What's your game?

Finished Psychonauts

I 101%’d Psychonauts. Damn this was a helluva game. It’s not selling well at all, but it’s one of the best games I’ve played all year. You guys need to go out and give this one a try.

Seriously though, this is the first platformer since the original Mario 64 that I’ve enjoyed enough to play all the way through, much less collect the thousands of items scattered around the levels. If you enjoy games, you need to play Psychonauts.

Psychonauts

The last outstanding platformer I played was probably Super Mario 64. There are a lot of half-assed platformers, that have serious flaws, ranging from insanely difficult to just plain not fun. There are a couple of decent platformers, Voodoo Vince and Jax and Dexter fall squarely in that category.

Psychonauts is the first platformer that I’ve played since Mario 64 that balances easy accessibility and the ability for newbs to advance with complex and innovative puzzles.

Psychnauts puts you in summer camp for psychically gifted kids. In the course of your stay, you’ll not only explore a typical psychic kid’s camp, you’ll also journey into the mind of nearly everyone at the camp, from the counselors to lungfish. Inside each mind, you’ll have several goals—defeat an enemy, destroy an object, collect something—which advance the main story.

In addition to the basic “complete the mission and collect the reward” type missions, there are tons of objects to collect in each mission, and at the camp. You’ll find many of the objects as you explore, more than enough to complete the game. However, if you want to 100% the game, you’ll need to do lots of hunting.

Each mind you explore is different. Some minds are extremely organized, some are cluttered, some are insane, and some are very primitive. They’re all unique, and they’re all goood, old-fashioned, wacky fun.

Anyway, Psychonauts is really good, and definitely worth playing.

Finally, something new!

I got a PSP a couple of weeks ago, and while there are a lot of good games on the system, a couple of them have eaten large chunks of my gaming time—note that’s not portable gaming time, it’s gaming time. While I could be upstairs plastered to the PC or Xbox, I’ve been sitting quietly in the living room playing Lumines and Untold Legends.

First, a bit about the hardware. For the most part, Sony made the right choices for the hardware. The inclusion of a simple mini-USB port for PC connectivity and storing games on a fairly standard memory card format is awesome. I wish they’d gone with the cheaper, more ubiquitous SD Card format, but Memory Stick Duo is acceptable, and prices on media will drop the more PSP sales rise.

If you shell out for a larger Duo card, you can even enjoy music, videos, and photos on the player. Why view videos from a memory stick instead of just buying the special UMD-format videos that Sony is selling? Battery life and price. Right now, you can get a 1GB Duo card for the price of seven movies. With that memory card, you can watch _any_ DVD you own on the PSP, with a little transcoding. As a standalone portable media player, the PSP leaves a bit to be desired, but when you factor in the games, it’s awesome.

As for the games, Untold Legends is a typical hack n’ slash Diablo clone, that’s actually better than any of the more recent Diablo clones. It avoids many of the more annoying ‘features’ by making it easy to know what gear is good, and what is better. Only occasionally will you stumble across class-only weapons and armor, the only requirement for most gear is that you have a certain level. The boss fights are exciting without being frustrating (my hunch is that the game tones down the difficulty of a particular area after you die a couple of times), and some of the monsters are fill-up-the-entire-screen huge. It’s apparently the best selling title on the PSP, and it deserves that. The game is huge, even by Diablo-clone standards. I’ve put 15 hours into it, and barely feel like I’ve scratched the surface. Add in the dynamically generated dungeons, multiple player classes to try, and peer-to-peer multiplayer, and I can see Untold Legends absorbing a lot of time.

Lumines is a fairly typical post-Tetris puzzle game. The goal, stack falling multicolored blocks in such a way that they make four (or more) block squares of the same color. Once you make the square, those blocks are queued for removal, but here comes the trick. The blocks are removed in batches every few seconds when the scanline passes them.

This is where it gets tricky. As you progress through the game, more “skins”—combinations of block color, background animation, and music—are unlocked. Each skin’s music is a different tempo, and the tempo of the music changes the speed the scanline moves right to left across the screen, and the rate at which blocks are dropped. The upshot is simple—the game’s pace changes every few minutes. Slow paced skins require you to stack huge combos, while lightning-fast skins force you to make every placement count. As you reach the higher levels especially, the game will intermix fast scanline movement with slow block drops, and visa versa.

Once you get the knack, it’s quite addictive. One other note, you should definitely play Lumines with headphones. Not only will the ‘phones help keep you focused on the game, once you get the tempo of the music for each skin down, you’ll know where the scanline is without having to look at it.

More on Ridge Racer, Wipeout Pure, and Mercury later.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

I just finished writing the review of Chaos Theory, and I have to say that the kids up at Ubisoft Montreal have really done a bang up job with this game. It’s one of the few series I’ve played that just gets better every iteration.

In addition to the objective-based two-on-two multiplayer in the previous version, Chaos Theory also adds two-player co-operative multiplayer. Gina and I spent a couple of hours mucking around with it last night, and it’s super-sweet.

By working as a team, you and your partner can hoist each other into otherwise unreachable areas, take out guards in new and exciting ways, and make a general nuisance of yourself. It’s such a blast on the PC that I think I’m going to have to pickup a copy for the Xbox so I can play with my Official Xbox mag buddies on Live.

Single player is both more challenging and less frustrating than Pandora Tomorrow. In addition to doing a better job of spelling out the objectives, you can now save the game anywhere. That means no more useless repetition of the same portion of the level ten times until you get it just right.

Ubisoft also added completion stats at the end of every single player mission. Not only do you get a comprehensive kill count, the game tells you how many times you were spotted, how many bodies were found, and how many alarms you tripped, then it spits out a numerical score. Hitting 100% requires high skill. Not only can you not kill or knock out any enemies, you can’t even be seen.

Chaos Theory is a must buy in my eyes.

No posts mean more Halo 2

When I’m playing the same two games 99% of the time, it means there’s not a whole lot to talk about here.

Halo 2 is a thrice weekly event. I’m constantly impressed at how well the rankings—the game ranks you based on your wins and losses, as you win more games, your ranking goes up—show our relative skill. The guys I play with have consistently hovered in the 10-11 range, and we consistently beat guys lower than us, and consistently get beaten by guys higher than us.

Now that the game has been out for a while, I’m starting to see some more advanced tactics, specifically the Plasma Pistol + Assault Rifle one-two death blow. The trick is to use your Plasma Pistol to take their shields to zero, then finish them off with a single headshot from the Assault Rifle. It’s brutal, and the fastest way to kill someone in the game from range—without a sniper rifle or a rocket launcher.

Halo 2 & World of Warcraft

Two games have completely owned me. I’ve barely touched anything else in the last few months, and I’ve got a stack of games that have received incredibly high scores sitting in my apartment.

Despite the gamepad handicap, Halo 2 is the first modern multiplayer first person shoot I’ve played. The game mechanics are rock solid, choosing between dual wielding and single weapon + grenade is brilliant and perfectly balanced. The weapons all have a place (except maybe the brute shot), and the vehicles are powerful without being completely overpowered.

Effective use of voice comm can make or break your game. I absolutely love that when people chat near you (either friendly or enemy) their voice comes out of the main speakers, but your team voice comms come out of your Communicator headset.

The thing that keeps me coming back is the way matchmaking works. I have a fixed group of friends I play with pretty much every night. The first person who logs on creates a party, then everyone else joins it. If we have a bunch of people, we just break up into two or three teams and play whatever we’d like. If there’s only three or four of us, we go straight to the online matchmaking and play versus strangers. Playing with your friends is absolutely brilliant.

On the other hand, there’s World of Warcraft. I reached level 26 last night, and I realized exactly what it is that I like about the game. It plays like a really good single player role-playing game, but when you need a hand with something, there are thousands of other ‘real’ people bopping around in the game world with you.

This is a much simpler game than EverQuest was. Instead of visiting spoiler sites to learn what your spells do, then memorizing 500 different spells, the game actually tells you exactly what each spell does. Instead of having 50 different damage over time spells, you have three that get better as you level up. Instead of having 40 different pets, you have 5 that improve as you reach higher levels.

Every class can solo—with differing degrees of success. My warlock has soloed or duoed through almost the entire game. I’ve got good gear, I’ve had a lot of fun, and I can stop and start anytime I want. It’s officially rad.

Of course, with any MMO game, the endgame is what matters, and I’m still a month or so away from seeing that.

Also on my plate: Metroid 2, X-Men Legends, Knights of the Old Republic 2, and the Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. When the hell am I going to find time to play this all!

