Category Archives: Games

Games

I weep for those down under

November 3, 2009 – 2:55 pm

Aussie gamers don’t half get a raw deal. We bitch here in Europe because of delayed releases (less of a problem these days), and more expensive games & hardware (the typical exchange rate is 1.2 dollars to the pound, which I can’t remember us ever getting close to), but compared to Oz, we’re laughing. Not only do games take ages to appear down there sometimes, they’re often ridiculously priced and mutilated by censorship. The latest example is what Valve had to do to Left 4 Dead 2 to make it acceptable to the censors.

I can sort of understand the gore reduction – the amount of blood and bits of bone and sinew flying about in the sequel was quite a surprise compared to L4D1, and I’m not sure it really adds to the game except for perhaps being more true to the zombie movie tradition. Things that do have a serious effect though include:

  1. No riot cop zombie. I guess the Oz authorities didn’t like you shooting the police, even if technically they aren’t exactly suitable for active duty anymore, on account of the fact that they’re trying to eat the brains of law-abiding citizens, which I’m pretty sure is a disciplinary issue. The ‘uncommon infected’ are good for mixing things up a bit and I liked this one.
  2. Bodies fade away quickly. This is awful – when we played L4D1 on split-screen we were struck by how quickly the bodies disappeared (for perfomance reasons) compared to the PC and it really saps the realism. In L4D2 after you’ve survived an attack it’s a source of pride to see the area littered with vanquished zombies as a testament to your will to live. Looking around and seeing a bare street just undermines the experience. I don’t know why they thought they needed to do this, especially as the gore is already turned down so it’s not as if you can marvel at the hideous new damage models Valve has implemented.
  3. No burning. Oh come on – so now you’re not allowed to set zombies on fire? They still die if they’re in the fire, they just don’t catch on fire themselves. Right.

I fail to see what the Aussie censors are trying to achieve here. Are zombie films not allowed in Australia either? Because essentially L4D2 is just a better sim of that experience. Here’s the comparison:

About the L4D2 demo which we got a few days ago (because we pre-ordered) – it’s a lot of fun. The demo isn’t as creepy as L4D1 because it’s in daylight, and in a developed setting so it’s less about peering into the dark and shooting trees that you’re sure twitched, and more about just trying to hold off rampaging hordes. Different L4D1 levels had different feels so I’m hoping the night-time campaigns will have more of the suspense element; in particular I’m sure the swamp level will be pretty nerve-wracking. The demo was much more of an arcade shooting romp than a suspenseful survival experience, I’m just hoping that Valve haven’t caved in to the vocal people that just play bombastic Versus and keep more of the tense & pressing atmosphere in the other levels for us co-op players.

That said, the new special infected were great to mix things up, as are the uncommons, melee weapons, new ranged weapons and buff variants like the adrenaline. Instead of just going Boomer-Smoker-Hunter-Smoker-Hunter-WITCH!!-Boomer-Hunter-Smoker-Boomer-TANK!!, which started to get repetetive after a while (but still fun), you get a bit more variety. The Charger in particular is great for instilling panic, smashing through a group if you don’t see him quick enough and dispersing you from your defensive huddle, with one unlucky person ending up being smooshed into the dirt. He’s not that tough, but boy he runs fast.

I liked the idea of Realism mode, where you can no longer see hinting outlines of team mates / objects to assist you, and that if you die, there’s no coming back unless another team member has a defibrilator unit (nice idea). Puts a new spin on the harder modes! Anyway, should be fun when it’s released on November 17th.

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Games OGRE

Torchlight launches today!

October 27, 2009 – 11:52 am

Woohoo, torchlight-1-year-stompTorchlight, the new ARPG by Runic Games and using OGRE for rendering, is launching today! Well, strictly speaking the single player game launches today, with an MMO version planned for 2010. Torchlight has been developed in Seattle by a veteran team composed of the designers and leads of projects like Diablo, Diablo II, Mythos, and Fate, so you knew this was going to be good.

