Olaf
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 21:02
See you all over on the other server, and a happy new year.
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TITLE: Shards of Dalaya
AUTHOR: KyoshoBallard
DATE: 12/29/2005 06:19:00 ip.
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BODY:
A shard is a fan-run server for a MMO. Usually free. The first instances of these came about with Ultima Online. This one is for EverQuest. I knew free EQ servers were being worked on a while back, but I had no idea they'd finished one. They have. It's not bad. And completely free. Here's an indepth look at it.
You don't even need to own the cds to play it. This raises legal concerns in my mind. But then again, Sony is indeed making the patcher available for free. Just go to the official EverQuest website and download the game. Then you just follow the instructions on the SoD website. It's all quite simple.
They are quite a few changes from EQ Live (that's what SoD players call the normal, original EQ). Your new characters start their existance in a dream sequence. It's kind of neat. I'm not going to tell you what occurs exactly. I don't want to spoil it. But it seems to mainly be a creative way of giving your character their newbie starting equipment. It's much better than the way EQ Live does things now. I tried EverQuest again recently. I got an email saying they'd reactivated my old account for free, for 21 days. When I reactivated my account and made a new character, it started off in a newbie dungeon. Why? I hated it. I played the game for about 10 minutes before quitting.
A fair number of the cities are pretty much unoccupied. Well, not exactly unoccupied (with the exception of Felwithe, which seems completely deserted), just lacking NPCs, guild trainers, etc. Freeport has been overun with zombies. Appearently the only way to make it safely through the city now is to use the tunnels underground like thieves and evil characters had to use in EQ Live. The Dwarf starting city, Kaladim, has been overun by goblins, I think. Most of Butcherblock Mountains too. Kelethin, and Greater Faydark are pretty much monster-only zones now as well. Some of them have different names now though. A lot of the zones do. Usually names that reflect what that zone has become. For instance, ButcherBlock Mountains now has the name Goblinskull Mountains, and with good reason.
The Dwarves now start in the same city as the gnomes. A city I always hated. I don't know for sure, but I'm willing to bet high elves start there too. Iksar (the lizards), now start in Grobb (the Troll city). At least my monk did. It's possible some start in Oggok, as I've heard that city is still running fairly normally as well. I don't know about the Dark Elf city. I saw a low level Dark Elf in Grobb, so I'm going to assume they start there now as well. My Erudite necromancer started in Newport (new name for Qeynos). I think that was an option in EQ, so maybe that one isn't so weird. I don't know if all Erudites start in Newport now or not. I'm going to try making a magician or something to find out. Erudin seems to be still functioning to an extent, so it's possible you can still start there.
There are reasons for these changes. One of which, for the Iksar, is that their city and most of their continent are not implemented in SoD yet. That disappoints me a little. I loved leveling my newbie lizards in the Boneyard. My favorite newbie area from EQ Live. I have two theories as to why other races, whose zones are implimented, no longer live in their city. One reason, and the most likely, is that the SoD guys probably had to redo all of the NPC dialog in the game. That's a LOT of dialog to write for such a small team. A second reason it could be, which I don't even know if it's true, is that maybe NPCs take up more CPU power than normal monsters or monster-ish NPCs and they combined the races into a few cities so that the server costs wouldn't go through the roof. I don't know if that's true or not. NPCs might take the same amount of processing power as normal monsters for all I know.
There's a backstory to explain a lot of the changes and things in SoD. You get two books at the end of your dream sequence. I started reading them and found I didn't care whatsoever what they had to say. A third item you get in your dream is a note from some one asking you to meet them at some point. It seems there is a main quest in SoD. I like that idea. I don't know what sort of reward you get for it. I suppose if I keep playing, I'll try to complete it eventually.
In the 10 minutes played EQ Live recently, I noticed how poorly the game ran on this computer. SoD, on the other hand, runs extremely well. It probably is partially due to EQPlayNice, a program you can download on the SoD website, "A program that makes EQ hog up less CPU power." It's a much older version than the current version of EQPlayNice, but I'm not sure if the newer one will work with SoD. I might try playing EQ Live with EQPlayNice and see if it runs better as well. Since EQPlayNice makes SoD take less CPU power, I can use AOL Instant Messenger and IRC, or browse websites while playing the game with little to no slowdown.
SoD also comes EQW, a program that allows you to run SoD (or EQ Live) in a window, rather than fullscreen. A lot of people use it to run more than one character at a time, on one computer. I remember trying that a few years ago when it first came out. SoD has a rule that says you can only play 2 characters at any one time. Either two on one PC, or on separate PCs, it doesn't matter. A lot of people make a bot character. Like, say they play both a cleric and a warrior. They'd start the fight with the warrior, then switch to the cleric and heal the warrior. It's also possible there are bot programs that these people are using to run their other character. The fact that they call them bots makes me think this could be the case. I haven't looked into it yet. I doubt this computer could handle two accounts at once anyways.
Speaking of rules, SoD has quite a few. They are all perfectly reasonable. They are strictly adhered to, though, so I suggest you not break them.
With fewer people on the server (I have yet to see it hit 300 at one time, yet), people have to work for their equipment. What I mean is, you see much less twinking of characters. Twinking is where you give high-end equipment (armor, weapons, etc) and/or money to lower level characters who normally wouldn't have them. I usually disliked twinking back when I played EQ Live, and always tried to have each of my characters earn their own equipment. So this fits me nicely.
There are 20-some guilds in the game. Like in EQ Live, you need 10 people to form a guild (10 separate people, not just 10 separate characters/accounts). Perhaps it's only me, but I'd prefer it if they'd change it to 5 people or so. With so few players on the server, I don't see why not. I'd like to be able to get some of my friends to play SoD and form a guild so we have our own guildchat and won't bother other people. But I don't think I could get 10. I guess we could make an IRC channel and just flip back and forth if we had to. Either that, or ask some other random people to help us meet the 10 people requirement, and then they could leave the guild. I recall people doing that in EQ Live. I don't know if they allow it in SoD. Oh well, I'm not going to make a fuss about guilds on their forums or their IRC channel or anything. It's not a big deal, really. Just thought I'd bring it up.
When you first make a new character, you're automatically in a newbie guild. It's there for the purpose of asking questions about the game, and answering other people's questions. I like it. It's an awesome idea. With so few people on the server, the Out of Character chat and the auction chat is all server-wide. That way, even if there aren't many people in your zone (or if you're completely alone in it), you still get the feeling of playing a MMO. I remember playing EQ at certain hours and there'd be pretty much no one in my zones to talk to, and it'd feel pretty lonely, boring and pointless.
As far as I know, most of the tradeskills are functional in the game, except smithing, I think. There's talk of revamping Fletching on the forum, and I look forward to that. If it turns out to make Fletching much more worthwhile, I may have to start a Ranger.
This brings up possibly the best feature of the game. You can communicate directly with the guys working on it. They often ask for suggestions, and many times impliment those suggestions. You can post on the forums, or chat in the IRC chatroom. It's really really great. They do patches all the time (this is a good thing). And they usually don't take very long to patch, unlike Sony. I suppose it's because they only have one server to patch, while Sony has a bunch. If the server is down for a patch, most people hop into IRC while they wait. The IRC channel is updated with the server status whenever it goes down, or comes back up. So you can go there and chat with the other players while also knowing exactly when the server is back up. It's cool.
There's a lot of things I'm probably forgetting, and a lot of things I haven't discovered yet. But I think what I've said should give you a good idea of what the Shards of Dalaya is like. I hope I've been helpful.
If you want to contact me in the game, look for Cresia. A human wizard. I think she's going to be my main character. Generally I never like playing female characters, but males look a little too homosexual in those EQ caster robes for my liking. Heh. Oh, and here's a little parting tip:
If you plan on starting a dwarf, or gnome (or a high elf?), try and get them to Newport (Qeynos). That's the main city that most of the good characters are always at. It can be a bit lonely over on the continent of Faydwer. I sucessfully navigated my level 1 dwarf Cleric to the docks in Goblinskull Mountains. If you've played EQ long enough, you probably know how to avoid enemies and such. By climbing high on the mountains and walls of the zone, mainly. Once you ride the boat to Freeport, I guess go through the tunnels. Then.. make the big trek to Newport. I'm going to guess it's just as dangerous a journey for low level characters as it was in EQ Live. Probably even moreso. But I know it's doable. If not, see if you can get a wizard or druid to transport you. I believe transporting is still in the game, but I haven't seen anyone do it yet (haven't exactly wandered very far from newbie areas).
Addendum: There were a few things I was incorrect about, and was informed of these things by Liam, who I believe is a GM in SoD. Here's a list:
*"Starting locations are all deep rooted in the lore of the server. Iksars start in Grobb, because Kaezul, the menace of the entire world, drove the entire population to this new land. Kaezul, being an Iksar, created a bit of a bias against the Iksar survivors of the Fall, thus the only place they could find solace was in Grobb with the Blackscale." He had this to add: "My very quick synopsis on starting location lore shouldn't be taken as gospel as I'm super paraphrasing."
*"Basically the most important thing to note when you're starting SoD is that we're genuinely very different from EQlive. I know it's often cited and quoted, but there's a reason for it."
*"Yes, there is a main quest and it's actually well worth doing. It's a progression quest that teaches you the lore of the world while allowing you to make decisions and influence your alignment. The reward is an augmentation item that progresses in quality"
*Kaladim is full undead dwarf ghosts, not goblins. (Thanks Yally)
*Smithing is in. It's baking and tinkering that's not.
*There's a boat that goes from Freeport to Newport, so that trek across the continent I mentioned is not necessary.
*Druids and Wizards do indeed have zone specific self/group teleports, as they did on live, to some of the locations in the world.
*There's 5 obtainable transporting items and there are also translocators in the various cities allow you to port to Newport, Greenmist, and Sadri Malath..
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 05:35
I never liked EQ too much. I played a free trial of it awhile ago, but couldn't stand it. As to whether I'll try this or not, I couldn't say; I'll likely get back into World of Warcraft as soon as I'm back at uni (I'd play it here, but I don't really want to sit through an hour's installation) so I may not have the time or impetus. You never know, though. I may give this a look.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: KyoshoBallard
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 19:27
If you're used to WoW, there is a WoW-style User Interface you can get for it.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: KyoshoBallard
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 19:38
Whoops. Accidently hit enter before giving you the link!
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 05:49
It's not so much that; I was playing UO back when I first tried out Everquest. If I give this a whirl I'll likely try out that interface, though. Cheers.
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TITLE: Ze games zat you love to 'ate.
AUTHOR: Gremmi
DATE: 12/27/2005 08:07:00 ip.
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Wherein Master Gremmi plunges the depths of decent gaming to find the hidden gems in the muck.
Crap games. Everyone knows of them, sane people avoid them. I somehow end up owning them quite a bit, mainly due to special-offer fillers. Example, recently I found ICO as part of a 2 for £20 offer. Considering ICO is rare as rocking horse shit, I couldn't really say no, but the other games in the selection were dire. I plumped for Batman Begins in the end.
Anyway, to be fair, I've found a lot of these so-called crappier titles to be quite enjoyable, and worth a playthrough at least. Going from top-to-bottom of my games collection and picking out the titles that are generally rated as "Average" or "Utter crap". Listed is the Metacritic score, and the score I'd give it, along with a mini-review.
Xbox - Armed and Dangerous.
Metacritic say 79/100.
Gremmi says 75/100.
I'd say Metacritic have it about right. The game is decent enough, but nothing more than a time-filler. Except for a couple of stand-out moments (like the Castle Sieges, with you in a giant cannon trying to repel invaders), it's an incredibly repetitive game, enlivened only by the occasional humerous cut scene.
PS2 - Batman Begins
Metacritic say 64/100.
Gremmi says 80/100.
Despite the reviews, this is quite a fun game. At its heart, it's a Final Fight style brawler with stealth thrown into the mix. It has a few interesting ideas that aren't fully implemented properly (You earn a fear rating by scaring enemies, which adds to your overall reputation and generally makes bad guys easier to fight), but it's a good solid romp with some fun driving levels based on the Burnout engine. No real replay value however.
PS2 - Driv3r
Metacritic say 57/100.
Gremmi says 75/100.
There's no denying it's a horribly broken game which was released far too early with virtually no playtesting. But I'm not judging it as a game, I'm judging it on something that's fun to play. Ignore the missions, ignore the bad on-foot and on-boat bits, just jump in a car and cruise about, ala Driver 1 and 2. I'm really surprised no-one's done any machinima stuff with this yet, as using the director's camera mode, you can get some really fantastic looking chases out of it. Oh well. Great fun, shame about the game.
PS2 - The Punisher
Metacritic say 68/100.
Gremmi says 80/100.
At it's heart, it's just a Max Payne clone with no bullet-time and the ability to torture people. But it's well done, for what it is, and it's got an absolute tonne of unlockables for anyone who likes that kind of thing. Despite being voiced by Tom Jane from the Punisher film, it completely ignores it, and instead has seemingly unconnected missions of you hunting down criminals. The big selling point was the interrogation/torture scenes, where you could use various things in the environment to torture people into giving you info (dangling someone off a ledge, or holding their head close to a boiling vat of chrome). The only difference being, once you've got the info you want, you're free to do with them as you like, usually with messy (although black-and-white for censorship) results if you decide to kill them. Despite a few flaws, it's a solid game with some nice touches. Nothing outstanding, but worth a playthrough as well.
There's a few more I could have added, but they're so widely divided critically, there isn't much point. Deus Ex 2 being the obvious one that split people massively. It's either complete shit or a decent game, no in-between, seemingly.
Anyway. Shit games. At least worth a rental, a fair few of them.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 01:58
Not much to say about most, except that I'm still tempted to buy Punisher for PC, especially as it's cheap on Play right now. I played the demo expecting something unpolished and godawful, and found a fairly entertaining romp. Not a great game - possibly not even a good one - but fun, and worth £4.
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TITLE: Ossu! Tatakae! Ouendan! - DS Review
AUTHOR: Olaf
DATE: 12/27/2005 02:52:00 ap.
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BODY:
An article due? But wait! There's no time!
...OUENDAAAAAAAN!
Right. Before I get the review underway proper, I should point out: This is a rhythm action game. Closest, really, to Parappa the Rapper or Gitaroo Man (the latter was done by the same company as this) but if you don't know what those are, then think Dance Dance Revolution, only less hateful. Now, with that out of the way, I can get into the real meat of the thing.
The game's set in a fictional town in Japan. Sort of. When people are in trouble, they shout OUENDAN, and three tall guys in black trenchcoats with impossible hair turn up and, uh, cheer them on. No, I'm serious. You essentially play as three male cheerleaders. With ridiculous hair. This game takes itself very seriously, as I'm sure you can tell.
I want hair like that, someday.
This is one of those games that it's nearly impossible to talk about. For one thing, people listening will think you're completely insane. Secondly, you keep thinking of awesome bits to mention. It's sort of like an even more ridiculous Psychonauts in the latter sense. For starters, these three tend to be nearby whenever someone screams out OUENDAN. Should a potter need inspiration to create pottery, they'll just happen to be nearby, spinning their own pots. Or perhaps a schoolteacher isn't getting respect from his students - they'll be sitting at desks at one side of the classroom, studying. Hell, even their various missions vary a fair amount. From those aforementioned ones, through assisting a kid impress a girl he likes by beating a rival at dodgeball, to helping a father rescue his daughter from a Godzilla-sized mouse (by growing to the same size as it and punching it in the face, obviously). Hell, there's even a surprisingly touching one where they cheer on a spirit who's come back from the grave because he can't rest easily without telling his girlfriend he loves her.
And yet, the game's quite obviously in Japanese. So how do I know this? Because, by and large, the stories are fairly obvious. Before each level you get a little cutscene across both screens summing things up in a manga comic-book style, albeit with some minor animations. No, I can't read Japanese. I don't need to. By and large you can ascertain what's going on from these, and the little cutscenes that crop up on the top screen mid-level. One particular laugh-out-loud moment involves the battle between the giant man and the Godzilla mouse - right when he's about to hit it, the mouse pulls out a piece of paper. I can't read what's on the paper, but it's fairly obvious that in the next frame, the bloke's looking for a pen. And then, brilliantly, he wonders exactly why the hell he's doing this and smacks the mouse in the face. That's only if you're doing well, of course - if you're doing badly the mouse hits him instead.
That's another thing, you see. Each level has three checkpoints. If you're doing well, then the person you're cheering on has a minor success at each point. If not, then they fail. There don't appear to be any adverse effects for failing them, mind you, and in some cases it's funnier to do so (though less desirable, as you're closer to losing). So, what exactly constitutes failing and succeeding? I guess I'd better describe the game, then.
Considering how much space I've spent describing how fantastic the style of the thing is, it'd be reasonable for you all to assume that the game itself is quite bad. Stunningly, this is not the case. The game itself is fun, and gives that feeling of Just One More Go as much as, say, Tetris. Part of this, at least, is down to the music - ah, but I'm getting ahead of myself. The top screen is used for cutscenes, the whole way through. Even while playing, the top screen is showing what's going on. Sadly, you'll rarely get a chance to look at this, as you'll be staring intently at the bottom screen. This is where the entirety of play commences. In the background are your three black-clad cheerleaders. They dance away in time to your button presses. You see, coloured buttons, numbered from 1 to 9, pop up on your screen. Circles slowly close in on each of them. When the circle reaches them, you tap them with the stylus. Obviously, the 1-9 helps you ascertain the order in which the circles are going to close in on them. There might be three yellow buttons, 1-3, and then five green buttons, 1-5. But the yellow buttons appeared first, so you tap them first. Making it a bit easier is that the circles close in time to the music - you can take it for granted that if you tap them in time to the beat, or along to certain riffs in the tunes, you'll get full marks for each one. Miss too many and the person you're cheering on will fail spectacularly in their task, and you'll have to try again. And yes, it's fun. To make things a bit more complex, occasionally you have to drag things around, or spin up wheels. By and large, though, it's all about tapping those circles.
The top screen shows what you're supporting, while the bottom shows where and when to press.
Helping this out, certainly, is the fact that the music is catchy and addictive. It's pretty much all licensed J-Pop and J-Rock, but damn, it's catchy. After a few tries at each level you'll be tapping your feet to the beat. You'll giggle along at the cutscenes. You'll thoroughly enjoy yourself, and every aspect of the game. That's the thing, you see, and it's fairly rare these days. The reward, in a sense, is the game. Whereas in, say, an RTS, where you feel great after smashing an enemy base - you feel great just playing this. It's one of those games where you really get into the spirit of the thing just playing it.
Downsides? Well, it's all in Japanese, but you don't really need to know it to get by. Menus are fairly obvious - the button marked with one person is single player, the choices on the menu after that are the difficulty levels, and you'll probably have worked out which button is Retry and which is Quit at least by the second time you've failed a level. That's another thing - you will fail levels. After a piss-easy first few levels, the difficulty ramps up enormously. That, or I'm just rubbish. Once I get into a song though and start working out the rhythm and remembering how it goes, I sail through, though. It may also be that there's an order that's only implied in the Japanese text - you normally have a choice of which level to go for, so perhaps some levels are easier than others, and this is shown. Regardless, do expect to fail every so often.
It's even more bizarre and excellent than it looks. Really.
This game is bonkers, charming, addictive, bonkers, brilliant, and utterly mental. If it sounds at all like your sort of thing, then import it. Don't be put off by not reading Japanese, because it's almost completely inessential, though if you need to get through the menus there are translation FAQs up at www.gamefaqs.com. A don't worry - DS games don't have region encoding. You won't need to chip your DS to get a foreign game to work in it. Because it's extremely quirky, and it uses Japanese songs, it's unlikely to ever be released in the west, so you'll likely have to import it.
So just buy it. If you like rhythm action games, if you like games that make you giggle, if you like any aspect of this - buy it.
And the name roughly translates, in my broken Japanese, to something like Support! Fight! Cheerleaders!
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: 
EMAIL:
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DATE: 14:18
When you said you were playing a game about a Japanese male cheerleading squad, I thought I'd imagined the most fucked-up possible mental image to equate it to. Jim9137
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DATE: 16:08
I deem this article coffee stain worthy.
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DATE: 19:01
You forgot the Pirates remake, damnit. It'd fit perfectly in that empty "P" spot in your alphabetical list.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Gremmi
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DATE: 22:12
Pirates remake was 2004 though. Knyght
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DATE: 02:43
Oops, yes they were. Real close to the end, though. Olaf
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DATE: 16:42
Concur. It's been really quite a good year, although it's not liable to go down in gaming history as particularly Zomg Awesome. Olaf
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DATE: 22:13
Merry Christmas!
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Knyght
EMAIL:
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DATE: 02:55
What Fuzzy said. Also, since it's my update tomorrow, and it actually *is* christmas tomorrow, I'll make sure I try to write about something remotely interesting.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR:
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 04:36
SHINIES
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: KyoshoBallard
EMAIL:
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DATE: 06:13
Merry things.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Joq
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DATE: 18:51
Jim, I still have something like six days left, no?
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Troy Goodfellow
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DATE: 19:58
Pfft. A "team". You are all Jim's lackeys.
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DATE: 02:17
A good team of lackeys, though.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Gargantuan Dissident
EMAIL:
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DATE: 12:14
I think this is pretty decent blogging idea, even if Jim started it.
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TITLE: Fireballs to the civilizations
AUTHOR: bjarke
DATE: 12/23/2005 07:47:00 ip.
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BODY:
Wherein I pick up another good old thing.
After the disappointment of Civ4, I was left without a good long empirebuilder, as I coulden't be arsed to go back to Civ2. As if Civ3 is even an option. So I remembered the good old game Master of Magic and promptly leeched it from HOTU. It took a bit of fiddling to get it to run, but I succeeded eventually. Just no sound, but no matter, I'll try VDMsound in a bit.
Anyways, this game's really good. It's like Civ lite + magic. One of the things that turned me off about Civ4 is the hordes of new gameplay options and whatnot. MoM gives me what I want: A simple, but large, empirebuilder and cool units to destroy my enemies with. On top of this, there's the whole facet of spells.
Another good point for MoM is look and feel. While Civs are serious and "realistic," MoM put you in some generic fantasy world. You play a powerful wizard, and you're apparantly the leader of a state. How cool's that?
So, depending on what types of books you got at character generation (oh yes!) you get different types of spells. Life spells can heal and buff your units, nature spells can summon a wide variety of critters, chaos spells blows stuff up and so forth. You can mix and match between the different spheres as you wish.
On top of that, you have to pick a starting race, and there's quite the difference between halflings and gnolls.
This makes for an immense replay value, as a naturewizard will have to use a drastically different approach than a lifemage. The Civs lacked this, each game pretty much starting the same place.
Among weak points in MoM as a rather odd AI, lack of multiplayer (that's in the original, there's some remakes on the way) weak diplomacy and the sheer unbalanced-ness of the Heroism spell. Not that I mind - the AI rarely use it.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 22:10
Fully agree on MoM, but I'd recommend retrying Civ4. It's great, and your complaint that all the sides play pretty much the same is largely unfounded, particularly on higher difficulty levels.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Troy Goodfellow
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DATE: 23:42
Whoa, whoa. Disappointment in Civ 4? Are you mad?
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: bjarke
EMAIL:
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DATE: 01:59
It wasn't fun.
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DATE: 05:25
Did you try the Age of Wonders games? I played AoW 2, and as far as I recall, it's similar in style to MoM. Lots of races, spells, and turn based madness, and some pretty nice 2d graphics to boot.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
EMAIL:
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DATE: 15:08
Civ4 is awesome. Barring Civ1, which I love for simplicity's sake, it's probably my favourite of the series. It just tends to chug a bit when I've uncovered most of the map and it has a nasty tendency to overheat my computer, causing restarts and then turn-offs so I can let it cool down. And my computer's underclocked at the moment. Bleh. bjarke
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DATE: 03:02
Buncha fanboys.
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TITLE: Bye-bye Gaming Skill
AUTHOR: KyoshoBallard
DATE: 12/22/2005 06:40:00 ip.
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BODY:
To do well in First Person Shooters, online, you generally have to be skilled. A lot of people can say they're particularly skilled at Counter-Strike, or Battlefield 1942, or whatever. I can get good at those types of games to an extent. Maybe not quite as good as most "skilled players" that play, but good enough to hold my own and be an asset to my team. If I stop playing for a few weeks, that skill goes away. Not completely away, but for the most part I will suck again when I try to play after a long stint of not playing. I suppose that's normal. After all, Johnathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel reportedly practices 14 hours a day to keep his skill.
A lot of gamers, though, can tell you of at least one game that they're excellent at, no matter how long it's been since they've played last. For me, that game was Team Fortress Classic.
You know, the official Half-Life mod that almost zero people play anymore. It's not a realistic game by any means, and doesn't try to be. There's people rocket jumping, grenade jumping, etc. It's refreshing to play TFC after playing so many other games that try to focus on realism. TFC focuses on fun.
Anyways, I was always extremely good at it. I could stop playing for months, but on my first game back, my team would most times be assured a victory. I could choose the Scout class (weakest class) and go around killing people with the crowbar (weakest weapon), and do well. The game just came naturally to me. There was even a time when I stopped playing for close to an entire year for one reason or another. Playing other games, not having internet access, or just plain losing interest. I came back, and kicked ass. I thought TFC was the game for me. I just GOT it. Some people can play the piano expertly, or draw professionally, or design buildings, whatever. For me, I could kick ass at TFC. It seems an assured fact. I didn't think it would ever change. And then it did.
