You are Likely to be Eaten by a Grue

EGHuk's Fast 3rd Base PvZ Strategy

2011-11-02T00:36:00.000-07:00

I've been having a ton of success with this build since I saw and studied it a lot at MLG Orlando. It keeps Protoss even with the Zerg economy, and functions much the same way the old 3-gate expand build used to go - we're just starting with an additional base to work with. I feel like this build is incredibly flexible and probably the best safe macro build you can opt for right now. It's also fairly easy to execute.

The gist of the build is this:
Forge FE.
I make 1 zealot and send it straight to Zerg's main to scout.
make nothing but sentries, get +1 weapons and warp gate.
chronoboost probes a LOT. almost exclusively, in fact.
make a total of 6 gates, as if you were doing an all-in.

If Zerg scouts this, he'll cut drones and start producing units and spines in anticipation of the all-in. I've had Zergs overreact so badly they cancel the spire or whatever tech they have building, cut drones at 50 for several minutes, and make 6 spines. This is an added bonus but not at all necessary for success! If Zerg doesn't scout this or your zealot sees some greedy tech like mutas, you can actually choose to all-in here.

As soon as warp gate finishes, warp in sentries (up to 8-ish then stop) and zealots. Right around the 8:30 or 9 minute mark, when warp gate finishes, make the 3rd base. I like to push out at this timing to make Zerg think I'm doing the 6-gate all-in - make sure to include a probe so he'll buy it!

We have to rely on forcefields, cannons, and building placement to survive roach-ling aggression right now. Just like the 3-gate expand - except instead of trying to secure the natural expansion, we're securing our 3rd. Zerg has a 3-base economy to pressure, but we have a 2-base economy and 6 gates. To pressure the expo Zerg has to forgo drones, which is great for us, as long as we survive.

As soon as 3rd base is secure, make robo facility and twilight council simultaneously. This gives a ton of flexibility. Make an observer as soon as the facility finishes.

At this timing is when Zerg's tech will reveal itself. See a flock of mutas? Start blink and make a templar archives. See roach pressure? Start that robo bay! If Zerg hasn't made his presence known at this point, and you haven't pressured to check his army comp, just start the robo bay AND blink. No big deal. Get up to +3 weapons before beginning any armor upgrades. If he goes mutas, delay colossus production in favor of blink stalkers and possibly psi storm. The mutas won't deny our 3rd base because it's already up and running. Just prevent any major damage.

At this point we kind of just sit until we're maxed. Take a 4th AND a 5th base at this timing while you get aggressive (the main and natural should be drying up soon). The maxed protoss army is fearful as hell. You should have 4-5 colossus and a ton of blink stalkers with 8 full energy sentries; OR you should have a bunch of templar with storm, blink stalkers, and possibly some immortals. Whatever you have to do based on what Zerg is making. This is also when you can add a dark shrine and whatever other tech you want to. Assuming you got to this point relatively unmolested, you SHOULD win the game.

This build has some problems, of course. It's weak (like most Protoss builds) to huge infestor-ling attacks when you're securing the 3rd and teching up. It can be weaker to certain early all-ins because there's no stargate tech. The build also only works on maps with an easy-to-defend 3rd base. Building sim-city and cannons are an absolute requirement at the 3rd.

replays

Check out Huk's PvZ from MLG Orlando! All their replays can be found here: http://pro.majorleaguegaming.com/news/mlg-orlando-sc2-replays-get-them-now

http://www.gamereplays.org/starcraft2/replays.php?game=33&show=details&id=239651

http://www.gamereplays.org/starcraft2/replays.php?game=33&show=details&id=239652

http://www.gamereplays.org/starcraft2/replays.php?game=33&show=details&id=239653

http://www.gamereplays.org/starcraft2/replays.php?game=33&show=details&id=239654

What I'm doing in each matchup:

2011-09-07T00:20:00.000-07:00

So, for long-time readers of my blog (the very few of you, I really appreciate you guys!) I haven't really been writing much. I'm pretty much playing Starcraft II all the time now. It's all I think about, and it's all I really want to write about. So here's some more Starcraft II content - specifically, what my gameplan is in each matchup right now.

Protoss vs Terran
I love this matchup right now, as long as Terran doesn't do one of the zillions of strong and difficult-to-scout all-in builds. It feels like I'm going to win as long as the game goes past the twenty-minute mark, and Terran isn't going for a pure mech strategy. My gameplan is as follows:

-1 gate fast expand. I believe this is viable against everything Terran can do and sets up Protoss for a decent mid-game. If Terran does a fast 1-base tech, like a 1-1-1 build, 1-gate expand is the most ideal response, and if he does a fast bio expand, we're about even at worst. We only need to worry about bio all-ins with SCVs pulled, but that comes down to micro and it's not totally impossible.

-Get up to 3 total gateways and a robo very quickly, then tech. If we try teching on only 2 gateways or lower in combination with a fast expansion, we're not being safe. We can only survive with great force fields, and a fast ghost push is deadly. And if we tech any later, we'll get run over by stimmed, healed bio with only unupgraded gateway units.

-Focus on upgraded gateway units until 3 bases. Opening fast colossus or fast psi-storm will leave us in a vulnerable and delicate mid-game, where a few EMPs, a few too many vikings, or a bad engagement will end the game for us immediately. Therefor I prefer going with fast upgrades and a lot of gateways. Our army can be reinforced faster, and our army size will be larger in general without relying on flawless micro to just survive. The faster upgrades also sets us up for a stronger late-game, and they're more mobile, allowing us to respond better to drops. I always get the charge upgrade for zealots before blink, as well as fast attack and armor upgrades from two forges. I also like to make some immortals, because they bolster a gateway army a LOT.

-Zealot-Archon in the mid-game. Against low to medium amounts of bio, zealot-archon is an amazing army composition that's difficult for Terran to kill. Conversely, Protoss has a hard time killing Terran with this army, because a good Terran will place buildings and bunkers to make the melee-only Zealots very ineffective close to Terran's base. This army is only meant to secure a solid economy in the mid-game in preparation for the last step.

-Double-robo colossus once on three-plus bases. I'm coming to the conclusion that it's hardly worth making colossus as a lynchpin of your army, unless it's from two robotics facilities from a strong 3-base gas income. Colossus one at a time is flimsy, and losing them means losing the game because they can't be reinforced quickly. It's also a gradual build-up, giving Terran plenty of time to make and upgrade his Vikings. By suddenly beginning colossus production two at a time in the late game, we catch Terran without many vikings on the field and we're able to reenforce the colossus much faster. Even if Terran has enough vikings, thanks to the great gateway and upgrade infrastructure set up in the mid-game, the colossus will thin out the bio army enough that the zealot-archon reinforcements will be enough to win the game. Because of Warpgates, Protoss has a production advantage against Terran in late-game and essentially gets a round of units a full 30 seconds faster after a huge engagement. It's important to take advantage of this.

Protoss vs Zerg
This is a hard matchup right now. Zergs realized how ridiculously overpowered Infestors are, and now we have to deal with them every game. Typically Zerg dictates how the game goes, with a roach-infestor or ling-infestor mid-game, including a potentially devastating timing attack, leading into very fast and numerous brood lords at the twenty-minute mark supported by infestors. The most effective style at the moment appears to be a very passive turtle strategy with a slow build up to a colossus, void ray, high templar army. Here's the general gameplan:

-A safe fast expansion. This one's a no-brainer, but also pretty difficult to pull off. Zerg has some strong all-ins they can do. I've been two-gate expanding and making two cannons at my natural to defend aggression.

-Tech quickly to blink or stargate to gain some map control. This will also pressure the Zerg a bit, and even potentially can kill a base if he's being especially greedy and unsafe. This prevents Zerg from making 80 drones before any units, and it also helps deal with infestors in the mid-game.

-Get colossus in time to defend a ling-infestor timing attack. I believe that two-base colossus is necessary now because of the threat of the infested terran + zergling timing attack. It's hard to not die to mass infested terrans without a splash damage option such as colossus or psionic storm, and psi storm takes too long to tech to. If Zerg attacks with infestors plus anything, we need to prevent the Colossus from being neural-parasited, so we have to have blink or phoenixes to snipe the infestors.

-Turtle on 3 bases. This is an unfortunate effect of heavy infestor play. Protoss can't leave their base with a big army once infestors are on the field in large numbers. All it takes is a fungal on the entire army and a massive surround with roaches or zerglings and Protoss loses the entire game. The only way to reach the late game is to not attack. We need to rely on stargate units, Dark Templar, or zealots to harass Zerg's bases and economy while we build up the death ball. Typically Zergs will aggressively try to kill our third and harass the economy with baneling drops at this point in the game.

-Make two stargates by the twenty minute mark. We need to pump out void rays in time to deal with the brood lord switch. A lot of void rays. I also like to add a mothership right as I reach max supply. The cloaking field and vortex can help a lot.

That's pretty much all I know about PvZ right now. After this stage in the game, I've either won or lost depending mostly on my micro and timings and other factors. It's difficult for any Protoss, even on the highest levels, to win against Zerg right now.

Protoss vs Protoss
My gameplan in PvP is pretty simple, actually.

-Geiko's defensive 3-gate. This is a great build I use every PvP to be safe against 4-gate while teching. Reply on the comment if you want to see a video demonstration of this build, or check out my youtube channel.

-If he 4-gated aggressively, rush to blink and end the game. This is a push that ought to kill the opponent or at the very least give us a faster expansion, because his tech was much later than ours. At this point I transition to charge zealots and archons.

-If he isn't 4-gating, make a robo quickly. This keeps us safe from a Dark Templar rush and from blink rushes.

-Once we know we're safe from a blink all-in, make a twilight council. If he went for fast blink, I get my own blink and counter-push with immortals and blink. This ought to win the game if he expanded. If he didn't open blink, for example if he went robo as well, I research charge and tech to archons.

-Chargelot Archon Immortal mid game. This army beats every other army in medium army sizes. We basically win automatically if he went colossus or pure gateway.

And that's all I know about PvP. The late game is very unexplored by most Protoss players. I've been experimenting with a void ray transition but I'm unsure how good it would be yet.

Core Concepts of the Protoss Matchups

2011-03-29T23:27:00.000-07:00

To celebrate my ascension to the almighty Diamond League (lol), I want to share some conceptual epiphanies I've had that drastically improved my play in various matchups. I feel like many players don't understand crucial and unintuitive specifics about PvX matchups, and this lack of understanding is all that holds them back from higher levels of play.

Protoss vs Terran
Scouting is the most important part of PvT, hands down. There are a few diverging paths the Terran can take, the largest being bio vs mech. Early game there are cloaked banshees and helion drops to worry about, and the way Protoss needs to respond to bio or mech in the late game are very different. Observer use will win or lose games against Terran, so it's important to get them. Countering bio and mech aren't difficult once you know the Terran has committed to them. So the most important building in PvT is the Robotics Facility. Observers, colossus, immortals. The other most important building in PvT is the gateway. I've noticed that it is just not tenable to have two-robo colossus or robo and stargate off of two bases. Gateway units are strong. Colossus are made of glass. They need to be in a supporting role, not a main role, within the army. Off two bases, there should only be a single tech building (robo, templar, stargate) with a collection of gateways and at least one upgrade building being used constantly. It's too fragile to add anything more until you're on three bases.

Protoss vs Zerg
Stalkers and sentries. Add immortals constantly against pure roaches, add Colossus against anything else. Build Dark Templar when you hit three bases. Be active with your army to force the Zerg to make units - don't commit unless the Zerg just isn't making units, at which point it's an easy win. Against an aggressive Zerg, defending a lot while building up and expanding will mean an easy win later in the game. Against a macro Zerg, they'll feel on the back foot all game long and eventually just die.

Protoss vs Protoss
This matchup is one I didn't understand for the longest time. I thought I could get away with a really technical build designed to hold the 4-warpgate rush and just win every game because I wouldn't die to 4-warpgates. The truth is that any counter-4-gate build is actually really weak against anything else.

PvP is based on the 4-gate attack. What this means is both players need to deal with the possibility of 4-gate. Neither player actually needs to do an offensive 4-gate, as often both will do a defensive build instead. But against a well-executed offensive 4-gate, there are only about three builds that will defeat it which aren't 4-gates themselves. The defensive 4-gate is probably the safest build with the best transitions after the 4-gate timing has passed.

After the timing for 4-gate has passed, or the 4-gate has been defended, the game can really only go in a few directions. The safest bet is to immediately make a robo and get an observer. The opponent can branch into a few tech patterns after the 4-gate. He can go for robo tech, which includes immortals or colossus. He can go for stargate tech, which usually means phoenixes. He can also go for twilight council tech, including blink, charge, and DT.

If you spot the opponent going robotics tech, you want to begin colossus production and make only zealots. On large enough maps, you can expand after your first colossus or two is out, because his re-enforce time for his colossus will be a huge disadvantage if he tries to attack. Otherwise, 1-base colossus pushes will probably decide the game. Do not get thermal lance until you've committed to expanding and the opponent is doing the same. At this point, get ready for dozens of colossus and war of the worlds. Teching to mothership late in the game is viable for a colossus toilet, which will end the game. Against immortals and stalkers, this is the best choice, but if the opponent is going for colossus before you commit to it yourself, you can throw down a stargate. He'll have very little anti-air and you'll get map control at the very least, allowing you to expand and harass. Blink stalkers or immortals is a good followup yourself.

Against a stargate build, you want to expand and get blink stalkers. That's actually it. Defend the harass while expanding, and you ought to come out on top. Use observers to get high ground vision and harass with blink, too.

If you scout a twilight council play, robotics play is going to be fine. If it's blink stalkers, go heavy on the immortals and do a timing push. If it's charge, a 1-base colossus timing push ought to end the game. You'll have mostly zealots yourself, negating the benefits of his charge upgrade, and you'll have colossus. If he's making a dark shrine, make observers and expand. Perhaps a cannon at your natural, depending on the map. You should gain a commanding lead and be able to win with virtually anything. Pure zealot+stalker with upgrades is a fine choice.

And that's all I know about PvP. Early game is defensive 4-gate, then the mid-game transition is a sort of rock-paper-scissors game. Use the observer to respond to the opponent. Don't expand until you know he isn't going for a robo-based timing push. 1-base 2-colossus timing attacks will beat a good number of followups. Far too often I see opponents who get past the 4-gate timing, and then begin expanding while getting colossus AND getting range. A 2-colossus timing will actually kill that. It should be your standard followup until you see otherwise.

The Development of a Build Order - Part 4

2011-03-19T10:22:00.000-07:00

Day 4.

Experimented against Muta-Ling a bit more. I believe I definitely need to research hallucination to spot the spire in time. If I wait until my first few stalkers to push, a Zerg could have a good number of mutalisks and zerglings already on the field and force me into an early defensive posture. Now I need to determine when to begin researching hallucination and whether to chronoboost it. Gas is at a premium before I take my expansion nexus, because it is all going into sentries. Directly after the nexus goes down and I have 7 or 8 sentries seems to be the reasonable time to begin the research. I'll need to examine whether it has to be chronoboosted in order for a phoenix to scout the spire in time. I doubt it.

If I scout an early spire, I believe I can skip the robotics facility and put down a fifth gateway and push, which should win the game. If I can't succeed with the timing attack, as has happened because of scouting the spire late, I have to get blink very quickly. I have been making the templar archives off of two bases. I don't know if I can survive purely on blink until I get my 3rd base. I know that iNcontrol also favors dark templar to regain some map control, which is a solid idea, but the gas consumption conflicts with the high templar tech. It may be a better response than the high templar. I'll need to try it out in the future.

I did have one game against an opponent who made pure roaches with burrow. I was able to crush it with good forcefields, stalkers, and a single robotics facility making immortals. Once on three bases I added high templar, anticipating a hydralisk switch, but none came, and I walked in and killed his roaches. A large stalker army with some immortals and templar mixed in can dominate roaches, and forcefields help immensely as always. I also decided to push much more aggressively all game long, relying on forcefields to escape if he had too many units. This kept me economically even or ahead.

The Development of a Build Order - Part 3

2011-03-16T00:25:00.000-07:00

Day 3.

One notable game to report on today. It was a very nonstandard game, so the build and timings were not very helpful practice. My Zerg opponent opened with a fast roach warren off of one base, prompting me to put down a forge and cannon early. Upon seeing the cannon, the Zerg expanded, and I proceeded with my 3-gate expand normally. My observer was unable to scout much beyond two bases, a roach warren, a hydralisk den, and two evolution chambers. As I had seen a roach opening, I expected roaches, and began immortal production from a single robotics facility. I researched hallucination but never used it once, which was a big mistake. As I moved out to poke and scout the Zerg's army, he dropped a large quantity of hydralisks in my main. I cleaned up his army but many buildings were destroyed in the process. I figured we were about even, economically, because he had made so many hydralisks unprompted. I also discovered in engaging so many hydralisks without colossi that guardian shield makes an absurdly big difference. It is 100% necessary whenever engaging hydralisks.

I moved to take a 3rd base while remaking my buildings. I forgot to begin my templar archives for a very long time, which was certainly what lost me the game. I didn't have storm researched until well after my third base was up, and I continued to try to engage hydralisks with charge zealots, which does indeed work very well. The rest of the game wasn't very relevant to my strategy, except that Zealot+Templar seems very viable against pure hydralisks. I simply didn't have enough of them, fast enough, and I continued to suffer from drops in my main, hurting my macro a lot. From watching the replay, my interpretation of the game state at all times was fairly good: the Zerg played aggressively with large numbers of hydralisks, and I thought (correctly) that we were economically very even, or I was ahead. This was true, and some Dark Templar harass actually brought me substantially ahead later in the game. What hurt me was my lack of production buildings, because they kept getting destroyed, and not enough high templars. The game was surprisingly close, but I simply couldn't quite catch up to my opponent's hydralisk army.

The game

Interesting fact: a single psionic storm brings the health of a hydralisk to 1 hp. This makes me think that as soon as Templar are on the field, I should switch from Zealot support to stalkers. Beyond that, this game has made me think about the ordering of the tech route I want to take. Early roaches should prompt me to go stalker+immortal first. This combination then prompts the Zerg into hydralisks. At this point I should already have psionic storm, which should be enough to beat virtually anything the Zerg can throw at me at that point. If, on the other hand, the Zerg opens with Hydralisks fast, I have to go for Zealot+Templar to open. If I execute this correctly, I hope it will be so dominating that the Zerg will need to get air units or roaches. Mutalisks are weak enough to high templar that I should be able to safely transition to blink stalkers. The most dangerous counter after fast hydralisks would be a very fast tech to brood lords, which require a large number of blink stalkers to counter, or void rays.

While my path from stalkers to immortals to a third base to templar seems reasonably clear, my path from zealots to templar to a third base to immortals does not. I'll need to work on rushing to storm and charge off two bases and trying to stay alive. An obvious problem here, as well, is knowing that a Zerg is going for fast hydralisks. If the Zerg began making hydras or just the hydra den early, but then made roaches or even mutalisks, I would be in some serious hurt, I think.

The Development of a Build Order - Part 2

2011-03-12T21:28:00.000-08:00

Day 2.

My practice partners were pretty busy today but I got a couple PvZ's in, between ladder and custom games. The rest was practicing the build order execution and some specific timings against an easy AI, as well as some testing in Unit Tester Solo.

In a platinum ladder game on Shattered Temple, I scouted roaches during my initial push coinciding with the observer. I did not use hallucination to scout. I went for double-robo immortals off of two bases upon seeing roaches. My 3rd base felt delayed and I was unsure of when to take it. I was surprised how much money double robo immortal uses. My opponent made roaches and zerglings and went for hydralisks later. The immortal and stalker combination seemed very powerful with decent forcefields. However, after perusing the replay I discovered that my opponent simply didn't make more than 40 drones all game long. I won by superior macro, not necessarily by the strategy. Still, I was able to discover some aspects of my build in a live scenario.

Replay

In a custom game against a diamond Zerg friend, I again poked at the front once my observer was out with my army. I scouted spinecrawlers and zerglings, making me suspect mutalisks. I then used my observer to scout to confirm the spire. I rushed for a twilight council for blink, as well as armor upgrades, while massing stalkers. My 3rd base again felt late - I took it while close to maxed. My templar archives also felt late - I didn't get storm before the game ended. Against good macro, I don't know if I would have won. The zerg didn't drone enough and didn't harass with his army at all, and a single push was able to win the game with good force fields and an excellent chokepoint engagement area. A goal of my strategy is definitely to be adaptable to roaches, hydras, lings, mutas or banelings, depending on my scouting, and I feel like I did that in this game. Still, I want to get a 3rd base sooner and I want psionic storm earlier. I'll focus on these points in the next few games.

Replay

In Unit Tester Solo, I wanted to find out just how powerful equal-resource armies of immortals and zealots fare against roaches and hydralisks. Immortals in decent numbers are ridiculous against roaches, as I expected. Chargelots against unmicroed roaches are actually cost-effective, which surprised me. Immortals are not terrible against Hydralisks in combination with stalkers, but it's not something I would want to stick with in a long game against mass hydralisks. A surprising find was how good sentries were against hydralisks. Sentries are actually an important damage dealer against Hydralisks, in combination with other units, but they die quickly to hydras like everything else. 8 sentries can actually kill 5 hydralisks.

By far the coolest find, however, was the effectiveness of zealots against hydralisks. Unlike roaches, hydralisks can't micro against zealots, and charge is a solid upgrade in this fight. Zealots are incredibly cost-effective against hydralisks, as long as no roaches are present in the fight. I'd like to start experimenting with staying alive against a hydra rush by using sentries and rushing to charge on my zealots while teching to psionic storm. I'd like to use a comparison to Protoss vs Terran here: in PvT, Marauders are weak against zealots and strong against stalkers, and they are the tank of the bio army - they absorb the most damage. The marines are good against zealots, while having very little health. In PvZ, Roaches are the tank unit equivalent to the marauder, except they are strong against zealots and weak to stalkers. Hydralisks are strong against stalkers and (apparently) weak to zealots, and have very little health. Both marauders and roaches can micro against zealots. And unlike marines, hydralisks cost a significant investment. I'm very excited about the possibilities here. It is also difficult for the zerg to transition from hydralisks to mass mutalisks, and the Zerg will not have enough gas to field both units in large numbers. Overall, reacting to a hydra rush with fast chargelots seems like a cool idea that I need to test more. Naturally storm will be necessary when the zerg has too many hydralisks, and when roaches are on the field, because the zealots won't be able to reach the hydras before dying.

The Development of a Build Order - Part 1

2011-03-11T23:56:00.001-08:00

I have a strategy I want to develop in Starcraft 2. The opening builds and strategies that I usually employ are created by professional players far better at the game than I. However I got an idea for a strategy, and this time I have no strict and specific build order to follow. I have to develop and test and hone timings on my own to discover if the build I want to create will actually be viable. I may need to abandon this build if testing proves it won't work. But without testing, it isn't Starcraft, it's Theorycraft. The next few posts on this blog will document the development and testing of this build, with replays and possibly commentary videos included.

"So what's the damn build already?!"
This is a Protoss vs Zerg strategy for the Protoss. The typical Protoss style which I use to great success is the Blink Stalker + Sentry + Colossus death ball, with a 3rd base Dark Templar/Archon transition. Extremely safe and well-rounded strategy. It's good against just about everything the Zerg can throw at it and transitions well throughout the game. But is this the BEST strategy against everything Zerg can throw at the Protoss? I'd like to find out.

In a nutshell, what I would like to develop is a strategy involving Immortals and High Templar. Immortals are one of my favorite units and I feel like they are criminally underutilized. With 50 damage against armored targets and a hardened shield, Immortals are serious threats to any armored unit. Typically we only see these in large numbers against Terran mech - Tanks and Thors - but both Marauders and Roaches are armored as well. With the standard Protoss PvZ strategy, the answer to Roaches is Stalkers and Colossi, neither of which is particularly strong against the Roach. Combined together, however, they can do OK. I want to do better than OK! I want to wreck roaches entirely. And with the Immortal in larger numbers than we ever typically see, I believe that is possible.

So the Immortal will be the key to defeating mass roach, but what about anything else the Zerg throws our way? Zerglings and Hydralisks are light units with high DPS which circumvent the Immortal's hardened shield. In the standard Protoss strategy, the Colossus deals with these two threats. If the Colossus count is very low because the Zerg keeps making Corruptors, Hydralisks and Zerglings can be devastating to the remaining Stalker army. It can be hard for a Protoss to deal with a Zerg who overmakes Corruptors and then masses Hydralisks. Alternatively, many Zergs will play with Zerglings and Mutalisks, or even Zerglings and Banelings. There just isn't a strong answer to large masses of Zerglings using a standard Protoss strategy. There are only ways to do OK against these Zerg strategies and eke out an economic victory. That's not good enough for me. I want to crush my enemies!

That's where the High Templar comes into play. Psionic Storm will melt Zerglings almost instantly. They soften Mutalisks substantially, and are a critical way to keep the Mutalisk count low enough for blink stalkers to deal with them. Storm deals with Hydralisks because they can't micro out of the storm easily, and don't have a lot of health. What storm is weak against is armored targets - the Roach, the Brood Lord, and the Ultralisk.

It is my belief that the Immortal deals with armored targets better and the High Templar deals with light Zerg units better than the more general-purpose Stalker + Colossus army. Now that I have this strategic concept, I need to fashion a gameplan around it. What are my goals with this build?

1. A safe fast expansion
-I want to win a game of any length using this build. The units I need to make require a lot of gas. I'll want three bases reasonably quickly both to get the economy I need for the units I want, but also to stay even with the Zerg's economy.

2. Immortals in time to fight mid-game Roaches
-If we scout Roaches, we need to be able to create out Immortals in time. This means a reasonably fast Robotics Facility.

3. Ability to scout the Zerg's tech in time to determine my Templar timing.
-What the Zerg is doing determines whether I start to go mass Immortal or High Templar off of two bases, and when to start getting Templars. I need to scout what Zerg does soon after taking my natural expansion.

I now have a very basic set of goals that my build needs to meet. As a general framework, we're looking at some kind of reasonably fast expansion to open. I'm going to elect for a 3-gateway Sentry expand, which is a standard and very safe Protoss expansion build. I feel that forge fast-expanding is too map-dependent and too risky at this point in the development of my build.

Upon taking my natural expansion, I need to scout the Zerg's tech, or optionally to force the Zerg's tech. There are four ways to do this:

1. Hallucinated Phoenix
-For the reasonably small cost, we can research hallucination and send fake Phoenixes across the map all mid-game long. This is a versatile and long-term scouting solution, offering more uses later in the game.

2. Observer
-We could build an observer to scout the Zerg with. The problem I foresee is that this is a slower scout method and we want the observer to be with our army. We also may want to utilize the Robotics Facility for Immortals early and often.

3. Poking the Zerg army
-Poking at the Zerg army will force him to make units and show what units he's building. This is a strategy we ideally want to do all game long to control the Zerg's economy. The issue with this method is that the Zerg can hide tech, like Mutalisks or Hydras, until it is too late to spot.

4. Forcing Roaches with a Zealot + Sentry attack
-I like to think of this as the Huk method. Upon expanding, we want to attack with pure Zealots and Sentries and a proxy pylon. Against a Zerg making Zerglings or small numbers of roaches, this attack can actually win the game, but our ultimate goal is to force the Zerg to make large numbers of roaches. The timing will hit the Zerg before Mutalisks come out. The issue with this method is how risky it is. Forcefields have to be perfectly placed and the Zerg can blindly kill the Protoss by building a lot of units early.

I'll need to test all of these methods, but my goal is a tactic which will determine what the Zerg is doing and give me time to respond via 2-base Immortals or High Templars. What timings I need to learn to defend specific midgame Zerg attacks I will have to discover through testing. The next question is when and how I will take my third base. With the standard Protoss style, the key timing is when the first Colossus is produced, because it immediately gives the Protoss some amount of safety. Without Colossus, it seems like a key timing will be the completion of Storm research, perhaps the completion of forge upgrades, or the beginning of double-robo Immortal production. This is something I need to discover through testing.

So now I have a basic framework for a build order, based on the goals of my desired strategy. 3-gate Sentry expand, some method of scouting, a robotics facility, and then a response to scouting - either double-robo Immortal or High Templar and Storm. After one of these responses, at some point, we need to take a third base. Once taking a third base, we can complete our Immortal + High Templar gameplan. Potentially we can move onto stargates or Dark Templar. This is when we might get Archons out, as well. This is the build order I intend to figure out through testing and playing with practice partners. Stay tuned for the next post, detailing my testing and experiences developing and refining this build order further.

Any diamond-level Zerg player that wants to assist this process by acting as a practice partner should message me on Battle.net! My ID is "GomJabbar", my character code is "678".

The Evolution of Starcraft II

2011-01-02T12:46:00.001-08:00

Ever since the beta, I've been rabidly following the Starcraft II pro scene. The game has been changing on an almost weekly basis, and not often due to patches. As new strategies are figured out, the strategic landscape of the game alters drastically. Here's a look back at the landscape for a perspective on the present and future of Starcraft II strategy.

Early in the beta, protoss play favored almost entirely four gate and three gate robo. Immortals were huge and Colossi were rare. Void ray rushes were very strong, and Terran would go for lots of early marines as a precaution. Expansions didn't really happen much. I don't recall ever seeing a fast expansion from any race but Zerg. Zerg had very few problems getting a fast hatchery up safely. Terrans basically always opened with a reaper or two against every race. Roaches were the primary (and sometimes only) unit in the Zerg army. Mutalisks were basically unseen. The game felt pretty balanced at the time, although mass roaches were very very strong.

Mid beta, we had the first big tournaments, the HDH and finally the Razor King of the Beta. As I recall, during or right before the HDH roaches were changed to 2 food, and roaches fell drastically out of favor. Mass hydralisks and baneling busts because very popular. Terrans were still opening with reapers and moving into helion or banshee harass in most matchups. TvT was in a lot of flux but tank-viking was not around yet. TvZ was almost always Terran doing a large one-base tank-marine push after lots of initial harassment. Protoss began using colossi, as White-Ra demonstrated their effectiveness in the HDH.

Late beta, in the Razor King of the Beta tournament, strategies were very similar, but Tester introduced us to a strategy IdrA still considers to be unfairly strong: double-pylon walling at the bottom of Zerg's ramp, with a cannon behind it. This opening is still used today, but will be weakened in the next patch (as of this writing). Tester also demonstrated his masterful forcefield use in the King of the Beta tournament, in combination with colossi which were quite popular. TvZ had not changed much, with opening harassment into a timing push off (typically) one base. TvP was considered in Terran's favor, with mass marauders being just too strong for many protoss to deal with. Tanks were also viable against Protoss at the time. ZvP, 2-gate zealot rushes were common, forcing early roaches. Muta-ling was also very popular due to the rarity of protoss air. Only Nony (Liquid'Tyler) was known for his phoenix harassment. Ultralisks, all through the beta, were considered useless and not used.

Early release, introduced to the world during Day[9]'s midnight launch party for the game itself, came Zerg's most hated strategy: 5-rax reaper. Terrans discovered that they could continue to make reapers and get a quick nitro pack while expanding, forcing roaches instead of drones and pressuring like crazy, and transitioning into a huge marauders push. Zergs struggled to figure out this opening, and after some time the very best Zergs could hold it off some of the time by rushing to spire, using extra spinecrawlers, or getting very fast speedlings and employing impressive micro. MorroW won the IEM tournament against IdrA with this strategy. But it took a mid-game patch to truly put an end to such a strong Terran opening. In TvP, mech was out of style, with mass marauders versus mass colossi being the norm. Banshees were still popular but helions weren't used as often.

Mid-release, the GSL began. With a patch, nitro pack required a factory to be built, and reapers essentially disappeared overnight. Even so, Terran harassment openings and timing pushes were widely considered overpowered against Zerg. IdrA pioneered the use of mutalisks in ZvT, with muta-ling-baneling showing its strength - provided Zerg could get past the early game. This is about when I first recall seeing forge-fast-expands from Protoss, and other fast expansions from the other races. Macro games became a little more commonplace. ZvP, roach-hydra versus stalker-colossi was the norm. Phoenixes shut down mutalisks, so muta-ling fell out of favor.