Well, Runic were kind enough to send me an advance copy which I played a little yesterday, and boy, is it polished. You can really tell the heritage of this team, it’s immediately fun to play and has really great production values with tons of neat little touches and is something of a visual treat, which considering it was designed to work on low-end hardware too (it has an explicit ‘netbook mode’ for goodness sakes) is no mean feat. A level editor is coming out very soon too – the very same one that Runic used to create all the levels in the game – so that will be a lot of fun to play with too I’m sure.

Obviously we’re very proud that OGRE has been a part of creating this title. Torchlight is available to purchase in about 10 minutes time according to the countown clock, as a digital download from Perfect World, Steam, Direct2Drive and other partners. It’s staggeringly good value, so go get it!

[edit]In case you need more convincing, here’s a nice video review / overview:

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Games

Left 4 Dead 2 trailer leaked, has a bombastic feel

October 24, 2009 – 3:22 pm

I’m not sure if this is the intro or just a trailer, since the first game had an intro which led directly to the starting point of the first chapter, which worked well, which this one clearly doesn’t (unless they start you in absolute mahem which would not make sense). If this is the intro, then I have to say I preferred the intro from the first game, which was a bit more suspense and atmosphere and less chainsaws & explosions, but I suspect it’s just a marketing trailer and hence appealing to the attention-span-challenged is paramount. At least this movie, whatever it is, gives you a better peek at the new characters than we’ve had before.

One of the undersold characteristics of the first game was that the characters were genuinely likeable without ever needing to litter the game with cutscenes (beyond the short intro) – just the little snippets of in-game dialog and the AI behaviour (we play only 2-player most of the time) was enough to let you know what they were about, which is no mean feat: Bill was a gruff veteran who is too stubborn to heal himself, Francis was a surly biker who hates everything and kinda likes killing stuff, Louis was an everyman in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Zoey was a naive horror fan completely out of her depth. That’s just enough character to set the scene and get players happy to be embodying the roles in my view. Francis was my favourite in the first game, closely followed by Louis (“Do I look like one o’them?!!!!”) – in the sequel I’m already liking Coach and Ellis particularly. Looking forward to this!

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Games Music

Woo, we’ve passed 300 tracks

October 20, 2009 – 1:52 pm

I could hug Harmonix. They have lived up to their original promise to providing a large, ever-expanding and varied collection of tracks on Rock Band with the kind of fervour that I think even fans have been surprised by. Apart from a couple of odd cases (Lego Rock Band and Beatles: Rock Band – the former puzzling, the latter due to brand management insistence that The Beatles should be revered as gods and can’t be seen mixing with peasants) Harmonix have avoided fragmenting the content available as much as possible and the result is a lot of people who have no reason to buy another music game; in fact there’s a positive incentive not to. It makes games that don’t try to integrate their content look a bit backward – it’s like being forced to use a portable CD player when you’ve been used to having everything immediately available on your iPod – inconvenient and horribly outdated.

So with the release of the Queen Pack today we passed the 300 track mark on Rock Band (307 in fact), which is both awesome and a little scary. That’s not even a third of the current content available, and it’s likely to go up once the Rock Band Network comes online. Will we ever stop? Well, we never stop stuffing new tracks in our iPods, so I don’t see why we would stop buying Rock Band tracks for the forseeable future either.

In related news, corporalgregg, the best source for full-band HD previews of tracks got his account suspended again (he thinks by Activision because he posted a GH video with Kurt Cobain in it) so has opened another one. Still the best place to go to review new RB tracks you’re thinking of buying IMO, but it’s a shame all that history has been lost. Thanks, big corporate bully.

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Games Personal

Steam’s L4D2 pre-order price shock – it’s reasonable

October 4, 2009 – 2:50 pm

l4d2I like Steam. Sure, you’ve got all the people moaning about not being able to sell on their games afterwards, but I don’t care about that – maybe because I don’t buy that many games compared to some, and I tend to hold on to them regardless more often than not.

It’s the nearest thing to XBox Live on the PC and it does a pretty good job of it. Buying games and keeping them up to date is simple, and it’s indie-friendly with far less of the snooty attitide that seems to be increasing in the console online marketplaces now they’re established.