For almost 3 years now, I haven't had a chance to play many First Person Shooters. Let alone online. I recently tried playing TFC again, and guess what? I suck. Okay, maybe I don't completely suck, but I'm nowhere near as good as I used to be. I'm getting my ass handed to me by bots. BOTS, for christsake! That's just WRONG! Perhaps if I keep playing I will get better. In fact I'm almost certain I will. But it sucks. Appearently you can never forgot how to ride a bike, but you can forget how to kick ass at TFC. Or at least I can. Argh.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
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DATE: 02:30
Heh. TFC. My online FPS of choice, too, and likewise I kicked an extraordinary amount of ass. An HWG using a speedhack fell to my Scout crowbar at one point, much to the amusement of my team. Haven't played in a loooong time, though.
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TITLE: zomg teh time
AUTHOR: Gremmi
DATE: 12/20/2005 02:10:00 ip.
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BODY:
Wherein Master Gremmi writes his entire post in bullet-time.
TIME CONTROL. It's great. Adding in a new tactical edge and looking damn stylish all at the same time. I think Max Payne was the first game that specifically allowed you to alter the flow of time as a core gameplay element to gain an advantage. Ignoring the speed settings in strategy games and "freeze" powerups in various platformers/puzzlers, anyway.
Ahh, that crazy Max Payne. Kill enemies to fill bullet-time gauge, right click to enable bullet-time, making it easier to kill enemies to fill the bullet-time gauge. Add some inspired level design (well, except for the nightmare/hallucination levels, anyway) and you've got yourself a winner.
The Matrix has a lot to answer for, then. Ironically, the bullet-time in the Matrix games wasn't as well done as Max Payne. In fact, it was downright shoddy. Unlike Max Payne, where the entire game could be completed without bullet-time in technicality, there are a number of sections in EtM that you have to use it. Mainly for the longer jumps (apparently, slowing down time = further jumping, although it does kinda make sense in the context of the game). Path of Neo was slightly better done, although it had a tendancy to kick in automatically in certain combat moments, and the sound glitched a hell of a lot, sometimes cutting out altogether.
But this isn't exactly time manipulation per-se, just slowing down perception. You still move and shoot at the same speed as everyone else, although your reactions (ie aiming) are faster.
Step forward the new Prince of Persia series. Recently got into Warrior Within, which is apparently the weakest of the three games, but I'm enjoying it nonetheless. Anyway, it's a fairly standard platformer/third person action game, leap around like a freak, slash things and hurl them about. Some fairly good level design although a few problematic "What the christ do I do now?" moments. Also a few quick-death moments that you weren't expecting. But therein lies the genius of the game design. Due to some contrived plot device that I've missed completely due to not playing the first game (Sands of Time), sand can control time. A quick tap on the time button sends everything into the familiar bullet-time mode (although unlike the others, you do not slow down yourself), but holding down the time button causes time to rewind up to 8 seconds. Suddenly that bottomless pit just around the corner isn't the end of your game. The Prince leaps backwards in a blurry haze and ends up exactly where he was just before tumbling in, allowing you to happily wall-run past it instead. It's strictly limited (by way of a sand gauge, replenished by some enemies, so you can't avoid certain death every time. Genius, and something that is starting to crop up in other games (from what I can remember, one of the Burnout-style racing/demolition games allows you to do it too).
Also step up Viewtiful Joe, which uses time to an intriguing concept. A helicopter causing problems? Just slow down time and watch it fall to the ground as the rotor cannot maintain enough speed to keep it aloft. Or fast-forward time, and watch it vanish into the sky as the rotor goes into overdrive.
These time-gimmicks, whilst incredibly handy, do highlight one thing, that without intelligent level design, restrictions on use and better visual/audio cues, they become more of a hindrance. Off the top of my head, games that use bullet-time/time control and end up being shit include Dead to Rights, True Crime, Blinx The Time Sweeper and the Matrix games.
Rambled enough now.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
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DATE: 17:00
Quite right. Just want to add that as far as I know the time mechanic in Warrior Within is utterly unexplainable - the first one, he had the Dagger of Time that let him do all this trickery, but he doesn't have that in WW as far as I'm aware. Of course he's on some sort of Island of Time or something, so God knows; there's probably some loophole they thought of there.
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I haven't played it (and I didn't finish Sands of Time) but I read that it might be due to the medallion he wears in the chest now, which is another artifact that can control time.
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AUTHOR: Knyght
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DATE: 08:16
Hmm, I've been thinking. Does anyone have a guess as to which was the first game that let you slow down time to gain an advantage over your enemies? Earliest I can think of is Perfect Dark back in 2000, but that was only a year before Max Payne, so there must be something older that does it, right? Gremmi
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I dunno what the first was at all. As I said, Max Payne was the first to use it as a core gameplay mechanic, but it certainly wasn't the first to use it as a powerup or non-core function before. A huge number of platform games had slow-down/freeze powerups, although whether these count or not, I dunno. Pang is probably the earliest I can think of.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Knyght
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DATE: 14:18
I was thinking purely in an FPS context.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Gremmi
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DATE: 16:24
In which case, Requiem: Avenging Angel had a bullet-time power. Nice game for its time..1999 according to Mobygames. I think it's probably the first FPS to feature it, anyway.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
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DATE: 16:58
Ooooh. I remember that game. Wasn't exactly brilliant but it was surprisingly fun for awhile. Never bought it, sadly, just played the demo.
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DATE: 13:45
Sometimes i think i'm the only person on the planet that actually enjoyed Blinx (never played the sequel though)
I wasn't kidding about that mullet.
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DATE: 01:04
Dude, it's not a mullet, it's a mop.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
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DATE: 13:30
True enough. If only it weren't for that little peak at the front...
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DATE: 08:38
You do know what a mullet is, right?
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
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DATE: 17:11
A particular type of haircut that's short at the front but long at the back. It's not the hugest, most exaggerated example of a mullet in the world, but I'd still call it one.
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DATE: 17:49
No no, it's short at the TOP, long at the back. Bowie had one in Labyrinth. This is a classic mullet:
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Fucking cropping. Jim9137
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DATE: 20:45
Bowie's mullet > *
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Ashiq
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DATE: 22:45
Can you explain the seal-drawing touch screen thing? I'm quite unfamiliar with DS technology.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
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DATE: 23:10
Good grief, nine comments.
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DATE: 18:59
Get a job, you slacker.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Knyght
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DATE: 19:08
I don't have a job, and I can afford games :D
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DATE: 17:12
I think your problem is overabundance, which often manifests in unplayed computer games, but points at a larger sociological phenomenon. As Attila the Stockbroker puts it in one of his songs:
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Herd-thought + hedonism ('overabundance' as said in the last comment) ? Gargantuan Dissident
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Game discussion is alright, if it serves some end. But if the game is good, I'd rather play it. I'd rather have sex than talk about it, etc. Although I'll read reviews from time to time, I like to try a game without proconceptions. Nevertheless, I will not play anything that is universally considered bad or poor. Gremmi
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DATE: 22:55
Old
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: roboczar
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DATE: 02:52
Just highlights the pressing need for the blog to be divided into categories, by game or topic.
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DATE: 17:16
Games of this complexity are a rather new things, and IMO they truly reflect the concept expressed by Attila the Stockbroker: Knyght
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DATE: 15:40
Those last FF examples aren't really flawys, they're just design mechanisms that they use to do what they want with the game. They aren't supposed to be questioned. Gremmi
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Well, to me they're design flaws, as there's no real exposition or explanation behind it. Why can you not use a Phoenix Down on Aeris? Sure, it would ruin the plot quite a bit if you could, but still. You could argue they're just McGuffins, but they're pretty poor ones, really, and badly thought out.
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DATE: 17:21
Yes, design flaws suck, but with today's complexity of game production, there's not much to do about it. Attila the Stockbroker puts it very rightly: Ashiq
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DATE: 01:08
Witch's Yarn sounded better in the review--I pictured something akin to FF7's mini-skit in the golden saucer with Cloud and (typically) Aerith. roboczar
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DATE: 00:00
Pretty much in agreement with everything you said, Knyght.
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"for Valve's simulation of High-Dynamic Range lighting." Troy Goodfellow
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This month's CGM has a column by Brett Todd complaining about the lighting in Lost Coast. He makes some similar complaints:
Fire Force (ICE 1992, Amiga) is a rad game.
Yeah, a rad game.
One of the greatest stabbing games ever, period. The main character, a random commando-ish fellow on a mission, is one tough mofo. While stabbing his arm moves way faster than a sewing machine. Oh yeah. Within a split-second you've already stabbed that evil terrorist-ish person thrice in the chest area (results in a satisfying scream), or just quickly slit his throat. Slice!
The guns aren't bad, either. Good ol' AK
and CAR-15 are the basic tools of the trade, but the M-60 really packs a punch (eliminates any enemy with one round). The M-16 (with M203) is pretty much useless, but the MP5 is silenced and really useful. The main character also has remote bombs, grenades, medkits and LAWs available. Choosing your own equipment within certain weight limits is swell. Swell, I tells you.
So, armed with your trusty STABBETY knife and one automatic rifle you're being sent on a mission.
One out of twelve. Some missions consist of simple assassinations, where you have to search bunkers, tents and multi-story buildings for the evil enemy commander. On some missions you have to mark strategic enemy buildings with GPS transmitters. There's even a few hostage rescue missions, the last one being really EVIL (every bloody time that I enter the first building I shoot the hostage (itchy trigger finger)).
The time limits in these missions are usually pretty darn tight,
and you have to reach the evac zone before the limit expires. Failure to do so means your commando will be tagged MIA and you have to start a new career. During said career your commando will earn promotions and medals. Which is neat! Joq
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DATE: 00:54
Wow, that looks ass.
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DATE: 09:11
Fireforce? Bah, nothing compared to Fire power! Knyght
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DATE: 15:31
Fire Force is awesome. Joq
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DATE: 17:21
It (M60) pretty much always kills them nasties with one tap, or maybe I'm just loco, Knyght.
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TITLE: Hammer and Sickle, thoughts on the demo
AUTHOR: bjarke
DATE: 12/02/2005 06:12:00 ip.
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BODY:
Does what it says on the box.
So yeah, I leeched the demo of Hammer and Sickle and played it. H&S is a squad-based tactics game based in some funky cold war scenario. You're a spy and you have to do spystuff. The combat's turnbased which I haven't seen in a recent game since Temple of Elemental Evil, the lovely little D&D game.
H&S was rather okayish, but I'm not declaring it to be the next saviour of mankind or anything. I didn't get to experience a lot of the gameplay mechanics in the demo, but it does have the essentials. Weapon fire modes, the abillity to crouch and prone, turn interrupts and so on. The baddies seem to die pretty quickly, and the 'nades and machine guns are pleasantly powerful. (Not that you get any, though. The bad guys have them.) It's pretty difficult too. Took a few tries on easy.
Which brings me to my final point. It's rather refreshing to see somebody go back to the old turnbased tactical roots. In this age of RTS's and insta-bang realtime games, it's nice to play something that has to pressure on it. You can take your sweet time to plan out your moves, and that's nice.
I don't think this game's going to be a commercial success. It's not very easy to get into, and is, is mentioned, rather difficult. It's not soulless clone from EA, and that earns points. Even though if you deviate from standards of mainstream gaming, you still have to write a decent game, and the demo didn't impress me much.
Don't worry, folks. Jagged Alliance and UFO still reigns supreme.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Knyght
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DATE: 19:06
It helps if you've played Silent Storm, as this is it's successor. roboczar
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DATE: 19:46
Don't know why turnbased tactical is still around. It's time to start using the UFO series model (and XCOM Apocalypse), and let people pause the action at will and execute commands as needed. Turn based was fine when computers needed to dedicate clock time to calculate results...now it's moot. bjarke
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As mentioned in the article, I like turn-based merely for the sake of turns themselves. Joq
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DATE: 00:34
Knyght, as far as I know the game's been out in Russia for a long-ish while and since it's out in Europe real soon, don't expect anything revolutionary in the full game compared to the demo.
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I disagree with Robo. Turn-based gameplay mechanics have little to do with computing power. Otherwise, computer chess would be obsolete ;-) And XCOM: Apocalypse sucked, so it's a bad example anyway! Knyght
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X-COM Apocalypse does not suck. Even so, it's a completely stupid point. HAY X-COM3 SUCKS IT HAS REALTIME. Yes... It also has turn based that's pretty much identical to X-COM1/2. So, yeah.
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I don't agree. X-COM 3 was designed for Real Time; Turns are an afterthought, and it shows. On the other hand, the original X-COM was designed for Turn-based, so they are certainly NOT identical. Olaf
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Whereas I just don't like X-Com 3. Adore the first two, dislike Apocalypse. That's for many reasons, mostly other than the realtime/turn-based thing. Joq
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DATE: 16:49
I really liked X-Com Apoc and the real-time mode was great (turn-based being quite cumbersome (in this particular game), IMHO). The only issues that I had with it were the unfinished city bits, unbalanced money thingies and silly-lookin' enemies.
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TITLE: Fable: A Retrospective
AUTHOR: Olaf
DATE: 12/01/2005 11:46:00 ip.
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BODY:
So, there I am, relaxing. It's a Thursday. No work's due. That which has to be done for Bastard Numbered is complete, and my various other commitments have been fulfilled. I can zone out. I light up a cigarette, pour myself a vodka, and am about to head into the kitchen when all of a sudden, the phone rings. Caller ID? Jim, or John (they use the same phone). A transcript of the recorded phone conversation follows:
"Hello?"
"WHERE'S MY FUCKING ARTICLE?"
"Fuck you. It's not due until Monday and you know it."
"Hah. Normally that'd be the case, but we've missed two articles this week already and it doesn't look like we're going to get one today. So it's up to you. WHERE'S MY FUCKING ARTICLE?"
*click*
Sigh.
Fable is one of the more well-known games amongst gamer circles. As with just about everything associated with Peter Molyneux, it was hugely anticipated, and had a feature list as long as my arm. RPG? Living, breathing world? Your Actions Make A Difference? Holy shit, said the gaming community, sign me up for some of that.
And then, after many (completely expected) delays, it was finally released. Critics, by and large, adored it. The gaming community was a bit less enthused. It's been awhile after the release, so the hype's died down, and Fable: The Lost Chapters - an extended version - has just been released. Perfect time to take a look at it.
The main issue with Fable is that it's a game of two halves, not unlike football. Completely unlike football, though, is that the two halves are radically different. On the one hand, you have a third-person action adventure - the main plot arc of the game. On the other hand, you really do have this living, breathing world they talked about. It's like a gigantic RPG sandbox.
Faults with the main plot arc are many. It's your typical uninspired fantasy story, it's short, and it's piss easy. It doesn't have much to do with the rest of the game, which is by far the better half. Do quests, get experience by killing stuff, and level up various spells and attributes. The levelling system is actually done rather well - you divide up your hard-earned experience yourself back at the Hero's Guild, however you like. Levelling your strength (letting you carry bigger weapons and do more damage) to Level 5 might cost you, say, 2000 experience. On the other hand, for that same 2000 experience, you could get yourself a couple of new spells. Level 1 only, mind you, but they might come in handy. Or perhaps you need to upgrade your ranged accuracy... It's a nice little system, and it works surprisingly well. Rather than choosing a class, you upgrade yourself as you see fit. Jack of all trades, or master of one. It's up to you.
But no. The real thing about Fable is that you get out of it however much you put into the rest of it. If you stick to the main quest and don't ever faff about in towns, you're going to be sorely disappointed by this game. If, on the other hand, you bother to spend some time in the towns, you can really grow to like it. Your character ages as the game goes on. He gets scars from his battles, you can change his hair and give him tattoos. Different armour gives different attributes of attractiveness and scariness, adjusting how villagers act towards you. Performing good or evil acts also changes your appearance; be a goody-two-shoes and you'll be all shiny and bright, with a halo. Go around indiscriminately murdering villagers, sacrificing people to dark gods, and stealing from shops, and you'll get a healthy red glow and a nice pair of horns. Villagers will run screaming when they see you, or cower in terror and beg you not to kill them. Quite a rush. Hell, even overusing magic makes your eyes start to glow. Your avatar is unlikely to be quite like one belonging to a friend.
If you opt to just play through the main game, you see, you're missing out on a lot. You'll never get drunk in a pub. You'll never flirt with every woman in town. You'll never get accidentally married to a man just to see if it's possible in the game (yes, it is). You'll never make your spouse cry by letting them see you flirting with someone else. It's just such a goddamn shame that with all this going on around you, the actual game itself isn't all that great.
The controls, for starters, are a bit poo. A lot of it relies on context-sensitive stuff... except that it's crap at telling what you need at any given time. Casting most spells requires you to hold down the right trigger and then remember what button you've assigned them to. In the middle of combat against a group rabid werewolf-equivalents, this isn't the nicest thing in the world. Worse still is the fact that you'll be constantly going into the extremely long menus to change stuff around, and although this isn't quite as crap and boring as in, say, X2, it really takes you out of the rest of it. Considering the freedom exhibited in most of the game, this is more than a little disappointing.
It's not all bad, though. Quite often you'll have good/evil choices of the same quest. Defend a farm from bandit attack, or help the bandits kill off the guards so you can all raid the farm. There's not much difference, though; it's just a change as to who you're maiming, and the combat itself is a wee bit peasy. There is a bit of replayability in going back and trying things out as a different character type - pumping your skills into magic (which, incidentally, is extremely well done; I'll get onto that in a sec), or archery, or brute face-smashing strength. It's still just not enough, though, especially considering the general crapness of the main quest. Not only that, but loading times tend to be fairly long - and common - and traipsing around gets a bit dull after awhile.
Magic, though. There aren't that many spells in the game - around about 12, from memory - but they're not just different variations of each other. Each of the spells are just a bit different, and fairly well thought out. One teleports you behind your targeted enemy, letting you get in a backstab. Lightning lets you do your best Emperor Palpatine impression and fry everything in front of you. Lobbing out a bastard great fireball will cause a massive explosion. Another spell lets you slow down (or stop) time for everyone around you, and yet another summons a bunch of magic swords to help you take out multiple foes. They're not really customisable at all - pumping experience into them sometimes changes the effects (time stops for longer, lightning electrocutes more people) but frequently just increases damage.
Weapons, though, are customisable, in a Diablo 2-style jewel slot system. It's another nice little touch in a game that is very much about nice little touches. You really do get a sense of individuality when your battle-scarred, black-plate-armoured veteran strolls down a village high street, brandishing a gigantic sword that's frankly more like a slab of iron which has been imbued with fire magic, and so has flames licking the edges. Or perhaps you're more into being a good guy, and you have a gigantic warhammer (some of these weapons truly are gigantic, too) that contains a couple of stones increasing the damage against the undead. The fact that the game is intrinsically very pretty doesn't hurt, either.
There's a lot more to talk about, really, but I think you've got the idea. Nice touches, shame about the game. It's not a bad little giggle if you can find it reasonably cheap, and The Lost Chapters may very well add some more cool content, but the main quest is a bit rubbishy. If you're not the type who enjoys customising your character and messing around in towns, then you're not really going to enjoy this. If you do, though, you might just find some value in it.
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DATE: 05:24
Speaking as someone who generally plays RPGs purely for the sake of sidequests, I'm currently twitching with the urge to play this game. You've described it before but never in so much detail (well, obviously). So... you've now given me two reasons to want an Xbox. Asshole. Jim9137
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DATE: 21:27
http://bannumbers.blogspot.com/2005/10/i-have-cunning-plan.html
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DATE: 04:50
You left out one my most commonly utilised benefits from games, which is stress relief. I have never, ever gotten a kill-crazed bloodlust from an FPS. On the contrary... when I'm particularly frustrated or angry at the world in general, switching on System Shock 2 and smashing ten kinds of snot out of mutant hybrids with a giant wrench chills me the fuck out. I mean, I'd much prefer to go to the top of a tall cliff and scream my lungs out for ten minutes, but that's not really feasible in this day and age of dense populations, so mutant smashing it is. If you play, say, Hitman, and then get the urge to go garrotte a few people, you've got problems much more severe than whatever games you choose.
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Okay, well my points really don't have a lot to do with your article now that I look over it again, but still.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
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DATE: 15:31
Quite right, though.
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To focus more on your actual article and draw from my own point, it really irritates me that games aren't being utilised more as a possible medium for 'intellectual' expression. Few games are really what you'd call arty, and if they are seen as more 'clever' than usual, it's generally just because of a new gimmick or two that no one's really explored much before. I understand that they need to focus on player entertainment, but comics have managed to make the leap just fine. It bugs me senseless that 99% of games have to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: roboczar
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DATE: 17:44
Great article, man. I'd just add that the strategy genre is more blatantly education these days, what with the Paradox games like Victora, Europa Universalis and Hearts of Iron. That entire series of games is a fantastic teaching tool, for obvious reasons. Also, titles like Sim City can build problem solving skills very quickly, but at a pace that's manageable by younger folks; that was part of the original design. Olaf
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Rhubarb: Funny you should say that - Roger Ebert (the film critic) recently mentioned that he thinks games are a total waste of time. This was brought up by his review of the Doom film, and someone questioning whether he actually knew anything about the source material. His response, to another question posed by someone defending games, included: "I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic." Full response is here, about the third question down. Knyght
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A quick note that I completely forgot to add, but should've: Casey
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DATE: 07:08
The only direction marked on a compass is North, but that doesn't mean a compass is only useful for people who are travelling north.
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Problem is mainly with the US system. The UK system is generally fine, as games get censored twice, once by PEGI, once by BBFC or whatever they're called. Games such as GTA, Kingpin et al end up with an 18 certificate slapped on them, which is enforced by law as opposed to being a guideline. roboczar
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I totally agree that parents need to be active in shopping for software with their kids. You would think that this is a no-brainer. roboczar
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Oh, and I think putting in descriptors for theists is unnecessary and likely to appear hostile to some religious denominations. Knyght
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My point is that it'd get around all the Christian nutheads who go "OH GNOES I CAN'T PLAY BLACK & WHITE 'CAUSE THEN I'D BE GOD AND I'M NOT GOD OKAY>>!! WAHHH"
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DATE: 01:18
The ESRB rating system does its job. You can't create a rating system for every possible group since some groups are just idiots. Your new rating system would have to include categories like "This company most likely worships Satan" or "Satan will try to possess your children through this game." The ESRB system is by far the most rational categorization procedure available compared to more liberal methods which you have previously mentioned. Olaf
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DATE: 19:51
I mention this everytime it comes up, but I do think that the effects of piracy can be overstated. Jedi Knight 2 had the shittiest copy protection I've ever seen - a direct copy of the CD was enough to fool it, and there was no CD key, so copies could be played multiplayer - and yet it sold fucktons. Admittedly I know about the crap copy protection because I, uh, gave it to a few of my friends, but they didn't lose any sales from that. Not an excuse, I know, but two of the people would never have bought it in the first place, and the other dude *did* buy it after a little while.
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DATE: 20:09
The whole entertainment industry is like this. The media side, anyway. Movies, music, etc. What was that root kit that Sony used on recent CDs to fuck with your computer if you try to circumvent the obstacles preventing the ripping of the mp3s? Not to mention the ridiculous notion of charging a completely random number of network filesharers with theft every once in a while. Publishing companies tend to care more about piracy than the creators do, I find. Knyght
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DATE: 22:29
You're wrong. Not completely, but still wrong. Olaf
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DATE: 22:59
That raises a point. How much does using, say, Starforce protection cost? I'm going to guess a fair amount if the company producing it is to stay in business. Considering that with most major releases it seems like copy protection generally takes a matter of days to defeat, is it really worth it? Kind of intrigued as to how much licensed copy protection, like Securom or whatever, actually costs.
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AUTHOR: Olaf
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DATE: 23:00
Hrm. Although now that I've posted that it does seem like some of them are internal; publishers (as it usually seems to be them rather than development companies) tend to stick to the same copy protection. Don't know whether the protection is developed internally or licensed for a set number of years or titles or what, though. Interesting.
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AUTHOR: Trey
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DATE: 05:48
The way I've always figured it, if someone wants to pirate your game, they're probably going to pirate it. If someone wants to buy your game, then they're probably going to buy it. Copy protection is an unnecessary cost in the end, really, and only serves to be a serious deterrent to consumers for the more anal (and buggy) copy protection schemes.
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DATE: 12:58
I might well feel differently if this were to be realised, but if I created a game and it was sold retail, I don't think I'd personally have a problem with people pirating it because of expense or copy-protection issues. I'd prefer it to be experienced by as many people as possible, and it's not like the extra money would mean life or death to me. Although it must be said that I covet the proverbial fame much more than the fortune.
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DATE: 23:31
Not to sound flippant, but are you saying games should be free simply because there's some open-source apps available? Most major games currently out cost anywhere between $1-5 million. I don't see a way that can be matched by Freeware. Adware, maybe, but even then it would most likely not be of commercial quality.
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DATE: 06:51
It sounds pretty childish to claim you can't copy games because lawyers and publishers are greedy. You can't copy commercial games because their owners want them sold, not given away. It's pretty clear-cut. Trey
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DATE: 20:00
I have long ago decided not to buy any of the nextgen consoles. I still have plenty of games that have yet to be played on the PS2, the XBox, and the Gamecube, and I intend to play the majority of them before I put down more money on more consoles. And by that time, maybe the 360 and pals will have taken down their hideous bloated prices.
