03.30.08
Now Taking Suggestions
I need a new headset, and it has to be USB because I’m tired of messing with my sound card.
Anybody got any good recommendations?
03.29.08
Go, Go, Go!
Why haven’t I picked up Rainbow Six: Las Vegas before!? This is a great game! When I think about Rainbow Six, I remember going through the team-roster like a fat kid goes through a box of Oreos, and I remember meticulously pre-planning all the missions, even going so far as to place waypoints for my four teams. It was fun back then but I quickly grew tired of it. But this is different! This has Halo-style health regeneration, a Gears of War-style cover system (in a first-person game! Crazy!), and the most fluid and reliable team management I’ve experienced since Republic Commando! I’m really enjoying it tremendously. If anybody wants a game of co-op I’d love to give it a try.
I only have two problems with it so far: Infrequent checkpoints. Since I bought an X-Box 360, I’ve come to appreciate checkpoints - there’s something elevating about not having to worry about quicksaving all the time, especially in games like Rainbow Six where I tend to quicksave at every door. But in a game that forces you to rely on checkpoints, the placement of these points are of crucial importance! And so far, R6 has had about a third as many checkpoints as I’d like. Several times already I’ve felt my heart sink as an unfortunate mistake (”oh, you can’t take cover behind that ledge - oh, ow, sniper…”) has set me three or four arenas back. The game’s combat is a lot of fun, but not fun enough that I’d like to replay such lengthy parts of it.
And my other problem? The max resolution in 1280×960!! My monitor is 5:4, you barbarians! I demand 1280×1024!
03.25.08
Words
Dear executives, business people, game developers, and everybody else who expresses an opinion about PC games in the media:
Please stop referring to piracy as theft. As an aspiring game developer whose future carreer sometimes seems in peril due to rampant game piracy, and as a passionate PC gamer whose favourite game platform is constantly threatened by this very problem, I feel your pain. You’re trying to make a living in gaming and you want to sell your games to the PC market, yet you keep losing money to people who illegally download your software.
But copyright infringement is not theft. Not in any practical sense and certainly not according to any nation’s laws. If I steal your car, I will gain a car for free and (crucially!) you will lose your car. If I download your games, you will not lose any games, you will simply not sell me one either - as I’m sure most piracy groups would love to point out, this doesn’t necessarily mean you would sell me a game if I didn’t pirate it, one pirated game != one lost sale. Piracy is not theft in the same way that riding the train without buying a ticket is not theft. Sure, it’s still illegal, but it is not theft.
If I wanted to steal your games, I would have to break into your warehouse and physically remove one or more boxed units of your game from a crate and then take it home with me. That is theft because you will litterally lose a copy of the game. The fact that the physical box, disk, and printed manual is worth a lot less than the data on the disk does not factor into this. Capiche?
03.24.08
The Crate Problem
I’ve started the first balance pass of the first section of TNM, which is the biggest and most non-linear part of our mod with its 26 maps offering about 30-40% of our total play time. I’ve chosen to split the balance work on these maps into two parts - first I’ll remove any items that I’ve placed too many of, then I’ll go over it again adding the items that are missing. This prevents the balance sheet from getting way too confusing to handle reliably.
My biggest problem now is the dreaded crates. Everybody and their grandmother would, if prompted, tell you that crates are a lazy design choice, and that’s why they’re increasingly rare in modern games. To the player, crates are just a weird, nonsensical design flaw that we’ve all grown used to through repetition.
03.22.08
Follow the Rules
I have a problem with turn-based combat. It usually relies entirely on its general ruleset and tries to avoid special case rules. This can create some really counterintuitive situations - why is it that as a well trained and superbly experienced Soviet commando, I can’t seem to kill a technician by shooting him in the back of the head at point blank range? Let’s ignore for a moment the interesting fact that my chance to hit him at point blank is 87%. Why when I do hit him (in the head) does he not die? Why is my best chance at killing him to shoot him twice in the torso?
I thought we’d moved away from games where abstract rulesets meant to be understood by players governed everything and towards games where actions and reactions more closely resemble what you’d expect to see in the real world. I guess it’s a matter of preference, there are certainly merits to having an exposed rule system that the player can understand and act on, but I think you’ll need a lot of special cases. Hammer & Sickle is very good for a turn-based game, but if I sneak up on an enemy who is completely oblivious to my presence and shoot him in the back of the head, I don’t want a “very high probability” of a “critical hit”. I want a definite one-hit kill.
03.18.08
Blizzard - what went wrong?
Apparently rumours circulate that Blizzard has started working on Diablo 3, based on some clues in a recent job posting. I don’t know if that’s true, but it got me thinking.
Far as I reckon, Blizzard haven’t worked with an original IP since they put out StarCraft in 1998. That’s 10 whole years of milking existing IP’s. If one felt especially spiteful, one might even point out that StarCraft is pretty much Warcraft in Space, but as far as I’m concerned the SC IP is clearly different from the WC IP in terms of story and plot, which is the important thing for the purpose of this discussion.
