Bastard Numbered

How could our love be so strong? Or why we're moving

2006-01-01T16:36:00.000+02:00

Happy new year's folks! I hope it'll be even better than the last one for you all, but I am not going to merely wish you all something happy and shiny. white satin. I am going to say, we're CLOSED! FINISHED! IT'S OVER JOHNNY, NO MORE COOKIES! ( :( ) Well, that was rather exaggarated. We're just moving, towards our own special webhost! I'll archive and post all the posts from here to there eventually, but for now, I'm urging the uh, team to start posting there instead and readers change their bookmarks accordingly. The new address is, http://bannumbers.american-idyll.com for now, until I can get 3 dollars to pay for a domain. But hey, happy new year's!

Shards of Dalaya

2005-12-29T18:19:00.000+02:00

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..

Ze games zat you love to 'ate.

2005-12-27T20:07:00.000+02:00

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.

Ossu! Tatakae! Ouendan! - DS Review

2005-12-27T02:52:00.000+02:00

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!

Knyght's Holiday Roundup

2005-12-25T03:02:00.000+02:00

This would be Knyght's Christmas Roundup, or at least Knyght's xmas roundup, but I'm not exactly a devout Christian. Or any sort of Christian, really. Anyway, here are the games that I feel are worth mentioning from 2005, for whatever reasons I see fit (even in some sort of alphabetical order, too). Well, we have Advance Wars: Dual Strike, of course. The new Advance Wars for DS, obviously. It's not a lot different from earlier Advance Wars games, but what makes it worth mentioning is that the stylus is nice. It's now actually easy to control. The Bard's Tale. Not a remake, or anything. This dissapointed me enough to not bother buying it, but apparently it's not actually that bad. Apparently. We have Batman Begins, a crap Batman game based on a crap Batman film. Excellent. Then there's Black & White 2 from lionhead, a dissapointing sequel to a dissapointing game. Hopefully, it'll persuade Pete to stop hyping his games up so much, but we know he'll do it anyway. Civilization IV thankfully puts Civ 3 behind us, and leaves us with a nice, fairly balanced game, with even a good AI. Darwinia. Released early in the year, it's one of the few indie games that the mainstream are even thinking about accepting. It's even in proper stores. Not my cup of tea, but it is a lovely game. Fable: The Lost Chapters! At least it's on PC, and not just xbox. Another of Pete's overhyped games, but this one is at least good. I hear FEAR is good. I haven't had chance to play it though. Nintendo have finally decided to release Fire Emblem games here. Which is nice. Half-Life 2. Well. I think it sucks nuts, but a lot of people love it. So what more can I say? Just to appease the wargamers, HoI2 was released just on the turn of the year, yay woo. It's boring, though. Fahrenheit or Indigo Prophecy. heh. I prophecised that people would love it for a few hours, then would think it sucks. I was right, thankyou. Meteos, a surprisingly original puzzle game. Can't say more than that. Metroid Prime 2. Qualitay. The Movies. Yet another of Pete's overhyped games. This one's not too shabby I hear. I'm gonna put Nintendogs here, just 'cause I want to. Massively hyped, annoyingly available in three different versions, and not a bad timewaster. Serious Sam II, just as inane and dull as the first. Silent Hunter III. Best. Subsim. Ever. UFO: Aftershock appalled us less than Aftermath, giving us a fairly playably, but ultimately laughable and forgettable. X3 nearly solves the problems of X2, but doesn't quite manage it. Infinately more fun and usable, though. I've missed out a lot of stuff I'd like to mention, and left in some things that might not matter to a lot of people. But that's what you get when you let me write things.

Merry Christmas

2005-12-24T22:03:00.000+02:00

Merry Christmas from the whole Bastard Numbered Team! (we're a team now?) (yes, shush now.) (but, but!) In a year this blog has existed, a number of things has happened and a number of things will continue on happening. To shine a little history of this small blog which has evolved into not-so-small one, this was mainly a small project of mine. Something to post my thoughts into. Then one day, John9137 walked up to me, saw the potential, quickly hired Knives and few days later, a whole bunch of people and then we slowly have come here. Now I'm not writing my thoughts in here as much anymore, I'm merely guiding and making sure this blog is going uh, at least somewhere. Instead, a numerous of people are doing that for me. A bunch of great people with great varied thoughts, discussing and talking about things, and even sometimes arguing, for your pure amusement and will hopefully carry on doing that for the year to come. This is Bastard Numbered's first Christmas together, and I can only be happy about the fact that it's not a lonely one. Thank you dear readers, thank you Bastard Numbered Team, thank you John9137, for a great year. I'll do my best to make sure this thing moves on somewhere. Somewhere where the shinies dwell and shout. P.S: Joq, that article?

Fireballs to the civilizations

2005-12-23T19:47:00.000+02:00

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.

Bye-bye Gaming Skill

2005-12-22T18:40:00.000+02:00

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.

zomg teh time

2005-12-20T14:10:00.000+02:00

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.

Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow

2005-12-19T22:57:00.000+02:00

A DS game that's actually compellingly playable even when you have better things to do? Good grief. Don't get me wrong: I adore the DS. It's just that, thus far, the games I've played haven't exactly been the type of excellence I've come to expect from Nintendo. While fun, even Kirby's Canvas Curse was somewhat... lacking. With the purchase of Castlevania DS, my faith in the DS was restored. Players take over the white mullet of Soma Cruz, all-round nice guy and, unfortunately for him, rebirth of Dracula. This makes him the centre of all kinds of ooky nastiness, and in this - his second adventure - he's been targeted by a church dealing with the belief that for God (the ultimate good) to exist, there must be an opposite being of ultimate darkness. So, seeing as how Soma doesn't exactly want to become the force of ultimate evil in the world, they've decided to kill him so that a new vessel can be chosen. Or something like that. Fortunately, Soma is apparantly some sort of weapons master, and is equally adept with all of the many kinds of weapons you can come across, be they brass knuckles, maces, broadswords, katanas, pistols, or - well, just about anything. Besides this, he also has a rather unusual power. When he defeats an enemy, Soma has a chance to absorb their soul into himself and use their power. Every single enemy in the game can be absorbed in this way, although the chances for some do seem to be ridiculously low. The powers are fairly variable, too - the Succubus soul grants you a highly damaging attack that gives you life back, while the Bat Company soul lets you transform into a bat for a short time, allowing you to get to previously unreachable areas, or cross massively dangerous spike pits without harm. Some souls (most of the boss souls, in fact) are necessary for continuing play, as the abilities granted let you progress further through the castle. So, with this setting, Soma ventures off into a castle believed to be the headquarters of this cult. He's followed by a variety of characters, from ex-militant shopkeeper Hammer who's more than happy to sell maps, potions, and weapons, through to the highly mysterious Akardo, a member of a Japanese governmental group responsible for dealing with supernatural threats. While they're all doing their respective thing, you're wandering the castle, dishing out death to the monstrous inhabitants and trying to put a stop to these rotters (no pun intended) who want you dead. All the while acquiring their souls, upgrading your weapons, and jumping about like a rabbit on amphetamines. This Castlevania takes on an RPG approach that became popular with the more recent breed. Rather than the typical platforming adventure of, say, Super Castlevania on the SNES, you can pretty much choose where to go, although at first many routes will be blocked off until you've obtained whatever soul is needed to let you by. This doesn't actually hinder the feeling of non-linearity, though - it's not like you keep coming across dead ends everywhere. Rather, you'll spot places you can't reach, and remember them for later. When you've got a few more ability souls you'll head back, and... hm. You still can't reach that exit in the roof. Ah, but wait, there's a platform over by the wall; if we jump onto that and then use the slow-falling soul... In this way, it doesn't feel so much like you keep running into brick walls - rather, just puzzles that you'll have to come back and solve later on. Besides this, there's also a degree of non-linearity in that you level up, find new equipment, can upgrade or buy new weapons as you choose, and a variety of other choices. Not to mention that at any given time, other players will likely have a different assortment of souls to you, so their play experience may very well be fundamentally different. My own personal favourite combinations are the Persephone soul (hold down the R-trigger to generate a vacuum that hurts enemies and heals you), and the Killer Clown soul (lets you lob truly devastating playing cards), but it was frankly luck I got both of those. Who knows what I'd be using, or what tactics I'd employ against bosses, if I'd had something else? I wasn't kidding about that mullet. Graphically, the game's pretty damn good looking. Character portraits are done in an anime-style, and that's servicable enough, but it's the animation that's the real star of the presentation here. All of Soma's animations are gorgeous and reasonably well-carried through, even to the extent of his little sprite cloak trailing after him when he falls and settling on the floor slowly when he lands. Even the monsters are well animated; a few carry a genuine air of menace, while others are very much the cannon fodder you'd expect. The graphics do their job for certain, though. Combat and platforming mechanics are fairly well done. The only times I've been particularly frustrated are due to some incredibly hard bosses (who I promptly defeated through changing my tactics), and the Clock Tower area of the game, where you're trying to jump from moving platform to moving platform to avoid spikes, while dodging Medusa Heads coming at you from all angles. Nightmarish. Fortunately, there hasn't been a single other area nearly as irritating as that. As ever, I have issues, though. The touch-screen stuff is nice in part, and is utterly useless in part. The good? When you summon a Familiar, using a soul, you can tap on whatever target you want it to focus on. The bad? "Magic seals" have been crowbarred into the game. Basically, you find these patterns throughout the castle, that open various doors - usually leading to bosses. Upon defeating a boss, you have to draw the seal on the touch-screen. You have a variety of points to work with, and basically connect them up, but you do still have to recall the order and shape. At first they're extremely simple, but the later ones can be a bit difficult. Muck them up and the boss gets some health back and continues the fight. Get it right, and the boss dies. Beyond that, I'm a little irritated at the crap level design that's occasionally shown. I wish it was based a bit more on a "real" castle. I'm not advocating that the developers suddenly remove all the massive spike pits, or remove the jumping from precariously-hanging chandeliers. What I'd like to see is less stereotypical levels. It does feel like the level design was decided in the laziest way possible - "Hey, we need a garden level. That can be level 2." "Yeah, good idea. What about the church? This game needs a church. No, wait - an evil church." "Woo! That's level 3!" Not that the game is actually divided up into levels - there's that wacky non-linearity, again - but it is divided into distinct areas, and it's a bit disconcerting to find a massive overgrown garden in the middle of a castle's interior. The thing is, these faults are just nitpicking, and that should be abundantly clear. This game is a fantastic amount of fun. Various endings (although the worst does seem rather arbitrary), a huge number of souls (at least 100, by my reckoning), a vast castle to explore, and various extra game modes unlocked after finishing. There's even a multiplayer where you drop enemies into a set of rooms and race through them, though this can also be played in single player. So, my thoughts? It's superb. If you've got a DS and this sounds even remotely like your sort of thing, you'd be doing yourself a disservice to ignore this.

Gaming Slump

2005-12-15T18:13:00.000+02:00

I appologize in advance for this. I'm mostly going to be rambling in a whiny sort of way. Blame Jim if you don't like it. Heh. As stated at the beginning of my previous article, I am in a gaming slump. These happen a lot, and many times I don't know what causes them. But this time I do. It's a few things. I'm going through an annoying time in my life, and that's one factor. The main problem, though, is a lack of money. I don't have the money to buy any of the games I want to play. Even if I did, I don't have a computer up-to-date enough to run them. Nor a console. The newest console I have is a N64. Even then, I don't have a TV of my own on which to play them anyways. There's emulation, sure. I've done some N64 emulating, but that's not the point. The games I want to play are not on the N64 or PSX. They're on the PC. And a few on the current generation consoles. I'm not a console gamer in general, but right now I'd kill for a Gamecube or Xbox or PS2. Perhaps if I get enough money for Christmas (fat chance), I could buy a used Gamecube and perhaps a VGA adaptor. Even if I could, I wouldn't have enough for games. Bleh. I have quite a few completely unplayed games sitting around. I have no interest in playing them, though. They're games I got in trades, or ones I bought on impulse. It seems if I go to a store with an intention of buying a game, and there's nothing that looks interesting in my price range (which usually means $10 jewel case games), I cannot leave the store without buying a game. So I'll buy one that I have just a tiny bit of interest in. But when I get home, I know I won't play it. Take Stronghold for instance. When it first came out, I had a small interest in it and wanted to try it, but never did at the time. When I made one of those trips to the store for a game (which I do perhaps once every 3 months), I bought it simply because there was nothing else. I don't even like RTSes. At all. Why did I buy it? Even with games I'm interested in playing, I sometimes end up not playing them because by the time I get them, I've lost interest. I have a limited attention span when it comes to new games. What I mean is... Well, let me give you an example. At one point, I really really wanted to play MechCommander Gold. This was when I was involved in the MechCommander 2 preview beta. Everyone was talking about how great the first one was, so I badly wanted to play it. Well, it was no longer sold in stores, so I had to buy it on ebay. The transaction and shipment took about two weeks. By the time it arrived at my house, I was no longer interested in playing it. I believe I've installed it once since then, but it stayed on my harddrive for less than 24 hours because I just didn't want to play that sort of game. And maybe never will. I guess part of the reason I lost interest in MechCommander Gold was that those people in the MC2 private newsgroup had stopped talking about it so much. For some reason, when I know a lot of other people are playing the same game as me, it makes me want to play it more. I suppose it's because I know there are people who are willing to discuss the game. Want to discuss the game. And I want to take part in those discussions. That's kind of stupid, but it's true. I think that's the reason why most people buy new releases. If they were smart, they'd wait for some reviews, and for the hype-factor to wear off, and if it did, then they'd buy it. But by then people might not be talking about it. Discussing a game I've recently played, or am playing at the moment, always seems to make it more fun. It's not the trend-factor. I wouldn't play a game only because other people are playing it. It has to sound like something I'd enjoy, too. I guess that describes my slump. I don't have the money to play those games that other people are discussing, or that I just really want to play in general. Like Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. People aren't talking about it so much anymore, but that's one I'd want to play regardless. But I don't have a PS2. Bleh. Thus concludes my ramblings.

The Filminator: Rise of the Machinima

2005-12-14T16:16:00.000+02:00

So, I'm sure most of you have heard of The Movies. If you haven't, well, what it is my friend, is quite literally the only Lionhead Studios game worth putting money down for. Yes, Lionhead appears to be making progress in distancing itself from the Black & White VPTS (Virtual Poo-Throwing Simulator). Read on if you care to hear more; at the end you'll get a present, I promise. Anyway, The Movies is great. Not only do you get to mess around with your garden variety Tycoon business simulation, but you get a full-fledged 'script writing' feature that lets you create movies out of a few hundred separate scenes. A few hundred may not seem like much on the face of things, but most scenes have anywhere from 1 to a dozen different variations (props, expression, direction of motion). With just a little creativity and careful planning, there are very few classic movie scenes you can't put together. Other people complain about the variety, but just a quick hop over to the official Movies site will show you just how versatile those scenes can be. Another huge plus to this game is the post-production options you have. You can record voice tracks that your characters will lip synch to, add your own custom music scores, sound effects and introductory screens, making your Movie even more...well...movie-like (none of the post-production stuff has an effect on how much in-game people like your film, though). In any case, this is a game that definitely rewards those who put the most effort into making use of all the custom features. Those who just play the management/tycoon game by using the 'automatic scripts' are just asking to be bored in a day or so. All of the fun comes out of making a movie that flows and tells a story, while at the same time making you enough money to build that big-budget dream movie you've always wanted to make. Before I go back to forging the greatest film to ever grace the land of machinima, I did promise at the beginning that there would be a present for you at the end. Being the honest and charitable person I am, I would like to announce that my DSL service has been activated, and that I will be preparing the rest of this week and into the weekend to host Bastard Numbered on my uber leet connection of awesomeness. Is this a present? Maybe. If it's not, it's sure as hell all you're going to get out of me at this point, so piss off. I mean it. Shoo.

DESSIGIN FLOORS

2005-12-13T21:52:00.000+02:00

Wherein Master Gremmi discovers new ways that games annoy Design flaws in games. At best, a slight irritation. At worst, an unbelievable game breaker. I'm not talking about bugs or glitches, I'm talking about massive flaws in the game design. HENCE THE TERM DESIGN FLAWS. Logic, y'see? Anyway, playing Enter the Matrix got me thinking about it. It's an averagely average game, in fact it's pretty crap all round. But it has some of the most horrendously thought out designing ever seen. I'm not going to provide a list, I'll just provide one simple example. The button for "Lock on Enemy" and "Put away weapon" are one and the same. One of the reasons why the gunplay in this game sucked was that the targetting was next to useless, you end up targetting an unarmed guy walking slowly towards you, and not the guy with the semi-automatic filling your body with lead. So you hit the Lock on button, and your hapless avatar PUTS AWAY THEIR WEAPON AND STANDS THERE LIKE A MONKEY. Stupid. Another good example, although not in-game, would be the Prince of Persia series by Ubisoft. To pause, you press start, go to the save menu, choose save. "Would you like to save?" Er, yes. That's why I went to Save. "Choose save slot." I'll just choose the one I've been going with all the while. "Would you like to overwrite your save?" Er, yes. That's why I chose it. That happens a lot in EA games too, although it's probably worse in those, as it's an auto-save anyway, so after every level you get "Would you like to overwrite?". In fact, one broken example that I forget the name of quit to the main menu if you chose "No" at this point. YOU WILL SAVE, MOTHERFUCKER. Loading's not much better. Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb. An average game. At the main menu, you have to go through about 4 different screens to load your game, then once you've loaded it, it doesn't automatically start it. No, you have to back out to the main menu again and choose "Game/Resume". No time for load, Dr. Jones! Most of the design flaws I know of seem to revolve around controls and saving..but in some games, it's the lack of controls and saving. Unskippable cutscenes with a save point right before them, especially if they're a stupidly lengthy and rambling cutscene. Yet the same game features no save points right before immensely large boss fights. STEP UP AND CLAIM YOUR AWARD, FINAL FANTASY. Less noticeable, but just as important are the logical story flaws, as if game designer and writer never met. Back to Final Fantasy again, and the unanswered question of why Phoenix Down's don't work on Aeris. Or why Yuna ends FFX as an uber-hard warrior and starts FFX2 as a level 1 girlie-girl with no skills. DESIGN FLAWS. THEY SUCK.