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AUTHOR: Josh
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DATE: 21:00
Western society continues to amaze me. You really are all slaves to your impulses, and it makes me angry.
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DATE: 21:00
The whole thing with consoles selling for several times their retail price is simple supply and demand at work. What do these people get for their $1200 Xbox? Well, they can be the centre of their like-minded friends' attention for however many days. They paid for it, so at least at that point in time they were convinced that it's worth that much to them. roboczar
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DATE: 21:03
Josh, roboczar
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DATE: 21:07
P.S. I AGREE WITH STUFFNESS Knyght
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DATE: 04:15
robo, yeah, it's pretty crazy, I'm not really sure how anyone could think that way... but then, if I saw a copy of Oblivion out now, I'd jump at the chance to buy it at more than retail... not ten times more... probably not even twice more, but still. And it's a fairly different situation.
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DATE: 10:29
Does it make me less of a gamer if I don't really care about the 360 either way? If morons want to throw money away, they can knock themselves out as far as I'm concerned. Consumerist society's been crap for a long time, and there's only so long you can stay mad before you lose the will to live. Olaf
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DATE: 13:22
If anything, this makes me want to get an XBox360 just so I can sell it for vast quantities on EBay. On the other hand, the risk of not selling it for all that much and the fact that I can't really afford it in the first place tempers that impulse. Stuffness
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DATE: 22:43
I'm sure Microsoft counts on the rampant profiteering to boost demand as well. It's essentially like scalping. Oh, and there's no risk if you want to try it, since most decent-type stores should give you a full refund for anything still in its original packaging. But I think it's too late for that now (Unless you have a different release date over there?).
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
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DATE: 02:01
Release is next week, I think. Probably far too late for me to preorder and buy one unless I camp outside a shop a few days early.
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AUTHOR: Trey
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DATE: 04:20
The Revolution seems good, yeah, but when you get down to it, we really know fuck all about it. The controller is freaky, and you can do stuff with it's attachment thing. That's roughly it, as far as I know (haven't been paying attention lately). Olaf
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DATE: 19:19
Mm, there aren't many games that can actually pull it off. Tempted to give King Kong a whirl. The demo was quite fun - the Jack section, anyway - though I imagine the full version is rather more impressive.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
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DATE: 19:20
Funny you should mention it, too, as Dark Corners of the Earth has no HUD either, though there is a somewhat Resident Evil style system in that the menu does show your heartbeat, which can be a general indicator of sanity and/or physical condition.
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TITLE: What I've Been Up To
AUTHOR: Olaf
DATE: 11/22/2005 05:05:00 ap.
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BODY:
I went home for the weekend.
Not exactly a promising start to a gaming entry, really, is it? Rest assured, it picks up.
Anyway, as I said, I went home for the weekend. Combined with this, I turn 20 in... ooh, an hour and a half, as of writing this. This means Small Party With Family. This means Presents, such as Money.
Money means new games.
When not out, the weekend was largely spent rekindling my relationship with my Gamecube, which was sadly left behind when I moved to London, but is now perched happily next to the XBox. Jesus, the Gamecube is tiny in comparison. I mean, the Gamecube's small anyway, but put it next to an XBox and it's like comparing Jupiter to, say, a small goose.
The majority of my Gamecube time has been spent playing Naruto: Gekitou Ninja Taisen 3. This is a game I have no doubt most of you will never, ever have heard of, and those of you who have will only have done so because I've rambled on about it frequently - and now I'm going to do it again. GNT3, as I'm going to call it from now on to save myself from RSI, is a one-on-one fighting game based on the rather popular Naruto anime series. Gorgeous, smoothly animated cel-shaded graphics, most of the important characters from the series, and "authentic" sound effects and voicework are but the icing on the cake. The genuine surprise is that the game mechanics themselves - the important bits - are extremely well done.
The majority of the mechanics are the exact same you'll find in most fighters. The game is on a 2.5d plane, in that you're essentially fighting on a flat plane, but the arena is circular and you can sidestep. You have a health bar, and a Chakra bar, which is essentially your "super move" bar. It charges up as you hit, or are hit, and it allows you to pull off some truly spectacular moves. Controls are likewise simplistic: the analogue stick moves around, the L and R triggers sidestep, Y is throw, X is super move, and A and B are special move and normal attack, respectively. Rather than relying on complex button presses to pull off special moves, a la Street Fighter 2, you simply press a direction and either A or B to perform different attacks or combos. Stunningly easy for beginners to get into, then.
There are a few other things to mix it up, though. If you have at least 75% chakra and are being damaged, you can hit L or R to teleport behind your opponent and hit them. While this hit does almost no damage, stopping it from being anywhere near gamebreaking, it can get you out of an extremely damaging combo before it hits. On the other hand, it reduces your chakra bar to 0, so if you do it, you're going to have to wait a little while before you can do it again, or use a supermove. Some of the 30-odd characters have traits that add another layer to it, too, such as one character who fights with a puppet, meaning that you have to keep your eyes on two targets at once (or sort-of control two characters at once, if you're playing as him) or another character who can drain chakra from the enemy as he hits them. A few of the characters have multiple "modes" that can be switched to by expending some chakra and hitting down+X, giving them access to another moveset, which usually has its own pros and cons. If Sasuke does this, his most damaging combo is removed, and his supermove is replaced with another that's a lot easier to dodge (though even more damaging), but he gets an extremely damaging counterattack and a few other excellent little moves. If Kakashi does this, he can counter supermoves - should anyone attack him with a supermove while he's in his counterattack position, he'll avoid it, copy it, and return it upon them. As a drawback, his health slowly drains while he's in his alternate mode. The reasoning behind these choices is only really clear if you're a fan of the series, of course, but the simplicity of the combat and the lush graphics should be enough to draw in anyone who hasn't seen it. It's a fantastic little game. The problems are that it's entirely in Japanese (though translation FAQs for the menus can be found online, and the actual game portion of it doesn't really need translating at all - hitting the other person until they fall over is a universal concept, it seems) and that a fully unlocked character roster can prove a little daunting for someone who has no idea who any of the characters are. Once you find a character that you like you're away, though, and the lack of complex movesets to memorise means that trying out another character is simplicity itself. Super Smash Brothers controls with a one-on-one styling. Except that it supports four players simultaneously, of course, in any variety of teams, so if the resident master feels up to taking on three players at once, he or she can feel free to try.
So, yes, I rather like that game. I've had it awhile, though, so it's not really new.
Today, however, I went and picked up a couple of other games: Killer7 on the Gamecube, and Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth for XBox. Let's start with Killer7.
This game is... bizarre. Capcom eschewed most traditional gaming concepts with this one, believe me. The graphical stylings give a little of this away - extremely simplistic cel-shaded graphics, meaning that a suit (for example) is just a shaded white colour in the shape of a suit. A little hard to explain, sadly. Go Google for screenshots, then come back. Don't worry, I'll wait.
Okay, so you know what I mean now? Right.
The plot itself is bizarre (I'm going to be using that adjective a lot; get used to it). You take the role of Harman Smith, an assassin - sort of. Harman, you see, is a wheelchair-bound old man with a split personality. Seven of them, to be exact, all of whom have been given flesh. These range from the arrogant, pistol-toting Dan Smith, through the shy sniper Kaede Smith, to the pro-wrestling grenade-launching nutter, Mask de Smith. All of them have their own personalities, weapons, and special abilities. Apparantly, terrorists are attacking America, and the Killer7 are the only ones that can stop them, for some reason. These terrorists are extremely bizarre laughing mutants called Heaven Smiles, who explode when they get close. Exploding terrorists with religious connotations? Wherever could they have gotten that from? To be fair, the plot is interesting, and delves into a grudge between Harman and the leader of the terrorists, along with questions as to exactly what the Killer7 are. Obviously, I'm not very far in, but the plot is definitely a reason to keep playing.
Sadly, it's about the only one.
The controls are servicable, if unusual. You're on rails the whole time, though you have choices of direction - hold down A to move forward, tap B to turn around. If you come to a T-junction, pick a direction. Whenever you hear a laughing, signifying an approaching Heaven Smile, hold down the R trigger to switch into first-person mode and take aim. Almost like Virtua Cop or House of the Dead, except that you have a lot of manual walking, and some extremely crap puzzles. It's kinda fun for awhile, but it gets old quite quickly. The Smiles have weak spots you can aim for to net yourself blood, which in turn lets you upgrade each of the Smiths. The combat in the first level is a little dull, though it does pick up when you start getting hordes of enemies coming at you from both sides, requiring you to prioritise targets and spin around.
The puzzles, though, probably don't deserve the word. Here's an example from the first level: Five candles, each with a number, from one to five. You have to light them in a particular order. Take a wild guess. Just in case that's too hard, there's a guy nearby who gives a "cryptic" hint as what you're meant to do, and if you still haven't figured out that you light them 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, you can give him some of your hard-earned blood and he'll tell you outright. While calling you a loser and raising both of his middle fingers at you. Richly deserved, I might add. The other form the puzzles take make use of the special abilities of each of the Killer7 - Coyote Smith can pick locks, for instance, while Mask de Smith can knock down barriers with wrestling moves. Again, this might seem stunningly obvious, but just in case it's too hard, the map has arrows with a picture of the relevant Smith pointing to the area where they need to be used.
The game does have a remarkably creepy atmosphere, though. The unusual graphical style adds to this a bit, but the fact that the main character has multiple personalities who all see ghosts (one of whom, as previously mentioned, helps you out with puzzles, while one of the others is a bondage freak who acts as a more general advice dispenser), and the enemies are all hideously mutated freaks who laugh hysterically before lurching towards you and exploding - well. Hell, the first boss is a little girl with hollow, blood-drenched pits for eyes. But wait, there's more! There's the severed head of a girl who gives you useful items every now and then, while her subtitles have anime smilies which she uses quite abundantly, particularly while describing the death of her mother and the time she jumped off a building \(^o^)/, there's the special ability of Kaede Smith, who slits her wrists and sprays blood on barriers to dissolve them, and of course who could forget the fact that when one of the Killer7 die, they leave behind their severed head in a blood-stained paper bag for collection and subsequent resurrection, after a lot of backtracking.
Oh God, the backtracking. This is another massive sticking point with the game. As previously mentioned, when one of the Killer7 die, they leave behind their head in a bag. Should this occur, you switch to Garcian Smith at the last save point (save points being Harman's nurse, who may or may not let you save depending on whether she's feeling bitchy), and have to walk back to the place where the member died to pick up the head. While fighting along the way. And as soon as you've picked it up, you're back at the last save point to resurrect them, so you backtrack through that part of the level yet again. Combine this with frequent - albeit short - load times, and you can get quite annoyed with the game quite rapidly. Besides this, you may have to wander back and forth across a level several times anyway to solve various "puzzles" with new items you've just picked up. God almighty, it gets annoying.
It's not all bad, though. Music and sound effects are both servicable and add to the atmosphere, and the voice acting is routinely good all round. There is one sticking point with the voice acting, though - when you kill a Heaven Smile by hitting it in its weak spot, your character mutters a catchphrase. Garcian Smith shouts out "Son of a bitch", Coyote mumbles something like "You're fucked", and Kaede cries out "Hurts, doesn't it?" Yes, Kaede, it does. Every single time you say that, it's like nails being hammered through my groin. If there's ever a reason to use the completely silent Kevin Smith, this is it.
I'm still going to keep playing it, but the fact that these little things have already gotten on my nerves and I'm only on the second level doesn't exactly inspire high hopes for the tediousness fading for the rest of it.
Finally, we turn to Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. With a development time of almost 6 years, over multiple systems, I was quite surprised to discover it's been released on XBox alone to minimal fanfare and advertising. I'm quite a fan of the whole Cthulhu mythos, so this is one I've been waiting for, for quite some time.
The game casts you as a private investigator who had his first encounter with the Mythos six years prior to the beginning of the game. In the playable prologue, you're called to a derelict house, where something occurs that totally shatters your sanity. At the beginning of the game, you can't remember anything you've been doing for the past six years. At this point, you're called in on a missing person's case in a little coastal town called Innsmouth. Cue the alarm bells ringing in the heads of everyone who's ever read Lovecraft at that town name.
The game itself is a first-person shooter... sort of. It's in a first-person perspective, certainly, but thus far there's been very little shooting. In fact, there's been none whatsoever. For the first few hours at least you very much play the role of the private investigator, looking around the exceedingly dark and creepy town, questioning people, and trying to find out just what went on. Funnily enough, it's played more like an adventure so far, with actual puzzles that require actual thought. There's also been a little bit of stealth while trying to sneak into a building guarded by a policeman. I suppose the puzzling aspect shouldn't come as much of a surprise as the lead designer of the game is none other than Simon Woodroffe, who was a major part of Horrorsoft/Adventuresoft - think Elvira, Simon the Sorcerer, etc.
Unpleasant though the townsfolk are (think the worst kind of isolated, inbred hillbillies, and add in a healthy dose of horror, though quite frankly if you know the Mythos at all you should know what to expect from Innsmouth), they're at least not actively trying to harm you - at first. Suddenly, though, all hell breaks loose, and you're literally running for your life in one of the most harrowing game scenes I've ever played. Being chased from room to room by axe-wielding villagers, completely defenceless, while slamming and locking doors behind me and shoving bookcases in front of them in an effort to hold them off for just a second longer while trying to escape. I'll not go into the specifics, but again - if you've read Shadow Over Innsmouth, you'll know exactly what to expect from that bit.
I've not had a chance to play it much yet, but it relates extremely well to Lovecraft's work, as you can probably tell from how often I'm referencing it. There are loads of throwaway references specifically for the fans, and I do particularly love that a lot of the characters from Shadow Over Innsmouth make an appearance, from Joe Sargent to Zadok Allen.
One other thing I have to mention is that this game has no on-screen display. You have no health bars, no ammo counter, no nothing. If you want to know how many shots you have left in your gun, you check the chambers. If you want to know how your health's doing, then you look out for telltale signs like blood splatters on the screen. Incidentally, once you get injured, you heal in a very Metal Gear Solid 3 kind of way - you pick up medkits as you play through, and they contain splints, stitches, poison antidote, and so on. Depending on the type of damage incurred, you need different forms of healing, and they affect your status. Jump out of a window and you'll break a leg, vastly reducing movement speed, and causing your character to limp and utter some rather pained gasps as he walks. Get cut up and you're going to need to get it stitched up, or you'll bleed to death - the screen will start greying out and eventually you'll keel over. This just adds to the immersion, really, as does the fact that barring the intro and a couple of very minor cutscenes so far, which are out-of-body for a very in-character reason, you see the entire thing through his eyes. Approach a safe and you'll see your hands tentatively reach for the dial. In one cutscene you walk down a flight of stairs, and your hands stretch out to the banister to steady you. Voice acting is also extremely good. The other thing that's done well in this is the sanity effects, and these are done somewhat more realistically than in, say, Eternal Darkness. It doesn't quite fuck with your head in the way that ED did - you won't suddenly get a message that your controller is disconnected, or anything, but you will get rather more appropriate effects, and seeing the whole thing in first person adds to this. Look down from the edge of a roof and the version will blur and sway with vertigo. Spend too long staring at a dismembered corpse and sure enough, you're going to lose some sanity. Hide in the corner of a room while crazed villagers are hacking down the door with axes, screaming for your blood? I think you get the picture.
I haven't played it much yet it's certainly looking good so far, though I did have an ununsual audio bug a little earlier on. I'm looking forward to playing it more as soon as I can.
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DATE: 05:52
Call of Cthulu sounds pretty awesome. Probably the only reason so far that I've had to lament my lack of XBox.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
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DATE: 14:32
Beyond Thief 3?
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COMMENT:
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DATE: 14:57
No, for Thief 3 I lament my lack of decent PC.
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TITLE: Numbered Bastards
AUTHOR: Knyght
DATE: 11/20/2005 02:46:00 ip.
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BODY:
So. Now we update regularly. And nobody reads this. WHYYYYY? Well it's either shit, shit in comparison, or just that nobodoy knoooows we exist. My vote is on a mix of those.
This is really all I have to say today, that our less than awesome writings are slightly useless if they don't reach the masses, and something should be done, perhaps. But what? And why? And should we even bother trying?
SIGNING OFFZ0RZ
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Jim9137
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DATE: 14:52
I still have no idea who registered us on www.gameblogs.org Olaf
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DATE: 18:01
My vote is on the latter, because I (at least) am fucking awesome. Glad to hear we'll be doing a bit of advertising though. Was kinda wondering myself as to how and when we'd get more people here and was running through a few possibilities in my own head, but it seems like Jim has it all planned out.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
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DATE: 18:03
Might also be worth remembering that we've been up for ages but only recently started updating regularly, so anyone who knew about this before we changed format would likely still expect us to be shit.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Jim9137
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DATE: 06:30
What was wrong with the old us? :|
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DATE: 07:36
I read it. Or at least check it daily to see if I want to read it. Jim9137
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DATE: 08:04
Indeed, I'm glad that we have some audience besides our writers!
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DATE: 15:30
Sweet. Once you've got a navigable layout and a decent archive, you should start pulling in more visitors anyway. I've linked a couple of other people here, but I have no idea if they read it much. Was gonna ask about being a contributing writer actually, but sadly I'm unreliable with deadlines.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
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DATE: 00:22
So am I, but I always manage in the end. Olaf
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DATE: 18:06
Clock Tower 3 isn't really a parody, per se. Nearly bought it yesterday, being that I saw it for £8, but then I remembered that I don't have a PS2 in London so I'd have to wait 4 weeks to play it. It's a similar sort of thing in that you get chased around each level by a murderous psychopath but involves ghosts and other stuff too. Doesn't really have much to do with the other games besides the style, though, although the Scissorman makes an appearance later on, from what I hear. It also has boss fights. BOSS FIGHTS.
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DATE: 18:48
I heard that CT3 is very much along the lines of some generic stalker-slasher flick. I can't imagine the atmosphere would be anything like the original. CT was freaky as fuck because of all the unexplained surreal shit (the wind-up doll that played tinkly music and slammed you, the parrot that fluttered around squawking "I'll kill you", your mirror reflection reaching out to strangle you) in the midst of this somewhat spooky but otherwise comfortable and normal-looking house. It was easy to imagine yourself there, as it wouldn't have been if the place had been old and decrepit or full of ghosts or something. The constant silence added to the effect. Bobby was the only 'real' monster, and while he was pretty freaky with his random sudden attacks, it was the house itself and all its little weirdnesses that fucked with you on a slightly more subliminal level... more than I imagine it would have in some run-of-the-mill haunted house or survival monster game...
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
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DATE: 00:31
There was another version of the game on some other system - possibly a PC version only released in Japan, actually - which had a load of extra stuff. Stuff that was harmless in the original suddenly became dangerous, so I imagine there'd be a few nasty surprises if you tried playing that one, now.
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TITLE: Alright
AUTHOR: Jim9137
DATE: 11/19/2005 01:03:00 ap.
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BODY:
Puppaz, and his association with the nethack tourist.
Nethack is a game I'm familiar with, and useless at. No matter what tactics I try, or walkthroughs I try, I end up dying at the hands of some evil gnome lord, or from kicking an especially hard door. I suck at nethack. So what is the best character for me? Ahhh yes. the tourist. It automatically gives me an excuse for my lameness.
Whats that? a goblin killed me? Thats ok, I'm a tourist
The tourist is the ultimate solution for any serious gamer, who's SHIT AT GAMES.
Anything you acheive, anything at all, feels like you've just beaten the game, whilst wearing a shirt from hawaii's best fashion shop.
True, you may find it hard to club orcs to death, a troll may scare the shit out of you, mindflayers may make a light snack of your mind, but you are the ultimate underdog, and as such you can know that you'll always be immune to any mocking, safe in the knowledge that, so long as you can get down to medusa, and get a special luckstone or something, you'll have acheived your aim, and become... in some way... respectable.
*checks online scores of tourists on nethack*
Oh shit...
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: KyoshoBallard
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DATE: 05:41
I can't get into Nethack. For some reason complete randomness puts me off. Plus it lacks atmosphere. Even with Falcon's Eye. I can play Diablo just fine, but I think that's because it has creepy music and great sound effects.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: bjarke
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DATE: 19:09
Plsy adom. It has atmosphere. As long as you can fill out the blanks yourself.
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TITLE: Look! It's Not XCOM!
AUTHOR: roboczar
DATE: 11/17/2005 08:41:00 ip.
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BODY:
Yes, friends and Romans, UFO: Aftershock is not XCOM. No really, It's a totally different game. If you're looking for an XCOM experience, you won't find it in UFO: Aftershock, because they're just two totally different things and not alike at all. Really.
I don't even know why Altar Interactive even bothers to say such things. Everyone knows the 'UFO' series is the successor to XCOM, as much as they attempt to distance themselves from the famous franchise, for reasons I can't understand (copyright infringement?). In any case, I've has a day or so to mess around with it, and despite a few bugs, it's a pretty solid offering. At least, more solid than Altar's previous, UFO: Aftermath.
Despite famously being not like XCOM, they certainly added quite a few XCOM-style features that work out very well, all around. I think the base management is quite well done, and easy to learn...I haven't seen all the structures yet, but the limited amount of space you have forces you to go out and find new base locations, just so you can fit the structures you need. Altar has also resurrected the 'keep your sponsors happy' model, which is basically keeping the various surrounding factions friendly to you, making them more likely to give you large amounts of resources and better troops-for-hire. No complaints with any of that stuff, at all. Everything else has pretty much carried over from UFO: Aftermath as far as I can remember, and the tactical battle mode has always been a cut above the rest when it comes to real-time battles.
In fact, there isn't really much to complain about. I mean, the Altar forum is literally swarming with people who endlessly debate whether the M60 machine gun should outperform the RPK in such and such a way (it really makes no difference past mid-game), which basically goes to show that there's really nothing wrong with the game itself, just the people who play it. People are reporting some bugs, but none of them are a game-breaking issues...most of them I haven't even seen.
UFO: Aftershock is one of the better games to hit shelves (shelves? Had to order it from Amazon, since there's no publisher in the US) in a long time. I'm thinking it's my contender for #2 if I were one of those ridiculous people that makes 'Top 10 Games of the Year' lists on the Internets.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Joq
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DATE: 11:54
Tried Space Rangers 2 yet, robo? Should make your list.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
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DATE: 02:07
Technically, you could make the arugment that the UFO series is the predecessor to the X-Com series, being that the first game was called UFO: Enemy Unknown (or X-Com: UFO Defense in the States). roboczar
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DATE: 16:59
I actually kind of liked Aftermath, but I was generally disappointed in it because of the missing XCOM features I thought it should have. That said, the storyline is good, the game itself is challenging at the right difficulty setting, and the tactical game is as solid as you could get at the time. Knyght
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DATE: 02:04
Well, wow, I'm surprised it sucks. Jim9137
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DATE: 09:31
Holy crap.
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DATE: 13:42
It's an ending that needs to be spoiled. No questions asked. If you plowed through the game with the promise of having a brand new life-changing ending, and witnessed that instead, you'd be heartbroken and need counselling. Olaf
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DATE: 02:04
Not that I'm advocating piracy or anything, but I'm, uh, presently acquiring this. By which I mean "renting", obviously. It's about 62% rented at the moment. Trey
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DATE: 20:11
Please tell me you're kidding about that ending. Knyght
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DATE: 01:49
I agree up to a point. However, I don't really think how realistic the graphics are is a factor. Although it could be, since graphics these days are still far from realistic, really. Jim9137
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DATE: 09:38
Once, year or two ago, I was completely excited about Day of Defeat, the Half-Life mod. I saw a review for it, and it seemed to be all I ever wanted from an FPS. Well, it turned out it wasn't but that's off-track. Olaf
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DATE: 02:00
Hmm. Well, once while playing Warcraft 3 on battle.net pretty much non-stop, I went to bed at about 4am, woke up at 9am, and my very first thoughts after waking up were to check my gold and lumber supply, make sure all my peasants were doing things, and checking that my barracks' were producing troops. About a second later, I realised that, no, I wasn't playing Warcraft, I was in bed, having just woken up.
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DATE: 10:06
Nice article, Loretta.
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TITLE: First Impressions - The Movies
AUTHOR: Olaf
DATE: 11/15/2005 12:04:00 ap.
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BODY:
Ah, Hollywood! The stars! The films! The booze! The paparazzi! The drug-fuelled rampages! Take a guess at which one of the above isn't represented in Lionhead's latest offering.
For those who've not heard of The Movies, it's a newly released game by Lionhead - those behind the Black & White series. As you've probably gathered from the title, you take control of a movie studio. Everything's under your control: the building of the lot, the stars and directors, researching new technologies, and of course the making of the movies themselves. An interesting concept, and one that's been done very, very occasionally with varing degrees of style and success (the mostly-text Hollywood Mogul springs immediately to mind), but never quite as high-profile as this.
You start off with an empty lot at the dawn of movie making, in the 1920s. To begin with, it's fairly simplistic - lay down a few paths, drop a stage school and some crew buildings to attract actors, scriptwriters, film crews, janitors, et al, and then get to work making movies. Stylistically, the game is gorgeous. Graphics are rendered in high detail, people and buildings look good (albeit not quite on a par with, say, Sims 2), and once you've started researching you've got a wide array of sets and costumes to choose from. Speaking of research, staying ahead of the technology curve is quite important. Even if the films your studio is producing are utter shit, being the first to show colour films will guarantee an audience desperate to see such amazing technology. When you're finished making a movie you can watch it, and in a nice touch, it's rendered in whatever technology you have available at the time. If you've researched 2-colour films, then that's exactly how it'll look, complete with grain.