Most recently, we had GSL2 and GSL3. Foxer was the name of the game, demonstrating the power of raw marines and micro. No one knew marines could beat banelings with proper spreading and kiting. Thanks to this huge shift back toward marines, which had been seeing some disfavor, Terrans are again able to counter mutalisks by keeping them alive against banelings. Tank-marine or marine-thor are now the dominant Terran strategies, but macro Terrans are still the minority. In the finals of GSL2, Foxer again shook up the game by winning several games with marine-scv rushes, which became commonplace in GSL3 and on the ladder. Zergs are still having difficulty dealing with this attack. In PvZ, phoenix openings are becoming very strong, forcing hydralisks and transitioning into colossi. Zergs once again feel under the gun. In GSL3, oGsMC revolutionized PvT with brilliant forcefield micro, early stalker and zealot rushes, and the return of early void rays in professional play. Many people feel TvP favors the Protoss now. Macro games seem to be very common now, even with Terran players.

As we move into the future, we can look back and see what drove the changes to the game and to strategies. Patches were always a response to a change in gameplay brought about by the players themselves. The perceived balance of the game constantly changes due to these player discoveries, and in the absence of any patch. Already we're seeing more and more long and exciting games in every matchup, and we're bound to see more as strong early attacks are ironed out of the game, thanks to player discoveries like new micro techniques or better building placement (as Jinro showed us against Fox.Moon on Scrap Station). Starcraft 2 has only been out a few months, and I can't wait to see how the game develops next in 2011.

Continue?

2010-07-05T19:30:00.000-07:00

You can now find me writing for the retro-themed gaming blog Continue? and I have my first article up. Longer readers of my blog might recognize it. I'll be submitting new and old reviews and articles over there, with my focus on older PC games and on shmups. If you enjoy my blog chances are you'll enjoy Continue?, and it's a bit bigger than mine. Definitely check it out!

I will still be writing here for odds and ends, and for discussion of modern gaming, but expect fewer large features on older games to show up on here. And definitely continue to check out my youtube channel where you'll find my ongoing Let's Plays of MechWarrior 4 and Illusion of Gaia. I hope to start shooting some shmup reviews for Continue? soon, and they'll be posted to my youtube channel as well.

The future of gaming, according to Bobby Kotick of Activision

2010-06-14T09:48:00.000-07:00

Surfing Kotaku today, I came across an interview with the Baron of Hell himself, Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision. You can find the full interview here. Most of the interview was unremarkable attempts at damage control by Kotick, but one part really stood out.

As the interview is winding down I point out to Kotick that he has achieved his goal, traveled down that road to a billion. So why not retire?

"I'm not really thinking about that," he says, after I point out he could use the time to play more games. "I have a big objective for the next ten years. You know the thing that's really exciting is that when you look at what's happened to our medium. We're finally now at a point where we have all the characteristics of mass market, mass media opportunities. And I think it's three things for me that are really driving how you make video games as appealing as TV."

The first is making video game characters real, something he feels still hasn't happened.

"You can't put dialogue in these characters in a way where it's believable," he says. "If we can get the facial animation to be compelling, the dialog to be believable, I think you can satisfy that emotional connection between the audience and the character that gives you the characteristic attributes of film and television."

The second is physical interface, like what Guitar Hero brought to gaming. Something that Kotick strongly believes has a lot more opportunities.

"Physically tying you as a player to what you see on the screen, I can tell you a hundred fantasies I've always had whether it's like conducting an orchestra or unleashing as a rock star, really having a driving experience, like with a helicopter flying experience that is real," he said. "So physical interface is really just scratching the surface of opportunity there."

Finally, tapping into the ever increasing importance of social interaction, whether that means Facebook and Twitter, multiplayer gaming or including voice and video in a game.

We have seen this trend over the last few years already. The modern game climate is all about the experience. Graphics, atmosphere, perspective effects, a focus on first-person views, and stuff that looks exciting all seems more important than games that are actually exciting. Games are getting easy and simpler to play, because deep challenging gameplay isn't conducive to the experience. Dying takes you out of the immersion! The hero of the game is supposed to be a badass, so the player shouldn't ever fail, either. Gamers would get bored with really easy and simple gameplay, though, so they need something to keep them involved in the game somehow, and feeling a sense of accomplishment somehow. They're sure as hell not going to get it from good gameplay, so more and more developers are adding RPG elements to just about every game. RPG elements add a fake sense of accomplishment by popping up item and ability unlocks every once in a while, often for doing nothing but playing for a period of time.

Physical peripherals are in line with this trend, of course. But they're also an opportunity for Activision to make a lot more money.

"Social" gaming and multiplayer is also a clear trend over the last few years. I'm not opposed to it in principle, but the execution game developers have chosen leaves a lot to be desired. Most games nowadays have a singleplayer and multiplayer portion. They focus a lot on the social aspects of the multiplayer, and again the fake accomplishment of multiplayer unlocks and experience points and leveling up. The singleplayer ends up being really boring, for the reasons above. If a game is going to have singleplayer and multiplayer, although it's more costly and difficult, the best thing to do is make the gameplay in the single and multiplayer components actually different, or just don't bother with the singleplayer at all. For example, the upcoming Blizzard RTS Starcraft II will have a very competitive multiplayer with deep and complex gameplay, and a focus on balance and e-sports competition. The singleplayer will actually be quite different. It will have units and abilities that won't be in the multiplayer because they wouldn't be balanced for it. The singleplayer will be like a different RTS than the multiplayer, because that's the right thing to do for that game.

Social aspects of multiplayer is great. It's great to make friends online and play against the same people a lot. Of course, the best way to do this is to have persistent places for gamers to meet. Like a dedicated server. But developers hate those! They don't let you sell map packs and game modes, because they need to compete with modders who create that content for free. They also make piracy a bit nicer, because of pirate servers. So instead, because of consoles, developers can get rid of dedicated servers and just use peer-to-peer connections. You get matched up with a bunch of random people you've never met before, will never meet again, and won't remember. Then you just play games, hosted on one of the player's connections, leading to a ton of lag for everyone but that player. So, social multiplayer as consoles do it, which is how PC games are headed as well, is one of the worst ways to actually do it! Oh, and you can hook into twitter and facebook, because THAT makes the game itself better.

Let's Play: MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries

2010-06-03T15:46:00.000-07:00

Because of the recent re-release of MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries by Mek Tek, I've been playing through it again, and really enjoying the changes and additions by Mek Tek. I also have a lot of fun recording commentary videos for games, so I decided to do a series of "Let's Play" videos of MW4:Mercs. I have 7 episodes up so far, with more to come. The pace of episodes is roughly 1 or 2 per day. However, I'm going on vacation next week and I won't be able to record until I get back.

You can find all of these and future videos at my Youtube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/kengou

Cadillacs and Dinosaurs

2010-04-27T19:32:00.001-07:00

This game kicks serious dinosaur butt.

The Most Amazing Mech Simulation Game Ever

2010-04-18T21:46:00.000-07:00

I recently discovered the Playstation 2 game "Robot Alchemic Drive", although I haven't gotten to play it yet - but it looks incredible. Giant robots punching each other through buildings is pretty much impossible to NOT be fun. Something about the controls of R.A.D., which it appears are very clunky and awkward - just the way a mech should operate - gave me a brilliant idea for a Mech game. Humor me for a minute here:

It's an in-cockpit simulation like the Mechwarrior series, of course. Nothing beats the feeling of being in an authentic, detailed fictional war machine! In the regular Mechwarrior games, movement is controlled via a throttle configuration to control speed, while the torso twists from side to side to aim or move weak armor away from the enemy. This basically amounts to the mechs handling like a futuristic tank, with jump jets and lasers. That's awesome, it works great for that series. What I really like about the clunky control scheme in R.A.D. is how it gives the mechs such a sense of scale, and how it adds an entirely new layer of skill to even basic piloting. Think about a massive, tall, bipedal robot. It's not going to be a very stable vehicle. Again, it works in Mechwarrior because pilots wear neurohelmets to control balance effortlessly, but I'd like to see something different in a new Mech game. In many cases, giving more control to the player is a sure-fire way to add more depth to game mechanics - something the current video game generation could stand to learn. That's what I propose for this Mech game.

In R.A.D., you control each limb of the robot individually. The robots control slowly and awkwardly. I'd like to see even MORE clunkyness in my Mechs, though! It's not nearly enough! Part of this idea comes from watching some really good R.A.D. videos where the players know what they're doing. They make the robots do some ridiculous stuff! I've seen robots uppercut enemy robots, and then punch them again on the way down - all using pretty detailed control of the individual limbs of the robot! That type of control takes SKILL! A beginner could not do that sort of thing. A real mech shouldn't be pilotable by just anyone, they should take some real skill to control a humanoid bipedal robot, right? So, the clunkier and more awkward you make the mech to control, the more awesome it will be to make the mech do awesome stuff! That's the assumption I'm working with, anyway. But just how clunky do I want this mech to handle?

In this fabled Mech game I'd love to play, there will be detailed control of each limb of the mech - of course. But here's what R.A.D. doesn't do, that I want to see: control over the mech's balance. If you screw up walking forward, you should fall over. If you want to run, you need to lean forward and lean into your turns properly and time your leg movement properly, just like you're really running. Unlike Mechwarrior, you can actually sidestep or make quicker movements in this game, although doing so will be DIFFICULT. As it should be. Dodging enemy fire and melee attacks would be more dynamic in this mech game, unlike in Mechwarrior where you need to just run perpendicularly to enemy missiles to avoid them and use cover to avoid everything else. Ducking, diving and maybe even rolling on the ground could be possible to avoid enemy attacks. In the Battletech books which I've recently started reading, the mechs are capable of this - why can't they do it in the games? Melee attacks would be much more physics-based, and you could have a chance to regain your balance if you are struck or pushed, provided you have enough skill at controlling your mech's posture and leg positions to maintain balance. Guns would of course have recoil, requiring a slightly forward posture and good arm position to fire accurately. Seriously, I think the skill ceiling for this game would be insane! Playing the game as a noobie would be a neverending hell of falling over and being killed over and over, but improving at such a game would certainly be rewarding.

Of course this sounds like the most detailed mech simulation anyone could think of, but how on earth would you actually play it? I can think of only three possibilities. The first is one way in which you could control everything AT THE SAME TIME: a special controller in the vein of Steel Battalion - but even more complex and probably expensive! Analog sticks for both hands could control the arms, conceivably - maybe with the addition of hat sticks and sliders and things for finer control of different axes of motion of the arms. Legs could be controlled via foot pedals, but simple analog pedals with a single axis wouldn't be enough. Multiple pedals or perhaps rotating pedals might do it. There would then be a ton of additional buttons, and maybe a third middle joystick, to control the mech's posture and other functions. Weapon switching, power and heat management, and other things would need to be handled by traditional buttons. Ridiculously complicated and impractical? You bet. Fun as hell once you get good at it? YES!

The next solution for control is one that allows for real-time simultaneous control of the mech, but I think might take away from the clunkiness and skill ceiling: motion controls. Something like a wiimote, in each hand, and strapped to each foot, but with a LOT more buttons to deal with. Or, perhaps, all those motion controls in addition to a PC keyboard and mouse, might be satisfactory. That would still be ridiculous fun to play and control, but I think remove some of the skill involved with managing each limb.

Finally, the solution easiest and cheapest to implement, but the clunkiest of ALL: pure mouse and keyboard control. Really, it would center on mouse control for the axes of movement for all limbs and posture, and using the keyboard to rapidly switch between limbs using hotkeys. It would be POSSIBLE to control the mech with adequate speed using a mouse with hotkeys - look at any RTS and you can see how possible it is to control so many things at the same time, so rapidly. But it's really, REALLY difficult. Running while shooting, for example, would take ridiculously fast and accurate mouse and keyboard skills. It would be FAR easier to make mistakes resulting in the mech falling over. But this is still probably the most realistic control method that still provides the adequate amount of control.

SOMEBODY MAKE IT HAPPEN!

Quick Update

2010-04-13T20:46:00.000-07:00

Thought I'd update a little on my goings-on. My laptop has been having issues for a while with gaming, and I think I finally got it diagnosed! It appears to be an overheating problem. It also seems like a bit of a pain to fix, and I had been planning to build a new PC soon anyway, so I'm just going to tolerate it for a few months. I have my PS3 to keep me occupied with gaming for a long while. On the PC I've mostly just been playing 2D games and emulators because that's all it can consistently handle. Played through Super Metroid in its entirety in 4 hours last week, which I had never done before, so I figured it was about time to! I have the Starcraft 2 beta downloaded, and it's as amazing as I had hoped, but unfortunately the framerate is just not that consistent. I'll be building a new PC this summer so I can play the full game properly.

On the PS3, at the moment I'm going through Just Cause 2 and having a ton of fun. This game is absolutely massive! So many crazy situations and so many things to do, I highly recommend it! Beyond that, the two games I continue to come back to are BlazBlue and Guitar Hero. In GH, I got into it pretty recently, so maybe I'm behind the trends here, but the plus side is it was pretty cheap. I'm working my way through the game (Metallica, and occasionally World Tour for Tool and Dream Theater songs) in hard mode right now, after beating everything on medium. Adding the 5th button was a real challenge, but I've finally got it and it's so much more fun because if that! Soon I'll try to transition to Expert. In BlazBlue, I'm playing a lot more online, and winning more. I think I'm around level 28 right now, playing almost exclusively Tager.

Currently I'm getting super-hyped for Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar's western sandbox game coming up in May. I haven't been this hyped for a game since the Orange Box, I think, and this game just cannot come soon enough!

Finally, some non-gaming stuff, but I just want to mention it anyway, I had a big epiphany in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu last week. I've been training in BJJ for 4 and a half years now, and I'm sure any hardcore gamer can identify with the awesome feeling of a major epiphany in any game of skill and strategy, which is what BJJ is for me. The rest of this paragraph won't make a lick of sense to you unless you know about grappling, so if you don't you might as well stop reading. I had been having some issues with my guard in the last year or two, and then last Friday, all of a sudden, I was rolling with a friend and something in my brain just clicked. I was using rubber guard pretty much exclusively, all the time, from full guard, no matter if it was gi or no gi. When it works, it's awesome, and I get an omoplata and probably finish them 60% of the time. Side note, so many people don't actually finish the omoplata submission, I've been working really hard on learning that skill and it's probably my #1 submission now. Anyway, when I was starting out in BJJ I was doing everything standard with my guard game, and had good success with it. I have long legs, and my guard was fairly good. Around the time I got my blue belt, I started trying to learn rubber guard, and just stopped doing my fundamental guard moves in favor of rubber guard. I would break them down and go straight for mission control, and if they tried to break out, I'd just work rubber guard stuff on them regardless. So last friday, I had my friend in my guard, and broke him down properly, with the intent to go for rubber guard. He started standing up, in anticipation of mission control. Instead of going for mission control ANYWAY, as I normally would, I just went to a completely textbook armbar from the guard, got it, hooked under his leg and rolled him over for the finish. I realize now that I was getting tunnel-vision about the rubber guard. I wasn't being adaptable and I was neglecting the fundamentals because of that. I don't doubt rubber guard is fantastic, and innovative, and effective. But there's a time for it, and there's a legitimate time for the traditional closed guard game, as well.

Are publishers TRYING to kill PC gaming? Yes. Yes they are.

2010-03-21T13:12:00.000-07:00

Over the past several years, developing games have become a very expensive affair. Because of this, more and more games are going multiplatform and abandoning exclusivity. The age of PC exclusives is coming to a close, and we've seen games come to consoles which no one would consider playing without a PC just a few years ago. FPSes, RTSes and even MMOs are being released on multiple platforms now, simply because they will generate more overall revenue because of it. It's hard to blame a business for wanting to make money, but I do feel that the overall quality of games has deteriorated because of this behavior.

Most recently, we've seen the rise of some very harsh Digital-Rights-Management (DRM) in PC games. The reason is obvious: piracy. It has been a problem virtually as long as games have existed on the PC. I doubt it is possible to completely eliminate the problem of piracy on the PC - nor on any platform on which piracy exists, including the 360 and the Wii right now. Yet this is precisely what Ubisoft, EA and other publishers claim they are seeking. There is considerable evidence that adding more restrictive DRM will only encourage piracy, not dampen it. Take the recent example of Ubisoft's DRM in Silent Hunter 5 and Assassin's Creed II. Both games - and all future Ubisoft games, as of now - require a constant internet connection to play. If your connection or Ubisoft's authentication servers drops out for any reason, the game will stop until the connection is resumed. Even if you are playing strictly singleplayer, as is likely to be the case with both games. Within a day or two of release, Silent Hunter 5 was cracked and pirated en masse. Shortly thereafter, Ubisoft's authentication servers went down, preventing legitimate buyers from playing the game they payed for. The pirates could still play the cracked version just fine.

Do publishers (who certainly are the ones behind the implementation of DRM, not developers) really believe this type of system will stop piracy and increase game sales on the PC? Average gamers such as myself, who do not work in the game industry, can clearly see evidence that it will not. Indeed, DRM like this drives gamers away from the PC platform and from purchasing PC games, because they are in reality being punished for legitimately buying games.

Now ask yourself what is more likely: that game publishers are completely oblivious to this effect of DRM and sincerely believe they will decrease piracy and increase sales, despite all evidence to the contrary; or, that they know full well what they are doing and the consequences of doing so?

The latter seems far more likely. But why would they do it, if they know it doesn't work and only encourages piracy? Because they want to kill gaming on the PC. There are a few reasons they would want this specifically:

A: PC games cost more money to make than console games
While I don't work in the game industry and I don't have evidence to back this up, it seems logical to me. Developing a PC game means ensuring that game will work for a wide variety of hardware and software configurations and versions. With consoles, the hardware is a very known quantity and not as difficult to develop for.

B: Console games make more revenue than PC games
With WoW as the major exception to this point notwithstanding, console games are more profitable to make than PC games. The average gamer doesn't really care about the inferior controls of FPSes on a console, and the RTS genre is now mostly a niche genre anyway. Games simply sell better on consoles now compared to the PC (in general).

C: Game publishers would prefer all gaming to be done on consoles only, with the PC out of the picture

This becomes clear when you consider the previous points and the problem of piracy. Beyond this is the lack of control over their product which game publishers desperately want. Modern Warfare 2 illustrated this when Activision chose not to have dedicated servers or mod support (I firmly believe it was Activision's decision, not Infinity Ward, despite what they may claim). They don't want gamers to modify their game. They don't want gamers to have access to the longevity and moddability of dedicated servers for their games, because they want every customer to switch to the newest game next year when a new one comes out, rather than continuing to play the older one. Publishers want to sell map packs and other content that PC gamers are used to getting for free. Big publishers do not want to compete with free user-created content. The PC simply offers too much freedom for gamers, and too little control for publishers.

I don't think PC gaming will die because of the moves of these publishers, thanks in large part to Steam and Valve's efforts on behalf of our platform. Even so, I do expect large publishers to begin abandoning the platform in the next few years. At the moment, most big releases are developed for consoles primarily and then ported to PC, often to the detriment of the PC version. There are also frequently no demos of games, which PC gamers use to determine if a game will run on their hardware. When publishers do this, in addition to adding obtrusive and restrictive DRM, gamers turn to pirated copies of the game to sidestep the headaches of the DRM or test a game before buying it. When publishers see the high piracy rate of their games, they declare PC gaming is dying and decide to add even more DRM or put even less effort into porting games from consoles - nevermind putting effort into making native/exclusive PC games! If this trend continues - which I've just argued is intentional, so it ought to continue - then many large publishers will eventually give up on the PC platform. They just need to find the right excuse.

Let's Play: My First Attempts

2010-03-02T12:33:00.000-08:00

I've got some recording software up and running, so I've been attempting some Let's Play videos. If you're not aware, Let's Play means recording myself playing a game and adding commentary. The commentary can be done during or after I play the game itself, but I personally prefer videos with live commentary that reacts to the gameplay. So far, I've made:

a quick test using Peggle Nights,

A full mission in Wing Commander,

and a full (crappy) run of Dodonpachi,

It's a lot of fun to do these things, but it is difficult dividing my attention between playing and talking. I plan to do a few more next week, and I'm definitely open to game requests. I've had one on youtube to do a Dodonpachi Daioujou LP and I'm considering it.

The Star Wars Jedi Outcast Multiplayer Treatise

2010-02-13T11:16:00.000-08:00

A Guide to Star Wars: Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast Multiplayer

1. The Basics and Etiquette

Jedi Outcast is a game with a unique multiplayer atmosphere. When you're just starting out, it can be a confusing experience. If you do or fail to do certain things, you might be picked on or even kicked by the denizens of a server, so it is very important to know how to behave. Admittedly, this has turned many players off of the multiplayer experience, but for most servers this is just a fact that must be accepted if you want to really play the game. How and why these practices came about is beyond the scope of this guide, but rest assured that you will learn everything necessary to start out Jedi Outcast's multiplayer on the right foot.

When you first fire up the multiplayer portion of the game, you'll want to immediately head over to the setup screen and configure your player. It's a sad fact that if you go onto most servers with the default white name of "padawan", other players are going to assume you're a noob and they will treat you as such. A few servers will kick a "padawan" player outright. Avoid these baseless judgments and choose a name for yourself before you start. You'll avoid some potential trouble later on. Optionally, you can give some color to your name in the same way as any other game based on the Quake 3 engine: with the ^ character, followed by a number. Play around with different numbers to discover all of the colors. It is also possible to switch colors multiple times within the name, so enjoy personalizing your experience.

When you're done setting up your character, it's time to jump into a game. When you hit "join game", you probably won't see any servers initially. Go and change "source" from "local" to "internet" up at the top of the screen, and then hit "get new list" to connect to the server list. This late in the game's life, you probably won't see a large number of servers, but there are plenty to choose from.

Jedi Outcast is unique in that most gametypes are not actually what you think they are. If you see a server running the map ffa_bespin, chances are it's not actually a free-for-all deathmatch with weapons and force powers where every man fends for himself. Most servers running this map, particularly clan servers - you can tell these by the clan tags at the beginning of the name, naturally - disallow weapons and run mods that specifically disable force powers except for jump, offense and defense. This will apply to other servers running other maps, and it might not apply to every server running ffa_bespin. Still, this is a fair generalization. There are a few other gametypes, but it mostly boils down to duel and not-really-FFA gametypes. If you want to be sure about the details of a server, you can always select it in the list and hit "server info" to find out what mod it's running and who is playing on it. Keep an eye out for servers that have nobody but bots populating them! You'll recognize bot names easily because they sound like characters from the single-player game and they have all-white names. Make sure a server has real people before joining, unless you just really want to kill some bots. But then that's not why you want to play multiplayer, is it?

If you want to play online in a deathmatch with full force powers and weapons, this guide won't be of much help to you. Hunt down a server that allows these things and have fun! Let's briefly cover duel servers before moving on to the main focus of the guide. On a duel server, players are put into a queue as spectators while two players duke it out in a one-on-one lightsaber duel. Typically these don't allow force powers either. On a duel server, when you get your turn to play, you'll want to start out with a bow to your opponent (see below) before beginning the fight. Most servers also frown upon kicking the opponent (doing a wall-flip or side-wall-flip off of an opponent will damage them and knock them down) and attacking an opponent who is on the ground due to a failed saber-lock. Let them get back up and then resume the fight. Aside from that, there isn't much to say.

From here on out, I'll assume you're on a "regular" FFA server. These servers have a lot of unwritten etiquette rules that baffle most new players. For starters, when you enter the server you'll want to make sure you have the right force powers allocated. Max out your jump, saber offense and defense before entering the game. When you enter the game, your lightsaber will be on - turn it off! Running around with your saber turned on conveys a threat to other players and make them feel uneasy. Even though the gametype is called "free-for-all", it is not correct to attack any other player - unless they attack you first, of course. The real point of this game mode is to duel other players.

"Why not just play on duel servers?" you might ask. The answer is that in duel servers, only two players are fighting each other at any given time. On a FFA server, with the help of mods - the vanilla game cannot do this - any number of players can be dueling at the same time. To instigate a duel with another player, you hit the challenge button. The default button is k, although I prefer to have it closer to WASD so I don't have to reach for the button. When you're engaged in a duel with another player, you and the other player get full health and are covered in blue. This means no other players can damage you, and you cannot damage any other player. Of course, other players can still get in the way, because you can not run through them no matter what. It's courteous to avoid duels already in progress at all times, so you won't interfere.

When a duel begins, you have to bow to your opponent. Just hit the crouch button, and optionally look down to simulate a bowing motion. The duel begins when both players have finished bowing. If you don't bow, your opponent might not know you've started, which is unfair to him. Believe me, you'll get yelled at for not doing it, at the least.

At the end of a duel, one player will be dead. No matter which one is you, be sure to say "good fight" or "gf" (to chat, hit the y key). This is like bowing - you just have to do it, or you'll get hell from the other players. Besides that, it's just a nice thing to say. If you're the winner of the duel, remember to shut off your lightsaber! Go challenge some more players to duels and have more fun!

2. Beginning Combat

Want to know how to win a lightsaber duel? You need to start here. There are three lightsaber styles to use in a fight:

2.A. Blue Style Basics

Blue style is the fast, weak style. It lets you chain up to ten attacks in a row with no restrictions. Each hit does fifteen points of damage, which isn't much but can add up over time. The special attack of the blue style is the lunge, probably the most useful special of all the styles. Crouch and hit forward and attack to do a lunge. The lunge is great because it moves you quickly forward and disrupts the other guy's lightsaber, knocking it away and preventing him from attacking. The rear attack is the backstab, and it's good, but other rear attacks are more useful. Blue is mostly used to counter red.

Because blue is so weak but so fast, your strategy needs to be to avoid damage and play very defensively. Dodging and counter-hitting is the only way to use blue effectively. Use the lunge judiciously but try not to be predictable. Crouch during a blue combo, and you can chain a lunge after your combo for a surprise hit. Above all, the main attack in blue is the sway. Swaying is the act of moving left and right rapidly to swing horizontally. With blue, you can do this pretty fast, and it's a good way to rack up some fast damage. Crouch while swaying to get under the opponent's defenses in some situations.

It's dangerous to rely on blue style too much. You could spend half the duel whittling away at the opponent's health with blue, only to be the victim of one solid red hit and be losing the fight just like that. There are also counters to every blue attack, and if your opponent knows what he's doing, you'll have some difficulty executing any good attack against them. As a beginner, my advice is to only use blue to lunge. It's far too difficult to successfully win using blue's regular attacks. When you get more skilled, you might use blue to finish off a weakened opponent with quick attacks. Outside of this scenario, I don't advise using it much.

2.B. Yellow Style Basics

Yellow style is the medium style. Medium speed, medium damage. Up to five attacks can be chained together with no restrictions. Each hit does thirty points of damage, which is pretty respectable. The special attack in yellow style is the death-from-above, or DFA. Hit forward, jump and attack at the same time while facing an opponent at close range to do this move. The DFA does a lot of damage, but it's a stationary close-range attack so it's very difficult to hit with. It leaves you wide open to a variety of damaging counters as well. The rear attack in yellow is a spinning swing, but for the risk involved it doesn't do that much damage. Yellow is used in a wide variety of situations, but typically to counter red or sometimes other yellow users.

Yellow style affords a little more in the way of offensive options than blue. Two yellow hits is roughly equal to most red attacks, so it isn't hard to give out damage equal to or better than what you get. Even so, it's good to play defensively by dodging attacks as much as possible and counterattacking. As with blue, the sway is a great attack and crouching while swaying can get under the opponent's defenses sometimes. There are also other combos to mix up your offense; vertical hits mixed with diagonal rising swings can land an unexpected hit. Experiment with different angles in different situations.

Yellow is very versatile but takes skill to use properly. A good yellow player will time his opponent's swings, and count the number as well as pay attention to the type of swing, and counterattack accordingly. Generally, I don't advise using the special or rear attack in yellow at all. It's not worth the risk in either case. When you get more skilled, you can experiment with setups for the DFA.

2.C. Red Style Basics

Red style is the slow and powerful style. Only three attacks can be chained together, with the following restrictions: The same attack can be chained to itself only once, e.g. two vertical swings in a row at most; attacks can only be chained if they are zero or forty-five degrees away from the previous attack, e.g. "horizontal right > diagonal-down right > vertical" is a legitimate combo, but "horizontal right > vertical > horizontal left" is not valid. Each attack does varying damage based on when during the swing animation the attack lands. The general maximum damage is sixty points, but if the swing lands at the beginning or very end of the animation, it may do less. The vertical red swing does much more damage compared to the others. It varies more as well, but typically it's around one hundred points maximum, making it the most powerful normal attack in the game. The special attack in red style is the red death-from-above or DFA. Begin any normal red swing, and at the beginning of the swing at the point right before your character swings the lightsaber forward, hit forward, jump and attack all at once. You will jump forward and swing downward, resulting in a one-hit kill if you manage to land the attack. The sheer power of this attack is offset by the fact that it is virtually impossible to land against anybody competent. The rear attack of red is similar to yellow's: a spinning swing behind you. It does a good amount of damage and is worth doing when combined with a jump. A jumping rear attack is an advanced technique that will be covered later. Red is great for attacking against any style, but weak for defensive options.

Red is the style of attack so accuracy of attacks is very important. Horizontal-right swings have the most range of any normal attack, and it makes for a good approach. It also has the advantage of sometimes knocking back the opponent's saber, disrupting his defenses. This attack can defeat the sway of both yellow and blue because of this property. The vertical red swing is the most powerful normal attack, but it has its own weakness: it requires a lot of accuracy. A yellow or blue user can be adept at dodging sideways around vertical red swings in order to hit you from the sides. Vertical red attacks are great against other red users though, as you can risk being hit by a single horizontal attack in order to land one vertical attack. It will be well worth the sacrifice of health. The diagonal-down-left swing is also a useful one in red, because it is the fastest attack you can perform. It works well at counterattacking a jumping opponent. Swaying with red is, of course, impossible because of the combo restrictions.

Red requires an aggressive play style and accurate attacks, but you get some serious power for your effort. The special in red will kill anyone in a single hit, but - well, just don't do it. You won't land it and you'll get punished severely by trying. Due to red's ability to counter the other two styles, it's a good beginner style to learn. Typically at least one player in a duel will be using red at any given time, making it useful to know.

3. Advanced Techniques

There's a few advanced techniques that not as many people know/do in the game.

The Running Lunge

The main weakness of the regular lunge is you need to stop running to crouch. If you crouch while running, you enter a roll. Thus, you need to stop running, crouch, and then execute the move, at which point the opponent knows what you'll do. To get around this limitation, you can use the walk button (default left shift). If you crouch while walking, you'll crouch rather than roll. While running forward, hit the walk button and then immediately crouch and hit the attack button. It will be so fast, you will appear to run right into a lunge, surprising anyone who doesn't know it's possible to do that! Believe me, this works, and people still don't know about it. After you learn this, there is no reason to do the stationary lunge except to purposefully trick people.

The Jumping Rear Attack

A stationary rear attack is fairly useless, with the possible exception of the backstab. To make it more mobile, when the opponent is directly behind you, you can jump backward while hitting attack. Time it right, and you'll jump and execute a rear attack in midair! This won't hit often, but it's a safer way to do this attack than standing still like an idiot. Best used with the red or blue rear attacks.

Extended Range Red Horizontal

The red horizontal-right swing is versatile and effective, but sometimes the opponent knows the range and can dodge it every time. If you notice the animation of the swing, your character will end the right-horizontal swing with his right hand outstretched to the right, holding the lightsaber. Take advantage of this animation by turning ninety degrees to the left as the swing finishes. The longer range will catch many opponents by surprise and add some damage.

Fake-Roll

Want to fake the opponent out a little? Try rolling forward but not actually moving forward! During a forward roll (forward + crouch) simply move backward, and you'll roll back along the ground as if sliding. Not useful as an attack, but can be used to trick the opponent. This only works for the forward roll, not any other direction.

