Robie Jr. Lives... sorta

So I know this whole post is one that goes down as a bit of " You might be a geek if..." but hey, I am one, so whatever. For those not old enough to know what a Robie Jr is here is a pic...

Pic from: http://theoldrobots.com/omnijr2.html

After a few days...weeks... ummm months (I am certain I was an insufferable little brat about it) of begging and pleading my wonderful parents got me one of these for christmas many years ago. I would have to say it ranks up there as probably one of the best gifts I ever got, excited was not the word.  For a few joyous months I enjoyed the hell out of having a 'Robot' of my very own. You could tell it were to go, it apologized if it bumped into something, it followed you (the remote at least) around etc... Granted it was really just a cheesy R/C toy that made some noise but you have to consider what the level of tech was at the time. This would have been around the time Nintendo hit the scene. Of course, all good things come to an end and one of the battery terminals broke ending my 'robotic' bliss much sooner than I would have chosen for it to of my own accord :-( So, Robie went on a shelf with a vague plan of repair. As I got older and started fiddling with computers I kept eying the ever more grimy little plastic minion perched on my shelf and thinking "one day I will be able to actually make that into a real robot instead of a cheap R/C doo dad". And time went by. Robie survived several aborted surgeries. More time went by, many moves, many life changes... and yet Robie survived. Always staying above the line when I started rummaging around my clutter with a mind to clean things up. And finally the time has come. The first steps have been taken.

This is the original circuit board. Really is amazing what they did considering the tech of the time. 

Wider shot of the base. Unfortunately the wheels have not really survived. The grey rubber separated from the rest of the wheel carcas on the left... you can kind of see it here. In the video below you can see where it stops rotating. 

Test run with new brain (Arduino Uno and Motor Shield). Motors still work... but man is this thing noisy.

I never really wanted to just revive Robie Jr... I wanted to transform him into an actual robotic test bed for tinkering with. Every now and then I would check the availability of new widgets and gizmos to use to Frankenstein Robie but never found a solution I liked in terms of what I could accomplish vs. what it would cost. Micro controllers were cost effective but had some limitations and were (still are in many cases) difficult to program for. Small format computers were heavy, power hungry and expensive. But no more. Systems like Arduino and Rasberry Pi have taken a lot of the sting out of trying to do smaller electronic designs and enable tinkering on the cheap. The above concoction was out and running in minutes after I got home from the store running a basic program example. I also managed to connect power to the old circuit board along with most of the response generating contacts (arm, head button) and get him to speak again for the first time in more than 20 years. Kind of surprised the memory is still intact for programming and audio. Anyway, I recorded most of his responses to put to use later in the project. Haven't figured out how to re-connect the sensor for the front contact bumper... may have goofed that wiring to much.

I am not sure if the original base is going to serve my purpose or not. If I cannot figure out how to repair/replace the wheels I will probably rig up a replacement. May do that anyway as the cheap gearing solution in the base is very noisy... not to mention the omni directional ball bearing front 'wheel' didn't work all that well when it was brand new... needless to say the years have not been kind. Perhaps now that I have sorted out some brains I can save up for the lynx motion tracked base. Should let Robie roam around a bit more freely than his original designers ever envisioned :-). Also have a notion to rig the original arms and maybe the hands (if I can find some small enough) with some servos. Kind of split between a non functional 2DOF setup that will let him wave his hands a bit, or perhaps just replacing the arms with a bit more functional 5/6 DOF arm/gripper solution. Cost is the biggest issue there, the simple 2DOF solution would probably be less than 50 bucks... the Lynx motion sight has some arms similar to what I am thinking of and they are not cheap.  New base and arms are down the road at any rate.

The thing I want to do is rig a communication link With my laptop. It just so happens I do have a zigbee system lying around (yes I know... another you might be a geek if...). Anyway, The goal is to make the Arduino setup in the chassis mostly a core nervous system that reports back and gets marching orders from a program running on my laptop. That way I can futz around with some autonomous behavior programming without constantly butting up against the Arduino limits. Or course to do anything interesting I am going to need to get some sensors. The motor shield I got uses the seeeduino grove system so that should be pretty simple to put together.