The game is basically split into two parts - a Sims/Theme Park crossbreed where you build and assemble your lot and look after your stars and directors, and a fully functional film maker. You don't ever need to touch the latter if you don't want to, as you can employ scriptwriters to generate films, and then just set them filming. You don't have a choice when it comes to the former in the main game, though. There is a sandbox mode which you can use to set up a studio in whatever time frame you want, with as much money as you want, so if you just want to make a film you can go right ahead in that mode, but the main meat of the game is in the strategy section.
This is where the game falls down a bit. The interface is pretty much perfect, and is more than slightly reminiscent of - as before - both The sims and Theme Park, but there are numerous issues with this mode. Firstly, your stars and directors are all bastards. They all require an insane amount of babysitting. At first, this isn't too bad. They whine about stress or boredom (two major factors in their happiness - if they aren't working, they get bored, but if they are working they get stressed), amongst other things, but this is fairly easily dealt with. Later on, when they start demanding trailers, entourages, salary raises, makeovers, plastic surgery, and so on, you might start getting a little more irritated with constantly having to look after them. In addition to this, earlier on, you may only have two stars and a director to look after (stars and directors are pulled from the same tiny pool, which I'll touch on later), but towards the 60s and 70s you'll have maybe 10 people whining at you for attention. Yet more annoyingly, they get jealous of each other - if your best actor gets a pay rise because you feel they deserve it due to a stellar performance in your latest flick, the happiness of the others will decrease, because they'll want a pay rise too. Gnng.
The other major issue with that is that you absolutely have to babysit them. While you're trying to deal with all of the above and improve their skills in the various genres (Action, Romance, Comedy, Horror, and Sci-Fi), they're getting stressed/bored/upset with their image/jealous of their co-workers. With 10 or so people... well, imagine a house in The Sims with 10 people, where they won't do anything useful themselves. Slightly unfair, as they do occasionally do things themselves, but only ever to lower their stress - and usually this involves going to the bar or the restaurant, which increases their risk of getting addicted to alcohol or food, respectively. They'll never go to an empty set that's not scheduled for filming to practice horror, for instance. You have to pick them up and drop them their yourself. Likewise, you can't queue up actions, meaning that when they've finished their 30 second practice, you'll have to pick them up and drop them off again. I'm sure you can understand that this gets really irritating, really quickly, particularly with a lot of people under your control. Star and director happiness feeds directly into their performances in the films, so you have to keep them happy in order to make good films. You also need to improve their relationships with each other by dropping them onto each other and having them talk. While they'll talk amongst themselves anyway, it appears that their relationship bars don't increase unless you make them do it. As relationship feeds directly into the success of films... well, this is just as irritating as the rest of it. It just feels unnecessary.
Somehow, though, it's addictive. You'll sigh in exasperation as they whine constantly for your attention, but it's still fun, somehow. You have choices not just related to the stars, too - different movies are popular at different times, so you've got to plan ahead for changes in the public's taste. World events affect this quite a lot. When World War 2 kicks off, for instance, their desire for something to take their mind off it, like Comedy and Romance, will increase. When it ends, they're used to bloodshed and horror, so that's exactly what they want. With effective planning and a bit of foresight you can make an absolute bundle on these, particularly as the timeline at the top of the screen tells you what's coming up.
And, of course, there are the Oscars. They're not called such, but they're the Lionhead Movie Awards Ceremony, or something similar. winning these awards gives you various massive benefits. Getting a Best Director award means that any movie that particular director is attached to will gain an instant boost in the public's eyes, for instance. Get the award for happiest staff, and they're free to eat and drink as much as they want without getting addicted. As you might gather from this, you have rival studios - and they're all very, very good. Early on in the game you'll be very lucky to top them on anything they do, and it requires a lot of planning and effort to do so, even when you're 15 years ahead of them on the technology curve. You never actually see their lots or films, which is a bit of a shame, as it could provide some useful hints.
You also have various goals to aim for, which unlock new things. From memory, the very first one requires something like producing a 2 star movie, getting an actor up to 2 stars, and amassing $100,000, or something similar. This unlocks the Custom Script Office, allowing you to make movies of your own, which I'll get on to in a few paragraphs time. Every time you meet these goals, you'll be told what to aim for next, and what you'll get in reward. New sets and better production offices are your early rewards for these.
Now, as I said a billion paragraphs back, actors and directors are pulled out of the same pool. This pool is fucking tiny. You'll have something like 4 or 5 people to choose from at the start, and you're going to need a director, a couple of stars, and probably an extra or two. Every ten years or so, you might get a new applicant. Yes, every *ten years*. The way you get new people to this pool is never really explained, but it's incredibly uncommon. This is hideously annoying when you're a multi-million dollar studio and you have all of four people working for you, and you can't get any more sodding janitors to clean up the refuse. How difficult can it be to find a suitable applicant? It's a very "game" thing; an artifical challenge that really shouldn't be there and serves only to frustrate.
Hilariously though, race and gender make no difference whatsoever in most of the roles. It's not uncommon to have a highly-lauded black female actress in the 1930s. It has no bearing whatsoever on the success of your films - only their looks and skills do. This becomes particularly hilarious when you accidentally make your first gay romance film and it hits the top of the box office - again, in the 1930s. Unrealistic, maybe, but it's goddamn funny the first time it happens, and considering your tiny pool of candidates, I'm not going to complain about race and gender having no effect on your films.
So, after waffling on for what seems like forever, you really want to know about the films. Yes, you can design your own. The manual suggests what sort of scenes you should have for each type for best success, but you're free to do whatever you want with your available sets. Dress people up, make them slip on banana skins, whatever. You can't quite choreograph everything, but you can choose from a truly gargantuan pool of possible actions, and adjust sliders to change reactions. Someone slips on a banana skin, and you can change both how they respond to this, to how everyone watching responds. Do they ignore them? Do they laugh? Do they shout at them? Up to you entirely. It's possible to make some truly awesome films with this, but I've not had nearly enough experience to comment on it in depth. Once you unlock a post-production office, you can drop finished films in there, and add subtitles and voiceovers, allowing you to replace the Sims-style dialogue with real dialogue you've done yourself. You can then extract the finished films as movie files that can be opened in any media player, and upload them to the internet. Obviously, this is a few days after release, so there's aren't too many up yet, but it's a tool with massive potential.
Bear in mind that this really is a First Impressions piece. I've only played the game for about 8 hours, but that was pretty much in one sitting, which should say something about the addictiveness of it. And yes, I fully plan to upload some finished movies as soon as I get the chance. But first, I need to sort out a couple of stars - they have drinking problems, so it's time for them to go to rehab...
So, yeah. It's addictive, it's fun, and it's flawed. Perhaps not worth paying full-price for, but I'm a cheapass student, and so I say that about everything except the most perfect titles. It's great fun though, if you can get the opportunity to play it. If it sounds like your sort of thing, download a few movies to see what's possible, and maybe give it a go.
Reviewed on:
AMD Athlon XP 2200+
512mb RAM
128mb GeForce 4 Ti4600
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 02:07
Oh, and I absolutely intend to post some finished movies as soon as I make some worth seeing. Particular favourite thus far is a 6mb one made regarding Jack Thompson - http://media.putfile.com/Battlestar-Tarantula
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 02:08
Or download it here, if you hate streaming: http://slickdoody.com/MyMovies/Battlefish_Tarantula.wmv
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: KyoshoBallard
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 03:09
Nice. You should email that to Penny Arcade. Seriously. Send it to Gabe. He'll probably post it.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 03:26
Heh. It's not mine, sadly, just found it online, though I realise I gave that impression. Might email him the link anyway and see what he thinks.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: KyoshoBallard
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 16:14
Nuts. Oh well. If you email him, let me (us?) know what he says.
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TITLE: First Impressions - X3: Reunion
AUTHOR: Knyght
DATE: 11/13/2005 02:39:00 ap.
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BODY:
X3 seems to have been released without hype. Strangely, though, it's been released without hype from *gamers*, but with hype from *stores*, who mainly run away from anything even remotely nerdy looking. Something's wrong, here. Here are my first impressions of the game, but I've not had much chance to play it yet.
Intro to X
Ok, I haven't played X, but I've played X2. X2 is like Elite, but with a realistic economy. You can even buy your own space stations and stuff, woo. And there's races and a bunch of other stuff.
The graphics
"Dude, whoa, there's like graphics". "Whoa, totally!". Indeed, the visuals are pretty impressive, I must say. I thought space games couldn't get any prettier since it's just a black background with a few polygons flying around it, but EGOSOFT have managed to make space pretty, like it should be. But isn't in real life.
Sound
Well, for better of for worse, they've kept the same music and voiceovers AGAIN, and the new voice acting sucks mega penis. The SFX is really good, though. Although we shouldn't be able to hear things in space, it's nice to marvel at how we actually can, and it sounds nice. Or maybe there's some onboard computer that just generates sound so we know what's happening based on sensor input. I can always dream.
Interface
The interface isn't shit anymore. It's still a very similar interface, but it's been cleaned up, and is much easier to use.
Combat
Enemy ships don't ram you anymore. Well, ok they do a little. I've been rammed once in the time I've been playing, but usually they react pretty well, comparable to Privateer 2, as I recall it. Combat is now pleasurable.
The economy
I think this is an improvement, but it's a frustrating one. I keep losing money. A lot of the time people will buy for less than other people sell, so you really have to look around to make a profit. It stops me from being lazy and just running randomly between solar plants/cattle thingies/meatsteak making places/random factory thing, and makes me actually look around for profitable runs. This is a good thing, but it does force you into running all over the place to turn a profit.
The plot
I've only done the first two missions. The first mission was fine. You just patrol a bit and shoot some stuff up. The second mission, while fun, lasts too damn long. For two reasons. One, it's a long mission. You start in a turret thing, stationary, and blast stuff. Then you're in a turret while moving, blasting stuff. Then the same while flying around a cityscape. Then you have more stuff to do that I won't get into 'cause it's a bit of a spoiler.
The other reason is that it takes *ages* to load between each mission bit. Which brings me nicely onto the most annoying thing about X3.
Loading...
It loads. A lot. Each time you go through a gate, you're waiting for a minute or two. Not too bad, but every time you load your game you're waiting about five minutes, and before every plot mission, at certain points during plot missions, and after plot missions, you've got to wait five minutes, for each of those. Ugh.
In conclusion
It's a nice game. An obvious improvement over X2, but the loading times are so annoying that rather than playing it right now, I'm instead going to dance with some governor's daughters, or maybe conquer the last of Gaul.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Knyght
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 02:41
And yes, I do like stealing Fuzzy's titles and changing the name of the game ;/
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: KyoshoBallard
EMAIL:
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DATE: 03:00
I'm highly curious about these space games. I have honestly never played one. Everyone tells me my first should be Privateer, but I have trouble running it. Plus from what I've seen it's kind of oogly. I've been thinking of trying the Privateer remake, but I don't know yet. Knyght
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DATE: 03:13
Not unless you're willing to put the hours in to learn it. The manual is a bit light on info and there's no tutorials. Privateer 2 is good if you can find it. And not as oogly. bjarke
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DATE: 17:09
There's also Freelancer, a rather average spacegame, but with a smooth learning curve. Might be able to pick it up cheap in a bargain bin somewhere.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
EMAIL:
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DATE: 05:25
Heh. My titles are functional, and nothing more. Feel free to steal. It might add a little more coherency to the site. Olaf
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DATE: 05:26
Oh, X2 has tutorials, by the way, but they're crap. I *think* I-War has tutorials but in terms of complexity, think a naval sim in space. You didn't need 'em in either of the Priv games, and I-War 2's first few missions taught you how to play.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Knyght
EMAIL:
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DATE: 15:21
Fuzzy, I'd say buy X3 if you see it second hand anywhere. The interface hasn't been fixed, but it's been improved. Same for the combat. It's playable now. Still crap voice acting though.
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TITLE: An observation.
AUTHOR: Trey
DATE: 11/11/2005 11:59:00 ip.
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BODY:
This post won't be very well written, as I'm not too capable of coherent thought right now, so bear with me.
I was thinking the other day, why aren't games getting more expensive? I remember when the N64 came out. It's games were $50-$60 dollars. It's roughly the same now. Generally when a new PS2/X-Box/Gamecube game comes out, it's sells for $50 (more for a "special addition" package, but that's different.). The only way that the lack of price change can be justified is that they're selling higher quantities of the game, and making more money. The profit margin must be dwindling, since the more sophisticated the game is (graphically and engine-wise, anyway) the more time it probably takes to make, which takes more money to pay the workers to make it. But now Microsoft has confirmed that new 360 games will be coming out for an average of $60. For every game. No more of those cheapy $20-$30 ones that we had for the older systems.
It got me to thinking. If the cost to produce a game keeps growing (as I believe it will, based on having to code for more complex processors and having to create better and better graphics to "keep up with the Joneses"), will the cost to purchase keep rising as well? I believe the only reason the cost of a video game isn't $90 or above is because the gaming audience has been increasing over the years. More sales = more money, even on a shrinking profit margin.
But what happens when you've pretty much gotten everyone who would play a game to buy them? The audience won't increase that fast anymore, and a lot of gamers would likely be lost as prices keep going up (I know I'd never buy a game for $60 even I had the money to spare). Newer customers wouldn't appear simply because they'd also be turned off by the price.
So that leaves the question: At that point, would the market crash as gamers fled from the insane prices, as the companies were forced to raise prices to make a profit after the games' high production cost? Or would games be mainstreamed to such a point that the audience grew? Or would gamers accept the growing prices?
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: KyoshoBallard
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 03:05
I think you've forgotten an important part of the equation. The media the games are printed on/burned on/whatever go down in price quickly as new technology arises.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: bjarke
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 17:11
On the other hand, the rampant privacy will eventually force publishers to decrease prices to sell more.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Jim9137
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 22:25
Or lift the prices, as their strategy is.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Trey
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 23:59
Well, yeah, that's probably going to happen, Jim. But it might turn into customers not accepting the prices anymore, leading to a major crash. Which is the point I'm trying to make.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Trey
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 00:01
And Kyosho, right now a CD costs a few pennies to make, if not less. I can't imagine a DVD being more. The media part of the equation is virtually irrelevant from a cost standpoint.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 05:15
Fairly irrelevant, though from what little I can remember of the discussion on the subject, the decision on whether to use Blu-Ray or whatever the hell the other one is at least somewhat based on cost. roboczar
EMAIL:
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DATE: 17:11
I think the console market is pretty hot still. Consoles target low-income consumers, and there are a lot more of them than anyone else. I think that fact is doing more to keep prices down, because the manufacturers know the market they are trying to sell to only has so much disposable income. You can't grow into a market demographic by pricing them out of buying your crap. Trey
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URL:
DATE: 23:53
Computer software prices are going up? Higher than $500 for the latest Adobe Photoshop?
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TITLE: I Like some of those Rogues
AUTHOR: bjarke
DATE: 11/11/2005 04:42:00 ip.
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BODY:
Today, we'll have a look at Angband, perhaps the most remarkable roguelike there is.
It will be thrilling, exciting, and geeky. Enjoy.
Angband was written back in '90 by a couple of chaps at Warwick University, open source of course. The game was, at the time, just another roguelike, together with games such as Nethack (which came in '87), Moria and others. However, a few years after its inception, Ben Harrison came along. He modified the code to make it easier to read and work with. This spawned a multitude of variants, which makes Angband less of a game and more of a genre. Angband is still being developed, though, the latest version from September '05. You can find a full list of the variants at the angband site.
This is all nice and well, but the problem is that these games aren't very good. First of all, they lack atmosphere. You don't care about it as much as you'd care about Adom, for example. A major factor to this effect is the non-persistent levels. This means, in layman's terms, that the levels aren't saved after you leave them. Thus, you can go up a staircase, immediately go down and find yourself in a whole new level. The dungeon layout is also rather tame. You usually get long, dark hallways with little excitement and the occasional room with a few monsters in it, as opposed to adom with many rooms condensed on little space. This results in a more intense experience.
The magic system in the 'bands is also rather tame. It's incredibly inefficient - there's a few too many keypresses involved in casting a spell. What's wrong with pressing 'Z' and picking it off a list? Why must you select the book first? There's no point to it at all. The game has a town, and in some variants a whole wilderness. Problem is, that in these towns you get shops stocking magic items in bulk quantity. This is bizarre. Why would a buncha townsfolk have a storage of 36 scrolls of identify?
In conclusion, the angband games simply fail to keep my attention. The first few levels are boring corridors with a distinct lack of monsters to kill, it has an autoroller (sheesh) and even an option that allows you to automatically scum for good levels. If a game needs a scummer to make good levels, then there's something very wrong.
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TITLE: Metal Gear ramblings.
AUTHOR: KyoshoBallard
DATE: 11/10/2005 05:56:00 ip.
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BODY:
With all the recent fanfare over the Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots video, it made me want to play Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty again. Mainly to brush up on who the Patriots are. I ended up playing the first Metal Gear Solid as well. Both on the PC. Well, the first one with an emulator. So here's some ramblings from the experience.
For future reference, there's going to be spoilers. I'm sorry. Nothing drastically major, but some.
I have played Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (hereafter refered to as MGS2) twice in the past. When it first came out, my sister bought it for me for my birthday. I would never have bought it myself, because I didn't own a PS2 at that time. My sister figured I'd get one somehow because she knew how big of a fan I was of the first MGS and how very much I wanted to play MGS2. In the end, my mother's boyfriend's son had a PS2 that I borrowed for 24 hours. I think I might've slept maybe 3 hours durring that time. It was a glorious experience. And at the same time, really annoying. Maybe it was because I was extremely tired, maybe it was because of all the plot-twists within the last 2 hours of the game. I don't know, but I was confused as hell. I went online to the IGN Metal Gear forum to try and get things straightened out in my mind. It helped a bit, but all the theories there only left me with more questions.
Anyways, after that, I wasn't able to play it again until last year (2004). My step brother had a PS2. Here is something I wrote in my blog then:
"Now that I've played it a second time, I completely understand the story. Even though I'd forgotten most of it from the first time, I just remembered being very confused because of the plot twists. This time I got it. It made sense. And I loved it. Though I still think Raiden is a homosexual. Seriously. Heh. Nevermind about that. The whole long scene on top of Arsenal Gear was sooo awesome. I saved right before it, and when I continued on with the game, I saved in a different slot so I can go back, load, and watch it again. I finally understand why Hideo Kojima wanted to have you play as Raiden instead of Snake. His reasoning was that he wanted people to see Snake from a different perspective. And it worked. It made Snake an even more compelling character."
Okay, so this time around I didn' have access to a PS2, so I need to get the PC version. I got Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance for the PC in a trade with a guy from Octopus Overlords. I was extremely worried about how the game would run on my system. I'd heard bad things, and my computer isn't exactly a powerhouse. I figured it was worth a try though.
In most areas of the game, it ran extremely well with most of the settings turned down/off. But there are certain places, like the holds with all the marines in the Tanker or the water parts of the Big Shell that simply freeze my computer seconds after loading. For these areas, I have to turn every setting to it's lowest, including sound. And I have to go into dxdiag and turn off sound acceleration. It makes these parts sound a look like crap, but it works. Well, sort of. I'd say it works 10% of the time. I just have to keep trying over and over. Eventually, through some surge of luck, the game doesn't freeze and will continue to not freeze until I quit the game completely. It's very odd.
It had been an enjoyable experience otherwise. Until a certain point later in the game. Up to this point I've been playing on Normal mode. In normal mode, at one point in the game, you have to fight 25 Metal Gear RAYs. For the uninformed, a Metal Gear is a HUGE bipedal tank (RAY is the name of this particular model). Basically a giant walking robot loaded to the teeth with weapons (think Mechwarrior, etc.). And you have to fight them while you yourself are on foot, using a handheld Stinger missile launcher. And the only place they can take damage is in their heads. It's insane. And yet, the last time I played it on a PS2, I played on Normal as well, and I beat them on like my third try. This time around, I've tried eleven times. Eleven! That might not sound like much, but you have to realize that it takes at least a minute and a half to kill ONE RAY. I'd spent quite a few hours trying to beat the dang things and I just couldn't seem to do it! So, I thought I'd go online and try and find some downloadable savegames people have made. I tried every one I could find, but none of them are at that point in the game. Okay, so I checked them all to see if any of them had collected enough dogtags to start a new game with Stealth. It's a device that makes you invisible to enemy soldiers and would've made starting a new game -- and getting to the point where I was -- less painless and faster. But none of them even had THAT! So now I had a choice. Do I spend a few more hours trying to beat those stupid RAYs, or do I start a new game with the Easy difficulty setting (instead of Normal)? On Easy, you only have to fight 5 RAYs. But that'd mean I'd have to go through everything again! Everything! Including the parts that my computer almost always refuses to run. I know I can skip all the dialog this time, skip all the cutscenes and that will cut down on the time it takes. But I'd have to fight Fatman and Vamp and the Harrier and do all the bomb crap again. That'd be so annoying. But will it be more annoying than fighting these RAYs over and over and OVER?
I was so fed up with it that I decided to play through the first Metal Gear Solid instead. Which I have done. It's such a better game than MGS2 in my oppinion. Better story, better atmosphere and a much larger sense of urgency. This was my ninth play through, I believe. But it was my first in around 3 years. So I forgot enough small details for it to be a fresh, fun experience.As I rambled on about to my friend Sam the other day, I'm still learning new things about the original MGS. I never realized the Stinger was so useful. I used my weapons a lot more. I fought Vulcan Raven in a completely new way. Etc. Etc. And I still think the Otacon ending is the best of the two. That's the one I intentionally got this time. Mainly so I could see it again, but also so I can use Stealth the next time I play it (Otacon gives it to you at the end of the game). It's such an awesome game. So, yeah, anyways, after I beat MGS1, I decided to start up a new game of MGS2 on Easy. This time around, I decided to collect dogtags (so that maybe eventually I can get Stealth, heh) Anyways, by skipping most (not all) of the cutscenes and codec conversations, it didn't take me long to get to where I'd been before, fighting the RAYs. Of course, killing only five RAYs was extremely easy and I beat them on my first try. Then I beat the game completely, seeing as there's just a boss fight after that.
The Substance version of MGS2 comes with some extras. One of which are some missions playing as Snake, called Snake Tales. I played part of one of them. Whoever made it was really uninformed about the plot of the game and made some big story mistakes. So I didn't even bother playing the rest of them. I will eventually, I'm sure. But I read this on a cheat page, "Successfully complete a Snake Tale to unlock the M9. Begin a game and use M9 to stun the Bosses instead of killing them to view an alternate ending sequence." I'm going to assume it means to stun the bosses and you'll get an alternate ending in the main game (Sons of Liberty). If that's true, I might just have to play through the game AGAIN, just to see that ending. But that can wait...
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Joq
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 18:32
I never could be arsed to play through MGS, but I got MGS2 right when it was released and finished it. Was cool. Now I need someone to come over here and play MGS through so I can actually enjoy the plot.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: roboczar
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 19:25
I remember cleaning up with MGS in a night's worth of gaming, and I remember being really disappointed at how short it was. Luckily my local game shop was taking trade-ins at and I swapped it for Brave Fencer Mushashi. NES METAL GEAR 4 LIFE
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: KyoshoBallard
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 20:00
Yeah, I'd say it might take 10 hours your first play through. But did you see what I said in the post? It was my ninth time through. Because it's so story heavy, I like to play through it a lot. I mean, it's like watching your favorite movie a bunch of times. Olaf
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DATE: 22:24
I've been kinda tempted by Twin Snakes for awhile, though I remember a video up on Fileplanet just before it was released with like 40 minutes of the new cinematics on there. I've finished all three of the MGS games, and MGS1 is the best, but 3 is also very, very good. Quite different, and I thought it was shit for the first four areas or so, and then suddenly it clicked and I adored it. MGS2's okay, but I don't like it as much as the others. I'd have much preferred it if it would have let me start with the sword after finishing it, but that's just because I loved that part of the endgame.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
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DATE: 22:25
Oh, and I loved some of the Snake Tales stuff too. The murder mystery one was ace.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: KyoshoBallard
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DATE: 00:02
Yeah I was hoping for the sword too. Seemed logical to give it to you. But no. Very annoying. Oh, I'm going to have to play those Snake Tales.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
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DATE: 09:29
I'm somewhat tempted by MGS3: Subsistence, too. Enough so that I'll probably sell MGS3 for the PS2 when I head back to the island, and pick up Subsistence when it comes out instead. Proper 3rd-person camera, the MSX Metal gear and Metal Gear 2 games, multiplayer (which I suspect will be a bit tacked on, but I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt being that Splinter Cell has some of my favourite multiplayer ever)...
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TITLE: Civ 4, or Human History Through Rose-Tinted Glasses
AUTHOR: roboczar
DATE: 11/08/2005 09:23:00 ip.
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I wanted to write this really serious and great article about how Civ was this that and the other thing to the people that played it, but about 1/4 of the way through, I realised I sounded like complete punter and decided to get it overwith.
So, to get to the meat really, really quickly, I'll put in some convienient bullet points. It'll be fun, just like those PowerPoint presentations people in suits get paid millions of dollars a year to sit through once a week.
Joq
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DATE: 02:32
Crikey. I might have to get me some Civilization IV after I finish Space Rangers 2. That bleedin' game has taken up all of my free time (and non-free time, too) during the last two weeks or so.
