed down into one half-hour game: a gorgeous, first-person adventure game where you interview suspects and solve simple puzzles across a modern city. You play as a sentinel, investigating the murder of a man in a hotel room. Which witch did the deed, and why did she leave her sacred mask and Tommy gun behind? The pixel art is sumptuous and suggestive of a whole city, while the dialogue plays it straight and manages to find the humanity in a setting that borders on parody. There are a few puzzles to solve, generally by combining inventory items and discovering where to use them, and for me they found the sweet spot where I was stumped a couple of times, but not long enough for me to resort to a walkthrough. PRICE Free PLATFORM PC WEB bit.ly/TommyGunWitches Cocoon is a puzzle adventure of rare ingenuity that thrives on its tactility as much as its design. Jon Bailes VERDICT A creative slice of urban fantasy from a developer adventure fans need to watch. Tom Sykes VERDICT 1 You often find yourself being transported on strange vehicles. 2 Secret paths lead to creatures known as moon ancestors. 3 Green switches are the most basic means of making things move. 1 2 3
DOWNTIME | GAMES MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 105 You can see why the original House Flipper was such a hit. Its cosy fantasy of home ownership and fulfilling work was a soothing balm after a miserable day at the office, and that fantasy is only strengthened in this sequel. The basics remain the same: jobs appear in your email, from cleaning tasks to full-on home renovation, and you can use the profits to buy properties from the auction house, ready to be glowed up and flipped for a profit. Accept a job and you’ll appear outside the house with your bag of tools. Bin bags to collect the rubbish, one measly cloth to wipe down the surfaces, a roller for painting, and so on. Straddling simulation and more casual play, these actions mimic real life, to an extent. When building a brick wall, you watch a lovely animation play, but all you’re doing is holding the mouse button down, as your character plucks bricks and mortar from thin air. Mostly, I’m happy with this middle ground, but I’d feel more connected to the work if I also had to clean up the rubble. There’s now a wholesome story campaign tying all your freelance jobs together, as you tackle projects across the town of Pinnacove. You’ll gradually expand your operation, from Crayfish Coast to Suburban Pinnacove and ultimately Coralroot Forest, taking on bigger jobs and earning more money in the process. As I restored a bedroom for a grandmother who was eagerly awaiting her grandson’s arrival, I was touched to open a box and discover his train set. Delicately assembling it on his desk – because I wanted to, not as a marked objective – is one of the most satisfying things I’ve done in a game all year. And, there’s the new Sandbox mode featuring no clients at all. Design a house from scratch without having to worry about money, and with a more comprehensive range of tools that let you speedily set down walls and even sculpt the surrounding environment. Lovely. House Flipper 2 Live the property fantasy, debt-free. PRICE $58.50 PLATFORM PC, PS5, XBS/X WEB houseflipper2.com THE TWO RIVERS HYPOTHESIS DRIVING A SUBMERSIBLE. The Two Rivers Hypothesis is pure aesthetic and atmosphere, with little beneath that – but what aesthetic and atmosphere. It’s a game where you pilot a submersible around a dark and flooded facility, exploring tunnels until you discover the ending. Controlling the craft is an exercise in mild frustration, then, that feels appropriate for the bulky thing you’re steering. It should feel cumbersome to explore this place, inciting fear as you blindly turn a corner and drive it down another pitch-black corridor. As you find your bearings, you’re assailed by emails that tell of the facility crew and their ultimate fates. Are you one of them? Are you trying to escape? Two Rivers is reluctant to reveal too many details. But the atmosphere as you explore the place – the mounting dread and sense of anticipation – is almost too much to bear. Assisting in that atmosphere is the flickery VHS filter, which is overused in the indie space but feels relatively fresh here. The effect adds a layer of authenticity that makes the dark, ponderous exploration all the scarier. PRICE Free PLATFORM PC WEB bit.ly/RiversHypothesis House Flipper 2 is more of a touch-up than a full-on renovation, but Sandbox mode is exciting. Tom Sykes VERDICT 1 You have a gun that turns unwanted items into profit. 2 Hit Q to highlight objects that need to be dealt with. 1 2 Tense atmosphere in this spooky sub game. Tom Sykes VERDICT I’m sure the Toblerone headquarters is smaller than it used to be.