Doom3

I’ve been playing a lot of games, and not writing about any of them here. Shame on me.

Most recently I’ve put a lot of time into Doom3. Here’s the one-line review: It’s one of the best games id software has ever made, but it has some very annoying flaws.

The game is very spooky—if you’ve been living under a rock for the last year, it’s set on a zombie and hellspawn infested base on Mars—and the engine is absolutely spectacular. The lighting is hyper-realistic, the shadows are soft-edged and smoothly rendered, and the game looks plain real. Enemies leap from the shadows, and throw fireballs at you that actually light up the room. It’s unbelieveable.

There are really two major problems. First, the enemies act incredibly dumb. I fully expect zombies to be dumb and mindlessly charge toward me (and my boomstick), but the hellspawn are another matter. They should be smarter than the zombies, and they just aren’t. The enemies don’t dodge, most don’t use cover or retreat, and they are practically no threat. It makes me sad, because most of the model designs are very creepy, and there’s a lot of potential to make something that’s truly terrifying.

Second, the game features many, many ‘security’ crates, which you have to unlock using key codes that you find by reading other people’s emails and listening to their voice diaries. So, you pick up the key codes as you push the story along, right? Well the problem is that the secuirty crates and the PDAs with the voice messages are not always close, so by the middle of the game, you’ll be searching through thirty voice logs just to find the key code that’s hidden at the back of one of them. It’s cool that id is trying to force people to use that Notes section at the back of their manual, but the fancy PDA you carry through the entire game should automatically make a note whenever a new code is discovered and add it to a master list.

The security crate thing is just a minor annoyance, but the enemy AI problem is inexcusable. For gods sake, Half-Life had better enemy AI than this six years ago.

NCAA Football 2005

NCAA Football 2005 is the big time cool. I can’t put it down.

The option works just the way it should. The crowd noise makes a real impact in each and every game. Most of all, it feels like college football. Players get stupid in the last few minutes of a close game. Onside kicks work just when you least expect them to. You can bulldoze a good running back right up the middle.

I haven’t played online yet, but I did muck around in the Live interface last night for a bit. As you all know, NCAA Football is the first EA game to show up on Xbox Live. They’re hosting the games on their own servers, and you need to connect your Gamertag with an EA gaming account to really get the most of the service. It includes all the nice stuff that I dig from the latest version of Live, including email and SMS alerts.

I’m concerned because I didn’t see a way for two people to play on the same Xbox on Live against two other people. That would suck if it’s the case. It remains to be seen if the game is good enough to warrant purchasing another Xbox.

They also run the scores in current games—both real-world and games your friends are playing—on the score ticker at the bottom of the page. I’m really stoked, and plan to play online later this week.

Chronicles of Riddick

I’m way behind the times on this one, but I have to toss some props to Chronicles of Riddick. It had two things going against it from the get-go—a movie license and Vin Diesel—and it managed to overcome both quite nicely.

The game puts you—as Riddick, the character played by Diesel in Pitch Black—on a high-security prison planet, with no hope of escape. Pretty standard stuff really. What sets the game apart is the combination of first-person stealth and fighting action.

The main problem I have with most stealth games is that if you’re discovered, you are going to die. Not so in Riddick. The first-person fighting mode is simple to use, and very powerful. It works like this, you aim your attack with the left thumbstick, and time your attacks (or blocks with the triggers). By using the right sequence of attacks, you can perform devastating combos.

Even when attacking a heavily armed combatant with nothing more than a club or screwdriver, you stand a fighting chance at winning in Riddick. By executing counter-moves when your enemy leaves an opening, you can kill any enemy in just a few hits.

Having stealthy elements in a first-person game has been problematic in the past. After all, if you can’t see your character, how do you know whether or not he’s visible? Riddick solves this by tinting the screen blue whenever you’re well hidden. The deeper the blue, the safer you are. It’s very simple and easy to grasp.

Using advanced rendering techniques—all the models in Riddick are self-shadowed, nearly every surface is bump-mapped, and there are loads of post-processing shaders in use to make the final output look more gritty—puts a big strain on the Xbox’s hardware. Never have I seen a game in more dire need of anti-aliasing.

I also really dig the inclusion of Xbox Live connectivity so that my friends on Live can hit me up for a game of Pandora Tomorrow or Links, even while I’m playing Riddick. Prince of Persia and Full Spectrum Warrior have this as well, and it’s much appreciated.

I’m about 6 hours into the game, and am getting the sinking feeling that I’m probably nearly done. It’s definitely not the best game I’ve played so far this year (Far Cry still holds that honor) but it’s pretty damn good, and definitely worth a rental.

It’s about time…

EA has announced that it will begin supporting Xbox Live on this years games. First up, NCAA Football 2005 this July.

This makes me very happy. On a somewhat related note, I’m leaving for E3 today. I’ll try and report in occasionally when I see something cool. I’ll also be posting photos from my phone when I’m able. The site is still really rough and I haven’t had time to fix the archives yet, but take a look at http://photos.willski.com if you want to see some live from the floor pics.

Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow

In case you missed it when I mentioned it the first time around, the original Splinter Cell put you in the third-person shoes of one Sam Fisher, a near-future high-tech super-spy. Equipped with two different vision modes—a light enhancement mode and a thermal mode—Sam was tasked with getting in and out of extremely secure areas undetected. Further complicating matters, on several of the maps, you were forbidden from harming anyone. Aside from the difficulty level that scaled from very hard to ludicrous near the end of the game, the only real complaint that anyone had about it was that it lacked any kind of multiplayer mode.

Pandora Tomorrow takes the gameplay of the original Splinter Cell and kicks it up a notch. I’ve not delved too far into the single player campaign yet, but the first few missions are very difficult. The single player campaign is just a nice diversion from the real point of this game though: multiplayer.

Pandora Tomorrow only includes one multiplayer mode, but damn is it good! Four players compete in a two-on-two format. Sounds pretty lame, eh? Well, as you can guess, there’s a hook. Two players take the role of spies, with most of the tricks that you’ve grown accustomed to Sam Fisher having. The other two players assume the role of Argus Mercenaries, whose job it is to prevent the spies from doing something. The trick is that the spy keeps the third person vantage point that we’ve becomes accustomed to, but the mercs utilize a Rainbow 6-like first person mode.

The spies goal? It’s simple, they have to get to a known area, activate a device, then hide, before the mercs come back to kill them. The spies come equipped with two standard visual modes and several alt-fire weapons. Mercs also get two vision modes—motion tracking and electromagnetic. Each team has a variety of weapons to choose from. The spy can use Spy Bullets, which not only track the tagged enemy on the map, but allows you to snoop on Merc voice chatter. That’s just damn cool.

The balance is great, and the two-on-two fighting is freakin intense. When there are two minutes to go, and the spies only have to capture one last point to win, you can rest assured that you’ll sweat. Tonight as a spy, my team was creating diversions, keeping the enemy pinned down, and just being an overalll nuiceance.

The multiplayer game alone is worth the price of admission on Live!

Carmack Keynote at the Game Developer Conference

I just heard the Carmack keynote at GDC. Unsurprisingly, it was very interesting, but there wasn’t a whole lot of new information about Doom and what id is working on next. Note: I’m low on laptop battery, so I’m going to write now and edit later. Sorry for any typos or grammatical errors.

He started off by comparing hardware when he started programming with the hardware that’s available now. A modern system with a fast CPU and a next-gen GPU is about 1,000,000 times more powerful than, say, an Apple ][. This was a launching point to talk about how the bottleneck in 3D games has shifted in the last few years.

In the old days, actually getting the game to work took forever. From the git-go to drawing the first triangles could take several months, and drawing the first scene could take 18 months.

Now the renderers and game engine are actually the ‘easy part’. Now it takes man-months to create the actual art—that is the character models, game levels, and even textures—used in the game.

Look at character models. Some of the models in the Unreal 3 tech demo that Epic showed today are created from high-resolution models with more than 6 million polygons. It takes a very long time to create a model made up of that many polygons.

OK, uber-high polycount models and world geometry take a long time to create, but the art creation tools are much better now than before as well. There’s got to be something else that explains why it takes four years to develop a game, right?

According to Carmack, the problem is that the level of detail in games has gone up exponentially in the last five years. We’ve moved from boxy shaped objects that represent tables, to table shaped objects with realistic textures, to table shaped objects with a few objects on them to represent clutter. Next up, table-like objects that actually look like the desks we all work off of every day. Carmack says that when we can render that level of detail real-time, then we’ll basically be done with graphics in gaming from a tool and engine standpoint.