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TITLE: LIVE
AUTHOR: Gremmi
DATE: 11/08/2005 06:07:00 ip.
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BODY:
Of the Xbox Variety.
Finally bit the bullet and got it. My first game was on Halo 2, and it didn't go well. A 15 minute match, I got one kill and was killed about sixty zillion times. Some people were squawking various things to each other, but it seemed pleasant enough, none of the "wtf fag camper" talk I was expecting. Anyway, considering how "pwnt" I was, I decided to leave Halo 2 until I'd settled into things.
Call of Duty was my next stop, and at first I leapt into a straight-out Deathmatch. I didn't die as much as Halo 2, roughly 1 kill to every 3 deaths in the end, and that's without knowing the map at all. Whee.
After that, a bit of team deathmatch..that's where it all suddenly fitted. I'm not exactly used to online gaming, and thought it would be a mostly unorganised mess. Oddly enough, it worked incredibly well. I didn't have a communicator, so actually talking to people was impossible..but somehow we managed to fit as a team..if I was sniping, someone covered me with a rifle or machine gun..if someone else was sniping, someone else would seem to naturally cover them..when going on an all-out assault, the whole team seemed to join up and cover each other. It was beautiful to watch, and all this without any communication at all, all complete strangers. A refreshing opposite to what I was expecting.
Anyway. Got the headset now, and had the surreal experience of chatting with a British guy in Australia about the weather whilst racing around Sydney on Project Gotham 2.
I've still yet to encounter any complete tards yet. Maybe I'm lucky, or maybe some sort of Live Angel is watching over me, protecting me from the regulards who cry out" omg cheating fag" whenever they lose.
Gamertag is Gremmoo, for anyone who wishes to kick my ass at most things.
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TITLE: Spartan: Total Warrior - First Impressions
AUTHOR: Olaf
DATE: 11/07/2005 09:57:00 ip.
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BODY:
About half an hour ago, a friend of mine knocked on my door. "Alright mate," he says, casually handing over a box. "Brought this round for swapsies."
"Help yourself," I respond, pointing a finger at my XBox games. He picks up X-Men Legends and Ninja Gaiden, and then heads off back upstairs. At this point, I spare a second to examine the box itself. Spartan: Total Warrior, the box proudly proclaims. Well, now. This should be interesting. A Dynasty Warriors-esque console game, developed by that little-known company Sega, with the Total War license. This should be entertaining.
And yet sometimes, against all odds, they manage to horribly fuck it up.
I guess the first warning sign should have been the development time, thus far. I might be out of the loop slightly, but the first time I heard about this game wasn't all that long ago. It may have been that it was announced when it was near completion, but even so, I only recall hearing about it a few months ago, and now it's out. Crap, but out.
What should I talk about first? Well, the first thing you'll probably notice are the graphics. The backgrounds are quite pretty, I confess. Unfortunately, the character models, and much of the incidental detail (on crates and things like that) look a bit crap. Considering the number of characters on screen at any time, this is quite understandable. It looks pretty much like a PS2 game, only running at a much higher framerate than I imagine the PS2 could pull off with this.
The very next thing you'll spot, during the intro, are the twin evils of a truly appalling script, and some truly appalling voice acting. Cortez from Timesplitters apparantly took a trip back to 300BC, as he seems to play Castor, with no attempt to change or disguise his voice in the slightest. The Romans have some... interesting... accents. The main villain's seems to change from Australian to Evil Brit every 30 seconds, hilariously. The rest of the soldiers have mixed accents, though I suppose I can forgive that, being that they'd most likely have been called forth from various different conquered populations. History buffs, feel free to correct me.
As an aside, I'm kinda miffed by the realism aspect of this. Yeah, okay, it's not exactly realistic to take control of one soldier against hundreds and win, but considering the Total War brand, I wasn't really expecting the Romans to field gigantic walking statues, or (from a look at the manual) Medusas, Minotaurs, Hydras, and various other things pulled from mythology. Likewise, getting god powers seems a bit naff. I sure as hell don't remember most of this from Rome: Total War. It's not that important an aspect, I guess, but it's still annoying.
The gameplay itself, then. I guess I've put this off for long enough. Dynasty Warriors is indeed an apt comparison - you, and an autonomous army on your side, against loads of enemies. You're led constantly by objectives; there's little chance to explore or take your own paths as in Dynasty Warriors. You're constantly being told what to do, and pressed on into the next battle. I suppose Dynasty warriors-lite is a better comparison, then, or possibly the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers/Return of the King games. Even then, they had a lot more depth to them than this does, so far. You have levelling up at the end of each mission ("Favor of the Gods", allowing you to increase health and damage), and you obtain new weapons as you go along, but the levelling up hasn't made much discernable difference, thus far.
The controls are servicable. Left trigger blocks, A and B attack forward and around you, respectively. X is "fatality", allowing you to instantly kill a downed opponent, and also doubles up as use. Y lets you jump, which thus far has been utterly pointless. You also have "Rage" attacks - when you've hit enough people in the face, you can click in the left thumbstick, and press one of your attack buttons. This results in a rather brutal animation of you either attacking one person in front of you, or leaping forward and smashing through a horde of them, depending on the button pressed. I've not found any opponents strong enough to require the first one.
The different weapons do make a bit of a difference. The bow, for instance, makes things about a hundred thousand times harder, if you're stupid enough to use it. I swear to God, it has some of the worst controls I've ever been party to. Press the black button and your Spartan puts away whatever weapon he had out, and pulls out his bow. At this point, the view locks directly in front of you, so you can circle around any target. This means you can supposedly dodge. The problem is that it automatically locks onto a target in front of you - even if there isn't one. Try and use the right thumbstick to turn around while you have the bow out and you're in for a world of frustration, because he doesn't turn normally - he just locks onto another target in that direction. If there aren't any targets in maybe 45 degrees of the way you're looking, he won't do shit. Enemies gleefully take advantage of your idiocy in attempting to use the bow and stab you in the side. Besides this, the auto-locking has a range of about 10 feet, which makes it the most utterly useless long-range weapon in the world. You can't aim for shit at anything further away than that, so while enemies high up on towers are giggling and shooting at you with their own bows, your Spartan shoots the wall of the tower, rather than aiming up at them. Possibly the worst example of this occured in a fight on the second level. The scene: Romans have a ballista at the other end of a narrow field (armed and ready, in the middle of their own camp, for some reason). One of them is on this. There are a bunch of crates stacked up neatly for me to hide behind while I make my way towards him. There are a horde of soldiers between me and him. This ballista can kill me in about four hits, and cuts through the crates like they were made of butter and it was firing arrows of pure heat.
There's one soldier fairly near to me. Thanks to his broken AI, he doesn't actually make any attempt to move towards me unless I step within range of the ballista's targeting (which, again, is a bit pointless, as it can shoot far beyond the range when it'll open fire - maybe it just has the same broken targeting as my bow?). I pull out my bow. It targets on a crate that's supposed to shield me from the ballista arrows. No, I don't want to aim at the crate. Thumbstick right. No, not at that crate either. Thumbstick right. No, not at that crate either. Stop aiming at the fucking crates. I don't want to shoot crates, I want to shoot the sword-wielding lunatic that's closer to me than the crates. Yes, that's it. That one. Well done, targeting system. I fire off an arrow, and it smacks him in the stomach, knocking him back, and halving his health. Curious about the AI, I wait to see if him or any of the others are going to try running at me and attacking me, now that I've hurt one. Apparantly not. I fire off another arrow and kill him. Now, my bow has a fantastic range, despite the crap auto-targeting. The horde of Romans at the other end of the field still aren't approaching me, and they're well within range. I pull out the bow again - and target the crates. No, they're to the left of the crates. No, left, not right. NO. STOP TARGETING THE OTHER CRATES. TARGET THE ARMED MEN. THEY MIGHT BE FURTHER AWAY FROM THE CRATES BUT THEY'RE RATHER MORE OF A FUCKING THREAT THAN WOODEN BOXES.
Come to think of it, it's not just the bow camera that's broken - the camera in general is a bit crap. It frequently looks in the most useless direction possible, or gets caught up in a wall when you're near to one or on a bridge. It can be centered behind you by clicking in the right thumbstick, but quite frequently, a side-on view would be more helpful, letting you see the buggers behind you who you presently can't block. It also turns oh-so-very slowly when you try and move it with the right thumbstick. Not a good thing.
My other major, major, major complaint with the game (other than the fact that it's no real fun whatsoever, obviously) is its over-reliance on game logic. The main character is a novice. You're told this repeatedly during the first level. Then why, oh why, are you made to do everything? Why don't the more experienced soldiers do it? At the point where you have soldiers preparing catapults, why do they suddenly bugger off as soon as the catapult is ready and order you to launch it? Why don't they just do it themselves? Why the hell do you have to continually walk over to a lever to let reinforcements in? Why are you, a novice, ordered to aim the fucking catapults to take down a giant walking statue, when more experienced soldiers could do it easily? Why the hell does the Roman camp conveniently have explosive barrels stacked up against the weak parts of their walls? Why, when hundreds of soldiers are being killed and the alarm has been raised, do they still have soldiers wandering around completely oblivious? Why do they have these mythical, super-powerful swords that they supposedly stole hundreds of years ago, completely unused, in a camp, right next to the only Greek city they have yet to take? Come to think of it, why do all my allies keep calling me Spartan, even though they're all Spartans too?
I'll cut it off there, I think. It's kind of more-ish, though not in a good way - like contaminated popcorn, perhaps. And the twin swords are kind of fun, if only because they're really quick and let you get through the game quicker. It's possible it'll get better, and I'll be sure to let you all know if it does. Right now, though? Spartan: Total Shite.
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TITLE: Woo @ Oblivion
AUTHOR: Knyght
DATE: 11/06/2005 01:11:00 ap.
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BODY:
Hopefully as a nice contrast to the STALKER post.
Oblivion. I am looking forward to you. You have just been delayed, until "Early 2006". Heh, early. Yeah, anytime before June, then. But I don't mind.
At first I was upset about having to wait, especially after just doing a bunch of upgrades so that it will actually run.
Now however, I'm fairly happy about it, for two reasons. The most obvious is that we may get a good game out of it. Now don't get me wrong, Daggerfall and Morrowind are both sexy games, but both randomly crash, and Daggerfall is simply horrible with all the bugs, even after all the patches. If I'm going to get a game that doesn't crash out of this, I'm happy. If I'm going to get a truly great experience out of this, with no crashing, I'm even happier.
The second reason is a spiteful bitch of a reason. It won't be a launch title for the xbox360. Why isn't this a good reason? Well it is, if you're an xbox fan. I however, am not. I hope the 360 will slump, and with many of the launch titles delayed it's quite possible. Unlikely, unfortunately, but still, it has more chance now.
So why, after delays, and a game that's taken ages to develop in the first place, am I still childishly excited about it? I don't know. Maybe the hype's getting to me. I watched the movies up on The Elder Scrolls website. The trailer was a bit dull, but watching the nerdy guy play the game and talk was truly impressive. There were a few things that truly impress me about them.
First, the trivial. The forest looks gorgeous. The wind effects are realistic, the trees look beautiful - though a little fake still. Hopefully they will be polished up for the release. Also the animals are a little tacky looking. Specifically, the horse in this screen shot looks quite fake. Hopefully the animals will blend a little better into the environment on release, too.
Next, the fight scene. Incredible. It actually looks a bit like what people slashing each other up with swords might look like. Not just a couple of people standing still going "OK I'LL HIT YOU. THEN YOU HIT ME, OKAY?". However... (yes, always a however), it looks slightly weird in the dungeon. My bet is it's 'cause it's an E3 demo, but when the guy's shooting all these things with a bow, I can't see a bloody thing. Nothing. At all. How about a little light, eh? Maybe they were actually visible on the screen if you were actually there, though.
Truly, the most impressive thing was the AI. Radiant AI or some such they call it. But it is truly awe inspiring. The example used was a little over the top, what with fireballing your pet dog and all, and I hope this doesn't happen all the time, since the dog population would diminish quite quickly. I also hope there's safeguards there that stop characters important to the plot being killed by random people getting fed up of them and fireballing them. I also like how people have schedules. I was sort of annoyed by the fact that everyone in Morrowind didn't need sleep. They'd just run their stores 24 hours and never leave, take a lunch break, go for a piss (ok, so I don't really need Oblivion to model a shopkeeper going for a piss break, but you get the point), sleep, or anything else, really.
The AI used in the demo, though, looked really set-up. I mean, he just walks in there and all that stuff happens without any sort of scripting? I find it difficult to believe. I will definitely enjoy it though, if it works out as well as it seems. Having interesting people to talk to all of the time would be nice. Although I understand they'd probably say the same things, just at different times or depending on their mood, it's a lot better than the basically static Morrowind or Daggerfall NPCs who litter the game doing nothing but saying the same thing as everyone else, independent of the world around them.
Okay, upon proofreading this for me, I've been semi-reliably informed by Kyosho that (I'll just post an edited log):
<Kyosho> Okay, the thing in the chick's upstairs apartment, with the dog and all... Yes that was somewhat scripted. It was all AI, but they put in some specific things they wanted her (and the dog) to do, and whether they did them (and the order they did them, I believe) was up to the AI <Kyosho> They wanted something cool for E3, so they fixed it a bit so the player wouldn't have to stand around for an hour to see something cool happen. <Kyosho> meaning, it wasn't completely random. <Kyosho> But think about it, why on earth would you ever want an NPC to kill her dog? and what real person would EVER go to bed while a stranger is in the room? it was all set up. <Knyght> so if you wait around, that stuff might actually happen, should the right potions and spells be known by that character? <Kyosho> yeahand:
<Kyosho> Okay, the thing about killing plot-related characters... <Kyosho> If you try and kill them, they won't die. They'll just fall down. They'll stand back up after a while. Once they've played their part in the main storyline, you can kill them properly. <Kyosho> Of course, Bethesda has gone through many changes of this system. But I think they're finally sticking with that one.So, trying to end this gracefully, I'll just say that I'm expecting great things from Bethesda. If I don't get them, they *will* be killed. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR:
Olaf
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DATE: 20:00
Fuckin' hell. Apparantly I am He Who Posts Comments. Knyght
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DATE: 01:06
Yeah. I started writing this article thingy a few hours after they posted that. Seems apt timing, I suppose. I WANT MY OBLIVION :( KyoshoBallard
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DATE: 02:17
Well since basically everything I would've said in a comment ended up in the article, I will just say this. I do not want the 360 to fail. I want it to win this new console war. Sony was the obvious victor last time. With recent things like that rootkit by Sony, I hope they burn. Sony has become even more evil than Microsoft. In fact, in recent years, Microsoft has become a pretty good company. I'm rooting for the 360 this time around.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Knyght
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DATE: 02:20
Oh, sure, xbox should win over sony, but nintendo should reign supreme.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: KyoshoBallard
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DATE: 02:25
It'd be nice for Nintendo to win, but with their gimmicky Revolution, who knows what will happen. I predict Gamecube-level sales.
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TITLE: Big Frikkin' Giants
AUTHOR: Trey
DATE: 11/05/2005 07:51:00 ap.
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BODY:
So, yeah, I ordered some solitaire game for an older friend of mine, and inexplicably enough it was shipped with a demo of "Shadow of the Colossus" for the PS2, by the makers of ICO (Which I have yet to play). I popped it in a few hours after receiving it. It was... awesome.
The game is beautiful, first off. The animation of the main character is just what I would think would happen. If he jumps or falls off of something, he stumbles a bit upon contact with the ground. When he jumps on his horse, he doesn't just mount it immediately. It takes him a few seconds to climb up and adjust himself for the ride.
That's not the heart of the game, though. The entire game apparently revolves around fighting 15 Colossuses (Colossi?). And that's it. No little monsters, no hard puzzles, just them.
And they're huge.
Freaking huge.
At least the one I fought was.
The demo only featured one of these things. It was a huge bear thing with armor and a giant club. And you really got a feel for how big it was and how vulnerable you are to it. When it swings it's club, you have to get out of the way. There is no second chance, if it directly connects, you die. The fight involved me dodging around a bit, trying to figure out what to do (and shooting a few ineffectual arrows at it) until I noticed one of its heels was exposed. So I jumped on it and started stabbing away at it until it kneeled.
On a tangent, I'd also like to note that the stabbing there is performed with a desperate, violent kinda feeling.
So I proceeded to climb up further, stabbing on the way up. At around its back, I managed to climb onto a platform that was bizarrely built into it's armor (I'm assuming such things are explained in the actual storyline) and rested for a few precious seconds to recover a bit of strength (run out of strength while climbing, and you fall... usually straight by it's feet, for rather fatal results). It started shaking violently, trying to knock me off, but I managed to grab onto some of its fur and ride it out, all the while climbing higher and higher, slowly getting closer to the top of it's head. It continued flailing, knowing my goal but powerless to stop me. I arrived at my destination, and assaulted his vulnerable head, ignoring the black ichor spewing all over me until finally the giant was toppled.
I would like to note that I died a few times until I managed to kill it.
This game, just the atmosphere of it, is art. I've never been so drawn into a game before, and I plan on buying it immediately after I cash my check tomorrow. You should do the same.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
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URL:
DATE: 14:55
God almighty, I want to play this game. Two problems: My PS2 is on the Isle of Man and I'm in Liverpool, and it's not out over here until February or something.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
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DATE: 14:58
Ooh. Although now that you mention this, I find an interesting little tidbit on another games news site: Joq
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DATE: 12:23
Bleh. I want a PS2 so I can play MGS3, Ico, Colossus and Guitar Hero.
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TITLE: Road Rash
AUTHOR: KyoshoBallard
DATE: 11/04/2005 02:17:00 ip.
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BODY:
I was watching an episode of Judgement Day on G4 a couple weeks ago, and they were reviewing a motorcycle racing game. I don't recall the game. All I remember is Tommy Tallarico was saying that throughout playing the game, he missed the ability to hit the other riders over the head with a baseball bat, etc. The review pretty much ended up being about them wanting a new version of Road Rash. And I agreed with them. Then I remembered there were a couple versions of Road Rash that I hadn't ever played.
I'm sure everyone's played at least one version of Road Rash in their life. Most likely one of the ones on the Genesis/Master System. I believe the first one I played was Road Rash 2 on the Genesis. I have fond memories of playing that game multiplayer. A couple years later I bought the PC version of Road Rash. I loved it. Since then, I've always considered the PC version of Road Rash to be the best one released. Well, after playing the n64 version on an emulator, it's now a toss up.
The n64 version, has a lot of improvements. For instance, when you wreck, you start at the back of the pack. In the PC version, you had to run back to your bike, and continue from where you were, playing catch-up. At first, I thought the back-of-the-pack thing was stupid and took some of the challenge away, but now I like it. The enemy AI is better now, too. The physics are a little more realistic this time around. No more crashing your bike into a sign and your rider flying a mile away. The graphics are nice improvement.
I realize they look similar in these shots, but when in motion, the PC version looks very bad compared to the n64 version. The PC version is 2.5D, not 3D, ala Doom, I think. Lots of jaggies.
Overall, I suppose it's a superior version. The only thing that detracts from it is that even though I'm very far in the game, the sense of speed is nowhere near as cool as in the PC version. For some reason, I don't ever feel like I'm going very fast. I accidently turned on Frameskip on at one point, and of course things were twice as fast. It was kind of fun, but it's not the way the game was intended to be played.
So, which do I like better, the PC version or the n64 version? I really can't decide. The n64 version has so many obvious improvements, but it's also missing the little touches that made the PC version so much fun. In the PC game, you'd get to see funny little FMVs after the races. Sure they were repetative, but I liked them. Also, the whole back-of-the-pack thing completely removes the ability and the satisfaction of making a truly spectacular comeback.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Joq
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 17:18
The PC version was great back in the day. At least the bits that I can remember were. Nice menus and music. Or something. Something something something.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 20:19
I played shitloads of Road Rash on the Genesis, back in the day. The first one, mostly. I seem to remember a friend (who I'm now out of touch with) borrowed Road Rash 2 from one of his friends and we spent, like, a day, sitting in my room, playing through the thing in its entirety. I don't remember much about it, though. KyoshoBallard
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 21:32
FD: It's on HOTU if you want to give it a go. And yes, it's Windows native.
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TITLE: Bleh @ S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
AUTHOR: Joq
DATE: 11/03/2005 09:13:00 ip.
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BODY:
A few reasons why I'm not really waiting for the game:
#1: GSC Game World claims to have a brilliant DirectX9 engine for the game but they're not showing it.
#2: The 'life simulation' in the game is supposed to be brilliant but they're not showing it.
#3: In fact, they haven't shown anything new in ages, except bits of multiplayer.
#4: The game's been very close to completion a few times too many and delayed over three years.
#5: They're leaving out co-op multiplayer.
#6: The book is always better.
I reckon that GSC Game World suffers from the Molyneux syndrome*, which is to make really, really big claims about your game, and when it finally comes out, it lacks all the things you claimed it to have, but does have really unnecessary features.
Or the game might be good. Who knows. GSC's publicist sucks ass. And the game really seems like a mess.
*I think I wasn't the only one who thought that Fable seemed a bit ominous when Molyneux said in the hype that the fans of your hero would get themselves a similar haircut... (that's fucking important when making an epic rpg)
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 03:02
They *did* show off the life simulation stuff before, I seem to recall. It was still a bit buggy back then, as it was awhile ago, but it was reasonably impressive. Haven't heard anything about the DX9 engine, though. Joq
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 12:23
The leaked alpha was from 2001 or 2002. And it looked really cool.
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TITLE: overhaul
AUTHOR: Joq
DATE: 11/02/2005 02:34:00 ap.
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BODY:
The blog is getting a totally (well, not totally) new look soonish, whether Jim wants it or not. Design done by yours truly. Should retain the ol' crappy feel, of course.
Edit: oh. The new design is up (quite religiously based on Beckett), and still has temp graphics and colours (inconsistent). And the comments bit needs to be fixed up. And I should probably revert the 'go to the full post thing' from the post title to a 'read more' link. Oh well. I'll let Jim fix the aforementioned design issues. Ta!
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 15:38
Eee. It's gorgeous.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Jim9137
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 17:17
It's bloody ace, that's what it is. Too bad I'm too lazy to fix those issues, so I'll just leave it as it is and bug someone else to it. As usual. Trey
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 17:35
I agree. I think this makes me want to post a review. As soon as I can figure out what to review.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Joq
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 18:42
Well, as Jim seems to like this I won't edit the appearance any further, since I just fixed the comment thingies and added a list of contributors.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: bjarke
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 20:38
Yeah. Joq
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 19:26
Arse. As the blog's css file and teh images are hosted temporarily on another server, they might load now. Or something. The site worked just fine for a few days, now it might fail loading the css. I dunnoes. Gonna try an' fix.
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TITLE: F.E.A.R.
AUTHOR: Olaf
DATE: 11/01/2005 05:48:00 ip.
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BODY:
Your intrepid reviewer makes a triumphant return to the Bastard Numbered scene after having spent altogether too much time dicking about with other things. So, F.E.A.R., and just how good it is.
Little kids are scary.
I'm not talking about soiled nappies, or being woken in the middle of the night due to bed-wetting, or other things generally associated with small children (though let's face it, they're quite scary too), but rather said little children smiling innocuously amidst scenes of horrific carnage. From what I've seen, things like this have been fairly common in Japanese horror for a while, and it's had an occasional showing in the West with things like Halloween (remember how Michael Myers started off?) but it's really coming into its own now that films like Ringu are being taken notice of over here. With Hollywood remaking Easten horror left and right, it was only a matter of time before these elements crossed over into the realm of videogames. Rumour has it that the original design for FEAR was to combine just this kind of psychological horror and cinematic-quality action, and while this sums up the game pretty well, I'm sadly not paid to write one line about a game and then bugger off (actually, I'm not paid at all - Jim, I think we need to talk).
So, what's it all about?
You play the part of a nameless, voiceless soldier who's just transferred into an organisation called First Encounter Assault Recon, or FEAR for short. It's FEAR's job to deal with ooky paranormal weirdness - usually by blowing it up with ridiculously large amounts of ordnance. Think Mulder and Scully with body armour and huge weapons, and you're not far off. As the game opens, some trouble's going on with a psychic commander named Paxton Fettel who's taken control of a battalion of cloned supersoldiers. These soldiers were designed specifically to take orders, and while they can think for themselves, they'll stop responding completely if their commander is taken care of. Your mission? Take out Paxton Fettel as quickly as possible. Luckily for you, he's got a transmitter implanted in him that your superiors can use to track his general area. So far, so ordinary. Hordes of enemy soldiers and a villainous type controlling them. And then, suddenly, that little girl starts showing up. Who is she? What relation does she have to all the chaos that's unfolding? Exactly what is Fettel after?
The horror aspect of the game is generally well done. From very near the beginning, you'll have a general feeling of unease as you progress through, and it certainly pays off. Whether you're hearing strange noises, or spotting Paxton walking slowly around a corner before disappearing in a cloud of ash, the game keeps you on the edge of your seat. There are plenty of jump-straight-out-of-your-seat moments, too generally involving the aforementioned little girl - I can think of five particularly effective ones offhand, and there are an awful lot more, but I'm loathe to spoil any of them because the surprise is the best part. Rest assured, the horror elements of the game are well done.