Independent Games Festival 2006

2005-12-13T09:22:00.000+02:00

As I imagine most visitors here should know, not all games have to be costly to be fun. Some of the most fun I've had with games was with freeware and shareware products. Being that the Independent Games Festival finalists were announced recently, I figured I'd give some of the interesting looking ones a shot, and report back. Thomas and the Magical Words Oh, don't look at me like that. Yeah, it looks like a kid's game. Yeah, it sounds like one. And yeah, the title is desperately childish. But damn, this game's fun. "Sort of like a one-player Scrabble" is probably the best way to describe it. Trapped inside a magical book, your character (the eponymous Thomas) has to get to the portal on each level. Sadly, there are huge gaps in the way, so what can he do? Plonk words down, obviously. Much as in Scrabble, the idea is to place down as big a word as you can think of, connected to the previous words, and traverse your way across the board. The full version costs something like $20 and the free demo only allows an hour of play, but it's more than enough for a bit of fun, and it'll certainly let you decide if it's worth paying for. http://www.viquagames.com/game/thomas_and_the_magical_words Rumble Box Ahaha. This is an interesting little idea, and the game itself is free. Essentially, this is a 3D fighting game. You're a character made up of cubes and spheres, and you have an attack button, a throw button, and your usual move buttons. You're dumped in a pit, with enemies (also made up of cubes and spheres) constantly appearing. When you defeat them, the pieces remain behind. Your goal? Escape from the pit within the time limit by building up the corpses (using that word makes this game seem gory, somehow, when in reality it's far from it) into a slope to the top of the pit. Quite fun, and well worth a look if you've got a computer that can run it. It's not exactly high-spec these days, but it does seem to require a half-decent video card, and a 1ghz processor. http://www.phackett.com/rumblebox Strange Attractors This is what I love about the Independent Games Festival. You get some totally awesome ideas that would never, ever crop up anywhere else. The thing about this game is you control the entire thing with just one button - the space bar. It's a little hard to describe, so bear with me. You're in space, with lots of objects floating around. You're completely unaffected by gravity, just bouncing and ricocheting off things - unless you press and hold down the space bar, in which case you're attracted to nearby objects. The bigger they are, the bigger the attraction. So, using the space bar and timing, you have to bounce and slingshot yourself around the open arena to the exit. Bizarrely enough there are also spacemen floating around who you can murder for points - either by knocking them into the force field walls the surround the arena (which don't hurt you; you can't be hurt in this game - you can just run out of time) or by splattering them between your craft and another object. Good for a giggle. http://www.ominousdev.com/ The Witch's Yarn Another little bizarre game. It's a little hard to give a review on this, as I've not yet finished a game of it, but the premise itself is rather interesting. Essentially, it's a story, but you affect how it turns out by cueing different actors and props at different times. The plot itself revolves around a witch who's opened up a yarn shop in the mortal world, and is trying to make it a success without using magic. Depending on the order you cue actors in each scene, the plot apparantly unfolds in different ways. I can say that there are certainly different endings, in the respect that you can "lose" the game (on my first go, the familiar pissed off the witch's mother so much that the mother got rid of it, and the witch gave up on the whole endeavour), but I'm not sure if there are actually REAL multiple paths through the game, and different endings. It's quite amusing, and it's a great idea, though I'd love to see different stories done with it, with real choice and real different endings. That would be quite an endeavour, mind you, and this in itself is certainly quite well done. The first two chapters are available free, while the rest have to be purchased. The game states that you can change the story even in the first two chapters by cueing things in a different order, so I might just try it again... http://www.thewitchsyarn.com/ These are the ones I've tried thus far. You can check out the finalists yourself here at the IGF site. Oh, and Darwinia's there too, and we all know that's fantastic.

Allied Force: Why it sucks and why it's awesome

2005-12-11T19:29:00.000+02:00

Falcon 4.0: Allied Force. For those of you who don't know it, it's basically a sequel to Falcon 4.0. So, why does it suck, and why is it awesome? Read on, cockmuffins. First, why it sucks. Well, it's very much the same. At first it feels very much how X-COM: Terror From the Deep felt after playing UFO:EU/X-COM:UD. Samey. New graphics, and a different campaign that's virtually identical. Nothing huge has been added. New campaign. That's all. Balkans. It's entirely different from playing the Korean campaign, but it still manages to feel the same. Which is a little boring. You can still only fly the F-16, although you get new (virtually indistinguishable) variants to play with, depending on the campaign and your squadron. The tutorials still suck ass. At least they're fixed now, you don't start with full fuel in the flameout landing training mission, which is nice (it was fixed in a patch of F4, but but still, it was a silly thing to not notice), but you have to read the manual to do the training missions. Okay, this isn't too bad, but when you consider that the manual comes on the CD, so you'd have to print it out, it's a massive pain in the ass. That graphics, while serviacble, are... monotonous. If you fly below cloud level but at a reasonable altitude, and look down, or otherwise face the dirt, you'll notice about 15-20 farms. The *same* farm, that is. It really takes away the element of immersion. This can be somewhat remedied by installing HiTilesAF, but it's not free. Twelve US dollars it costs, which isn't much, but I could get a decent oldish game for that - and the devs should really have done better. The tactical reference is both missing things, and is a little inaccurate in places. Actually, while I'm at it, some planes don't actually have skins yet. It's not too annoying, though, since there's just so many damn planes in the game. So, onto the awesome. The campaigns are still very much dynamic. Your flights can make a difference on the war on the short term, and your general tactics on the long term. Since there's always a big land war going on, this means your flights are usually tank-busting runs, which can get real boring, but you can always leave these up the computer and just pick what you think are the most interesting. You can set the priority targets yourself at any time, and can even choose that the computer makes no flights of any kind, so that you are forced to create every single flight manually. Not for the faint hearted. They've gone hugely overboard with the realism. Yum. The cockpit is now as realistic as it could possibly be, as far as I'm concerned. As well as choosing to start on the runway (or taxiway) and just hit the throttle, you can also choose to start on the ramp, and go through the routine of getting your jet up and running, turning the electrics on, and the engines, avionics, etc., which can easily take 10 minutes. The radar works as it should, and well, most everything does, actually. They've also made it easy enough for idiots to play. If you want, you can have lovely red boxes to show enemy planes and such, without taking much challenge out of the actual combat. Which is nice enough, really. The biggest thing I like about it though, is that the devs aren't just addressing issues with the game, they're adding features, too. For example, in the upcoming patch, you'll be able to do FAC (Forward Air Controller) missions, where you receive radio calls from flights, and designate ground targets from them with smoke rockets and such. Nice. So go out and buy it if you like flying planes and shooting stuff, yeah.

TAke my TAlking sTAin, TAttler!

2005-12-09T18:30:00.000+02:00

They don't make RTS' the way they used to. So, lately, I've rediscovered good old Total Annihalation. Mostly pegging it for a rather simple RTS, I've found it to be much cooler than suspected. As opposed to most modern RTS', there's an awful lot you can do it. Instead of your old tired tank rush, TA has coastal bombardements, airstrikes, proper artillery fire, and stationary guns worth your time. The other bit where TA shines is the diversity of the units. It has everything from small combat bots over bomber planes to gigantic battlecruisers with two triple-barelled guns and a gatling laser and amphibious tanks. The resource model was very nice as well. Two resources, energy and metal. For energy you build one of the approximately fifty different power plants, and for metal you build mines on metal deposits. Metal deposits are often rare and most be fought for. It allows different stategies to succeed. You can hole up in your base 'till you're powerful enough to build a large gun and shoot the crap out of your enemy from afar, or you can just churn out a lot of cheap units and rush your enemy as early as possible. In conclusion, with its varied units, tactical opportunites, and resource collection that isn't annoying, (and the way it runs problem-free in XP) I declare TA to be the best RTS ever.

Ghosts of Christmases Past

2005-12-08T17:54:00.000+02:00

I am in a gaming slump. This happens at least once every year, though usually more. It can last for weeks. Even as long as a few months. It really depends on what's going on in my life. I think every gamer goes through this. At least, once they reach a certain age. My cousin, for instance, is still at an age where he plays games daily, and losing interest in gaming is something that he doesn't think could ever happen. It will. Oh it surely will. Maybe not right away. And maybe not for more than 24 hours at a time at first, but it will happen. Because of this, I shall spin a tale from my past. Yeah. My very own Christmas miracle. ______________________ It's coming on Christmas, they're cutting down trees, putting up reindeer, and singing songs of joy peace. Oh I wish I had a river I could skate away on. But therein lies a problem. I cannot skate. So there goes that idea. Anyways, Christmas shall soon be here. How nice. In my mind, Christmas has always been connected to gaming. We got our first game system, an Atari 2600, for Christmas. And then later an NES for Christmas. Even later a Genesis, SNES, and N64, all for Christmas. Not at the same time, but you get the idea. Plus many games in between. The week between Christmas Day and New Years was usually spent gaming. I remember the Christmas I got my N64. It wasn't the year it was released, but a couple years later. Like 1999, or 1998, I think. Ah yes, it was 1998, because New Years was 1999. Anyways, I had trouble hooking it up to our VCR. I couldn't see very well where the VCR was positioned, so I kept putting the yellow wire in the white port, and the white wire in the yellow port. From my perspective, they looked to be in the right ones, but appearently not. So that Christmas day was the first Christmas Day in which I got a new system but wasn't able to play it. The little manual fold-out thing that came with the 64 said they recommended getting a Y-connector, so that the white and the [extremely lonely with no port to go into] red wire could plug into the same spot. I thought that's what the problem was, and what I needed. The day after Christmas (Boxing Day for those of you that say "oot and aboot"), we made a trip to Radio Shack for it. Brought it home, and this time I used a flashlight so I could see better and realized I had the wires in the wrong ports all along. How annoying. Well, since we already had it, I used the Y-connector anyways. My system was bundled with red second controller, and a game. What game, you may ask? Well, what game was it that made me want the system in the first place? What game was it that I played at my friend Jon's and HAD TO HAVE? Take a guess. Sure, there's a few games it could be, but really, come on now. Oh fine, I'll just tell you. Goldeneye. Yes, Goldeneye. I finally got to play it in my own home. That was nice. But I only got to play it for a couple hours before I had to go and visit my dad. My sister came with me, but she only stayed at my dad's for a few hours and then came home. Me, I was going to be staying until New Years. That's a week, for you slow folks. A week without my N64! Without Goldeneye! The idea was preposterous! But my mother would not let me take it with me. To add insult to injury, my father must've talked to my mother, because he knew I had gotten a N64 and he got me a game for it. It was a game which couldn't have cost him more than $10. It was used, and it was a game that didn't sell well, and was relatively unknown. Because it sucked. Well, no, it wasn't horrible, but it wasn't great either. The game was Aero Gauge. A futuristic racing game. But that didn't matter, all that mattered was that I had yet another game I couldn't play! Argh! Whenever I was at my dad's, I usually hung out with my older step brother. And when I was with him, we were usually over at the neighbor's house. Brandon's. And what do I see as soon as I get into their living room? Brandon playing a N64! Yet another taunt! Ye cruel world! But...what was this game he was playing? He was doing something in a menu that looked very complicated. Then he exited the menu, and was chasing a chicken. A chicken? Why? "Why are you going after a chicken?" He paused it (bringing up that menu again), looked at me, grinned and told me he'd just figured out something cool. He went back to chasing the chicken, and kept hitting it with his sword. Then something happened which I shall never forget. The chicken got pissed off. Really pissed off. Suddenly the chicken multiplied into what looked like a dozen more chickens, and they all began attacking Brandon's character. He ran and got the hell out of there. "That was awesome," I said. "I know," he said. But what was this game? Oh, I'm sure anyone reading this already knows. But I had no idea. I asked him what it was. He pointed to the box it came in. The name registered in my mind. Zelda. I'd heard it before. I remembered seeing Zelda games for rent for the NES and SNES at my local video store. But I'd never played them. I watched him play for a while longer, doing all kinds of other things, and then we went back to my dad's house. I knew two things: I really really wanted to play my N64. And that I HAD to have that game! That was the New Years Eve that I got drunk for the first time. It was the year of the infamous putter incident. But I won't go into that. When I finally got home on New Year's Day, what did I find my sister doing? She was playing my N64! How dare she! And my mother was watching her play, something she usually had no interest in. For a moment, I was so consumed with jealousy and annoyance that I didn't notice what game she was playing. When I did, all negative emotions were gone in an instant. She was playing Zelda! "Where the heck did that game come from?!" They told me they'd rented it, and had already decided they were going to be buying it. "What? But... That's the game..I.. When are you buying it?" Tomorrow, they told me. Tomorrow, when the stores open back up. It's a Christmas miracle! Hooray! And so they did. And all three of us played it. We each had our own save slot. My sister lost interest after a little while, but my mother and I were almost competing to see who could beat the game first. This was the first time she'd really played any games in years. It was the gateway drug. It led to EverQuest later, which led to..well, that's not important. That's enough for today kiddies. Have a Merry Christmas. And remember kids, don't get drunk and sing into a putter. Good day.

YOU GOTTA FIGHT

2005-12-07T23:57:00.000+02:00

FOR YOUR RIGHT TO PAAAAAAARTAAAY Yes. Party games. The saviour of gaming? Seems to me gaming is thoroughly split at the moment, and not just via genre favourites. Some people refuse to touch multiplayer aspects of a game, and likewise other people will buy a perfectly decent single-player game and ignore the main meat, instead tucking into the sidecourse of Vs Other People. BUT Everyone likes party games. EVERYONE. Simply put because they're pure undiluted fun, and they're immense fun when drunk. Even the rubbish (in my opinion) DDR becomes fun with a group of uncoordinated mates and a few beers. You can't really say the same of, say, Counterstrike, or even split-screen multiplayer games. Sure, drunken Burnout was a right laugh, but I didn't have a freakin' clue what was going on. It's more the social aspects, I suppose, watching someone make a tit out of themselves prancing about in front of an Eyetoy attempting to swat invisible zombies has more humour factor than watching them hammer at a joypad whilst the car crashes. Anyway. Obvious point I'm coming to here, Nintendo Revolution. It's a very physical console, and will probably have a hell of a lot of party games released for it. Then again, Nintendo's track record of party games aren't that good. With the exception of Smash Bros, Ninty games aren't really multiplayer larkathons. Mario Party is utter crap, for instance, and the curreny avalanche of Mario Sports titles are only slightly above average. The less said about Mario DDR the better, really. Donkey Konga doesn't count, for nitpickers, 'cause it's by Namco, and it's just their previous drum game with a Nintendo skin. So. Party gaming. The new karaoke? Well, we've already got Singstar.

Hey, look who decided to show the hell up and post for once

2005-12-07T23:26:00.000+02:00

So now that I've got that unpleasantness out of the way...I'd like to talk to you a little about Half-Life 2. Specifically, the Lost Coast tech demo. As you probably know, the Lost Coast is the showoff piece for Valve's simulation of High-Dynamic Range lighting. It's basically the effect you notice when you've been inside all day, in a basement, and suddenly step out into a bright and glorious summer day. You reel and cringe for minutes while your eyes adjust to the horrible beams of photons that seem to be going directly into your brain. It's quite fun, and I recommend you try it right now... After you read the rest of this. This is all well and good, and I'm as much for realism as the next guy, but I have a gripe or two. The main issue being the lack of subtelty. It may be that because Lost Coast is just an HDR showpiece, the HDR reflections are exceedingly bright. I mean really bright. Even when your eyes adjust, it's just so bright you can't even look at it. There's no reasonable gradient, like in real life, it's just dark, then huge blobs of HDR lighting. At no point in the game does it really get any better, you can stare at the HDR spot for hours, and it's still a fuzzy blob of pain. That brings me to my next issue...the light is all fuzzy and blobby. Never in my life do I recall seeing the bright sun reflecting off a building in such a way that it blurs my vision. I understand this is an effect of the ever popular 'bloom' rendering style that was originally concieved to be a cheaper (than anti-aliasing processor-wise) way to hide jagged edges of ploygons. Light bloom is not pretty or awe-inspiring when it's *everywhere*. The whole time I was thinking that Gordon's glasses may just not be enough to repair his clearly deteriorating eyesight. Look, I don't mean to get down on Valve about HDR. It's really a great thing that they're trying. I would just prefer that they spent more time mimicing reality instead of trying to provide an 'oh hey look at the light' experience. It would be much more impressive to have shocking realism than shocking for shock's sake.