He then talked about the other technologies that need improvement, and where they stand. According to him, if we focused GPU-level hardware at audio, we’d be able to realistically model head acoustics, occlusion, reflection, and generate completely realistic audio in games.

He said the areas that really need some focus are AI and physics. AI, especially with regard to character interaction is a real problem right now. We have these extremely realistic characters, but they’re essentially cardboard cutouts with either only a few fixed lines of dialog or no real chance for character interaction.

He said physics right now is like graphics in 1997. Right now we can kind of simulate a whole bunch of things, but that there are many ways that the gamer can break the physics model, which creates a jarring anti-immersive experience. I’ll talk more about this later.

He talked briefly about a Quake2 Remix project he wanted to do where they took the existing levels and story for Quake2 but replaced the renderer and engine with something more Doom3-like. Very interesting, and the first I’d heard of that.

He mentioned that hardware curved surface rendering might be of interest as Hollywood 3D rendering and real-time 3D rendering converge. This is new, since he’d never really mentioned curved surfaces in a positive way.

He also answered a question about multi-processor console architectures by saying basically that he didn’t understand why people continued to setup their consoles with that kind of architecture, since it’s been a pain in the ass to code for for two generations. Hrmm…. I wonder if we’re going to see the next id engine debut on the PS3?

I’ll post some more cogent thoughts later.

You know what I’d love to see in MMO games?

I’d love to see aging in Massively Multiplayer Online games. Right now in most MMO games, you advance in levels until you reach the cap, when you’re among the most powerful players in the game. This takes a long time, it took me almost two years of casual play to reach level 60 in Everquest, and I didn’t reach the current cap (65) until I’d played for almost three years. But what happens next?

Right now, you just continue to spend your experience on alternate advancement points, which you can use to get new skills and further strengthen your character. There are a finite number of points that you can actually get though. With enough time and no further expansions, you eventually run out of things to spend points on, and everyone’s character ends up with about the same skillset again.

The problem is that these alternate advancement abilities have made many characters super-powerful. Casters can tank raid-level enemies, and that’s just not right.

What I’d love to see is an optional progression of four or five levels beyond the maximum cap. I’d call them ‘old age levels’ or something equally clever. Basically, the idea is that as you advance down these levels, you become worse at your generic skills, but your voluminous experience makes you much better at your primary duties. So, you’ll run slower and might not be able to carry as much, but you’ll be much better at your primary role. For example:

• Tanks would be able to absorb damage and hold an enemies attention without fail, at the expense of damage output.
• Casters would cast the spells they specialize in for much more effect and a lower mana cost. However, their manapool would get smaller non-specialty spells would cost more mana, and enemies would hit them for much more damage.
• Melee characters would become adept at one particular type of weapon at the expense of all others. Non-tanks would lose the ability to tank in exchange for a huge DPS output.
• Hybrid classes would be… tricky.

Anyway, it’s just a thought.

Prince of Persia

I finally broke down and got Gamefly to send me Prince of Persia. I can pretty easily understand why it’s getting such mixed reviews. I got hung up on a spot in the first five minutes of the game, couldn’t figure out how to get past it, and was really pissed off. Got up, got a coke, sat back down, and nailed it on the first try.

For the unintiated, the original Prince of Persia was a flat-shaded 3D software rendered platformer. Unlike console platformers, where the key is getting the right timing and mashing the baddies, PoP was all about jumping puzzles and using the right combination of special moves to get past an obstacle. The original game was also notoriously unforgiving. When you completed a level in PoP, you had the distinct feeling that you just finished a tough challenge.

The new PoP manages to capture that same sense of insane difficulty yet ditch a lot of the annoying repetitiveness of the original. Mind you, there is still plenty of repetition. I think I repeated the first boss fight 20 times before I got the hang of fighting teams of four really tough guys at once. What amazes me is that the jumping puzzles are actually interesting. I think there are two reasons for that: I’m never sure if I’m actually going to clear a jump when I start out, and it’s always a challenge to get the jumps done flawlessly, even when you know what you should do.

The game further eases the pain of the “there’s only one way to complete this puzzle” gameplay by giving you occasional ‘visions’, which give the gamer who’s paying attention quick glimpses of the proper strategy for tackling the next room.

Perhaps most telling is that I sat down with the game around 10PM, and just looked up 20 minutes ago when I realized it was almost 2AM. I’ve not played a game with such a strong “just one more section” feeling in quite a while.

Links 2004

Links 2004 is, quite simply, the best game on Xbox Live, and one of the best multiplayer games I’ve ever played over the Internet.

Just about every night for the last week, I’ve logged onto Xbox Live and played a few holes of golf with someone across the country. I’ve also spent some time playing with some friends of mine. I’m having a difficult describing it, but I sit down with a few friends, grab a beer, and despite the fact that I play some sort of game every single day, I have to fight to beat neophyte gamers. Of course, I guess that’s as much due to the totally random nature of hitting a 2-inch ball into a 5-inch hole more than 300 yards away as much as the quality of the game.

Links 2004 is part of the XSNSports family, which means that in addition to the already great single and multiplayer games, you also get a website where you can track stats, and create player run tournaments.

Of course, you need to actually enjoy playing video golf to like Links.

F-Zero GX

I’ve always held a bit of a soft spot for F-Zero games. The original on the Super Nintendo was the ultimate high speed racer. All those years playing Spy Hunter that I trained myself not to blink for extended periods of time finally paid off. Then came F-Zero 64, a worthy addition, taking full advantage of the shift to 3D tracks. Like many of the other first-party Gamecube games I’ve played, this isn’t any radical re-imagining of an older game, but an improved version of the last game that’s been polished to a shiny, shiny sheen.

The problem is that there’s really no reason to play this game, if you already played the Nintendo 64 version, unless you were just fiending for more high-speed racing fun.

It’s true, there are some innovative track designs, and there are loads of new vehicles to unlock and experiment with, and I haven’t finished all three main racing circuits to see if there’s an uber-hard fourth circuit at the end, but there’s just not enough to the game as it is to keep me playing. I’m much more likely to actually play some single-player Mario Kart than to sit down for an hour of F-Zero GX. Even the fun novelty tracks, like the one where you ride the outside of a cylinder, aren’t that challenging, they’re just different.

I guess the other alternative is that my nerves are shot due to my advanced age. Maybe I just can’t handle the unblinking, constant, high-speed tension that this game invokes. I’ll play it some more, at least until I get an invite to another game of Links 2004.

Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna

As any gamer knows, January is the slowest time of the year. Most developers manage to ship their A-titles in time for Christmas, so at best we get one or two titles that slipped. This is the time every year that I play the titles that I missed the first time around.

I finally finished playing the first Dungeon Siege game late last year, and was somewhat underwhelmed. Near the end of the game, you spend much more time managing inventory than actually fighting baddies. The problem is one shared by many games where the dropped items are randomly generated. With dozens of different skills and bonuses, the odds of finding a random weapon or piece of armor that one of your characters will actually use falls somewhere between slim and none. To counteract this, developers instead have every single enemy drop something. Because you don’t want to lose out on the 1600 gold that the item sells for, you tote it around with you, constantly trying to guess which junk weapon will sell for the most.

Enter Legends of Aranna. Its basic improvements are to inventory management. It adds automatic potion distribution so that mana potions automatically go to your casters, and health potions automatically go to your melee fighters. You also can see the selling price of each item in your inventory just by clicking on it. Inventory management is still a pain in the ass if you have an eight character party, but it’s much less annoying than it was.

Aside from the new inventory management system, there are new effects on armor, new spells, backpacks, and a new pack lizard. Nothing truly revolutionary. From what I’ve played so far, the new campaign to be much more fun than the original, with more boss monsters, including ones that require more than simply killing them as fast as you can.

My main complaint about Dungeon Siege carries over to Legends of Aranna. It’s really difficult to multiclass. Either you prohibit yourself from wearing any type of armor because your strength and intelligence will both be so low, that you’ll be unable to find any decent armor that you’re capable of wearing. The way class definition works (if you use melee weapons, your melee skill will go up; if you cast spells, your casting skills will go up) is great, but if you want to roll a traditional paladin, good with weapons and with basic healing skills, you just can’t do it. You’ll end up with a character who is good at neither melee nor healing.

The problem is that the game uses the level of your casting skill to determine your effectiveness when you cast a spell, rather than your character’s overall level. For example, if your character is level 50 melee, but level 3 nature magic, he’ll just be able to heal 20HP at a time, even though he’ll have close to 1000 HP. Instead of having hybrid characters that can fill multiple roles, you end up stuck with highly specialized casters, archers, and melee characters. I hope that Gas Powered fixes this in Dungeon Siege 2.