4. Counters

4.A. . . . to blue

Blue offers two main attacks: swaying, and lunging. To counter the blue sway, a red horizontal or even vertical swing with proper aim will make them regret standing or crouching in one spot for long. A blue lunge will adequately counter the blue sway. Yellow is difficult to use as a counter to the blue sway, but doing a yellow sway right back at him can often work. Each of your hits will do double the damage of his, and you'll likely do more damage than him during the exchange, but the element of randomness leaves a risk to be considered. It's possible to use the yellow DFA as a counter - a blue sway typically lasts through ten swings, and the opponent might be surprised enough by the DFA that he will fail to cancel his swaying and avoid it properly. Against a blue lunge, recognize that the lunge is a linear attack. Dodge sideways around it and attack at the exposed rear of the opponent. Most normal attack is adequate for this, although a few red swings are slow enough that it's possible for the opponent to dodge them, or even turn toward you and do a second lunge before he is hit.

4.B. . . . to yellow

Yellow offers more varied attacks, which makes countering difficult. Countering the yellow sway can be done in blue with the lunge. With yellow, you can counter the sway with a vertical swing to penetrate the overhead defenses of the opponent, but this has an element of randomness. A less risky strategy is to count the opponent's swings in the sway. Remember that a yellow combo only lasts five attacks at the most. Wait until his fifth attack is almost finished, and then rush in and attack for one or two hits, before immediately backing off. With red, the horizontal swing is recommended, because a vertical swing is too easily dodged by a yellow user. Yellow swings are slower than blue, so you tend to move farther to the left and right while swaying, compared to blue. Countering the yellow DFA is fairly easy. As long as it doesn't hit you, the fastest thing to do is a running lunge on your stationary and defenseless opponent. If you have the time to wind it up, a vertical red attack is very damaging. It is even possible, with fast reactions, to wind up a red DFA, but this becomes dangerous if you delay too long.

4.C. . . . to red

. . . horizontal swings

Don't get hit by this attack! Jumping and rolling are good ways to evade it. With blue, lunging into the horizontal swing will generally succeed, but there is some randomness and you may take damage regardless. Otherwise, wait for the swing to finish before moving in to attack. The ending animation of the horizontal red swing is long and leaves the opponent open for a moment to counterattack. With yellow this could mean rushing in and hitting vertically. It's also possible but dangerous to use a yellow DFA as he swings. Using red, a vertical swing is a great counter to the horizontal swing, and you don't even have to worry about being hit! Run straight into his attack while winding up your vertical swing, and he'll be left with much more damage than you, provided you succeed. It's also a bit safer to wind up the red swing by running backward first to stay out of range of the horizontal swing, before moving forward on the down-stroke of the vertical hit for massive damage.

. . . vertical swings

Definitely do not get hit by this attack! Fortunately it's not hard to dodge. Move to either side and you'll avoid it, unless he's very fast and accurate. With blue or yellow, follow up a dodge with swaying. With red, you won't be able to respond quickly enough in close-range after a sideways dodge, so just retreat after dodging and begin a new attack. Backing off in a straight line and winding up a vertical hit at the same time can work, but you need to know the range of your attacks precisely.

5. Attacking Options

5.A. . . . with blue

Lunge! Aside from this, blue doesn't have much in the way of offensive options. You must wait for the opponent to do something before running into range and swaying.

5.B. . . . with yellow

Yellow is also a counterattacking style, but it's possible to poke the opponent a little. Run in with a single yellow hit before running back out to avoid damage. The combo "vertical > sway" can sometimes be effective. Running in and immediately swaying might do damage, but if the opponent is smart he'll back out of it and come back with one of the counters presented above. With yellow, feinting is also a smart option to provoke the opponent. Try a fake-roll or even just moving in and out quickly, making it look like you want to attack. When he does something, counter it!

5.C. . . . with red

Any swing can make a good attack in red. Take advantage of the slow speed of red attacks, and launch swings at odd angles while running forward. If you begin a diagonal-rising-right swing for example, you can begin running forward before the swing has finished even winding up. Mix up the direction of your movement and the swing direction to confuse the opponent, such as swinging right while running left. Never underestimate the power of the vertical swing! If you master the accuracy of this swing, you'll win duels quickly and violently. Jumping while winding up a red swing can be a good idea, but don't do it too often. A diagonal-downward red swing or a lunge can defeat any normal jumping attack.

6. Training

Improving your skills doesn't have to be just guesswork. There are some particular exercises and methods to improve your game at a rapid rate. I've discovered or developed all of these in the process of one-on-one training with several players in the course of my career with the game. These are effective and they work. I've had players progress to near my level of skill in only a month or two of training with these methods. Find a partner or a cooperative player and get to it!

Learn Red Attacks

Practice red attacks against a wall. Learn the exact range of each attack, and learn how far you can run during an attack to land the hit. Use the wall marks from the lightsaber to see feedback of what hits and where.

Learn Red Attacks, Stage 2

With a partner, duel with only red versus red. Learn the timing and range of your attacks and the opponent's. Know how to dodge red attacks and you will learn how the opponent will try to dodge your attacks.

Learn Red Attacks, Stage 3

Fight real duels using only red style. Learn to deal with yellow and blue opponents. Learn how to attack without being counter hit.

Learn Evasion

A partner will attack you using red, trying their best to hit you. Your job will be to avoid getting hit. If you take a hit, exit the duel and restart completely. You cannot attack. See how long you can survive.

Learn Evasion, Stage 2

The partner will do the same thing. Instead of only dodging, your goal is now to use yellow style to win the duel, without being hit once. If you get hit, exit the duel and restart. Use your dodging skills from the previous exercise to avoid damage, but now you must recognize openings in the opponent to hit once or twice with yellow before evading. It is important not to get greedy by attacking too much.

Learn Evasion, Stage 3

Same as before, except use blue style. No lunging.

Learn Yellow Style

With a partner, fight duels using only yellow style against yellow style. This fight is fast and furious. You'll learn just what yellow is capable of and how to avoid fast attacks. This should increase your reaction time as well.

7. Final Thoughts

To excel at Jedi Outcast Multiplayer, you can not be predictable. As I've shown, every move in the game has some sort of counter. Don't stick to a single style for the entire duel. Remember every option at your disposal, including every special move and every evasive option including rolling and jumping. Keep in mind that you can flip off of walls to get behind an opponent. Sometimes avoiding damage is more important than dealing it. You can easily estimate the opponent's health by keeping track of when you land a hit, based on the amount of damage I've told you each attack does. Keep an eye out for when the opponent's shield drops, as this is the simplest visual cue to his health. If you have less health than the opponent, plan your strategy accordingly. If you have more, you can afford to take more risks.

Get out there and own some people with a lightsaber!

How to Botch a Demo, according to Rebellion

2010-02-03T21:13:00.000-08:00

Rebellion is the developer of Aliens vs Predator, the upcoming reboot game of the 1999 PC classic. I was tentatively optimistic about the game, and today the demo finally came out. Let's examine just why this demo is probably the worst advertisement Rebellion could ask for!

First, some backstory. When Modern Warfare 2 came out, and PC gamers everywhere unleashed a torrential flood of rage over the lack of dedicated servers, Rebellion announced they would fully support dedicated servers because they care about the PC gaming community. Hooray! The internet rejoiced and began praising AvP alongside Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for having features that are simply standard on every PC game released since Quake. So, this week, the demo was announced, and it would be a multiplayer demo! Wait, what? Let me explain just why a multiplayer demo is a bad concept for a game that ISN'T entirely multiplayer:

The purpose of a demo is for potential consumers to sample the game and decide if they want to buy it based on how much they enjoy the demo. When your demo is multiplayer only, it's not so easy to get a feel for the full game. It's an inherently competitive atmosphere, with each player trying to win, so learning the controls and mechanics of play aren't so easy when you're thrust into that. A prospective player hops onto the game to try it out, and they end up getting killed over and over while trying to learn the controls. It makes them feel frustrated and that feeling becomes associated with the expectations for the full game. Besides, a lot of players (including me) are interested in certain games for single player, not multiplayer. I didn't particularly care about AvP's multiplayer, but now the only way I can get a feel for the single player of the game is to play the multiplayer, and that's not very easy.

This decision to release only a multiplayer demo for a game with a substantial single player campaign is only the first in a series of monumentally stupid ideas! Let's go through them one at a time:

The demo does not have dedicated servers! Seriously, do they even care at all? The player has zero control over their experience. You just hit "quick match" and you get to stare at a screen saying "searching for game" for twenty minutes until you arbitrarily get put into a game or kicked off of matchmaking for timing out. And that's not an exaggeration. I watched the clock, it takes around twenty minutes to find a game. That's just not acceptable. I don't care if some developers think it's "easier" than going through a server browser to find a game, it takes MUCH longer, and it gives me much less control and feedback. What exactly is it doing while it says "searching for game" for twenty friggin minutes? Why exactly does it time out sometimes? I have no idea because it won't tell me. I understand this is the first night of a demo, and there aren't that many people actually playing yet, but it's a symptomatic problem for matchmaking and it's there whenever I've tried it on other (console) games. It sucks. And here's the kicker! Remember how I said the full game was announced to have dedicated servers? And yet the demo doesn't. How is the demo supposed to be a way for the player to sample the full game and figure out if they want to buy it, when the demo doesn't actually represent the experience of the full game?! If the demo DOES represent the experience of the full game, there's no way in hell I'd play the multiplayer of it, which only leaves the single player. But I guess I don't need to sample that, because Rebellion said so.
The other major consequence of not having dedicated servers is that players host servers. This means lag, and I mean a LOT of it. The game is barely playable half the time. Of course I don't know how MUCH lag, because the game is kind enough not to tell me what my ping is! Seriously is it that friggin hard to do this, when every PC game since the beginning of time has done this?
Next, while there are scalable graphics settings and it works fairly well on my computer at low settings while looking decent, there is one very annoying and non-optional feature of the graphics: motion blur. If I turn fast, the screen blurs annoyingly. This makes quickly turning or aiming behind me very difficult, which shouldn't happen in a PC game. I don't know if I'd mind it terribly in single player, but in multiplayer it has no place.
So how about the actual gameplay? I'll just break that up into each of the races you can play as, because they all have serious issues.

Predator
You spawn with no weapons but claws. No disc, no speargun, no plasma caster, nothing. Invisibility doesn't make you nearly invisible enough either; marines can detect you with their motion sensor (if you move at all) and aliens can just see everyone, all the time, everywhere. Predators also don't have as much health as the original game, so they go down to a few shots from marines or melees from aliens. Their super-jump ability consists of holding down a button and then auto-jumping to a marker that pops up onto the terrain. While doing this, you can't turn more than a few degrees, so jumping and turning around is just not possible.

Aliens
You automatically stick to every surface. You wouldn't believe how annoying this is. The original game had a crouch button to hold down if you wanted to wall-walk, but this game has no crouch button. I guess that's too complicated. If you run to the edge of a platform, instead of jumping off you will start walking down the edge. If you are running and casually bump into something, you'll wall-walk up it even if you don't want to. Oh and did I mention that Aliens had wall-hacks? Because they can seriously see every nearby player through walls as a bright outline.

Marines
The humans unequivocally suck. The other two species were DESIGNED to prey on humans. I can understand this in the single player, because the Marine's campaign is supposed to be like a horror game. This shouldn't be the case in multiplayer! Regardless that the lag made it impossible to aim or react properly to enemies, the marine only has a pulse rifle to start out with. No grenade launcher attachment like the first game, it seems, which was the main balance in that one's multiplayer for the humans. As a human in this one, you're just going to walk around and hope you can hit an enemy before they close into melee range, because at that point you're done. Also you better hope you aren't facing more than one enemy at once, or you're done. It's frustrating and it isn't fun to play as a Marine online.

Common gameplay problems:
The entire melee combat system is simply broken for multiplayer. Normal melee attacks by predators and aliens will kill other species in around two hits. When you get hit with a melee attack, you go through a hit animation in which you are stunned and cannot move or turn or attack. This leaves enough time for a followup finishing hit without any possibility of defense. If you get hit by one melee attack, you're probably going to die. Oh, there's a block button, but it doesn't help much beyond preventing that first hit (which it probably won't anyway). Oh also, melee has auto-aim, which will track enemies during the animation. I can understand this on a console game, but on the PC it's stupid and inexcusable because it just removes any remote semblance of skill from the melee system. Although, the grabs throw any remote chance of balance straight out the window as it is! If you are behind an enemy, you hit E to grab them and insta-kill them. They cannot defend themselves. Already that's a big red flag for anyone who knows anything about multiplayer balance. And yet, it gets worse! While grabbing and killing someone, you are stuck in this animation that lasts a good three seconds. During this animation, you can be shot at, and you can even be grabbed yourself, and there's nothing you can do to defend yourself! It's entirely possible to be grabbing another player, when a player grabs you, and a player grabs that player, and so on. No one can defend. If you are killed in the middle of the kill animation, the original victim won't even necessarily survive; if they have been killed during the animation, but the animation itself isn't finished yet (e.g. the predator stabs an alien in the face, and is about to throw him to the ground) you still can't move, and if you get grabbed or killed at this point, you'll die and your victim will die and neither of you can defend yourselves! It's a real mess. I can't imagine why anyone thought this was a good idea for multiplayer!

I'll keep a jaded eye on how the single player turns out for this game, but I'm definitely no longer excited for a frustrating, laggy and unfair multiplayer experience. Luckily, the multiplayer for the original 1999 PC game has recently been resurrected, and it plays far better, so I have that to fall back on!

Dune: The Ultimate Strategy Game

2009-07-05T11:47:00.000-07:00

I'm a big fan of Dune. The original six novels by Frank Herbert are the pinnacle of modern literature. I'm also completely baffled about why no one yet has made an accurate adaptation in other forms of media. Ok, the Sci-fi Channel miniseries was pretty accurate to the storyline, but it got a lot of small details wrong for no real reason. The David Lynch film got so many aspects of the details and atmosphere correct, but completely dropped the ball on the storyline. The "weirding modules" undermined the whole theme of environmental shaping and human ability triumphing over technology. I don't even want to talk about the continuation books by Brian Herbert.

Since this is a video game site, though, I'll talk about my problems with the Dune games. The first Dune game was a graphical adventure game which was alright, but of course took a LOT of liberties with the story. Dune II has the distinction of being the first RTS game as we know the genre today. Dune 2000 is mostly a graphical upgrade to Dune II with a better GUI and more usability features, but not much new. Emperor: Battle for Dune once again sets the bar as Westwood's first 3D RTS, but it was still very similar to the other games. Through the course of the series, environmental aspects such as sandstorms and sandworms were added, but they just serve as random ways to lose a few troops here and there. And these games all share the same very major problems: they feature large armies consisting of gun-wielding soldiers and tanks and walking mechs battling on the open sand of Arrakis.

In Dune, personal shields will block the movement of any fast-moving object. Guns, explosives, fast-moving knives and swords are all useless against shields. Lasguns are useless because they cause a reaction with shields which blow up both shooter and target in a nuclear-sized explosion. The only way to penetrate a shield is a slow-moving blade, usually covered in poison of some kind. Sword and knife fighting is the prevalent form of combat, with a particular style of fast defense and slow offense used to penetrate shielded enemies.

On the open desert of Arrakis, shields can't be used because it drives the giant sandworms crazy. They'll come and attack everything in the area. Know what else summons a giant, hungry sandworm? Any rhythmic vibration on the sand. This means anyone walking around on the sand (except Fremen), as well as vehicles on the sand, will get eaten within a few minutes.

What does this mean? It means that open warfare between large armies on the plains of Arrakis isn't feasible. The only people trained to walk without rhythm on the sands are the Fremen. It is possible, of course, to battle on rocky surfaces, such as in sietch or in the mountains, but then land vehicles would be fairly useless and soldiers would be able to wear shields. In the books, all major fighting takes place in the city of Arrakeen or in the mountains. Combat in the desert is relegated to guerilla attacks by Fremen, or ornithopters outfitted with lasguns. Everywhere besides the desert, warfare consists of shield-fighting.

In the games, large armies fight all over the open sand using tanks, walker mechs, and guns. If a worm comes, it will randomly go after one or two units at a time and kill them if you don't simply run away. The worms in Emperor: Battle for Dune appear to be about five meters wide and don't move very fast. The worms in the books are at least forty meters wide and are probably the fastest things on the sand. When they eat something, they commonly attack from under the sand below their prey, swallowing before the target can even move. The only escape is for a carryall to carry the person or vehicle into the air.

Now, I understand that Westwood would make Dune games be very similar to their Command & Conquer games. Set C&C in the desert, add random sandworm attacks, rename some units and you've got a Dune game. Problem is, this just isn't accurate to the books and I think it can be done better.

Here's my ideal Dune game:

Rather than straight RTS, I'd make a mix of a galactic map and real-time battles between armies.

The galactic map would function similarly to the Total War series, but real-time rather than turn-based, in a way similar to Sins of a Solar Empire.

Your great house would be tasked with taking over planets and gaining share in CHOAM and seats in the Landsraad. Politics would be an important part of the game.

Different planets would have environmental factors which recruit different types of units. The environment shaping people and cultures was a major theme of Dune, and it would be a large part of the game as well. People recruited on Caladan or Kaitain might be weaker soldiers than those recruited on Arrakis or Salusa Secundus, but would be cheaper to maintain or take a shorter amount of time to recruit. This could affect resources as well on a per-planet basis, depending on the environment. Of course Arrakis is the home of the spice. Giedi Prime might be a good source of slave labor as well.

There would be a way to deal with the Tleilaxu, Ixians, and Spacing Guild. Illegal technology from the Ixians; gholas, face-dancer assassins and twisted mentats from the Tleilaxu, and bribes to the Spacing Guild for secret enemy orbital surveilance.

Special agents, such as those found in Total War games, would include Bene Gesserit, Mentats, skilled swordsmen, and various types of assassins. These might help improve the effectiveness of your resource gathering or upkeep costs (mentats), or help with diplomacy (bene gesserit), or improve the effectiveness of an army (swordsmen), or of course kill rivals. It might be an interesting idea for mentats to open up new strategic options based on their intelligence, or perhaps to give advice from time to time on what an opponent is probably up to.

When armies of opposing houses meet at a planet (they cannot fight in space, the Spacing Guild owns all space travel), the game goes into a real-time battle. The coexistence of the galactic map and real-time land battles would work similarly to Total War or Star Wars: Empire at War. The galactic map would be paused while a battle goes on. The units you have on that planet in the galactic map will be used in the battle, and the environment will determine how the battle plays.

The real-time battles should play out in the style of Total War mixed with Dawn of War. Due to the nature of combat in Dune, battles would consist of smaller squads of highly skilled shield fighters, perhaps with larger squads of less skilled, non-shielded fighters to lead an attack. This would naturally consist entirely of melee fighting - swords, spears, knives. I think Dawn of War/Company of Heroes does smaller-scale squad-based infantry combat very well. Battling over strategic points of the map would fit Dune's more cerebral form of warfare. I would also like the units you start a battle with to be all you have, like Total War. This makes the strategy of the galactic map more important, and makes battles more chess-like.

The disciplined legions found in Total War may or may not be accurate to Dune. It could work, but faster movement with more micro would make a better game I think, and especially considering the smaller numbers of units. Total War works the way it does because of the massive armies which seem out of place to me in Dune. On the other hand, no real-time recruitment during a battle also means much shorter battles due to the smaller numbers and faster movement of units. I think that due to the shields, it would take a while for squads of equal skill to kill each other, so strategy in the galactic map would be especially important to ensure you have a superior fighting force going into each battle. Among equal armies, superior strategy should always win out. I suppose each system of combat has its advantages and disadvantages, and the books don't get specific about which is more accurate.

Regardless of the specific combat system, I like the stamina and morale system of Total War, and this would be included for each squad. There would be many factors controlling how fast a unit becomes tired or how fast they will rout when losing a battle.

My idea is pretty similar to a once-in-development Dune MMO that has long ago been cancelled, although I'd prefer it as a single-player game with multiplayer battles like Total War. This game could also potentially come about as a mod for one of the Total War games (Rome?). If you're a modder reading this, GET ON IT ALREADY!

Making fun of a random list I found on the internet

2009-06-25T00:07:00.000-07:00

First, take a few minutes and glance through this list of the "20 Games That Changed Gaming Forever." Or is it the "20 Most Innovative Games Ever Made?" The article's title says both, although they mean different things. Keep this list open for reference as we journey through it together:

#20: Portal
This is undeniably an innovative game, unless you want to consider the indie game Narbacular Drop that was the predecessor to Portal, and was essentially the same concept. It was made by the same team, and was pretty rough, so I guess I can concede this one. Portal was the first commercial game of its kind.

#18: Dance Dance Revolution
The article claims "Before DDR, music-based videogames were a virtually unknown niche genre. But DDR changed all of that with its patented "dance platform" that enabled players to bust a move instead of busting their thumbs on a typical game pad." So, while they acknowledge it is not the first music game (which it wasn't), it was the first to utilize a unique controller. I guess they forgot Beatmania, which had a DJ controller and came out a year before DDR? If DDR didn't actually innovate in the way they claim, then maybe it "changed gaming"? I don't know, the guitar hero series seems to have much more in common with Beatmania than DDR. I suppose that's debatable.

#17: Resident Evil
The article says "Alone in the Dark did it first, but Resident Evil made it iconic." So...it didn't innovate, then? I guess it must have "changed gaming", then.

#16: Bioshock
First complaint right off the bat, the article lists it as a 360-only game. I guess they forgot that it released on the PC simultaneously, and was also ported to the PS3 later? Now that that's over with: I just...I have no clue what this is doing here. It was a great game, but it was essentially a dumbed-down, steampunk version of System Shock 2. How does the article claim it innovates? "But the real spark in the BioShock experience was the realization that you could choose to be the hero or the villain"; "BioShock is also enormously influential for advancing steampunk chic." It was the first game with a morality system that let you choose between good and evil actions to affect the outcome of the story? No, that can't be it...that's been a part of gaming for a helluva long time. In fact right now I'm playing through Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic, which gives you moral choices every five minutes and has two fairly different endings to the story based around that. So, Bioshock was the first game with a steampunk art style? Certainly not. That style has been a staple of (mostly japanese) RPGs for a long time. Did Bioshock change gaming? Not that I've noticed...what games after it have tried to emulate anything it has done? I really can't think of anything.

#15: Warcraft
"Though Dune II technically set the modern real-time strategy (RTS) genre into motion, it was Blizzard Entertainment's Warcraft: Orcs & Humans that turned a fringe game style into an international sensation." Changed gaming? Yes. Innovative? No. They admit that Dune II did it first, right in the first darn sentence!

#14: Final Fantasy VII
The article doesn't present a single reason for this game being innovative, because it just wasn't, aside from being 3D. But I can concede that it was definitely influential.

#12: Geometry wars
This entry says flat out that the gameplay itself isn't revolutionary. Anyone who has played Robotron can tell you that. Instead, the article claims that the way that Geometry Wars was digitally distributed has changed gaming by popularizing downloadable games. Um, I don't know about that. Even if we discount the PC and just make this claim for consoles, the first game on XBLA to hit a million downloads was apparently Uno. Maybe that helped just as much as GeoWars? I don't really know.

#11: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Hahahaha! I guess "identical to the previous three games, but this time it's not set in world-war-II! Oh and it added one new feature to the multiplayer that essentially gives players the ability to choose an unfair advantage over others!" means "innovative." I suppose you might make the claim that a few console shooters after CoD4 have copied its perk system for multiplayer, which makes it influential...but the fact that this is on the list but games such as Super Mario Bros. (the first platformer!) or Quake (the game that essentially created online multiplayer deathmatch) or any number of other far more famous and undeniably innovative games are not, is just ridiculous.

#7: Halo
There's no denying that Halo changed console gaming. Practically every FPS since then has had regenerating health, for example. I don't necessarily like the WAY in which Halo changed gaming, but it certainly has. Sigh.

#3: World of Warcraft
"World of Warcraft was by no means the first MMO, but it was the game that perfected the rules and the experience." Once again the article flat-out admits that the game is not innovative. Just because its the most popular game in its genre, does not mean it innovated, or even that it changed gaming! One might argue that MMOs today all try to copy WoW, but one could also just argue that those MMOs are all trying to copy Everquest, since that's what WoW essentially tried to do.

#2: Grand Theft Auto III
Aside from the fact that it was just a 3D version of the standard GTA formula, I guess it did innovate.

#1: Doom
I'm mentioning this one because it's probably the best entry to this list. I mean, it started the FPS genre! Oh, what's that? Wolfenstein was the first FPS, not Doom? Nevermind.

So, now that I've established just how ludicrous this list is, how about all of the games that should be here, but aren't? Like, I don't know, the games that CREATED GAMING AND EVERY GENRE WE PLAY TODAY? Spacewar, Pong, Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Wolfenstein, Dune II, Adventure...compared to any of these games, NO game of the last 10 years can even be considered "innovative" or "influential."

Quick Game Impressions

2009-05-31T18:32:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I posted. There's been no shortage of games to play, so here's what I've been playing:

IL-2 Sturmovik

Most flight sims are a bit too complex for me to take the time to learn them. IL-2 is different because it's not as hard to jump into and shoot up some planes. I especially like it because of all the interesting differences between the capabilities of WWII planes and modern jets. In Aerowings 2, for example, I can do a loop or immelman pretty much anytime because of the afterburner. With a prop plane, speeds are in general much lower, and you don't get enough thrust to do a loop or immelman a lot of the time. This means that height and potential energy plays a far bigger role. Also, because there's no missiles, IL-2 requires you to be right behind another plane, in close proximity, in order to even hit anything accurately with machine guns. It sure is rewarding when you finally do blast an enemy out of the sky, though!

Ghost Master
I remembered hearing about this a long time ago when it was released, and it sounded interesting. It was on sale a while ago so I nabbed it and tried it out. You control ghosts and try to scare all the humans out of a house. It's kind of boring and the controls suck. Luckily I didn't waste much money on it.

Zeno Clash

Here's a unique first-person beat-em-up. The style is some sort of weird mix between prehistoric and . . . I don't really know what. It's a lot of fun, but I wish it had a little more to the combat system. As it is, there's pretty much the regular punch which can become a three-hit combo, plus a charge punch, a grab which leads to two attacks, and a counter-attack. That's about it. There's some weapons, which are also pretty unique, but they're nothing new for the FPS genre. For an indie game, this one is pretty great.

Punch Out!

Nintendo put out a new, good first-party Wii game? Really?! That's right, Punch Out has been remade and updated for the Wii. It has a collection of fighters from the previous games, plus at least one new fighter in Disco Kid. The gameplay itself is exactly the same. You dodge, duck or block punches by recognizing the telegraph of the opponent, and look for an opening to knock his face off. There are no new moves for little mac. When I say it's the same, I mean it's EXACTLY THE SAME. It's not that big of a complaint because the formula is still great fun, but it would have been nice to see a little more gameplay. Being a Wii game, it also features optional motion controls for punching with the wiimote and nunchuk, and I really like it. There's the optional balance board for dodging, but I don't have one. I imagine it wouldn't work out well, because dodging requires a LOT of timing and I don't know if the balance board would be good enough for it.

Empire Total War
Really good! Kind of buggy. Not a big fan of the naval combat, but it's a good addition for those that want it. Just play this!

Dreamcast!

2009-03-14T18:37:00.001-07:00

This week I decided to buy a new console. And by "new" I mean "I haven't owned one before". This is also the first and likely only console I own made by Sega. If you haven't guessed which console it is by now . . . well you're an idiot because it's in the title and there's a big picture of it right up there ^^^

Just why in the heck did you buy a Dreamcast? you might wonder. My answer: because it has some AWESOME games. Also, because it's just one of the best consoles ever, and here's why:

-it was the first console with online play, and yes people actually played it, and it was actually FREE. And it had cross-platform online play between the Dreamcast and the PC for some games before anyone else was even contemplating it

-it was the first console with mouse+keyboard support, with awesome FPSes supporting it like Half-Life and Quake 3

-It has hardware that's almost identical to NAOMI arcade boards, which means it got some kickass flawless arcade ports like Ikaruga and Under Defeat

-It was a console designed for hardcore gaming - it had simulations, fighters, shmups, platformers, adventure games, puzzle games and also many unique genre-defying games. The small number of FPSes released supported mouse+keyboard controls

-Despite its commercial death at the hands of the PS2, there is a dedicated homebrew and hacking community to this day, and there are still commercial games being made for the system! Karous came out just two years ago for the Dreamcast, and due this year is another shmup called Dux. Incidentally Dux looks like a crappy R-Type clone to me, but I have to give them credit for supporting the Dreamcast, and some people do like R-Type and would probably enjoy Dux

A Dreamcast goes for around $50 these days, and the games go for around $5-$10 at most. However, because of very poor anti-piracy measures implemented in the system, no one has to pay ANYTHING for Dreamcast games aside from the cost of blank CD-Rs. No boot disc or modding is required to play downloaded or backup games on the Dreamcast, and because all of those games are now out of print it's perfectly fine! If you have $50 to blow and you don't really want any of the current generation consoles, consider going back and discovering some gems of the last generation!

Mirror's Edge

2009-02-14T23:57:00.000-08:00

About a month ago the PC version of Mirror's Edge was released. I anticipated this release because the game was a unique and new concept, and now that I've played it the concept does not disappoint. The mechanics of the game are fun and original, and while I was initially skeptical of a first-person platforming game, the game pulls it off wonderfully. The time trials are addicting and fun as well.

Unfortunately, the time trials are the core of the experience, because the story mode is very lacking. The game's developer, DICE, is primarily experienced with multiplayer-only games, and it shows, because the level design just does not work well a lot of the time. The mechanics encourage navigation of obstacles and finding ways to quickly traverse large areas, but the level design favors slow climbing and platforming puzzles. The mechanics also favor avoiding combat, and the player dies very quickly in combat. However, there are a handful of spots in the game which require combat, and these portions seem unfair and generally not fun. Finally, the game is very short, clocking in at perhaps 5 hours. This could be a good thing considering how inconsistent the level design is.

As I said, the real fun of this game is the time trials. I've never dabbled much in speed-running but I can see the appeal now. Experimenting with faster routes and tiny adjustments to squeeze a few more milliseconds off my time is a ton of fun. Once I had 3 stars on almost every time trial map, however, there just isn't much else to do in the game. There's a map pack coming soon, but it costs money, and I generally hate paying for any extra game content unless it's an actual expansion pack.

The mechanics of Mirror's Edge are great and fresh. With better single player level design, this could have been an excellent game. It's a shame how it turned out, but I hope DICE has learned some lessons and will make the sequel far superior.

System Shock 2

2009-01-18T00:06:00.000-08:00

I've only played this for maybe an hour total and it is already scarier than anything I've played before. This includes FEAR, Dead Space, Bioshock, and Resident Evil 4. I'm not much for scary games in general, and as such I find it difficult to play SS2 continuously. I try, though, because it is undeniably a quality game. Here's why:

The gameplay is much like Bioshock. You explore a sort of living envinronment - a nonlinear world with unscripted enemy AI that will attack you on sight. There are weapons - with very limited ammo, of course - as well as "psionic powers", much like Plasmids in Bioshock. These can freeze enemies, move objects telekinetically, or light things on fire. Beyond Bioshock, however, is an extensive RPG-style stat system and inventory. Everything in the game must be dealt with in real-time. Nothing in-game will pause it, including inventory screens, computer interfaces, or stat upgrades. Of course there is an escape menu that lets you save, load, change options or quit, and this does pause the game. A totally real-time gameplay experience is a feature that many people consider Dead Space as famous for developing, but clearly SS2 came first, which surprised me. (On a side note, many people also consider Dead Space innovating the concept of a HUD built into the character's player model. This is also not true, because Roboblitz did it first. Interestingly, Roboblitz is a great game that was the very first to make use of the Unreal Engine 3, something people falsely credit Bioshock with.)