Fighting Games: The Flatmate Test

2005-12-06T02:12:00.000+02:00

Fighting games, these days, are pretty much a console-only endeavour. Back in the early-ish days of PC gaming (I'm talking early 90s here; yes, okay, it's far from the real early days, but it was when PC gaming was really becoming more mainstream), a lot of fighting games were ported from consoles. Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat, anyone? Hell, there were some games which were desktop computer only - Body Blows, for instance, was only released on PC and Amiga. The problem is, with a few notable exceptions, most of these were crap, largely due to the difficulty of trying to pull off, say, a fireball manoeuver with a keyboard. The exceptions, when made, are definitely amongst the cream of the genre, though. One Must Fall 2097 holds a very special place in my heart and is one of my favourite fighting games ever. If you've not played it - well, why the hell not? But I'm not here to talk about the PC's fall in this genre. I want to talk about more recent ones, and the differences between them. So, we have three major console contenders right now - XBox, PS2, and Gamecube. I'm not counting the 360 because at present there are practically no games out for it. Each of these have a wide variety of fighting games, both spread across the platforms and exclusive to one. They've also all got different controllers, though all are perfectly suited for fighting games due to the use of both analogue sticks and d-pads. Of them all, the PS2 probably has the widest amount of fighters. The Dead or Alive series was on this before jumping ship to the XBox, so it's got Dead or Alive 2 - the best of the lot, before Ultimate was released on XBox a bit later. It's also got most of the Capcom ones, like Marvel vs Capcom, and it also has the phenomenal Guilty Gear X2 - and that's without mentioning the Tekken series, which is practically a flagship title for this console. The XBox has DoA3 and Ultimate, and those are the main ones I'm going to be looking at here. The Gamecube, on the other hand, caters for a more party-ish taste, with things like Super Smash Brothers Melee and my beloved Naruto: Gekitou Ninja Taisen series. And they've all got their own variants of Soul Calibur 2, which is ace. XBox first, then. Dead or Alive is one of the most simplistic series you can find when it comes to fighting games - one button for throw, one button for counter, one for punch, one for kick. Hitting a direction and a different combination of punch and kick results in a different combo of attacks. Definitely one for the button mashers, because it's frankly piss easy to get into, though at high level play it can very much become a guessing game of what your opponent is going to do and countering it. Giving it the Flatmate Test - chucking my flatmates at it and seeing how they do and how well they like it - DoA Ultimate (a redone version of DoA2 with updated graphics, characters, and more costumes), it received a resounding "Woo". Pretty graphics, stunning-looking moves that are easy to pull off, and button-masher friendly. I'm not good enough to defend against button-mashing tactics, either, so it was fairly even all round. Much loved by the masses, this one, then. Kung Fu Chaos is the other XBox fighter I want to take a very brief look at. The main fighting portion of the game is a bit naff, sadly, but the minigames make this one well worth picking up for cheap. The joy of four people running around a slippery iceberg trying to knock each other off without falling off is unexplainable until you've tried it. Or my personal favourite, the game with a huge spinning pole where everyone has to either jump over it or knock it backwards. As time goes on it gets faster and faster. Last one to lose all their lives (by getting knocked off) wins. Simple and hilarious, this also scored highly on the Flatmate Test, though the actual fighting part is crap so maybe it doesn't count anyway. The PS2, then. This is home to a huge number of fighting games - Serious Fighting Games, too. Not simplistic little things like Dead or Alive where you can button mash. No, this has things like Guilty Gear X2, possibly the most ridiculous "serious fighter" I've ever seen. GGX2 takes inspiration from rock 'n' roll, both with the music, characters, and moves. Hell, one character - Axl Low - is based on Axl Rose. Another is based on Frank Zappa. The game is balanced out by everyone having access to a huge variety of moves and countermoves, and then having their own special moves as well. The problem is that this is an awful lot to remember, and as the moves are performed Street Fighter-style (quarter circle forward + punch, etc), it requires a fair degree of memorisation. Once you're into it, you'll love it. The problem is that it takes awhile to get into it. Despite being one of the best fighting games I've ever played, this one fails the Flatmate Test. Too complicated for pick-up-and-play, sadly, and one where button mashing will fail against anyone experienced. Sadly, barring Dead or Alive, most of the fighters on the PS2 fall into this category. One exception is Soul Calibur 2 (on all systems) which strikes a wonderful balance between being simplistic and deep. Easy to control and play, but hard to master. As for the Gamecube, I want to take a quick look at the aforementioned two games - Super Smash Brothers Melee, and the Naruto: Gekitou Ninja Taisen series. SSBM is well known to anyone who's played an N64 or Gamecube, really, and deservingly so. A huge number of well-known characters from all sorts of Nintendo games, ranging from Link and Zelda, through Pikachu, Kirby, Mario, Donkey Kong, all the way to less-well-known characters like the Ice Climbers, and Ness from Earthbound. Even some of the Fire Emblem characters make an appearance. The game has a huge wealth of unlockables, most of which can easily be done through multiplayer, and the game is simple - and yet exceptionally devious and varied. Some stages rotate, others explode, some have lava rising up from the ground. The idea is to hit your foes off the screen, causing them to lose a life. The more damage someone takes, the further they're knocked back by each hit. This means that at the start of a match, or after respawning, you're fairly safe, but you'll quickly start reaching higher damage percentages and have to tread a bit more carefully. Last man standing usually wins, though there are alternate game modes. The real winner here, though, is the control system. By and large, there are only two buttons needed except for movement - one for normal attacks, and one for special attacks. More can be used, for things like shields and rolling, but they're not as essential as one might think. As such, this gets a big thumbs up from my flatmates. The final game is Naruto: Gekitou Ninja Taisen 4, now that I've finally imported it. My previous article details the game system enough, but I'll recap quickly - gorgeous graphics and animation, extremely simple controls (think SSBM, only with the addition of sidestepping and supers), entirely in Japanese. It has an extremely chaotic four-player mode, though the real meat of the game is the one-on-one battling. This, despite being simple, can be extremely harsh. Attacking can leave you wide open to a counter attack, and so higher-level play revolves around working out what to do and when to do it. It's stunningly cerebral, and though many fighting games reach this at higher levels of play, it doesn't take long before you hit this with NGNT4. And thoughts from the Flatmates? Very pretty, very simple, very fun. Button mashers beware, you'll suffer badly at the hands of anyone who's played before, but it doesn't take long at all to get past the button mashing phase. So, basically, if you want a serious, hardcore fighting game, go with the PS2. If you're after something more party-ish, go for the Gamecube, though if you're up for importing then the NGNT games can provide you with a decent fighting game too (and there's always Soul Calibur). If you've got an XBox, then you've got a reasonable mix with SC2, Kung Fu Chaos, and Dead or Alive.

Fire Force!

2005-12-05T00:04:00.000+02:00

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!
Where was I? Oh yeah. Stab!

Hammer and Sickle, thoughts on the demo

2005-12-02T18:12:00.000+02:00

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.

Fable: A Retrospective

2005-12-01T23:46:00.000+02:00

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.

Games and Education

2005-11-29T01:47:00.000+02:00

Games have lately been widely linked (largely by, in this writer's opinion, people who've overreacted) to violence, killing, and other such evils. But can they be beneficial to people instead? We investigate. Or rather, lazily hypothesise. So, that question again: can games be beneficial? Short answer: Yes. Long answer: Well, that's going to take an article. The most obvious type of "beneficial" game is edutainment. A much-maligned genre, edutainment is frequently scorned and looked down upon, and rarely compared to "real" games. The main purpose of edutainment is, as can be gleaned from the name, to educate. Entertainment is a secondary function of it, and one that's not really very well done. Within a certain age group - say, 4-7 - edutainment is reasonable. The simplistic games within this category tend to attempt to teach basic math and literacy skills in bright and colourful environments, with a modicum of gaming built in. Obviously, not much there for older users. Minor digression: my first real encounter with edutainment was with Granny's Garden on the BBC Micro at school. This game taught, as can be expected, basic maths, literacy, and logic. I was 4 when I first saw this game. It scared the living fuck out me. Any game which contains semi-random encounters with a gigantic blue witch head that laughs at you was more than sufficent to traumatise me at 4, although the blow is slightly lessened by the threats of "Ha! Ha! Ha! I've caught you! Now I'm going to send you home," from this avatar of pure evil. It's also one of my most memorable games ever and something I occasionally dig up to emulate. Check it out sometime, if you can. Anyway! No, my real bugbear with edutainment is that which tries to attract slightly older groups to it; say, 8-11. Most 8-11 year olds I know are hardened gamers who aren't going to be particularly impressed by this approach. It becomes significantly harder to entice gamers within this age group to become excited at the prospect of helping a frog cross a stream by choosing which lilypad has on it the number of an arbitrary sum off to one side. That's an example taken from my own youth, once again. Edutainment, then, is largely crap once a gamer hits a certain age or intelligence level. But do games teach us? Or is it as Jack Thompson and varies other reactionaries claim, that they only teach us to KILL? (Excuse the emphasis, I'm rather ill.) Of course they bloody teach us, if we're willing to open up to them. It depends on the type of game itself, of course. There've supposedly been studies that show that people who play FPS games have faster reactions and better attention to peripheral vision, making them safer drivers. I can't find any actual evidence of this, mind you, but it sounds reasonable to me. Any stimulus which forces you to pay attention to what's happening all over the screen and react to it as quickly as possible is certainly going to teach you to those things after a few in-game deaths. But that's not quite what I'm talking about. Can games teach us more academic things? Again, I'd say yes. Take Gabriel Knight, for example - another game from my childhood. What could I possibly learn from a game focused largely on the ritual slaughter of innocents, with a womanising, foul-mouthed main character? Well, basic German, for starters. I played this before I started secondary school (where I started to learn German) and by the time I was there I had a few words of basic German. While being able to say "Three snakes crawl in my sleep" isn't exactly a commonly used phrase in Germany, things like "Guten Tag. Sie haben Schloss Ritter erreicht" was certainly a start on the useful basics of the language and the syntax. More to the point, I was intrigued by the game and the language, and wanted to learn more. I'm sure that the lectures on Voudoun in the game aren't quite as helpful in real life, but they were sure as hell interesting and are certainly added to the trivia I know. Perhaps the most telling thing is an article in a recent PC Gamer UK, though. There's a story in this particular issue about a Creative Writing class in a school near Bristol that uses the Myst games rather... well, creatively. The kids play through the game as a class, and the teacher asks them to describe what they've seen. They recently had a visit from Rand Miller - the creator of, and one of the stars in, the Myst games - where he went through the same thing with them. And they love it. Whether they're creating a For Sale sign for a house in the game, or describing the area and adding it to a soundtrack with Powerpoint, it's hard to fault this approach. Hell, I wish my school did stuff like this. And is it working? Oh yes. The class of primary school students, 10 and 11 years old, are some of the best in the country. Here's an excerpt from one of the works of a ten-year old in this class. "To my left, a pillar of light looms above me. It is strangely satisfying to watch the dust particles pass through the tower of illumination. I wave my hand through the dancing brightness and feel a sensation like no other, as every muscle in my body relaxes. "I pull my hand out. Immediately, my body feels tense and stiff so I move forward, puppet-like. "Moving forward cautiously to the angel wing doors I step through and..." The boy who wrote that is ten years old. Ten. Years. Old. I honestly wish I could have written like that at ten. That work, incidentally, is unedited, and the other examples given are just as impressive. So will we see computers and gaming entering the classroom more in future? Probably not. Not any time soon, anyway. But to me, at least, it seems that they can educate just as much. Obviously, it depends on the approach taken, and the games in question - I doubt very much that Myst would be quite so educational if just played through outside of a classroom environment. But this, combined with my own experiences, shows me that yes, games can indeed educate. What do you think?

Wherein I agree with Jack Thompson

2005-11-26T22:29:00.000+02:00

Bear with me, I'm going somewhere with this. As we all know, Jack Thompson can't do none of that law practicing doo-das in Alabama no more. Good. I don't live even within a few thousand miles of there, but it's still good. However, I'd like to say, there is a point that I agree with him on, albeit for very different reasons. ESRB is shit. To be less specific, all rating systems I've seen are shit. Jack cites different reasons, but seriously, it sucks. There's a *one year* difference between "mature" at 17+ and "adults only" at 18+. WHY? But even that doesn't really matter. There are two things that *do* matter. People have value systems I guess is an important thing. An active Christian of any age is going to be more offended by GTA (or even Black & White) than any non-heavily-religious person of any age. Hey, I'm religious - although not in a theistic way - and I've not been offended by any game, really. Except by games I hope will be good and end up being disasteriously bad (I'm looking at *you*, Birthright). The other thing that matters, that was half-almost-touched upon was maturity. Age is not maturity. Maturity is maturity. If this Christian is 25, he will still be offended more than most 12 year olds would be. I'm not saying that Christians are immature, here, just that kids (especially gamers - not the charvers (regional variant of chavs)) have rather high maturity levels these days, for better or worse, and any rating system that doesn't cater for this is stuck in the dark ages. My proposal: Keep in content descriptors such as "violence", "strong langauge", etc. Add descriptors for theists, like (a better way of saying) "goes against mono/polytheism", or "has scenes against the values of relgion x", and whatnot. Remove all the useless age-related ratings. Add a simple rating system. a game is either: "kiddie-safe", not "kiddie-safe", or "seriously, not kiddie safe" (with possibly better names). What I would like to see happening is parents actively involved in the gaming that their kids do. Go shopping with your kid(s), choose games with them, play the games beforehand, decide for yourself if *you as a parent* think it's okay for your kid(s) to be playing them. Get closer to your kids, enjoy them a bit, and censor things at your own discretion, not just by what the box says - which would completely kill any sort of suing of games companies using tactics such as "OH BUT I DIDANT KNOW IT WAS A BAD GAME OHGNOES" and such. Thankyou.

You have the right to remain copied...

2005-11-25T17:49:00.000+02:00

In which I rant on the concept of copyright. --- You trod down to the gaming store, looking for that hot new game you've heard so much about. You're quite anxious to get the game and play it - it got good reviews and your friends recommended it. You make it to the store and find - to your dispair - that the damn thing costs £50. You find yourself forcing to choose between the game and roof over your head for a month. Of course, being sensible, you opt to pay rent instead. You come home, muttering curses under your breath, but you do get a thought. "Hey," your mind goes, "I can just as well download the damn thing!" Of course you can, but the problem is: It's illegal. It's illegal because the makers or publishers of the game copyrighted it, and thus only they may duplicate and distribute the game. Now, why is that so? That's of course because the developers and publishers need to make money on their creations. They have to make a living. The odd thing is, that there's loads freeware and even opensource programs out there. Hell, there's even an open source operating system. Now, if that's possible, why isn't it possible to create open-source commercial-quality games? Well, it's certainly possible to do so, but nobody does it. Instead we have publishers hiring armies of lawyers greedily keeping the rights to themselves. Programmers constantly inventing new schemes to protect the games, and "pirates" constantly inventing new schemes to circumvent these protections. This isn't good for the creative progress that good games are created by, nor does it allow any form of outside modification to the game. In the opensource community, modifying the programs on your harddrive is a god-given right, as it should be whatever you run.

"Wherein I Insult the Intelligence of the Console Market" or, "You People are Complete Retards"

2005-11-23T19:12:00.000+02:00

Unbelieveable stupidity. Utterly shocking. There are people out there paying multiple thousands for the Xbox 360 as I write. Reportedly one unit sold in a one day auction for $10,600 US Dollars. Dozens of units are going for 8 to 10 times their retail price. One ebay autction listing was audacious enough to say 'bid now and save money' as part of the listing's selling page. People. This is crazy. I know you have more money than you know what to do with, but this is just complete and total idiocy. I just can't wrap my mind around the kind of thought process that goes along with spending that kind of money on something that is less powerful, less functional, and less useful than your bargain bin desktop computer. What, exactly, are you expecting to get out of it? You aren't getting any exclusive games. Sure, you might get them slightly ahead of time, but patience...well, clearly you all are lacking in patience. Oh wait. I think Project Gotham Racing might be exclusive. Maybe. I'm sure that was a dealbreaker for you. Western society continues to amaze me. You really are all slaves to your impulses, and it makes me angry. I'm going to go now, and I hope that one day all of you crazy shits learn that there's more to life than instant gratification.

HUDS UP

2005-11-23T01:17:00.000+02:00

Or, why Feedback is King (Kong). Been playing quite a bit of King Kong recently. It's not a bad game, it's visually stunning and very well made, although like most movie licenses, there's not much to it and very little replay value exists. Anyway, the thing that struck me the most about the game is that it has no HUD whatsoever. Most of the game is played as an FPS, and it doesn't even have an ammo counter. Health is represented by visual disturbances and aural cues (Take a heavy whack from an enemy and your vision and hearing will blur, get your legs gnawed at by a giant centipede and you'll noticably limp for a while..close to death, your vision starts to fade red etc), and ammo is..well, it's certainly novel. Hit the B button and your character says how much ammo he has "3 in the chamber, 2 clips on backup!". It's very well done indeed. Another similar game is The Getaway on PS2, an incredibly flawed game that could have been something rather special with a bit of effort. At heart, a GTA clone set in London, but as per King Kong, there's no HUD at all. Health is represented by limping and bloodstains on the clothes, and when you're in a car, the route you need to take is indicated by your..er..indicators (left starts flashing when you need to turn left, for an obvious example). It doesn't quite work in the game though, as it simply doesn't have enough feedback. You're being led along a set driving route with the indicators, so little chances exist for exploring shortcuts or trying alternate routes. But that's more the fault of the game itself than anything. Now, on the flipside of the coin, you have Deus Ex 2. This game is HUD heaven. Virtually everything about anything appears on the interface, all accessible with a slight flick on the d-pad. You can adjust the colour, transparency and size of it too, for some reason that hasn't made itself clear yet. You can't put both games side by side and say "This game is better because of the HUD/lack of HUD", 'cause if the game's rubbish, the best interface in the world won't save it, but I can honestly say that I felt more immersed in the game playing King Kong..it felt incredibly cinematic and generally made me more aware whilst playing. Having your guy frantically shout "This is my last clip!" when reloading is a lot more immersive and a lot less breaking than simply watching a number decrease by one. It's something to think about, anyway.

What I've Been Up To

2005-11-22T05:05:00.000+02:00

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.