Legends of Aranna is more of the same, but in this case, that’s not really a bad thing.

Best Games of 2003

Here it is, the moment all three of you have been waiting for, the best games of 2003.

I’m not going to give any specific category awards, there are multiple games in a few categories that deserve mention, while other categories are notably lacking. I do have a pick for best overall though.

Continue reading "Best Games of 2003"

Knights of the Old Republic and something to look forward to

After nearly four months, spent playing on two different platforms, I finished Knights of the Old Republic.

This game reminded me why I stopped playing most RPGs. As a general rule, RPG stories are all the same, the characters are nothing but stereotypes, and there really isn’t any feeling of adventure or surprise.

KOTOR has both adventure and surprises galore. As my character progressed from a typical Republic grunt to a full-fledged Jedi with the Force at his command, I was amazed at the excellent writing, the believable voice acting, and the constant flow of the plot. While many of the individual missions were of the “Go to this place and get something, then bring it back” variety, the designers at Bioware disguised them well enough that I didn’t even notice.

Where several KOTOR characters fall into one of the three Tolkien-esque stereotypical categories-lovable rogue, brooding ranger, or haughty wizard-KOTOR adds several deeper characters. It showed in my selection of different characters for each mission. The lovable rogue was rarely a part of my party, but the conflicted Jedi and the homocidal assassain droid made frequent appearances. Your frequent interactions with the different characters shape the direction of the several quests in the game, including the main one.

The other major innovation in KOTOR is the combat system. Never has a turn-based combat system felt so dynamic and fun to me. I definitely don’t have a thing for turn-based combat, but the way KOTOR lets you manage fights is rad. Basically, you queue up a set of commands, whether they’re buffs, Force powers, melee attacks, or range attacks. Every six seconds each character in your party gets to make one move, and each enemy character gets to make one turn. What’s impressive is that the outcome of your turns is acted out using some amazing animations. Lightsaber combat is truly something to behold.

KOTOR is based on the d20 RPG system, just like Neverwinter Nights and other Bioware RPGs. However, unlike other Bioware RPGs, you don’t need to know a single thing about d20 to succeed. If you want to powergame, it helps to know that the 25% stun chance that Critical Strike imparts to every successful crit is more effective than the extra swing that Flurry gives you. Serious RPG nuts can see the outcome of every single roll of the die, from persuade checks to melee attacks, but you can go through the entire game without ever knowing that a virtual die is rolled.

Perhaps the most telling is that I can safely say I would have played KOTOR all the way through if it hadn’t been set in the Star Wars universe. The combat system and the overall quality of the writing is such that once I started, I wouldn’t have been able to put it down. Like Deus Ex: Invisible War, KOTOR is one of the three best games I’ve played this year.

Since it’s the end of the year, I’m going to pull together a list of my favorite and least favorite games of 2003 sometime before Christmas. Even without Half-Life 2 and Doom3, this has been a banner year for PC games.

We’ve seen large leaps in role-playing gameplay with Deus Ex and KOTOR. Rise of Nations added another level of strategy to real-time strategy games with its Risk-like Conquer the World mode. Planetside gave us the first real massively multiplayer, persistant world war sim. Sure Sony billed it as a shooter, but it has armored cavalry, infantry, air cavalry, artillery, and loads of support vehicles, fighting in massive 300+ person battles. That makes it a war sim in our book.

We’ve also seen a rift growing between ‘big budget spectacular’ type games and thought provoking games that require actual skill to complete. It will be very interesting to see what direction the industry moves in the next year or two. Anyway, that’s all. It’s way past my bedtime.

Deus Ex: Invisible War

The rise of the first person shooter in many ways marked the end of the thinking man’s videogame. You see, creating the art required for first person shooters was much more intensive than anything that had come before. Instead of taking two days to build a level for a side scrolling platformer, it took two weeks to build a rudimentary Doom map. Moving into a full 3D world required even more time and effort. Completing a Quake 1 map could take a month or more for a small team of people. Compared to isometric role playing games, strategy games, and old-school platformers, creating content for first person shooters is a bitch.

Because of the increased demands on FPS developers, and because devs really want gamers to get to see every portion of their game, shooters became more and more linear. Instead of presenting gamers with difficult choices and making them think about the direction they want to take a character, shooter devs simply create linear paths straight through a game, with loads of enemies to blow up. It’s the gaming equivalent of a big-budget summer blockbuster. Beautiful sets, great scripted sequences, but no real meat to your game.

Deus Ex: Invisible War breaks the linear gameplay mold. Instead of confining gamers to a set scripted path, Deus Ex creates a realistic world with rules, and gives players a wide variety of skills to choose from that will help them overcome the obstacles. Objects in the world have mass and take up space. The game also does reasonably complex physics simulations. When you encounter an obstacle, whether it’s a security bot, a defense grid, or simply a locked door, you can rest assured that there will be many different ways to get around it.

For example, in one mission you were tasked with burning a store’s supplies. There were many different ways to accomplish your mission. You could break into the shop, disable the alarm, and chuck a grenade into the stockroom, but there’s no way that would look accidental. You could sneak through a neighboring building’s ventilation shafts, drop a flare into the stockroom and make it look like an accident. You could make yourself invisible, follow someone else into the building, and then quietly steal all the product and chuck it into a flaming garbage can out in the street. Or, you could talk to the owner of the shop and hit him up for protection money so you wouldn’t torch his supply room.

By setting up basic ground rules instead of scripting actions, the developers at Ion Storm created a game that people can truly play any way they want to. If you don’t want to kill anyone, you don’t have to. If you’d rather kill everyone, that’s cool too, as is anything in between these two extremes.

Ion Storm applied this to the game’s plot as well. Every NPC in the game belongs to a faction, and your standing with their faction determines how they treat you. Friendly factions will give you assignments, while enemy factions will try to recruit you to join their side. If that doesn’t work, they’ll try to kill you. The missions you choose to complete, and the way you complete them will change your faction standing with the different groups. By choosing different missions as you progress in the game, you can have a totally different experience.

The point of all this is that Deus Ex is getting disappointing reviews, and I’m really not sure why. There were some serious problems with the initial demo, but those weren’t really present in the final game. The PC version’s interface is a bit wonky. It’s not always easy to tell what clicking the mouse is going to do, but the rest of the game is good enough that I was willling to overlook the interface’s awkwardness. Despite the annoying interface this is definitely one of the three best games I’ve played this year.

I’ve read the submissions for the stupidest news story, and they’re nowhere near as stupid as the iPod jacking story at Wired. You guys have to do better than that. I’ll extend the contest one more week, and announce the winner next Friday or Saturday.

Between now and then, I hope to finish the PC version of Knights of the Old Republic. I’m a little disappointed in the PC-exclusive extras so far, but the game is very good, even on the second play through. My PC Jedi is so evil that his skin has gone pure white, his eyes are yellow, and little smoky things rise off his portrait. People in the game are even starting to call me Lord :)

Knights of the Old Republic and Call of Duty

News that KOTOR for the PC finally went gold prompted me to pick up the Xbox version with an eye toward finishing it up again this weekend. I’m not sure exactly why I stopped, but I was a damn fool. It’s one helluva an RPG.

I’m about 35 hours into the game, and I just had my first confrontation with Darth Malak, and boy did he drop a bomb on me. I’m going to play some more as soon as I can pry Gina off the Xbox. She’s been playing SSX3 all day long.

I’ve been playing Call of Duty multiplayer with Gordon this week at the office after work. We’re hooked on TeamDeathmatch. The action is super-fast and the weapons are exquisite. I find myself dying much more than I should, but I also seem to score pretty high, so I guess it balances out. I have a bad tendency to throw caution to the wind, which is fun for me, but usually ends up with my untimely demise.

The more I play Call of Duty, the more I realize why I’m still hooked on Planetside’s DM. Unlike CoD, where a player with strong first-person shooter skills can dominate, in Planetside you have to work with your squad, or you’re doomed. Even the strongest weapons are too weak to do crazy Quake-style bunny-hopping and spinning. The fastest way, bar none, to rack up a bunch of kills is to gun a medium tank (the biggest currently in the game) with someone who knows how to drive it. That’s really all there is to it.

They’re different games, but Planetside really, really makes me happy. I haven’t played enough of the expansion, Core Combat, yet to really make a judgement. But the new vehicles and weapons are damn nice!