Anyway I will post updates as I get to them... could be days, months, even years before it happens though. If you are interested or have questions then use the comments... might motivate me to keep at this more steadily.

Tomb Raider 2013: Rebirth or Backbirth?

Both. This is the best and worst Tomb Raider game to date.

*there are many spoilers in this, do not read further if you do not wish to encounter plot twists etc...*

The good? The controls are magnificent. The graphics are stellar. The environments lush and pretty varied. The story is fast paced and lasts a solid 12-15 hours of gameplay for a well versed gamer, longer for newbies. All good things. So what is the problem? Mostly that to enjoy all that good stuff you have to pretty much turn your brain off, ignore gaping holes in the story and silly set pieces that make no sense and just go with it. If you can do that then there is a very fun and well executed combat platforming game in the package you buy. As for the story???

It is a disjointed mess. A fun and enjoyable disjointed mess mind you... but a disjointed mess all the same. On top of that it doesn't have any fricking tombs. The so called side quest tombs are a laughable joke to anyone versed in the series and the main story has no real big set piece multi level interaction environments that have been the hallmark of the series.

Let us start with the so called open ended environment. I will grant that most of the individual levels are in some sense of the word non linear and open. But just because they do not have you tunnled through a set of tree walls does not make them open ended either. There really is only one progression through the majority of the levels. The only non-linear choices are some of the side quests such as finding all of a level specific item, or one of the side tombs. The act of going after these 'non-linear' options are completely out of character for the story line. For example one level has you rushing to the aid of a downed rescue flight pilot... and your so called non-linear choices are to poach eggs in nests hidden around the zone or to go explore a couple of side tombs. The run through the level following the story is fun, seeking out the extras is pretty fun but together they make no sense. And unlike a truly open environment where you have the option to NOT trigger major plot points in favor of pursuing side quests, here you still have to progress from area to area with a mandatory cut scene/story progression angle that you cannot avoid.

Let me harp on that issue of the side tombs a bit more. This is a Tomb Raider game... and yet the Tomb puzzles are all non-essential side quests. The meat of the game is a combat system with the mad island brigade that keeps you and your friends separated most of the game and provide never ending cannon fodder for Laura to hone her 'survival skills'. The game has completely flipped from its roots where combat was a comparatively small part of the game. There was obviously an effort to inject some of the formula employed by naughty dog in the uncharted games here... and in my opinion they went to far. To make it worse, the most recent Nathan Drake adventure had better tomb raider game play (in addition to its absurd but fun combat) than this tomb raider reboot. And the combat and set pieces here come off as more of an uncharted rip off than a proven franchise restamping its dominance in a genre.

Why do I say copycatting? Ill give you the most obvious example. In the most recent uncharted there was a massive and super impressive set piece designed around a 'ship' where you go through the ship as a ship, then go through it Posiden adventure style as it capsizes and changes orientations on you. It is an impressive re-use of the environments that transform as you rotated it. In Tomb Raider you encounter this random ship carcass suspended in an elaborate cable car setup in some mountains (just trust me... its really in there) and in the process of hopping around it in a pretty bog standard platforming combat sequence the baddies shoot out some of the rigging causing the ship to hang differently and pushing you to move around it in different ways. It is not even a 10th of the sequence in the uncharted game yet it is supposed to be a pretty major point in the game. It comes off as a poor and obvious ripoff shoved into the game for no other reason I can surmise than to be a rip off. I have this vision of some horrible meeting with executives giving the order to put in something like the boat sequence in Uncharted regardless of whether it makes any sense or not. The developers then 'protested' by putting it in and making it as absurd as they possibly could and then being dumbfounded when the idea gets accepted...

Another area they sadly take from the uncharted games is the practice of massive waves of moderately differentiated enemies that you must dispatch in order to advance. It drove me nutz as an idiotic game mechanic in the uncharted games and it is even worse here.