Numbered Bastards

2005-11-20T14:46:00.000+02:00

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

Clock Tower, or why I'm a using funny font

2005-11-19T17:50:00.000+02:00

I'm covering for Trey today, who's going to be a pa soon! Congrats, congraaats! Arr. Fittingly, this article was intended to be more experimental one, first with me and Trey doing it and then Fuzzy... But yarr, I wrote all of it in the end. No hard feelings or anything, just a knife. But hey, I get to use funky fonts and formatting! READ MORE! Clock Tower, hailed as one of the most creepiest, clumsiest and funniest games of all time, is a game that was released on SNES and spawned two sequels and a remake on PSX. Clock Tower 2 continued the story of the Barrows' legacy, but Clock Tower 3 as I understood is only a 'parody' without any real connection to the previous games. It puts the player in the role of a small orphan girl, stuck with her friends in a mansion that instead of providing home and shelter is actively trying to kill her. But for Jim9137 try to dig in the very essence of what makes this game so scary, creepy or what is it. PART I: BEGINNINGS (Jim9137, John9137) [John9137 and Jim9137 are arguing] Jim9137: "Wait, wait, this didn't belong in our contract! I spec-" [John9137 shows the contract.] Jim9137: "oh. crap. Uh, hello kids out there! We'll be your guide today, taking you for a tour of the famous Barrows' family mans-" [A scream can be heard outside.] Jim9137: "DON'T LOOK OUT THE WINDOWS." [More screams, lights go out.] PART II: Don't forget to pick up the ham (Jim9137) Jim9137: "Uh uh, what happened to the lights? Oh, damn it John, now you've done it! Curses where is the switch..." [Lights flicker on, revealing a kitchen with a fridge and a shelf of bottles on the opposite wall, the wall to the right has oven and a door leading to cold room. Kitchen knives hang right of the door. Lights keep on flickering.] Jim9137: "Uhm, okay I suppose. Where did Trey go? Ah, anyway. This is quite usual on the Barrows' mansion, pots and pans flying all around and things like that... Wait, not exactly. It's far subtler than that." [Jim9137 walks out of the room, peeks and goes in to a dark corridor.] Jim9137: "As I was saying, the terror of the Barrow's Mansion is quite subtle. Many things, many many things are quite wrong in here... It's quite imminent on various little details, such as portraits that bleed real blood. No, I'm not kidding. Real blood, just like the Virgin Mary statues do. The lack of music is just reinforcing this fact, because the sound of your footsteps is all you hear most of the time." [Sounds of footsteps as Jim9137 walks towards the end of the hallway.] Jim9137: "Most of the time, that is." [Jim9137 opens the door and slams it right shut again.] Jim9137: "Little surprises will dot your life around in the Barrows' mansion, such as this one. Hiding will be a prominent part of the game, and it's great fun to try to find out different places to hide." [Jim9137 runs towards the other end of the hallway, swings the door open. You're in a wooden garage with a lorry and ladder leading there. A shovel, box and hey lies on the floor. Jim9137 climbs up the ladder to the larry and lies down flat.] Jim9137: (whispering) "When you're being chased, the only way to get away is to either hide, or just wait until you're left alone, but that might take a while. The main villain is very, very scary person and unstable as well, and the fact that his whole family is out to get you isn't helping at all. Besides for his dad, but that's completely different story. Wait, what was that?" [A crash, scream, Jim9137 drops from the lorry and runs right through the hallway and the door he tried earlier. A large hall with a circling balcony (word?) and stairs leading up there. Right next to Jim9137 is a door, and way ahead is another door.] Jim9137: (panting) "But sometimes, it's just better to run. When you're being chased, your body produce thing called Adrealine. It allows you to do feats that you couldn't normally do, such as jump over holes, climb over cabinets... Stamina is vital part of the game, it's your health. Running depletes it for example, making you trip over. Right next to your chaser sometimes, which is not that nice. Only way to recover it is just to rest and give it some time, although it might turn out you're going to need it faster than it recovers. Which just contributes to the feel you're plaing a small girl." [Jim9137 opens the door across the hall, and keeps it open.] Jim9137: "But the greatest thing in Barrow's mansion is all the feel of mystery, which is going to keep you addicted. That mystery also cover the feel of insecurity, the feel that you are just a simple girl instead of a marine with nearinfite amounts of ammo and few tonnes of artillery in your pants and the fact that the whole mansion is probably one of the most twisted, sickest and crooked things on the existence filled with morbid details and secrets. You can tackle through it many different ways, many of which give you different end result in the end. Or you can steal the car and drive away, leaving your companions here... alone... uh..." [Fadeout] INTERLUDE: Twinkie Bobby!

Alright

2005-11-19T01:03:00.000+02:00

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...

Look! It's Not XCOM!

2005-11-17T20:41:00.000+02:00

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.

Los Matrixo - El Patho Del Neo

2005-11-17T00:55:00.000+02:00

Ahh, The Matrix. 1 good-for-its-time film, 2 "What the fuck were they thinking?" films, an average filler anime, and a godawful game. Can they cure things with another game? Er, no. This is possibly the most uneven game ever. For starters, the graphics. There's a few moments when you honestly think it's one of the best looking games ever (usually during the better cutscenes later in the game), and then there's moments when it looks like the inbred child of a retard and circa 1999 software rendering. The character models are fairly badly done, the model texturing is somewhat saved by the stupidly large amount of mapping and pixel shading on them, it uses distance blur far too much and there's quite a few annoying glitches. But on the whole, when you're zooming about punching people really really hard, it doesn't look too bad. The animations are superb, anyway. The game itself is basically Streets of Rage with slow motion and a few guns. You have three main fighting buttons, dodge, punch and special. You use the left trigger for focus (bullettime) and right trigger for various combat modifiers. This is where the game is very very good. Despite the limited controls, the combat feels excellent. It works almost entirely on basic prompts (hit the guy, press attack, then usually the best combo button for the situation will appear in the bottom left). It feels fluid, and quite natural after a while. Multi-combatant fighting is done quite well, although pulling off a 5-person combo does feel more like button-mashing luck than actual skill. The intuitive combo system is both its greatest flaw and weakness, especially when you get deeper into the game. You face off against Agents, who are supposed to be fairly tough to beat. But once you've unlocked the 5 hit combo, you also unlock some extra prompts to go with it, and usually one combo can be prompted into another. The agent fights are usually one-on-one, and you can pretty much kill them in one combo. In fact, once you've reached that stage, you can defeat almost any enemy in one combo, and probably large groups with one multi-person as well. The feeling of invincible-ness as The One is quite good, but most of the deaths in the game are due to really stupid design flaws (There's a mission where you plant a remote bomb on a pillar, then have to fight an agent underneath the pillar. You're holding the detonator in your hand, and touching the R trigger blows it. By this time, combat is natural, and using R a lot happens instinctively. It even prompts you for it a few times). I won't mention the gunplay in the game, as it's complete shit. If you've played Enter the Matrix, you'll know what I mean. It's not been improved on that. It -roughly- follows the storyline of the films..you can alter a few minor details here and there (you can evade capture from the Agents at the beginning if you can tolerate the level enough..more on that later), a few additions to flesh it out (you spend a few levels seeking out "Red Pills", people with potential to be freed and a few..uh.."changes" (the ending. I'll mention this at the end). The clips from the film are shit though, thrown together in sporadic 5 second bursts, edited with the manic energy of a music video, with no sequence or meaning. And, very noticably, there's none of the original soundtrack, including the licensed music. So instead of the epic choral chanting during the Super Smith fight, you get..generic rock music no. 4. Oh dear. Voice acting. Apparently they only got Lawrence Fishburne back. I don't know how, as it sounds nothing like him. I don't think they've got a single voice right, and the fact that pointless clips from the film flash by every 8 seconds with the proper voices in them, it makes the world seem disjointed, as if it's Little Britain in the Matrix. There's also hideously annoying sound cues in the game..the rooftop battle, with the infamous bullet dodge scene, you have to fight an agent a couple of times..Trinity needs to be in -exactly- the right place when Neo says "Trinity..help..", otherwise you have to try again. He says "Trinity..help.." approximately 40 times in this level. Continuing on from that, the first level is a really shit stealth section which has you wandering around Neo's office building hiding from agents. Although in actual fact you're just following crap instructions and heading vaguely towards the green area, if you can see it. The main problem with this level, and with most of the game is that the instructions are so unbelievably vague. "Go to the end of the hall", says Morpheus, whilst I'm standing at a T Junction. "The door on your right", when there's 4 doors on my right. In-game is no better. There's a mission where you're stuck in a glitch in the Matrix, the instructions are "Turn the carriage rightside up and pull the alarm when the train enters the station". So you spend ages wandering around the carriage looking for a way to turn it rightside up, when you finally discover all you have to do is LEAVE THE FUCKING CARRIAGE AND RE-ENTER IT. Finally, the ending. Oh dear God, the ending. This is a much hyped "Brand new ending" to the films that promised to "Redefine the story". Here's the ending. You beat Smith as per normal. All the other Smiths who were standing around announce "It isn't really that easy in a video game!" and leap together with rocks and stuff flying about, form this huge MegaSmith, who grabs some sunglasses off a billboard and throws cars at you. And to defeat this monstrosity? Press A a few times when it tells you. Neo doesn't die, the scene switches to Zion where the whole place is singing "We are the Champions" by Queen. I shit you not. Then, to make things even worse, the Wachowskis wander on and say "Hey, we changed the ending to make it more like a video game. Isn't that great?". ...No, Wachowskis, it isn't. Anyway. This could have been a really really good game. At some points it looks gorgeous, combat is very well thought out and superbly animated. The rest of the game fucking sucks though.

Gaming vs. Reality In the Subconscious Mind

2005-11-16T22:42:00.000+02:00

Gaming nostalgia. I'm sure we've all felt it. Wanting to play games we haven't played in years. And then actually doing it and getting a weird warm fuzzy feeling. Either that, or being disappointed it doesn't live up to the memories. I think, though, with the introduction of 3D graphics over a decade ago, things were stepped up a notch. A lot of gamers will report dreaming about a game if they've spent 5 hours or more in a row playing. They'll dream they're still playing it. These happen whether it's a 2D game or a 3D game. Really, it happens when you're spending the majority of your waking hours doing any one specific thing. For instance, back when I was in elementary school, during the first couple days of the summer months I would dream I was still in school. That was annoying. At night, being back in class. Heh. Okay, I'm getting off-track here. As for the dreaming that I'm gaming thing, I've had that happen a few times, sure. But it's not quite the same as some other dreams I've had. A lot of times I will dream I'm at a place from a game. Not that I'm playing the game, or even in a game, but that I'm simply in a location that was once part of a game. Some portion of my brain registered these 3D game locations as real locations I've been to. I've dreamt about being places I've seen in movies and read about in books, but they're never as real and as detailed as the dreams that take place in game locations. Often, I find myself wanting to revisit game locations. Which means having to play the game again. It can be kind of annoying, because I just want to be there again, not have to do all the stupid things said game may require. For instance, lately I've been wanted to visit the locations of Everquest again. It's been I'd say at least four years since I've played it, perhaps more. Back then I played it all the time. I was badly addicted. And now I want to see those locations again. Does that mean I want to buy an account, start a new character, level, etc. (generally just play the game)? No. Yet I still long to see those places again. Places like Surefall Glade, Qeynos Hills, Butcherblock Mountains, Greater Faydark. I had to look these names up because I'd forgotten them. But I don't forget the zones themselves. I could navigate my way through any of them like an expert. Sometimes my mind will be wandering and I'll think "I want to go there again sometime" before I realize they were game locations and not real ones. Granted that's usually only when I'm extremely tired, but it happens. Does this mean I'm losing touch with reality? I don't think so. It just means that games can and do actually affect our subconscious to an extent. That might bring up the issue of violence in games. I recall reading a review for Grand Theft Auto 3 in which the reviewer had been playing it non-stop for a few days and when he was out driving one day and saw a cop car, he thought for a split second "I could take him!" Of course, within the same second he realized how ridiculous it was, and that it was a reaction from playing the game too much. Think about it, haven't you ever caught yourself thinking something similar to that? Something to do with a game, but in real life? I'm fairly certain pretty much every hardcore gamer has. Now, think about this for a moment. If you lacked the mental faculties to realize right away how stupid those thoughts are, you just might act on them. Do I think I violent games can turn people into killers? No. But I do think if some one has already completely lost touch with reality, and is used to killing people in games 24/7, that it's possible they might get the urge to do it in real life. Here's something surprising: I agree with Jack Thompson to an extent. I don't agree with his methods, and he is extremely misinformed about a lot of things, but in general I understand his cause. I don't think violent games should be sold to children because their sense of reality is more fragile than most adults. I'm sure most gamers agree with that. We don't want these games in kids' hands. But we also don't want them to stop being produced. Jack Thompson is out to kill Rockstar games. I see nothing wrong with their games. I didn't mean to turn this article into a debate about violent games, but simply about how 3D games in general affect our subconscious. As graphics get better and better, and more and more realistic, will they affect us on an even deeper level? I really can't say. But I think it's entirely possible.

First Impressions - The Movies

2005-11-15T00:04:00.000+02:00

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

First Impressions - X3: Reunion

2005-11-13T02:39:00.000+02:00

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.

An observation.

2005-11-11T23:59:00.000+02:00

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?

I Like some of those Rogues

2005-11-11T16:42:00.000+02:00

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.

Metal Gear ramblings.

2005-11-10T17:56:00.000+02:00

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...

Civ 4, or Human History Through Rose-Tinted Glasses

2005-11-08T21:23:00.000+02:00

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.

Civ 4 is great stuff.
Civ 4 is basically the same as Civ 3, but rounder.
Civ 4 has all of the classic gameplay you'd expect from the Civ franchise.
Civ 4 is still a beer and pretzel affair.
Civ 4 makes me feel like a teenager again.
While Civ 4 is a good game, probably the best game this year, it still doesn't live up to the gritty, cerebral and "adult" Alpha Centauri.
Civ 4 is not a simulation or even a rough approximation of the span of human history.

There you have it. You'll love Civ 4; you can't help but love it. The gameplay is classic and there's enough to keep you going for months. The vast majority of people will never go beyond that, because it's quite simply a well crafted piece of entertainment. Those of us who have been playing these types of games for a long time will likely be looking for something more. Now, I know what you're saying. Civ was never meant to be about genocide, slavery, exploitation, disease, ad nauseam... It's a *game*. Those things are never fun, and games are supposed to be fun by definition. All right, you've got me there, and I agree that none of those things are fun, and most of them are quite scary. Also, Civ 4 is a strategic puzzle, with an outer layer of vaguely historical stuff in a properly presented package in tune with the ESRB rating. I accept that...you're absolutely right. What's my point? I think there's something wrong when the definitive strategy game of human history totally fails to address the issues that really make us human...our weaknesses. Everything about Civ show us what we view as our strengths: Mind, Body, and Soul. We use each in varying amounts to achieve goals, and we are only set back in those goals by some mistake on our part. External forces are entirely absent in Civ, and everything is under your control. It is about time that gamers and students are shown that sometimes, even the best of efforts fail, and that adapting to new situations that cannot be changed is sometimes the only way to succeed.

LIVE

2005-11-08T18:07:00.000+02:00

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.

Spartan: Total Warrior - First Impressions

2005-11-07T21:57:00.000+02:00

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.

Woo @ Oblivion

2005-11-06T01:11:00.000+02:00

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> yeah

and:

<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.

Big Frikkin' Giants

2005-11-05T07:51:00.000+02:00

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.

Road Rash

2005-11-04T14:17:00.000+02:00

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.

Bleh @ S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

2005-11-03T21:13:00.000+02:00

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)

overhaul

2005-11-02T02:34:00.000+02:00

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!

F.E.A.R.

2005-11-01T17:48:00.000+02:00

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

i have a cunning plan

2005-10-31T01:08:00.000+02:00

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.

I Like those Rogues

2005-10-25T18:50:00.000+03:00

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)

The corner, the gun, the interrupt and me, or why I just got shot to pieces

2005-10-16T20:01:00.000+03:00

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. --- 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.

Price games fairly, you fat wankers

2005-09-26T22:55:00.000+03:00

With so many people supposedly updating here you'd expect updates more often, eh. Following is a quick rant about game pricing, thank you. Let's say I wanted to buy Fantastic 4. Ok so I actually don't, 'cause I know it'll suck if I do, but for argument's sake let's continue. It'd cost me £29.99. Now, if I was born in a different country, let's say... I don't know, the USA, I'd be paying... $29.99. Wow identical prices! Or not. Let's see, in USD I'd be paying here $53.56. WHY THANK YOU. Yes, that's right, I could be paying £16.86, which actually *is* an almost reasonable price for a game (I'd say £15 is reasonable for a good GBA game, £10 for not so good GBA game), but no, I pay nearly *double* that because of where I live. No wonder there's such a piracy culture here, I might as well join them. This has been the norm in the UK for a long time. Consoles, PC, handhelds, it doesn't matter. We pay more for games. The only tiny consolation is that the games we get, since they're released later than the ones from the US and Japan, usually have the bugs ironed out, especially console games. But what consolation is that? I pay twice the price, for what? A patched version? So what? So fucking what?

Portico, or why it ain't a port to ICO, honey

2005-09-03T21:24:00.000+03:00

... 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. --- 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.

The Good, The Bad, and The Cheesy

2005-08-21T20:48:00.000+03:00

or Why Bad Games Are Guilty Pleasures by doowopman "Phantansmagoria? You actually like that game? Good god man, but why." This is a typical reaction when I tell anyone I actually enjoy Sierra's infamous 1994 7Cd monstrosity. What drives someone to enjoy these little guilty pleasures? What perverse kind of joy can we possibly get in playing a game with awful acting or in the case of strategy games, completely mangled AI? Sometimes, you just need a break from the perfection and seriousness of other titles. It's almost that simple. It can also cause gales of laughter ergo giving one a good psychological release. The logic sort of follows. Play something flawless like Gabriel Knight 2 or Europa Universalis and you can feel the sweat dripping from your brow. Lots of gears turning upstairs and they are going to need a break before they shut down. Enter one of many guilty pleasure games. Fire up the game, play it for a while. Get a nice bowl of buttered popcorn, kick back, and chuckle at such professional dramatics as the "soup's on" sequence from the 11th Hour or the "surprise ending" to Phantasmagoria 2. Don't be afraid to play one of these awful games! It may just do your brain some good. Now you can explain to your friends why you enjoy your favorite worst game in the world.

Salvo, a completely unrelated to anything or nothing review

2005-08-15T00:17:00.000+03:00

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?

Music: Not just an afterthought, please

2005-08-11T22:30:00.000+03:00

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?

Silver City, or why I've been amiss for ages

2005-08-10T20:18:00.000+03:00

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. --- 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.

Titles, or where have all the good names gone

2005-07-07T21:09:00.000+03:00

Okay, this is going to be completely unrelated article about anything which I shall type in grand total of fifteen minutes with all my mind focused on just on it so I apologize about all the errors and the like before hand. This is my method to post, right from the mind, right from the core of one's cortex to the magnificent bubbly things and today I shall discuss about game's names. Like, totally. I hope at least, because I'm not exactly on the best moods to do such thing. ANYWAY, NAMES, QUEUE MR ROBISNONS. --- 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.

Addendum: Okay! Thanks to Mandrake42, we all know where Looking Glass comes from! Excuse me while I quote: "It refers to an old tale Alice Through the Looking Glass (Must have been hard fitting that on a book cover). It's basically the same as Alice in Wonderland except this time Alice steps through a looking glass and gets transported to a world where in thing can happen. I think its supposed to be a metaphor for what looking glass hoped to achieve with its games." Yes. I knew there was something hideous going on here, didn't I tell you? Ha! Now to get some hot dogs.