DOWNTIME | GAME CHANGER MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 107 There are few gaming accomplishments more satisfying than the thrill of pulling off kills in stealth action games. The sweetest of feats can be achievements or timed runs or trick shots but there’s something extra special about a grudge kill. Shadow of Mordor, the Warner Bros. action game of 2014, was a factory for satisfying kills with its nemesis system that became the centre of any conversation about the game. After recently working my way through other stealth romps like Styx: Master of Shadows and Hitman 3, I got the itch to return to one of the previous decade’s golden children to see if it’s everything thought. The way I remember Shadow of stealthily across ropes connecting them feels serviceable now, but pretty basic. There’s not too much puzzle or exploration in spidering up the side of the same broken stone arches all over the map. It’s a wide but not high map, structures and strongholds of a couple of stories evenly spaced out across the barren crags in the corner of Middle-earth. Shadow of itself The world itself felt grander at the time but doesn’t really inspire awe in this decade – like returning to a childhood playground and realising that I can reach up and touch the monkey bars that once seemed quite intimidating. Even though it doesn’t have the towering structures I’d remembered them Mordor was as an understudy to Assassin’s Creed. It has tons of climbing, opportunities for silent kills, kills from above and all the other stabby stealth skills of classic Creed. Coming back to it, I was anticipating plenty of verticality, clutch kills using the environment, and some good melee combat when everything goes wrong. I was partially right. I don’t think Shadow of Mordor’s world design and structures are all that much to write home about, unless I’m retroactively giving old Assassin’s Creed games more credit than they’re due too. Shadow of Mordor’s crumbling Middle-earth infrastructure is largely repetitive and none too intricate. Climbing up ruins and creeping Lauren Morton revisits Middle-earth’s nemesis system. Shadow of Mordor RELEASE September 30, 2014 DEVELOPER Monolith Productions PUBLISHER Warner Bros LINK warnerbrosgames.com ABOVE Shadow of Mordor’s photo mode takes better glory shots of my kills than I’d remembered.
108 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024 DOWNTIME | GAME CHANGER as, the climbing and creeping across structures is still enjoyable. There’s some suspension of disbelief required in how easy it is for me to lose the attention of a horde of orcs just by scaling the opposite side of a stone wall, but it sure does make me feel stealthy to do it. Sprinting across the rock landscapes and hauling up towers, jumping across gaps between buildings with ease and prancing along ropes connecting them is the kind of versatile traversal I was hoping for and that I got in spades. Fight or flight Even though the Middle-earth ruins city planning feels just passable, there’s still a lot of satisfaction in combat. The basics are initially repetitive – one button to swing Talion’s sword and another to aim his bow – but quickly get compounded as I unlock parries, vaulting over orcs’ heads, executions and finishing moves. It all weaves together about as well as I remember with only a little clunkiness to Talion’s general movement. As I stalk towards the general location of an orc captain on my kill list, I’ll often begin by crouching in a patch of bushes, using a skill attached to my bow to lure away nearby uruks to pick them off. Inevitably I’ll miss one, and 2 3 4 1 Crossing swords with my quarry never gets stale. 2 Ghostly interrogation is a staple of my captain-hunting strategy. 3 Every infiltration begins with a couple of kills. 4 Higher rank captains have a range of resistances and few weaknesses. 1
DOWNTIME | GAME CHANGER MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 109 being spotted by one orc turns into fighting five or more of his cohort as they rush me simultaneously. Those are the weaker moments of standard combat in Shadow of Mordor, getting surrounded and mobbed by a gaggle of stock baddies. There’s initially a little glee in whacking the orc in front of me, quickly parrying the one swinging at my back, and vaulting over another to continue the attack. But after about ten seconds it becomes clear that I can’t pull a finishing move on the orc I’ve downed because I’m constantly parrying another, which interrupts that kill. I’m surrounded by nearly-dead orcs managing to just cover for one another all while arrows rain down from the one archer I didn’t pick off. In a fight between Talion and ten orc toddlers, the strength in numbers does eventually win out. Those dogpiles become untenable, leaving me only one recourse: turning tail and running. Since those packs of gathered orcs don’t really disperse in a natural fashion, those failures to manage the crowd force me off to pick at some other fortress, hoping that the enemy AI will reset and settle while I’m away. The times when I can keep a brawl with stock orcs to a headcount of three or four though – firing off a quick bow shot at the one running to raise the alarm, killing the one I’ve downed, and then snagging the final assailant in Talion’s ghostly grip to call for help when in danger. Thus