Demon's Souls, impressons

Demon's Souls, by From Software, rings so many good references from my gaming experience that I have no choice but to love this game. It is a punishing game, in an "old school" way --- it will force you to redo good bits of a level when you die; there are no hand-rails or barriers in high-hanging places, allowing you to fall (or be thrown) off cliffs or stairwells if you're not paying attention; you restart a level, all enemies are back there where you found them the first time; and when you die, you leave all your game currency ("Souls") right there at the spot where it happened --- i.e., right where you'll find the baddie that killed you when you come back for it, and marked by a pool of your own blood. Any one "level" of the game has areas, easily accessible from the start, where wading into as a beginner will expose your character to high-level enemies who will kill you within seconds of contact. Careful exploration is key.

Anyone can make a difficult game, but this isn't the only quality of Demon's Souls. The maps I have explored are interesting and sections integrate together very well. The first world you have access to, a large, battle scarred keep, constantly impressed by the spacial integration of the many areas; looking through a window and seeing a walled pathway in the distance probably means you can get there. Details like these are great contributors to the feeling of immersion I get out of this game. Ghosts of other players walking around also add to the immersion.

Yes, there are ghosts. In fact, you'll start the game proper as a ghost. The game kills you early on (really minor spoiler), so you'll walk the early levels as a phantom. When you die, you get transported to a place called the Nexus. Frankly, the story doesn't really make that much sense to me. As a ghost you can still be killed by the foes you encounter through the level, and leave a blood stain when you die. And you're able to physically interact with the world around you. Really the only side effect that I can see is that in ghost form your hit points are halved. Its logic aside, this ghost premise allows for some very interesting game mechanics.

As you walk around you will frequently notice white specters, which are other players moving through the same area in their own ghost forms --- you can't interact with those forms. You'll also see other player's blood stains, where they have been slain. You can activate those stains, and observe a reenactment of the last seconds of that player's life, allowing you perhaps to prepare for what's ahead. Another interesting aspect of the game is the ability for players to scribe messages on the floor (that appear as ghostly looking characters to you as you walk by). Those messages may warn you about what's ahead, give hints, or just be idle chatter. They may also be downright misleading. Messages are left by selecting phrases or combinations of phrases from a menu, so you won't be encountering immersion breaking graffiti (neither high-quality in-character chatter).

The mechanism to reacquire one's physical form is to perform an heroic deed, like helping a hero to slay a monster. If you die while fighting a monster, you'll be able to leave a message to other players indicating that you're "haunting" that place, waiting for another chance at the foe. Another player in possession of their own physical body is then able to summon you to help them in their own fight. Up to three players are able to cooperate in this manner. Success makes the specters corporeal again, and sends them back to their own worlds.

Alternatively, instead of offering to help other living players, you may choose to follow a darker path, and infiltrate a living player's world to hunt them down and cause their demise, which also returns you to life. This can be initiated by a ghost player and it is completely outside your control as long as you choose to enable on-line interactions. While it may be easier to kill another player this way than to fight against a demon (especially because it gives you the element of surprise against the other player), for the spirits that follow this path there is an inconvenient side-effect: they become more vulnerable to other dark foes, including demons, that they will need to fight in their progress through the game.

Demon's Souls is an original, beautiful game, with a sense of immersion that is difficult to match by other RPGs. Its form of uncommitted on-line mechanics takes what's essentially a single-player game and adds to it a richness of interaction that only on-line games can provide. The result is one of the most unique games I've played in years.

Random "new phone" notes

This morning I was greeted with a software update dialog when I turned on my new G1.

• The update completed in just shy of five minutes.
• Firmware version 1.1 to 1.6.
• Kernel version: from 2.6.25-* to 2.6.29-*.
• Build number: from "kila-user 1.1 PLAT-RC33 126986 ota-rel-keys,release-keys" to "DRC33".
• Noticed a few new entries to the settings menus: System tutorial (which covers how to use the newly added soft keyboard), Speech synthesis (which requires the installation of voice data before becoming fully functional), Search, Accessibility.
• Refinements to market interface.
• Some improvements to the Contacts and Calendar apps.
  

Got an Android phone today

Today Ellen and I went to the T-Mobile store nearby and got out of there with a T-Mobile service contract and two HTC G1 Android phones. These are a few disorganized notes as I explore the device. My previous phone has been a first gen 8GB iPhone.

Why the G1?
The contenders were the HTC G1 and the T-Mobile MyTouch (HTC Magic). Besides the physical keyboard, the hardware on the G1 and on the newer MyTouch are very close to identical. I was set on getting the MyTouch due to the fact that it comes with a larger Micro SD memory card (4GB vs. 1GB in the G1), it can record videos, and the G1 would never show a software keyboard -- the physical keyboard is nice, but it would have been better to be able to use an on-screen keyboard for short text input without having to slide the thing open.

Well, all of the above disadvantages disappear when the G1 receives the latest Android OS version (1.6, "Donut"). The device becomes video recording capable and gets a soft keyboard, which appears when the screen has not been slid open to review the physical one. The memory card on the G1 still only holds 1GB, compared to the 4GB one that comes with the MyTouch, but since I would have updated that to 16GB anyway, it's not much of an advantage (in any case, the G1 is $30 [make that $20] cheaper than the MyTouch, which is more than enough to buy an 8GB memory card).

Odds and ends

• Even though the store display unit had Android 1.6, our purchased units are still on 1.5 [correction: they were still 1.1 units]; we should be receiving the 1.6 update push soon (otherwise T-Mobile support will be receiving a phone call tomorrow). Manual update of the OS is also possible of course (one of the key features of this platform is unrestricted OS modification/upgrade).
  
• Google Voice integration: I can set up the phone to use my GV number automatically for outgoing calls, transparently, after downloading the GV app.
• It has three types of call forwarding modes supported by T-Mobile: Always forward, forward when busy, when unanswered, and when unreachable. I actually use forwarding on a day-to-day basis, as I receive no cell signal in my (soon to be old) office. The only forwarding option on my iPhone was the always forward. Now I can simply set the "when unreachable" forwarding to my Google Voice number (which will ring my office phone) and don't have to worry about setting call forwarding as I arrive at work. Of course, my new job's location will have good cell reception, making this point moot...
  
• It has out-of-the-box integration with my GMail account (contacts, calendar, email). It does not come with any sort of desktop sync software, or any desktop software at all. And it doesn't require it, provided you don't mind using the Google software stack (which I obviously don't).
• There is an entry in the phone settings menu for application development (which I thought was pretty cool), and it contains two options: USB debugging ("Debug mode when USB is connected") and Stay awake ("Screen will never sleep while charging").
• When connected to a computer it will simply show as external storage, allowing me to copy files to and from it without any sort of gate keeper software. I find this extremely positive.