Non-Linearity

2005-07-02T18:52:00.000+03:00

Non-linearity, of a sort, is something we don't often see in games. These days, it's fairly common for most games of any type to have elements of it. Deus Ex included multiple paths based upon your skills, and gave you enough experience that your skillset would generally let you attempt at least two paths. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory added bonus objectives and alternate routes. More commonly, RPGs tend to include it - recent Bioware offerings in particular allow both "good" and "evil" paths, and even going back to the Baldur's Gate series and beyond, there were seperate paths for different classes and alignments. But this, to me, isn't really non-linearity. It's a little bonus, but that's all. What I'm talking about, and what I adore above all else in gaming, is something far rarer. It's something where your path through the game can change utterly depending on what choices you make. Obviously, this isn't without problems, particularly for developers. Depending on how it's handled, testing may quickly devolve into a nightmare. Besides which, this won't work for some types of games, particularly if the designer is interested in telling one story. As a player and a character, though, I find it becomes more interesting. In a recent forum argument about RPGs, this sort of thing is what was dubbed "true roleplaying". Sadly, there really aren't many of these games out there. Two of the most prominent are the Way of the Samurai series on PS2. In each of these, you take the role of a wandering samurai who wanders into a town, and depending on your actions and choices, the action unfolds in a different manner. In the first game, two samurai clans were warring over control of a tiny village. You wander in, and in the opening scene, you see a girl from the village being carried off by one of the clan lieutenants and some of his soldiers. She screams at you for help. What do you do? Do you avoid the area entirely? Do you fight them off? Do you try to talk them out of it? Your choice there will certainly affect your path. If you ignore them, a different scene will take place shortly after. If you fend them off, you may have just made a mortal enemy - depending on how you handled the situation - but you'll get free lunch at the girl's restaurant (which leads to more complications, before long). If you lose the fight, or give up, you'll wind up without your money, tied to a train track, where you may be saved by the leader of the opposing clan. It's all up to you. The game itself is divided up into time blocks. It takes place over three days, each with - from memory - a Morning, Afternoon, and Night. You advance to the next time block when you make one of various choices in that time block. They may very well be unrelated - it's not simply a case of one person asking you to do something, and you'll move on to the next time block if you accept or refuse. There are generally at least three or four "choices" in each time block, and they may be utterly unrelated. A blacksmith may ask you to run an errand for him, triggering the next time block. However, if you don't visit him, and instead go to see a clan leader, you may be given a mission to escort his son. You'll miss out entirely on the blacksmith's subplot, but it'll go on regardless. In your first playthrough, you will most likely miss an awful lot of events, just because of this. Did I mention that each game takes around 3 or 4 hours? In those 3 or 4 hours, you'll learn about the town, ally yourself with people, bear grudges, kill people, and quite possibly be killed. It has a wonderful combat system, but I'm not reviewing the game - this is about the approach it takes to telling a story. And when you're done with those three or four hours, and have seen one of the endings? You'll get a clue as to how you could have done better, and then you're back into it again. Only with the weapons you picked up and upgraded, and the extra bonuses you got, the last time you finished it. If you die, you lose them all. The only way to attempt the higher difficulties (the only reward for which is some rarer weapons and new enemies) is to do well on the easier ones and work your way up. That's not so much non-linearity as it is an incentive to play the game again, but combine that with the thoughts of the stories you haven't seen yet, and the ways it can unfold, and you may well go straight back in. I know I did. I want to see more things like this. I want to see games that may only take 3 or 4 hours to finish, games that drop you in a scenario, ask you "What now?", and let you decide how things transpire through your actions. I want to feel important, I want to see how things could have turned out if I'd chosen differently. I don't want to feel that I'm just following orders, or just running through a maze shooting things. I want to *choose*. I want to see how things would turn out if I'd failed, or done things a different way. I want to know just how important I am to the game's universe. I had an idea for something somewhat more personal but stil along these lines a little while ago. If you've seen Battle Royale, imagine something like that. You're dropped off on an island with 20 or so people, and you're forced to kill each other. How do you respond? Perhaps you go it utterly solo, murdering everyone. Perhaps you try and ally yourselves with different people or groups. Maybe some of them will backstab you. You'll learn their personalities as you replay it, and you may very well have a unique experience, as there'd be enough possibilities. The more possibilities and variables, though, the less "personal" the experience may feel, if handled incorrectly. There are problems to this form of non-linearity, though. It requires an awful lot of work to map out all the possibilities, and even to come up with a story interesting enough and with enough facets that such a thing would work. Likewise, it's all planned out, and doesn't really allow for emergent gameplay in plot respects. You won't be telling your mates about this amazing thing that happened, and it won't be like Deus Ex where you might discover later on that Paul *could* have survived, but died because of your actions, simply because the whole point is to replay it and see it different ways. It won't provide a truly unique experience. But it could, if other elements were added, with a particularly clever designer. So come on, developers and designers. Let's see more things like this. Let's have some more non-linear games, some things where we have our choices and can act as we wish, with many paths and many endings. I know I'm not the only one who thinks like this.

ALLENS

2005-06-26T23:03:00.000+03:00

My recent gaming sessions - Shenmue 2 (Started a new game, currently at that fucking annoying bit where you have to carry books out of the library for, like, 3 weeks.) Paper Mario 2 True Crime: Streets of LA (which, for all the bad rap it got, is actually quite playable in hindsight) GTA: SA, which is horrifically overrated. Alien Hominid. The only one of these I've put any real effort and time into is Paper Mario 2, which I've stuck with for a couple of weeks now, give or take. That's rare for me..my gaming sessions per-game are usually measured in days. But anyway. This ain't what this post is about. This post is about these bastards here - 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 *

Resident Evil 4

2005-06-23T19:53:00.000+03:00

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.
The cave troll from Lord of the Rings makes an impromptu appearance. This leads somewhat neatly onto one of the first changes you'll notice. There are no zombies in this game. Your foes, for the most part, are human (at least, in appearance). They display a few zombie traits - pallid skin and slow, shuffling movements, without any desire to protect themselves or use tactics. However, they use weapons. They can drive vehicles. They will do their damndest to hunt you down and kill you. One of the first sections has the entire population of one of the village districts coming after you, and you have no cover whatsoever. The sheer numbers coming after you are astounding, if you've played another RE game. What do you do? Maybe you try climbing up the village belltower. A nice idea, as you can happily shoot any of the villagers who climb up after you. Unfortunately, they'll lob molotov cocktails up at you, setting fire to the tower. Bugger. So then you dive out of the window (Leon, happily, takes no falling damage, and can do all sorts of context-sensitive actions - climb ladders, kick down ladders, hop over fences, dive out of windows, etc.) and decide to take refuge in the large-ish building you can see. You slam the doors, and in a moment reminiscent of the first Alone in the Dark, you shove a bookcase in front of the window, a desk in front of the door, and then start scouring around for supplies. If you really think that a bookcase and a closed door are going to stop them, you've got another think coming. They surround the building and start climbing up to go in through the upstairs window, while others start trying to push over the bookcase and kick open the door. And then you hear the chainsaw and realise that you really aren't in Kansas anymore. A gigantic villager with a bag over his head cuts down your desk barricade and runs up the stairs after you. Yes, runs. He doesn't walk or shuffle. He runs. And while you're desperately trying to fend off the other villagers who're lobbing axes at your head, you can see him getting closer - and then he reaches you, grabs hold of you, and hacks off your head. You stare incredulously at the screen the first time this happens, but it's true. No matter how much health you have, if that chainsaw-wielding lunatic gets close to you, he will cut off your head in one swift movement of that blood-splattered chainsaw. This is when you first realise that this game is *serious* about being hard. "But I haven't saved yet," you cry. "Do I really have to do the opening sections again?" No. That's where one of the next wonderful changes comes in. When you die, the game gives you the choice of continuing. If you say yes, then it'll start you at the beginning of the "room" you were at - unless it was a particularly big area, in which case it'll start you at a checkpoint somewhere around the middle of it. If it was a boss fight, you'll start off right before the boss, giving you a chance to do anything you need to before taking a few steps forward to start the encounter again. This time, you think you know what you're doing. You charge straight through the villagers (who, incidentally, shout orders and instructions to each other in Spanish, which is really creepy, although most of these boil down to things like "Get him!") and go straight to that house. You barricade the doors, run to the back and grab the herbs and ammo, and head straight upstairs to pick up the shotgun. You fend off the villagers that break in through the windows, and wait for the sound of the chainsaw. You spot him coming up the stairs, take careful aim, and fire straight at his head. And it doesn't faze him. You fire again, and again, and again, and again, and eventually manage to knock him down. You turn your attention back to the throng of villagers who are at this point grabbing you by the throat and shaking you - and then you see him get back up. Bzzt, splat. You are dead. Continue? And then you *really* understand what they mean by hard. From these two encounters, you've learned to fear the sound of a chainsaw, because it will always herald the arrival of an enemy who moves quickly, takes a ton of punishment before going down, and can kill you in a single slice. The game has taught you to fear this enemy, and it's done it well.
Somewhat foreboding. The camera angle itself is set behind Leon at all times. Unfortunately, this means that he'll occasionally obscure your view, but this happens less frequently than you'd think and you can quickly turn for a second just to see if there's anything there. One issue is that he doesn't turn nearly as quickly as I'd like him to, though this is apparantly a design issue and it certainly raises the tension. You do have a button combination to turn him 180 degrees instantly, which helps an awful lot when it comes to running and then turning around to shoot at whatever's chasing you. It can get awfully confusing trying to work out what's going on when you have multiple enemies up close, however. The controls are simple, effective, and reminiscent of the other games. Hold down the R trigger to bring up your equipped weapon, and press A to fire. When not holding down R, A is used for all the context-sensitive actions (opening doors, jumping out of windows, and all those other wonderful things), B is your Run button, and Y brings up your inventory (pausing the game as it does so). The L trigger always brings up your knife, while is astonishingly useful for one simple reason. You don't have to waste ammo shooting open crates, if you don't want to waste time switching to your inventory to change weapon. In a pinch, the knife can also help you against enemies, but it's generally not recommended. You can't move when aiming with either knife or gun, which is largely inexplicable except from a design reason, but it works, once again, to heighten the tension. You can forgive the game for little quirks like this simply because, while hard, it's rarely frustrating. If you die, you'll just wind up redoing that fight again. This is a checkpoint system done right. So, combat. As previously mentioned, hold down the R trigger and Leon raises his weapon, with a laser-sight helpfully pointing out whatever you're aiming at. The enemies have various hit locations, which is frequently useless in first-person shooters (other than headshots, naturally) but not here. You're almost always outnumbered, meaning your ability to aim for the legs and cause enemies to temporarily collapse is extraordinarily helpful. Blast two enemies in the shins and they'll drop to the ground, giving you ample time to either deal with a third, or get a few shots in on their stationary heads. You also have the ability to shoot their weapons out of their hands, which is occasionally helpful, though never more so than when one's carrying dynamite. Blast that, and the resulting explosion will hopefully kill anyone near to them. Enemies drop copious amounts of money, herbs, and ammunition. While you never have enough ammunition to be able to blast away wildly, you don't have to watch it as carefully as you might normally expect. Herbs are mixed and used for healing, while the money can be given to a curiously-accented merchant who crops up every now and then to sell you weapons and upgrades (though never any ammo), and buy any treasures you've found. All in all there are about 13 weapons you'll get your grubby mitts on your first time through the game, all of which can have damage, reload time, and capacity upgraded - for an increasingly steep price. Stylistically, the game is stunning. The early areas are about as brown as Quake was, though in a good way. The village reeks of desolation, with wooden shacks standing along dirt paths, ringed with dead trees and fallen leaves. Characters are extremely well-rendered and animated, and the entire thing looks *good*. The only real complaint is that the screen is letterboxed with black borders at the top and bottom, but with something that looks this good, it's bearable. Aurally, the voice acting is by and large decent. Not as good as it could have been, with a few pathetic voices here and there, but certainly better than the past of the series. The villagers' voices are well done, with the use of a real language making them seem an awful lot more believable. The music is good at building tension, though not as effective as the silence the game sometimes employs. When the only things you can hear are your footsteps and maybe something in the distance, sudden, jarring shouts or chords really make a difference. You'll get extremely sick of Ashley's biting screams of "Leon!", though.
Always outnumbered, never outgunned. This game employs a very small number of silly puzzles, as opposed to the previous entries in the series. There are occasional scavenger hunts for keys but your map generally points out where you need to head next, reducing frustration enormously. Your inventory is also divided up nicely - weapons, ammunition, and herbs are placed in your "attache case", the size of which can be upgraded at the merchant. Any treasures or puzzle items, however, are placed in an entirely seperate inventory, with infinite space. This is a welcome step-up from the number of slots you had in the rest of the series, but it'd be nice if you could carry as much as you wanted. Despite the upgrades from the merchant, you never really have enough space for everything you want, particularly when every individual grenade takes up two slots. Think Deus Ex in terms of inventory size, and you're not far off. At least you don't have to carry any ink ribbons. Saving still takes place at typewriters, but you now have infinite saves, and because of the Continue system you don't really need to save unless you're planning on turning off the system any time soon. One more thing that deserves mention is that this game did cinematic gaming *right*, particularly when compared to things like the Metal Gear Solid series. Cutscenes, though frequent, are rarely dull. You have a Shenmue-style QTE system where you'll need to hammer buttons to affect things. In most games, when the hero's being chased by a boulder, you merely watch. If he has a knife flung at his head, you'll see him stylishly dodge it. In this, when you're being chased by a boulder, you're hammering at whatever button it tells you to in order to avoid being squashed. Get a knife flung at your head and the game will flash up with two buttons you'll need to hit to successfully dodge it. Don't hit them in time, and it's the Continue screen for you. These pop up every now and then in the actual game, as well - most frequently in boss fights. If a gigantic tentacle monster takes a swing at you, a pair of buttons may very well pop up. Hit them, and Leon will backflip out of the way. You'll get very, very good at this, and it really does add to the cinematic feel of the game that the main character can do this stuff at times other than cutscenes. The game is also fairly long. Your first time through will probably take somewhere between 16-20 hours, not counting deaths, and upon finishing it you'll unlock some extra weapons and modes, my personal favourite being Mercenaries. Pick one of five characters (four of whom are unlockable), and one of four levels. Score as many points as possible in the time limit. You get points for killing enemies, and bonus points for killing more than one at the same time and more than one in a row. Dotted around the levels are time bonuses. If you die, you get nothing. It's a throwback to the action games of yore where score was everything, and it's great fun. So, the all-important question: Is RE4 scary? Well, no, not really. There's a hefty level of tension, and you'll certainly feel fear at times (most noticably whenever you hear a chainsaw), but it's all in a rather camp, B-movie horror film way. You've got the regular Resident Evil-style silly villains, the gigantic tentacle monsters, and the hideous genetic mutants. And yet somehow, it all works. All in all, the game is action-packed, fun, and longer than you'd expect (you'll probably wind up thinking you're near the end fairly early on, but you aren't), not even counting the bonuses and the desire to play it through more than once. There are some superb set-pieces that I really don't have the heart to spoil, and an interesting enough plot. They haven't managed to get rid of all the faults in the previous games, and they have a few new ones, but it's a fantastic experience anyway. This is a beautiful game, and probably one of the best games I've played in recent months. It really is a shame that it has to be compared to the rest of the series, but that's essential to make sure it's not thought of as being like them. All hail Resident Evil 4, new king of survival horror. Note: The images used in this review have been taken from a pre-release of the game. The visible status bars are not the ones used in the release version, and there may be other changes.

Updating, or why Goodfellow poked me in the eye with a cane

2005-06-21T20:45:00.000+03:00

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? --- 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.

Players, or why I do I have a huge razor-edged scytche next to my door

2005-06-20T23:12:00.000+03:00

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.

Gaming blindspots

2005-06-20T03:33:00.000+03:00

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?

2005-06-17T00:15:00.000+03:00

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.)

Destined to Obscurity

2005-06-12T21:11:00.000+03:00

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.

Immersion, or why I couldn't figure any titles for this

2005-06-05T13:33:00.000+03:00

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! --- 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:

Graphics, you don't need funky 3D graphics to achieve the effect, XCom managed to do it and it was just VGA, as long as they fit the game and actually have something to contribute!
Gameplay, if you're struggling with the interface half the time, you can say bye bye to the immersion. If everything plays smoothly it's going to way easier to achieve. BUT! There are always exceptions. System Shock 1 had most annoying interface ever, and it still creeped me out. And to manage to creep me out, you need to have immersion!
Atmosphere, related to the last point. Halo loses it's atmosphere faster than a jumbojet falls from the sky thanks to it's BLATANT COPY PASTEING, and so goes the immersion! But System Shock 1 managed to keep it up with the help of various ways, and even Doom 3 have managed to achieve this with pitch-black rooms and monsters jumping out. For some at least. (Really, pitch-black rooms were last used in Doom as far as I know. Such simple way to give the player a heartattack!)
Story. And this is probably the most contributing factor to the immersion. Simply having a story doesn't mean it's going to be helpful to the immersion, but having a good story or one that gives you the feel that you're actually affecting the game world and it's characters in some way, it's going to immerse you in faster than a Joq drinks 36 pints. I could've labelled this as Interaction, but I'll just slap it under Story, because interaction is pointless if you don't have a reason why!