But one thing holds it back – prices. The simple fact is that it should be cheaper to buy a game online than to buy it in a physical box. To say otherwise is utter madness – after all the boxes have to be manufactured, shipped, placed on shelves and waved through a barcode scanner by a bored teenager on their Saturday job – each stage of which sucks a little more money out of the loop. Even Amazon has to handle physical boxes and add or pay for postage & packaging. The cost of some digital storage and bandwidth pales in comparison, so why can I buy most of the games on Steam for less on Amazon, and even in my local HMV? It’s insanity.

My feeling is that this bizarre situation is forced upon them by publishers, who are simultaneously being leaned on by the physical retailers. This is backed up by the fact that any game that is not by Valve, and is also available in stores, is more expensive on Steam than it is in the shops. I guess if Best Buy threatens not to put your game on the shelf if you let Steam sell it for less, you don’t have much choice but to comply, even if that actually perpetuates the reatiler’s control over the industry, to everyone elses detriment.

Anyway, we were playing Left 4 Dead’s Crash Course expansion (pleasantly free on PC, and a superior experience there anyway) and helpfully a Left 4 Dead 2 pre-order offer popped up after we finished the game. The hooks that were offered were early access to the game and demo, and an exclusive in-game baseball bat. The asking price: £26.99, discounted from the normal price of £29.99. My first reaction was ‘ok, but it’ll be cheaper on Amazon’: except that when I looked, it wasn’t. It was precisely the same price in fact (although in this case Amazon discounted it from £34.99).

So, we pre-ordered on Steam since I’m sure it’s going to be awesome. Still, I think it could be even cheaper given that Valve must get much less than that from Amazon’s sale of the game. Hopefully as digital distribution continues to mature, we’ll see the prices come down. Games are too expensive at retail by a large margin  (particularly on consoles), it’s hampering mainstream adoption, driving the second-hand sales market and piracy, and making the hit-driven mentality of the industry worse. Games need to be cheaper at first purchase, and need to sell for longer outside the first month on sale. Movies make the majority of their money from DVDs, not the box office, but the ‘big’ games are still stuck in a chase for a box-office smash. Services like Steam provide a route to a more sustainable model – and by sustainable I don’t just mean the environmental benefits of not manufacturing more plastic and shuttling it around the world with fossil fuels, I mean that games could last longer there and provide a longer tail return for their developers, all while costing the public less.

Ah well – I guess parity is at least a start. We won’t make much more progress towards sanity until the hands of the big retailers can be slowly prised from the throat of the industry.

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Games Music

10 Queen tracks coming soon to Rock Band

October 2, 2009 – 4:30 pm

queenOh hell yes.

Finally, one of the best British classic rock bands that was sorely missing from Rock Band makes an appearance on 20th October, and how:

  • Another One Bites The Dust
  • Crazy Little Thing Called Love
  • One Vision
  • Fat Bottomed Girls
  • I Want It All
  • I Want To Break Free
  • Killer Queen
  • Somebody To Love
  • Tie Your Mother Down
  • Under Pressure

Now, I could lament the absence of Don’t Stop Me Now, and Princes of the Universe which I would have loved, but really that would be being petulant because this list is pure class. Anyone with any sense has been crying out for Queen in Rock Band for ages, and now we have a duty to shut up and save our voices for some serious (or rather seriously bad) Freddy Mercury impressions. Now, where did I put my sparkly low-cut one-piece? :D

[Edit]Oh, and huge kudos to Harmonix for bringing us some Kula Shaker this week. Feel free to follow in that vein with some Ocean Colour Scene, Happy Mondays, Seahorses and Shed Seven guys :)

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Games

Yet another good XBLA purchase – Defense Grid

September 19, 2009 – 8:10 pm

defencegridI haven’t been a fan of tower defense games very much, I’ve found them a bit dull and repetitive sometimes, and there’s far too many of them. But Defense Grid has very much hooked me in and is proving to be a lot of fun, and at 800 MS points (or about 7 or your Earth pounds) it’s an absolute bargain.