The real meat of the gameplay itself, though, is the combat. When they claimed that they wanted this to have cinematic combat, they weren't kidding in the slightest. As an elite soldier, your superhuman reflexes are reflected by a slow-down power, akin to Max Payne. You and your enemies both move slower, giving you more time to take stock, aim carefully, and dodge incoming fire. This power recharges slowly whenever you're not using it, meaning that at the start of almost every combat, it's topped up. This is a Very Good Thing, because you're definitely going to need it. Your enemies aren't dumb, you see. They're graced with probably the best AI I've ever seen in a first-person shooter, and they can do pretty much anything you can, as well as a bit more. They'll use tactics to pin you down or flush you out. They'll cover each other. They'll try and flank you. They'll use anything they can nearby as cover. They're smart. I cannot emphasise enough how effectively your opponents will fight against you. In any given firefight, you can expect them to knock over tables for cover, dive through windows to get closer to you, lob grenades at your position in an attempt to get you out into the open, and - I say this again - flank you. The levels are linear, but in almost every area where you're likely to find combat, there are multiple ways around. More than once, I've been concentrating on pinning down enemies in front of me only to discover that one of them legged it when I wasn't paying attention, went through a side door, and snuck up behind me with a shotgun. None of this is scripted. It's all based off the AI. They can duck under low doors, climb ladders, whatever. Play a battle through twice and it's not going to turn out the same way.
Did I mention how stonkingly gorgeous everything is? You've got the basics, like lights that can be knocked around to cast shadows, but they really put effort into getting the engine to throw around a lot of particles at a time. Fire off a shotgun and some shots might hit an enemy, causing blue sparks to fly off his armour. Others will smack into the wall, causing a chunk of the wall to fly off (superficial only - no Red Faction style level destruction here), and kicking up a huge amount of dust. Almost everything you can find is mobile and destructible. The lobby scene in the Matrix is a good comparison, and one I hope Monolith would be happy with, considering it proves how cinematic the combat is. Think of how the lobby was beforehand, and then think of the shot of it, desecrated and crumbling, at the end of the combat. That's what every single battle in FEAR is like. It's particularly impressive when you're in slow-motion mode, too, when you can see every individual pellet of a shotgun blast fly out.
The beauty of the combat graphics extend past the environment, too. Your opponents have ragdoll physics, as you'd expect, and this just adds to the visceral thrill of the combat. There's a huge amount of gore thrown about - the shotgun is capable of reducing a nearby opponent to a red cloud, or if you're a bit further away, it merely blasts them in half (or blows off their arms, or legs, or head). Blood splatters thickly against the walls. Amusingly enough, you'll get access to a gun called the Penetrator, which rapid-fires huge metal spikes. Combine this with the ragdoll physics and you'll pin your opponents by the head to distant walls, and they'll slowly dangle in the breeze.
Speaking of weapons, you've got access to quite a number of them. By and large, they're nothing we've not seen before - pistols, machine gun, assault rifle, shotgun, sniper rifle - but there are a few particularly inventive ones, like the aforementioned Penetrator, as well as an energy gun that reduces your opponents to a blackened, charred skeleton, and Monolith have done a fantastic job of balancing the weapons. Without exception, every weapon has a use. Barring grenades and mines, you can only carry three weapons at a time, so you'll be constantly changing them based on the situation. Your favourite weapon might very well be the assault rifle, but you're running low on ammo - should you take it with you anyway, or swap it for the Penetrator lying on the ground? My personal favourite weapons of choice were dual pistols, a shotgun, and an interchangable third slot, and I'm quite looking forward to going back through the game again and trying to master it with different weapons, or possibly without them. That's right, without them - your in-game persona is also apparantly a kung-fu expert. You have a button defined for close-combat, and depending on what you're doing at the time, you'll get a different result. Press it normally, and you'll smack whatever's in front of you with the butt of your weapon. Jump, and you'll let loose a devastating flying kick. Crouch and move forward while pressing it, and you'll slide leg-first along the floor into your opponents. By and large these moves are instant kills, which makes them extremely useful if you can get the drop on an enemy - or at times, when the enemy gets a drop on you (say, if one sneaks up behind you with the shotgun), especially considering your slo-mo powers. You've always got clues as to what your enemies are up to, as they'll bark orders at each other, but they're not always obedient. After depleting a squad to two men, I heard one shout "Close in!" The other immediately responded with a curt "Fuck you!" It's hard to tell at times, too, but they do seem to get scared. Close in with a shotgun and at least one is likely to sprint away as fast as he can while holding his gun over his shoulder and firing wildly in your general direction. It's as much of a joy to watch as it is to play, and more than once I've quickloaded after a particularly glorious battle just to try it again a different way.
The game isn't quite perfect, though. For one, the levels are extremely samey. They're almost all fairly drab-coloured, and the locations aren't particularly inventive - slum, treatment plant, office block, etc. You've also got some crap puzzle bits in between which suffer from typical FPS logic. Find and turn the valve to increase the water flow so you can jump across the crates, as opposed to just stacking the bloody things, or simply jumping in and climbing up the other side. The game contrives ways to get you to fight on your own, even though you're supposed to be part of a squad. The squad never really feels particularly real, either - you meet two or three other members as you go through, but they tend to disappear off on their own thing fairly quickly. These faults are all bearable, though.
The real shame is that the horror and action elements are largely incongruous. You'll feel tension and you'll jump miles, yes, but there aren't a great deal of horror sections where you're in any actual danger. Once you realise this, the game starts to seem somewhat more patterned - horror section, followed by a few fights, followed by another horror section. Rinse and repeat. This won't stop you in the slightest, though, because you'll be having too much fun. Almost all of your enemies are the standard supersoldiers, too. You'll occasionally come up against ED-209 style robots, gigantic "heavy" soldiers, and various other opponents, but the supersoldiers are who you'll be fighting most of the time. One type of enemy - the terrifying Assassin - is criminally underused. This particular breed of foe moves with blinding speed, is capable of cloaking, can run along walls and ceilings, and tries to engage you in melee as much as possible. They're used about 4 times throughout the entire game, which is a crying shame, because fighting them is a different experience to the Replica supersoldiers.
What else? The plot's not going to win any real awards. You can probably guess half of the twists if you've ever seen Ringu, and the other half if you've ever played a computer game or watched an action film before. It's servicable, though, and engaging enough to keep you going. The voice acting is of high quality, too - there's nothing to complain about there. The gun sounds are sufficiently booming and the music is tension-inducing. Top rating for the sound, then.
Technically speaking, the game ran fine on my computer on 1024x768 resolution with most of the detail on medium. I was highly impressed by this, being that I had to run Doom3 in 800x600 or suffer ridiculous framerate drops. I've heard reports of high-end rigs having difficulty running it, though, so you might want to try the demo first of all just to be on the safe side.
I really do feel treacherous having spent three paragraphs talking about the bad parts, because you just won't care about them while playing. The game is some of the most fun I've had with a first-person shooter for a long time, and it deserves to be bought. The AI is masterful, the horror is engaging, the combat is absolutely phenomenal, and I've got enough anecdotes to tell about What Happened In This Battle to bore my friends for years to come.
NOTE: The US have both a regular edition and a Collector's Edition. In the UK, we only have a standard edition, but this standard edition comes on DVD and contains all of the extras on the US Collector's Edition, barring the comic book.
Reviewed on:
AMD Athlon XP 2200+
512mb RAM
128mb GeForce 4 Ti4600
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TITLE: i have a cunning plan
AUTHOR: Joq
DATE: 10/31/2005 01:08:00 ap.
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BODY:
aka "actually i don't have a cunning plan, but a silly one which is to write a filler article in order to distract jim"
I slowly lifted my eyes from the daily paper's Sudoku puzzle, and greeted John9137 with a warm smile. He answered by slamming the door to my office behind him and throwing a mug of pommac at my face, which I managed to dodge. The mug. Not the face. "Where's that [expletive] [expletive] [expletive] article of yours, you [expletive]?!", he yelled. I kept my cool and collected the mug from the floor. "Now, now, John. I've been working for you and ol' Jim for... what? Over six months now? And how many of my articles have been late? Just one! One, man!"
"One? That's the same bloody article that you've been writing all this time!", John screamed and his ape-ish good looks really came out by his obvious agitation."How many words have you written up so far?", he asked, calming down a tad whilst licking some pommac off my desk. "Oh, about four hundred words. Give or take a thousand.", I replied. At this point I had finished a sketch of John's muchly agitated face. It looked something like this:
Astounding.
"So you might actually have negative six hundred words?!", he yelled. "Well, I've been known to eat my words. Ha.", I snappily replied. John didn't appreciate my bad pun and actually set me a new deadline. Before the end of the year, he said. So maybe I should start writing after I finish doodling and playing Sudoku.
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TITLE: I Like those Rogues
AUTHOR: bjarke
DATE: 10/25/2005 06:50:00 ip.
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BODY:
Bjarke goes nuts with his first article. It's about roguelikes. How nice.
Once upon a time, there was a man. The man was bored, so he wrote a computer game. The game's name was Rogue. Little did the man know, that he was to start a whole new genre of games, all based around his game.
Today, we call them roguelikes. I refuse to try and define the genre, since it's quite varied. I instead refer to the wikipedia article. This article discusses my two personal favourites. We'll start with:
Ancient Domains of Mystery
(or Adom)
Now, this is the most kickass one of the lot. Roguelikes, lacking graphics, have the intrisic abillity to provoke the player's imagination to fill in the blanks, so to speak. It's like reading a book. Since Adom is the only roguelike that manages to combine fun, lethal gameplay with an actual setting and something that resembles
a plot, it does a better job at sparking the player's imagination. Hell, I sometimes find myself relating to my faceless character - inventing a background. Sometimes, I even act "in character" in the game.
And that isn't something you do when you're playing roguelikes. All roguelikes tend to be merciless. First of all, there's no saving. Well, there is, but it ends the game. Of course, you can just backup the resulting savefile but I never do so - why play a game of extraordinary difficulty if you're just gonna cheat? Defeats the
whole goddamn point. Sidetracked there. Roguelikes are merciless. They'll kill you - and they'll do it often, sometimes seeming human in their efforts to make your life as miserable as at all possible. Ever try dying with an unidentified amulet of life saving in your backpack? You'll know what I'm talking about.
Other times, you'll get very lucky. You'll pick up an eternium longsword of devestation in the first dungeon, get a wish from a pool, and otherwise experience incredible luck. Such is the variety of roguelikes. As they say on rec.games.roguelike.adom, "The RNG giveth, and the RNG taketh away."
Of course, it's not all luck. The enemies are a varied lot and thus so must your tactics be. Don't rely on your fire bolt spell, 'cause at some point a fire-resistant monster'll come along which will promptly reduce you to a bit of splat on the floor. So, what would you do to get past that fire-resistant badass? You could flee. You
could glup that potion of invisibillity. You could place some sort of obstacle in the way. You could teleport away. You could try to make it over the river. And my personal favourite, you could desperately start zapping, reading, and drinking unidentified items in hope of getting exactly what you need - your pulse pounding all
the while.
We continue on to: Linley's Dungeon Crawl
(or dcrawl)
This one is way cool. It doesn't have the mood and atmosphere of Adom, but it has something else. This one requires you (to an even greater extent than Adom) very your tactics. With its incredibly amount of races and classes and the large difference between them, it becomes a very varied game. It's also very difficult. It's in my opinion the hardest of the roguelikes I've played, mostly because the huge difference between the races tend to astound you. You have to play an ogre-mage wizard
very differently than a spriggan enchanter - even though they're both magic users.
Because of its lethality, it also quickly became very replayable and addictive. I like to randomly choose race and class everytime I play, and just plunge into the dungeon. I'm then quickly killed whereafter the next character comes along, randomly generated all the way. And that's fun, because of the incredible variety of
starting playing characters. I've yet to get below level 12, despite of my eighty-something tries, and that's only counting the ones I actually counted.
Now, the roguelike-wise reader might've noticed that I haven't even mentioned the 'bands. The 'bands are all derived from Angband, a roguelike written ages ago. This game spawned hordes of deriatives; zAngband, Animeband, Troubles of Middle Earth, OAngband, SAngband, the list is endless. The problem with them, is that they all manage to completely kill the imagination I mentioned in the beginning.
They've got dungeon levels that aren't the same the second time you visit them, a town with shops that stock large quantities of magic items (you're bloody well supposed to find them in the dunjon, not buy them for gold you lazy fuck), and general videogameyness. Bjarke does not approve.
Also, I haven't mentioned NetHack, perhaps the most famous of all roguelikes, and that's pretty much for the same reasons as above. Too videogamey. Though it has persistent levels, the tinning kits and magic markers does not feel right in a fantasy setting.
And don't even get me started on IVaN which is just fucking bizarre. Jim seems to like it, though. Editor's Note: (PINK EROTIC WIGGLY MUSHROOMS)
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TITLE: The corner, the gun, the interrupt and me, or why I just got shot to pieces
AUTHOR: Jim9137
DATE: 10/16/2005 08:01:00 ip.
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BODY:
Long due post. I shall return to talk about turn based games after getting my arse kicked repeatedly in Silent Storm, but I have few news to announce. First of all, I'm baffled at the recent exposure of this small blog to the world in the form of Wired article about Knyghtmare's post which dealt with unfair pricing. I'm going to stop buying games completely if the price hits 60€ per game over here, which is how much a console game costs around this cold part of the world. But whee, exposure! Anyway, the self gloating bit done, I have a slightly worse, and also at the same time, good news.
Knives has left Bastard Numbered permanently, and unlikely will come back. He told me he got a job as game reviewer, and thus won't be able to review games for us anymore. Sad to see you go, but it was fun while you were aboard. Knives was also the very first one who joined this blog with me, so a part of history dies with him. And so on, imagine cheesy moments hugging and mancuddling here. And keep your hands off my rear, thankyouverymuch.
Without further ado, to the article.
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Silent Storm and its expansion Sentinels, are one of the most biggest turn-based squaddie strategy games to hit the markets since Jagged Alliance 2, which is no wonder because it was and is one of its kind in the more recent games. Despite the Jagged Alliance 3/3D projects going, they're switching titles and games more often than I change my panties, I fear it might be that way for some time. Thankfully, it has one kickass modding tools and community fervently using them, so it's not that bad situation.
But, Silent Storm, as do any kind of turn-based game, has it's quirks and kinks. I shall be particularly focus on one certain feature on Silent Storm. Something that has been a source of huge frustrationg and anquish in the recent days, and I know I should be reviewing a ton of roguelikes for another site, but god damn it, that german soldier must die. Oh, um, the feature, yes. The feature I was talking about, is the interruption system.
I just hate it honestly.
It's sensible solution, soldiers have a chance to react before the enemy shoots their brains off and all in real life, but in Silent Storm it means that if your poor Scout walks behind the corner, no matter how hidden and sneaky s/he is, s/he'll have no brains left when the enemy's done with his/her full-auto. Full-auto, as in 40 bullets from a Suomi SMG in the head, and such. On easier levels the character would just get knocked unconscious, but on harder levels, it means you'll have a dead 10 level character on your hands. Just because you couldn't avoid going around that corner in anyway, and the interruption system seems to work for the enemy ALWAYS.
Hand hurts, but bravely I shall carry on.
Personally, I think it gives the enemy an unfair advantage. They stand around doing nothing mostly, giving them tons of action points to spent on poor unsuspecting scouts and soldiers a like, who in the worst cases run right into enemy they just couldn't see and run out of action points. But here comes the thing, it's quite rare occassion that a player will have any action points left, due to the high costs of moving around and shooting. So enemy can waltz right into my crosshairs without breaking a sweat. That's the thing.
Completely frustrating, and most importantly, reasonable.
Reasonable, not only because of the realism, but because game mechanically. The AI would stand no chance against the grenades and endless ammobelts of players, without resorting to such unfair system as that. It's a common feature on turn-based strategies, and especially on the squaddie ones. Even X-Com, as everyone who has played it can attest to, has an interruption system. You run through a field, and next thing you know the whole field has been blown out in the sky because a trigger-happy alien just happened to spot you. But it works quite well in those situations, because you still have some chance to survive. Indoors? You should be gambling at Las Vegas if you managed to survive MG32 in full-auto, aimed right into your head.
Damn wrist, hurts more than it should now.
I personally think this is quite critical problem which developers and programmes alike should strive to solve, as at the moment it's providing rather unbalanced gameplay. Sure, you could work on throwing grenades around corners or trying to be sneaky and out maneuver the enemy, but at the moment, if the corridor is just two squares wide, will one square in the distance make a huge difference? Not really. And the grenades will eventually run out, not to mention the added fumbling factor. Personally, again, I would strive to discard the whole interruption system althogether. Gasps from the audience, the shock has landed I shall deftly move out of the speaker box with a Luger P08 hidden in my pants before screeching in. Or not. I don't have an alternative to say at this point, so we might as well forget what I said few lines above and I shall offer few solutions. Why can't we peek around corners? That would give us some kind of idea what's ahead of us, and even if the enemy did spot us, we would be offering smaller frame to shoot at. Then again, that could potentially make it more unbalanced. Another possibility would be giving huge accurary penalties to interrupts happening at low range, because when an enemy bops into your crosshairs in random FPS, don't you tend to get a bit startled? That could work. Then again, it probably doesn't make much of a difference if 20 or 30 bullets hit your head from 40, now does it?
But, the ball's with the developers and we shall see if they notice this problem at all, which I sincerely hope they do. Turn-based squaddie strategies still hold a lot potential, as Laser Squad Nemesis and Silent Storm itself has shown, but the genre still carries few silly things which should have been solved ages ago, interrupt being one of them.
Now, sandwiches.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Joq
EMAIL:
URL:
DATE: 21:07
I do hope that Hammer & Sickle will be a neat game. And will improve on some of the... not-so-great aspects of SS.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Knyght
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DATE: 01:16
We should play Laser Squad Nemisis sometime.
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DATE: 15:23
The comment before me is just pure spam.
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DATE: 17:31
You lucky ###, in Norway a new console game costs from £43 to £52...
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR:
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DATE: 18:32
O come on, in Israel a game costs £43 but whereas the average income in Norway is $45,000 a year, the average income in Israel is $29,868 a year. [CENSORED]
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DATE: 19:03
Yes!
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DATE: 01:18
Yes, we're ripped off with game prices in the UK, just as we are with cars, electrical goods, music... We're used to it, but game prices are VASTLY inflated here.
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DATE: 01:25
The ridiculous thing is, if they were cheaper, I'd buy more. As things are, a game is a more considered purchase.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Knyght
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DATE: 03:55
well, the reason I bothered posting anything here was because it annoys me. I'm on a really low income, shared between three people, and I can barely afford two games a month (which is nowhere, at all, nearly enough for me), and games, PC upgrades, random low-priced goods, and food is all I buy.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR:
EMAIL:
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DATE: 14:43
What industries seem to fail to realise is, the more expensive they make their wares (Audio CDs, DvDs, Games, Software), the more people will purchase a multi-layer DvD recorder with some multi-layer blank DvDs, search for a decent bit-torrent site and download the stuff for free.
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DATE: 15:59
Maybe I'm wrong here, but for a game to be released anywhere in Europe, it has to be localized to 8 languages, right? Knyght
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DATE: 20:31
Localisation isn't the problem. The localisation teams are something like 10-20 people, and their jobs generally take... maybe a few months. It's not really enough to hike the price up. Stephen
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DATE: 10:38
Hey, Nice Blog!
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DATE: 16:47
Blogin järjestelmänvalvoja on poistanut tämän blogitekstin.
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TITLE: Portico, or why it ain't a port to ICO, honey
AUTHOR: Jim9137
DATE: 9/03/2005 09:24:00 ip.
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BODY:
... mainly because I drank all the chocolate coffee. ANYWAY, Portico is a blog about strategy games. You can probably find it on the link list on the right, unless I have already deleted on my mass murdering spree. The author eagerly advertises his exploits in the world of any gameblog's enemy, magazines. And how they rock, and how his reviews rock, and how he just got to interview the head satan itself, ESA. But I digress. Click read more to see why and why this blogpost is happening and why it's happening in the first place.
Or not.
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I happen to semi-know Portico's author, due to various internet exchangial features such as IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and Games. I regularly beat his arse in Close Combat as his beloved russkies run away in terror and panic as my brave finlanders throw their molotov cocktails with deadly accuracy from places which they haven't ever seen before! And in UFO2000 his plasma regiments can't stand against my power armored legions as they march down blowing everything moving and standing up, who needs a pussy plasma when you got some serious firepower anyway? But anyway, I only know him through this various exchangial features.
But sometimes, he gets the nerve to critize my blog. Just like that, call my vastly superior blog inferior to his pile of whatever dongus food they feed over the sea. "You don't update enough" "Your article doesn't make sense" "What the heck are you on about-" SHUT UP SHUT UP.
>:|
I dare to say that my blog has more content than his inane ramblings will ever achieve in their miserable electronic life time! How could his, Six Guns to Glory beat my infamous "Titles, or where have all the good names gone"? The former includes some whimsical attempt at constructive suggestion, the latter gets right down in the core of the problem and kicks it's miserable ass out of this planet.. You can't just beat the Staedler pen comparison with a poor World War 2 game blahblahing, you need to get right down on the issue and tear it's poor cold soul apart! The author whom I'm so carefully critizing just blatantly refuses to acknowledge this fact and sacrifices his creditability in order to advance his poor self-contained image forward in such world as game magazines, like Computer*spit* Game*spit* Maga*spit*zine. DARE I SAY HE BETRAYED HIS KIN FOR HIS OWN DEMONIC DEEDS?
But no, that's not all! He also regularly writes articles in Do-scre-yerself website, including GASP EDITORIALS! Who is this man? Is he a blogger? Is he a writer? Is he someone utterly genious for doing such things? NO! He is none of the above, he is just someone who rapes his status in order to gain something horrifically great in his sinister plans for the world domination.
Not to mention his theme just plain sucks.
So that's why Portico, the link which I'm in process deleting but seems to have enrootened itself on my poor template rather tightly, isn't the thing. That's why it ain't the port to Ico. That's why my dear and lovely readers, is why you should avoid it. I just hope that the author will shove his huge ego back into his arse and take a look at my post, and actually take heed from my highly constructive critizism and abandon his evil ways. Acknowledging the problem is the first step in the long path of cure, Goodfellow. Acknowledge your problem! Shove your blog back where it came from and leave me alone!
Bastard.
Disclaimer: I don't have coffee. I shall deny everything in the morning. And happy april's, kids.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Troy Goodfellow
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DATE: 22:56
A little cranky today? Or drunk? And we never play Close Combat - it's Combat Mission. And I always win.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Jim9137
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DATE: 00:19
(Shush now, back into your box.)
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DATE: 06:32
hey nice posts i added you to my bookmarks Jim9137
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DATE: 20:59
i have to admit i kinda liked princess maker 2. and pokemon.
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DATE: 07:31
What makes a "guilty pleasure" game, though? Jim9137
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I would assume Mr. Branden would assume those kind of games that have been flocked apart and generally despised upon in the more "hardcore" or "real" gamer venue. You still enjoy playing them, but you just can't come out of the closet and admit it, without losing "gamer cred".
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AUTHOR: Joq
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DATE: 18:33
Princess Maker 2 was friggin' awesome. And the Pokémon series has been pretty amusing as well.
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DATE: 17:17
Hey, you have a great blog here! I'm definitely going to bookmark you! I have a game zone site/blog. It pretty much covers game zone related stuff.
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TITLE: Salvo, a completely unrelated to anything or nothing review
AUTHOR: Jim9137
DATE: 8/15/2005 12:17:00 ap.
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by Jim9137
for a Goodfellow
Hello kids! We shall dabble in the world of naval sims today! And by the lords, what kind of naval sims we will dabble into! It's the amazing world of discovery and exploration, all over again! I also think there were some slaves involved in that world, but ah, I can't be sure. But anyway, naval sim! Feel the breeze, feel the water, I can already here the seagulls and the shouts of anxious and quite burly men commanding a ship made of wood. The time when men were made of iron and ships were made of wood, indeed!
Assuming of course, Salvo would've delivered what it promised. I have several gripes with this game, which I shall address in a promptish manner soon. First, let's talk about what Salvo is. It's a naval sim, you know, the kind where you press funny buttons and adjust bars and feel the breeeeeeeze! But alas, Salvo fails in that. And in both. I can't feel the breeze when I'm staring at godawful huge status screen of completely unrelated information about the breeze. The point is not to examine the breeze in a painfully detailed manner, but rather FEEL it. FEEL. You know what that is? Well, touch your groin and do circular motions, and you get my idea. And no, you can't feel me. Right, so there is no graphics present at all. Just, status bars. And arrows, I'd suppose indicating wind or the compass, but I have no idea where the hell the north is. Just arrows, I feel like guiding an arrow amidst arrows to a wonderland of arrows.
Then we have another problem, it's related to the nature of the game. It has bloody cannons. BLOODY CANNONS. No, they are really bloody. What is this, some eigenzeiner's sweaty and wet nightmare about bloody cannons on a wooden ship? PEOPLE, DO YOUR RESEARCH. AND NO, GÜBBELWAFFEN DIDN'T LIVE IN THE 17TH CENTURE YOU PIECE O' SODS. So, anyway. The combat. We have bloody cannons, we can only assume that the opponent behind the infinite amounts of stats and numbers and green letters, has too. And what we do with the information? I'd invite them over to my ship and have a cup of tea, casually discussing about the weather while the crew and their crew gets mush mushy underneath the deck. But no, you just kill people. I mean, totally, completely kill. Not my style dude, not at all. Not to mention you can't shout "RIP AND TEAR" without raising few raised eyebrows, you know, like the real pirates did. While wearing green armor, of course. So in short, the combat is rather bland and uninteresting.