This always-real-time experience is part of what makes System Shock 2 such a scary game. If you want to stop and read a computer screen or a text log, you need to be careful because a mutant could attack you while you do so. If you want to shuffle your inventory around or use some items, you need to keep an eye out for enemies. It's very tense, made even more so by the fact that enemies WILL appear right behind you. The first time I encountered an enemy in the game was most astonishing. I was wandering through a corridor, and saw an item on the ground. I looked down at it to pick it up. When I looked back up and turned around, a mutant was an inch in front of me in the middle of swinging a wrench. I jumped out of my seat, my hands momentarily left the keyboard, and I took damage. When I regained my wits I bludgeoned him with my wrench, pleasantly finding that they only took a couple swings to kill. Every time I met an enemy, I experienced that same feeling of surprise and fear, because enemies appear infrequently and often startle you. As soon as they spot you, they will run straight at you and try to kill you, so any time you spot one of these mutants you have to immediately deal with it. This is different from Bioshock, where splicers will often ignore you if you're not very close.

That's all I'm going to say on this game, because I can't stand to play it too long on account of how I don't particularly like feeling startled a lot. I enjoyed playing Bioshock more, but I understand the reason many people prefer SS2, and even consider it one of the greatest games of all time. It's very high-quality, even if it doesn't appeal to me personally a lot.

Next up, Mirror's Edge!

Ketsui Death Label on the DS

2008-12-30T21:58:00.000-08:00

This game is the entire reason I now own a Nintendo DS. After roughly 8 or 9 hours with the game I have no regrets at all.

If you know anything about shmups you probably know that Ketsui is one of the most highly praised games in the genre. It's also well-known that it is one of the rarest and most expensive games in the genre, because it never left the arcades. Guess what, now it is! Ok, it's not actually the full arcade game. It's a "Death Label" version of the game. This means that the game only contains bosses, of exceeding difficulty. This might seem lame to some people that a game consists entirely of 11 bosses, each of which can be beaten in a few minutes at the most. The game, however, offers much more than that. The insane brain-numbing bosses are a large part of Ketsui's popularity in the first place. It offers 9 different difficulty modes, each consisting of different sets of the bosses with different difficulties. The range of difficulty is such that one boss on Novice difficulty will be entirely different from the same boss at Very Hard difficulty, or even on Death Label difficulty.

Even though surviving every mode is difficult enough - although the game does give you progressively more starting lives so that eventually you should be able to conquer it - there is also a fun and unique scoring system in place, one that actually differs from the original arcade game. In the original game, scoring involved point-blanking enemies with the normal shot, which started a short timer and allowed you to kill enemies with the lock-on shot for large point-chips. It was fair simple compared to many Cave scoring systems, but enjoyable and not as restrictive as the chaining found in Dodonpachi or Mushihime-sama. In Death Label, some elements were retained. Namely, the risk-reward system of point-blanking enemies for more points. The closer you are to a boss while using lock-on shot, the bigger the point-chips you get, and the faster your score grows. At the same time, this increases your point multiplier. You can lower the multiplier by getting hit or by using lock-on shot to destroy enemies, so it is a careful balancing act to whittle down the health of a boss by point-blanking it with lock-on shot, and then deliver the killing blow with the regular (much weaker) shot, all without being hit at all. It's very challenging and involves changing your entire strategy on some of the bosses if you want to score well. I'm looking forward to re-learning all 11 bosses, in all 9 modes, to improve my score.

This is the first true bullet-hell shmup on a portable console, and it works surprisingly well. The fat DS is really great because of the big d-pad! The bullets are bright and colorful, which means they aren't hard to see on the small screen of the DS. If you have a DS, and you don't have Ketsui yet, do yourself a favor and go import it from japan. It's an awesome game.

Fallout 3, I-Fluid, and other odd things

2008-12-20T00:25:00.000-08:00

Haven't posted in a while, so here's what I've been up to:

Fallout 3 is definitely awesome. It is basically oblivion with guns, from a gameplay perspective, but I don't think there's anything wrong with that because I liked Oblivion. I also have to admit that killing supermutants over and over is getting a little repetitive now, but everything else about the game is pretty great.

Another game I recently bought on a whim on Steam is a little indy gem called I-Fluid. Think of the game Gish, but in 3D. You play as a water droplet. Levels are set mostly on kitchen tables and counters littered with various fruits, breads, plates, silverware, and paper towels. Because the game is physics-based, you need to avoid the absorbent surfaces like paper towels and dry bread, because they will absorb you and kill you. There are a variety of goals, from 'go from point A to point B' to 'move all 7 tomatoes into the bowl'. Oh, that's right, you can also possess fruits and control them. The game is pretty darn creative and easily worth the $10 it is selling for on Steam right now (hint, go get it).

I also haven't posted since Left 4 Dead came out. As amazing as that game is, I haven't been playing it much, because I've finally broken down and decided to get a gaming mic. Left 4 Dead pretty much requires it for maximum enjoyment, and I could definitely use it in TF2 as well. Who knows, maybe I can finally look into joining a clan now that I'll have a mic (clans require them).

Spike TV's Video Game Awards are a Travesty

2008-11-13T23:15:00.000-08:00

That's right, the Spike TV Video Game Awards. They're just terrible. Today the nominees were announced for the annual award show, and it just doesn't bode well. Let's take a look, shall we?

Best Independent Game Fueled by Mountain Dew (Not a Judge Category)
World of Goo
PixelJunk Eden
Braid
Audio Surf

This category is purely a sponsored award, meaning it's basically useless. I'm all for representing more indie games, but I know Audiosurf wasn't "fueled by Mountain Dew". Next.

Best Original Score
Fallout 3
Spore
Metal Gear Solid 4
LittleBigPlanet

I think this is kind of funny because the music in Spore was either nonexistent or mostly ambiance.

Best PC Game
Spore
Crysis Warhead
Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning
Left 4 Dead

So I guess this is only "best PC EXCLUSIVE game"? There's no Fallout 3 on there (a nominee for Game of the Year). Oh wait, Left 4 Dead isn't PC exclusive. So I guess it's just kind of a lame category?

Best PS3 Game
Metal Gear Solid 4
Resistance 2
LittleBigPlanet
Grant Theft Auto IV

Best Xbox 360 Game
Fable II
Gears of War 2
Grand Theft Auto IV
Fallout 3

Note the discrepency? Once again, Fallout 3 is the odd one out, for some reason. It's a nominee on the 360 but not on the PS3? If you were listening to this stupid nominee list, you'd think Fallout 3 never even came out for PS3 or PC. I haven't even played the game (yet) and can't speak to how good it is, but this is just a weird discrepancy. Seems the 360 is being treated a bit differently, doesn't it? Any game that is a nominee for game of the year (as you'll see in a moment) should be a nominee for each platform it's actually released on, shouldn't it?

Best Graphics
Gears of War 2
Fallout 3
LittleBigPlanet
Metal Gear Solid 4

This category represents what is wrong with the gaming industry. This category should not exist. Graphics don't matter. Also, Crysis Warhead looks far better than any of these games, but god forbid they put a PC exclusive into a list with mixed console games.

Game of the Year
Grand Theft Auto IV
LittleBigPlanet
Fallout 3
Metal Gear Solid 4
Gears of War 2

No Smash Bros. Brawl? I didn't mention it but it was on the list for best Wii game. Why isn't it on the list for best overall game? Where's Spore, or Left 4 Dead? Or Crysis Warhead? Also, Far Cry 2 is on the nominee list for best shooter. Where is it compared to these other shooters on the GOTY list? It's potentially a better shooter than GoW2, but it's not GOTY material? How does that make any sense?

The whole thing is just ridiculous.

What Half-Life 2 can Teach us About Game Design

2008-10-20T16:17:00.000-07:00

Half-Life 2, as well as its episodic sequels Episode 1 and Episode 2, are as close to perfection as any game has ever gotten. If any game deserves a 10/10 score, these games do. In designing the games, Valve made every right decision it is possible to make. Basically, I LOVE HALF-LIFE 2. What's so good about it, though? What makes Valve such a master of the art of game design? Why, if you haven't played Half-Life 2 yet, are you still reading this?! GO PLAY IT!

Half-Life 2 is so amazing because it adheres perfectly to the Golden Rules of Game Design. Let's run through them, and see examples of when they work and when they don't.

Rule 1: Never Screw the Player
This one is first because it's the foundation of a solid gaming experience. Simply put, this rule means that the player should have a way to deal with any possible situation in the game. A player should never be in a situation where they are simply trapped and must re-load the level. A player should never be in a situation where they are attacked by an enemy and have no possible way to defend themselves. Basically, the player shouldn't feel like the game is unfair.

Good Examples:
If you do this one right, the player probably won't even notice. Take, for example, the practice of giving the player a backup melee weapon or melee attack. If the player is snuck up on, or runs out of ammo, they still need to be able to defend themselves. Another example found often in HL2: often there will be enemies that require certain weapons to deal with. Hunter-choppers require rockets; turrets often require grenades or antlion minions, and so forth. Valve makes sure to place crates with infinitely replenishing ammo for those specific weapons in just the right spot. This ensures you're never screwed when you reach a hunter-chopper, because you always have the ammo to deal with it.

Bad Examples:
Any time you died or got stuck in a game and felt it was just unfair, that's probably an example of a game that didn't follow this rule. Here's one off the top of my head: Killer 7. As you walk through the game on a predefined rail path, if an enemy appears, you need to switch to your gun and then shoot it in a weak spot. You can only move forward or turn around and walk in straight lines. You have no control over when you reload your gun, and enemies also tend to pop out at you in close proximity. If this happens, and you need to reload, you're simply screwed. You have no way to defend yourself properly. Another recent example is a fan-made expansion for Portal called Portal: Prelude. The opening level starts you in a small room, similar to the opening of the full game. When the portal automatically opens, allowing you to leave, you are greeted on the other side of that portal with several turrets shooting at you directly behind you. There's really not much you can do about it, and it's almost a certainty you'll die the first time you play that level. That's unfair, and it breaks the first Golden Rule.

Rule 2: Generally Follow the Pacing Steps
This rule is a little different, but it's just as fundamental as rule 1. Every good game follows this (along with all the Golden Rules) as a very general guideline to game pacing. First, most games are split into different sections. Sometimes they are split by setting, sometimes by gameplay, and sometimes they are only split by the Pacing Steps, but they all have to be split or they become repetitive. For a given section, the Pacing Steps are as follows:

A: The Establishment Step - Present the new setting, gameplay element (item, enemy, obstacle, etc.), or in some cases the game world itself, in a safe and clear way so the player sees what they'll be in for in this section of the game. Example: When you receive the gravity gun in HL2, you are presented with a small area full of objects to play around with, and Alyx gives you a small tutorial. Another example: In Episode 1, when you first see a Zombine (Combine Zombie), it is safely behind a window. You observe it grab a grenade and run at you, exploding itself. This reveals the new enemy safely, without explicitly telling you how to deal with it.

B: Basic Application Step - Here is where you have to actually deal with what was "established" in step A. You need to apply the new gameplay element, or deal with the new obstacle, or use the new item in a real situation, usually involving some element of danger (but nothing too hard yet). Example: After you get the gravity gun and play around with it, you're forced to detour into the zombie-infested village of Ravenholm. In this village, you're encouraged (not forced) to use the gravity gun to take down zombies in creative ways, including launching buzz saws to cut them in half. (bonus example! the buzz saw is introduced according to these steps too; you first see it stuck into the dismembered body of a dead zombie, hinting at its purpose - Establishment Step!)

C: Advanced Application Step - Now that you've dealt with the basic application of the new gameplay element or setting, it's time to get more complex. This step will usually demand that you use what you've just learned in concert with previous skills. This is where the game should get challenging. Some games follow the first 2 steps but fail at this one. Such games are commonly known as "not very deep." Example: When you're introduced to the buggy in HL2, you're forced to utilize the gravity gun to flip it over in order to progress. This step often lasts for an entire game, or overlaps later sections of the game. The gravity gun has new uses throughout the game, such as when you encounter turrets and must use the gravity gun to take them out. That's technically a new section, the turret section, but it includes a new advanced use of the gravity gun in dealing with the turrets.

After step C, a new section will begin for the next new gameplay element, unless of course you've reached the end of the game, or the entire game is made up of one large section. Many times these Pacing Steps aren't followed in a really cut-and-dry way, but any good game does follow them in some degree. If a game is based on only one major gameplay element (for example, Katamari Damacy), the entire game often serves as a section, but the 3 steps are still followed. When a game properly follows these steps, the pacing ought to feel good. The game will feel fresh at each section, and you'll constantly be challenged with new gameplay elements and settings.

Rule 3: Everything Should Feel Natural
This is a big one, and it deals with the little details in a game. In this case, "natural" might mean "consistent," or it might mean "realistic," but things shouldn't feel disjointed. It's hard to describe examples of this, because it really is the sum of details that make up the natural feel of a game. There are, however, examples of games that don't follow this rule. Some RPGs or adventure games, in which you encounter invisible walls, or small steps that you can't jump onto, take you out of the game. They remind you that it is, in fact, just a game, and it doesn't feel "natural." In HL2, every boundary in the game is defined by walls that clearly make sense in the context of the game world. If you reach a spot where Valve doesn't want you backtracking, you'll be forced to jump down a small cliff which will be impossible to jump back up. That feels natural and plausible. The environment is forcing you to keep moving forward, not anything arbitrary.

If a game follows these rules, it will be GOOD. If you can think of a bad game, chances are it breaks one or more of these rules, in some way.

SPORE!

2008-09-11T20:46:00.000-07:00

Don't listen to what the reviewers are saying, or the idiots on the internet. Spore is amazing. Every part of it is awesome. Evolving your creatures and society is incredible. Everything is great.

Without further ado, here are some animated GIFs that the game AUTOMATICALLY made (I didn't even know they existed until I was looking around my spore directory). These animations show some of the creation process that went into the different stages of my creature.

First, here's me, creating a Sandworm from scratch:

And here is the creation of my space ship, the Arturan Mega-Platypus, from scratch:

And now, a selection of important evolutions of my creature (there were more, this is just a small selection):

Here you can see how radically my creature changes through its evolution. You can watch as I add legs to my small creature. After that you can see me add arms. Then I add another set of arms, which eventually turns into a set of weapons. The mouth and overall bodily structure also changes quite a bit. I made most of those changes in order to give my creature better stats and help it survive better. When something didn't work right, I removed it. When something worked well, I did more of it. The player of the game is playing the role of Natural Selection. It's awesome and educational!

Also, I want to mention that there are some people who actually think Spore is "evil" because it "promotes evolution." I have one response. Spore "promotes evolution" the same way Super Mario "promotes gravity." Thank you, that is all.

Genres and Innovation

2008-08-05T11:11:00.000-07:00

This is probably going to be a cynical rant, but I'm just getting fed up. The emergence of "game genres" and formulaic game structures within those genres is seriously hurting innovation in the industry. This has been building for a long time, and it isn't a new problem, but I feel the situation has been thrown into sharper focus lately. To an extent, the very same thing is happening in Hollywood with the film industry, so this is not endemic to the game industry. First, I'll start at the beginning - chronologically - with the original of the game industry as it pertains to this discussion. I will then move on to the state of the gaming industry today, and the causes that have led to the stifling of innovation and "newness." Finally I will discuss what I predict for the future.

Back in the 90s, games as a medium was still new. It was evolving. Developers tried different concepts and ideas. Production costs were low so there was little risk involved. Many games were distributed as "shareware," free versions of the games which could be unlocked to the full version with payment. Think of it as an extended demo. Individuals decided to program games because they wanted to make something fun to play, and then decided to distribute it for others to enjoy. New ideas were toyed with and manipulated, and some went on to success. Among these, the concept of first-person shooters that began with Doom, and was copied so extensively that a genre of games - which had before been termed "Doom Clones" - came about called "First Person Shooters" (FPS). There was enough variation between games like Quake, Half-Life, Deus Ex, and even outlying titles in the genre like Descent, that the genre came to be known based on the one similarity all these games shared: namely, the first-person viewpoint and shooting elements made them more similar than different. This "Doom Cloning" has set a precedent that continues today, but I'll get to that in a moment.

On consoles, this trend of game "cloning" was especially prevalent. "Mario Clones" became "Platformers," for example. More recently, games that copied Chrono Trigger and the Final Fantasy games came to be known more generally as "Japense RPGs" (JRPG) and all share similar characteristics. This is basically how genres came about. During this time period, however, each genre had a first game which was later copied ad nauseum. There were many more genres at that period of time that have since become much less popular. Among these: adventure games, puzzle games, vehicle simulation games and flight combat games have all become scarce. Consoles experienced a major upheaval of established traditions by the advent of 3D technology with the Playstation, Saturn, and N64, but many attempted to simply "port" 2D genres to a 3D environment. This achieved limited success, as well as spurned needed innovation, but at the end of the day developers went right back to "cloning."

We see, today, the culmination of this philosophy of "cloning" successful games to the point that it stifles real innovation. Out of the innovation of the age of shareware and genre-defining games, we've shifted into an age where every game must follow some established genre rules.

Let's first look at FPSes. FPSes until around 2001 had mostly copied Quake or Half-Life with regards to many major gameplay mechanics. Health pickups or health stations were used and games had puzzles to solve. As soon as Halo came out, it stood out as the best console FPSes of its time. It featured a regenerating shield system combined with the standard health pickups, little to no puzzle solving, and a focus on extreme linearity and combat itself. It wasn't a bad game, and it did things refreshingly differently for its time. It featured drivable vehicles which was rare for FPSes, and especially the multiplayer component. I enjoyed playing the game on PC quite a bit. Things went downhill with the sequel, Halo 2.

Halo 2 was average at best and boring at worst. The game removed the health system and pickups in favor of relying entirely on a regenerating shield model. If you could avoid being hit for several seconds, your health would regenerate itself completely. If you got hit without a shield, unlike the first game, you had no "HP" to account for. You would just die in a couple of sustained hits. The game added use of a few new weapons, and the ability to "dual-wield" certain guns, but beyond that the gameplay became far more repetitive and linear. The lack of quality in the single player mode is most likely a result of the focus on multiplayer. Regardless, the massive success of Halo 2 led to the new trend of console FPSes copying many aspects of it, which in my opinion is a step backward for the genre. Let me elaborate.

Regenerative health, the ability to only carry a small number of weapons at any given time (usually 2 to 4), a dedicated button to use a melee attack, and a dedicated button to throw grenades, are all frequently copied features. You can notice many of these in the following games: The Call of Duty series; Gears of War; Portal; Mass Effect; Assassin's Creed; Timeshift; Resistance Fall of Man; Project Origin; Mirror's Edge. This is a trend that will not go away.

Another example is the "gritty" or "grey" or "colorless" appearance that I'd like to say started with Gears of War, but carries through on most games that use the Unreal 3 engine since then. Guilty games include: Gears of War (duh); Call of Duty 4; Timeshift; Mass Effect; Resistance Fall of Man; Killzone 2; Project Origin; Unreal Tournament 3; Rainbow 6 Vegas series; Army of Two; Frontlines Fuel of War; Turok (latest); Fallout 3. For some reason, making a game look grey and dirty makes it feel more "realistic." I personally think it just makes the game more "ugly."

These individual problems are just symptoms, though. Games have massive budgets these days. Making a huge game that ends up flopping can put a developer out of business. Gamers also continue to demand better graphics and physics, which increases the cost of many large game releases. For this reason, risk taking is discouraged. Developers strive to follow certain formulas that they hope will lead them to success. Modern FPSes follow the formulas I just mentioned, with very few exceptions (the most notable lately being Bioshock). JRPGs today try to follow the standard for the genre set by Square Enix's games. Even original concepts like the upcoming game Mirror's Edge, which tries to simulate the experience of a rooftop-free-running courier, will have guns you can take from enemies and then shoot, from a first-person perspective. Essentially, it will be an FPS, but with the option of carrying a gun or not, in addition to the free-running gameplay. The fact that the developers felt the need to do this saddens me.

It's simply inconceivable in this age to think of a major game release in which you don't engage in combat with something. Portal, for all its puzzle solving and fun, had enemies in the form of turrets and the final boss. This is one game convention that has not been shed lately nor will be any time soon. Think of how much more unique Mirror's Edge would be, if the game had no enemies, only platforming and free-running puzzles, perhaps time trials or hidden areas, with incentive to keep a running "flow" going to build momentum. The developers had to pigeon-hole the game into the "FPS" genre in order to appeal to the widest audiences. Genre-defining innovation has been reduced to a unique FPS title. To take the Portal example, I had my dad try the game because of the puzzles. He enjoyed the spatial thinking a lot, until he got to the turrets, where it became an action game. At this point he lost interest. Why did Portal have to move from portal-based switch puzzles and platforming to turret puzzles? Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed those levels immensely, but I can't help but feel that the game could have been more unique and innovative if it had shed the common conventions of games needing to have combat in some form. The market for peaceful games, however, is just not going to appeal to the kids who crave action. In part, this can be blamed on Halo taking the focus off of tactical gameplay or puzzle solving and onto pure action. It's a step backward in game design. All the copied features I mentioned earlier, all feed into this philosophy of "more action." Mass Effect, a supposed "RPG" by the makers of the amazing Knights of the Old Republic, is literally a shooting game similar to Gears of War, with stat building, special abilities and an inventory screen. The game was praised by critics for having so much action. The most enjoyment I got out of the game was interacting with NPCs and completing side quests which each seemed to involve short self-contained stories. They offered more unique, often non-combative gameplay.

So, I guess I'll generalize and say that the current trend is copying rigidly defined genre formulas, increasing the action and decreasing the complexity. This is due in large part to Halo and the rise of the console FPS, as well as many console FPSes going multiplatform and causing PC FPSes to copy them as well. No one wants to take risks, and profit lies in doing what is known to succeed. Innovation is stifled, and new concepts are pigeonholed into known classes to appeal more. You can see this happening in the film industry, too. Hollywood has run out of new ideas, so they continue to make big-budget movies based on older movies, or TV shows, or comic books, and count on familiarity for the movies to succeed. To a large extent this does work, in both the gaming industry and film industry. This "safe blockbuster" approach generates a lot of money. We've shifted from the days of the 90s where small developers published their own shareware games, to massive megacorporations working to make the most money off the latest trends.

The most obvious counter-argument to this is indie games. They seem to embody the ideal of cheap, innovative games that defy genre conventions. The problem here, though, is they are not large commercial games. They are only experienced by small numbers of people, they're viewed as inferior games entirely because they are "independent," and often they are indeed unpolished or small games built onto interesting concepts. I sincerely hope that Valve will improve things. Audiosurf, one of the most unique and awesome indie games of last year, achieved incredible success by releasing on the Steam platform. Portal also came about because Valve saw the indie game Narbacular Drop, made by a group of Digipen graduates, and decided to turn it into a full game, employing the developers to do so. Valve has also hired developers of major mods of Half-Life, including the teams for Counterstrike, Team Fortress, and Day of Defeat, turning these mods into full-fledged games that have achieved massive success.

Another possibility is Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network, and Wiiware. These give more indie gamers outlets to display new games. The problem here is that the developers have to contend with the console publishers to be featured on these services.

To summarize: I'm getting sick of grey FPSes with regenerating health. JRPGs annoy me with too many cliches. Every game feels the need to fit into a certain "genre" and is developers are afraid to leave that comfort zone. Indie games need more support from larger developers like Valve. Question the formulaic designs of almost every major game that will come out in the next year or two. This is the idea of "Clone games" taken to such an extreme that genres themselves are far too restrictive of a concept. Go play games that innovate and challenge assumptions of game design!

Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven

2008-08-01T06:51:00.000-07:00

Who doesn't want to be a ninja? Infiltrating fortresses, sneaking past guards, slitting throats, hiding in the shadows; pretty darn cool, right? Tenchu has the unique distinction of being probably the only ninja game around where you play an actual, stealthy ninja assassin. Games like Ninja Gaiden and Shinobi are really hack-and-slash games, not stealth games, they only happen to feature ninjas doing very un-ninja-like things. Metal Gear Solid is more of a ninja game than Ninja Gaiden is; Snake does in the modern day exactly what a ninja did back in feudal japan, albeit with more modern tools. That's not to say Tenchu is a hyper-realistic depiction of ninja life, however. It's a japanese game, and as such, inevitably falls into the hole of demons and robots and magical ninja powers. It's not so bad, though, as the game uses these fantastical elements as an excuse to test your skill in sneaking, or sometimes fighting, rather than changing the gameplay into something else.

So what do you do in Tenchu? You play DEATH PERSONIFIED - ahem, excuse me, ninjas Rikimaru or Ayame - as they sneak through castles and villages and caves and cemeteries, slitting the throats of enemies. Just look in the eyes of this guard: I'm pretty sure he's wetting himself right now.

The levels vary between linearity and openness, which is awesome for pacing. Most of the levels offer multiple branching paths and maze-like layouts, but are still designed to let you get the drop on every guard. The challenge comes from the guard layout and movement patterns, as well as the actual combat. More on that in a moment. As you sneak through the level, you'll routinely be checking corners and backing along walls, waiting for a guard to turn his back so you can pounce.

The guards in this game are pretty much robots. They move along mostly straight-line patrol routes, walking one direction before turning around and walking the other way. It's not very hard to anticipate their movements. The challenge comes when there is more than one guard in a room, because you will then need to take each one out without alerting the others. If you come up to a guard before he sees you, you are awarded a stealth kill which kills him instantly, and looks awesome. If you get a certain number of stealth kills in a single mission, you're awarded a new ability, such as combat moves or wall clinging or a zoom-in camera mode. There is lots of incentive to beat each mission without being seen once. The stealth kills themselves are very rewarding. The camera will change angles to show a cinematic assassination, the animation itself depending on the angle which you approach the enemy. Each character is different, too. For Rikimaru: directly from behind results in a throat slash (and occasionally decapitation); approaching from the side results in multiple torso slices; approaching from above features a fierce stab through the top of the head, and approaching from the front results in a stab through the stomach. There are even contextual kills, such as when you jump down onto an unsuspecting enemy and stealth-kill in mid-air. The system is a lot of fun, and each character has different assassination animations.

To help you get the drop on enemies, you have a variety of tools at your disposal. The grappling hook is by far the most useful, and the most fun. It lets you quickly escape to rooftops or ledges, where you can better stalk your prey. It's also a real thrill in the middle of a battle to throw down a smoke bomb and then grapple to a nearby roof, leaving the enemy puzzled as to how you disappeared completely. There are also multiple ninja weapons and traps. Poison rice will paralyze whoever eats it, letting you kill them with ease. There are bear traps, mines, and caltrops as well, to damage anyone unwitting enough to walk over them. And, of course, there are shurikens and blow-darts to attack opponents from a distance. These won't work very well in the middle of a fight because you have to take the time to aim each one, but for dogs and other assorted enemies, these can be invaluable.

If you do get spotted, you'll have to choose between fighting it out and running away to hide. Fortunately the game sports a decent combat system which includes combos, special moves, and dodges. It's entirely possible, especially if you suck at sneaking, to beat each level dueling every enemy instead of stealth killing them, although it isn't nearly as fun. One problem I have with the fighting system, though, is that it can be unfair at times. If you take a hit, you have a hit-stun animation that is far longer than I would like. Many times opponents can rack up large, deadly combos on you after the initial hit, and you can't do anything at all. The worst offense is the demons in the cemetery who breath fire. If they catch you in the initial flame, you'll be paralyzed losing 30%-50% HP as the flame keeps hitting you, not to mention any other enemies nearby who want a piece of you. The boss battles in the game necessitate combat as well, which is unfortunate. Metal Gear bosses often let you utilize stealth as a means to help you beat them, drawing on the core gameplay for boss designs. Tenchu, however, throws out stealth as soon as a boss fight begins, and challenges you to simply win with your combat.

As I said earlier, the enemies in this game are completely stupid. They do not behave like real people whatsoever. If an enemy spots you and tries to fight you, it is possible to run around a corner and hide, and after only a few seconds the guard will look around, shrug, and resume his straight-line patrol route as if you never existed. If an enemy spots a body, he will, without fail or variation, walk in a straight line to examine the body. If there are multiple bodies in his line of sight, he will do the same to each in sequence. Furthermore, guards have very limited ranges of vision. If you are on a ledge 5 feet higher than the guard, you are effectively invisible. If you are 90 degrees to the side of an enemy, he cannot see you. In fact, it's often possible for you to move even closer toward the front of his vision without being seen. You make no sounds while running, unless you're moving through water or on a hardwood floor, making approaching guards very easy. Metal Gear Solid for the PSX came out a full five years before Wrath of Heaven for the PS2, and it still wipes the floor of Tenchu in terms of the AI as it applies to stealth gameplay.

This last paragraph may sound like I'm being critical of Tenchu. I do think the game would benefit from smarter AI, but at the same time, the stupidity of the AI and simplicity of the stealth elements give the game its personality. Unlike Metal Gear Solid, the challenge is not avoiding being seen, but rather perfecting each level. At the end of each level you are awarded based on how often you were seen and how many stealth kills you made, and this gives the game an arcade feel. It's easy in Tenchu to hide and avoid being seen when you don't want to be. It's harder to stealth kill every single enemy in the game without being spotted once. Much harder. Where Metal Gear Solid rewards you for sneaking past guards unnoticed, Tenchu rewards you for killing them in the most stylish way possible. The robotic patrol paths of guards and the layout of the levels are all designed to facilitate this. If you aren't a fan of stealth games, you still should consider trying Tenchu, because the stealth isn't all that hard, on its own. Stealth is only a tool to help you achieve the stealth kill. This is why the game succeeds so well. It's a different take on the stealth genre. It's a game about silent assassination. It's an actual ninja game.

F.E.A.R.

2008-07-30T08:59:00.000-07:00

To complete my "horror FPS" theme - the two-post theme I started one post ago with my Doom 3 post - here's the seriously awesome game F.E.A.R. (hereafter known as FEAR because I hate those stupid periods). I beat this a few years back, but I had a hankering for it again so I'm playing through it on the hardest difficulty (which the game helpfully describes as "for masochists"). Now, I play tons of crazy hard 2D games like shmups and occasionally Contra and Metal Slug, so maybe I am a gaming masochist, but FEAR's hardest difficulty level isn't exactly all that hard as long as you abuse the time slow ability for all its worth. In fact, getting into a firefight without slowing time is usually a death wish because in hard mode your health drops FAST. Firefights devolve into leaping out of cover with time slowed down, killing as many enemies as you can, and ducking behind cover to let the ability recharge. The enemies aren't stupid enough to come round the corner single file while you blast each one with a shotgun at point-blank range, so as long as they can't flank you (and they will try) they just hang back and wait for you. The way they should have made the game harder is to slow down the recharge rate for time slow, or speed up the rate at which it is depleted while in use.