I think one reason I like it is that there’s no tower damage. Your towers are effectively invincible, which may not be realistic, but it does mean that it makes the game entirely about planning, strategy and resource management. Some tower defense games don’t realise that it’s supposed to be a strategy game, and put all sorts of extra mechanics like enemies attacking and destroying towers etc, but this undermines the core planning game mechanic, turning it into a game of how-fast-can-I-repatch-my-crumbling-towers-if-I-even-get-time-to-notice-at-all. In Defense Grid and other TD games with no tower damage, you succeed or fail based on how well you plan – how you set it up, how you augment and supplement your towers as time goes on (which you should have thought out ahead of time), and watching it play out according to your will, or fall apart because of it. There are no random elements – it’s a little like Chess, and I think that’s a good thing.

I also like what they did with the fail conditions. Instead of stopping creatures getting to a map end point, you have to stop then nicking ‘power cores’ from your reactor and making it off the map with them. The catch is that when you kill an enemy carrying one, it floats slowly back to the reactor, and can be picked up by another enemy, creating the danger of a ‘relay race’ where a really tough enemy can make it through your tougher defenses, and even if they can’t make it all the way back, swarms of weaker enemies can potentially relay it if you don’t take them out fast enough, thus requiring a balance between defending against single tough enemies and lots of small enemies, and stopping you from lazily relying on one primary ‘choke point’ – because the ‘relayers’ might not ever have to cross it if another enemy already took all the damage getting through it. It’s a cunning design idea that works really well.

It looks great too, which helps. And the control system works perfectly on a control stick, which I didn’t expect. And the mechanic of being able to redirect enemies via longer paths with sensible tower placement, and how you can screw it up if you force them to breach this,  is good.

Highly recommended even if you’re not usually a tower defense fan, or perhaps especially if you’re not.

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Games Personal

Shadow Complex – more Shadow, less Complex please

August 21, 2009 – 4:13 pm

ShadowComplex2You know how you realise one day that you’re not part of the ‘young generation’ anymore? If you don’t know this, you’re either still in your 20s, or you’re kidding yourself; akin to 45 year olds thinking they can still legitimately be part of the clubbing scene. Well, it manifests itself in a number of ways, some positive – you’re in theory more financially & emotionally stable, and you generally give a lot less of a toss what people think anymore – and some negative – suddenly you can no longer treat your body like dirt and expect it to gleefully rebound. I think it also influences your taste in games.

I increasingly feel out of whack with the popular opinion of the gaming press and enthusiasts in a way that I never did 10-15 years ago. I hate competitive multiplayer while most players on the web think it’s the most important thing ever. Instead, I like social co-op games that I can play just for fun with others. I generally don’t like long single-player games anymore – anything over 15-20 hours tends to be a bit too much hassle these days unless I can incorporate it into my social / co-op play; Fallout 3 is an exception just because it’s so very good and tugs at my nostalgia strings. I don’t feel a need to complete games anymore – simply to play them until I’ve had enough; sometimes that’s the end, sometimes I bail before that due to boredom (Assassin’s Creed, GTA IV). As an antithesis to the sprawling single-player game, I’ve come to love bite-size gaming. Anything I can play and have fun in 15-30 minutes is ideal for fitting in around other things. XBLA excels at providing sustenance in this area; Geometry Wars 2, Peggle, Rez HD, Trials HD, Pac Man CE, they’re all great hop-in hop-out games.

And so finally to the subject matter (perhaps tendency to ramble is also part of the maturation process) – in terms of what I like in an XBLA game, Shadow Complex annoyed me a bit. It looks nice, and the demo was quite fun to play, except for the fact that they shoved a bunch of cutscenes in there which seemed deliberately designed to waste my time. The acting was hammy, the plot entirely derivative if somewhat confusing (switching from odd special-op double-cross to entirely predictable girlfriend-rescue fodder – complete with ‘I’m sorry, your princess girlfriend is in another castle secret base’), and above all, incredibly bloody annoying to sit through. I should have skipped them, but I watched just in case there was anything useful / interesting in them – there wasn’t, and those are minutes that I’ll never get back. Next time, please put a splash screen up at the start reading “Cutscenes are present only for the purposes of satisfying the designer’s own need for clichéd pulp drama, and any resemblance to something you’ll remotely care about is purely coincidental.”. Thanks.