So, why should a normal gamer care about these things? Why am I even bothering to write about crap like this? For starters, X-Com wouldn't have been so successeful if it didn't provided the feel that you are in fact, the last unit in the Earth capable of fighting against the hordes of aliens. It's a kickass way to make a game kickass, and even if the story was lacking... Well, you were in fact making the story for yourself and you felt that your actions had effect. And they actually did, which is even better. A regular gamer should care about it because firstly they give you more your moneys worth than just shooting aliens in your crosshair without deeper meaning. IT'LL BORE YOU FASTER THAN I DO! And the modern games, they really try to achieve this. But in my honest opinion and this is what really matters to this blog, they try to achieve in wrong ways. They have pretty graphics, but the pretty enemies just rush at you and DIE. Or maybe even shoot a grenade at themselves. Only way you can interact is by killing them, you can't shout or beg for mercy or anything like that effect, which you should be able to with this modern technology of ours. But guess I'm daydreaming. Photo-realistic graphics inequals immersion if the inhabitants just stroll around aimlessly, and the trees don't swing with the wind. Story. Halo, although many of you will probably disagree with me in this, had a story copied straight from Ö-Class Scifi book's back cover. NOT FUN OR REALLY IMPRESSIVE. The whole guys jumping behind your jeep thing was cool, but they didn't really comment to the situation or contribute in any other way besides being cannon fodder. And then refusing to follow you without any particular reason. Heck, you can't even talk to them. WASTED POTENTIAL WARNING. Multiplayer games, and especially those hotseat or party games, they really don't need any of this. Just sneering and mocking or gasping in amazement as your unbeatable character finally falls, is enough immersion. Friend sitting right next to you gives an immersion what single-player games have to look from far away. Internet games on other hand, really need people you can play with. Not random leet3noob9399439 from random public server is going to give you a good immersion. No sir. Well, as afterword, I guess my point is that if the game doesn't make you care about the game more than just finishing it, it has failed. Might give you coffeebreak fun but it's not enough of a reason for me to spend 50€ or 60€ as it seems these days to be for a game that fails to amuse me in the long term. Immersion is huge part of the content and I'm expecting the game developers and publishers to finally re-realize that and actually give me that content damnitgoshdarnbee! PS: As some of you might've noticed, the titles of posts are now colored according to the author, to ease your reading. I'm pretty sure most of you are still thinking I'm writing all these articles forced by who else than John9137, but just to prove you wrong, neener! Next challenge will be to give them sort of label according to the type of post.

UFO2000, or how I've managed to miss both this gem and bunch of Steves?

2005-05-31T14:39:00.000+03:00

Most of you who still read this rather unupdated blog might know that I've recently started playing UFO2000, which frankly still is quite awesome, mind you. UFO2000 being an opensource remake of X-Com: UFO Defense or UFO: Enemy Unknown... But most of all, it has multiplayer. Working one. Lobbyed too. So, to add to my trackrecord of reporting opensource remakes, here comes UFO2k! (click read more and yes, and to avoid from doing that massive JA3D article too.) --- Combine one of the best, if not the best, squaddie turn-based strategies into a smooth, (mostly) working multiplayer package and what you get? Maaayhem! To quote DrunkCow, the apparent master of this game, "KAPAPOWPOWPIU". And that sums up the game pretty well, lots and lots of sweating and hoping for that 31% to hit and knock that power armor guy before he unleashes his deadly accurate Autocannon explosive volley, or to kill Steves before they flock and come to do some probing. Unfortunately, the game has it's flaws which I shall adress first. The balance, the issue of balance! X-Com was very unbalanced game, when you think about it. High Explosivs obliterating whole blocks, Rocket Launchers doing just the same, Autocannons spewing fiery infernos full auto and the Alien Grenades... List goes on and on. I have to tip my hat to the developers for acknowledging the problem and doing something about it, but for now, the explosives are rather useless. Besides for terraforming the ground which is always fun! The other guns are, as far as I can tell, somewhat left untouched. I still can't understand how a power armor guy managed to withstand 2-5 direct hits from my Cannon, but maybe the dices were mocking me... Anyway, every game has a point limit. Point limits are good, we don't want those flying armor guys armed to teeth to obliterate the whole area and turn the whole game into WWIII simulator, now don't we? A regular, standard armor human with a laser rifle costs about 1000 points, which seems rather reasonable to me. There's even a weight limit to prevent one from carrying too much, that limit based on Strength stat, I think. No more guys armed to teeth here. Problem is the issues of rushing, the dreaded rushing! "Steve army" is practically 15 Sectoids armed with Plasma Rifles. No X-Com unit of smaller size can withstand that much of power, since they tend to die from one hit. And Plasma Rifle can spew deadly shots in such a deadly rate and with such accuracy, that it's very hard to win. Now on original X-Com, this was countered with the AI who didn't really cooperate his units to achieve such feats as is possible in UFO2000 with a clever human player. That's the main problem with UFO2000, and in developing as well. Playing against the AI is surely different from playing against a human. But that's not all! UFO2000 is, still, in my honest opinion, one of the best games I've played in a while. Not just satisfying in to the old regular "Pit Aliens agains Humans and look who wins!" you have missions, scenarios, randomized terrains, very customizable squads and a working lobby system! The essentials, they're all there. The balancing issues are a real problem for me, probably because I tend to get my arse kicked on it, but that's alright. HOLD! CAPTURE! ASSASINATION! BREAKTHROUGH! Those are just great ideas to implement, but the map size sort of limits the possibilities. Especially on the latter, since you can run quite effectively from side to side in a turn or spread your defending forces quite effectively to kill ANY threat which comes into sight. Randomized terrain is randomized terrain and that's that! Oh, one nitpick. You have to open doors by rightclicking.

Running in the hot desert.

2005-05-22T08:16:00.000+03:00

Hey hey. Trey here. I promised to do this update, what, like two weeks ago for Jim? Well, here we go then, I guess. A Tale in the Desert is an MMORPG based in... Egypt. In name and geography anyway, I don't think Egypt had the kinda technology that's in this game. But anyway. What sets this apart from most MMORPGs (and also why I enjoy it so much) is that there isn't any combat in it. You can compete against other players in various games (will also go into that later), but for the most part you work together with others to pass various tests, build monuments, and research technologies. The story is rather interesting. In lieu of copy-pasting it here (since it's rather long) or giving a bastardized version of it, I'll provide ---->THIS LINK HERE<---- to the story page on the game's wiki. The rest of this review will make more sense upon reading that. The tests are fun, and they're all quite original. There are 7 disciplines: The Discipline of Architecture; The Discipline of Art; The Discipline of The Human Body; The Discipline of Conflict; The Discipline of Leadership; The Discipline of Thought; and The Discipline of Worship. Each has their own style. The Discipline of Architecture, as you would expect, involves building stuff, while the Discipline of Conflict involves various minigames played against other players. Each encompasses individual tests, and passing each test gets you further into its discipline. Good stuff, all in all. My only problem with this game is that it's HUGE and involves LOTS of walking. Later on when you pick up a few skills you can set waypoints and travel automatically to them, but before that, well, it sucks. A lot. This isn't a very good review, I know. I'm tired, and I'm doing this more out of obligation than willingness, but take my word for it: this game is one of, if not THE best, and definitely the most original MMORPG out there. Hell, it's one of the most original 'games' out there. And best of all, it has a 24 hour trial period (24 hours of game time, not one day to play) so there's no reason not to try it out. Need any help, /chat Trizzle ingame, and I'll be sure to answer any questions you might have. Trey out.

Phantasy Star Online: Blue Burst (BETA), or what the heck am I doing amidst these blue eyed freaks?

2005-05-16T23:22:00.000+03:00

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*

Busy busier and busiest

2005-05-05T17:36:00.000+03:00

I'm busy. Really, I am! I'm busy with few school things I'm supposed to do. Anyway, I'm still working on the next part of JA3suckeD series, but I suppose you might get something from other BastardNumbered members. I think. I'll probably send John after them. In any case, we're still alive. In some degree or another, so fear not.

Project: Snow-white

2005-04-28T20:53:00.001+03:00

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. --- 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 :(

Flash games... I don't really need to say anything else.

2005-04-23T00:03:00.000+03:00

The Helicopter. The Roflcopter. The Defend the Castle. The countless Tetris clones, marble and other shooters. The Yeti Sports, stickdeath and so on and so on... Does any of these ring any bell for you? Should, since this is the one of the more hideous parts of the Internet. The dreaded Flash games. And now we're going to take a look at them. --- "Holy shit, what the heck is that?" Is quite regular scream at the computer class in my school. A bunch of students, with nothing productive to do at their breaks is drawn to the wonders of the internet, as usual. Most of this time, instead of doing something productive like reading your email (Seriously, no one does that at school. It's not safe.) or searching for info to your homework, people are either A) Scrambling through IRC-Gallery, B) Laughing at some silly pic of the day, á la Goatse et all, D) Playing flash games. What are Flash Games? Well, they are those coffee-break fun games on the internet. There's already hundreds, thousands of them all around. "You play Java games! EW!" Was the saying not too long ago. Then flash kicked in and Java actually became quite competetive language for games. And that's how my dear readers, stuff happened. In fact, most of the Flash games can be summed with two words; "Stuff happened." And as with everything, there's lots of crap and few gems buried underneath. For example, www.homokaasu.org sports quite amazing games in it's site which are both innovative AND addictive, but then we could take a look at www.miniclip.com or www.candystand.com and we could see what cloned crap 85% Flash games are. Someone makes a rather neat concept (for example Defend your Castle) and after few weeks you see 300 and one clones made of it. With varying themes, parodies and some actually expand the concept, but the plagiarism is even WORSE with Flash games than with the 'real' games. Take a look at thisand check the description. They won't even deny the fact! Hmpf. With free games, this is probably unavoidable, well, freely distributed that is. I've seen few games that need money in order to lock some of their features... Although, I have to wonder if these types of schemes make any money. You could just buy a more proper game while you're at it, instead of wasting the money on some obscure game that you saw on even obscurer netsite. It's screaming deceit all over it. And there's probably a clone of it somewhere, anyway. Another thing with flash games, as I understood it, is that it's way easier than programming in Java and thus is why it's so immensly popular. Judging from some of the graphics in some games, the games are made by 3-year-olds. Really, some of it's that bad. Anyway, are these games good for anything? Why are they so popular? Is it about the same effect as spam was? To start, yes, they can be quite good timekillers. And quite innovative on the game designing part, since no one is breathing down your neck and demanding that your bring this game to the christmas markets or trying to sell their 'vision' on to you. On top of that, they're quite cheap to make so if one thing bombs you can just try something else with minimal loss. They're also very easy to reach, a bit googling should bring you few sites with games, but the mouth-to-mouth method is probably the largest contributing factor to this. It's far easier to talk with someone about Flash games than say, Doom 3. If you'd say to me "Blood 2 was oberly superior to Blood look at da grpahics maaaan1!!" I'd probably punch you in the nose. (That was taken from real life. My friend managed to constrain me.) Hence, when you're playing a silly game and someone walks up to you and says "Heh, that is really silly game you know. What's your score?" It's easy to continue the conversation from there. It's a social thing too, apparently. Globz is a good example of this, their all games are based on two things: A) Cutesy things are forced to do random things with terrific and innovative gameplay ideas B) The sociality that just breathes and is encouraged by the site. As surprising as it might sound, I don't feel most of the "Multiplayer only" games encourage that factor at all. It's just bunch of Gasts with infitely long numbers playing checkers against each other. Oh! OH! We can pull in Yahoo! here! It's games are in Java though, but it shows very nicely done idea of giving bunch of games for freely registered users to play and then boast to eachother about their ratings. Not terribly new idea that, but Yahoo! managed to do it popular by making it work. Arh, I can't write in 01:04, anyway. So Yahoo! works, but is there grey clouds in the sky? Is it really that wonderous? Well, yes it has. It's called spammers and leets and just people who are taking everything so bloody effin seriously. A form of entertainment in it's own way, for those sick enough (like me). I mean, I don't know if anyone really believes if 3 exactly same spambots with differents numbers in the end advertise "their sites which has more exposing photographs" will actually start a private conversation with the things and give out their credit card number. RIGHT? To sum it up, Flashgames are popular, they're spreading at an exponential rate... If it were an animal, it would probably crash and die in few years. Hey, maybe it will! We'll see. Most liable to be targeted for scams, spams and the like. They're social, they don't make you look like nerd (even my granny does it!) and such. It's different than the 'real' games, they can be innovative and unique or be just another tetris clone, and well, that's pretty much it. I just felt I had to write something. Hopefully it was coherent enough for you peeps to enjoy it. OOOH! We've broken the 1000 visitors limit! All hail to the king, which is not me.

Koei, what are you doing?

2005-04-18T23:30:00.000+03:00

Koei has always been one of my favorite developers. They created my two favorite series', "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", and "Kessen". However, their two of their latest games, ROTK9 and Kessen 3 have been... disappointing. Let's take a look. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms series revolves around the Three Kingdoms period in China, at around 220 AD. Various warlords vie for supremacy of China, with the kingdoms of Shu, Wu, and Wei being the "three kingdoms" (i.e. heavy hitters of the game). The rules change in each iteration of the game, growing more complex and deep with each release. And in ROTK7, they even included an option to be a vassal or a free officer instead of a ruler, which to me was a great improvement to the series. ROTK9 took all that away. I was first rather excited about the game, for the sole reason that it featured a continous map, as in, a map of all of China that units move around on, not individual battle maps for each city/province/whatever. I had thought this was to be a solely graphical change, but alas, I was wrong. Basically, they turned Romance of the Three Kingdoms into a real-time strategy game, and sucked all of the depth out of it. Every month (or everything three, I can't remember) you gave orders to your guys, and you watched as they performed them in real-time. So what. That's crap. I want ROTK, dammit. I'd be willing to look past the problems if it was fun, but it's not. It's just crap. As for Kessen 3. I liked the Kessen series. 1 and 2 are real-time deep tactical wargames. The first one takes place in Japan, chronicling the war between Mitsunari Ishida and Ieyasu Tokugawa. The second one took place in the Three Kingdoms era, although it's plotline branched severely from history. Both were lots of fun. Then Kessen 3 came along. I'm just going to say it up front. Kessen 3 is a Dynasty Warriors game, except with units instead of individual guys. You use the control stick to move the entire unit around, and you press X for a light attack and square for a heavy attack, and you can do combos and stuff with that. It's a tad deeper than DW in that you have tactics (spells, basically) and special moves (more than one, anyway, unlike DW's Musou system). Let me just say, if I want that kind of gameplay, I'll play Dynasty Warriors. Keep that out of my Kessen. In closing, stop trying to mainstream your games, Koei, please. For the love of your fans, give us ROTK. Give us Kessen. Give us Dynasty Warriors. But don't mix them just because one sells better than the other.

And introducing...

2005-04-16T17:42:00.000+03:00

ME. Trey here. I'll be reviewing random games that I come across, mainly for my own amusement, and for the 8 other people that read this page. I was going to do a review of SHOGO: Mobile Armor Division, but it turns out that even Windows XP knows it's crap, and refuses to even run the installer. Oh well, no big loss. And Jim was going to edit it anyway. Bastard. Well, yeah, I'm here, yay and all that. Whee. Jim9137 says: Well, not really. I was just going to edit to add more insults to the injury, really. Seriously, when the game simply refuses to work with 3/4 of my videocards, there's something wrong. And it felt really hideous, little more effort and it could've been good. Oh yeah! 8 Teammembers. We're getting larger and larger! Glad to have you all onboard, me mates. Trey says: Actually, by some random maintenence today, I figured out the problem with why it wouldn't run. So I'll still review it. Just later. Going out to eat now. Whee. Joq says: I never got the bloody game to work with my Radeon. It's mean. That is all.

Jagged Alliance 3D, or why the game stinks more than a black egg on napalm

2005-04-14T15:11:00.000+03:00

Joq kindly poked me to this article about Jagged Alliance 3D, and as I'm quite a fan of Jagged Alliance so I of course rushed to read it in glee. And well, the emotions after reading it was quite different. Click read more for my professional opinion... (follow the dots! grr.) --- The original Jagged Alliance was one of the pinnacles of Squaddie Turn-Based Strategies, right next to the first X-Com or UFO: Enemy Unknown. The sequel (Jagged Alliance 2) managed to avoid the so called "sequelitis" and actually improved the concept. Unlike the saying "Third is the charm!" (or something like it, can't remember how it went exactly for now) most of the games usually manage to destroy the whole concept with the third sequel. Not always, sometimes the third sequel even manages to save the series. But, I have my doubts in this case. Before I start dissecting the article piece-by-piece, I'll give a short introduction to those who have managed to stay away from this game all these years. Jagged Alliance in it's core is a Turn-Based Strategy, meaning that you and the baddies take turns to shoot at each other. It's also a squad-based once, meaning that you only have 1-8 peeps to control. Got me this far? Nothing particularly fancy about the system, except that it works like a charm and manages to give the player reasonable degree of freedom. The game also combines elements from other strategy games by forcing you to plan, control and manage sectors. The map is divided to sectors, and tapping the sap from the trees (sounds silly I know, but the story explains this, more later) is the only way to get you some money to hire mercenaries and pay their salaries. Surprisingly, you can't buy equipment, but rather loot it from the island. The mercenaries bring in their own equipment, but you're wanting to find some more ammo and fast, since in JA lead flies and that's not nice when your gun hits empty. Story is that an island middle of nowhere has a tree that produces special kind of sap that could prove very useful in battling against certain diseases. One of the members of the original research team hired a private army and took over the island, planning to monopolize the market with the drug. The leader of the team hires YOU in response, and gives you bunch of cash to hire 'army' of your own. A.I.M leases mercenaries for conflicts, assuming you got the money. The mercenaries couldn't care less about who wins the conflict (most of them, anyway), as long as you're paying their salaries on time. But the thing that separates and truly makes Jagged Alliance a classic is the personality of your mercenaries. They all have their own way to handle things, some might refuse to leave the enemy from their hindsight until he dies, some mercenaries hate each other to the point of making them 'disappear', and so and so on. Ivan! Wolf! 'Unusually Ruthless'! Larry! Static! Magic! Ah, memories. Do yourself a favor and find a copy of either Jagged Alliance 1 or 2, you won't regret it. Back to the article, shall we? I assume you have read the article by now, so I'll just start pointing out things that I think are just wrong and generally gives a bad 'feel', 'gut instinct', et cetera.