Ok, enough about the difficulty level. This game is really awesome for a variety of reasons. First, it's scary as hell. Not in the way Doom 3 is, however. This game won't make enemies pop out at you from behind while running through dark corridors. Instead, this game will make creepy little girls and sometimes ghosts or cannibalistic psychic military experiments run at you from around a corner and then disappear without hurting you, leaving you feeling freaked out. The scares are very well designed. In some parts you'll be ascending a ladder, and upon reaching the top find the girl, Alma, standing there in front of you, before she dissolves into nothing. Other times you'll come around a corner and see, in a dark corner of the room, the girl creeping along like a spider, disappearing into the shadows. And still other times, you'll approach an open door, to have it slam in your face, the lights to go off all around you, and then the hallway starts bleeding. In contrast to the cheap dumb scares of Doom 3, these are harmless, freaky scares that leave you creeped out. This culminates in the final cutscene of the game before the end credits. I won't say what it is, but if you've played the game you know exactly what I'm talking about. And if you haven't, this has to be the craziest ending in all of videogame history (with the possible exception of the ending to the game Bad Dudes: "Hey dudes thanks, for rescuing me. Let's go for a burger... Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha")

As for the enemies themselves, they will sneak up behind you, but only during a firefight and because they're really smart. This game has the best AI in existence, no joke. You'll almost always know there are enemies ahead or around a corner by the sounds of radio chatter or just seeing them in front of you, but once a fight has started you just cannot predict them. The AI will take cover intelligently, will flip bookshelves or desks or chairs over to hide behind them, will lob grenades to flush you out of a hiding spot, and will take alternate routes to get behind you whenever possible. When I say they're smart, I mean they could almost pass for online opponents in a multiplayer game. On one occasion, I was concentrating on the enemies right in front of me on a scaffold, only to be surprised and killed by a soldier who had jumped off the scaffold down to my level and ran around behind a large tank in order to flank me while I was distracted. Another time, I approached a patrol, and took out one guy ahead of me without being seen. The enemy squad leader yelled "recon" and one guy ran around the corner to find me. I took him out with a shotgun. Now, in most FPSes, the rest of the AI would dutifully follow the first guy, each getting shot one after another as they rounded the corner. Not so in FEAR. They immediately stopped coming (I waited half a minute for any more to round the corner), and fanned out behind cover waiting for me. One moved to get a good angle of attack at me by taking a longer path around boxes and cover so he would remain safe. Others hid around corners of their own so that when I eventually left my hiding spot I was suddenly under attack by three guys simultaneously. I died more times than I care to remember trying to get past this part. It's not often in a game you can be outsmarted by AI, but in FEAR it's a common occurrence, and it still never feels cheap. It just feels fun. I laugh when I get killed by a soldier who had moved around behind me and shot me from behind. I laugh because I know I left that window open for him to use that tactic against me, and the next time I would try to fix that mistake. This is called immersion, folks! I don't know if I've ever seen an FPS since FEAR with even an equal level of AI. Crysis sometimes comes close, but the AI in that game is way too inconsistent. Basically, good AI like this ought to be standard in FPSes right now, but too many game studios focus on multiplayer these days to put any real effort into crafting an amazing single player experience.

So, this game is pretty much a long series of firefights in different environments and against different enemy layouts. The enemies are, for the most part, identical soldiers. There's one super-soldier enemy with a penetration gun that is hard to take down, and there's one robot thing that can be annoying to fight, but overall the enemies don't vary much. Honestly this just isn't a problem though. I don't care. The standard enemies are fun enough to fight as it is. I'll quickly touch on the time slow ability because it's an integral part of gameplay. It slows down your perception of time, allowing you to react faster. It doesn't let you actually move faster, or shoot faster, it only symbolizes fast reflexes. I love that. It's not a super-power like in some other games (Timeshift). It's also very necessary, because you can see the matrix-like trails of bullets and this can help you successfully avoid damage.

Time gets really slow, much slower than the time slow ability in Timeshift, and far slower than the abilities in Max Payne, so you can really see how it helps you deal with enemies. It also recharges pretty quickly, so you rarely feel pressured by being out of "mana". This leads to a bit of imbalance but it's not a huge deal.

So, the final element that makes this game stand out is the effects. I know, I always say I don't care about graphics, but this goes beyond graphics. When you shoot at anything at all, there are TONS of effects going on. There's dust, debris, sparks, explosions, changes in lighting, all sorts of things going on. If there's books around, shooting will result in little pieces of torn up paper floating around in the air. Shooting a wall will create 3D chunks torn into it. In the aftermath of a firefight, all that debris lingers and fills the room and looks awesome. This has nothing to do with how nice the game looks and everything to do with how visceral and fun the firefights feel. Believe me, if you play it, you'll know what I'm talking about.

The next game, Project Origin, is looking pretty good so far. It won't be out for a while, but it already promises excellent AI, good effects, the ability to knock over desks and objects to make cover for yourself, and even a pilotable mech suit. My one problem with the game so far is the regenerative health, but let's hope it doesn't detract too much from the experience.

Doom 3

2008-07-29T07:19:00.000-07:00

This image sums up Doom 3 pretty well.

This is your basic corridor-shooter. You walk down dark (like, pitch black) hallways, and enemies pop out at you from ceilings and hidden wall compartments and floor panels, and usually right behind you. You shoot them, they die, you keep moving. In my opinion it's the worst breed of horror: the jump out and surprise you style. It's not smart, it's not actually creepy, it's just designed to surprise you from behind a lot. I can't stand movies like this and it's annoying in a game.

The enemies aren't much fun to fight either. There's zombies that walk slowly toward you and take about 5 head shots to kill. There's demons that throw fireballs at you from a distance, and you just dodge the fireballs and shoot them. If they are too close, they'll scratch you in the face like some sort of feral cat, which makes your view shake wildly and thus makes it difficult to shoot them at all, even with a shotgun at point-blank range. If you get caught against a wall, it's entirely possible that you'll be stuck taking massive damage every few seconds from a claw-swipe, until you just get lucky and pop off a shot in the right direction. The zombies do this too when they get close. There's also marines, who shoot you with guns. As far as I've seen they have perfect aim and will always hit you if they can see you. You can't dodge their shots. I've tried bunnyhopping and strafing wildly while sprinting, but I continue to take bullets. They start shooting the moment I leave cover too, so I can't pop out for a few shots before hiding again and expect to avoid damage. And any game where you cannot avoid being damaged no matter how skilled you are is not fair, in my opinion. Ok, so there's also a few faster moving dog-demons. They run at you and scratch and bit at you. If you backpedal while sprinting, and shoot at them, you'll be fine. It's not all that exciting. There are probably more enemies, but I haven't beaten the game yet. I'm not too optimistic though.

Another major problem, which is probably the most common cited about this game, is the fact that you can't turn on a flashlight while you have a gun out. You need to put away the gun and get out the flashlight to see in the dark, i.e. the entire game. Yes, you can do a flashlight bash attack in case you get surprised, but it's completely useless. I've never even noticed the attack doing damage. There are mods that fix this problem, but that doesn't change the fact that the original game has a seriously annoying flaw that could be potentially game breaking.

The old Doom style of hunting down colored key cards to progress has actually been kept, in some form. You have to find PDAs that belong to certain people in order to have access to locked doors. Unlike the original Doom games, though, getting each key card does not involve any puzzle solving. It involves finding a locked door, being told which PDA you need, and then backtracking (while having even more demons jump out at you in areas you had already cleaned of demons) long enough to see a scripted event like a demon busting down a previously closed door to scare you. And the PDA is usually somewhere back there, past even more hordes of demons that you don't see until you get hit from behind.

It sounds like I hate this game, but that's not entirely true. It's incredibly simple, it relies on the cheapest scare tactics around to keep the game exciting, and it features some really annoying or boring enemies. Sometimes, though, I just feel like playing a mindless FPS where you shoot demons in dark corridors. It hearkens back to a simpler time, where you had Quake and Doom and maybe even Serious Sam, games that just required you to shoot, shoot, shoot. Doom 3 won't keep your mind engaged or keep you interested in anything about it, but mindless fun is a nice change of pace from FPSes that challenge you to think tactically to survive, games like Crysis, Team Fortress 2, FEAR or Half-Life. There's a time for each type of game.

Timeshift

2008-07-28T13:30:00.000-07:00

When the game came out back in October, I tried the demo. It was pretty fun, but after I read some pretty unfavorable reviews I decided not to bother with the full game. Something lately compelled me to download it and try it out. Maybe boredom. In any case, here's my impressions.

To start with, it's clearly a console-based FPS. The game is set by default with (I think) an FOV of 80 degrees, which is substandard for PC games. I switched it to 90 as soon as I noticed. It carries the annoying trend of only allowing you to carry a couple weapons at a time, three in this case. Developers and console gamers will say this makes the game "more tactical" or something but really it's just compensating for a controller's lack of buttons. Having fewer options doesn't make a game "more tactical," it makes it "simpler." Furthermore, the design of levels and overall gameplay is definitely based on the assumption that the player cannot turn quickly, another console symptom. The flow of gameplay is such that you'll enter each area/corridor and see the enemies in front of you. They won't pop up behind you or flank you. Everything you need to deal with will be in front of you. That's not to say the design is bad, per-say, as it does offer tactical challenges, it's just that it is simpler and less frantic than it could otherwise be (see Crysis). Finally, of course, the game has regenerative health. Ugh. Given the context of the game, it would have been SIMPLE for them to implement a sort of health pickup system or even health station system like Half-Life, but no, they decided that was too complicated for the console gamers.

With that basic complaint out of the way, I'll talk about the game on its own terms. First, I just have to mention that the story is laughably bad. It tries to be edgy by having those flash to white screen with a sound effect and go into a cutscene/flashback things that many games tend to do nowadays, but the game just fails completely. The cutscenes are rare, convey basically no information, and frankly seem shallow. I found myself skipping most of them. After I watched the beginning of the game I learned that someone stole a time-trsvel suit, and then your character conveniently has another one to hunt down the first one through time (an actually cool premise). After that, you travel to this dystopian future that is, of course, a muddy grey Gears of War look-alike with a tiny bit of steampunk thrown in. I actually like some of the elements of the world the game creates. The oppressive big-brother figure on televisions everywhere, the sparse scenes of resistance fighters, it all reminded me a lot of Equilibrium, especially how the rebels all look up to you as a super-soldier after they learn about you in the beginning. It's a good feeling.

Aside from that, however, the story offers absolutely no reason behind anything you do in the game. I've played it for hours now and still have no idea who stole the other time suit and why I should care. I assume he's the reason I'm in a dystopian future right now instead of someplace awesome like the Cretaceous period, but I still just have no motivation to find him. And speaking of motivation, why the hell am I running around this grey world shooting enemies in slow motion? The game just plunks you down into the world, hands you a gun, and says "shoot those guys for 15 hours." I'm guessing about the length of the game because I did not finish it (you'll see why in a moment). Anyway, the rebels just sort of make you run errands for them even though you have no idea who they are. At one point you hop onto a dirigible and man turrets to shoot down enemy planes. Why? I have absolutely no idea. They don't give me any reason why I should. Now, normally I don't care that much for a story in FPS games, but in this case the fact that they tried to insert a story into the game, and failed so miserably, stands out a lot to me.

So, since the story obviously isn't really there, how's the gameplay? It basically comes down to shootouts, in varying environments against varying enemies. Very occasionally there's time puzzles, which I felt were vastly underutilized. The game is entirely based on the "timeshifting" abilities, of which there are three - in chronological order...or reverse chronological order...actually I have no idea: time slow, time stop, and time reverse. Two of these, the latter two, are pretty much unique to this game, but as any long-time gamer knows slow motion has been used to death pretty much since the Matrix came out in 1999. The most notable bullet-time games have been the Max Payne games, FEAR, Gun, all the Matrix games (duh), and Star Wars: Jedi Outcast (also known as the best multiplayer game in existance). Of all of these, FEAR is the only straight FPS to utilize it, but the fact of the matter is Timeshift is not treading new ground here. Where it does tread new ground, however, is the other two powers.

Time stop freezes everything around you except what you physically touch, apparently. You can freeze time, and then pick up a gun and shoot it at regular speed. The temporal mechanics of that make my head hurt, but I can forgive it. It's darn useful. It's a shame this is the shortest-lasting of the three powers. Because of the regenerative health, using time stop refills your health bar much faster. This is good because your health will drop RAPIDLY when you're being shot at. Also, you can use time stop to run up and grab an enemy's weapon from their hands. When time resumes, they stand there with a stupified look on their face for a moment before running away. It's a fun feature but I wish there was more to it; as it stands, that's about all you can do with time stop aside from the odd puzzles. It works as a more effective, but shorter, version of bullet time.

Time reverse is almost entirely useless except for a single scenario: a grenade sticks to you. This is the single time you will use this power, aside from the odd time-reverse puzzles (some of which are very creative). You can't actually interact with anything during time-reverse, you can only reverse things which have already happened, and then change them when time resumes in the (near) past. This feature seems to have so much wasted potential, it's a shame they didn't do anything more with it.

I want to talk briefly about the time puzzles before moving on. They're a mixed bag but I see a lot of potential here. Here's a list of all the puzzles I can recall from my several hours of playtime:

-reverse time to move through a hallway before it explodes and collapses.
-freeze time to walk over electrocuted water safely.
-freeze or reverse time to walk up a ramp without the other end falling down from your weight.
-freeze time to walk through fire safely.
-freeze time to get through a gate that will close immediately after being opened.
reverse time to ride an elevator that can only be raised by manually turning a crank that is outside the elevator; thus you have to turn the crank to raise the elevator, let it fall back down, then reverse time, get into the elevator, and ride it up. This one was my favorite.
-freeze time so you can climb onto a platform that can only be raised by a button located elsewhere, and ride the platform up as time resumes. This is used to get height to jump over a nearby fence.

That's it. Many of these puzzles are repeated, too. Most of them are simplistic and obvious, while a couple are actually pretty ingenious and took me a few minutes of trial and error before solving. The good puzzles reminded me of the gravity-gun puzzles of Half-Life 2 and that's no small feat. If we could see a better balance between really tricky time puzzles and combat, this could have been a much better game overall.

The shootouts themselves are also a mixed bag. Some of them are pretty well-designed, with open areas and opportunities to show off the sometimes awesome AI. It's hard to tell in Timeshift when the AI does something that's scripted and when it does something on its own, and I think that's a great thing. It's not as fun to fight as FEAR, but it occasionally does surprise. It's too bad most of the game isn't really designed for the AI to stand out. Often you'll be moving through an area and see, at the far end of the area, the enemies come streaming through doors and run for you or for some nearby cover while shooting at you. The enemy knows where you are. It does not feel pity, or remorse, or fear. It will find you. Stealth is completely impossible in the game. If you can see the enemies, they can see you, and this often comes off as just too scripted. When you're moving through the levels with the enemies, though, they do show surprisingly good tactics most of the time. Expect to be grenaded, expect - rarely - to get flanked, and expect turrets to be occupied by a second enemy after you've gunned down the first. Unfortunately, with only the three time powers (one of which is almost useless and the other two delivering almost the same gameplay quirks), and pretty repetitive enemies and environments, the game gets old. It took a while before it did, but it did, and that's always the sign of poor design implementation. A truly good game does not get old. That's why it's still fun to play Super Mario.

Finally, does the protagonist of this game look at all familiar?

N64 Games to get on the Wii Virtual Console

2008-07-24T13:56:00.000-07:00

F-Zero X

If you like fast-paced racing games you probably already love the F-Zero series. I'd played the SNES one but that was it. Well X definitely blows that out of the water. Insane tracks with loops and jumps and tunnels, along with 30 racers in each race, and insane speed, add up to one intense experience. It has a really smooth framerate too which never stutters once. I wish more games focused on that nowadays (and even other Nintendo games of that time period didn't, see the next game for details).

Star Fox 64

The classic rail shoot-em-up from Nintendo. This, to me, is the natural 3D version of the 2D scrolling shmup. I don't want to say "evolution" because it's just different, not necessarily better or more advanced. Regardless, Star Fox 64 is an awesome arcade-style game with branching level paths, a (simple) scoring system, and a set number of lives. The major problem with the game is that it's plagued with slowdown. Like, all the time. I've tried the game with Project64, and it's a major difference compared to playing it on the Virtual Console. Now, it's not gamebreaking by any means, and during gameplay you probably won't notice it, but during cutscenes and particularly busy sections of the game when the screen is filled with explosions, you'll definitely see it. Still a great game though.

Sin & Punishment

This is another rail shooter, in the same genre of Star Fox, but also entirely different. It's more like a scrolling 3rd person shooter/platformer, with a melee weapon on top of it. This is made by Treasure, so it features many of their signature bosses and styles. I know some people might not be into that style, but for those of you who love Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga, you'll definitely love S&P. It feels more like a shoot-em-up than perhaps even Star Fox, with actual bullet patterns and attacks to dodge, as well as memorization necessary for scoring the bonus items and amassing a large hit count. I'm still trying to 1cc this game, and it's really difficult to do. I heartily recommend this game to absolutely anyone who enjoys action games.

Oh yeah, I also own Mario 64, but I think everyone on earth knows the reasons that game is great. (although Galaxy is better)

The Big E3 Post

2008-07-18T06:35:00.000-07:00

E3 is finally over. There have been tons of announcements and closer looks at upcoming games this past week, as well as press conferences from the big companies in the industry - most of them comically bad. If you've been following coverage, you probably know the main stuff, but there's lots of information that you might have missed. Let's get to it! I'll organize everything by Platform, and be forewarned that I'm mostly focusing on Wii/PC games, since that's what I was interested in and that's what I took notes about.

Microsoft - Xbox 360
Microsoft's press conference was one of the strongest this year. They announced ripoffs of both Home and the Mii. They announced a bunch of multiplatform games that they don't have much right to brag about. They showed off Gears of War 2 along with other muddy, grey shooters. They showed off a new Netflix deal for streaming movies which seems like it'll be very good for business. And, oh yeah, they forgot to mention, Square decided to release Final Fantasy XIII on the 360, instead of JUST the PS3. This move hurt some Sony fans as they've lost yet another big, system-selling exclusive. They're down to just a couple now: Metal Gear Solid 4, and God of War 3. Not that the 360 has any except the upcoming Ketsui port. Every big Xbox release comes out for the PC (see: Gears of War, Halo, Mass Effect, Bioshock, Geometry Wars...).

I was surprised at how many RTSes were shown off on the show floor for the 360. Why the heck do developers suddenly think that RTSes will work on a console without a mouse and keyboard? It never has in the past. It never will in the future. Even so, we got multiplatform Supreme Commander, Command & Conquer 3, Battle for Middle Earth, and Universe at War. And upcoming, shown off at E3, we have Halo Wars, EndWar, and Stormrise, all console RTSes that are doomed to failure. Well, Halo Wars will inevitably sell well and probably get praised by idiot press who've never played an RTS on a PC and have absolutely no concept of micro. The only interesting looking of these RTSes is EndWar because it seems to be entirely voice controlled. We'll see how that works out, but I have a hard time believing it will turn out that good. The games will inevitably be a lot slower than if you used a mouse because microing by saying "group 1 attack enemy tanks" is a helluva lot slower than clicking 1 and right clicking the tanks.

Among the (limited) PC gaming news was a KOTOR MMO. I'll pause so you can read that again and finish wiping the drool from your mouth. Done? Ok. There isn't anything else known at this time, but it has to be better than Star Wars Galaxies, right? It will be hard convincing myself to put down the monthly payment to play this, but I just might force myself to try. I just don't know though.

Another announcement is that the new WoW expansion, which believe me I do not care about, is getting achievements. Can I just ask, as I did after Valve introduced them to Steam, WHY?!?! Achievements are the most useless things I have ever heard of. Unless you actually get something for "unlocking" an achievement, what's the point? Some sort of goal to keep the game replayable? Well if your game isn't replayable without some sort of artificial achievements, then I think you have some problems with the game design. Then we have games like CoD4 and TF2 where prolonged play, or better play, or in the case of TF2 very strange play involving posing for freezecam shots (Autopsy Report) or killing spies after healing them (Hypocritical Oath), will result in getting better weapons or abilities. I HATE unlocking things in multiplayer games. Everyone ought to be on equal footing, right from the get-go, with only skill to separate players in the leaderboards. Giving any player an advantage over another, for any reason, seems unfair to me. What if I don't want to sit there grinding for achievements for an hour to get the Backburner? This isn't World of Warcraft! Oh wait...

Next on the PC we have Mirror's Edge. Holy Spaghetti does this one look amazing. It's a first-person free-running simulator. It also has some wicked cool krav-maga style gun disarms, but the game is really about running fluidly and keeping up momentum. It looks like a far more detailed version of Assassin's Creed's free running, along with a modern setting. Being first-person, they of course just had to add weapons to turn it into an FPS at times, but I know that I personally am never going to fire a shot. Gun disarm, melee, drop gun, keep running. It looks like the game will be entirely playable, and possibly more challenging, this way. I just can't wait. I sort of wish they had chosen to keep first-person shooting out of this game, though. It feels like they're pandering to an established genre/market when they could have something more unique on their hands. Portal, for instance, had no shooting whatsoever, and I feel it was the better for it. Maybe I'm just getting sick of all the generic grey FPSes coming out every week.

There was also a showing of Postal 3, which will come out for virtually every platform under the sun (including Linux!). This series has always been extremely offensive, but often in a wacky way. My favorite feature of the upcoming game is the weapon called "badger on a harness." It's literally a badger, with a harness, that you aim at stuff which will subsequently be destroyed by a badger. Pretty awesome.

Left 4 Dead and Spore were shown off on the show floor and at EA's press conference. Both continue to look amazing. Spore now has more species than exist in real life. The characters for Left 4 Dead have been changed, too. Now you can play as a gay biker! Look at the comparison shots and decide if you like the new characters better, or the old ones:
OLD - Beards aplenty, these guys are guaranteed to be tough lumberjacks or something; I think even the woman has a beard:

NEW - no beards, one gay biker with a droopy mustache and a woman that looks like Mila Kunis from That 70's Show:

I wonder if the Director AI is programmed to follow the script of every horror movie ever and kill the black guy first while letting the woman be the sole survivor - provided her shirt gets ripped at the midriff? Only time will tell. I predict everybody will be playing as the vietnam vet since he logically has the best chance to survive a zombie apocalypse.

Finally, on the PC side of things, we have Fallout 3. It definitely looks to be a good game, but I can't help but feel bad for fans of the original RPGs. Bethesda took a series of purely D&D style RPGs for the PC, and turned it into a gray console FPS with some sort of freeze-camera so you can get automatic headshots. I like FPSes, although I'm starting to get sick of the market being flooded by Halo and Gears of War ripoffs with regenerating health and only a couple weapons that can be carried at any given time, all coming to consoles - where FPSes have absolutely no place (Goldeneye, Perfect Dark and the Metroid Prime series notwithstanding; they had the good sense to focus on autoaiming completely). The Fallout series is known for dark postapocalyptic humor and a wide open world full of side quests and possibilities, so I can definitely say I'm looking forward to this.

Sony - PS3
Sony actually had a solid showing. They showed off their sales numbers and announcements using a custom LittleBigPlanet level, which was really awesome. That is one game that really makes me want a PS3. Sony also showed off a concept trailer for M.A.G., or Massive Action Game. Yes, that's apparently the title. It's a (surprise surprise) FPS featuring 256 players on a single server, somehow. I don't know how they'll pull this off without lag, but if they do it'll be pretty unique. Finally, Sony officially announced God of War 3, but who didn't see that coming?

Capcom
They talked about the Lost Planet movie. That was the entire press conference. I kid you not, a movie about a crappy game was the entire focus of their conference.

Ubisoft
They showed off the new Prince of Persia which looks very sweet. I especially like the "throw woman into the enemy like a projectile" attack. The art style is fantastic too, it looks like a watercolor painting.

Konami
I have to mention this press conference. Konami is coming out with a game called Rock Revolution which is obviously trying to compete with Rock Band (and doomed to failure). They had a Ramones cover band on-stage, who played a song presumably from the Ramones. I don't know music. Then, Konami had the band play the same song in Rock Revolution. The band failed the song after like 15 seconds. The entire audience laughed at them. Konami immediately said "the press conference is over now" and made everyone leave. Wow.

Nintendo - Wii

*Sigh* There's a lot to talk about in relation to the Wii. Not all of it good.

I guess I'll start with Nintendo's press conference. This was quite possibly the worst press conference in the history of E3. First a little background info: in the weeks leading up to E3, Nintendo had promised that they had announcements for the "core gamer" so that we wouldn't feel left out. They want to assure us that they do, in fact, care about hardcore gamers with a Wii, and not just grandmothers and 10 year olds. Everyone thought Nintendo would announce a new Kid Icarus, Pikmin, Star Fox, or Zelda. I'll go ahead and categorize the announcements made during Nintendo's press conference according to demographic.

The casual audience:
Wii Motion+
Wii Music
Animal Crossing
Shaun White Snowboarding

The hardcore audience:
Wii Speak
Animal Crossing
Shaun White Snowboarding
GTA on the DS

I'm being really liberal with the "hardcore audience" category because I have no interest in anything Nintendo announced except for Wii Motion+. Even disregarding that, Nintendo just had seriously weak announcements all around. I'll go into each one in more detail.

Wii Motion+ - the most exciting part of Nintendo's press conference. It's an attachment that increases the range of motion detection that the Wiimote is capable of. It supposedly allows for true 1:1 motion; that is to say, motion in-game that fully mimics the motion you do to the Wiimote in 3D space, down to the last detail. The current Wiimote is incapable of this even though many people thought it was possible from day one. It certainly should have been. Regardless, I'm really glad this functionality is finally here so we can get rid of the "gesture-based" button replacements and get down to the really innovative gameplay. Coming with this attachment is Wii Sports Resort, a sequel of sorts to Wii Sports. Reggie says this is "literally a day at the beach" and if you can't figure out what's wrong with that sentence, shame on you. Assuming you're NOT playing the Wii on an actual beach somewhere, but instead in your living room or something, the game offers more great minigames. Things like jet skiing and throwing a frisbee to a dog are nice, but what really has me excited is the swordfighting game. Yes, this game has Kendo, and it works with true 1:1 motion. From the hands-on impressions I've read, including one from an actual fencer, it works really well. Lightsaber game, here we come!

Animal Crossing - this is apparently a "hardcore" Nintendo game. Really? I thought you wandered around talking to animals and doing activities with no real goal or way to lose.

Wii Speak - finally, voice chat on the Wii! Actually I really don't care that much, I doubt I'd make a lot of use out of it, and Brawl will probably never support it. This is definitely useful for the hardcore gamers though, and the Conduit is already planning to use it.

Shaun White Snowboarding - I really don't care. It requires the Balance Board which I'll probably never get, and I don't like snowboarding. Seems kind of neat for people who are completely the opposite of me in both those aspects, though.

GTA DS - meh.

Wii Music - Oh boy, here we go. This game is without a doubt an absolute travesty that makes me almost lose all faith in Nintendo. This is a music game, obviously. Nintendo felt that it would be too difficult or complex to have players match on-screen note prompts, though. The result is that you have to move the wiimote as if you're pretending to play an instrument, and you can control the tempo and pitch of the on-screen music, but other than that the song will play itself. There is no way to hit a wrong note because the game always hits the right note. There is no way to lose. The only decent looking instrument might be the drums, but judging by the flailing awkward performance by Ravi Drums (that was his actual name), those will be really inaccurate and probably fail too.

This colorful display resulted in random beating of the drums on-screen with no rhythm or semblance of anything musical.

When asked if it was more of a "toy" than a "game", Shigeru Miyamoto could only say that, yes . . . it is more like a toy. That’s why it’s more fun than a video game. I guess Nintendo makes toys now and prefers that to video games. Ugh.

After the conference, Miyamoto offered a ray of sunshine in the developer roundtable by stating that the Mario and Zelda teams are working on projects. He also said "We are making Pikmin." So there will definitely be a new Pikmin!

However, he quickly dashed those hopes later at E3 by saying this:

"Frankly, some of the so-called 'franchise games' are quite difficult for nongamers to play, so making accessible games for these players is key. With Zelda, we have to consider how to make it accessible for new gamers to pick up and play and enjoy just as hardcore gamers have. For example, we’ve got the Touch Generations series. Now, we’re not necessarily going to make our 'franchise' games in that style, but we’ll take what we know and have learned — the philosophy behind those games — and incorporate it into franchise games. That’s a philosophy that’s very strong at Nintendo."

If that sounds good to you, you must be someone who's 70 years old, can't handle all the buttons of these newfangled video game machines, and yells at the "darn kids" to "get off the lawn."

At least the 3rd party showing for the Wii was irregularly strong. The Conduit looked really awesome for a pure Halo ripoff. It had a few cool and unique weapons and some of the best graphics I've seen on the Wii. It looks at least as good as Metroid Prime 3 or Mario Galaxy. I hope it has the gameplay to match.

Another big announcement this week was Gradius Rebirth for Wiiware. It's unknown whether this will be a remake or a new game, but it will feature 2D sprites and have Maoi Heads. I think that's enough to have me sold.

Madworld was also on display. This black and white game seems to focus exclusively on over the top violence and gore. The blood is the only bit of color in the whole game. I'm reserving judgment on this one, because blood, gore and violence don't make a good game. So far it seems like it's shaping up to be similar to No More Heroes, which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.

Oh yeah, guess what? Dead Rising is coming to the Wii. I can't wait! This zombie-killing simulator was one game I really wanted to play on the Xbox, and now I'll be able to!

Finally, we have the announcement of Onechanbara for the Wii. This was a Japanese PS2 game that's being localized and enhanced for U.S. Wiis and it should be all sorts of awesome. I think the subtitle, "Bikini Zombie Slayers" is enough to warrant interest, don't you?

Ok, that's pretty much all I have. There was lots more but this was all the stuff that interested me as a Wii owner and PC gamer. I think most of those PC games are coming to the Xbox too. Anyway that's it for me.

Classic PC Games

2008-07-15T13:03:00.000-07:00

Yeah, E3 is going on right now, but I'll wait for it to finish before talking about it so I don't miss anything. For the record, Nintendo's press conference was seriously depressing. Nothing was announced that appeals to hardcore gamers or hardcore Nintendo fans. Hopefully they have something hidden for later this week.

Anyway, PC gaming. Pretty awesome? I would assert that it is pretty awesome!

Recently I've been going through some real classics for the first time in many years (or, in some cases, ever).

Descent Ultimate

Ultimate is essentially the "essential collection" of Descent I and II. It includes both games, in an updates engine. It's also based on the open source community upgrades of each game. Look around for it, it's a spectacular package. And as much as I love Descent III (which is now available on GameTap), the original two are better gameplay-wise. Much more corridor-crawling and key-card-fetching than the plot-oriented mission objectives of D3, and while that might make D3 sound more appealing, it just doesn't seem to flow as well. Maybe it's just me.

So who enjoys getting motion-sickness? Play Descent for a few hours. It's an FPS, in zero gravity, with full 360 degree movement in any direction and rotation on any axis. You go around exploring and finding key cards to open new doors and eventually unlock the door to the boss, all the while fighting enemy bots. Basically the same structure as Doom, but a lot cooler and more vomit-inducing. Seriously, at least go "find" the first Descent, somehow. It's probably not that hard to find and it's really awesome.

Deus Ex

I know I've written about this before, but I never got around to beating it last time and I'm just now getting back to it, starting over from the beginning. I have to say it's definitely growing on me. The aiming and control is still an issue, but it's mitigated if I just use stealth more, take about 20 seconds to wait for my crosshair to shrink enough that I won't miss my headshot on the guard walking slowly like a zombie on his 10 ft patrol route, and make sure to pick up every item I can lay my mechanical hands on, I'm having more fun with it. Exploration is actually rewarded with awesome new weapons, too! I went into a (completely optional) Hotel area to rescue some hostages from terrorists, and happened to find a bad-ass Flamethrower in there. I had to dump half my inventory to make room for it (RE4, anyone?) and I haven't actually needed to use it yet (I haven't been close enough to an enemy who wasn't already a corpse to hit them with the jet of searing hot flame), but anyway it's a Flamethrower, so that's cool. I also entered this terrorist warehouse a different route this time through that level, and managed to find a sweet assault rifle on one of the guards that made that level about fourteen times easier.

Also the AI is pretty friggin' dumb in Deus Ex, I'm sorry, but it's true. If you shoot them and fail to kill them, they just start flailing their arms like kermit the frog and running in circles or bumping into walls.

Alright, maybe it's more like this:

You know, same thing.

Diablo 2

ATTACK OF THE COWS

In anticipation of Diablo 3, I'm playing Diablo 2 for the first time ever. It's pretty good, I guess. From what I've seen, all the issues I have with the game will be fixed in D3, so that's good news.

Basically, this is a game where you click on things and your character attacks them. Or you click on loot to pick it up. Or you click on NPCs to talk to them. Or you click to move around. Basically what I'm saying is I have carpal tunnel?

Descent: Freespace

Despite the name, the only thing Freespace has in common with Descent is the developer and the fact that it features spaceships. Not the same spaceships, though. Also it has some kick-ass box art, even if it's unreleated to Descent's kick-ass box art.