Difficulty level and SSX3, Simpsons: Hit & Run, and the Quiddich game

To celebrate shipping the last of the pages for our special issue on Friday, I’ve spent the majority of this weekend on my ass in front of a TV playing games. I intended to spend some time playing Call of Duty, but my gaming PC had a freak-out, and I just got it back up and running a few minutes ago.

First up is SSX3. I hadn’t really taken the time to play it, since I want Gina and I to progress at about the same rate. Nothing’s less fun than a multiplayer game that one person schools you at every single time. I finally sat down and unlocked enough of the game to gain access to the second peak of the mountain, and I think that I’ve got enough time in to accurately judge it now.

The game is a masterpiece of game design. I expect to see this game win a shitload of awards at GDC next year, it’s technically innovative while maintaining perfect gameflow. Best of all, it’s easy enough that you feel like you’re always progressing, but there’s still loads of stuff to do for the hardcore gamer who wants to unlock everything.

It works like this. Unlike earlier versions of SSX where you unlocked individual courses one-by-one, in SSX3, there are only three regions to be unlocked. These are represented as three different peaks of the same mountain. Transitions from one peak to the next are absolutely seamless. You can board from the top of the highest peak on the mountain to the bottom of the lowest peak without a single load screen (there are loading screens when you go back up to the top of a slope though). On each peak there are several junction points, where free riders can either board directly into the next event, or do a free ride down a particular section of the course.

While you board, you listen to a “Radio BIG,” one of two different ‘radio stations’ you can choose to tune into while you race down the mountain. Between songs, the DJ keeps you informed about happenings around the mountain, including what you’ve been up to, what other competitors are doing, down to what the weather is going to be like on different tracks. The effect completely sucks you into the game, and gives the player the feeling that stuff is actually on the rest of the mountain while you try different challenges and races.

That’s enough SSX 3 for now. I’ll talk more about it later, don’t worry :)

I also put a few hours into Simpsons: Hit & Run, which is nothing more than a Grand Theft Auto clone without the machine guns. If you’re not familiar with GTA, the point of the game is to drive around interesting, dynamic areas and do ‘stuff’. ‘Stuff’ can range from destroying another car, collecting a bunch of one type of object, racing someone, or a combination of the three. There’s not a lot of variety in mission-type, but the environments are big enough to keep it ineteresting, especially for a Simpsons fan.

The problem is difficulty level. The initial levels of the game were a complete cakewalk. I unlocked through mission five (of seven) in about 2 hours, without playing many of the side missions or bonus missions. However, midway through mission five, the game suddenly becomes MUCH more difficult. When I say much more difficult, I mean try the same section of a mission twenty times before you successfully complete it. Once I got past the three missions at the end of level five, it went back to cakewalk mode again. It’s quite odd.

Speaking of a cakewalk, Harry Potter: Quiddich World Cup is an astoundingly easy game. I’ve read all the Harry Potter books, so I had a pretty good idea how Quiddich worked before I started playing the game, but it’s insanely easy. ‘NHL 1993 for Sega Genesis once you learned how to shoot one timers’ easy. It’s really that easy, even on the harder skill levels.

The problem is inherent with the rules of the (fictional) wizarding game. Here’s the quick version: there are three hoops at either end of the field. Tossing one ball (the quaffle) through one of those is worth 10 points. At some point, another ball, called the golden snitch, will make its appearance. Catching that (a job so important a player is dedicated to looking for it the entire game) nets you 150 points. The problem with the game is that the snitch always appears about the time the 160th point is scored in the game, rendering all the bits with the quaffle and the rest of the game pointless. Well, unless you’re unable to score a single quaffle goal during the match that is. You end up farting around for five or ten minutes trying to get the total combined score to 160, then make absolutely sure you nab the snitch and your guaranteed a win.

It’s not quite that simple, the team in the lead has a better chance of getting the snitch since they start out closer but that’s a minor inconvenience for a skilled player. In order for the game to be fun, and the outcome not entirely dependent on catching the snitch, the game should wait to spawn the snitch until 250 or so points have been scored total. It would have also added more strategy to the game if your seeker (the person who looks for and catches the snitch) could knock the opposing seeker off the trail of the snitch, if you were more than 150 points behind.

My feeling is that the game is intentionally too easy though, to make it accessible to a much younger crowd than most videogames.

EA and Microsoft hate me

Tycho over at Penny-Arcade really hit the nail on the head today. EA and Microsoft have got to compromise so we can get Xbox Live support in EA’s games.

Xbox Live is the best thing going for console gaming online. EA publishes loads of great games, but their online support is limited to the PS2, and is spotty and inconsistent even there.

I’ve already mentioned that the inappropriate music in SSX3 annoys me, but the thing that kills me is the lack of online play on the Xbox version. Spending some quality time with Crimson Skies reminded me what online play can give a game.

I didn’t even play the single player game in the Xbox version of Return to Castle Wolfenstein. I only played enough Midnight Club II to unlock the cars and motorcycles I wanted to use online. The single player game in Crimson Skies just taught me how to fly and a few little tricks of the flying trade.

Without online play, Gina and I will probably unlock most of the game, put a few dozen hours into multiplayer, and then never touch SSX3 again. It will go in the pile of other awesome multiplayer games we just lost interest in, along with Soul Caliber, and Dead or Alive 3.

I know that EA and Microsoft aren’t screwing their consumers of a few measly dollars per player. Meet in the middle and bring some EA games onto Xbox Live.

Speaking of good dogfights

Microsoft sent me a copy of Crimson Skies on Thursday. Despite copies of Call of Duty, Simpsons Hit and Run, Rebel Strike, SSX3, Max Payne 2, plus a couple of others I’m forgetting, I played it through to its end in about three sittings.

The dogfights are excellent. Not so hard that you’re frustrated and quit after two missions, but hard enough that you think “Whew, barely squeaked by that one” after nearly every fight. It’s balanced so well that you can’t help coming back for more. It’s as though the guys at FASA learned their craft by designing Vegas slots.

The singleplayer game is short, but that’s ok because the game has a thriving Live! community. I logged on last night at about 2AM PST, and had my choice of games. Even a crappy DSL connection can host a 16 player match, and the action is great. There are four or five multiplayer modes, but so far all I’ve tryed are Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch. My all-time favorite multiplayer game on the net is QuakeWorld team deathmatch. Crimson Skies isn’t going to replace it, but it’s team deathmatch mode is strikingly similar to the way typical QuakeWorld matches would play out.

I can talk about Call of Duty now, because it’s available in stores. I got this about the time I finished Max Payne, and played the game through in an orgy of WW2 shooter fun. It really deserves a post of its own though. It’s very good, the multiplayer is great fun, even with pickup games, and it’s not too hard or too easy for anyone. I’ll go into more detail later, but if you have to choose between this game and Max Payne 2, definitely get Call of Duty.

Rebel Strike and SSX3

It’s been a helluva busy month. I’m pounding away on the special issue for work, but I should finish that up at the end of next week or the middle of the week after that.

I’ve been burning up Gamefly with games I wanted to play, but never wanted to spend real money on. Things like NFL Fever 2004, Shaun Murray Wakeboarding, and Simpson’s Hit and Run. Good stuff, but that can wait til later.

Right now, I’m playing Rebel Strike, the game by the same guys who made Star Wars: Rogue Leader. Rogue Leader was one of my all time favorite games. It’s got challenging gameplay, a good story, and some dogfighting that convinces you you’re actually in one of the Star Wars movies.

My only complaint was that some of the missions are obscenely long and there’s no way to save your progress midway through a mission. Rebel Strike picks up where Rogue Leader leaves off. The new game includes two branching storylines, in one you play Luke Skywalker, in the other Wedge Antilles. Wedge is the leader of the X-Wing squadron Luke was in when he blew up the Death Star in Episode IV for those who are lesser dorks than me.

There are three different mission types in Rebel Strike, flying missions (phenomenal!), AT-ST missions where you pilot the scout walkers (damn good!), and missions where you’re on foot. The foot missions are so poorly done I felt like amputating my own hands after one intensely frustrating session. The problem lies with the camera. Instead of using a fixed third person camera that follows behind your character, the camera moves from one fixed position to another. Whenever the camera moves, the direction your character is moving will change too. This would just be annoying, except some of the missions require you to avoid hazards, like water. Falling into the water means you lose a life. Lose all your lives, and you have to start the level over. It’s just not cool at all.