my complaints about unwieldy mobs of orcs. After that, an orc captain I definitely killed seems to have come back from the dead, ambushing me as I’m stalking one of his higher-rank brethren saying that I gave him a scar, and sure enough his face has large pink sword marks. Each successive fight takes more work as I find captains clustered together at the same outpost, requiring much more finesse from my plans. Others have traits that make them fearful of certain attack types, forcing them to retreat and me on a chase to run them down. This is where the stealth action of Mordor shines: the five minutes I spend casing a fortress for an orc captain who’s vulnerable to takedowns. I perch atop crumbling arches watching his entourage come and go, never leaving him fully open to my death-from-above leap. Eventually I had to decide whether I should flush him out by blowing up a nearby campfire and risk him running away, or dive right in the centre of his posse for that takedown I want so badly. I spend several hours at my task of orc captain eliminator without realising it. So I’d say that the nemesis system holds up well. Patent trending The success of the nemesis system naturally begs for other games using it as inspiration. And yet they haven’t. In 2021, after a few years of trying to get it approved, Warner Bros acquired a patent for “Nemesis characters, nemesis forts, social vendettas and followers in computer games,” the nemesis system as we know it. We’ve yet to see it legally enforced in any public fashion, but it did have a chilling effect. Patented or not, I hope we’ll see takes on the nemesis system from outside Warner Bros. Even by another name, there’s excitement around evolving enemies. Until someone else takes the bait, Shadow of Mordor is worth returning to. interrogate him for information about his captain – that’s the glory of Shadow of Mordor’s basic combat. Killtacular The part of Shadow of Mordor that’s barely aged is its nemesis system. Its method of creating and preying upon grudges became its defining feature when it launched and for good reason. The nemesis system still kills. I hopped into a fresh save file of Shadow of Mordor and decided that my personal goal would be to kill as many orc captains in Sauron’s army as possible without ever letting them re-hire new talent. What main quest? Sauron’s army has three tiers of orc captains who I can either stumble upon in the wild or pick off lesser orcs to learn their general location and eventually their strengths and weaknesses. If I ever die by their hand, those orcs get promoted up a tier and can gain additional strengths too. So I just won’t die. That’s the challenge I set myself. I started my killing spree with the middle management of Sauron’s army, whichever orcs were hanging out nearby on the bottom rung of the ladder. The first three kills are easy enough – orc captains with small entourages milling about in crumbling ruins. I pick off their guards quickly and then take out each captain with a short sword fight and execution move. The next captain throws a wrench in my plans. He’s got the Summoner trait, which lets him HUNTER’S HUBRIS THE EMOTIONAL JOURNEY OF ORC SLAYING ORCS KILLED SELF CONFIDENCE First stealth kill, I am the orc slayer. Height of hubris, taking on a mob of orcs. First death and first nemesis acquired. I am the agent of downsizing in Sauron’s army.
110 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024 DOWNTIME | RETRO Rockstar Games recently unveiled a 90-minute trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI. Within a single day, it had been watched 90,421,491 times, making it the most viewed videogame reveal on YouTube in 24 hours, according to Guinness World Records. Many millions more have watched it since. Such excitement was to be expected. The Grand Theft Auto franchise has long been a smash hit – sales of the crime series have reached 410 million copies, firmly placing it in the top five best-selling franchises of all time, behind Mario, Tetris, Pokémon and Call of Duty. It’s easy to see why, too. The games allow players to indulge their dark side, letting them loose in a As excitement builds for the latest instalment of Grand Theft Auto, David Crookes looks at how the first game shot to glory a little over 25 years ago. How Grand Theft Auto stole hearts GTA VI is getting gamers very excited – and it shows just how far the series has come. vast environment to enjoy an open-world adventure with few rules. Across the series, gamers can steal cars and planes, rob banks and people, engage in shoot-outs and fight it out with cops. It’s also possible to get drunk, watch TV, go to the cinema and play a game of tennis or golf... before running red lights and running over pedestrians. Wholesome it ain’t, but the carefree approach is only part of the story. During the course of such mayhem, the series has taken a satirical swipe at American culture, explored social issues and spawned a genre of its own. Importantly, the games, as uncomfortable as they can be at times, are also laden with humour, having been developed with tongues firmly in cheeks. They’ve been created to empower people to feel free and, above all, have fun. Born of passion When the first game was released a little over 25 years ago, no-one could have foreseen the impact GTA would have had. Back then, Dundee-based developer DMA Design was simply looking to build a game its team would want to play themselves and that, initially, didn’t involve taking on the role of a low-level gangster. Instead, there had been a plan to create either a city simulator or a top-down racer. DMA Design’s co-founder Mike Dailly got the ball rolling. “He had built a cool top-down semi-3D © Rockstar Games