The sounds merit a bark from a second room. That is all.
In comparison to other naval sims, Salvo manages to completely ruin the single thing naval sims try to give. The actual simulation. The feel that you are there. It's a sum of multiple factors I suppose, but the designers would do well if they took a cup of tea, went to the nearest "Sea Star", asked if the captain would let them in for a short ride, and then get a feel of it. Now? It's like, someone tried to simulate space, and isn't Buzz Aldrin. Or, Neil Armstrong
Right. Salvo, in short, is a naval sim.
... Salvo. Don't they call Helicopter's missilepods salvos or something?
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TITLE: Music: Not just an afterthought, please
AUTHOR: Knyght
DATE: 8/11/2005 10:30:00 ip.
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Is Hubbard locked the cupboard?
It would seem so. Rob Hubbard - considered one of the greats in composing music for Commodore 64 games back in the 80s - now has a cushy job as Audio-Technical Director at EA, which involves no actual composition of music. Why? Seriously, why? One of the greatest game music composers of all time, and he's composing anymore. He used to compose for EA, but why not now?
Apparently, game music has no place in (at least western) games anymore. Nowadays, the best music you can hope for is if the music changes when you get into a battle. Now, Japanese RPGs, and Square's in particular, has nice music, just for the record, Final Fantasy 6/7/etc, Xenogears and the rest have some really awesome music, but let's just concentrate on us westerners for now.
Back in the days of the C64, music was well thought out, and it could be written awesomely thanks to the SID chip. Let's take Supremacy as an example. If you don't know the game, go check it out, you basically try to overthrow this evil guy in space by manning planets and builing an army. The music, is stunning. It starts with just one sound type and an echo. You get the feel of the emptiness of space, the complete lonliness. In a possible reference to your colonisation of space, it gains more notes, a bassline, and the tune is much more pronounced. It also hints at the progress against the rival, and this comes to a climatic point, maybe hinting at his eventual defeat. The music then suddenly changes tone to a sort of... "there's something worse out there", and the last piece repeats. I guess for the next rival this repeats again a few times, until the music is over.
This is well thought out music. What's more interesting, however, is that this was composed by one man - Jeroen Tel, one of my personal favourite C64 composers. One man. These days an entire team has the nearly the whole devlopment cycle to work on the music, and all we get is a fairly dull ambient soundtrack at the midrange, and maybe some half-decent songs at best. The best relatively recent music in a game is probably from Omikron: The Nomad Soul. However, the music serves more of a plug for Bowie than as a game soundtrack, mostly because the music can only be accessed once, at specific places. The one exception to this is the intro music, which complements the intro perfectly.
As another example, Robocop 3, again the C64 version by Jeroen Tel. The intro music (don't remember if it's loading, intro, or title, or what, but the first piece of music anyway) is just awe-inspiring. Ot at least violence-inspiring. By the end of it you seriously want to yell "DIE MOTHERFUCKERRRRRRRS" at the screen and hit the fire button with a hammer in an attempt to kill everything on the screen. Just to change the composer, let's go to Rob Hubbard himself. Sanxion. Best piece of music in a game. Ever. In this case it has nothing to do with the game, it's just nice music.
While this might just seem like a rant of the "omg sid am good", I'm actually aiming at something here. Game developers and publishers these days have big audio teams. Like, big, seriously. Why don't they make use of them? Tel and some others are still going, but not many big games get the music/sound outsourced, I would imagine it's too expensive when you already have a team. A useless team that does nothing, though.
I'm just going to re-iterate for the sake of it. Music is important. It can make me feel like I'm in the game. I don't want to be shooting at starfighters and have bland elevator music in the background. I WANT ACTION. Even the almighty X-COM fails in this. Dark broody, excellent music, but it's a pointless when I'm in a massive firefight, isn't it? Make the music represent what is happening in the game.
However, big however. Don't use music when silence is better, you can still fail here. If I'm playing Thief, or Metal Gear *, or Splinter Cell, I don't want music. Just stfu already or I won't hear the next guard tootle into the path of my blackjack/neck braking skills.
Yeah, it's a balancing act, but it can't be that hard, eh?
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DATE: 14:28
Evil Genius, X2, anything by Maxis, GTA, Civilization 3, etcetera. Knyght
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DATE: 19:12
I like the music in the Sims 2,it's fitting. I can't say I'm a fan of any of the others though.
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DATE: 21:44
I wouldn't say I failed to see your point. I just wouldn't say that music is "boring". Olaf
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DATE: 17:19
Evil Genius had a decent theme, though I don't really remember the music being particularly stand-out barring that. Good sound design in general, though.
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DATE: 10:45
Play God of War, it's got probably the best music score that i can remember.
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TITLE: Silver City, or why I've been amiss for ages
AUTHOR: Jim9137
DATE: 8/10/2005 08:18:00 ip.
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Hello kids. I know this blog hasn't been updated in what, two or three months? Well, it's probably mainly my fault. I apologize. Please, don't send any bloodhounds in my direction. I can not be held responsible for what happens to them. Anyway, the clock is 20:29 at the moment and it's long-due for your regular dose of "SCRE YE" in the form of lovely words by Jim9137.
Oh, before I forget. We have a new nember, Brother Dysk. I have no idea what he is going to write about, if he's going to write about anything, or anything, it's one of those doing random things at 3AM things, you see. So, give him warm hugs or pommac and click read more for my rantly thing.
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That title over there? I have no idea what it means so don't ask me. I am however, going to talk about game and their inventions. Particularly focusing in FPS games, because those are the most readibly available material and everyone knows them. Left mousebutton masturbation would get pretty darn close. And that's my major gripe with FPS games. I can't name but only few games that could be truly said to deviate from the mass, because when you say "FPS", you automatically mean you're going to have a game where you start with a pistol or in some rare cases, knife or wrench, and you have a crosshair and you're going to kill lots of meanies in it. The point of this all? Rarely anything sensible, you're lone marine off to save the world seems to be pretty much the stock standard, with few variations there of.
For those who might not realize where I'm going with this, I've been paving way for my finger to arise and point towards the great big beast, the unoriginality. I'm not saying it's not happening everywhere, because it is, and that it's something radically different from old good times, because it isn't, but it still bugs me. The last mildly interesting "revolution" of FPS games came in the form of Half-Life 2 and with it's physics engine. Well, I'm pretty darn sure we'll see it to become a standard, crate puzzles in FPS games that is. Doom 3's expansion pack featured a variant of the gravity gun already, although it didn't use it as much as Half-Life 2 did from what I heard. But the signs are here, it's becoming another standard. Just like real multilevelled levels did with the first Doom, the truly revolutionary game. Wolfenstein might've been the first, but Doom made the genre what it was today. The one of the most popular, most easily accesibles, most famous and especially most controversial genre there is.
But every day, every game I play, I just keep thinking to myself, haven't I seen this before? And in fact, I most likely have. That is my problem, that is why I'm so cynical, as people have told me when I went on my quest against Battlefield 2 and it's squad handling system, although I haven't even seen a bloody screenshot of the game, only a promo video of it in the Xbox360 garble, and it was prerendered anyhow. They tell me it works, I told them no way jose, and we get in an argument. No, this didn't really relate to this article, but the same happened with Half-Life 2 as well. People tell me it was something huge, something that we will warmly remember in our older days (as gamer's, that is), or that it was the best game to come out in a while.
I beg to differ. It's a good product, it's got a decent story (although I felt that it's story-telling was bit of lacking in my opinion, but that's another argument that doesn't relate to this article), the graphics were pretty, combat was fun at times and it got neat little innovations and tricks with the stunning physics. Except I yawned my way through the game. There was nothing radically different there, just the same stock FPS with prettier glitter than the other similar games had, nothing new. Nothing new. Why, what new there could be? How could you think of anything new to a genre that seems to be a dead horse and everyone's just raping it, just because it's famous? Bad argument jose, you just haven't met a man crazy enough with crazy ideas and guts to pull them.
Killer 7, from the little I've read, showed a little what could be done, but it'll never be a revolutionary game. No one will follow it's lead. I'm not even truly sure whether it's a FPS at all, but hey. Things are weird. I'm not saying that you should have weird things to please my appetite, I'm just saying that FPS genre has been stagnant for ages. Seriously, who didn't see the physics engine making its way to the games, should go quickly grab a copy of Duke Nukem 3D and play a game of pool with the pool table in the, third or second? level of L.A Meltdown. The signs have been there all along, we just lacked the technique, the power to do it properly. But honestly, it's just candy covering on crap, excuse the harsh wording.
A true revolution would be to combine FPS, a highly intensive and grabbing game experience as it can sometimes be, to strong story-telling, exploring the ways it could be done (System Shocks). Exploring your personal alter-ego in the game, what could be done to it (Operation Flashpoint). Even exploring the combat itself, how to make those corridor battles a truly shocking and gritty affair as it is (That PS2 FPS which flopped), instead of being a clean and hygienic like in bloody Rainbow Six's. A game with a mood, exploring the ways how it could intensify the feel that you, not some marine on stimpacks, YOU are there. As a marine on stimpacks or a scared little girl. (Doom 3). Heck, even exploring the ways to interact with the envinronment instead of looking at it through some window or bubble, that'd be pretty darn neat.
But alas, the FPS genre is going into a completely different direction. Maybe it will overlap with my preffered direction, maybe they won't, we'll see. But well, this is why I don't really like FPS games. Maybe you disagree with me, maybe I'm just old gamer rambling about things he has no idea of, but this is how I feel. And it makes an article so I'm happy.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Joq
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DATE: 00:50
Hehe, Jim said masturbation. Jim9137
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DATE: 22:34
Blaa blaa blaa face the delete dear spammy tree.
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DATE: 19:36
Blogin järjestelmänvalvoja on poistanut tämän blogitekstin.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
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DATE: 22:05
Yet more proof that all you buggers need to play the FEAR demo. Most fun FPS demo in ages, and containing at least one ARGH FUCK moment. Hooray for mood! No, it doesn't contain pool tables which you can play with, but they'd seem rather out of the ordinary in a situation like that. It's scary, fun, and pretty, with some really good AI (play the demo over more than once and see if they react in the same way - I'll wager they don't). If the full game turns out to be as good as that, I'll be pleased. Jim9137
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I would, but I'm pretty sure it won't work on this computer. Olaf
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DATE: 21:08
Aye, true enough, though not all games necessarily need to be immersive. Depends on the game itself. As was written by a mate of mine for this month's PC Gamer UK, though, you can enhance the atmosphere yourself if you're willing to go the extra weay. Playing Doom 3 at night, with no-one else around, is a far cry from playing it in the middle of the day while you're being interrupted by loads of people, with your back to the wall. Olaf
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DATE: 21:11
Oh, and try the demo of Psychonauts. It's a pretty crap part of the game (the tutorial level), and doesn't really give a good feel for the rest of it because it has no psychic powers, amongst other things, but it gives the very basic setting and lets you know how the game'd run on your computer. It's also a damn sight smaller than F.E.A.R.'s demo. The Psychonauts demo didn't run all that well on mine, but I shelled out for it anyway, and I'm glad. It runs okay. Not brilliantly, but okay.
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AUTHOR: Jim9137
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DATE: 21:53
No, not all games need to. But well, it seems the developers think that no single game needs to be immersive. Well, sure, they have the graphics and all that, but it's just glitter. Olaf
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DATE: 02:56
No hope of running on a 450mhz, me thinks. As for SoF... hell, I dunno. Switch on some fans on the ice levels? Turn up the heating on hot levels? *shrugs*
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Brother Roy
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DATE: 03:12
Nevada
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TITLE: Titles, or where have all the good names gone
AUTHOR: Jim9137
DATE: 7/07/2005 09:09:00 ip.
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BODY:
Okay I have no place to go. Today, when I was dying from the heat and peering at the grey clouds of doom with fervent rage, I happened to notice System Shock 2's CD underneath few miniature bases and a red Staedler pen. If you don't know what Staedler pen is, don't ask me, because I have no clue what the most stuff on my table is. Also, my current candies are worst ever. So as I was looking at the CD, I got this odd sense of feel. I started wondering about the names of the game industry. I also like to twist names according my own whim, but that's just me. Most of the classical names, such as Blizzard, Fallout, System Shock, Warcraft, Half-Life and such, rarely bear anything more to the game than a little funny word play.
Blizzard is a classic example of such name. But then we have Infogrames, which has no point at all except having extra r and info in it. I don't really understand the naming scheme behind company name's, it's so weird. Lucasarts, that makes sense. George Lucas founded it and he's such an egomaniac anyway. But then we have... Looking Glass. It sounds nifty, it has that clang on it. But what does it mean? How do you apply a Looking Glass into gaming? Is it a metaphor, is it something else? I have no idea dear sir.
Apogee switched it's name to 3D Realms. From obscurity to straight "Ah! It's gotta be a game company!" you know, it helps us common folk. But I suppose company names don't need much of a naming anyway, I tend to use Mono-Cel in my business simulations, just because it's snazzy and most of all, boring name.
Game names, now this is something I particularly wuuurve. They always have some sort of meaning in them, at least I pray that they do. Because I just remember I have ZPC on my shelf and I have no idea what it means. But mostly, yeah. It's a good policy you know, inform gamers about what you're going to except from the game. You aren't looking at Hack N Slash when you see "Stars above the Hemisphere of Ogzillian." Or you might, depends on how retarded the name designer is. Which in my case, is quite retarded. What does one except from a guy who has taken something else than regular substances? Anyway, I'm pretty darn glad games names have a proper meaning most of the time. Because otherwise we get the movie/book syndrome where the names very rarely mean anything or refer to the book's events. But still... I just wish I'd stop seeing Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 3 and X-Box freaking 360. Half-Life! What does it even mean! I cry! You fight zombies and you're suddenly Half-Life! AAEEEEI. And I'm not going to get into the X-Box freaking 360 business because it's so bloody silly I could rant about it for hours with ease.
But names, figuring names is a hard task. Anyone who has played RPG's or anything similar where you're supposed to think of a name and you just don't want to use your possibly stupid sounding name in that particular universe because it makes you feel uneasy, knows what I'm talking about. Sure you can have a stock of names, you can use random name generators, but figuring names from the air is HARD. And especially if they should have some sort of meaning as well, as it happens to be in fiction these days. So understandably we get a freaking Master Chief occasionally, and I my unborn first child is crying baby tears on my dream girl's stomache whom I haven't had the chance to meet yet. Yet, it's silly. Creativity is something everyone has, but it rarely means that if you can figure huge plots of drama and epochal proportions, figuring names out of thin air is hard. But bloody Master Chief! HAVE MERCY ON MY UNBORN FIRST CHILD!
And as far as the current naming goes in hardware -> It's pointless, no one reads the names, you're just fooling your customers with fancy numbers and I wish you'd stop breathing or give us some useful data in the name instead of pretending.
Thank you, back to Dungeoncrawling. Damn those imps are hard.
P.S: I love the Image uploading feature on Blogger. Olaf
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DATE: 05:54
Ah, the stuff I could tell you about retarded company names, but that'd give rather too much away. Wasn't aware 3D Realms were Apogee, though; apparantly I'm slow. I knew there was a link, but didn't know what. Apogee is kind of an obscure name though it's not made up - the word itself means the part of an orbit that's furthest from whatever it's orbiting. Jim9137
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DATE: 08:18
I know it was his rank, but it's still bloody silly. I always thought it was Master Chef in the start. Olaf
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DATE: 16:54
Master Chef would have been so much better. Under Siege reference!
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DATE: 21:12
half-life refers to the zombies, fool.
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DATE: 21:12
half-life refers to the zombies, fool.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: cc Infopage
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DATE: 06:11
.
Yeah, those crazy people at Capcom. Specifically, those crazy people tasked with creating the Street Fighter series. I played Capcom Ultimate Mambo Mega Giga Jam Max, or whatever the hell the new one is called, and after 10 minutes I wondered why they bothered. It's exactly like SNK vs Capcom, which is exactly like Marvel Vs Capcom, which is exactly like Street Fighter Alpha, etc, etc ad infinitum. Sure, some have had more interesting looking moves (Marvel Vs Capcom, with the screen-filling combos comes to mind), and some have even had NEW CHARACTERS, but still. I'm playing with Ryu, and he still has all the same moves. Quarter-circle forward punch for Hadokun, etc. He still has the same combos, heavy jump kick, standing jump kick, dragon-punch, etc. I learnt how to beat people easily with Ryu when SF2 was released. And now, over 10 years later, I can complete -any- Capcom fighting game on my first credit on any difficulty level.
WHY DO YOU KEEP CHURNING OUT THE SAME GAME OVER AND OVER AGAIN CAPCOM. Did you not learn your lesson with the seventeen bajillion variations of SF2 you released? Was Hyper Super Alpha Street Fighter 2 Turbo not enough? WHY, CAPCOM, WHY?
* beats relentlessly on wall *
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AUTHOR: Trey
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DATE: 03:29
Silly Gremmi. It's because fanboys still buy the games no matter how much of a clone they are.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
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DATE: 18:45
Hurrah for more people thinking SA is horribly overrated!
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TITLE: Resident Evil 4
AUTHOR: Olaf
DATE: 6/23/2005 07:53:00 ip.
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Going to warn you right now that there are a few spoilers in here, though it's stuff you almost certainly already know, and it's all covered within the first couple of hours of gameplay. Regardless, if you don't want to know anything about it, then don't read.
I don't like the Resident Evil series much. This may not come as a shock to some of you - I'm fairly well known for disliking things. The first RE was fun enough, aided by some hilarious voice acting and my love for games taking place in mansions, but the sequels never held any real allure for me. This is why my absolute adoration for this game may come as quite a surprise.
So what's changed, then? Just about everything. Hang on a moment, you'll doubtless say when you first fire up the game. What's happened to the obscure and utterly useless camera angles? Where are the zombies? Why are there no save ribbons? What's happened to those silly door animations? How come I don't have to shuffle weapons and puzzle items around in my inventory anymore? Why is the combat *fun*? Is this really Resident Evil, or did they give me the wrong game in the shop? Yes, it's Resident Evil, and yes, they've purged most of the problems with the series. Patience, and I'll explain.
The game takes place six years after the destruction of Raccoon City in Resident Evil 2. Umbrella, the evil corporation responsible for the events in the past RE games, has been rather forcibly disbanded. We learn that Leon Kennedy - one of the playable characters from RE2, and one of the few survivors of Raccoon City - has been working with the uS government and has received some training from one of their more shadowy divisions. He's given the job of defending the President and his family, but shortly before he assumes this role, the President's daughter is kidnapped, and Leon's assignment is changed to that of tracking down and rescuing her. As the game opens, he's discovered that she was moved to a small, remote village in Spain, and he's travelling there with a pair of Spanish policemen. Predictably, it's not long before Things Go Horribly Wrong. Leon's inquiries in the village are met with hostility and violence, and the policemen (who elected to stay in the car and wait for him) are rather brutally murdered.
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DATE: 05:22
Great review Tim! I wish I could compose paragraphs half as well.
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TITLE: Updating, or why Goodfellow poked me in the eye with a cane
AUTHOR: Jim9137
DATE: 6/21/2005 08:45:00 ip.
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Righto then, let's tackle the updating bit. LET'S KICK OUT THE JAMS! I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna KICK THEM OUT, YEAH!-... What are you staring at?
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Games need updating. Everyone knows this. Everyone does this, in fact, it's so easy with Steam that you won't probably even notice it most of the time. But this hasn't been the case always, but it's relatively old news. I remember an article dated in '98, several in fact, completely dedicated to teach readers to update. They in fact, copied the instructions posed in it to every magazine from then on, just because they got tired of "How do I update Fallout 2?" letters. It was the time when Team Fortress was still on Quake, with mods being relatively new concept.
Updating, as we all know, fixes game bugs, game killing aspects such as overpowered weapons, game AI, and occasionally bring new content. Not the way it was meant to be first. Back at the '98, this article complained how the updates make the game developers lazy, careless and bring consumers unfinished product. Fallout 2 1.0 was unplayable, unfinishable to a game killing bug. And sadly, after you updated it you lost your saves. Then it proceeded on to explain that updates, instead of constantly fixing problems that should have been fixed in Q&A/Beta phase ages ago, should bring new content, new weapons, new enemies, new chapters (anyone get a deja vú feeling here?), new levels to tackle. They should expand the game experience, not make it possible, something that the players can download if they have means to do so. Not everyone had internet access back these days, I certainly didn't. Anything larger than few megabytes was hard to get, and internet was expensive in general. Which is why Fallout 2 shot itself to the leg, disabling some of it's consumers for playing it. This same magazine offered CD with the essential game patches as a subscriber's gift.
Zoom a little forward, everyone knows how to update these days. Autoupdaters are becoming standard, Half-Life has established it's position as King of FPS'es, and Counter-Strike has made the mod community go boom as well as the multiplayer one. Also, Jim9137 takes his baby steps on the scary IRC world but that's bit of side of the point. Updating these days is common, essential even. It's still rather new concept, but people are learning. I can remember how I complained on IRC how long updating Counter-Strike took with my ISDN, which was whopping 64k/128k fast. 100 megs, it took weeks. Not to mention the map packs, which were essential if you wanted to play on any reasonable server. Game updating was done mainly on "If absolutely required" basis. The talk about game updates bringing new content instead of new bugfixes, the talk about game updates making game developers lazy, suddenly diminished. Few grumbling noises could be heard all over the world, but mainly at the slowness of Internet. This was time when finding an update was certain type of skill. This was the time when WON was the only way to play Half-Life online. Team Fortress immigrated over HL as Team Fortress Classic. Multiplayer gaming is forming to what it is now, clanbased activity across the world without the need of LAN and close friends. MMORPG's take over from MUDs. Consoles challenge PC's as the biggest gaming venue, but they are very strictly offline. Their biggest marketing trick is how you don't need to update their games. You don't need to, well, you can't either.
And we hop to the current age. Half-Life 2 has hit the shores, and it most likely will be the new king of FPS'es for a year or two, although challengers are on a line. Valve's greatest invention, and the greatest source of frustration for gamers alike, Steam has hit the shores and completely replaced WON. It promises to update the game without the player knowing, it promises to make a true online experience possible. For me that online experience was waiting that the Steam Client finally agreed to update itself after a bad update. Yes. We have bad updates these days, the ones that instead of doing anything sane, breaks the game. Makes it unplayable. New content is quite common, even on single-player games, but most of the time it's something relatively small. Updates, everyone does it, even your neighbour's cat will update it's food cup's BIOS soon, just wait for it. The "new" cash making idea of making games chapter based, which you buy one by one, is on the news on regular basis. The newest generation of consoles is promising to be the thing, the one you want to share your 10mb/10mb cable connection with. They promise that you can download totally new content, new weapons, new enemies, new chapters (anyone get a deja vú feeling here?), new levels to tackle.
So, PC gaming's updating has actually evolved. But are the consoles making the same mistakes as PC did, or will they do it like it should have been done in the first place? Updating isn't that big of a problem these days... But as the updates go larger, I've seen ones which are way over few hundred megs, so will the player's patience. Games aren't anymore like books, which you can just install and play at will. But then again, if it's not the updates it's the installing and struggling to match your PC's power to the required. It's a wild time we are living in folks, even purely from updating point of view, gaming is living on the edge of a revolution. We only need someone to truly push us over that edge.
But if no one does, we'll fall away from that edge and we have lost another chance, and I suppose next one will come after the virtual reality kicks in. Ah well, we'll see.
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DATE: 17:26
you should note that fallout 2 was not totally the programmers fault- they were raped by inane laws and an idiotic marketing team
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AUTHOR: Jim9137
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DATE: 12:55
Yeeup, probably so. I don't recall the exact details, but Fallout 2 is perfect example of a game that was shipped unfinished. And, unpatched. ;)
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DATE: 08:57
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TITLE: Players, or why I do I have a huge razor-edged scytche next to my door
AUTHOR: Jim9137
DATE: 6/20/2005 11:12:00 ip.
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BODY:
Out of boredom, here we go talking about players. Blaa blaa, hate mail to the usual address.