The sad thing is that the dogfights are so damn good, I don’t even care how bad the infantry missions are. Vehicle combat has evolved considerably from Rogue Leader. Your main blasters now have varying levels of charge. Fire them, and they discharge. Subsequent blasts are weaker than the initial shot, but if you give them a second or two, they’ll recharge to full strength. It’s definitely incentive to make your first shot count.

As for SSX3, the game is great. I’m really glad I have an Xbox though, so I can play my own ripped music instead of being forced to listen to the non-topical crap that EA’s music division licensed for this game. Who the fuck wants to listen to Fatboy Slim when they’re snowboarding down a mountain at 100 miles an hour? Instead of introspective club tracks, I want to hear something with more than a pumping bassline. I want to hear something that will get me really cranked up. It’s almost like the guys who picked the music over there just make a mix CD without ever playing the damn games. Alot of the newer EA games have had the same problem. It’s too bad, because SSX Tricky had perfect rah-rah music for this kind of game too.

I’ll see if I can get Gina to post something more about SSX tomorrow or Sunday. She’s put a little more time into it than I have.

What I’ve been playing

Just because I haven’t been posting regularly doesn’t mean I haven’t been playing games. It’s actually been a really busy time for me.

I picked up Soul Caliber II and Unreal Championship for the Xbox the other day. I originally was just going to get Soul Caliber, but when I saw that Unreal is down to $20 bucks, I picked it up to play with my buddy Marty down in Florida.

Soul Caliber is very good. If you’re not familiar with the premise, it’s your basic fighting game, but instead of using mere kung fu to beat the shit out of your opponents, you use bladed weapons. The controls are very simple, one button does a horizontal attack, one a vertical, one kicks, and one blocks. Like any good fighter, there are literally dozens of attack combos, defense combos, grabs, throws, and power moves. The only problem with it is that I’m completely incapable of beating Gina. She absolutely spanks me every time we play.

Unreal Championship is a little different. It’s essentially a dumbed down port of the PC version, which wasn’t particularly smart in the first place. Don’t get me wrong, UT is the purest form of online Deathmatch, but it’s a tired formula these days. The weapons include standards, like the machine gun, chaingun, and rocket launcher, as well as some unique weapons, most notably the Link gun, which you can use to power up your teammates attacks during certain types of battles. This isn’t a great game, but it’s definitely worth $20.

I’ve also been playing the Battlefield: 1942 expansion, Secret Weapons of WW2. It adds a bunch of weapons that were under development by both sides of the war, but never saw action. Controversially, this includes a German rocket pack, which many people argue destroys the ‘authenticity’ of the game. Bah I say to them! The rocket pack is fun, it’s not easy to use, and it doesn’t really affect the game one way or the other, except that it makes anyone using it very easy to kill. I’m going to play it more in the next few days. I’m reviewing it for our November issue.

Last but not least, I went to an ATI event in Seattle earlier this week where we talked about 3D card technology and how it pertains to forthcoming DirectX 9 games, like Half-Life 2. There’s been a lot of press about it, at places like The Tech Report and ExtremeTech. The short version is that Valve, the company that is developing Half-Life 2, has had to go into their game and write special code to accomodate nVidia’s 3D cards. The problem lies in color complexity. DirectX 9, and Half-Life 2, use 24-bit floating point numbers to describe the color of ever object in the game. Unfortunately, nVidia’s boards only support 32-bit and 16-bit colors. The problem is that in 16-bit mode, the numbers don’t give a large enough range to describe the colors that show up in the game, and in 32-bit mode, the game is too slow to play on even the fastest nVidia hardware. That’s the short version. For the long one, check the November issue of Maximum PC magazine, or check back here in a couple of weeks. I’ll post it here once the issue goes on newsstands.

Anyway, I’m off to see the White Stripes in a few hours.

Galactic Conquest, Xbox controllers, and Planetside

First, I need to say that the Xbox controller USB adapter is really handy. I ordered mine from these guys and am using their drivers too. There’s analog support for all the buttons, the two triggers, and of course both analog sticks. Everything is fully configurable, just like a real Windows controller. I used it with Midnight Club 2 and Battlefield for quite a few hours this weekend, and had no crashes or other problems. As C. Montgomery Burns says, “Excellent”.

Galactic Conquest is a little different story. It pretty uniformly sucks right now. The only map that’s available is Hoth, and the imperials have about twice as far to travel to the flags as the Rebels do. The scout walkers are pretty weak, and the first person camera is jittery enough to make you barf in your stormtrooper helmet. Hopefully it will get better, the current iteration should never have been released.

I’m still splitting my gaming time between Planetside and Knights of the Old Republic. I recently picked up a two-man tank certification in Planetside, so I’ve been cruising around the continent with a buddy picking off enemies. The tanks last a LONG time, and are quite effective at squishing other people too.

KOTOR is KOTOR. I’m playing it, but taking my time. Every moment of a game this good should be cherished. Right now I’m really enjoying mixing up the characters I bring on missions to get the best dialog.

Midnight Club II PC and Battlefield: 1942 stuff

This was a good week for releases. We saw Galactic Conquest, the Star Wars mod for Battlefield: 1942 and the demo for the new Secret Weapons mod were both released. I’d also highly recommend you check out the XIII demo, which was also released this week. Everything’s available for download at Fileshack. You have to register for an account, but it’s free and the downloads are very fast once you get through the queue.

I just set up an Xbox to USB adapter, so I can use my Xbox gamepads for PC games. I’m going to play some Midnight Club II with it, and let you know how it goes. It looks promising so far, but I’m not sure that the controllers triggers will show up as analog controls in games. The gamepad might be my new favorite way to fly in Battlefield.

I’ve put a few more hours into Knights of the Old Republic, mainly late at night when I don’t feel like commiting to an hour or two of multiplayer play online someplace else. I’m still enjoying it as much as before. I’ve gotten the knack of combat, and all the Jedi characters I use have the Force freeze ability, which lets me freeze those pesky extra attackers. I’m still undecided whether the single, double bladed saber does more damage than dual-wielding sabers does. Luckily, the same feats give bonuses to dual-wielders and double-bladed saber users, so I can swap them up some.

The story’s progressing well. I’m still playing as a goody-goody Jedi, although there are a couple of places that you have to get downright unpleasant in order to do the right thing. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to wait for the PC version to play it again as an evil bastard though.

I also want to document my creation of a new emoticon. It call it The Bird. ..|.,

When it starts popping up everywhere, remember, you saw it here first :)

Midnight Club’s done installing. Off to play!

Planetside stuff

There’s much afoot in the Planetside community. The devs are making good on their promise to add new content to the game by changing the way that certain base captures work. Instead of simply hacking a base then guarding the control center for 15 minutes, one team will have to take an object to a nearby base.

The idea is that we’ll need to have a convoy to protect the base cap widget since the other teams will throw everything they have against it. It sounds like a lot of fun to me, if it’s implemented right.

I’m out of town this weekend, but I’ll be at the CPL tournament in Dallas judging the case-mod contest. Be sure to say hi if you see me there!

It has come to this

This year, I’ve seen three games that actually included well thought out, immersive, entertaining stories. Frighteningly, they’ve all been on consoles. Zelda, Metroid Prime, and Knights of the Old Republic all have deep, rewarding storylines. The interesting thing to me is that although only KotOR is a pure RPG, the others have very RPG-ish elements. These three games all appeared on consoles (although you could argue that KotOR is a PC game that was pre-ported to the Xbox), but I’ve not seen any really compelling story-driven games on the PC in ages.

Sure, some people want to talk about those hardcore RPGs and turn-based games, like the Age of Wonders series, but for those games, the story is usually just as tacked on as it is for a shooter like Doom. What was the last turn-based game that your goal wasn’t to protect the kingdom from some unspeakable evil?

There are a stunning number of excellent multiplayer-based games on the PC these days. Battlefield: 1942, Planetside, Rise of Nations, and the whole host of MMORPG games are flourishing on the PC. The pundits said it years ago, and now I believe them, multiplayer is what the PC is best at.

In many ways, the couple of years I spent playing Everquest ruined my enjoyment of single player games. Even when I started playing, before any expansions were released and the biggest monsters in the game were a pair of level 55 dragons, the game was positively massive. There were at least 10 starting cities, each filled with loads of merchants, quest characters, and guild leaders who will teach you. Unlike normal single player games, there’s a lot of stuff in every city that has absolutely nothing to do with you. Heck, there are even a bunch of people that won’t speak to you at all, or will try to kill you on sight.

Between these cities were MASSIVE tracts of land, filled with giants, lions, skeletons, ghouls, ghosts, and goblins. I had played for a year before I saw 90% of what the old world had to offer. Hell, after three years of playing, there were still a few dungeons I’d never explored in the initial release of the game!