DOWNTIME | RETRO MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 111 much built on PC and for PC, which was quite wasteful in memory and CPU usage in hindsight,” Hamilton said. “The engine was written in assembler but the vast majority of the code was written in C, which was a first for DMA because all previous games had been the other way around. “Using a higher-level language like C was what enabled more complex gameplay than our previous games. Of course, it also enabled some really complex bugs, and we had to implement a recording system to capture them. For example, the game could crash randomly after playing it for half an hour – eventually tracked down to a fire engine hitting a pedestrian slightly off-screen.” Although PCs were powerful enough to handle full 3D, a decision was made to stick to the pseudo-3D top-down perspective created by Dailly. It allowed gamers to see what was going on around them and it meant the developers would have more time to work on creating a living, breathing city, putting gameplay over graphics. “We built the game around the engine and the initial gameplay mechanic – full 3D was never really considered,” Hamilton affirmed. “We were concerned that the look of the game was quite dated compared to other games of the time, but our tech efforts were very much focused on gameplay rather than visual effects. Our art team had a challenging job to keep the game looking fresh.” As development continued, the game evolved. The multiplayer aspect of the game was dropped and the structure of the game was refined. Further suggestions were made by members of the team, although some were briefly considered then cast aside for various reasons (there was a plan to allow players to drive combine harvesters to mow down pedestrians, but this was dropped because the team didn’t have sufficient time). “Most of the experiments ended up in the game: theft, open world, police, ambulances, trains, tanks, Hare Krishnas,” Hamilton said. Indeed, players were able to mow down a bunch of Hare Krishnas and earn a Gouranga bonus (a Hare be stolen, raced, collided and crashed. “It will also be possible for players to get out of their car and steal another one. This will mean controlling a vulnerable pedestrian for a short time. Trying to steal a car may result in an alarm being set off which will, of course, attract the police.” DMA Design allocated the game a budget of $2 million and work began on the DOS version, with the PC becoming the game’s lead platform. “The game was very LEFT The concept for what was going to be called Race’n’Chase. ABOVE The new “bad boy” of computer games hits the shelves. “The series has taken a satirical swipe at American culture, explored social issues and spawned a genre of its own” scroller,” said Keith R. Hamilton, GTA’s team lead and lead programmer. Hamilton had just completed his first commercial game – “I’d been lead programmer on the PC version of All New World of Lemmings” – and was looking round for his next title. “As car enthusiasts, we were keen to do a top-down racing game, and it came together nicely with Mike’s prototype.” A decision was made to work on a top-down racing game based in a city. It would be called Race’n’Chase, and the idea was to create a straightforward cops and robbers game with the player assuming the role of the good guy – the chasing cop. But the team decided they wanted to spice things up and allow players to drive any vehicle they wanted, and that posed a little problem. “Just driving cars was not enough so we introduced playing on foot,” Hamilton told APC. “But how do you explain going from on-foot to driving a car that you weren’t driving? Theft! And so the game evolved.” In an instant, the game effectively turned into a sandbox, car-based crime sim. Nothing was off limits, and the aim was to let most of the fun situations just happen because of player interaction rather than because the developers wanted them to be that way. “We didn’t write a story and build a game around it, we evolved a gameplay mechanic and then imagined a background to explain it,” Hamilton continued. “But the team was chaotic, quite inexperienced, and I think the game reflects that.” On a mission In a bid to help the development run more smoothly, Hamilton wrote a design document on 25 January 1995. It was revised five times, with the final version written on 21 March following several meetings. The document proposed “a fun, addictive and fast multi-player car racing and crashing game” using “a novel graphics method”. It suggested there would be three cities, a host of missions and an ability for players to “drive cars and possibly other vehicles such as boats, helicopters or lorries”. Crucially, Hamilton said cars could