Freespace takes place in . . . wait for it . . . space. "Free" space, actually. You fly around in space inhabited by deadly alien spaceships and questionable physics (but really, what space game has realistic physics outside of Space Shuttle sims?). You shoot lasers and missiles at enemies and try to kill them. It's really fun, but still not as good as Freespace 2. Freespace 2 hits GameTap this thursday, and I will be promptly replacing Freespace on my hard drive with #2 because it is superior in every way.

Although I should really just download the upgraded, open source version of FS2 which looks twenty-seven times better:

Seriously, if you like space combat, download FS2: Open. It's free and legal and looks amazing. It's also the greatest space combat game ever created, unless you count Dodonpachi which I don't because that's a totally different genre. If I did count it, though, it would totally win.

Day of Defeat: Source

2008-07-10T09:10:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, Valve hosted a free trial weekend for Day of Defeat: Source. It was free to download and play all weekend, and the normal price of $9.99 was cut to $4.99. I've been meaning to try the game out, but never got around to it, and I can say that I'm sorry I've been missing out for so long. I might just like this one better than Counterstrike: Source! I bought it after a very enjoyable weekend.

Ok, so if you're not familiar with the game, I'll explain a little. It's an online-only multiplayer team-based FPS set in World War II. The original Day of Defeat was a Half-Life mod, just like Team Fortress and Counterstrike, and Valve decided to buy out the mod developer and create an official version for the Source engine. Although many players of the original games continue to decry the Source-based updates of the classic mods, often for "simpler" or "dumbed-down" gameplay, I happen to think Valve has done an amazing job with these games. But then, Valve hasn't made anything I don't like yet. I digress. The gameplay of Day of Defeat: Source is, at first glance, not very unique. It has class-based team gameplay similar to Team Fortress 2, you have to capture flag points or plant explosives just as in Counterstrike: Source or TF2, and the weapons kill quickly with no health or ammo pickups, just as in Counterstrike. These similarities are really superficial, though, when you look at the actual flow of the gameplay and the key differences that set DoD:S apart.

Firstly, DoD:S features two important gameplay additions. Up first is sprinting.

This seems similar to the sprinting found in the Call of Duty series, and I don't know which came first. Regardless, it lets you run much faster than normal, with the downside that you can't shoot while sprinting. Sprinting also quickly decreases your stamina meter, so you can only sprint for a few seconds before you become tired, and need to walk normally, or stay still, for a few additional seconds to bring your meter back up. This definitely helps balance the game, because the sprinting really makes you move fast and helps a lot dodging enemy fire or escaping from grenades. If you know that a sniper is waiting for you or a machine-gunner could open up on your position as soon as you leave cover, sprinting erratically might be the only way to progress. This greatly speeds up gameplay that might otherwise be the same slow, methodical pace as Counterstrike.

The second gameplay difference is the prone position. Again, I think this is in Call of Duty, but that's not important. When standing normally, your gun has a lot of recoil. I mean, if you think the AK in CS has recoil, just try out the support rifle in DoD and you'll know what I mean. It's possible to counter the recoil when spraying, but it's difficult. This only really works well with the assault rifle because of its fast rate of fire and decreased recoil. Anyway, laying prone will greatly reduce this recoil, which can be crucial to scoring more kills. It also greatly lowers your profile, and in dark areas of the map or around corners it can help you stay a little more hidden from a distance while you pick off noobs. Lying prone also allows machine-gunners to mount their weapon when there's nothing else (like a sandbag pile or windowsill) to mount it on. Of course, the downsides of lying Prone are that you don't move very fast at all; the transition from standing to prone takes some time during which you are totally vulnerable and cannot fire; you can only fire while not moving while prone, so that if you try to move around a corner you need to stop moving to actually fire, and at close range you'll have a much harder time killing someone because you have to look all the way up to their upper body for the killing shot while they have your entire upper body lying right in front of their sights, not to mention the decreased mobility. All in all, a balanced proposition.

So what about the classes? They're actually pretty unique to this game as well.

First up is the Rifleman class. The rifle is a slow rate of fire, high damage weapon. Think of a sniper rifle without the scope. It's deadly at medium to long ranges, and includes an iron sight, although aiming is sometimes more effective without it. These guns also have high recoil, making them hard to use at close range firefights. Definitely a strong support and defensive weapon, but you won't be mowing down dozens of enemies with one of these guys. It's a pretty cool and unique weapon for an online FPS, and works well to bridge the gap between the other classes.

Next is the assault class. After playing last weekend, I checked the Steam forums, and it seems this class has gotten a big buff in the latest update, which some claim to make it unbalanced. I can see their point but I think the balance is fine. Basically, this class sports two types of grenades (smoke and frag) as well as an automatic gun for short to mid-ranged use. It has high rate of fire and moderate recoil, but weak damage per shot. Secondary fire is a strong punch for really close-quarters combat. I love playing this class, and it's true that this class is versatile and lets you rack up the kills, much like the soldier in TF2. Mainly, the assault class is used for breaking through defensive lines and capturing flag points. As an offensive class, though, it falls short at defending, and is weak to long range support classes like the sniper, rifle, or machine-gunner. Because the recoil is weaker, I've found it easy to spray at an enemy while controlling the recoil for more effectiveness. The smoke grenades are great for busting machine-gunner and sniper nests too, and play a crucial role in winning a lot of games.

The support class sports an automatic rifle similar to the assault class. It has better power per shot but a lot more recoil, though. With secondary fire, it can double as a weak rifle by switching to a more accurate semi-automatic mode with a much lower rate of fire. I'm not a big fan of this class, because it just seems like a cross between the rifle and assault classes but with the worst of both worlds. Weaker than the rifle, and less accurate than the assault. This is used for medium-range firefights and covering the assault players as they rush forward. This is the one class that is seems redundant.

Next is the Sniper. Every FPS needs a sniper, right? Well, this is the same old story. You have a sniper rifle. Most of the time it seems like a 1-hit kill to me. The sniper also has a pistol for close range encounters, and it's not a bad gun. Not much else to say; the sniper is clearly a useful part of any defending force.

The machine-gunner. I'll admit I haven't gotten a chance to play this class yet. This is because there are only 2 machine-gunners allowed on a team at any one time, which is the main balance to this class. This class comes with a heavy machine-gun turret that you can set up on the ground or on a piece of scenery like a window-sill or pile of sandbags. It has great rate of fire and big clips, and will tear apart anyone unlucky enough to enter the field of vision of the gunner. Since it can only be fired accurately when mounted, though, machine-gunners are immobile and only face one general direction, making them very vulnerable to flanking maneuvers. A lot of people in-game (noobies like myself) were crying that this class was unfair "like the heavy in TF2" because it can sit there and rack up kills, but that seems ridiculous to me. Classes serve particular roles. It's a defensive class. It has weaknesses just like the heavy. Learn to deal with it. If I get killed by a machine-gunner, I don't think "crap that was cheap", I think "crap, I need to find a way past that machine-gunner position" and then I might switch to assault and toss down a smoke grenade, or switch to sniper and take him out from long range. Or find an alternate rout and come at him from behind. All in all, a very useful and balanced class for those who like to sit in one place and rack up kills.

Finally, we have the rocket trooper. He's equipped with a rocket launcher, but plays very differently from the soldier in TF2. For one, he has to shoulder the launcher before firing, which takes a moment and makes his movement very slow. This means no rocket jumps, no spamming loads of rockets, and also means lots of vulnerability. This class is mainly used for cracking defensive positions or getting people behind cover. I don't play it that much because it's just not as hectic and fun as assault, but it has a purpose and it's very balanced.

This is getting a little long-winded, so I'll make the next part brief. The flow of gameplay and map design. This is what makes DoD:S really stand out. On a 32-player server, this can be an amazingly fun game. Each map has several flag points you need to capture, and holding each one simultaneously results in a win. Capturing most points only requires one guy to stand near it for a second or two. It's very fast. Only one or two points on each map usually require two members of a team to be near it for several seconds before a capture takes place, and these are strategically located in heavily contested center areas. Each map contains many different routes to each flag point. If the enemy has set up a strong defense in the central area, you can bet there's some sort of back path that will let you flank them. This is what makes the game so darn fun. It feels like each individual player has the capacity to alter the entire game by a clever strategic flank, or through superior positioning. With good teamwork, a superior team could completely dominate any random group of players because of how important class counters and map positioning is in this game. This is one game where tactics and strategy can clearly trump superior accuracy and reflexes, much like TF2, but with the difference that accuracy and reflexes do help a lot more in DoD:S than TF2.

Alright, I'm done. Go give the game a try, it's super-cheap and really awesome!

Apparently Shmups Suck! Who Knew?

2008-06-30T08:53:00.001-07:00

Let's take a quick look at Metacritic scores here, shall we? What follows is just about every american-released shmup that has an average score listed on Metacritic. I've selected review excerpts from most of them that pissed me off, not because they just criticized the game, but because they displayed horrible ignorance of Shmups as a genre. I in fact left out any negative review excerpts that criticized the game and made a fair point about it. I also obviously left out positive review excerpts, of which there were several for each game. Keep that in mind as you read on.

Raiden III: 61
-Review excerpts that piss me off:

"A purebred '80s throwback, Raiden III hasn't a chance of competing with exciting modern shooters - or even the classics of yesteryear."

"The game is too short, and doesn’t sport enough play options to keep it fresh past a few hours of play. "

"The game doesn't take long enough to beat, there's no real reason to play it again, and there isn't anything even remotely special about the experience."

Gradius III and IV: 64
-Review excerpts that piss me off:

"Only enjoyable if you equate fun with frustration, but most gamers have long since outgrown that philosophy, as have most games. Yet Gradius III and IV clings to its roots like a long rotting tooth."

"Two arcade perfect ports of games that will get stale within a short few minutes. Back then, way back then, this may have been revolutionary but on the PS2 it's almost like an insult to the grown intelligence of gamers."

"Meritless in terms of taking their genre forward or, worse even, invoking the warm glow of nostalgia. Spend £15 on a NES and the original games instead." (I'd like to point out that neither of these two games were on the NES. Or on any home console until this collection on the PS2, in fact. And Gradius on the NES was a joke compared to the two masterpieces of Gradius III and IV)

"Old-school graphics and unprecedented difficulty level make this one a loser for all but the most dedicated retro-game freaks. "

Chaos Field: 61, 63 (DC, GC respectively)
-Review excerpts that piss me off:

"It's like fighting a fireworks display. Sometimes the enemy blows up. Sometimes you do. There's no strategy; no hook that makes you think about how you'll do better next time."

Triggerheart Exelica: 63
-Review excerpts that pissed me off:

"Despite the enjoyment of slinging bad guys around like giant wrecking balls, Triggerheart's indecisive difficulty, average looks and short length render it a bad choice for any but the most devoted shooter fans."

"Like most arcade shooters, the experience is brief. The challenge is there for those who would like to memorize attack patterns and master the five levels, but there isn't anything that feels exciting."

"I enjoyed Triggerheart, but the game's length is both a good and bad thing -- it has only five levels, and most players will be able to beat them all in about 30 minutes."

Castle Shikigami 2: 67

Castle Shikigami 3: 67
-Review excerpts that pissed me off:

"If this were a downloadable title on WiiWare, Xbox Live Arcade, or PlayStation Network, it's a safe bet that we'd be telling you to go fire up your console and start it downloading right now."

"Castle of Shikigami III is a great title for people who enjoy the occasional classic, arcade-style game. However, it has a decided lack of content and doesn't offer much beyond the initial experience."

"The mere fact that it fills a niche on the Wii doesn't excuse this disappointing lack of substance. "

Under Defeat: 67
-Review excerpts that pissed me off:

"Inarguably, what Under Defeat does, it does very well. The execution is perfectly pitched and it clearly ticks each and every box the developers drew up on the ideas table. But it's hard to shake the feeling that this is '80s gaming dressed in '00s visuals running on '90s hardware. The gameplay is sweet and eloquent but, underneath it also tired and relentlessly derivative."

Thunder Force V: 70

Gradius Collection: 76
-Review excerpts that pissed me off:

"Twenty years ago, it would have been worth forty bucks. But today, it’s just another obsolete space ship, grounded in favor of better, faster rockets."

"If you love slow, old-fashioned gameplay, you'll be in heaven here. "

"The Gradius Collection will mainly appeal to fans who want to relive those old school memories; I can't see many new gamers being hooked on Gradius, even though it's a fun experience."

R-Type Final: 79

Gradius V: 82
-Review excerpts that pissed me off:

"Even though its more visually polished than some of the other shooters out there, the lack of innovation and the small number of seven stages makes Gradius V a must for fans of the series only."

"It's just too bad that there isn't much to it beyond the standard gameplay. "

"About the only things that keep the game from scoring higher is the lack of any meaningful innovation in the gameplay and the fact that the game only has seven stages to play."

Ikaruga: 81, 85, 88 (DC, GC, 360 respectively)
-Review excerpts that pissed me off:

"As fun as it starts out to be, it gets old rather quickly. Fortunately or unfortunately, the game is extremely short, and on its easiest mode can be completed in about an hour."

"A perfect example of why shooters have become such a niche genre. It's a good game that's well made. It's even got an interesting hook to keep the hard core happy. But the insane difficulty will keep most players from getting past the first level before giving up. And with the ultra-short playing time, even shooter fans might not find enough to like here."

Summary of Criticisms

Shmups are "retro" or "old school"; "not modern"
Shmups were once one of the top genres of games on consoles and in arcades all over the world. To this day, companies such as Cave, Seibu Kaihatsu and Alfa System continue to develop and release shmups in Japanese arcades, but in America and Europe they have become much rarer. The reason this criticism pisses me off is because new shmups are being released all the time! If you say Gradius V is a "retro throwback" and that it "isn't modern" is ridiculous because the game was released in 2004! If an average reviewer decided to play Cave's newest shmup, Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu, I can guarantee he or she would mention how it's such a "retro" game even though it came out about a month ago as of this writing! It includes new features compared to other shmups and Cave has always pushed the genre forward, albeit slowly. A game released this year cannot be "not modern."

Saying a shmup released this year is retro is like saying that one of the dozens of FPSes released last year (like Bioshock, or Half-Life 2: Episode 2, or Crysis, or CoD 4) is retro because FPSes have been around since Doom in 1993. "Hey, you walk around with a gun in a first-person perspective and shoot things," on the most basic level the most modern FPSes haven't really changed that formula. So it is with shmups. "Hey, you just fly around in a 2D plane and shoot enemies and dodge bullets," and on the most basic level modern shmups are the same. That's what a genre is!

Shmups are too short
Ugh, I hate this one. So, most shmups are between 5 and 7 stages in length (not counting loops) which usually equates to about 30-45 minutes of gameplay time to beat it in a single run. Criticizing shmups for this trait, however, shows a real ignorance about the genre and about arcade games in general. Sure, if you get a shmup and just play through it, continuing every time you get a game over, until you hit the end, you might think "wow, that was fast." But that's not how they are meant to be played. For arcade games, and shmups specifically, the aim is for high scores. To achieve the highest theoretical score, you will need to beat the entire game without using any continues because continuing resets your score each time. To truly "beat" a shmup, you need to beat it without continuing. This is called a 1CC, or "1-credit-completion." To accomplish this requires considerable skill and often memorization, but above all PRACTICE. While it's true that you can continue through a shmup in 30 minutes, to actually beat it properly by 1CCing it, will take you considerable more time. Often 20-30 hours of total play time, depending on your skill level. To put it into perspective, I played Ikaruga on the easiest possible settings for over 25 hours before 1CCing it. I don't even consider that 1CC to be legitimate because it was not done at default settings. Under default settings and in easy mode I'm lucky to even make it to level 4. I played those 5 levels over and over and over until I could survive for longer and longer, and rack up chains to get a decent score as well. I think my 1CC score was around 13 million, which is still horrible considering the world high score is around 40 million.

Anyway, my point is, properly beating a shmup takes just as much time as beating an average FPS or even some shorter RPGs. It is just ignorant to complain about how short shmups are. Playing the game right means replaying each level over and over, trying to improve your run each time and get just a little further. In fact I advise not continuing, ever. That way each time you get a little further in the game you will see new levels and areas and enemies and bullet patterns. In my experience this helps you improve faster, too.

Shmups are too hard to be enjoyable
If you're too much of a wuss to play a shmup, don't cry that the game is too frustrating. Maybe the problem is you. Seriously, keep practicing, get better, and you'll enjoy making progress. Of course shmups are hard games. That's a part of their inherent awesomeness. The entire fun comes from bettering yourself. The only time this criticism is valid is when a game is unfairly difficult and where there was nothing you could do to prevent death. A small number of shmups do fall into this catagory; namely, most things made by Psikyo and Raizing. But even those games aren't really that bad.

Shmups don't have enough content outside the main game
When was it that gamers started caring more about the extra content that come with games than they do about the games themselves? I remember when you got a game, and that was all you got. Does Contra III have online multiplayer and bonus movies and storyboards and making-of documentaries and a thousand extra levels? No, it has 6 stages and a couple difficulty levels. And it's still a FINE game. What about one of my favorites, Star Wars: Jedi Knight 2? It's a 3D PC game that came out in 2002. It featured a single player campaign, and a (amazing) multiplayer component. That's it. So why is it that shmup reviews can honestly say "The gameplay is great! It's really fun! It has a deep scoring system! But wait, the game only comes with 5 levels. It has no extra content! Waaaa! 60/100!' If the game is FUN, then that makes it a GOOD GAME.

This is like when reviewers take away points on games lacking online multiplayer. Why don't you judge the game based on what's there, not what isn't? Now, I won't complain about extra content if it's included. The recent Blast Works on the Wii features an extensive level editor and 4 other shmups that were ported from the PC, besides the main game. Hey, that's great. But I wouldn't have cried if they had only released the main game with no other extras. I've heard it's a solid shmup with improvements over its predecessor Tumiki Fighters.

My point is, extra content is a nice bonus, but really not that important.

Shmups have no storyline
So what? If I want a storyline I'll play an RPG. Or better yet, read a book. I play shmups to dodge friggin' bullets!

Time to end this rant in the way any shmup-related article should end: with this immortal quote from Winston Churchill:

"There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result."

What am I playing right now?

2008-06-17T07:08:00.000-07:00

Over the past couple weeks I've been in an RTS mood so I've been playing Supreme Commander, Starcraft, and Dawn of War a lot. Check out some of these Korean pro Starcraft matches, they're really exciting to watch, complete with hilarious English commentary by Tasteless! Also who else is excited for Starcraft II?

I've also been playing lots of MechWarrior 3, the best mech game in existence. Also if anyone wants to challenge me to some megamek let me know.

I've been working my way through Metal Gear Solid 3 on the PS2. In terms of gameplay it's probably the best one yet, although the story seems a little lacking compared to the other two. I'm not at the end yet, though, so I'm sure there will be lots of plot twists to change my mind in the near future.

I'm also still plodding through Mass Effect but the only motivation I have to play it lately is that I payed $50 for the thing.

Finally, I'm stuck on the final boss in Metroid Prime, called... uh, Metroid Prime.

Thar she blows

This boss is a tough one. I can get through most of its attack patterns without taking much damage, but when I get to Prime's final form, it becomes exceedingly difficult to hit it without taking damage.

Today marks the release of the Spore Creature Creator. It runs on crappy integrated graphics cards as well as intel macs (and thus probably linux very soon), so there's absolutely no reason not to try out the free trial. Download it and have fun creating horrible affronts to nature and watching them struggle with their miserable existence!

More Mass Effect Impressions

2008-06-09T08:42:00.001-07:00

Well, after a lot more time with the game, here's some updated impressions:

combat is getting really boring. It basically amounts to sitting behind cover and clicking on enemies until they are dead. If they get too close I might have to back up, smack them with my gun to knock them down, or use a tech/biotic power to destroy them before getting back to clicking on enemies from cover. There is absolutely no more depth than this.

the story missions kind of suck. I'm intentionally doing every side quest because I don't want to do the story missions. The story missions are consistently about excessive and long combat sequences and driving sequences. Over and over. For a long time. And occasionally there's NPCs to talk to and do a few small side quests in the middle of it. It's basically the same structure of KOTOR (which wasn't bad in that game) but because of the boring combat and driving, it just falls apart.

In fact, everything besides the conversation (which isn't much more advanced than KOTOR) is pretty dull. The inventory sucks too, I'm constantly reaching the 150-item maximum limit, which forces you to convert any NEW items you pick up into omni-gel. You get no choice in this as far as I can tell. So if you hit the item limit but you pick up some sweet items at the same time, and you want to convert some old useless items into omni-gel and save the new ones, you just can't. You can't (as far as I know) just 'not' take stuff from a storage locker; you have to take an item or convert it to omni-gel. The inventory list is awkward too. I hear it's an improvement over the one on the xbox, but if so I'd just hate to see how much worse it could be. There's basic categories by item type, but within those categories can be as many as 20 or 30 items just laying around. This is especially true in the weapon upgrade items, because I rarely go into that item category unless I'm actively upgrading a weapon, so there can be a hundred ammo types just sitting there that you'll rarely even see until you need to lighten your inventory.

Also, unlike KOTOR's vast assortment of weaponry, from vibroblades to lightsabers to stun batons to blaster pistols to disruptors to sonic blasters to bare hands, in Mass Effect there are literally just 4 weapons: pistol, rifle, shotgun, sniper. I don't know how Bioware could have taken such a large step backward in its game design compared to KOTOR, but Mass Effect feels like such an unpolished game it's sad. I really think the entire reason this game was praised so highly by major gaming press was that it plays like a slightly more complicated version of Gears of War, but with a storyline that copies KOTOR. Hence, the phrase that I like to use to describe Mass Effect:

GEARS OF KOTOR

Mass Effect (PC)

2008-05-28T21:00:00.000-07:00

After about 3 hours of Mass Effect on the PC, here's my first impressions:

Pretty good; not as good as KOTOR. I like the dialog choices, although the radial menu system seems much more fitted for consoles. I would have liked the ability to click on my choices with a cursor instead of having to move the mouse in the direction I think it should go. Also, it could just be my framerate, but the aiming feels laggy and inaccurate. I know it's a console port but Bioware is generally good at those, I expected more from them.

The graphics surprised me, and not in a great way. By default, there's this film grain effect that is really annoying. I turned it off after a few minutes. Not sure why they included that but it just makes everything look fuzzy. In addition, it has some really overdone motion blur that gets obscures your vision and doesn't add much to the immersion. I turned that off too. Finally, there's a persistant pixelation effect with shadows and many textures. This effect seems to be much less so on objects directly in front of you, which leads me to believe it might be an intentional "out of focus" effect, but it looks just awful and jaggy compared to the great effect in Assassin's Creed (I'll write about that game later). And this always makes shadows on character faces look glitchy and weird. This could also just be an issue with my own graphics card, since I've heard some cards can make graphics look pixelated, but even so, it's a dumb glitch that Bioware should really have fixed.

The gameplay is pretty good, surprisingly. I was disappointed to hear the game wasn't an RPG like KOTOR, but the third-person-shooter style gameplay actually works pretty well. The cover system is decent, although breaking out of cover feels sluggish, and the squad commands and powers are ok. It feels more gritty and realistic than the KOTOR fights where two guys stand in front of eachother, taking turns firing their blasters.

One bit of the gameplay that I'm not sure on yet is the Mako driving. The Mako is a sort of land buggy used for exploring new planets. You basically drive around alien landscapes, sometimes shooting stuff. The game's tutorial says you can just press E to get out of the Mako and fight on foot, which I would vastly prefer to do, but it's never worked for me so far. And the Mako itself, which uses decent vehicle physics, is also extremely glitchy. In my last game, the Mako got stuck in a platform and I was FORCED to reload my last checkpoint. The "return to ship" button did not work. And I still couldn't actually get out of the Mako for some unknown reason. So now I'm scared to go back to the Mako without saving right before each landing.

The storyline seems to be EXACTLY like KOTOR, just without any licensed Star Wars aspects. There's a renegade "spectre" (they're like Jedi/Sith combined), and he's commanding an army of what are basically borg ripoffs. He's searching for something called a "Conduit" which will bring back the "reapers" which were thought to be extinct for thousands of years. The reapers will help him wipe out the humans and probably take over the universe, or something. Apparently, his only actual motivation is that he hates humans and wants to kill them. Does this ring any bells? Malak, leading an army of Sith, searches after an ancient technology that will allow him to take over the galaxy with a newly mass produced army. Come on, Bioware, come up with something new for once!

Overall, Mass Effect doesn't feel like as polished an experience as KOTOR was. The combat amounts to third-person-shooter combat, which means that your success is less dependent on what items you have equipped or your characters stats, and more to how good you are at cover and aiming. KOTOR had a ton of depth in areas an RPG ought to, namely items and character stats. Mass Effect certainly has fun gameplay, but it feels more shallow in execution. The lack of any Melee combat (besides simple knockdowns when enemies get close) is probably the culprit, but who knows. Anyway, I'll keep playing with some cautious optimism that it will get better. So far, it's a good game, but nowhere near deserving of the high praise I've seen it receive from the mainstream gaming press.

Giant Robots!

2008-05-12T21:27:00.000-07:00

This, of course, is based on the popular (and awesome) Dinosaur Comics. Check it out, seriously!

Here's some pictures of some awesome giant robots from Mech Warrior and Supreme Commander:

Mad Cat from the MechWarrior series of games

And here are the ACUs from Supreme Commander

I think I've said all I can here.

What am I playing?

2008-04-22T23:16:00.000-07:00

Here's what I've been playing over the past week or so:

DOS Games!
Downloaded DOSBox and went back to a few old favorites - and games I'd never tried. Among these:

Descent: What a great game, and a start to an awesome series. Maybe this will refresh your memory a little?

It's essentially Doom, but with zero gravity and you fly a spaceship. It's a really unique game and still holds up well today. Try out Descent 3, the most recent one, for a real treat.

Escape Velocity: Arcade flight combat game, pretty cool for its open-world style gameplay. You can fly just about anywhere and shoot up everything you see, and explore for hidden tunnels, but there's always an objective arrow to your next target. The game is fun if a bit simplistic.

MechWarrior 2: Wow. I didn't know what I was missing but this game is insanely fun! It's basically a detailed simulator for large battlemechs. Much slower and more realistic than other titles like Armored Core(if a nonexistent vehicle can be portrayed realistically), it's much more immersing as a result. I'm already looking for the more modern MechWarrior 3.

Monkey Island: I'm terrible at point-and-click adventure games and this one is no exception. It's really funny and clever, but I'm just unable to advance without walkthroughs and this really hurts my enjoyment of it.

Planetfall: What? An Infocom text adventure? Astounding! A fairly good one, too. I'm trying to play this one correctly by making a map and keeping track of things better, so I might have a chance of progressing a little.

Other Games
Aside from the oldies, I downloaded the recent free release of Trackmania: Nations. This is a racing game built entirely around time trials, with insane courses that include trick jumps, obstacles, and difficult layouts built on top of a good physics engine. I'm currently something like 15th in Connecticut. Some of the gold medals are just really hard to get, though, hindering my progression to the top of the ladder. This game can be downloaded for free here.

Another game I downloaded just today was FaceWound. It's a side-scrolling zombie shooter with impressive effects and ragdolls incorporated with 2D graphics. It's a lot of fun for anyone who has a hankering for shooting a zombie's head off and seeing a shower of blood. It can be downloaded for free here.

Finally, I'll finish this entry off with Rome: Total War. I haven't played it too much yet but I do love me some realistic strategy. Good luck sieging Sparta, because some bearded guy keeps kicking me into this pit after yelling about something. It's just getting annoying now.

Metroid Mania!

2008-04-12T19:14:00.000-07:00

I'm not entirely sure why but I've had a hankering for Metroid over the last week or two. I'm currently stuck on Ridley in Super Metroid and Mother Brain on Metroid: Zero Mission, and I have games going in Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. I've been attempting the original NES Metroid but I'm not a big fan of that one.

What's so Cool About Metroid?
The name of the game in Metroid is "explore." This is both the series' greatest strength and its greatest weakness. It's awesome because, well, you get to explore alien environments, and you never know what's in store for you up ahead - or behind, but I'll get to that in a moment. It's bad because often you simply don't know where to go next. Most of the time this isn't a problem, but when it is I find it very frustrating.

At the start of each game, you basically land on a planet, and from then on you're free to go anywhere you wish. As you explore, though, you'll find many doors or geographical features that are impossible to conquer with your current abilities. This is what makes these games just so addicting. As you progress through the game, you get different suit abilities, beams and missiles. Once you get a new ability, you'll almost always want to go back and explore previous areas to see if you can get anyplace new. The feeling of getting all these new abilities is fantastic, because each one changes the gameplay and adds to your arsenal. Unlike a game like Zelda, where you use a new item to defeat the current and maybe part of the next dungeon before it becomes mostly useless, in Metroid you'll always be using all of your abilities as you explore for lots of puzzles, platforming, or combat. The game design is based around the use of your abilities, so each time you get a new one, the game world effectively expands around you.

This type of gameplay is a ton of fun at the beginning, and end, of the game. At the beginning, you have virtually nothing but jumping and a regular beam. Your initial range of movement is quite limited because there aren't a lot of places you can access. At the end of the game, you can go almost anywhere and you have so many abilities and weapons that you're essentially a walking, flying (screw attack), rolling death machine, and this is when you really feel like the powerful bounty hunter Samus Aran. And being immersed in a game is a big part of what makes a game stand above others - I'm also looking at you, Half-Life series.

As I said, I only really don't like it when I get lost in a Metroid game. With Zero Mission, and each Prime game, this is rarely a problem because the games give periodic hints about where you should head next on the map screen, although they never say how to actually get there, and you're always free to explore. In the NES original, and Super Metroid, however, there are lots of times where I just don't know where I should be going, and there isn't much fun to be had backtracking aimlessly around the world looking for any tiny detail you missed.

I want to end this on a positive note, however, and say that Metroid is one of Nintendo's best series. I like it better than the Zelda series by far. Metroid Prime is just an incredible experience so far, despite the sometimes annoying controls. And Metroid Prime 3 fixes the control problem completely with Wiimote aiming. I consider these two games to probably be the best in the series (Prime 3 over Prime, though).

Also, Samus is the hottest videogame character ever:

Metal Gear Solid

2008-03-22T23:43:00.000-07:00

That's right, I've never played a Metal Gear Solid game before today. I am generally not a fan of stealth games, as I mentioned in my Deus Ex article, but I figured that what with all the hype surrounding the entire Metal Gear series, I needed to give it a chance. After a few hours at the first game, I'd have to say that it's pretty good. The gameplay itself isn't amazing, but what really makes the game feel above average is the style, plot, and characters that all come together to make a really fun atmosphere.

The game feels like a military-themed anime in the style of Ghost in the Shell or Appleseed. There's lots of futuristic technology like invisibility cloaks and giant robots, but also that little bit of realism associated with sneaking around and dying if you've been spotted in an inconvenient location. This last point I can't stress enough because this game will kill you. As with most stealth games, it's a lot of trial and error. You try sneaking on this route, they see you, you die, you try a different route, and just keep repeating until you get past the guards. This gets easier when you get a cardboard box to hide under (yes, apparently no guard will think twice about a cardboard box lying in random sections of a military base). Still, the game really feels like you have to go through the game the way the developer wants you to. It's very linear and story-driven. This is both a good and bad thing. It's bad because it means there's little room to experiment with tactics. You just sneak through the game, and you either get caught or don't. If you get caught, you try to run and either die or don't. If you don't, then you have to hide until the alert timer goes back to zero, at which point you just attempt to sneak through that section again. It's usually not practical to use stealth kills or anything unless you absolutely have to. It's possible to create distractions to lure guards around, but I find that usually unnecessary.

Now, the linearity is good because of the story. The plot really does add a lot to this game. I find if I treat it as an interactive movie instead of a game as such, it's a lot more enjoyable to experience. The cutscenes are good, the dialog is good, and voice acting is good. The gameplay feels like just a vehicle to let you travel between cutscenes, but honestly, I don't mind. OK gameplay coupled with an awesome story and sense of style (gotta love Snake sneaking around in a cardboard box, or the occasional sexual jokes and other things thrown into the game for humor) makes this a fun game.