The downsides to a world this massive is that it’s very intimidating for a new player to get into, and has a very steep learning curve. In some cases, there were high level areas a five minute walk from the newbie area in the game, but the depth of gameplay you get from this size game outweighs the other downsides.

Combined with the massive world, the number of other people you meet and group with add another dimension of complexity to the game. If you want to join a massive player army and attack (and hopefully kill) monsters that can kill most players with a single hit, you can. Or you can sit quietly back and nuke the monsters for the team. Hell, you can even just play the game to make cash, and not stop until you make a million platinum. The game, and it’s goals are either completely open-ended and non-linear or non-existant, depending how you look at it.

There aren’t any single player games that can live up to that kind of game. KotOR is definitely a much smaller world, and most every NPC (non-player character) that has a name has something for you to do. However, the breadth of the game, and the complexity of the character interactions and the dialog trees you must explore really affect the outcome of the game.

I realized as I was playing yesterday that if I charge into an inevitable battle before the other side attacks, I move closer to the light side of the force. If I charge, nothing happens at all. Very nifty.

My benchmark run is almost done, so I’d better get back to work, but I’ll have more to talk about KotOR later. I didn’t mean to spend this time talking about what makes massively multiplayer games special instead.

Knights of the Old Republic

So, last night I finally got a copy of Knights of the Old Republic. If you’re not in the know, KotOR is a role-playing game set in the Star Wars universe. Bioware, a very well respected developer of PC RPGs (think Baldurs Gate and Neverwinter Nights) developed the game for Lucasarts, and the results are absolutely fantastic.

KotOR is set 4000 years before the events of the movies, during the Sith wars. Character creation can be as complex or as simple as you like. If you don’t understand all the different stats and rules, you can just pick a basic class, and press auto-create. However, if you want to tweak your scoundrel’s fortitude so he’s not as big a wuss, you can individually adjust each and every aspect of your character.

I’ve put about 7 hours into the game so far, and am flabbergasted by the story. Setting the game 4000 years before the events we know from the Star Wars movies let Bioware create the story in a universe we all know and love, without being encumbered by the “canon” of Star Wars. Remember when Obi-Wan Kenobi said that the Jedi kept the peace in the republic for millenia? This game recounts the last major war before that peaceful time began.

You start out as a normal Republic grunt, tasked with bringing one Jedi from one place to another. Unfortunately, your ship is ambushed by the Sith and the crew of your ship must evacuate to a nearby planet in escape pods. After that, you’ve got to track down the missing Jedi, get off the quarantined planet, and make a few new friends along the way.

Typical RPG conventions apply here. You’ll frequently be presented with other characters and your interactions with them can determine whether you’ll become a powerful Light Jedi, or will succumb to the Dark Side. Frequently the choices are very cut and dried: You see a guy getting mugged, do you help him, attack the muggers, then mug him yourself, or just walk away because it’s not your problem. Not all the interactions are so cut and dried though.

I’ve got a lot more to say about the game, I’m going to play some more tonight. More details to come.

Half-Life 2

Not to toot my own horn, but the August issue of Maximum PC is on newsstands now. The cover story explains exactly what kind of PCs will be required to run Half-Life 2. The story actually talks about how the game will look when it’s run on different classes of graphics hardware.

I’m going to pickup my copy of Knights of the Old Republic tonight. This makes me happy :)

Metroid Prime

I’ve had a busy week. Our new car finally arrived, so we’ve been going out and driving around quite a bit in the last few days. We’re getting ready to go to Marty’s wedding in Orlando this weekend. After we ship Marty and his new bride off to Hawaii, we’re going to spend some time in amusment parks.

We’re also ramping up for our special issues at work, so I’ve not had as much time as I like to play games or update the site.

I did sit down and play some Metroid Prime when I should have been working on the Half-Life 2 story for our August issue. I managed to plow through most of the end of the game. I’m finding the game just about perfect, it’s not so hard that it’s frustrating, but not so easy that I breeze through it. There are loads of interesting things to check out in the environment. There’s something entertaining about reading Space Pirates internal memos about an intruder, who happens to be you!

The one complaint I heard with the game is that some of the bosses are too hard. Most of the bosses have one fatal flaw, that makes it easy for you to defeat them, once you’ve discovered the trick. I think that the people that complained about the difficulty just didn’t figure out the trick.

I’ve still got at least one boss fight to go, so I’ll report back in when I finish it off.

Enter the Matrix

When I was in junior high school, I remember sitting around the NES with my friend Marty. We’d get really excited about the summer movie season not because of the movies, but because there would be a bunch of games based on the movies. We played the Batman game, the Ghostbusters 2 game, and even the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade game. Most took the form of craptacular side scrollers, and were ginned together in a few short weeks.

The people who are marketing Enter the Matrix apparently forgot this. The game, and simultaneous launch of The Matrix Reloaded were hyped as a one of a kind convergence between film and cinema. Yes, there is some spiffy FMV of the characters that appear in the game. Yes the game does fill in a few of the story holes in the movie. No the game isn’t very fun.

Admittedly, using bullet time and flying through the air to kick dozens of baddies asses is fun for the first hour or so. The problem is that the game never really goes anywhere. It’s not particularly difficult, but it is very tedious. Every fight in the game can be summed up in three steps.

1. Charge around corner, engaging bullet time as you go.
2. Kick/shoot one or more people’s asses.
3. Stand still in a safe place if you take too much damage so you can recuperate.

It just gets very blah after a while. On top of that, the car chase portions are tedious, and the other game-type, where you fly a hovercraft in the “real world” seem a little boring.

It’s too bad that you can’t just watch the FMV without playing the game first.

While I’m talking about the Matrix, I managed to sit down and watch the Animatrix last night. The images are beautiful, and the animation is amazing. I was even impressed with what those hacks at Squaresoft on the Osiris piece.

Still more Planetside

I keep coming back to it because there’s definitely something there. Planetside is compelling, and adds a lot of depth to the standard, boring first person shooter.

Even though the experience comes in big giant chunks still, I’m still advancing pretty slowly. With levels come certification points, which you use to get access to new types of gear, vehicles, or armor, as well as new abilities, like engineering and hacking. I really think it’s more useful to have a couple of level 5 or 6 characters with different specialties than a single level 20 character with all sorts of fancy implants and skills. The implants really don’t do that much, and with a single armor upgrade and two engineering, medic, or hacking upgrades you have the same level of skill as someone who is level 20 and a master hacker. That’s just not right.

I’d like to see some new implants that really add something to the game, or make the vehicles a tiered system. In order to get access to the big APC, you first have to have the small APC cert. In order to get the gunship, you would have to get a cert in the stealth ship category. If they were to do such a thing, they’d have to either give more than one cert point at certain levels, or add some levels and make leveling easier. Right now, it seems kind of difficult sometimes.

I talked with one of our game columnists about it today, and our general consensus is that it’s a lot of fun, but it’s definitely not worth $160 a year, and they need to fix some of the server side lag issues.

Also, my entire company went bowling tonight at the Sea Bowl in Pacifica. We had a rootin’ tootin’ good time. There’s nothing like taking 120 people who play videogames for a living, giving them free beer, and a bunch of 15 pound rocks to throw at some wooden sticks.

That is all.

Planetside

Woohoo! Planetside just came. I know what I’m playing tonight :)

Five and a half hours

That’s how long I played Rise of Nations last night, thinking I was going to have a quick game, then go to bed.

My Conquer the World game is progressing nicely. Last night I wiped out the Germans and Greeks, giving me solid control of about 60% of the world. I’m poised to take over Japan and most of Africa, under control of the Egyptians tonight. After they’re gone, I’m just a few battles away from total world domination, when I take out the Incas.

I finally decided to start using the bonus cards, since I’ve only got six or seven fights left at most. My favorite is easily treachery, which gives you an enemies territory without a fight. Talk about handy.

The more I play this game, the more impressed with it I become. At the end of every real-time battle, in with all the other stats about technology and land controlled, is a section that tells you how you use the game. It tells how many formations you made and how many times you use them, how many hotkeys you press, how many clicks you make in the game field and in the UI. It’s extroidinarily cool, and I wish more games would give you those kinds of stats. A fighting game that saves profiles that tell you how many attacks to the head you take versus the number you dodge and other in-depth stats would be badass.

We watched Adaptation last night. It was a little too clever for my taste, and the writing wasn’t anywhere near as clever as Being John Malkovich. It is very funny to hear Meryl Streep call someone a “fat fuck” over and over again though.