"Game action takes place in the western coast of Africa. There is arms race intensification and exacerbation of a situation in the region. One of local countries desires to be a member of a nuclear club, but had no access to resources to produce it. The country has financed the revolution in another one small country, which possessed that resource. Thus, there was established a special regime in this country and all its resources were crossed to the invaders. Ex-government of the occupied country contacts with a player and suggests interfering in the situation: to overthrow a government of conqueror regime and to restore the previous regime. As conqueror-country and players opportunities arent equal a player starts to wage guerilla warfare. But for all that the small country cant conduct open operations in the most big and powerful country, as it is afraid of world community attention. Thus, a player acts in a role of a Che Gevara of the present. " --- The article

And that my friends, is the story. It doesn't sound that bad at all, and actually goes well with the rest of the series. Only problem I have it that it sounds extremely cheesy and is clearly aiming for the "OH ME GAWD, NUKES" shock value. Or something, maybe they just love Che Guevara. Moving on, skipping the screen shots and let's get to the details:

"The game consists of number of missions that are the unification of united plot. Game contains ~20 missions, who include obligatory and several unnecessary missions. Passing unnecessary missions, the player lightens pass of obligatory missions for himself, what means that the more unnecessary missions of the episode the player passes, the more easier it will be for him to execute the main mission of the episode." --- The article, again

Pass- I mean uhm, besides for the bad wording and grammar, this practically means that there will be no or minimal amount of strategic planning. So, no sector maps or handling salaries. Which was the part of the game's charm, appealing both tactical and strategic genre lovers... Sigh. 20 missions sounds quite short too, but that probably depends how large and complex they're wanting to make the maps. Lack of real freedom will surely lower this games score, and diminish the replay value (Jagged Alliance is always so popular because you can always just take a new set of mercenaries and go for the goal in different way. At least, that's how it seems to be.) Optional missions? Why the god they just couldn't make sectors out of them while at it! Anyway, to the next part:

"Each mission is a level, on which the team of player appears and executes the combat task. In the real-time mode the player can control team, which can be arranged of 6 fighters (max). Mission considers accomplished if all of the soldiers of the enemy are destroyed. For successful execution of the mission the player gets money. Team of the player gathers experience and grows over itself." --- The article. Eyes are bleeding.

Again, the grammar. The developer is Russian, so I can let that pass but I can't let the fact they first say you execute a combat task, and then they add that it means just killing all the enemies. Okay, most of the other types of games in this genre aren't any better in this degree, BUT WHAT STOPS THEM FROM TRYING TO INVENT SOMETHING ELSE! LIKE BOMBING THE PLANT AND MAKING A GETAWAY! Okay, now to the real-time. This worked reasonably well with X-Com: Apocalypse, as long as you can switch between Real-Time mode and Turn-Based mode at will. It actually removes some of the frustration when you're looking for that last guy. But what if they mean the game is going to be real-time instead of turn-based?... Good to hear they left the experience intact, I hope at least. Don't know about the growing part, though. Next one:

"Between missions the player can hire/fire the mercenaries, can buy/sell the ammunition, choose the mission from available on given moment missions (all of non accomplished missions of episode are available simultaneously)."

Meaning, you don't have to plan your use of ammo at all, which some might say is a good thing but it detracts the feeling for me. You know, remember that warm feeling you got when you find a huge weapon stash? No more, sniff. And, no more assigning your mercenaries to various other duties besides combat, I take it. (Teaching, healing, repairing, training, etc) Which is sad and killed the little school kid inside me. Now on to the little details. This is the best, or worst depending on if you're still taking this article seriously:

Jagged Alliance, but in 3D (the game has been developed based on the well-known brand)

Skinned mesh animation with animation blending
Grass fields rendering
Optimized tree rendering system
SSE and HT support
Many-storied buildings
DX 9

So we got the graphics! We got the looks! But do we have a game yet?

Recognizable charismatic persons (the game uses mercenaries from previous JA titles)

And this is where I started laughing. I admit that the Jagged Alliance 2 used lots of same mercenaries that were on Jagged Alliance 1, but hey, that just sounds so silly. "We have these kewl guys, see we stole it from the previous games." I don't know if they're planning to continue the individual characters stories as happened in Jagged Alliance 2, (Is Larry still taking drugs? What about Ivan and his nephew?) but anyway. Gave me a laugh. Looking, looking for the game!

Thrilling campaign with a lot of various missions
Real-time gameplay with pause
High interactivity of levels (destructible objects)
A lot of various weapons

Oh. My. Gowd. Real-time gameplay with pause. When will the developers learn that real-time gameplay, even with the pause, is going to be frustrating and will most likely will not work? Managing your units, well, ever had the feeling when you have 6 random members probably running across the map, all doing their own things and you with only one mouse trying to control them all? This begs for rushing in with your guns blazing with fire! Bad design! Bad design! Destructible objects and the weapons bit sounds promising though, maybe it will be just as good or even better as in Silent Storm. The look for the game, still going what if slightly darker than before:

Mercenaries are raising their parameters during gameplay

Using JA role-playing system

Finally some good news! Let's skip it and move on to the next one, since I'm ranting after all:

Various mission objectives

Destroy all enemies
Destroy specific enemies

Seriously, that's all they mentioned. Is it just me, or am I missing the variety in "Instead of shooting everyone, you shoot the guy in the red suit"? Seriously, it's not that hard to think of other types of missions to play. While I typed that sentence I got five, actually. Well, maybe they're just shining the physics code to care about such things, but let's move on to the next one:

Visual variety of battlefield theaters (mountains, plains, towns, beaches, etc...)

Mountains
Plains
Towns
Beaches

Why do they bother listing the types in ()'s when you spill them out soon afterwards? Well, no rainforests so that's different at least. And towns sound nice, I've been wanting some urban street fighting, with the snipers thankyouverymuch. Prepare yourself:

Various difficulty settings from casual to hardcore.

Easy (enemies ain't accurate)
Normal (enemies have normal accuracy)
Hard (enemies are very accurate)

... Seriously. Instead of simply bursting into laughter and rolling in the floor for all the misery that caused to the game world, I had a heartattack. Are we still stuck in the 90's? Is the AI still that silly that we can only give it better accuracy to "make the game for the hardcore"? Really, this just shows bad design or very bad PR from the developers. Final quote before I'll let you go:

Gameplay is dynamic and not turning into a boring routine
Ja2 interface (ui), adopted for real-time mode

"Gameplay is dynamic"? And how, pray tell, they're planning to achieve that? It's good to hear they're trying at least, but the game seems to be following a boring routine of making a game! Interface? Hm, I wonder. Since you have to bear in mind that the interface in JA2 could have been way much better, they could have just taken a new shinier one instead of constantly ripping off from the earlier parts of the series! Well, that does it for me. In the end, this game seems to be a Lite version of the other, hopefully more promising Jagged Alliance game, Jagged Alliance 3 (Note the lack of D in the 3). --- In other news, I have a shotgun. And it's loaded, with shells. --- Okay, that does it for me for the day. Hopefully you enjoyed the rant, it's quite large and whiny but so was the timegap from my previous one. Other teammembers are invited to add their opinion on the end if they wish so the management, ie John9137, notes. Addendum: I hate HTML. Addendum pt II: I hate Blogger's HTML Editor. Addendum pt III: Added some little things and hopefully the dang thing works now.

Obilar cuts a promo...

2005-04-12T18:15:00.000+03:00

Strike Like Lightning by Mr. Big starts playing. Obilar enters the ring and grabs the mike. "Hello everyone..." The crowd cheers. "Basically Jim invited me in to act as a counterforce to the resident Purveyor of Gayness, Joq. To drop a bit of common sense, credibility and cool into the mix. And to deflate Joq's ego that has been growing to sizes of the inflatable woman AC/DC tends to have hovering over the stage during Whole Lotta Rosie. Also, there was a distinct lack of pictures of Bueno Exellente and mentions of Hitman - Hitman should be mentioned every now and then, it just is THAT DAMN GOOD. Not the game, mind you, the comicbook. Bueno... Anyway, enough of me and enough of Bueno. Being the good American (cheap pops) I am I decided to do a bit about the famous Finns in the game industry. I know I will run out of steam sometime after Stavros Fasoulas and Jukka Tapanimäki, but who wants to hear about crap like Max Payne or the rally game those some fellas made anyway? So stay tuned, I might even get something done." Lightnings strike the ringposts. Crowd marks out like it is Hulkamania all over again.

Dungeon crawling (updated)

2005-04-12T17:11:00.000+03:00

aka "stop stabbing my ghost, you elven eejit" Been playing good ol' Fire Pro Wrestling D (on Dreamcast) lately with my flatmate, and I absolutely suck in it. Too bad. As an alternative means of measuring our not-so-leet playing skillz we decided to see which one gets more points in Dungeon Crawl with a random character. Dungeon Crawl is a classic roguelike where the player chooses a race and a class from a multitude of choices, including ogre-mage necromantics, demonspawn crusaders and sludge elf stalkers, and tries to find the Orb of Zot. The game system is supposed to be based on Dungeons & Dragons, but I wouldn't know. My flatmate had previously finished the game three times a few years ago, but this time we used a newer version of the game, 4.0.0 beta 26. The new version is just plain evil. During the last two days or so I've managed to kill about 32 of my characters on the first and second dungeon levels. Of course, most of the times I've had either really bad luck or a really bad random character (yeah, right. -ed.). The game has a nice tendency to spawn quite a few nasty buggers even on the first level, and with a hint of bad luck you'll start the game next to a room with half a dozen hobgoblins. Grr. The game feels like a fresh breeze of air after playing ADOM and Nethack for countless hours. Since I knew nothing of spoilery sort about the game before playing it, everything was a new experience for me. A big red number 5? A measly imp. A dark grey letter p? A ghost of an adventurer past. Discovering things was fun for a change. A few noble adventurers managed to get to experience level 8 or so, but they were all brutally killed at some point. Gagger, a hill dwarf hunter, got bashed in the head with an orcish great mace in the orcish mines (he got quite rich before kicking the bucket, though). Peniece the minotaur gladiator managed to get quite deep, but Blork the orc zapped him with a wand of lighting. Rest in peace, Naava, Mutton, Jerky, Steffan, Paasikivi, Bukkakekkonen, Hooves, Banan and the lot. One of your followers might manage to snag the Orb of Zot. Forgot if I had any point when writing this piece, but I'm still leading our (very small) Crawl competition. I'm sure that when the flatmate gets bored of Vampire: Bloodlines he'll beat my ass in Crawl. The fella is actually quite an avid Vampire the Masquerade card game player, and has more than a few thousand cards for it. Groovy. Or scary. Anyways. I'll update this post later on, since I'm in a hurry now and have more to talk about. Ta! Added, 17th April: Well, in a few days we've managed to get a tad further in the game. Kaulin, my troll fighter, managed to reach the 12th experience level, and got a slew of nifty items. However, on dungeon level 13 he encountered a hydra for the first time, and wasn't properly prepared. The hydra regrew its heads quickly after being decapitated, and swiftly slayed the brave adventurer. Flatmate's Maastoauto the hill dwarf fighter was a real trooper, he reached experience level 15. He was a servant of Xom, a quite quirky chaos god. Every now and then Xom would give the dwarf a boost in strength, protect him from harm or summon demons to his aid. But Xom sometimes does evil things to the player, such as draining a few thousand experience points. So, Maastoauto got drained back a level at one point, and renounced his belief in Xom. Everything was alright until a few levels later Xom decided to mess with the fella and drained his intelligence. Maastoauto never was a very bright chap, his intelligence was 4. However, Xom drained it a good amount... resulting in Maastoauto forgetting to breathe. Back to the drawing board... Added, 21st April: Okay, got past 102 dead characters. This game is mean! ...which is nice.

Joq's ramblings on multiplayer gaming, part I: random hotseat classics

2005-04-10T19:36:00.000+03:00

aka "excuse me, your elbow is in my mouth" Hello, dear readers. In this first installment of my multiplayer games thingie thing I'm going to talk about a few classic simultaneous hotseat multiplayer games; namely Wizard of Wor, Battle City and Mine Bombers. Just don't expect anything very coherent. And sorry for the silly layout. Wizard of Wor (Bally Midway, Arcade 1981/C64 1983, more info here, download here.) One of Commodore 64's earliest multiplayer classics was Wizard of Wor. The game was addictive and intuitive, depicting a pair of heroes with some kind of laser guns battling a vast array of meanevil monsters, and, ultimately, the Wizard of Wor. In an evil twist, killing the other player, while a stupid move, resulted in getting more points. The players had only three lives, and the only means of getting more of them was getting enough points. In any case, killing the other player usually ended up in a physical fist fight. Those were the days. On each screen-sized level the players would face the enemies in waves; usually the tougher monsters appearing after the easy ones. If "lucky", the players would face the Worluk, which would move with ludicrous speed and was hard to hit (cautionless firing at it quite often resulted in the other player biting the bullet, or in this case, laser). The levels would always retain their maze-ness, but the enemies would become faster and would shoot faster as the game progressed. The gameplay in the game is nicely frustrating, as you could be hit after coming around a corner before you even had time to face the direction of the enemy. This was usually the main cause of death, the other being the generally mean and quick level bosses. For the life of me I can't put my finger on why the game was (and, to a certain extent, is) addictive, but it probably was because of pure frustration. You usually died because of some small mistake of yours, and wanted to get just one level further. Anyways. Let's move on to something more interesting. Battle City (Namco, NES 1985, more info here, download here.) I was introduced to this absolute gem of a game quite recently. I never owned a Nintendo Entertainment System, but had played a slew of games on it back in the early nineties. After many recommendations from a few friends that had lived in good ol' USA in those days, I decided to acquire the game. I put the game on a cd and had a spin with it on my Dreamcast. The aforementioned friends almost creamed their pants upon seeing the game; they apparently hadn't played it in over a decade. I was completely stumped over the geniously simple gameplay and ultimate classicness of the game (the gameplay actually was kind of reminiscent of Wizard of Wor). They should've packed the game with every NES system with Super Mario Bros. The idea of the game is to fight against enemy tanks and protect your base. Each player controls a tank and about two dozen enemy tanks of different kinds appear in waves. Every map consist of a different kind of maze, and various power-ups appear randomly on the map. The players can gather up to three powerups that turn their tank to a bigger one; the best tank can even destroy steel walls. The game manages to be very challenging even though the basic gameplay is simplistic. Since you only have two extra lives (although you can get more during the game) and your tank is destroyed from one hit, you have to stay extra careful in order to reach level 35 (after that the game restarts with a higher difficulty). Even though you had to play the original game only on a single NES system, with the wonders of modern emulators you can now experience the multiplayer mode over internet, which is nice. Just download VirtuaNES and the game's rom and you're good to go. Mine Bombers (Skitso Productions, PC DOS 1995, download here.) One of the greatest multiplayer games of the DOS era was Mine Bombers. Developed by two Finns, Antti Haapakoski and Teppo Lähtinen, the small shareware game failed to reach acclaim outside of it's native country. Having purchased the game back when it was released in 1995 (or was it 1996?), I've been playing the game for years. The failing point of the game was that it only offered hotseat multiplayer. Having four players simultanously playing on the same keyboard was a doomed idea. I didn't have a joystick at the time so I fail to recall if the game made any use of joysticks. But anyways, three players on the same keyboard was the practical maximum. Even them some keys didn't work properly, but it was a small price to pay for one of the absolute best hotseat multiplayer games. The game's real selling point was the excellent gameplay. Two to four players dig their way around an arena using different kind of explosives while trying to kill off the other combatants and gather treasures. You could buy different items and weapons between rounds. The varying assortment of weapons and tools was exceptionally fun. For example, you could place a nuclear bomb where you wanted, then disable it with a fire extinquisher, and then place a remote bomb next to it, so you could explode the nuclear bomb at your will. A classic tactic was throwing polyuretan bombs at players (they filled the tunnels with a very-hard-to-dig substance) and then placing various explosives around the now-quite-seriously trapped opponent. The arsenal had some balancing issues, though - for example, the large crucifix bomb exploded in a cross-shaped manner and the explosion always reached the edges of the arena. Despite a few random shortcomings the game was pure diamond. It even contained a level editor and a singleplayer mode. I gladly paid the developers the twenty finnish marks or so after trying out the demo, and wasn't dissappointed. A few years back the developers released the full game as freeware, which was a nice gesture. The development team is still alive after a decade or so, and are currently working on the sequel for Mine Bombers. It's probably going to support tcp/ip multiplayer this time, so I'm already wetting my pants in anticipation. Huzzah! And big thanks to Jim for taking the screenshots from the game. ...more multiplayer talk coming later.

LACK OF DUCKING

2005-04-10T14:33:00.000+03:00

Megaman, that blue bastard. I've got Megaman Anniversary Collection for my Xbox..been playing through it slowly. Two things. First of all, unless you put the game on Easiest Easy EASY mode, you have to play them in order, and complete each and every one of them to unlock the extras. So..uh..I can understand unlockable content, but you'd be better off downloading the ROMs. STUPID. Also, MEGAMAN CANNOT DUCK. All he can do is that crappy slide thing. STUPID STUPID MEGAMAN. Lego Star Wars has the unlockable content just right. Y'unlock characters when you use them in the main story mode, you can unlock new levels by collecting in-game bits, you can buy new characters and Goldeneye-style cheats (Have everyone wearing moustaches, turn lightsabres into brooms, etc) using the points you've earnt. It's brilliant. BRILLIANT. TAKE NOTE, MEGAMAN. Unlockable content rocks.

Monkey Balls...?

2005-04-08T21:24:00.001+03:00

Hello everyone. I really don't know how to write my debut so here we go. Also, this will shut Jim up for the next week or so, during which I will hopefully wade through more games and write more whiny rants (because whining and ranting is what I do best). Even though I promised to make a back-to-back review of Republic Commandoand Brothers in Arms, which have a lot in common, I'm probably not gonna at this time. Thing is, I liked them moderately, which is quite unusual, and I'm not a huge fan of praising games mostly because dissing the fuck out of bad or otherwise over-hyped ones is just much more fun, so without further ado I present you with the review of Super Monkey Ball Deluxe for the Xbox. Disclaimer: a lot of jokes about Monkey Balls have been left out. Add your own when it seems fit. (Editor's note: Click 'Read More... To read the full article. I also had to remove few tons of borked HTML so some of the article might have been messed up, so it's not Knives' fault if you find a typo. And it was John who was harassing Knives , really.) Super Monkey Ball Deluxe has a very simplistic premise. You control a monkey inside a ball, and on each level you play through you must prevent the monkey from falling off a floating platform full of wierd traps. The control of the ball is what makes the game's actual gameplay, which is pretty stupid considering that in the intro you see the monkey has the power to SUMMON AND GET RID OF HIS BALL AT WILL. Taking a more indepth look at the game's setting, the plot is about an island full of monkeys robbed of their bananas by the evil Dr. Bad-Boon. A crack team of monkeys engulf themselves in these monkey balls and go flying after him to stop his plan and retrieve the bananas. This being the best example to why the Japanese are raving lunatics because a) some of them actually set down, brainstormed and have fathered this concept and shaped it into the puddle of diarrhea it is and that b) the rest actually buy this crap, thus supporting the market for "Stupid Games for Stupid People". Of course, some stupid games don't make bad games, but let's face it, these games would've been much better if they were both GOOD and NOT STUPID. Gameplay has actually nothing to do with the plot, though, because even though the plot tells of a villian, an army of robots, flying monkeys and lots of bizzare locales, very little reflects on the gameplay. You never fight the villian or the robots in game, because you just roll around in your ball, and you're also not flying but rather rolling, falling and generally getting slapped all over the place. Also, there's only one monkey on screen, and the locales are mere backgrounds to the levels which are just the same checkered colorful platforms. You don't actually play in the world of Super Monkey Ball, which, even though very stupid, is very bad in terms of making the game at least coherent in it's own context. I mean, here you are watching these cutscenes, getting laughed at by your girlfriend, playing this really stupid game, and then the intermissions don't even have the common decency of having ANYTHING to do with what just happened on screen. Add the fact that the screen tilting is seriously headache and nausea inducing, the retarded singing and some nerve-racking difficulty at times and you're in for one annoying experience To make matters worse the game is short, uninteresting, extremely difficult and not much fun. It's not WORST GAME EVER, but that's only because the level design offers some pretty cool stuff at times, which is only noticable if you're not busy being irritated by the game's very intentional flaws.