---
Anyway, let's talk about players for change. As we all know, games have been accused for being a springboard to madness. The first clear example I think we can drag to the shooting, the Columbine High School Massacre, let me quote:
"Harris and Klebold were fans of violent video games such as "Doom". (Harris often created levels for the game; these were widely distributed, and can still occasionally be found on the Internet as the Harris levels. Rumors that the layout of these levels resembled that of Columbine High School circulated but have been debunked [3] ). Some analysts argued that part of the killers' problem may have been a result of their constant exposure to violent imagery in such video games, as well as music, and movies, theorizing that their obsession with these forms of media may have led to them having difficulty telling the difference between reality and fantasy. Several unsuccessful lawsuits against several video game manufacturers were filed as a result by parents of some of the victims."No one will ever know what their real motive in the end was, but video games can and will continue on affecting players. In both good and bad ways. There have been rumours and even documented evidence of MMORPG players, playing Everquest/etc 24/7, forgetting to eat and rest, and eventually reaching their untimely death. Because of the pixels on the screen. It's fanaticism, but it exists. And that's not the end of it; there have been rumors of whole companies just focusing on selling virtual items on eBay, items which they have hired kids from low-income countries. But hey, it's just entertainment! On the brighter side, there have been numerous counter-arguments, claiming that games are good for one's mind, at least better than TV has ever been. They allow you to think, work on the why and when and who, rather than just taking everything they spill at your face. Chess improves logical thinking, and so do video games. Interactivity is from what your mind lives from after all, and games are widely used in education these days. It's far more fun way to learn than reading from book, but Educational titles sometimes tend to be rather limited. I think I should mention The Get-Well Gamers Foundation, who are a voluntary group devoting their time and effort to spread games to hospitals which don't have them yet for children to play, as it significantly reduces the time spend in hospital. Saves money! But still we hear horror stories constantly from various media outlets, how another gamer has gone loco, inspired by GTA or Manhunts to go on a killing spree. We hear stories from our friends how they get so addicted to a Civilization game that they just don't notice it's morning and they should go to work, actually my friend who rarely plays anything else than racing games was subjected to this, we hear stories of people who worship the game designers as gods or at least semi-gods (Derek smart syndrome)... And so on. Catholics and other conservative relentlessly crusade against games, while they are doing the exactly same thing with their bible and their "better way to live". And games are in fact, bigger business than movies these days. It's not some geeks Amstrad of Commodore anymore, it's huge battle between console makers and eternal struggle with few big publishing companies. But I think the issue in the end really is, which ticks these conservative parties, is that games are violent by nature. Only few game genres can claim to be non-violent, and these are business, puzzle, adventure and sports, pretty much. Exceptions do exist, but even Super Mario Brothers could be considered violent. Just in a pretty scene. HOLD THE PRESS! It's part of the human nature, has always been. Violence in various forms, we can see this starting from the bible, sports (American football?), books, music, movies... It's integral part of entertainment! I'm not saying that it's the only thing, but it's very huge part of it. And that my dear reader(s), is part of the human nature. The urge to compete, the urge to be superior. Heck, it's how nature works in it's purest, no matter what the bible said. A tiger won't bow to your superiority just like that, it'll struggle. Survival is the oldest game in the books. But to shift the focus back on players. This "getting too addicted" isn't really only games' problem, it's with games that harder because the experience can be so intense sometimes. That's what we call a good sign for a good game, right? But some people... they don't notice the difference between game and reality. Even a regular look person, who otherwise could be a perfectly decent citizen, might fall to this. I pray that they are on the minority, but they exist. And then we have the ones with real mental issues. But as it is, any form of entertainment can "trigger" a person. And not only entertainment, even his own life! But that's beyond the scope of this article. Let's take an example from another form of entertainment for change, the one that is probably more relentlessly pursued by Catholics and the like, the one that might take the experience further than the games at the moment can. And that's Role-Playing. I have personally roleplayed for few years, not very much I admit, and only through internet. And this mostly applies to freeform games, not the pen & paper games as such. But I've been exploring the internet, and I've noticed few common things with roleplaying and games. First one is In character (IC)/Out of Character (OOC) difference. Again, bear in mind that my following examples are in the minority, and there is nothing particularly wrong with roleplaying. There are few stereotypes of "bad" roleplayers. Mary-Sues are the heresy of any decent roleplayer it seems, where the player creates him/herself to play. Which, of course, is not particularly wise since you are there to play a role. And IC insults directed at the IC persona of the player might carry over OOC and essentially harm their relationship. This brings me to the second stereotype. The one who lives his life through his creations. Stalking people, attacking people OOC just because they killed his/her character in a game... In fact, I have seen a video where a roleplayer tried to justify to cops why he shot his friend with a crossbow to the chest, with dice rules. And then promptly fled while shouting "BOOTS OF ESCAPING" and got a bullet in his leg. Anyway. This has been happening on MMORPG's lately as well. There was a news article about a player who tracked down and killed a person who stole his sword in enrage. He didn't mean to do it, but he did. But who can play games then? You can only answer for yourself. And the education system better start pouring money on teaching this to kid before virtual reality truly kicks in, or otherwise we'll have some real problems. Parents, watch your kids. Talk to them; ask why they play what they play. Ask them why they watch their movies, why do their listen to their music. Or just talk about their hobbies; mention how you would like to play games some days. Everyone has responsibility, I do, you do, they do. You can't pinpoint on anyone, so start acting like it. ----- -------- TITLE: Gaming blindspots AUTHOR: Jim9137 DATE: 6/20/2005 03:33:00 ap. ----- BODY: Frostymakes a spazzy guest appearance, and what kind of guest appearance it is! For those who don't know who Frosty is, he is the grumpy, (old), British person who tends to hate everything and has a great music taste which he so willingly spreads around, and well, I somehow managed to make him write something. Now, lean back on your chair, take some popcorn and let the man say what he has to say about gaming blindspots! --- I'm trying to work out what it is about the later stages of Half-Life 2 that I dislike. Thinking about it, I'm pretty sure it's the sections where there are enemies in front of me and enemies behind me that do it. In most of my early gaming, you see, there was total situational awareness. Mario can see the Goombas and the Koopa Troopers and the Hammer Brothers, all over the screen, all the time. I'm pretty sure this holds true for every single game I played until X-Com, which introduced to me the idea that there could be something there, but that I couldn't see it. The black parts of the screen I was okay with, those were places I hadn't seen yet, I didn't know what was there. My problem came when I saw my first alien, then turned my soldier around. Each of the next few soldiers took a shot at the alien, then turned away to do something else. It happened that at the end of the turn, nobody was looking directly at the alien. At the start of the next turn, three of my soldiers were dead. This confused me. I had seen the sectoid. It was a seen thing. Then it did things. And I didn't see them. Blew my mind. X-Com gave me a lot of trouble. Not seeing things was a problem my gaming mind was not prepared to deal with. I still don't check rooms thoroughly enough in games of that type. And I still get shot in between turns by aliens I didn't see. Fast forward ten years. Half-Life 2 is progressing nicely, I'm having fun. I'm actually having the most fun I've ever had in a shooter. Half-Life 2 is a fantastic game. Suddenly, I get to a section where I'm asked to defend a square with entrances on two sides. Look down one road, enemies. Kill them, turn round, more enemies coming down the road on the other side of the square. I got killed about twenty times getting past that section. Mostly from being shot in the back. By enemies I couldn't see. Don't get me wrong, I knew those enemies behind me were there. The game's quite obvious about pointing out that there will be enemies coming down these two streets. Not a fault in the game. Also, not something I wasn't expecting after having been shot in the back th first three times. I knew what my problem was, it was the enemies behind me. They were coming up on me while I dealt with the group on the other side of the square and they were shooting me in the back. I knew what was happening. I expected it to happen. And I couldn't deal with it. I ended up using cheats to get past that section. Not only that, I ended up needing cheats to get past several similar areas through the rest of the game. Apparently my gaming mind isn't geared to dealing with threats that aren't obvious and on-screen. I have learned, for good or bad, that the things I need to deal with are the things on the screen that I can see and while I can recognise threats coming from elsewhere, the parts of my brain that deal with the playing of computer games apparently haven't learned this yet. Now, thinking about it, I haven't played too many games where the threats I face aren't coming straight at me. Most of HL2 is played in areas where the threat is in front of me. Most of most FPS games are like this. In fact, most games are constructed in such a way that I'm only dealing with one great threat at a time, only loooking for that threat to come at me from one direction. And games that aren't? I can't deal with them. That's my gaming blindspot. Other people I know can't play driving games without a steering wheel controller. Driving is dealt with with the same part of their brain that steers with a steering wheel. I used to know someone who couldn't play platform games because he couldn't judge the jumping distances. He played Prince of Persia and Abe's Oddysee just fine, now that I think of it. Mario Brothers, on the other hand, was a complete mystery to him. One guy couldn't play Minesweeper by using the left-and-right-click check function. He'd learned to play it without and couldn't play it with. It needed him to use a whole different part of his brain and he would make mistakes he knew were mistakes if he tried to use that control method. I could watch him playing, watch him pause, try not to make the mistake, then click and make it anyway. He knew what he had to do, but his brain simply wouldn't cooperate with him. Don't think you've got any gaming blindspots? Think you can cope with pretty much anything a game can throw at you? Check back later. --- P.S: What the heck is the left-and-right click check function? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR:
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DATE: 14:27
FROSTY DEMANDS REAR VIEW MIRROR ACTION IN HL2. Troy Goodfellow
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DATE: 23:23
Very nice post. I love the term "gaming blindspot" and think I will steal it.
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AUTHOR: Jim9137
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DATE: 01:52
Personally, my blindspot is RTS. I just can't wrap my head around it, no matter how much I try to click, I fail.
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DATE: 19:15
Silly Jim. Go to minesweeper, mark the correct number of bombs around any square (with number of course), and click both buttons. If you've got a '1' square, and you selected the square with the bomb, you don't need to open up every individual clean square around it. 'Course if you're wrong, kablamo. It's not a necessary part of the game, just saves time. Silly Jim.
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AUTHOR: Jim9137
DATE: 6/17/2005 12:15:00 ap.
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Revamped the whole blog's appearance, finally. Still needs quite lot of work, but it's progressed nicely so far.
Comments would be nice. (Not from Knives though.)
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DATE: 07:46
The titles of posts are now coloured according to the posting contributor, but the names of the posting contributors in the list to the right of the window are not coloured. Colour THOSE and then we'll be able to see who posted what by colour. Jim9137
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DATE: 15:02
... Emm, okay. Working on that. Might take a while. More than a while in fact, so don't hold your breath. Joq
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DATE: 16:35
Hey, I'm almost ready to post my next post!
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DATE: 17:02
Looking great guys. Keep up the good work and great reviews.
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DATE: 00:14
prettyful, very prettyful :P
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AUTHOR: Jim9137
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DATE: 00:30
... Okay, no more mr. Anonymous guy, this is getting creepy and I'm a paranoid.
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DATE: 04:47
A squid eating dough in a polyethilene bag is fast and bulbous. Troy Goodfellow
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I like it.
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AUTHOR: Olaf
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DATE: 19:33
S'nice!
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TITLE: Destined to Obscurity
AUTHOR: Knives
DATE: 6/12/2005 09:11:00 ip.
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BODY:
Obscure. Ob-se-cuuure. LES OBSCEUEUREUX. This word is so fucking French it hurts my hateful heart to pump the blood through my veins to the muscles and tissue in my face and throat to allow me to pronounce it. But that is besides the point.
Obscure is a survival horror game. Teens trapped in highschool, nightmarish creatures of the night, have to solve the mystery and save their friends and themselves, yadda yadda. It's all pretty generic, yet told in a very solid manner. Documents you find are written in a convincing way, voice acting is annoying but suitable fora bunch of American highschool trash. Graphically, Obscure is fairly good, I guess, for current gen consoles. Solid modelling, nice, detailed highschool enviorments ranging from an abandoned dormatory through the classes and labs and to the big gym. Sound is very good, atmospheric. Monster design is okay, all of your generic horrors, from humanoid to creepy crawly to wall and cieling clinging and more. Creepiness levels are okay, nothing Silent Hillish, but you get the hibby jibbies from time to time. Biggest problem is probably the camera, typical survival horror on rails camera that sometimes fucks the action, although controls are much better than RE's, being camera relevant instead of character relevant, so you don't end up trying to out run the evil undead with a control scheme more suitable for a tank.
The characters you control vary - Kenny, the jock can sprint, Ashleigh, the ugliest "babe" ever, can apply her self defense skills in close quarters, Josh, the journalist, can save you the time hunting and tell you if there are items in the current zone or not, Shannon, the smart one, can give you clues as to what to do and Stan, the jive talking skater boy, can pick locks almost instantly as opposed to the rest of the guys who struggle for annoyingly long periods of time. Of course, Stan is useless since picking locks isn't that big a deal if you just clear a room of baddies, Ashleigh's close quarters combat is absolutely useless against the onslaught of darkness, Kenny's running is just pointless since rooms are so small you can make it to the door anyway and the game isn't complicated enough to get through to actually need Ashleigh. Josh is really great because I'm too lazy to scour every room for every little fucking box of bullets. But it's still cool, because even though they don't have much to go on, they're fucking highschoolers versus the Dark Armies of A (sort of) Ageless Evil, didn't expect them to fart lasers and wield Katanas made of calcium they themselves ooze out of their palms and shape at will or something.
So yeah. What's the point of reviewing this game, then, if it sounds like nothing special? Well, there's the fact these kids are more capable than Mr. Doom Marine and KNOW how to combine a flashlight and a pistol with a handy roll of duct-tape. There's also the very neat factor that, like in a true horror movie, when your characters die it's not game over if you still have any of them standing, which means the game could end with one survivor or five.
...Or none at all, but then you're a loser worse than Gremmi.
But these are not the reasons. The reason is, ladies and gentlemen, that during the vast majority of the game you play two characters, not one, alternating between the two at the press of a button. What's so cool about that you ask? Nothing, but plug in another controller and press start and you've got a very solid survival adventure CO-OP. That's just _it_. COOPERATIVE PLAY. One guy hogs the pistols, the other hogs the shotguns, and the two of you go out fighting the armies of evil while being mildly scared if you allow yourselves to, and having a really good time solving puzzles, killing baddies, uncovering the plot and getting new stuff. It's not too exciting in itself, but with the right person, it's a lot of fun.
One thing I must mention though: when you finish the game you get alternate outfits. The girls look like whores, the guys look like fags, and it's all extremely pathetic really. The only conclusion is that the French developers of this game wanted the French youth to have someone they can relate to as well, but France sucks, so the game should be American. Don't laugh this off, I'm afraid it's quite possible that this is true. My god, they look so horrible that it just might be that someone actually thinks that is cool. And then you realize there's a whole country of them.
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TITLE: Immersion, or why I couldn't figure any titles for this
AUTHOR: Jim9137
DATE: 6/05/2005 01:33:00 ip.
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To bring you a break from all the specific game dissing and wowing, I present you an article of game immersiooon. What is this ugly word? What does it mean? How come we don't get enough- wait that doesn't relate to this discussion. Anyway, immersion. I'll be trying to focus on what makes a game an immersive one, why should it be an immersive one, and then get in the goo' ol' nostalgy train. All this was inspired by me remembering what it was like to blast those sectoids all those years ago in UFO: Enemy Unknown. So, without longer ado, click the read more and read away!
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As much as I'd like to argue that games should be fun or thought provoking and so on, you can't really achieve any of these without proper immersion. Okay, that was a blatant lie, you can. But not in the same degree if you HAD immersion. Tetris for example was fun. But did I get immersed in the game world, did I feel like I was there? That's totally different question. Assuming you get immersed, assuming that you really feel like you're in the game doing all those weird things the game wants you to do for a reason, then you're in for one helluva ride.
Too bad all the modern games have failed me in that degree more than I can count. Starting from the famous Half-Life, I haven't gotten really impressed or immersed by anything really, not yet, but I hope I will someday. At least, that's pretty much only thing why I'm still playing games. Have you ever read a book that captures you in it's world so much that you lose the track of the time? Have you ever watched a movie so keenly that you didn't notice you're dribbling on your shirt? Yes, that's what I'm talking about. But with games, it's harder to achieve. You have to have few basic things in order to even consider the immersion value, and these are:
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DATE: 07:46
That's right. I DESTROYY YOUUU! Troy Goodfellow
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DATE: 11:18
Trizzle? Trey
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DATE: 14:12
Were you looking for something more Egyptian?
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AUTHOR: Jim9137
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DATE: 18:54
Obligations, aren't they lovely? Joq
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DATE: 16:47
Luckily Jim hasn't tried to force me to post something. Trallala
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TITLE: Phantasy Star Online: Blue Burst (BETA), or what the heck am I doing amidst these blue eyed freaks?
AUTHOR: Jim9137
DATE: 5/16/2005 11:22:00 ip.
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BODY:
Phantasy Star Online, is, as far as I can tell, anime superduber scifitech thingles I have no idea what the heck it is. I was persuaded by random third parties to leech the game, which was roughly 500 megs in size, (psobb.com) give it a try on my 450mhz (min is 700mhz), and well, play it. Open beta, free! You can't lose anything if you try!
I did. Which brings you to this blog post today, which I promised for Trey to write.
Sigh, and I thought having other people to write would remove the "work" factor.
Especially since I'm so late with my schoolwork and things WANTEITN#"%"#4.
---
Okay, I blink. I'm not totally sure what the heck I was thinking when I leeched this thing. My computer is for reference, 450mhz with 390 megs of ram (give or take) and a GeForce 2. Yes, it is a piece of rubbish at the modern standards, but it does it's thing for me. Then we get this new MMORPG, Phantasy Star Online which has debuted on Dreamcast if I'm not terribly mistaken, and then later switched over to PS2.
Still, I had no bloody clue what I was doing when I joined the party line, so to speak. I HAD NO IDEA WHAT I WAS DOING WHEN I REGISTERED AT THE SITE AND INPUT THE CORRESPONDING INFO ON MY CLIENT! Don't shoot me! So, I zoom in the game and see if the thing agrees to cooperate nicely. ... Ship? Block? Lobby? Excuse me, this begs for few dozens of lost players lost in the matrix. I mean, the whole character creation process was scaringly simple enough, with few robots and anime girls and boys and things like that.
But ingame! What do I SEE! DOOM! Okay, not doom. It's actually rather nice scenery, high tech and the like. Calming music pours into my ears, and I relax. Then I actually start playing, after that moment of screaming. I press forward. Nothing happens! Okay, WSAD works. Phew, so I can move around. And that's it, I can't even figure out how to bring help screen on. Website tutorials are manga comics, and I find them not particularly helpful.
I quit.
Next day, I try again. The mentioned 3rd party agrees to guide me through, and after few hours of furious clicking and keyboard bashing, I finally gain few levels and gasp, a new gun! And that's what is most important in any MMORPG, big guns or swords. This being anime/manga style, this has both.
except my huge robot has skimpy pistol at the moment. *cough*
I'm not sure how I should describe PSO. It's very confusing in the start, as you might realize (especially to one who hasn't read the help at all), it's very leaned towards teamplay, taking in consideration all the game is taken place in games that support people up to 4. Or one, but it's mainly a team game. Well, I've had the honor to play with most understanding chaps, so I don't what the scary peeps who say !¤#"!ing constantly. Oh yeah, the game censors blowing as "#%"ing. Funny trivia that.
Back to the game. Basically you go down to Pioneer 2, after you have organized a party. Pioneer 2 has all the hospital, shop and quest things. Nothing new, and a teleport on to the surface where all the game related stuff actually happens. This is just a rest room, actually.
Well, I sort of like the combat system. It's not good, it's not magnificent, and even HL2 tops it. But hey, it's more interesting than Anarchy Online's and that's just a good thing. The controls are designed to work with the PS2 pad, so it's not terribly intuitive on keyboard, but it's bearable. Aiming is arse, though. Pads are supported along with joysticks, thankfully. Basically you just bash heavy/normal attack key to make "combos". These are apparently very important, because the ROF would be drudginly slow otherwise. It's like a rhythm game!
Then you have techniques (magic) and traps (traps) to throw at enemies and help your allies.
And...
The MAG. What the heck is MAG? It's a pet clearly, you feed it items and it grows. But ah, it's not all! It also GROWS! And not only visually, but it also gains abilities! Photon Bursts if we're exact, it gains photon bursts. Ever played Final Fantasies? Know what Limit Break is? That's a Photon Burst. So MAG gives you this and few bonuses to your abilities as well, and hover happily over your shoulders. Funktastic, if they weren't quite ugly. Well, points for trying, I suppose. NEXT.
Items! What are items you ask? Items. Okay. I don't know if it's just this Beta, but you don't have that many choices. Just few Dim that and +4 there, and that's it. You first get handgun, then a rifle, then a mechgun, then autorifle and so on... Speaking about Rangers here. Oh! The game has three classes, Hunters (Sword wielding hack'n'slash), Rangers (Snipers), and Force (Magi's). They all have their own little gimmicks, and the races have ones as well. Androids and robots can't use techniques, but can use traps and are immune to status effects. I'd say it's rather balanced, from what I've experienced.
Areas! I hate them! Locks! Push switches! Crates! Enemies! Move on!
Quests. Okay, this game has a plot! That's awesome, better than the "DARKNESS IS COMING ALL 200LVL COULD YOU PLEASE STEP OVER THIS WAY THANK YOU." ones.
The game is surprisingly balanced, there isn't THAT much of a difference between 10 and 20 level char, just that the other one makes wee bit more damage. You can still hang with him or her. And to top that, the guns have no difference at all. None, zero, nada. Well, they do, but it's quite minimal. Your abilities is the major deciding damage factor. Good or bad? You won't be getting bazookas at 1st level, boy.
Negative things? The damn thing gets VERY boring if you don't have a good solid, fun group to play with. Well, I just got called "you get out of our turf niggah" moment ago. "Heil Hitler" by the same guy. I responded appropriately.
Sigh.
The things you do.
Oh, the game also sports huge animated emoticons. And you can edit them. I can't count how many pot smoking emotions I have seen so far... This game has so many features I won't bother commenting them all... *shakes his head*
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
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DATE: 22:47
When was PSO released on PS2? Jim9137
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DATE: 01:42
Okay, PS2 thing I pulled out of my behind. And yes, FDevil raises valid points which I'll shoot down later. Or not. Anyway, thanks for watching.
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COMMENT:
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DATE: 07:47
Played free version in private server. No Blue Burstage. Trey
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DATE: 19:14
You are so not busy, you lazy bum. Get to work, it's your turn. Or Gremmi's. Or Fuzzy's. Bah.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Jim9137
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DATE: 02:52
Hush! You're blewing my cover!
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Olaf
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DATE: 06:17
I'll have something shortly. Meant to have it done tonight but other concerns got in the way. Many such concerns over the next few days, but I'm aiming for tomorrow night, so we'll see... Joq
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DATE: 17:39
I'm working, so less time to write. Of course still enough to write an article. But kinda not. No? Yes? Dunno.
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TITLE: Project: Snow-white
AUTHOR: Knives
DATE: 4/28/2005 08:53:00 ip.
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BODY:
This article will discuss a game only the highest of improbabilities will get you to purchese. Why? Because it's so average, so medicore, so mundane and boring and lackluster, that you'd have to be utterly retarded, have absolutely no knowledge of games that you've picked at random or you have finished every game you've ever wanted and is available on the market, most of the games you've never ever wanted and heard of, and still want an FPS experience so badly that you'd actually pick up Project: Snowblind.
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What is it about Project: Snowblind that's so bad, I hear you ask? The graphics are pretty ungood, I guess, but it's not that. Is it the controls? The weapons? The special powers? Nope, controls are pretty intuitive, lots of varied weapons, longevity, relatively varied levels and special powers. "Why then, Knives, do you hate this game so much?" I hear you cry, and in response I shall be forced to say that it's just highly unlikable in any possible way.
Is that truly a reason to actually despise a game that is, in every way, a functional piece of software?
Let's quickly review another FPS title that is very flawed and lacking. Halo. Pretty, very good game mechanics, very very bad level design with the exception of the second chapter (of both the original and the sequel, oddly enough). Do I like it? Not really. But I don't hate it either. Why? Well, because it gets your attention. It's the design, it's the characters, it's the plot. None of which are particulary good, you say? Yes, but they're there.
Back on topic. Project: Snowblind is the most generic game ever made. It just is. The color scheme is blue-red-black-boring. The character is just another schmoe that looks like just another schmoe, but being a super soldier he has glowing hands. He has plenty of special abilities too, none of which are interesting. He has plenty of weapons in his arsenal, none of which are fun to use. He's fighting plenty of enemies, even though they're all either soldiers in gas masks, walker robots or turrets. The story is some political affair somewhere in the far east you don't care about. There's no spark, nothing actually likable, just street after street of straight, boring shooting that lack anything spactacular.
So why Project Snow-white? Because it makes you fall asleep. Yes, it's not a funny joke, but it's the truth. LOOK WHAT I PLAYED FOR YOU PEOPLE :(
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Joq
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DATE: 01:31
Ever tried Fire Warrior? I had the distinct pleasure of playing it at a friend's place, and it seemed to be the most bland fps that I have ever played. Damn console ports. And the audio was notably CRAP.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Jim9137
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DATE: 13:24
Go for the big one. (testing)
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Trey
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DATE: 18:11
And Knives makes the ultimate sacrifice for us yet again. Jim9137
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DATE: 00:42
Working on something bloody magnificent and beatiful. On the mean time...
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: tweedledeetweedledum
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DATE: 08:59
This blog is awesome! If you get a chance you may want to visit this green day mp3 download site, it's pretty awesome too!
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COMMENT:
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DATE: 18:53
Hi i am totally blown away with the blogs people have created its so much fun to read alot of good info and you have also one of the best blogs !! Have some time check my link of casino game.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Richpoo
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DATE: 00:13
Your blog is excellent - keep it up! Don't miss visiting this site about medicine sports
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR:
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DATE: 07:37
Hey, you have a great blog here!
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DATE: 00:36
Where the hell is the c) activity on the school internets?
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Jim9137
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DATE: 17:46
Think about it.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Knives
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DATE: 15:49
What? 1000? Who the hell reads this crap?? *slap* :(
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COMMENT:
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DATE: 19:49
Hey, you have a great blog here! I'm definitely going to bookmark you!
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DATE: 01:06
Sounds great, i like funny games too. Makes them more entertaining to play! So,this one is my favorite flash game. Have a nice evening.
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TITLE: Koei, what are you doing?
AUTHOR: Trey
DATE: 4/18/2005 11:30:00 ip.
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BODY:
Koei has always been one of my favorite developers. They created my two favorite series', "Romance of the Three Kingdo