The mold is going away. I hit the toilet tank with some bleachy water again to finish it off. Gina and I both still have coughs though, and my nose hasn’t stopped running since about last week.

Super Mario Sunshine

So, I’ve got a living shitload of games lined up to play, some for work and some for fun, and what do I spend two hours on last night but Super Mario Sunshine. After some frustration two months ago I put it down and didn’t look back. Last night I didn’t feel like any online carnage in Wolfenstein or a complex Rise of Nations campaign. I just wanted something simple, that didn’t require too much thought and Mario fit the bill perfectly.

As far as platformers go, it’s got the same high level of difficulty as the Rayman series. At least one mission in every area is an old-school 3D jumping puzzle floating in space. In order to succeed in the missions, you must master different jumping techniques, be able to land accurately, and be able to time your jumps very precisely. Some of these levels are insanely difficult, with challenges of increasing difficult until it peaks near the end. That means that you have to muddle through a difficult puzzle, just to fail at the very end and restart at the beginning. It can get very frustrating, until you figure out exactly what you’re supposed to be doing and how to do it.

I’d been stuck on the difficult jumping-in-space levels on three or four different worlds, since I stopped playing the game. Last night, I managed to plow through three or four of those levels last night, and was really surprised to find that the difficulty level was ratched way down for the missions after that.

Gina’s at a meeting tonight, so that means its time for more Wolfenstein.

Gaming overload!

GTA: Vice City, Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Tides of War, Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee, Desert Combat .35, WaveRace: Blue Storm, and Rise of Nations.

I’ve started to work my way out of the pile. The fact that Playstation gaming mags and websites laud the GTA series is just confirmation of my theory that there’s not one good title on the PS2.

Yes, you can drive around the city, and yes you can do whatever you want. However, to advance the plot, you have to perform annoying and repetitive missions. Frequently, the only way to find out how you’re supposed to succeed in a mission is to try it and fail. Failure returns you to a pre-mission assigned state. That means that frequently, you have to steal a new set of wheels, buy some new threads, and arm yourself, then have the mission reassigned. Usually, the clothing store, gun shop, and appropriate vehicle are on totally opposite sides of the city. This means that any sort of failure is rewarded with 5-10 minutes of driving through the city. Now picture a mission that takes four or five tries to get the perfect combination of weapons and vehicle and I think you’ll see my point.

There is a lot to enjoy in GTA:VC though. The new vehicles, especially the motorcycles, are fun to drive, and modeled well. The radio stations are entertaining, especially if you’re into 80s music, and exploring the city is a blast. Everytime I find a rampage icon or a new weapon, I have a little more fun. It’s just not enough to get past the tedium of most missions.

This one turned into another massive update, so click below to read on.

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Too many games!

It’s funny, just the other day, I was thinking I was getting a little bored with the current crop of games I’ve been playing lately, except for Rise of Nations. Then the Desert Combat guys release a new patch which finally includes shoulder mounted SAMs, GTA:Vice City, Enter the Matrix, and Black Hawk Down show up in our office, and I get the Wolfenstein Xbox game for my birthday.

We’re running a review of Vice City in our July issue, so I’ve got to put some time into that this weekend. Enter the Matrix, Black Hawk Down, and Desert Combat will have to wait until after that. Of course, I’m getting ready to log on Live and fire up Wolfenstein. I’m hoping that having voice comm in a class based teamplay environment is going to be cool enough the controller doesn’t piss me off.

E3 2003

I was at E3 all day yesterday. I spent most of my time looking at closed-door demos, and got to see some really great looking games, a whole lot of crappy games, and Gary Coleman with some bimbos. I was only down for the day, so I spent about 30 minutes with each developer/publisher.

We’re going to see the Matrix tonight, so I’ll probably have something about that up tomorrow. I’m trying not to get too excited, but it’s a losing battle.

Click continue reading below to see the whole thing. It ended up being pretty long.

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Desert Combat rules

I love Desert Combat. It’s got some problems, it’s not anything more than the default Battlefield:1942 game with tweaked weapon damage, a couple of new vehicles, and new models, but damn is it fun.

Gordo and I make a point to play a quick match or two pretty much every day after work. As we’ve played, we’ve started discovered that just two people who are able to communicate well and who work together can shift the course of an entire 50+ player game.

I’m going to go pick up a copy of Return to Castle Wolfenstein for Xbox after work today and see how the multiplayer is. The PC version had rudimentary classes, which gave it some multiplayer legs. I’ll be interested to see how voice chat helps a first person shooter.

Console weekend-o-rama

I finished Zelda this weekend, with only about 20 hours in the game. I thought I was taking my time, but I guess I really hammered through the last few hours. Unfortunately, nothing really gave me another wow moment like I got after I finished the first major quest. Still, it’s easily the best Zelda since A Link to the Past. I did miss seeing Epona though.

Saturday night was KFOG’s Kaboom, which is a local radio stations annual non-nationalistic fireworks display. Conveniently, it’s on piers 30 and 32, making it easily viewable from our rooftop. After 30 minute or so of blowing shit up, we cruised down the street to our neighborhood sushi joint, Sushi Groove if you were wondering, and enjoyed several rounds of sushi, beer, and sake. After our dinner excursion, we headed back to the apartment and got down to some hardcore competitive gaming.

First up was Monkey Ball’s triumphant return to our living room. After several heated mini-games, we fired up the main game in two player mode. The monkeyball addiction is back in full force. By the time we finished playing, Gina’s hands had cramped into a Wavebird-esque shape.

After Monkey Ball, we fired up the Xbox for a little DoA3. DoA’s still fun, even after a couple of years. I’m about ready for another fighter though.

Funny story. When we started playing DoA, I had to turn on the lights to prove to Gina that I hadn’t stuck her with the ‘big’ Xbox controller. Say what you will, jokes about the size of the Xbox controller are always funny.

Today we hit the demo disk that came with Xbox Live and played some Tetris offline and MotoGP online. When we saw Dirty Sanchez and guest, we both immediately thought it was Tatum and Ashley. Unfortunately, it was just another perv and his buddy.

On the movie front, The God of Cookery highlights everything that’s weird, fun, and just plain wacky about Hong Kong cinema. Anyone who thinks Iron Chef is bizarre could really have their eyes opened by this movie. I’ll never look at an Assorted Noodle plate the same again.

What have I been playing?

I’m writing reviews of Rise of Nations and Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis for our July issue, so I’ve been pretty occupied with both of them.

Rise of Nations kicks ass in just about every way. It’s the best RTS game I’ve played in ages. The combat portions are great, it doesn’t take 4 hours to fight through a single mission, there are a wide variety of mission types, and the units range from pike toting peasants to stealth bombers and ICBMs.

The single player missions are tied together with a Risk-like turn based campaign. You move armies across the map to defend or invade certain territories. Eventually, your empire is either wiped from the earth, or you stand alone as the supreme ruler of earth.

I’ve not played any multiplayer yet, but I’m going to try to get a game going later this afternoon.

Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis is the first JP game I’ve seen that didn’t suck in every single way imaginable. It’s actually quite good. Combining the Jurassic Park universe with a theme park building sim is brilliant. As the park’s manager, you control everything from collection of DNA samples to the security surrounding the T. Rex pen, to the types of souvenirs you sell in the gift shop. Putting a Stegosaurus in a Velociraptor pen to see what happens is sick, but very entertaining.

Best of all, it uses programmable shaders to draw the nifty waving grass and ripply water.

The game has a few flaws. It’s horrifically unstable on Radeon-based boards, and crashes as soon as you zoom in for a closer look on a dinosaur. It’s also got a pretty shallow tech tree. I had completely exhausted all my research options by the time I was four hours into the game. You should also be able to unlock more different types of dinos in each park. In order to see all the different species of dinos, you’ll have to create multiple parks.

E3 is next week, and I’m going to see all sorts of new stuff, including Half-Life 2. From what I’ve seen so far, it looks like it will be a worthy successor. I’ll keep you posted.

Xbox Live

So, last night I picked up the new version of the Xbox Live kit. After I struggled through the setup process and input all my billing information using the bloody controller, I was pleasantly surprised.

Tetris Worlds is a blast, MotoGP worked really, really well, and Mechassault was awesome. I’m expecting a copy of Wolfenstein today or tomorrow. I’ll be sure to let you know how I feel about that.

Voice support is a little odd for the most part. I’m a little uncomfortable hurling insults to someone across the country that I don’t even know, but appa