ROSS'S GAME DUNGEON: QUARANTINE

[deadlinejon]

Also, my friend told me that this game got a sequel, which is neat.

[Artlav]

On a random request tangent, Ross, do you have Magic Carpet on your list of games to cover?

 

Somehow i got reminded of that one while watching... And it's a game i never heard of since playing it in the 90s.

[Nex]

Potential cult classic. Anyone have any ideas what games are almost cult classics?

 

Wait, does this count other countries? I can think of some games forgotten in Canada/US but loved in Poland, Ukraine, and the rest of eastern Europe.

[Vozka]

This is brilliant!

I remember trying to get this game to run in the early days of Windows XP as a kid, after I found it on Home of the Underdogs and thought it looked so cool. And, well, it is, the graphics is awesome (I have a weak spot for software rendered 3d games), the gameplay doesn't look like it held too well, but i enjoyed the video greatly.

It's also fun to hear that I'm not the only person strangely attracted to maps - although instead of making game maps I spent tens of hours contributing to OpenStreetMap. There's just something about creating data in such a visually pleasing way.

[rathbone]

This game reminds me a lot of another old classic -- Carmageddon.

 

I only had the demo version of it, but spent a lot of time playing. One of my favorite things to do (after getting tired of just racing and murdering pedestrians) was use a speed boost power-up at the base of a steep hill, and launch my car through the air. When I hit it right, I was able to actually completely clear the map... my car would go tumbling beyond the edge of the city into a gray oblivion.

 

Loved that game!

[Presence]

Did I see the hover vehicle sinking in water?

[HLPrincess]

Did I see the hover vehicle sinking in water?

Hovering borad from "Back to the Future" couldn't hover over water... maybe these have even worse design

[A Satanic Panda]

Did I see the hover vehicle sinking in water?

 

Don't be silly, helicopters can't fly over water either.

[kingkolton9]

Did I see the hover vehicle sinking in water?

NowdrL6fvb4

[ScumCoder]

Waiting for subs from Danielsangeo ^_^

[dashofweak]

that was a good vid ross............loved how it made me think of Escape From New York mixed with Blade Runner and Minority Report

 

Definitely a bit of robocop too

[danielsangeo]

Subtitles are typed up. I still have to sync them. Have patience, folks. They'll be here soon.

 

Also, does anyone know the title of the song where "Glorify the weak" repeats over and over again? I want to purchase a copy of that song for my collection if I can.

[ScottD.Betson]

Did I see the hover vehicle sinking in water?

Hovering board from "Back to the Future" couldn't hover over water... maybe these have even worse design

well the hoverboards did in one scene in the film but martys hoverboard magda didnt actually hover well over water because he had a crappy one, but the one that Griff and his Cronies had did actually hover over the water but then again Magda it was a movie that promised us Jaws 18 in Holomax 3D, Hoverboards, Power Laces and Hovercars, Pizza that you could rehydrate, multi tv shows being able to be seen on one TV, glasses with 2 tv shows you could watch, amongst other things and well only a few things were promised in 2015 and if none of this stuff exist by the 22nd of October I am owed a Pepsi Perfect....hell even PEPSI PERFECT was available in 2015 WTF!? (Power Laces don't really count since it will be a one time only deal with Nike when they re-release the Air Mags aka Air McFlys)

 

sorry for this tangent, I love the Back To The Future films and loved how Ross mentioned one of my favourite films that sort of touches on totalitarianism (Escape From New York) which actually was written by Carpenter in the midst of the Watergate Scandal, but I do think this episode did actually make a cult classic game kind of look alot like a cult classic film I remember being a movie then a game by Rockstar Games, (I wonder if Ross would review it if he can emulate a PS2 on his PC....if he can then Can you Dig it?! Can you Dig it?! CAAAAAN YOU DIIIIIG IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT?!!!!!!!!!!!!)

[ScottD.Betson]

that was a good vid ross............loved how it made me think of Escape From New York mixed with Blade Runner and Minority Report

 

Definitely a bit of robocop too

Definitely but more Escape from LA the most, only thing that had any sort of connection to Robocop was maybe the part where he talks about OCP and Omnicorp and man those movies were good back in the day, I still sort of wish they didnt have to remake it or reboot it like they did.......I honestly think it could have been good to come back to Robocop but as a 4th one with it being more in California or somewhere else instead of Detroit, I mean they did the same with Total Recall where I think the original film was more or less closer to the short story than the remake was.....but I cant remember I read the short story when I was in Middle School after I saw the film and watched and read I, Robot by mr Asimov

[throttledan]

Also, does anyone know the title of the song where "Glorify the weak" repeats over and over again? I want to purchase a copy of that song for my collection if I can.

 

Underground Lovers - Weak Will

[danielsangeo]

Thanks for that!

[TheBizzliestGigsby]

Just wanted to join and say this is my favorite game dungeon yet, this series is way more interesting and fresh then a game review show should be and this is a good thing.

There is just something about a -Frusterated-Wildly Pissed Off-Slowly going insane-Ross- that's wildly entertaining to me, come to think about it, despite how different this series is from Freeman's mind it has a couple themes in common that will probably keep dragging me back forever. Create videos until the end of time Ross, we'll keep watching long after we've turned into zombies.