So why am I playing this all of a sudden? The Metal Gear Solid Essentials collection is upon us, which puts all 3 MGS games into one collection for a measly $30. I call that an amazing deal and I was curious about whether I should bother with it, before playing the first game. Well the answer is definitely "Yes." If I ever end up getting a PS3, I'll definitely get MGS4 as well. If you're a fan of stealth gameplay, I can see why this series might just be one of your favorites. If you aren't, like me, you'll still probably enjoy it for everything it offers outside of the sneaking. And even the sneaking isn't bad.

BRAWL (part 2)

2008-03-13T15:01:00.000-07:00

Last post I talked about the gameplay changes between Melee and Brawl. I want to mention some character changes between Melee and Brawl and my take on the newcomers. I'm not going to mention everybody, so If I forget anyone, it probably means I don't really care about them that much. Whine about it to me online if you care so much.

Characters that were changed from Melee:

Mario - his down-air was changed into what was his down-B in Melee. I like that change since I hardly used his down-air in Melee, and it's a nice approach to short-hop into a down-air in Brawl. His down-B was changed to his FLUDD from Mario Sunshine. It's essentially a water cannon. It has to be charged, and pressing down-B again once it is charged will shoot water, at whichever angle you put the control stick, pushing the opponent away. It can be used for edge guarding, and potentially to keep the opponent from hitting you with an aerial attack while you prepare a counterattack for when they land next to you. I'm not personally a big fan of this move, but it could grow on me if I work out more ways to use it. His forward-air has become a very powerful spike for edge guarding.

Bowser - he's gotten a little faster, but his only big change is his over-B. Instead of the claw attack, it is now a grab move where he will flip upward and then slam the opponent down for some good damage and knockback. What makes the move great though is it lets you "bowsercide" by taking the opponent over the edge of the stage with it. You're guaranteed to die as well but if you're up a stock or more it's great. Just like Kirby's back throw from Melee.

Mr. Game & Watch - wow, they made him even better than before! Of course I'm only mentioning him because he was my main in Melee and will definitely be one of my mains in Brawl. So, what changed? For starters, his up-B. It is still an amazing vertical recovery move which can also hit opponents, but on top of that he opens a parachute at the top of the jump which lets him float slowly, allowing for lots of horizontal recovery as well. And as if that weren't enough, he can do any aerial attack after his up-B. He can conceivable juggle somebody with an up-B into a forward-air. Another important change is his up-air, which will now push people upwards with wind if he is underneath them but does not hit them when using it. I haven't found that many uses for this besides escaping from opponents doing a down-air at G&W. The final change for the G&W is his down-air, which will now propel him downward at a pretty fast rate, but takes a pause after starting the move before he starts attacking. Because of the startup lag, it can't really be short-hopped as an approach, but it's good for countering jugglers, or even after an up-B. Also, I heard today that it's possible to cancel the downward momentum by pressing down after the move starts, which lets it be used as a spike. I'll be trying this tonight for sure.

Newcomers:

R.O.B. - I love ROB and I really want to figure him out, but he's difficult to play as. He has good short-hoppped aerial approaches with his forward air, he has some powerful smashes and aerials, and his spike is my favorite in the entire game. His recovery is one of the best in the game. He has two projectile attacks, his laser and his gyro (one energy and one physical, which is good against characters that absorb energy projectiles) that both do good damage and knockback. His weaknesses, however, are serious. When he gets forward momentum going, it's difficult to stop. He's a heavy character, which means he won't get KO'd easily, but also that his control in the air is lacking, and it's difficult to juggle people. His aerials are all laggy except his forward-air, so they require considerable timing to work right, and they make juggling very difficult.

Metaknight - This guy is really fun to play as. He's fast and juggles like no one else. He can build damage on an opponent very quickly while avoiding it himself. He only has two weaknesses: he lacks KO power, and he's light so he can be KO'd easily. Now, his recovery is amazing because oh his ability for multiple jumps and glide after them. And with his up-B, he has a second glide as well as vertical recovery. If, however, he gets smashed at any decent percentage he's probably going to die. As for his KO power, this can be fixed in 1vs1 by excessive edge guarding, but in a FFA Metaknight has serious problems.

Sonic - I don't like him. Yeah he's ridiculously fast, but his juggling and combo ability is a little lacking, and his KO ability just doesn't exist. His recovery isn't even that amazing compared to other fast characters like Meta. His best move is probably his neutral-B, but that has virtually no knockback.

Solid Snake - Very tough to play as, and I'm not very good with him. I've heard he can be very good, but his moves are generally so laggy I find it hard to hit anyone. His regular smashes and B moves are just about all projectile attacks like grenades and remote detonators, and they're all pretty laggy. I end up using his tilts and neutral A attacks on the ground and his neutral, down, and back aerials, but even those can be hard to hit with. One thing he excels at is power, and his ledge guarding is good thanks to his B-over missiles. His recovery, however, just plain sucks. When you use his up-B, his momentum keeps him going horizontally, but you lift upward with a helicopter. It's very easy to get caught underneath a stage from this, and there's even a bug where you can grab the helicopter as it rises, which will virtually always kill snake.

Pit - As far as I'm concerned, Pit is just cheap. His recovery is easily the best in the game. He has about a zillion jumps as well as a glide and he isn't even that light. His aerials are good, his ground smashes are pretty good. He doesn't have great power but he's still more powerful than Metaknight and has nearly the same combo ability. His B-over is cheap and spammable when you get caught in it, and his arrows just keep coming. Pit is just a real annoyance to fight.

That's all for now.

BRAWL

2008-03-10T22:21:00.001-07:00

I'm only writing this right now because my hands hurt too much from playing Super Smash Bros: Brawl. This is obviously an amazing game. If you've payed attention at all to the reviews then you'll probably know many good reasons, but I'd like to go a little more in-depth into the gameplay, which most major reviews failed to do. How exactly is Brawl different from Melee in terms of the pure gameplay? How are the characters different? Let's take a look:

Firstly, the major gameplay changes. Air dodging is totally changed. You no longer move in the direction of the control stick when air-dodging. You simply become invincible for a few frames while your aerial momentum continues. This ties into the next change, which is that you can also do multiple air dodges in a single jump and do any attacks, specials, or jumps afterward as well. The reason for the new air dodge appears to be twofold: one, it removes wavedashing, which was clearly a glitch in Melee and changed the gameplay significantly in competitive play. Secondly, and more importantly, it's very important for the balance of the game. I'll get into exactly how in a moment, but in general the new air dodging means that you can defend against ledge guarding and juggling much better.

The regular dodging has been tweaked, too. In Melee, some characters (like Game & Watch) had horrible dodging, while some characters (like MewTwo) had really amazing dodges, and this was one factor of Melee that led to imbalance. Well, in Brawl, just about every character has good dodging. Some are still better than others but the dodging has been balanced much better. This also makes up for the lack of wavedashing. In Melee, some characters with terrible dodging pretty much had to wavedash to stay competitive. In Brawl, that's no longer an issue at all.

The gravity has also been changed. Characters are generally more "floaty" than in Melee. This is most noticeable with the fast-falling characters like Falcon or Fox, but it affects everyone. What this means is an overall slower game, with more difficult combos and juggles for the attacker and easier escape for the defender. In my opinion this helps the game's balance but some people might miss the juggling and combos.

Speaking of combos, an important feature of Brawl is the "stale technique" system. If you repeat a move too many times in succession, it will lose power. To restore the effectiveness of the stale move, you need to use other attacks to balance it out. If you save your most powerful smash for when the opponent is at a high percentage, it will be far more effective than if you spam that smash over and over to get them to that high percentage.

One feature worth mentioning is the random trip. At seemingly random times, when dashing, you'll just trip and fall down. This has gotten me killed and also saved me at times, so it's sort of neutral, but I also sort of wish it wasn't in the game. I have a theory that trips become more frequent the more you are winning, but that remains to be proven.

Brawl on the whole is slower and more strategic. Off-stage play is very important, mostly because each character has very good recovery. Unless you knock a character out with a smash attack, they're probably coming back to the stage. To deal with this, you're going to need to follow opponents off the stage to finish them off. Most characters have a spike attack that sends the other character downward to their death when used off the stage, but some characters like Metanight have their entire play style revolving around jumping after an opponent, using an aerial to knock them out, and then flying back. The new mid-air dodge can counter these attacks, but this is the new style of play for Brawl, and it's a lot of fun.

That's all for now. I hope this week doesn't give me carpal tunnel.

First Impressions of Classic NES Games

2008-02-26T13:25:00.000-08:00

I recently got a chance to try out a few classic NES games for the first time. My first home console was the SNES, so I missed out on a lot of good games. Let's get started:

BattleToads

This game has a reputation for being insanely difficult. If you haven't played it, it's a beat-em-up where you play as a toad. A toad that apparently battles, I guess. Anyway, you go around beating up pig men and bats and stuff. Yes, it's difficult, and sometimes even unfair, but it's a pretty fun game. I still can't get past level 2, where you need to swing down this big cave on a rope, kicking bats and robots before they kill you. I'm not generally the biggest fan of shallow beat-em-ups like this, so I don't know if I'll play it enough to make a serious attempt to beat it.

Bionic Commando

I love this game. It's essentially a run-and-gun similar to contra or metal slug, except for some important differences that make it unique. First, you can't jump, or aim in any direction besides straight forward. Instead, you have a bionic arm which lets you swing around and climb up to different ledges. Sounds like a simple gimmick but it makes for a very fun game. The fact that you can't jump makes you completely rethink how you're going to travel anywhere. You also die in one hit most of the time (you can get armor powerups occasionally that allow you to sustain more), so you need to get seriously good with that bionic arm. There's a remake/sequel in development for the 360, PS3, and possibly the Wii as well, which essentially remakes the game with 3D graphics (but still played on a 2D plane). I'm looking forward to it, if it does come to the Wii.

Ice Climber

I'll admit, I only know about this game because the Ice Climbers are in Super Smash Bros. Melee. Regardless, I wanted to try out the game that Nintendo felt was important enough to warrant the addition of these characters to Smash Bros. So, I actually kind of like the concept of the game. Get to the top of the mountain. What I don't like is the controls. The jumping in this game feels terrible. It's basically a guessing game about whether you're going to hit your head on the ledge above you, or jump onto the ledge, or just miss the ledge and fall back down (possibly to your doom). You move very little horizontally when you jump, and the collision detection for your character's sprite is way off. It often looks like you're GOING to make a jump, but then you don't, and it seems like you fall right through half of the platform. I wish this game played better, because it might actually be fun.

Kid Icarus

This is essentially similar to ice climbers in concept. You need to ascend upward by jumping on platforms, and each time you go upward, the screen scrolls up with you and you cannot go back down without dying. The unique part of Kid Icarus is that the stages wrap around horizontally, so if you walk off the screen to the left, you'll appear on the right side. This leads to some somewhat interesting platforming, but overall a somewhat bland game. It's alright, but not amazing.

Metal Storm

Why isn't this game more well-known?! This is one of the most unique run-and-guns I have ever experienced. Again, it's sort of similar to contra, except that each level takes place in some sort of mechanical tunnel with robotic enemies on the ceilings and floors. You have the ability to reverse gravity at will, which will make you fall upward or downward. The gravity of enemies will reverse as well, so if they were on the ceiling when you were on the ground, they'll fall down to the ground while you move to the ceiling. It gets a little disorienting but ends up being a ton of fun. There's a lot of great level design based on this mechanic, that has you jumping upside down, reversing gravity while shooting, and using the gravity of enemies to get past obstacles and other traps. This is like what Mario Galaxy would have been like on the NES, except it includes a badass robot. Bottom line, this game owns.

Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu!

2008-02-18T19:19:00.000-08:00

Edit: the youtube video is no longer available apparently. Blogspot is also giving me issues about hosting the AVI, so here is the direct URL: Dodonpachi Video

That video is the first footage of the newest shoot-em-up by Cave, and the next game in the Dodonpachi series, Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu. Don't ask me what that means, because I have no idea. All I know is that Dodonpachi is my all-time favorite shmup, Dodonpachi Dai-Ou-Jou is an amazing game although it loses some points for being ridiculously difficult, bordering on the impossible. Even so, Daifukkatsu looks to be amazing, and it's a real shame that it probably won't be getting a port to a home console. It will in all likelihood be the first Dodonpachi game to never leave the arcades.

If you're familiar with Dodonpachi and/or Dai-Ou-Jou, here's some differences that Daifukkatsu will include (as far as one can tell from this video):

When in Hyper mode, regular shot will cancel regular bullets, while the laser will act normally. The pink bullets cannot be canceled, however.

There are now enemies with a laser attack that can only be countered with your own laser, in a similar way to Border Down. It looks like the game design incorporates a challenge in forcing you to choose when to cancel bullets and when to use laser to defend yourself while in Hyper mode.

The chain counter will not always drop immediately to zero when you break your chain. I'm not entirely sure how the chaining system has been changed, though. It might incorporate some stuff from Mushihime-Sama, where the chain counter will drop when you aren't shooting something.

Apparently some ship types do not get any bombs. I don't know how Cave plans to balance that. Those ships probably get hypers more frequently in order to use more bullet canceling, but I'm just speculating at this point.

No More Heroes

2008-02-10T18:39:00.000-08:00

Let me see if I can explain what makes this game so awesome:

-The hero is named Travis Touchdown

-Travis has a "beam katana" (it's a lightsaber) that he won in an online auction

-The combat mainly consists of cutting people in half or beheading them in a shower of blood so thick that the game can slow down because of it, not to mention the various pro-wrestling moves like suplexes that will take down most opponents easily

-The ranked assassins that you need to kill in order to improve your assassin's rank are all FREAKING INSANE (seriously, one guy has a crotch-laser, and another one blows her head clean off with a grenade after you defeat her, along with a portion of her upper torso)

-In between these awesome boss battles and combat levels, you have an open GTA-style world where you need to take on jobs like garbage collection, lawn mowing, or gas pumping in order to make enough money for the next ranked assassin battle

Maybe you read my Killer 7 post a while back. In it, I mentioned that this studio focuses on style over gameplay and I had hoped that No More Heroes would be better. Guess what? No More Heroes is insanely fun. The combat isn't extremely deep, and some of the open-world aspects can be frustrating or dull, but it's easy to look past all of that when you see a man sliced in two vertically with a lightsaber.

Ico

2008-02-05T18:36:00.000-08:00

After beating Shadow of the Colossus (see my earlier post on that amazing game), I decided to pick up Ico. Colossus takes place before Ico, but Ico was made first, and tells the "story" of a boy trying to guide this girl out of a castle. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, not really, because while Ico (the boy) can easily climb and swing on chains and push blocks around and do everything most videogame characters can do, Yorda (the girl) is basically capable of falling down a lot, walking in circles or into walls repeatedly, and sometimes getting kidnapped by shadow people, thus causing the game to end. Getting her up a single short step is a chore of holding down the R1 button while she stumbles around in a circle trying to step up for 5 minutes as you yell at the screen. You can imagine how difficult it is to navigate Yorda out of this huge castle. And sometimes, when you're trying to complete a puzzle, she'll just randomly run off in an arbitrary direction. It really is annoying.

There she is. Doesn't she just look stupid?!

In fact, upon reflection, she's about as smart as the horse Agro in Shadow of the Colossus.

When you're riding him, all is great, for the most part. In Ico, you can lead the girl by the hand and she'll go whereever you want. Works fine. Animations look great, feels realistic. Now, in Colossus, when you aren't riding Agro, it's common that he'll just wander around, or sometimes just start galloping away at breakneck speeds in some direction for who-knows-what reason. Getting the horse to maneuver up simple steps or in tight spaces is also a chore. Well, so it is with Yorda in Ico. In fact, saying that Yorda is as dumb as a horse is an insult to the horse, because Yorda is in fact dumber. Sometimes, when you call her, she won't even move. She's also incapable of climbing simple ropes. You can't direct her to do anything. When you want to climb up a ladder, and she's at the top, she'll sometimes just start climbing down the ladder, blocking your path. She won't start going back up, oh no, that would be too smart, she just keeps going down until you're forced to backtrack down the ladder, wait for her to get off at the bottom, then go up.

Oh, and god forbid you leave her in a single place for too long, because then the bad ol' shadow people will get her. Yeah, this is about the most frustrating part of the game, and of course it isn't helping matters that Yorda is dumber than a pet rock. Basically, it boils down to this: after finishing some puzzle section (i.e., what comprises most of the game), some portals will open and these shadow people will jump/fly/crawl out of them, and try to nab Yorda. You get to fight them off with a stick. If they capture her, they'll carry her back to a portal, at which point the game ends. Sometimes they knock you down, too, and grab her while you're still recovering. It gets pretty cheap, and often takes a number of tries to get through these sections. Also, the darn shadow people just keep coming! They don't freaking stop for 10 minutes! You're literally standing next to Yorda, pressing the square button furiously, and trying to avoid being knocked down because you just know that if that happens, you'll simply lose. Since these "defend the dumb girl" sections are separate from the adventure and puzzle-solving, they could have easily just removed all of these and made the game just that much better. And just to reiterate, while this is all going on, Yorda will sometimes just run off, at which point you need to chase her down and lead her by the hand to a corner or something so that she'll stay put! I swear, a pet rock would be better than this dumb girl. At least then I know it would stay the heck where I left it.

Ok, so it sounds like I've been trashing the game this whole time. Truth is, I do like Ico. A vast majority of the game is taken up solving some fun puzzles involving the environment. There are lots of "ok, how do I get Yorda over there?" moments, and figuring them out is fun and rewarding. When Yorda does what you want her to do, which is a lot of the time, the gameplay works great. The visual and storytelling style is very much in line with Shadow of the Colossus, which is to say it's awesome. Not that there is much of a story, but the way it is told is just great.

So, my impression of Ico? Unique, worth a play-through, very artistic, pretty fun. Not as good as Colossus. And Yorda needs to DIE (I'm crossing my fingers for the ending of the game).

Smash Bros. Brawl Roster is Out

2008-01-29T18:34:00.000-08:00

If you follow gaming news whatsoever you probably know this already. This game is being released in Japan this week, and just today people have finally gotten their hands on the game and have started unlocking characters. I'm just plain excited that Game & Watch will be returning. I'm much less excited that Marth is also making a comeback. I also heard a rumor that he'll be FASTER. Great, just what we need.

If you care about Brawl, google the roster and take a look.

I do not want a Playstation 3 a little bit less now

2008-01-25T23:50:00.000-08:00

I do not want a Playstation 3. It cost WAY too much for a game console; it's got a built-in blu-ray player that I do not need nor want (and which is next to useless without an HDTV); and it has very few games out, or coming, that interest me. With all that said, though, I find that I do not want one a little less every now and then. In a year or two, it might actually appeal to me enough to warrant a purchase, providing the cost is low enough.

Now, I've heard a useful formula for deciding if a console is worth a purchase, and I'll try to apply that formula here and see if it works out. The formula is that you take the cost of the console, and compare it to the combined cost of all the must-have games on that console. If the cost of games is the same or more than the cost of the console, then the console is worth a purchase. The Wii for me is already well past that mark; at $250, I've already got Mario Galaxy ($50), Metroid Prime 3 ($50), Zelda ($50), Zack & Wiki ($50), and Resident Evil 4 ($50) to add up to $250 total. I'm leaving out lots of amazing games, and not counting some excellent Virtual Console games like Sin & Punishment, too.

So, let's apply this to the PS3. Right now, it cost about $400. How many games are on it that I would like to play? Virtua Fighter 5 ($30); Assassin's Creed ($50) (although I can get that for the PC, it will be guaranteed to be a poor port with poor optimization); Warhawk ($50); maybe Uncharted ($60). Ok, that's $190. I'll go as far as to factor in future games that I will want to play. The Force Unleashed ($60) (there's also a wii version, but it seems like it just won't be the same game, and being the Star Wars geek I am I just need to play every major Star Wars game eventually); Ico 3 ($60) (I've fallen in love with Shadow of the Colossus and I've already ordered Ico; I can't get enough of this development team. If Ico 3 turns out to be nearly as good as Colossus is, it alone is a huge incentive to get a PS3). Ok, that brings the total up to $310. Still not enough, and I just can't think of any more games that I'd really like to play.

Here's a few other factors that I like about the PS3, though: wireless, rechargable controllers; this is something I wish the Wii remote had, the ability to plug in the controller and let it charge, or just play it plugged in. Very smart idea. Next, free online service. As a PC gamer, I just can't believe that Microsoft charges for an online service that is no better than Steam on the PC (and in many ways worse), and yet they have the audacity to charge money for it. You aren't paying them for much more than content hosting for XBL Marketplace, and again Steam does the same thing for free with their hosting. Microsoft does NOT need nor deserve the money, and the idiots that actually pay for the service aren't helping much. I hear that the PS Network is pretty good, with some good games on their online store, and it's free, like an online gaming service ought to be. Score a point for Sony right there. Next point: as a PC gamer, I can't do FPSes without my precious mouse aim and keyboard shortcuts. Well, the PS3 is pretty much the ONLY console to offer mouse and keyboard support for FPSes, the only one so far being Call of Duty 4 (as far as I know). If this becomes standard for all their games, I could definitely see myself buying some FPSes on there instead of my PC, since my PC only has so much hard drive space. Most modern FPSes are going cross-platform with PC, 360, and PS3, and if I can still play them with a keyboard and mouse, I'd probably prefer the PS3 to my PC, since they would look better, I would conserve hard drive space, and it's one step closer to losing my dependence on windows and switching entirely to Linux.

So, that's a LOT of points against the PS3. Enough that I do not want one right now. However, I'm seeing more and more points FOR it, and fewer points against it, all the time. In another two years, maybe, I could see myself buying one. To satisfy my equation, the price would need to drop to around $300 (and there are rumors of exactly that already), and/or I would need to find about $90 worth of amazing games that really make me want one. Let's see what happens.

As a side note, I would never buy a 360 in a billion years. Mostly because I hate Microsoft, but also because (a) FPSes with dual-analog controls suck (see my earlier blog post on the subject), (b) don't expect me to pay you money just so I can play my games online, and (c) the darn things break every two weeks.

Update: Instead of lowering the price of the PS3, Sony is continuing to be incredibly stupid by keeping the price the same, but increasing the hard drive space. Gamers like myself are NOT saying "I'm ok with paying $400 for a game console, but I just wish it had more hard drive space." We're saying "I'm not going to pay $400 for a game console, no matter what it comes with!." I'd be more willing to buy a $250 20 gigabyte PS3 than a $400 100 gigabyte PS3. Honestly, what do you need all that space for? It's not a PC. The Wii has 512 megabytes of space and while it's probably too little, it's also not bad at all as long as you don't download a hundred N64 games. Sony, you're stupid.

Crysis

2008-01-16T13:39:00.000-08:00

Oh yeah, and the gameplay is awesome too.

Killer 7

2008-01-13T21:57:00.000-08:00

Here's a great example of style over substance. Looking at the game, it seems unique, with a weird story and environment, and a surreal style. It's about something with suicide bombers attacking the world, and a group of assassin's being hired to stop them. I think. The game really doesn't make much sense. It goes for the cell-shaded anime look, which mostly works. So, now that we've got the style out of the way, let's look at the gameplay, because that's the reason I don't like this game.

It's hard to call this an on-rails first-person shooter. It is on rails in the sense that you can only move in certain paths. However, you can choose which way to go at hallway intersections and different doors, and it can get fairly nonlinear in large levels. There is only one button to move forward, and one button to turn around. Other than walking along set paths, you'll occasionally hear crazy laughter. At this point, you switch to first-person mode and shoot terrorists before they can rush at you and blow up. The problem with the shooting mechanic is that you really can't defend yourself. They can pop up right in front of you if you're running down a hallway, and by the time you try to shoot them, they just blow up. You can't back off or dodge or shield yourself in any way.

One of the rules of good game design is that you never screw the player. For example, if they mess up a puzzle, you shouldn't have to reload the entire level because you're screwed. If you're surprised by an enemy, you should have some means to defend yourself. That's what adds depth to the gameplay. This is exactly what Killer 7 lacks. If you get surprised by a suicide bomber at close range, you just die. It takes a second or two to even switch into first-person mode and aim properly. Reloading happens when it happens, and you can't do it manually. If you are low on ammo after killing someone, and then start shooting someone else that surprises you, you'll just reload right there and they'll kill you. It's unfair to the player and it's not fun.

Likewise, the puzzles are the tedious unintuitive kind. The kind where you're supposed to either think WAY outside the box, or else just guess random stuff until you get lucky. Not too fun either.

This is another case where reviewers give good scores purely based on a game's appearance. This is a case of just bad game design all around. I hope that the next game by Suda 51, No More Heroes, will be much better, but when it comes out be sure to check that the reviewers ENJOY THE GAMEPLAY, and not just the graphics and style.

Ignis Solus "Burn Alone"

2008-01-06T16:20:00.000-08:00

Really magnificent Team Fortress 2 short film about one Pyro alone on 2Fort. Here's the website of the great team who made this: link

Shadow of the Colossus

2008-01-05T19:39:00.001-08:00

Also known as "Oh my god that thing is huge!" this is one of the best games on the PS2, hands down. The game consists entirely of searching out the 16 giant Colossi, one by one; finding its weak point; finding a way to climb onto it; climbing successfully to the weak point(s) without being thrown off; stabbing at the weak point(s) repeatedly without being thrown off, and until the Colossus is dead. Sounds kind of boring and repetitive, but it's really just an amazing experience to climb onto a colossus and climb to its weak point as it tries to buck you off.

The animations are really immersive; seeing your character scramble trying to keep his balance as the massive colossus steps onto the ground, causing the earth to shake all around you, is just a sight to behold. As the colossus tries to throw you off of it, your character will be flung all over the place while madly holding onto a patch of fur or a small groove of armor. The art in this game is off the charts. It is one of the most gorgeous games I've seen, and not through any real technically advanced graphics, but through the art direction. Each moment in this game makes you feel like you're playing within a painting. It's art. It's designed to evoke emotional responses, and I think it succeeds admirably. When you kill a colossus, the music turns somber and you see the majestic beast fall to the ground crying in pain and bleeding profusely, and you really feel bad for what you've done. The music helps this too. As you first see it lumbering in the distance, you'll hear a sad and majestic song play; as you begin to climb it, the music will dynamically change to something upbeat and resolute as you make your way to the weak point. As you kill it, the music will become triumphant yet sad. Perhaps most interesting of all: while riding along in the search for a colossus, there isn't any music. This matches the empty landscape littered with ancient ruins. It's just you and your horse, and the colossi.

Each Colossus has to be taken down a different way. This is really a puzzle game as you try to figure out first how to actually latch onto and begin to climb a colossus, and second how to kill it. Each colossus is unique and so far (I've killed 4 out of the 16) it doesn't get repetitive at all. The first colossus will have you simply climb up its back and stab it in the head, while another might be a bird and require you to find a way to jump into its wings as it swoops low to the ground. On paper the game comes across as a series of boss battles, but that's really what makes it so fun.

To really get this game you need to play it. It's one of the few games that really evokes an emotional response from the player and conveys something that is hard to describe. This game is art, and it's an example of everything that's good about gaming. It's unique, it's fun, it's amazing to look at, and it deserves to be played. I found it for $20 and it's already well worth the money. If you have a PS2, go look for it.

Super Mario Galaxy!

2008-01-05T19:35:00.001-08:00

Best Mario game ever made.

One of the best games on the Wii (Zelda and Metroid Prime 3 are so good as well, it's hard to choose among the 3). Fantastic level and gameplay design are standard for Mario, but Nintendo has really outdone itself here.

This game must be played for great justice.

Gun

2007-12-29T18:38:00.000-08:00

For $9 on Steam, how could I not buy this one? A cowboy game with open-world features and decent gunplay. What could go wrong?

A lot, actually. Not enough to make this a "bad" game by any means, it's very fun, but some issues do get frustrating.

The first issue is the frequent loading. Now, this is an open world so naturally it's going to need to load different areas somehow. The way that it's implemented, however, is rather awkward. While you're traveling, the game will just suddenly freeze for a second or two while it loads the next part. It often happens at inopportune times, there's no real predicting it, and it interrupts the flow of gameplay. This wouldn't be such a huge problem if it wasn't so frequent. While traveling through a large canyon, for instance, even though there's absolutely nothing inside the canyon of interest, it will load for a few seconds upon entering the canyon, then load again as you leave the canyon to go to the next area. So you enter, it loads, you ride through for maybe 7-10 seconds, then it loads again as you leave. The loading was never this frequent in GTA, which rendered sprawling cities with only a load between different large areas separated by bridges. Gun would be like if GTA loaded after every 5 blocks of street travel. This won't happen in combat-heavy sections of the game, so its impact of the gameplay is mostly negligible, but it's still annoying.

The second major issue is the hitboxes and general aiming. This is a console port, unfortunately, so this means that if you aim at someone your crosshair will start automatically tracking that enemy until he's dead. If you aim a little to the side of the enemy, it will still hit him because of how big the hitbox is. This doesn't make the game unplayable, but it's annoying for sure. It also makes headshots seem a little random, because your reticle is usually rather large. The best you can hope for is to center their head in the big box of your crosshair and hope for the best. Sometimes it blows their head off (literally, it's cool looking) or sometimes it just hits their chest.

Ok, with that out of the way, I do like this game. The protagonist is a bad-ass, the storyline is actually decent (if cliche) and the open-world mechanics work well in a wild west setting. I wish there was a little more going on in the world to interact with, since usually you're just traveling through empty canyons and plains or else in a dusty towns with people just walking around. Occasionally you'll see a saloon shootout or something but they don't affect you much. The game is a lot more linear than the GTA series, in fact. Most of the time, you'll just want to get to the next scripted story mission, which are the real focus of the game and handled well in general.

I wish the control problems and loading interruptions weren't there, but even so this is a good game. I doubt I'd have bought it for more than $20 or so, but for $9 it's a good deal.

Game of the Year 2007?

2007-12-27T11:17:00.001-08:00

It's that time of year again. The end. The time when all major game publications start naming Game of the Year awards. I've read a number of these lists, so here's my take on the whole thing.

This is without a doubt a great year for gaming. We've had some truly great games released this year that will go down as some of the best of all time, as well as some gameplay innovations that will definitely see a long-lasting impact on the industry. Here's a few notable games this year (in no particular order) that I felt will be remembered for a long time as not only good games but innovative ones, and are all probably eligible for GOTY:

1: The Orange Box (Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Portal, Team Fortress 2)

This is absolutely a must-own for anyone who enjoys FPSes. Or puzzles. Or PC games. Or, well, games. Ok, this package is a must-own for ANYONE regardless of who you are or what you like. First, it features the newest Half-Life 2 installment, Episode 2. The Half-life 2 series is my absolute favorite of all time. Valve is the master when it comes to game design, storytelling, immersion, gameplay, and anything else you can think of. Episode 2 features some excellent gameplay moments, incredible Hunter and Strider battles, and some very interesting plot twists and storyline. They even improved the graphics for the Source engine with the game to include new lighting effects that look great, especially in the Antlion tunnels.

Next, Portal. Since this takes place in the Half-Life universe (Aperture Science competed with Black Mesa for government funding), I consider it a part of the Half-Life 2 series and therefore it is also my favorite game along with all the other HL2 games. That said, it's just awesome. More fantastic level design from Valve, along with some excellent gameplay concepts brought over from the originators of the Portal idea at Digipen. I played Narbacular Drop before Portal came out and definitely enjoyed it, but Portal just took the fledgling idea from Narb and ran with it. It was also one of the funniest games I've ever played. I cannot wait for the inevitable Portal gun that will be featured in Half-Life 2: Episode 3.

Finally, Team Fortress 2. I haven't played this nearly enough because I've been otherwise occupied, but it's a quality multiplayer FPS. The classes are all balanced, useful, and specialized. They do not play alike at all, and that's a good thing. Shanking someone in the back as a spy, or lighting up a group of enemies as a Pyro, or mowing down foes with the Heavy's machine gun is just plain fun.

