11.18.07

This Week’s Recommendations

Posted in Games, Music at 23:32 by Jonas

Apart from Call of Duty 4, I have been enjoying two additional entertainment products these past few days. The first is Team Fortress 2, which has surprised me quite significantly by not being frustrating or boring or just plain uninteresting. I really don’t have the patience for competitive multiplayer in general - cooperative play is the definition of Awesome as far as I’m concerned, but games that pitch me against other people rarely keep my interest. Once in a while though, something will come along and push the right buttons. It happened with Counter-Strike, it happened with World of Warcraft’s battlefields, and now it’s happened with TF2.

There are several reasons for this. The primary reason is that TF2 is (as the name implies) a team-oriented game, meaning I’m not measured exclusively on my own ability to kill the enemy players. This is enhanced by the class system which offers several support- or defense-oriented options in addition to straight-out assault. Yesterday I kicked ass as the rather n00b-friendly Soldier, but today I found my niche as a medic. I didn’t even realize how much better I was at playing medic than any other class before I looked at my stats after the last game today and realized I’d scored 3 points more as a medic than in my best round as Soldier in spite of having played Soldier far far longer. This means I can be valuable to my team even if I do suck at killing the other guys.

One of my favourite things about Valve is that they’ve started providing commentary with all their games. I was quite surprised to find there’s also commentary in TF2, and it’s even very very good. I’ve realized I don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about multiplayer game design because I’m so infatuated with interactive storytelling. It was enlightening to hear about the team’s considerations and the challenges they encountered while creating TF2. I remain most interested in the level design, however, as I consider it the hardest but most important part of game design, and I can’t shake the feeling my vocabulary is tragically lacking with regards to that discipline. I’m very happy TF2 came with the Orange Box, and I’m very happy I chose to buy The Orange box instead of just paying specifically for Portal.

In the medium of audio, I have lately acquired Nightwish’s latest album, Dark Passion Play. I actually got a hold of it purely because I heard the first single, Amaranth, on the radio and fell in love with it at once. The song is a fantastic piece of pop-metal with some of the most captivating harmonies I’ve heard in a long time. I was never really into “femetal” (pardon the pun) like Nightwish, Evanescence, etc., but upon listening through Dark Passion Play a couple of times, I’m very happy with the album. It has plenty of variation, a good array of sufficiently heavy rhythms, and some great melodies.

My favourites among the 13 songs are Amaranth, the clearly Irish-inspired instrumental Last of the Wilds, and the rather epic 14 minutes long The Poet and the Pendulum that kicks off the record. The latter is almost operatic in certain parts, and demonstrates the impressive vocal range of Nightwish’s new singer (don’t try and tell me I didn’t do my homework). Another track worthy of note is the somewhat awkwardly titled Master Passion Greed which I wouldn’t have been surprised to find on an Iron Maiden album. So that’s a definite recommendation from me, unless you’re either scared of distorted guitars or disgusted by vocals without growling.

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