DOWNTIME | RETRO 112 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024 Krishna mantra meaning “be happy”). “The hard bit was putting a stop to all the suggestions to get the game actually released.” Bang bang Given the ambition and scale of what DMA Design was trying to achieve, the team missed all of their milestone deadlines. They were supposed to have completed the project on 1 July 1996, but that date came and went. Even so, the team was obviously on to something. They were creating an edgy city that felt alive, although Hamilton wanted to go even further in that first game. “I was very interested in the simulation aspect – the more the city functioned in the background, the more fun the player could get from interfering with it, noticing that they were having an impact on the world,” Hamilton continued. He wanted to create traffic systems, repairs, diversions and more. “But we moved away from this towards scripted missions to give the game more of a storyline.” Still, there were some lovely quirks. Cop cars would drive from the police stations to the scene of a crime and ambulances would make their way to and from hospitals, stopping to place injured people on stretchers. The missions also worked well: there were 90 of them spread across Liberty City, San Andreas and Vice City (based on New York City, San Francisco and Miami), and they’d involve driving to locations, stealing and delivering 1 An early prototype of Race’n’Chase was ripped up because it looked too similar to Syndicate Wars. 2 The graphics looked dated even for 1997. items, killing and kidnapping people, blowing stuff up and having cars resprayed. Communication was via public phone booths and pagers. The latter features were important. Initially, the game was going to be entirely based around the missions, which would be manually selected – complete one and you’d be asked to choose another. But the level selection ended up being effectively built into the game itself. Players would be able to do their own thing and choose to embark on a mission if they wished. Surviving is winning Trouble is, all of this made for a very complex game, and testing was difficult because it was hard to second guess every move that a player would make. The team cracked on, however, doing their level best to create a winning game. “There were, I think, 20 to 30 people – code, level design, art, sound, QA – all very talented but mostly quite inexperienced at the time, all with an input on the direction of the game. It was chaotic but I believe the game benefited from that. The challenge was to get it finished.” Development unfortunately didn’t always go smoothly. “There were heated arguments and it became very stressful at points,” Hamilton recalled. “We were concerned about getting the game released before being eclipsed by the competition. We were concerned about it being cancelled. We were concerned about the bugs getting out of control. It was fun at first but there was a lot of late-night work and stress to actually get it finished.” Some of the team’s fears were well founded, with the game nearly cancelled on numerous occasions. One time, DMA Design co-founder Dave Jones had to persuade American executives from game publisher BMG Interactive that the game was worth sticking with despite the presence of outdated graphics, bugs and the lack of a clear genre. “They’d flown over and were hugely unimpressed about the lack of graphical quality in an unfinished game that they had pumped a lot of money into,” Hamilton said. Yet, in general, the more people heard about the game, the more they were intrigued. “The confidence of the team was transformed when we put out a demo version and had a hugely enthusiastic response. We then knew it was going to work,” Hamilton said. ABOVE A second prototype became the basis of the original GTA. 1 2
DOWNTIME | RETRO MARCH 2024 APC MAGAZINE 113 Crime pays To attract more interest, publicist Max Clifford was hired by BMG Interactive to tip off the tabloids about the game’s content. As word spread, more people began talking. Lord Campbell of Croy infamously raised concerns in the House of Lords on 20 May 1997, months before the game was even released. “Is it true, as reported, that the game includes thefts of cars, joyriding, hit-and-run accidents, and being chased by the police, and that there will be nothing to stop children from buying it?” he asked. “To use current terminology, is that not ‘off-message’ for young people?” Proving that there is no such thing as bad publicity, interest among gamers soared. GTA was given an 18-rating by the British Board of Film Classification, which assessed videogames at the time, and it was worn as a badge of honour, with an advertisement proudly proclaiming: “Grand Theft Auto is so good, it won a certificate before it was even released.” It also helped that the game’s reviews were so positive. PC Play awarded the game 92%, PC Zone gave it 92% and PC Gamer also handed it 92%. C&VG was so impressed it gave GTA five out of five. And when Escape magazine printed, “Grand Theft Auto is depraved, disgusting, putrid and repellent, 6 out of 6!”, DMA Design said it confirmed “the truism that adults really do have all the fun. Sorry kids. Grow up and see what you’re missing.” For the developers, such attention was also a relief. Having been worried about the future of the project, they now knew they had a special game on their hands. “The team was very excited to see any news about the game at all,” Hamilton said. “The level of controversy was unexpected and exciting – not unwelcome. We were