Gaming and AI

Okay, I just got a new game but I haven't played enough of it yet, so I can't review it yet. And by played enough, I mean not hardly at all. All I managed to get to last night before I went to sleep was watching the intro movie, which, I admit, was pretty cool. You know the name of my new game escapes me at the moment, but I'll play it more when I get home and write up a review later.

What I wanted to talk about in this post is gaming AI. AI means Artificial Intelligence, for those who don't know. Now I'm not going to say it's come a long way, because in my latest game, it's not bad, but other games in the past have been better. The most awesome AI I have ever seen is in the game Halo, which had 4 basic types of enemy aliens in the single player aspect of the game. The weakest type and the most common, was this little thing that looked like a scrawny teenage mutant ninja turtle, and basically used a small pistol to shoot at you and threw the odd grenade or two. Now the pistol was something you also started with, and you could always pick up theirs, so it wasn't a useless weapon, and several of these midgets firing at you at once could really wear you down fast. The funnest thing about killing the midgets was tossing a plasma grenade at them (plasma grenades stick) and then watching them scream and run around crazily trying to get the grenade off before it blew up. At one point, I tossed a grenade at one that was fleeing around a corner, and it stuck to his foot, and apparently there were more of them around the corner, because next there was a BOOM and the bodies of several of the little buggers came flying out into the hallway. Creepiest thing ever: one of the AI soldiers I was accompanying said "Nice throw."

Now, I know they've made AI in games that tries to feed itself and seek certain things based on need levels that periodically drop and then need to be replenished, giving it a sort of daily life cycle. And obviously the bots in the game that were allied with me needed to be able to see the enemy aliens and fire at them until they were dead. Nothing new in gaming AI as far as that's concerned, it's in most games. But this AI was not shooting at an alien when he spoke. He somehow was aware that I had thrown a grenade, and that I managed to kill several aliens with it at once, at the very least. Now I know this is nothing unusual for humans, we make judgement calls all the time and think nothing of it. "YOU THROW LIKE A GIRL!" and "COVER UP THEM UGLY TITTIES, YOU OLD WHORE!" are common things that we might say to friends and co-workers on a daily basis. At least, it's something I say pretty often. But for a simple scripted program to analyze my actions and the result enough to say something like "Nice throw?" Just creepy.

Also in Halo, there was an alien jackal thing that wielded a shield and pistol to great effect. Then a hulking brute that was sort of a boss monster, and annoyingly and most frighteningly, a cloaked intelligent assassin type alien that ruled the lesser ones and used them as bait to draw you out of hiding so it could sneak up on you and then stab you in the back. All good AI.

Which brings me to my current game, and I still can't remember the name of it, OH MASS EFFECT 2 yea, that's the name, now I remember, this alzheimer's thing is horrible past the age of 19. When you're 19 everyone just thinks you're drunk. When you're 39, people start to worry. When I'm 59, I'll be lucky if I remember to wear pants when I leave the house.

But anyway, the AI in this game is pretty decent and based on difficulty settings, so the higher your difficulty, the more the AI uses it's special abilities. Which sounds awesome. But I won't know until later. Sigh. I should have skipped work today to play my new game, I still feel a bit icky, but I'm not as bad as yesterday, so I think my cold is going away. And if I start just skipping days to play games, I may as well quit my job and play games full time. But then, I wouldn't be able to afford new games. Sigh. Life's little puzzles. I swear the puzzles life gives me are harder than the ones in the original Half-Life, and I hate that game. There was this one puzzle, like right after you started the damn game, where you had to jump on boxes and if you missed one and fell, you dropped into a bottomless pit of nothingness. I never got past that puzzle, and threw out my copy of Half-Life.

Now it's not that I hate puzzles, just pointless ones. But goddammit, WHAT THE BLOODY FRIGGIN HELL IS THE POINT OF MAKING ME JUMP FROM CRATE TO CRATE OVER A BOTTOMLESS PIT WHEN I DON'T EVEN KNOW HOW TO MOVE IN THE GAME YET?????????????????????????????? I don't think there are enough question marks in the world to express my frustration. And no, I didn't do a crazy german kid and wreck my keyboard, my mouse, and throw my computer out the window while swearing vehemently in a high-pitched voice, but I did sigh sadly in a rather manly way, close the game out, and uninstall it from my hard drive. That is about as much anger as I show in real life.

Good thing I have my blog to cut loose in, isn't it? :-)