What's your game?

Busy Week

Sorry I’ve been so bad about updating this week, it’s been absolute madness at work. I’m working on a story about next-gen gaming engines for our August issue, and it’s eaten a lot of my time. I can’t talk about it a whole lot, but you can rest assured that it will tell you exactly what kind of performance you’ll get in games like Doom3 and Half-Life 2 with different types of PC hardware.

Since I last posted, I’ve been playing Planetside whenever I have a second. My initial feeling was that it isn’t very well suited to the hardcore shooter player, as aiming and shooting accurately is really difficult when you’re moving. However, there are a few tricks you pick up quickly, like using small bursts instead of full-automatic fire and stopping and crouching behind cover.

While annoying for someone who spends alot of time playing more traditional shooters, this is necessary in Planetside for two reasons. First, by discouraging movement and fighting at the same time, you can have many more people on screen at once without eating a whole lot of bandwidth. Second, it gives a more real-world feel to the game. After only a few hours playing, I can destroy anyone who’s in the open with a standard rifle if I’ve got a little cover.

Like the early days of Everquest, there’s initially a lot of running around looking for something to do, but once you’ve got a squad formed up, and have found a fort to either defend or attack, and you’ve got 200 people around you trying to either kill you or help you, it’s pretty damn entertaining. On Sunday, I’d spent about an hour fighting with my squad to take out a Terran base when a few troop carriers full of Vanu foot soldiers dropped in behind us and wiped both of us out to take the base! We lost, but it was a damn good time for everyone involved.

Really the best thing I can say about it is that it’s like a massive, persistant version of Tribes.