World of Warcraft has been out since 2004 (and was based on existing IP, clearly). It currently has over 10 million player-created accounts, though I don’t have the figures on how many actual paying players it has (personally, I’m among the fallen). I think it’s safe to assume though that Blizzard are pulling in millions upon millions of dollars of subscription fees from World of Warcraft every month. A fair bit of that goes to support and server space, I guess, but WoW is pretty much a license to print money.
So why do they keep milking their old IP’s? I mean sure, they want to make more money for their investors, that’s fine by me - make SC2 and Diablo 3, I’m sure they’ll be great games. But why stop there? Why not spend some of all that money coming up with some new IP’s? Valve presumably has far less money on hand than Blizzard, yet they consistently turn out amazing new properties like Portal, Left 4 Dead, and Team Fortress 2 (technically a ‘2′ but sufficiently different from the original that it might as well have another name). Blizzard make fantastic games, virtually unmatched in terms of polish - they used to create amazing new games. Now it seems they’re happy just creating amazing sequels to old games. It’s still amazing but it’s not extraordinary.
Or am I just demanding too much? It does make sense to keep expanding on your old work when you’ve created such a fantastic line-up of IP’s as Blizzard has. I was certainly excited when StarCraft 2 was announced. It just seems like they should be doing more than this. It seems like there are better ways to spend all that money.
03.15.08
Damn you, horror!
The upcoming Alone in the Dark looks fantastic. The video previews alone have showed off too many fresh new ideas and amazing details to count, and the gameplay looks a lot like MacGuyver: The Horror Game. It pains me to know I will never ever ever get to play this game precisely because of the “horror” part.
It’s bad enough that apparently all games these days must have a horror element (of course I exaggerate, but even Mass Effect has creepy zombie-like enemies for crap’s sake), but I don’t understand why there are so many outright horror games - is fear just the only real emotion that can easily be conjured up by video games?
03.13.08
A2
If you have an Xbox 360 or a PS3 and if you have any friends, I recommend getting Army of Two.
Co-op tends to be two people playing through the singleplayer campaign together. This is great, we all love it (by which I mean I love it) because it’s a noncompetitive social situation. Two players against computergenerated enemies and (when done well) with a story just as good as singleplayer. Some games go the extra mile to add specific co-op content such as Splinter Cell 3’s co-op moves where you can lift each other to reach high ledges.
Army of Two (let’s call it A2 because AoT is a somewhat unwieldy acronym) is in a whole other league. It’s pretty much in the title of the game: It’s designed explicitly for two-player co-op, and as such it provides the most powerful cooperative experience I’ve had since Ruben’s QFG campaign in NWN. A2 is such an improvement because co-op isn’t just the singleplayer with more players. It’s not even limited to a few impressive co-op moves like in SC3. In Army of Two, certain fundamental design elements encourage constant cooperation between the players.
03.12.08
Bring Down the DLC
Remember when you could buy and download horses and a wizard’s tower for Oblivion and it all felt a little tacked on because the moment you logged on there was a pop-up saying you’d received a letter (”How the crap did I receive a letter out in the middle of the swamp!?”) and you had to go somewhere to claim your tower?
Mass Effect has a great system in place for giving you missions no matter where you are: Every time you open the galaxy map on the Normandy, I think the game checks a list of conditions and if it finds that you meet the requirements for a particular side mission, Joker will patch a call through from the admiral and you’ll get a mission. It’s pretty much perfect for giving you the Asteroid X57 mission made available to you in the newly released Bring Down the Sky downloadable content. And yet they don’t use it. Instead, a new tag just pops onto your galaxy map with the name of the asteroid. No quest is given to you, no reason for why you should travel to the Asgard system in the first place. When you land on the asteroid, you get a cutscene with a distress signal - in spite of having a perfect system for delivering such content, Bioware still managed to make it seem tacked on, and I think that’s a shame.
But the mission itself is splendid. At first I was quite disappointed because it seemed like another generic un-charted world with a few small run-of-the-mill bases dotting the landscape. But as it unfolded, I realized it was actually pretty comprehensive. There are optional objectives, cutscenes, new content (a new alien race is the biggest new thing) and it all ends in the main facility which turned out to be a unique structure with a great level design - the final combat in that facility is very memorable. It has everything you expect of Mass Effect including one of the game’s best (though not most original) moral dilemmas which earned me enough Renegade points to finally get the achievement.
Bioware say it offers about 90 minutes of gameplay, and that’s about what I spent on it. Of course it has as much replay value as the rest of the game, so multiply by two if you want to try both the Renegade and the Paragon options. In summary, it definitely feels like more bang for your buck than the pathetic Oblivion DLC.