So in the end you have a masterpiece of a control scheme, marvelous environmental interaction all set to a poor uncharted ripoff story with no real central showpieces to call its own. The open ended island isn't, the combat is fun but repetitive and largely unimaginative, the tombs are essentially non-existent and the story makes no sense.

Makes no sense I say? Let me give you and example. The key element of the story is that no one entering the range of the storms of this island can leave. Yet you spend a large amount of your time crawling all over a WWII base that was obviously not built by crash survivors but by a functioning war effort with fortifications on the scale of the Normandy coast and pacific island strong holds. And yet the island is supposed to be unknown... a myth etc... that our epic heroine has to argue for her party to go in search of. Yet you encounter lots of evidence this base was in communications to the outside world in WWII. And this is one of the milder examples of nonsensical story telling. Yet I can overlook most of that as typical game idiocy. The thing that really bugged me was the botched main story line. The other Tomb Raider stories generally had at least a coherent central myth that was built up and eventually explained to some extent. Perhaps some think the big reveal of a trapped soul of an ancient queen sufficient... can't say I do. Based on prior games I was expecting some kind of massive structural system and a conflux of weather patterns and changing elements of the structure configuration to be involved in how the weather was being controlled... possibly driven by said trapped soul. That could have been epic. Massive wind gates allowing an ancient civilization control of weather as a defense of their island empire or something. Certainly would have been no more silly than the idea that a WWII or group of madmen would construct cable cars out of derelict shipwrecks.

And finally... something they should just be flogged for. The massively idiotic level of gore, especially considering there was really no good explanation for where all those freshly killed bodies would be coming from. You are talking 1000s if not 10s of 10000s of fresh flayed/chopped up bodies and guts. Skulls are a constant decoration employed almost everywhere in the game. Absurd is not the word, that is to tame for what they did here. Less would have been more. About 2 hours into the game I hit a point where I stopped even noticing it. About the only notable moment past that is Laura's bloody baptism. The use of bloody elements was like a rock song where the lead guitarist hit a sustained whammy bar wail from the beginning to end. Put another way it is like a cook serving you a dish that is primarily spice/garnish instead of an actual meal. I am not some shrieking violet who thinks you shouldn't have gore in a video game. I just think they were silly in what they did. The bloody baptism thing would have been so much more powerful if it had not had so much to de-sensitize you to the gore leading up to it. As it was when she rises out of that pool of blood I was like 'meh... whatever'.

Don't let me griping fool you. It is a good game and they have plenty of good stuff here to salvage going forward. But as a long time Tomb Raider fan I was very disappointed with the swing towards combat as the primary advancement mechanism and shoddy inconsistent/incomplete plot lines. Those kinds of problems are very uncharacteristic of the series to date. Here is hoping it was brought about by the difficulty of trying get lots of folks to agree on how to reboot the cash cow character that is Laura Croft.

Real Racing 3: Freemium done WRONG

The title pretty much says it. EA has recently begun moving all of its game to the 'freemium' model. If real racing 3 is any indication I think it means I will be abstaining from their content. Shame really. The racing engine and graphics in real racing 3 are one of the best so far on the iPad. I would happily race the lower tier cars in freemium grind mode and probably shell out some real money to get at better cars sooner... but I absolutely REFUSE to stare at an artificial load screen basically saying 'pay or wait'. If they would offer a one time buy the game fee I would probably pay it... and I would pay more than the average mobile game cost. This is easily on par with most full console arcade type racing games, 30-60$ would not be an unreasonable one time cost for access to their launch content. Instead they went so whole hog to the freemium side that they costed the entire purchased content of the game at ~500$ (or almost 500 hours of game play some have estimated). Truly absurd. So if I have to choose between freemium grind and wait screens, or absurd content costs I choose c) none of the above and I hope many others do as well. Despite the fact I enjoyed the 'demo' (IE before you run out of included gold) a lot I deleted the game once I saw the asking rate for gold compared to the burn rate the game required to stay ahead of the 'that will be ready in 5 min or pay x gold' screens.

This is Freemium done WRONG.