Oh, and if you never played Half-Life 2 or Episode 1 (shame on you), the Orange Box includes both of these games. That's probably 40+ hours of amazing singleplayer gameplay, plus a very deep and long-lasting multiplayer game, all for the price of a single game. Talk about a good deal.

2: Super Mario Galaxy

I got this for christmas and I'm up to 30 stars already. Simply put, it's Mario 64, but with the addition of some insanity and awesomeness. The levels have you running through environments where gravity will shift on the fly or lead you in multiple directions. You'll be running on the ceiling and floating through space. It's probably more addicting than crack and I had to literally stop yesterday because my hands hurt too much to keep playing. Best Mario game ever? Yes.

3: Bioshock

Another quality FPS. It's the spiritual sequel to System Shock 2, which I have never played but will try to get around to it some day. The storyline is surprisingly good for a game: there's an underwater city named Rapture where scientists and artists are free to create and experiment. This leads to technical advancements but also to gene-splicing which of course eventually causes the population to go insane and murder each other. Well, your plane crashes in the ocean and you just happen to come across this underwater city, and now you've got to survive and stop the mad administrator, Andrew Ryan. Well, that's how it first appears. I won't spoil anything but there's some big twists that are actually surprising. The gameplay, of course, is solid. You get powers called Plasmids that let you shoot lightning bolts or light people on fire or throw objects with telekinesis. In the interest of keeping this short, I'll only add that the water effects in the game look more real than real water. I was very impressed with the graphics technology of the Unreal 3 Engine.

4. Metroid Prime 3

Best FPS on the Wii, unless Medal of Honor: Heroes 2 is better. Haven't played that one. Regardless, I consider Prime 3 to be an excellent game. It feels like Zelda, but in space and a FPS. You'll see that the game has a sort of dungeon layout; there's specific areas with themes like lava or ice or whatever, and at the end is a boss and you receive a new weapon or gadget which helps you with the next area. This is what makes Zelda great and it works amazingly well in Prime 3 as well. The fact that it's a sci-fi FPS/adventure game just sealed the deal for me, and I like this one more than I do Twilight Princess. The fact that it controls amazingly well really helps, too. I just wish it had autofire, since my thumb got really sore of tapping the A button to rapid-fire for hours on end.

5. Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure

Classic point-and-click puzzle/adventure game for the Wii. I hesitate to call it an adventure game because it's set up as a series of individual levels, each with puzzles to solve, and no items carrying over between levels. Also, there's no inventory to speak of; you only carry a single item at a time. As a puzzle game, it's just great. It makes good use of the Wiimote, in many different ways. This will probably go down as a little-known gem for the Wii, especially since Capcom only made a limited number.

6. Call of Duty 4

I've only played through the single player campaign of CoD4, but it's intense and immersive. There are lots of memorable moments including sniping somebody while taking into account wind and the Coriolis effect, being killed by a nuclear explosion (while in full control of your character even during the fallout), and playing through an entire level as a dethroned dictator getting executed on television. You never get a gun, nor move around on your own. You can only watch as armed escorts lead you through the city and up to a platform where you are promptly shot in the face. I hear the multiplayer is excellent as well.

7. Games I haven't played (Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect, Unreal Tournament 3, Crysis)

These all look like very good games. Can't properly talk about them until I play them fully, though. The former 2, I'll need to wait on the PC version. The latter, I've played the demos already. UT3 was fast and fun, but didn't cooperate with my computer. Crysis, on the other hand, ran surpisingly well on medium settings and was lots of fun. I'll be getting that one for sure, some way or another.

So, what do I think is Game of the Year for 2007? How am I supposed to decide between all those? Play them all and make up your own mind.

First-Person Shooters Suck with Dual-Analog Controls

2007-12-25T13:01:00.000-08:00

Watch the above video. That's Fatal1ty, probably the #1 player in the world at Quake 3 Arena. Look at how fast the gameplay is. Ask yourself this: how much of that would even be possible on the dual-analog controllers that the PS3 and the Xbox 360 utilize? Now, take a look at this video of Halo 2 1-vs-1:

Notice how slow this is? In fact, you hardly seem them turning around much at all. They rely on the 1-hit snipe kills and sticky grenades. I won't go nearly so far as to claim that Halo requires no skill to play; a lot of those grenade ricochets and launches were impressive. However, the hitboxes in Halo are so big that it isn't terribly challenging to snipe someone and kill them anyway. You can literally miss the character model and still kill them. Go ahead, watch the above clip one more time and look for exactly where the guy is aiming when he snipes his opponent. To contrast this, here's a clip of some "quick sniping" in Counterstrike:

In Counterstrike, if you miss even a little bit, you miss. There are also some close range snipes as well as headshots on fast-moving targets. To me, this is far more impressive. You need a quick eye and accurate mouse hand to land those shots.

Anyone who has played FPSes on a PC for any length of time can tell you that a mouse is way better than dual analog sticks. The gameplay is much faster, you can actually turn around in a split-second which can mean the difference between a frag and a death, and you can aim very precisely in a small amount of time, assuming you're good enough. With dual analog sticks, the aim movement is jerky, the turning is slow, and the aiming itself is less accurate. I'm not saying you can't play and have a good time with dual-analogs. I personally can't stand playing FPSes with controls like that, if you haven't guessed, but when I do play I can certainly hold my own in most games. The point, however, is that to play a serious FPS, you just can't really do it with dual-analogs and expect it to be as good as a mouse.

Halo, for example (and I know I'm picking on it a lot but it's just the best example; this does apply to every dual-analog FPS), is a very slow game, without a whole lot of tricks or depth to it (not a LOT; there are some obviously, and it does take some skill, but not a ton). It's a fairly average FPS that is only popular because of (a) Microsoft's marketing dollars, and (b) it was the first major online FPS for a console. PC gamers have been playing solid, fast, and deep online FPSes for years and years. Team Fortress, Counterstrike, Quake, Unreal Tournament; these are all excellent fast-paced FPSes that would just not be as fun on a console with dual-analogs, because it would slow down the gameplay considerably.

Take a stand against the continued trend of game developers to release FPSes on consoles or to even focus on consoles and then port (poorly) to the PC. Stop playing FPSes with dual-analog controls when you could be . . . you know . . . aiming.

Wild Arms Update

2007-12-25T12:56:00.000-08:00

Ok, so I couldn't finish the game within a week. In fact I doubt I'm even halfway through it. And after today (Christmas), I don't think I'll have time for much besides Mario Galaxy and possibly Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance. And Battalion Wars 2. And Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles. And Crysis. . . . I'll try to find some time to play it at least once every day or two, though, once I get home from my Christmas vacation. Last time I lost a couple weeks of play, I picked it back up and forgot what I was doing or where I was completely.

In fact, now that I think about it, I'll just use this blog as a quick notepad to mention where I am at the moment I'm typing this. I'm in this maze in the desert near the ship graveyard, and I'm supposed to go fight this giant Preying Mantis boss.

Wild Arms

2007-12-16T17:47:00.000-08:00

This certainly is an old one. I bought this RPG on the Playstation when it came out in 1997. I never got around to beating it, so this week I'm making it my goal to try to beat it by saturday (6 days from this post). I hear this is pretty long so I'll be in for a challenge. Not to mention that for an RPG, this game is notoriously difficult. This might be a less well-known RPG for the simple reason that Final Fantasy VII came out a few months after this. It deserves more attention though, so here's my take on the game as I play through it again for the first time in at least 7 years.

So how is this, as an RPG? Essentially, it's Crono Trigger. I don't mean that in a bad way, because Crono Trigger is the best RPG ever created. Wild Arms takes everything that CT did well, adds some great anime FMV sequences and 3D battles, and a good if somewhat cliche story. It feels very polished even it is rather standard. The main element which makes Wild Arms a little unique is the puzzle elements. Most RPGs offer only very basic and easy puzzles, but Wild Arms actually goes well beyond that for some interesting and thought-provoking dungeons. This would be enough for a good but standard RPG, but what makes this a really great RPG is the fact that it combines these puzzles with some great combat. Sure, the actual gameplay of the combat is fairly standard also; you select your attacks, specials, and items in a turn-based system where you take turns with the enemy. The combat is above-average because of difficulty and balance of the enemies. This is one tough RPG. The boss fights are all memorable. You'll need to really think about what moves to do each turn, and when to defend or heal and when to attack. After a while, I was actually dreading the random monster encounters in the dungeons, not because the fights weren't fun, but because the monsters are legitimately dangerous. In most RPGs, you won't face anyone really dangerous until you get to a boss. In Wild Arms, the monsters are deadly, but the bosses are even harder.

I'll post again when and if I beat this one. Stay tuned.

Nethack

2007-12-14T14:01:00.001-08:00

This is seriously the best adventure game ever conceived. Download it for free here.

It's amazing what sorts of things you can do. The game functions much like any other RPG, except you only control a single character (the little @ on the screen). Battle and traps and other things run on a dice-rolling system for probability. There's an extensive stat system and inventory. The game is also randomized, so every time you play the game, the dungeons and enemies will be different. You also don't know what some of your items are. For instance, you might pick up a scroll entitled LEP GEX VEN ZEA. It won't say anything more than that. It could do pretty much anything, from generating a hundred monsters that attack you, to teleporting you somewhere random, to curing disease, to polymorphing an object or genociding an entire race of monsters. Each new game you play, those nonsensical scroll titles will be randomized too. The LEP GEX VEN ZEA scroll might teleport you in one game and kill you the next. Now of course, there are scrolls of identify, and other ways to tell what a scroll actually does (potions and spellbooks are randomized as well). Some character classes can also identify certain objects. Oh yeah, and there's food in the game. If you don't eat when you get hungry, you'll die. This forces you to press onward in search of food and gold.

Speaking of pressing onward, the game has upwards of 50 dungeon levels (I've never made it far enough to know the exact number). The object is to reach the bottom and acquire the amulet of Yendor, and then return to the top (ascend). This is insanely difficult. When I say this is difficult, I mean you will die. A lot.

If you needed another reason to play this game, it has Grues in it. Yeah, that's right.

Zork: Grand Inquisitor

2007-12-09T20:51:00.000-08:00

Finally, a game with grues! I would also like to mention right off the bat that I was eaten by a grue within about 15 minutes of playing this game. Maybe I should have learned by now that dark caves aren't terrible safe in Zork games?

Grand Inquisitor is the most recent (and probably final) game in the Zork series of adventure games. It is one of the few graphical Zork games, most being text adventures. It plays in a similar way to Myst, in the way that it features heavy FMV (Full Motion Video) and most everything is pre-rendered. You can pan the camera around in 360 degrees in every static area you move to, and you point and click on items and buttons and what-have-you with the mouse.

This game features heavy item combinations and out-of-the-box thinking. This is a bit problematic for me because I'm a more straightforward logical thinker. It's not in my nature to consider unintuitive solutions such as using my spell of open door on one door of a dam because the buttons which one assumes will open the doors given the proper combination actually can never open all the doors. I see the buttons controlling the doors and think "ah, a button puzzle. Ok, this button controls those doors there, and this button switches those doors here," etc. But no, solving the puzzle that way is impossible. The game is full of weird things like this. Another example is using a cigar to light an Inquisitor Action Figure on fire, so that the fireman would come to put it out and get arrested for setting the fire in the first place, allowing you to break into his house and steal the magic lantern that he was refusing to fix for you. Yeah, it seems obvious when you hear the results of the actions, but when you're in the situation where you need to think up that clever solution on your own, it's a lot tougher. Some people have brains that will solve those sorts of puzzles. I don't. I'll have to confess to using Gamefaqs on this game, a lot. I really wish I could try to solve more of the puzzles myself, but believe me when I say that even in terms of adventure/puzzle games, this one is very hard. The puzzles also get tedious often, much like a lot of point-and-click adventure games. You will probably need to try out every item combination in every room by trial and error, and it gets frustrating after a while.

So why keep playing it? Because the game is funny, that's why. There are some great and smart jokes as well as tons of references to past Zork games. It's kind of difficult to give an example, because you really need to play the game to get the humor. However, here's one example: right inside the entrance to the Great Underground, there's a glass case containing a sword and a hammer and saying "in case of adventure, break glass." When you open the case, the sword is clamped down. You then take the hammer, close the case, and smash the case open, after which the clamps are removed allowing you to take the sword. Not a very hard puzzle but it gives you an idea of the absurdity and overall fun the game is. It never takes itself very seriously and that's the best thing about it. As funny as the one-liners in Sam & Max are (another great adventure game), the overall feel of Grand Inquisitor leaves me wanting to play it more just to see what will happen next. I just wish my brain was wired to be able to solve the puzzles better.

Warning! No Refuge!

2007-12-02T22:55:00.000-08:00

"Be attitude for gains: Be Praying"

This is the message that pops up right before the final boss in the amazing Shmup by Treasure, Radiant Silvergun. Here's a picture of the boss, named Xiga:

This boss throws a LOT of stuff at you. This guy legitimately tries to kill you; he is absolutely no joke. This is the last of MANY bosses in Silvergun, and he's easily the hardest. So, why am I talking about an old Sega Saturn game? Because it's a shmup, that's why, and a darn good one too.

"Shmup" of course means "shoot-em-up" and stands for the genre of games where you have a tiny spaceship (or plane, or dragon, or magical human) and you have to take down about a million enemies while avoiding everything on screen except the powerups. If you get hit, you're dead. If you run out of lives, the game is over (no, you haven't really beaten the game if you use continues to do so. That's lame). Commonly, the genre involves dodging intense patterns of colorful but deadly bullets, like this game here named Dodonpachi:

Everything on screen will kill you if you touch it. Your ship is the tiny green one at the bottom. There's no wussy life bars or hit points. There's no storyline or fancy 3D graphics to get in the way of the sheer mayhem and action.

This is a genre that lives primarily in arcades, and even then primarily in Japan because that's where the new ones come out. However, every now and then a great one comes out to a console in North America and Europe. Take Ikaruga, for example. You've probably heard of it because it's consistently rated as one of best games on the Gamecube. Reviewers complained it was too hard (all shmups are hard, that's the point, play it for long enough and you'll get good at it) and that it was too short. Let me address this last one in detail because it plagues most shmup reviews by mainstream game press. These guys credit-feed through the game, using continues left and right, and when they beat it in 30 minutes they say "what, it's over? that was fast."

They don't understand the point of the genre. As with most arcade games, you've never really "beaten" it until you have done so without continuing at all. The way the game was meant to be beaten. Ikaruga can be played all the way through in about 30 minutes. To 1-credit-complete the game (1CC to those knowledgeable folks), it took me about 25+ hours of play (believe me, it's logged on my memory card). And by the way, that was on the eastiest settings in the game. It will take me another dozen hours probably to beat it on the normal settings, the way the game appeared in arcades.

Another thing reviewers often mention about shmups is that they are a "Throwback to a bygone era" or some such nonsense. Shmups are being played and released all the time. Not as often as the cookie-cutter FPSes coming out every week nowadays (to consoles, no less! More on that in the future), but still usually once or twice a year a big-name shmup releases. With the advent of downloadable games services like Xbox Live Arcade or WiiWare or the Playstation Network, many of the most popular games have been shmups. I'm looking at you, Geometry Wars.

The one reason everyone praised Ikaruga, and why everyone loves Geometry Wars, is the gameplay. It is about as pure as gaming can get. Shoot them, while avoiding projectiles. You need to move into the line of fire of enemies in order to kill them, and thus risk getting shot. Risk-reward system. There's challenge. Self-improvement. There are skills to learn. The games require reflexes. Knowledge of the games over long periods of play time will improve scores. Incentive to play better and longer. If you want replay value in the game, you won't find more than in a shmup. You're replaying the same levels over and over and over, improving your score, learning the enemy patterns and how to stay alive. It's just plain addicting.

I'll end this with a quote from Winston Churchill:

"There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result"

Serious Sam: The First Encounter

2007-11-29T22:55:00.000-08:00

Just look at that box art. That's a manly game right there. If that wasn't enough to make you want the game, I'll go on.

Let me explain where I am stuck right now in this game. I have a gigantic green dragon-like thing that shoots green fireballs at me. They home in on me and if I dodge them they'll circle around and try again. I can shoot the fireballs to destroy them, but they're fired at you pretty rapidly. In the meantime, I havea giant bull that runs at me trying to gore me. I also have crazy suicide bombers that run at me screaming to try to kill me. I need to shoot the bull in the face to kill it. I need to shoot the bombers before they get within range of me. I need to shoot the green fireballs. And I need to shoot the green dragon-like thing so that he'll STOP shooting green fireballs at me and I can continue the level (this isn't an end boss or anything). If I get caught by any single one of these objects, I die. If you're afraid of challenge, or in other words a wuss, stay away from this one. If you're a real man, though, get ready for an awesome FPS.

The underlying game is basically Doom. Walk around, shoot everything you see, keep going until the end of the level. There's also no annoying key cards to collect like in Doom. If there's a story, I don't care because I skip the cutscenes to get to the action. And oh boy is there action! The game is great about throwing a ton of stuff at you, all the time. This is a game where you need to dodge stuff to survive. The action is fast and furious and it hardly ever lets up. You'll be bunnyhopping, dodging left and right while shooting frantically at anything you see, and constantly looking over your shoulder to check other threats. The dodging also feels like it's ripped right out of a shmup. You can see the bullets the other guys shoot at you and you'll be dodging them, and believe me there's some fun stuff to dodge. There's also powerups, armor, and ammo lying around everywhere. This is a hardcore action-packed FPS for people with quick reflexes. If you have the reflexes of a spayed kitten, you are going to die. It's the fun kind of death though. The kind you wish you would have in real life. I don't know about you, but I'd love to be killed by a missile launched from a giant red scorpion as I try to gun down it and all its friends with a shotgun. What a eulogy that would be! "We'll miss him, but wow, that must be one of the most awesome deaths I have ever heard of in my life. He'll be happy to know that giant red scorpion with the missile launcher died from loss of blood just minutes after we finished picking up Kevin's pieces from the floor. Who's up for some cheesecake?"

I like cheesecake.

Battlestations: Midway

2007-11-29T22:49:00.000-08:00

This is one of the much more recent games on GameTap, from circa Januray 2007, and I had only vaguely heard of it. Well, lo and behold, it's a World War II game. I haven't played nearly enough of those in the past few years. But wait! This one is different! You never even play as a footsoldier or infantry. The entire game consists of commanding battleships, submarines, and planes, fighting the japanese in the pacific. As far as I know, you don't even fight any germans. Certainly dogfighting sims are nothing new, and there have been a few weak stabs at battleship and submarine command, but I have to say, this is the first game I've seen to put each one together into a cohesive whole. It essentially pulls it off well, except a few minor issues. It even manages to stick in some RTS gameplay which feels pretty good if simple. While the concept seems pretty original, the gameplay for the most part isn't. It might feel unique, however, if you've never played a little game I like to call "the best Star Trek game ever." You might know it as Star Trek: Bridge Commander. More on that in a second.

I'll start with the plane combat because it's definitely my favorite. I'll admit I'm not a veteren of the flight combat genre, but I've played a few in my time. As a stand-alone game, the flight combat would have been pretty good if a little simple for some flight sim enthusiasts. The enemy planes have a circle in front of their line of movement to show you where to shoot if you want to hit them. You have machine guns and sometimes a few types of bombs (just one per plane though). No missiles; it was WWII after all. The reason this part of the game is my favorite is that it's the most actual action you're going to see in this game. The ships and subs move at a pretty slow pace, which makes sense considering how big they are and the fact that it's supposed to be more tactical. The dogfights get pretty fun and intense though. I would have liked an interior cockpit view, as the first-person view it does offer only shows you a crosshair and nothing of your plane itself. One possible complaint is that you die pretty quickly if anything shoots at you accurately, but the reason for that is because there are dozens of planes in the sky and you can just switch to another one when you die.

In fact, you're never really dead because you can switch between anything on or over the oceans. Battleships, subs, even aircraft carriers are under your control. Let me talk first about the submarines. I love the concept. Hunt for Red October is a great movie. The idea of tactical submarine command with sub-to-ship combat and sub-to-sub combat is an awesome idea and I wish a game really came along to do it right. The sub gameplay in Midway is interesting. It feels almost like a stealth game where you have to sneak around sniping at ships with your torpedoes (which are really hard to hit with by the way). Unfortunately, at any depth except pretty much the lowest one - where your hull starts to implode from the pressure - any enemy ship can spot you with sonar and hit you with depth charges. You also have to surface for air a lot. And you don't move very fast. If you get into the middle of an enemy fleet, you're gunna have to go too low to shoot them if you want to survive, and you'll probably end up surfacing right in the middle of them for oxygen and getting killed. The sub combat is HARD. There is a certain skill to it, though, which I do not yet possess, and if I get good it might be a bit more fun, but it just feels too awkward for me to really get into. You sneak around deep underwater trying not to get detected, with very little chance to attack or fight at all. It can be exciting, sure, to keep watching the ships above you and hope they don't send a depth charge your way, but I just don't get that satisfaction of blowing stuff up.

Here's where the battleships come in. Here, also, is where Bridge Commander comes in, because if you're familar with that game, you'll be familiar with the ship combat in Midway. Except the ships in Midway are a lot simpler to control and with fewer options for attacking or movement. You slowly lumber around shooting artillery and torpedoes at other battleships, turning broadside so you can get better shots, and commonly going to the repair screen to position repair crews when you get hit. Honestly, this type of combat was better in Bridge Commander with 3-dimensional movement and different firing arcs for your phasers which had to recharge. And shield zones. And you could actually command your tactical officer to make different maneauvers and firing patterns, and auto-target. In Midway, you can tell them to attack a target, or guard a target, or follow a target. That's about it. It's not bad, just not nearly as good as BC. In fact, I'm getting all nastalgic for that game now.

How do these elements all come together? In an RTS style map view. You can select your ships, planes and subs, and give orders to attack, move, guard, or whatever. Actually, that's basically it. And once they destroy their target, they'll just sit there waiting for a new order. At any time of course you can go in and control a unit directly, which is what makes this game different from a normal battlefield-style game or any RTS. You command the fleet, and you're also every gunner and pilot in that fleet. It's a fun experience, and I hear the multiplayer is crazy good. Too bad it goes through that idiocy called Gamespy. The bad thing about this game? Not nearly enough action unless you treat it as an RTS/arcade-dogfighting game. If you treat it as an RTS, it isn't nearly deep enough or fast enough. If you treat it as a dogfighting game, it's fun but not very complicated nor accurate. This really is a case where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, though, and I do like this game. It's too bad the cutscenes (which are SKIPPABLE! Look, see that, Operation Flashpoint? You can SKIP THROUGH CUTSCENES!) are so corny. Yeah, the Japanese pilot looked at a picture of his family before bombing Pearl Harbor. I'm supposed to feel sympathy even though he's viewed as the bad guy. Look, we're all human beings really. What a touching and insightful message.

No, really, if I want an insightful philosophical message, I'll go read a book (preferable Dune).

Operation Flashpoint: Game of the Year Edition

2007-11-28T14:28:00.001-08:00

One of the unfortunately small number of FPSes on GameTap that I'd actually heard of, Operation Flashpoint: GOTY Edition has, apparently, been nominated game of the year at some point; I'm guessing 2000 or 2001, based on the release date of the game itself. Why it has been named game of the year by anyone, I really can't guess. This has to be the most boring first-person shooters I think I have ever played. I am not exaggerating when I say that the first level involves waiting 10 minutes for the bus, riding for 10 minutes on the bus, and (get this!), walking from the bus stop to your office. It's an hour into the game and I haven't shot anybody yet! I haven't even held a gun! The most action I've seen is from the (unskippable) cutscenes, which still isn't saying much.

I'm not sure what the developers were thinking with this game, but I'd have to say that my major gripe has to be the unskippable cutscenes. What if I want to skip right to the gameplay because I really don't care whatsoever about the story? What if I've played the game once already and don't want to watch the cutscenes again? That last one is a bit of a stretch, I'll admit, because I don't know who in their right minds would sit through this bus-riding simulator in its entirety and then actually want to do it all again. At least when you're waiting for the bus, you can move around and interact a little with stuff. I say "a little" because the most you can do, and again I am not exaggerating, is to salute people (who show no reaction at all to your existance anyway so I don't know what the point of saluting them even is), sit down, and look at your watch to see what time it is.

Now, if that sounds boring - and it is - then you may find it hard to believe that the cutscenes are worse. Luckily I got to skip a few in the beginning but as soon as you're waiting for that bus, it becomes unskippable. And you WILL want to skip it, because they are the type of cutscenes that make CNN look like an action-thrillride. While sitting on the bus, I get the incredible joy of listening to a news reporter on the radio talk about mundane political things that I have no interest in at all. The next cutscene comes when you're in your office, in the form of a news report about some country invading some other country. They show a few clips of tanks driving around wide open fields. Then at one point they stop talking and just show the tanks, driving along in a mostly straight line over some green hills. Then they show the tanks from a different angle. All without any talking or action whatsoever. For about 5 minutes. When the cutscene finally had the decency to end its miserable life, I'm plunked back into this office building with the objective "escape the city" because apparently the tanks have started attacking. You can't actually see any tanks or anything happening because you're in the middle of a city and they're out at the edge shooting at the ground somewhere near city limits, so there's really no sense of urgency or fun at all. I would have kept playing just to try to give the game a chance, if it weren't for the fact that (A) I was bored to tears as it was, and (B) the controls.

This is an original PC game back when PC FPSes were at their prime. This is 2000 or 2001. Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena are out and about. We KNOW how FPSes are supposed to be controlled: WASD, space for jump, mouse aim, and maybe a few other keys for different functions (some people would add ctrl for crouching but I've always preferred the c button. Maybe it's the years of playing Star Wars: Jedi Outcast, which used c as the crouch button, but I'm too used to it now to use anything else. But I digress...) I am again not exaggerating when I say this game controls like an N64 game. The crosshair moves around inside a bounding box, within which your view itself remains motionless. Can anybody please tell me why they thought this was a GOOD idea for a PC FPS?! I'm really at a loss. Oh, and the spacebar apparently is for switching weapons or something. I don't think you can even jump. The 'use' key, which I would think should be near WASD, maybe E or F if E is taken as a lean function, is instead the enter key. Wow, great design, idiots. Might as well make the firing button the page-up key.

As I mentioned earlier, I didn't get that much into the game before I quit out of boredom and frustration. However, this may be a bit of a misnomer, because the game itself was running for about an hour. I, however, only got to "play" about 10 minutes of it, and almost all of that was waiting for the bus. Maybe this game gets amazing when you actually get to do something fun. Maybe the multiplayer is awesome (no chance to try that). Maybe the modding scene was really good, which I am led to believe based on all the videos of mods I found when searching youtube for "operation flashpoint" in order to actually find some gameplay footage that wasn't more boring than watching a rock grow. Regardless, if a game can be playing for an hour and not even begin the action yet, and that game ISN'T an RPG or adventure game where a story is actually sort of important (and even in those cases, I want to skip the cutscenes if I feel like it!), then I really can't give it much more of a chance. I play an FPS for the action. It's not a movie. I have no problem with a lull in the action for some storyline. Just look at Half-Life 2, which is the model by which all FPSes should follow for how to deliver story. But when the entire first hour of a game is essentially a big cutscene with pointless gameplay thrown in, I just don't care to keep playing.

Deus Ex

2007-11-28T14:12:00.000-08:00

Ah, Deus Ex, the game many consider the best FPS ever made. I tried this a month or two ago and stopped quickly because I wasn't very impressed at all and had other games to play. I'm trying it again now thanks to GameTap and I have to say, after playing all the way through the first mission this time, it's growing on me. I wouldn't call it great, I wouldn't even call it good. I'm prepared to say it's an OK game, for a couple of reasons.

First, the control feels really bad. The aim seems to slide a little when you move the mouse in a way that feels inaccurate. Deus Ex used the Unreal engine so there's really no excuse for that. Second, the guns are weak-feeling and inaccurate. I once was sneaking up on a guard and literally had the crosshair right on his head. He wasn't moving at all. I fired, and the bullet landed on the wall next to him. He panicked and set off the alarm. Now maybe one of the skills or augmentations your character receives will make your aim a little better, but it shouldn't be THAT bad, when you're completely stationary, shooting at a guard who isn't that far away. Speaking of weapons, your character takes way too little damage before dying. I'm all for realism, but at least make it fair. I have rarely heard this game called a stealth shooter specifically, but if you basically die if you attempt to fight a guard - because all your shots miss because of the horrible aim and control while all their shots are apparently dead on - then it's a stealth shooter. I'm not very fond of stealth shooters. Stealth is ok in moderation, but give me a fighting chance if I choose to run-and-gun, please! Finally, the guns in this game feel horrible. The pistol does this muted little "pop" when you shoot, and a tiny little impact mark shows where it hits. No, I'm not using a silencer either. There's hardly any muzzle flash and very little appearance of impact at all. As I will frequently say, I don't care about graphics at all which is why I will not talk about it at all in any review. However, gun effects are quite easy to implement that are completely independent of graphics and go a long way toward making the game more visceral-feeling and intense.

The story of this game is touted as some amazing piece of literary genius. I don't know about that, but it seems pretty good as far as games go so far. I personally don't usually play an action game like an FPS for the story, but since this game is obviously more heavy on the RPG and stealth elements than the "Shooter" element, I'm treating it as such and going along with it. With that attitude, it's definitely not a bad game, and I'll continue to play it to see if it gets better.

Press Start

2007-11-28T01:47:00.001-08:00

Despite the title, I won't be talking much about Zork. Although I enjoy not being eaten by Grues, this blog is more concerned with slightly more modern games of varying genres. Let me give you a quick background on me as a gamer, so you'll know where I'm coming from and where I'll be going:

I started out as a PC gamer growing up in '90s. I'm talking about amazing games like Unreal Tournament, Quake III Arena, Descent II, Starcraft, Sam and Max, and so on. Now, I don't claim to be very good at any particular game (except Star Wars: Jedi Outcast), nor did I even play many games online at all. So I started out as a single-player PC gamer. I also must admit to not having played a lot of big-name games back then, such as Half-Life or Deus Ex or even Monkey Island. I'm trying to rectify that now, and I'll be posting reviews of any that I get to play. Besides PC games, I also had a Super Nintendo as my first console. I had hardly any games on there, besides Mario All-Stars and MarioKart, but my family loved to play those games together. I still hold that Super Mario Kart is better than Mario Kart 64 because of how much more responsive the turns are. Following the SNES, I got a Playstation because all my friends at school had one. I had some great fun with that thing but I wish I had an N64 as well because I missed out on some great games. Following the PS, I got a Playstation 2, which I was very satisfied with. It turned out to be the best console last generation, even though the gamecube had some great games which I'm now enjoying on the Wii. If you haven't spotted the trend yet, I only get a single console each generation. This gen it's the Wii. I'll go into more detail in future posts.

My favorite genres have always been first-person shooters, real-time strategy, fighters, adventures, and shoot-em-ups. I'm not particularly good at any of them, but I enjoy them and that's what matters. Nowadays, I'm playing a lot of FPSes and RTSes like Half-Life 2, Counterstrike:Source, Team Fortress 2, Call of Duty 4, and Supreme Commander. I'm also playing lots of shmups, such as Ikaruga and Dodonpachi. Just last week a friend of mine kindly let me have a free GameTap account, because apparently GameTap isn't interested in making money and would rather give out a dozen free accounts to anyone who pays money for one. I'm not going to complain because it's a great service which I would seriously consider paying for. I'll be posting a lot of reviews of some classic games on GameTap that I'll be trying out for the first time, like Operation Flashpoint, Delta Force, or Deus Ex. We'll see how these games stand to the test of time!

Aside from reviews, I plan to write a number of rants on subjects ranging from why some games are most definitely art, why Ocarina of Time is nowhere near the best Zelda game ever, and certainly not the best game ever (a spot reserved for Half-Life 2), why shmups deserve a lot more recognition among the mainstream press, and why gaming is headed into a general decline from the glorious days of old. Look for those on an ongoing basis.