[L0r3n20]

Wow. I played Quarantine II A LOT. I had a shareware copy which i almost consumed and then, a couple of years later I managed to find a complete version (I still have it!).

The sequel is not "open world" since most of the time you have a mission to complete: go from a place to another, kill someone or make something explode. As far as I remember there were not as much weapons as in the first Quarantine and you couldn't buy them...

Anyway great work Ross!

[eldflaugamadur]

Hilariously Unsuccessful Curve(Surface) Fitting Of The Pedestrian Weight To Impact Ratio Function

 

I've recently learned a technique of fitting any random data to interpolating polynomials(using a Lagrangian method). It allows one to take some crazy complicated function and turn it into a nice and simple polynomial(in theory). The downside is that if function doesn't fit well into any polynomials you get a really crazy and wavy polynomial instead which can be even worse than original function or it's data.

 

When you wield a hammer every finger is a nail(or however it goes), so when i saw that copy protection table in the video I just had to try this method. I wanted to know what polynomial can approximate that whole "Pedestrian Weight To Impact Ratio Table".

 

It has total of 36*13=468 values, seemingly not a lot of data, so I was very optimistic and at first tried building that polynomial on a piece of paper. Very soon after running out of both paper and patience, I realized I underestimated the scope of the problem. Not inclined to give up so soon, I decided to write a program to do it.

 

I chose Haskell as a language, mainly because I thought it would be faster to build this sort of thing in a functional programming language, and also because in the back of my mind I was suspecting I will need arbitrary precision arithmetic, little did I know I was right.

 

The program performs a very simple algorithm based on symbolic manipulation, not unlike the one you've been accustomed to since school. It constructs a series of polynomials and then multiplies and adds them all together to create bigger expressions, finally producing a single polynomial, a function of two variables, weight and mph, or x and y. Graphically such a function can be represented by a surface in three dimensions.

 

If anyone cares how I actually represented polynomials inside a program, 4yx^2+2x+5 would be seen encoded as [(4,[(1,1)(0,2)]), (2,[(0,1)]), (5,[])]. Here polynomial is a list of members. Each member is a tuple, consisting of coefficient on the left and a list of base/exponent pairs on the right. Variable names are encoded as numbers 0 for x, 1 for y.

 

I will not explain here how Lagrangian method works, as it can be technical(yes more technical), and I'm still new to it, so I'm not the best person to explain, if you want to study it, it's from branch of mathematics called Numerical Analysis.

 

The coefficients of this polynomial are extremely important, this is the area that requires the most numerical precision and where most of the precision can be lost. Originally in my infinite naiveness I chose to use a floating point number for coefficients. This is where I underestimated the problem again. Not only floating point numbers gave poor precision, they didn't produce anything that resembled a correct answer. The original unsimplified expression has over millions of terms! My computer with 4GB of memory couldn't even work with unsimplified expressions, it would crash. Even if those terms were correct from a single division that was performed on them, they would loose any resemblance to themselves after going through so many additions and subtractions while simplifying the terms.

 

Here I almost gave up. Precision errors are hard to beat, but here I remembered that Haskell has another useful number type - rational numbers. By themselves rational numbers are still limited to maximum integer size, but in Haskell you get infinite integers too. And so parameterizing rational numbers over infinite integers gives a practically infinite precision alternative to floating point, at least for this type of problem.

 

Finally after replacing all coefficients with rational numbers everything suddenly clicked, and program worked.

 

The source code is here: https://gist.github.com/echolot/9cea3cb8ef08e34746a4

 

The resulting polynomial takes about 30 seconds to compute, it has 468 terms, features rational fractions with over 80 digits in either numerator, denominator or both, and maximum powers of x and y up to 12 and 35 respectively. None of it would be a problem and I would be happy, save for one thing, the fractions of the coefficients are way too precise for floating point representation and so this function cannot be computed on any ordinary calculator without support for rational arithmetic. Any attempts to use floating point will lead to garbage. This is very disappointing for me. Not only it is useless for computation, but any graph of such function would produce a waving mess.

 

Nevertheless, it works, at least in Haskell with it's rationals. You can view it in your browser in it's full 468-termed glory:

 

https://gist.githubusercontent.com/echolot/9cea3cb8ef08e34746a4/raw/4f848ed5a0f8ce0d925f20f65f1246c931288008/pwtir.hs

 

Note that the percentage signs "%" here mean "/", this is just a way to represent rationals. It's NOT a modulus operator like in C. This is because "/" is already defined to mean floating point division.

 

If anything useful came out of this attempt is the fact that I trascribed the entire table, it can be found at the top of polyfit.hs file, encoded as a list of tuples. Maybe someone will need it, I'm sure you'd be able to figure out which columns mean what.

 

EDIT: I've just realized the polynomial has exactly as many terms as the table had entries: 468. Well, that was a waste of time.

Edited March 14, 2015 by Guest (see edit history)

[danielsangeo]

Subtitle update: Placemarkers added for syncing. Now all I have to do is move the individual pieces into place and fix formatting anomalies. I should be able to release the subs tomorrow. Thanks for the patience!