confident in the content of the game by that point. Reports of the game not being fun to play would have upset us, but media stories about the content did not.” DMA Design created other versions. “We built one for the new-fangled Windows, not sure if it would take off! And we also built a special for the 3DFX, a 3D graphics card, which was a rarity at the time,” Hamilton said. The PlayStation version was handed to a four-person team at Visual Science. “The PlayStation version, which was done in an incredibly short timescale, was horribly hampered by the original codebase and as a result was hugely inferior to the PC version, much to my regret to this day,” Hamilton said. Regardless, a countercultural phenomenon was born and a sequel was created two years later, along with London expansion packs for the first game. The franchise moved to full 3D with the groundbreaking Grand Theft Auto III in 2001 (at which point DMA Design was renamed Rockstar North). This was followed by Grand Theft Auto: Vice City in 2002 and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in 2004, Grand Theft Auto IV in 2008 and Grand Theft Auto V in 2013. The next instalment, Grand Theft Auto VI, is due for release in 2025. Given the gap of 12 years between GTA V and VI it’s little wonder there’s so much anticipation, and Hamilton is among those eagerly awaiting the next game. “I’m as excited as everyone else to see GTA VI. The technical advances, storylines and cinematic quality of the newer GTA games have transformed it into something on an epic scale that we could never have imagined developing the original,” he said. He contends, however, that the ethos of what makes GTA so special has changed very little from the original concept all those years ago. “It’s mind-blowing what they’ve done in the later games, and yet the original team can be proud that the core gameplay mechanic and sense of fun remains,” he said. “That sense of fun is why GTA games have proven to be so successful and popular, above all else. Violence is a side effect of that. It’s not the point of the game.” LEFT GTA was proud to receive an 18+ rating from the BBFC. ABOVE Getting a criminal record was a badge of honour in GTA. “Our tech efforts were focused on gameplay rather than visual effects. Our art team had a challenging job to keep the game looking fresh”
114 APC MAGAZINE MARCH 2024 Putting aside the fact no one sound checked the name WeHead, this ChatGPT based talking head with facial animations is undoubtedly one of the more absurd creations to hit CES in 2024. Yours for the basementbargain price of US$4,950, the head-shaped screen will generate a facial animation to match responses from a ChatGPT voice bot to make it seem fractionally less likely that you’re talking to a computer. The team has pitched it as a ‘brainstorming, decision-making and self reflection chat bot that can help you with all your important professional decisions: like coming up with product names… we presume. HACKDAY OFFERS GRID COMPASS 3D BUILD DIY YOUR OWN 80S NASA LAPTOP WITH MODERN COMPONENTS. If you’re a fan of Aliens: Directors Cut or old-school NASA stuff, then you might be keen to hear that a Hackday entrant posted 3D Printer schematics and instructions to build your own Grid Compass-looking laptop dubbed the Rasti. The device uses the Framework DIY laptop components and pairs it with a chassis and keyboard that you can largely print yourself if you happen to have a 3D Printer and a bit of time up your sleeve. The Grid Compass was the first laptop used By NASA astronauts and has a distinctive retro laptop shape, fortunately it’ll have a bit more power than the original. WeHead – AI-based head-shaped oracle You’ll never need to talk to anyone ever again with this AI talking head. Joel Burgess reports on the unusual side of tech news CHIP CHAT CENTRE CAM 2.0 SITS IN THE MIDDLE OF YOUR SCREEN WHAT WOULD YOU GIVE FOR ONLINE EYE CONTACT? We’ve all been annoyed by the placement of a webcam since it never sits exactly where you’re looking, but it’s definitely not as annoying as having something hanging in front of your screen. The makers of Centre Cam V2.0 disagree however, launching an Indiegogo campaign for a webcam that’ll partially block whatever you’re looking at in order to make you appear as though you’re staring directly into the eyes of whoever you’re meeting over a web conference. At the time of writing there were at least 962 other screen-haters happy to trade a clear view for a centred webcam. © WeHead © @johnnie X © Ian Foster Indegogo LG WASHING MACHINE SENDS 3.7GB OF DATA PER DAY THAT’S PRETTY GRANULAR CLEANING DATA Smart washing machine owner and X user Johnie turned to the internet to help him uncover why his LG washing machine would need to be uploading 3.66GB of data per day. While there are plenty of references to laundering Bitcoin and DLC (Downloadable Laundry Cycles), the thread actually has a number of updates that include the difficult air gapping of the washing machine to the potential solution of inaccurate readings from the router. Johnnie was still waiting for a response from LG as to the cause of the mega uploads and for some tips on troubleshooting it, particularly since LG CEO William Cho said the company wants to harvest data from household devices to train AI at CES.
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