Busy, aren't we.

2005-04-05T14:02:00.000+03:00

Some of you might have noticed the lack of updates recently. I have 6 team members, so you'd except content right? Well, as it happens everyone is busy with one thing or another. I'm in middle of an exam week, Knives is too busy dealing with his girlfriend, Joq's busy with various other things, Fuzzydevil is busy with work I suppose, and doowopman and Gremmi are... Em. I don't know, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but the main thing is that there shall be update soon. As soon as the next week. Or maybe today. Bottom line is that this blog isn't dead, and we're still alive and kicking, despite John9137's bloodhounds.

Doom: Roguelike, or "You die!"

2005-03-30T21:14:00.000+03:00

I recently found this little gem on the vast sea of freeware games. Yes, vast and dangerous. They are many freeware jewels out there, you just have to use scuba gear to find them. What is Doom: Roguelike you ask? Better click that 'Read More...' to find out... But please, bring in your own ammunition, I don't have any extra to spare. Save me from this squeeze! Heeheheee. --- Well, as many you probably already have noticed - thanks to my relentless advertising, or not - There actually is a rogue game of Doom. How is that possible? How did they do it? DOOM? What the heck is a roguelike anyway? WHY SHOULD I CARE?! Each one of those questions is a good one and worthy of answer. But first, what is a roguelike? This word has many definitions, but on the gaming world and especially when categorizing a game it means a game that is mainly made by ASCII characters. Ie, letters working as graphics. The word comes from Rogue, the first game to use this way to display things on screen if I'm not totally mistaken. Ehm, why are you looking at me like that? It's disturbing. Yes, you can remake Doom with only text character. No, not in the way as say, that Quake Text-only remake was, but in the traditional top-down style. And guess what is the scariest part in this whole thing (besides the demons)? It actually works. It works so well that it nearly rivals the original game itself, in my honest opinion. Although I never was huge fan of Doom so... But the interesting question is why? Is it just the good old nostalgia kicking in? Is it the light-RPG system that is embedded into it? Is it that the rogue-likes are, in fact, extremely addictive (ie, NetHack)? Or is it just the joy of seeing that dratty imp's guts spilled in a gory way all over the place, in a pure text format just is fun to watch? It's something I can't answer. Maybe it's just because the simple games are more addictive than more complex ones, even if they miss some realism. Maybe it's easier for players to grasp when it's only you, your dear double-barreled shotgun and the hordes of hellspawn. But let's get back to the game review, shall we? So, if you REALLY don't know what the one of the biggest and most important game hit is, in which case I feel a slight stab in my heart for no reason at all, let me sum it up for you quickly. Doom, one of the most important game titles on the gaming titles, practically popularized the FPS genre. It just put you, the marine of UAC and also humanity's last hope, against masses and masses of hellspawn. With a pistol, shotgun, chaingun, RPG, plasma rifle and the goo' ole' BFG9000 you sliced, ripped and tore the baddies into piles of corpses. The backstory goes sort of like this: You're a recruit who just happened to arrive on Phobos base, and to your surprise the whole base has been overrun by various monsters. Apparently the scientists had triggered something nasty while experimenting and opened a dimension gate to Hell. Of course, as such lucky person as you are, you go fulfilling your duty and start saving the world, and your pet bunny. Straightforward action, and didn't have much anything else. Great fun, I hear. I pee'd my pants though while playing it. How does the Doom: RL differ from the original? Most noticeable difference is that you have Traits. Okay, apparently we have a lightweight RPG system in place. A little character development hasn't ever hurt anyone. They range from "Ironman" to such traits like "Hellrunner" and "Son of a gun", "Reloader"... Et cetera. They just give bonuses to your hitpoints, damage, body armor, accuracy and reloading time and various other things. The damage is determined somewhat randomly, for example double-barreled shotgun is (6d3)x2, or roll 12 three-sided dices and see how much you got. Even the path of fire is randomized, you can accidentally blow up something totally different than that ugly ex-human sergeant who was waving that ugly shotgun at you moment ago. In a true rogue-like fashion, the dungeons are randomized. Except for few of course, but mostly it's random. You have these levers, doors and bonus items placed at random locations, but be vary about the levers. They can turn the floor into acid or spawn few big hellknights to ruin your day if you happen to be jinxed. Basically, what you would except from doom is here. Except not the keycards, thanks developers! That was considerate thing to do. Cough, anyway. You also have these stairs of course, to take you into various levels inside the Phobos base. You also have red stairs, that take you to special locations... Hell's Arena for example, strips you away from all your guns and armor and pits you against hordes of enemies in a vain attempt of collecting the reward. When you die, which happens quite often it seems, your poor marine's score is put on highscore table. And if you happen to beat the game, I tip my (fur)hat at you. I think I already mentioned the gore... Yes, this game has it. In the form of red %'s, #'s, and "'s. The blood actually spurts from the poor zombies when you fire that chaingun at them! Rip and tear, says the Doom comic! To sum up, I really like this rogue-like. I'm not great fan of them, I usually find them too complex and time-consuming to truly enjoy them, but this one is both simple and good timewaster in the morning while you're waiting for that coffee. Except that you might get stuck in the front of the screen, waving your hands in terror as that lever just summoned huge amount of Demons behind your back and you don't have any medpaks left, and that dratty shotgun is out of ammo again...

Sequelitis Got A Hold On Me

2005-03-29T16:15:00.000+03:00

Every facet of the entertainment industry seems to suffer from that unavoidable disease sequelitis. What is this plague you may ask? The unavoidable failing of a sequel to a popular film/book/movie/game, etc. Sure, there have been good sequels (Godfather II for movies, Gabriel Knight 2 & 3 for the game world, for example). There have also been some disasters or cash cow milkers along the way that were either just subpar or average (Doom3 anyone?). Even the soft drink world can't escape the dreaded sequelitis. Anyone remember Classic Coke and Crystal Pepsi? So what causes this to happen? The proverbial cash cow being milked for all it's worth, in it's wake causing great series of games to die (The various C&C's after Red Alert, King's Quest: Mask of Eternity just to name a few). What causes sequelitis amongst many other forms of entertainment? Lack of originality and fear of pushing the envelope. Gone are the days when games were made for gamers. While a gamer can find some nice gems if they know where to look (freeware gaming sites, independent developers, etc), most commercial titles seem to be the same recycled ideas we've been seeing for years. Anything that does come along that might show just the slightest spark of creativity or promises to revive a classic series seems to get cancelled. Take last year's cancellation of the highly anticipated Sam 'N Max 2 for example. While it continues for now, let us all hope for the day that gamers can be free once again to wander the halls of originality. History has been known to repeat itself and now is as good a time as ever.

Spiffy template change.

2005-03-29T15:29:00.000+03:00

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog. Again. 3rd time already. Anyway, as you can see the template has gone a change. It's not anymore that goo' ol' simple II you're so used to see.. RIGHT? Anyway, I'll be changing the graphics to something that fits the old style more, but that's in the future. For now, add your thoughts and wishes to the comments. Thank you.

Bioforge, or 'Forge me up Scotty!'

2005-03-28T11:28:00.000+03:00

... Yes, I have bad sense of topics. But I just had to. Also, I have deal that gives me 10€ per "He's dead, Jim." -quote. Feel free! You can pay to John9137 over there. Nevermind his glee. I'd like to use this space to advertise my newest technical thing on this blog, the expandable posts. Not expendable Jim9137, expandable. Teehehe, inside humor. So it basically works like that you just click the "Read more..." just above the authors name, and it'll take you to the full article. This article is hided behind it as well, but if the full post is already showing, it only takes you to the post's site. Anyway, more page views for more monies for us... *COUGH* I'm also planning to switch the template soon, and do other changes to the blog's appearence so that it'll be easier to read. Those are in the future however, since I have no HTML/CSS expertise. As promised long time ago, review of Bioforge. I'm trying to return to my roots from the ranting right now, so it's not as whiny as usual. Fear not anyway! --- Bioforge. Even the name already tickles my Science Fiction oriented brains. And it only gets better... What is the game about? Although, you probably clicked that link over there already and left me here, or you know what the game is already about (thanks to my advertising or you're one of the lucky ones who have played this gem) let me educate the promille of people who DON'T know what the game is about... Bioforge is about this prisoner complex far away from any other civilization. You're a prisoner there. But there is more, you're not only a prisoner, you've also lost your memory. And it gets even better, you're a guinea pig for Dr. Mastaba who is experimenting cybernetic implants on all the prisoners... Yes, you're a cyborg, and extremely pissed off one (You're constantly being poke by some medical bot, after all. With needles.) I challenge you to give me a game with a sweeter start. Well, there probably are some, but I can't figure any from the more recent games. Not that I pay much attention to them anymore. Anyway, to return to the topic. Okay, the starting plot is quite cliché, at least it might sound like it, but I assure you that this game has a very good plot. Compared to other games, at least. ANYWAY I should probably describe what's the game is like, instead of promoting the plot. Hmm, hey, I haven't even mentioned this game is an INTERACTIVE MOVIE... I got you there, didn't I? Err, no need to run away screaming. I uh... It's actually more like Action/Adventure with emphasis on the adventure bit. The reason why I said Interactive Movie was because it was advertised as one, and well, it's not far from the truth. But I'd classify it as Action/Adventure myself. So, you're this huge cyborg, with no memory of yourself whatsoever, and you just got free. The ones with more active imagination can already guess where I'm getting here, and the ones who can't I shall educate now. The game is basically you, the cyborg, running around the prison complex... Except that the thing is scheduled to be bombed away. And there are other experiments/guards running around, and they are far more powerful than you are. You're forced to kick some metallic arse once in a while, but most of the time you're trying to find a more clever way to handle with more tougher enemies. Like, the guard bot that blasts you into bits the minute you step in it's sight. It's good fun, seriously. The puzzles are hard. Not hard in the way, say, Half-Life 2 (CRATE PUZZLES FOR EFFIN SAKES, WHAT ARE WE, 3-YEAR-OLDS?) but hard as in the way the adventure games were. I had to resort to the walkthrough quite many times (although I have to admit that I'm horrible at adventure games.) I was actually quite stumped on the next room for a while, I just couldn't figure out what to do next. There are lot's of clues lying around though, in the form of various memos/computers/etc that also shred light at the events inside the complex, and why you got free in the first place. (No, you didn't bend those laser bars no sir.) This game is rated M, and for a purpose. SPOILEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERS For example, soon after you get free you help this fellow victim from the next cell free, try to convince him that you're his friend and then finally pick his severed arm up and beat him to the death. Just because you know, he apparently didn't like the meat you gave him. If no other scene in the game will stick in your head, this will. ALL IS CLEAR There aren't many premade cutscenes around, as far as I remember, but there are in-game cutscenes. They are quite short and usually just show what happens when you do this. They don't obscure the flow of the game though, and they are very interesting and fun to watch. Sometimes I just failed in purpose on some of the puzzles, just to see what happens. Although some of you might have some creeps about Action/Adventure games, let me take your worries away. This game is one of those games who manage to pull it off. And Bioforge pulls it off brilliantly. Kill Tomb Raider and her countless clones, for the cybernetic king of Action/Adventure's is here.

Joq's ramblings on multiplayer gaming, prologue: reporting for duty

2005-03-28T01:44:00.000+03:00

aka "no porn on my watch" "...the fuck asked you to write anything?", John9137 asked me. "I blame Jim.", I cautiously replied. "Oh. That's quite alright then, old bean.", Jim's identical yet nowhere-as-good-looking twin said. He waved the pile of paper that I had given him. "...but what am I supposed to do with a 14-page report about a sex game? Kids read our blog too, man!", he yelled. My spidey-sense tingled, and I noticed that the man might be slightly annoyed by my choice of subject. I rushed to defend my paper. "Hey, at least read the introduction properly, first - no, wait - I'll describe the whole shebang to ya. Gimme a sec to gather me thoughts." "So, envision this: there's this game, right? You're going to direct a porn movie. It consists of four different minigames, and after passing the group of four games it goes to a harder difficulty level and tougher assignments. In the first minigame you have to build a road...", I said with copious amounts of enthusiasm in my voice, but John quickly interrupted me. "A bloody road?!", he yelled in disbelief. "Hey, hey, hey, it'll make sense in the end! Let me continue!", I said and took a sip of my martini. "So, there's this road, and you gotta build it. In the next minigame you only have to choose your actors, they spin around in whopping three-dee, man! In the third one you choose the scenes and in the fourth one you design the cover! The default setting for the cover is Viggo Mortensen, nude, looking at a bright light coming from somewhere around his waist." "The hell? Viggo?", John barked, "What's he got to do with anything?". I grinned and pointed my finger at John, keeping my cool. "Just wait till the end, it'll make sense! So, then we move to the next difficulty level, and we can actually choose who are building the next road. Bosnian golf course workers aren't too good, but they're always an option. The tend to make the road a tad too straight... how are we supposed to drive rally there if there aren't any bends or elevation in the road?", I said with a small stream of drool coming from the corner of my mouth. What happened next is kind of hazy, since the five-pound encyclopedia that John threw at my face hit me somewhat painfully and after I came back from the ER John had burned my report, house and clothes. With my head bandaged and ankle handcuffed to the kitchen sink, I tried my luck with a slightly refined theme for my article...

On Deus Ex, stealth, and other ramblings.

2005-03-27T22:44:00.000+03:00

HELLO THIS IS GREMMI I AM GOOD HOW ARE YOU. So. Deus Ex. One of my favourite games, save for Fallout 2. F'r those who don't know (and if you don't, shame you on, you non-Deus Ex knowing person), Deus Ex is an action/adventure FPS, with strategy and RPG overtones. Which in gaming terms, usually spells quick death (Name more than 5 cross-genre games that are good. Go on.) What I like about this game, like Fallout, is that you can tackle a mission/task any way you feel like it. It's possible to complete the entire game without even so much as drawing a weapon, if you know how. But I usually take my tactic of "Charge in and shoot everything until it stops moving" to most of the game. I got hideously stuck a few times doing this though, and as a result, tend to play this game through very slowly. The reason I get stuck is because, if you've done something monumentally stupid, like say, charged into a heavily guarded airbase and suddenly run out of ammo half-way through, end up very low on health and with no real way out, one of the best options would be to stealth it. Sneak around in the shadows, observe guard/bot/camera positions, slip by unnoticed. I am shite at this. I cannot be stealthy in games for the life of me. Thief pissed me off for this reason, but I don't mind it so much, as the entire game is about stealth, so I avoid it. However, with the success of games such as Thief and Splinter Cell, the whole world briefly went insanely crazy for stealth games. (I don't particularly regard Metal Gear Solid as a stealth game. It's an action adventure which plays more like Pac-Man than Splinter Cell. Feel free to disagree with me.) So we ended up with a surge of games that weren't stealth, but had stealth sections in. Enter Soldier of Fortune 2. For those uninitiated, the Soldier of Fortune games have been about brutal violence, being one of the first games to offer body dismemberment. The sequel has stealth sections. STEALTH SECTIONS. A game about mindless violence has you PURPOSEFULLY AVOIDING IT. And not just "Oh, try to be stealthy, but if you get discovered, just start shooting until they go away". No. If you're discovered, game over. If an alarm trips, game over. Fuck you, Soldier of Fortune 2. Here's another game. Tron 2.0. Yet another game that's supposed to be action, lightcycles and so on. But no. There's a section that relies on stealth. Fair enough, it doesn't give you a Game Over if you trip alarms or whatever, but it does swarm you with so many enemies it's impossible to survive. More games should be like Deus Ex. OPEN ENDED GAMEPLAY = BETTER THAN FUCKING STEALTH SECTIONS. Click "Read More..." For other opinions in this. Jim9137's opinion: Although, I probably won't practise this giving opinions on other's posts that much, but I'd like to whine about America's Army. Gremmi will probably shoot me now. Anyway, the game, if you've been living under the rock or you're stuck in CS still, is about America's Army. Whoo, like you didn't guess that already. It's a multiplayer-only FPS which is quite enjoyable in short dozes. It's also free, thanks to the developer who happens to be America's Army. One of the interesting points in the game is the required training that you're forced to take. Okay, I spent few weeks honing my skills at the shooting range, take the medic's training, the advanced training blaa blaa and then finally I get to the special forces training. You can sure play this game without, but you're losing like 50% of servers/fun if you do. What annoys me is that the special forces training IS basically a sneaking mission. You're only giving a set of binoculars and are forced to run past outlooks, guards and dogs to get in the goal. Probably realistic, but hey! It's an shooter after all. It's not like I'll be doing that much on real life. And it's nearly impossible to predict where you'll be seen, because everything is so effin dark and the guards don't seem to follow any logical patter. And the guards spot you the minute you enter the light, giving you the urge to throw the keyboard to the wall. You basically have to crawl very slowly through the course, and if you get spotted... Again, 10 minutes of crawling. Whoo boy. There is also time limit, forcing you to take risks once in a while... Okay, I'm probably not special forces material, but I'd like to enjoy the game fully still, without being forced to take such silly training. Okay, that sums it up for me.