It seems like Shadow Complex wants to blur the lines between an XBLA game and what some might consider a ‘real’ game, and people seem to be lauding it for that, whilst I just want to shake it until its teeth rattle. Being ‘just’ an arcade game is nothing to be ashamed of – you don’t need extensive plots (especially ones that burn time on the qualitative equivalent of Mills and Boon), you just need a good game. Shadow Complex was fairly good fun – and I have to say not as fun as many other XBLA games I’ve played, just flashier in places – but my opinion was not helped by its annoying attempts to legitimise itself as ‘serious’ game content rather than just embracing what it is – an arcade game.

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Games Music

RockBandContent.com going dark

August 20, 2009 – 10:48 am

RockBandContent.com is being shut down because the maintainer hasn’t got time to do it anymore, which is a shame because it’s a really nice site for browsing the increasingly crushing number of Rock Band tracks available and finding videos of people playing the charts before you buy.

However, I found over time that the best videos came from corporalgregg2, who always posts full-band videos which saves a lot of time over the individual instrument videos, as well as being very good so you can actually hear the song with everyone playing on Expert :) So I’m just subscribed to him from now on for reviewing the new songs as they come out. This week is really good again – you can’t complain when you get Blur, Kaiser Chiefs and Foo Fighters in one week.

One thing that’s always irked me about Rock Band 2 is that despite the song database being really good, with album groupings, filtering by artist / genre etc, album art, individual instrument difficulties and all that, it’s missing one vital feature: a ‘Recently Added’ playlist, or at least a sort by release date. When you get quite a big song list, and your friends ask ‘So what’s new recently?’, you’re forced to either remember (never a sound strategy for me), or page through all the songs looking for things that are new. It’s such an obvious feature that I wonder whether they just don’t have access to that information on the DLC files which is why it’s not there – I can’t imagine no-one’s asked for it; our list is ‘only’ 270-odd songs deep and it’s an issue, I can’t imagine what it’s like if you own all 800+ songs.

However, I found a website which helps with that in the comments of the RockBandContent.com shutdown post – MyRockBandSongs.com. It lets you add all the songs you’ve purchased and then sort them by date added. And when you add in bulk, that still sub-sorts by release date, which is perfect. At least I can whip out my mobile and look it up when someone asks, or link friends to it! Here’s my personal hastily constructed page – it may not be 100% complete, I added things in a rush.

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Games hardware

PS3 gets its price cut (at last)

August 19, 2009 – 11:32 am

Finally. After months of speculation and general acknowledgement by all except Sony that the PS3 is too expensive for the market, and that no amount of brand loyalty, Blu-ray cross-marketing or theoretical performance advantages were going to outbalance that inconvenient fact, the inevitable has happened and the PS3 is now £50 cheaper in the UK. That’s actually pretty good; we usually get stiffed on prices in Europe so despite not quite being on par – a $100 cut in the US should mean about a £60 cut at current exchange rates, but they do have to hedge their bets there – it’s a healthy amount and I’m sure will help sales.

The new 120GB Slim is interesting too, especially since it’s priced at the same level as the newly-reduced 80GB ‘fat’ edition (as it will no doubt be known from now on); I’m not quite sure how they expect to clear the old stock when they’re priced the same with little difference except a bundled game. Although, I think aesthetically the old machine, despite being bigger, has a nicer looking design; the new one looks a bit plain, having gotten rid of the shiny looks presumably to save on dusting.

I’m semi-tempted, but right now I already have too many games to play for the time I have available – some of that is Fallout 3′s fault; I play a lot of co-op multiplayer games with my wife & friends so I only spend a couple of hours 1 or 2 nights a week playing ‘traditional’ single player games and F3 has gobbled that up for months – and I haven’t even touched the DLC yet. We’re still playing through new Gears 2 content (Horde rocks), and new Rock Band 2 tracks (we buy something almost every week), so really we’re getting loads of play time for our money these days. On top of that, XBLA fills in the remaining slots – if you don’t own Peggle, you have not lived, Trials HD is great,  and Shadow Complex is out today too. I’m just about finding time to play Dead Space a bit – I’m 8 hours in after a month! There are plenty of games I haven’t played yet, and the end of the year will supply more – L4D2, Brutal Legend, Dragon Age maybe. So, I don’t really have time for another games machine right now – I already have 2 I’m not using (DS & Wii). Maybe if my queue dies down a bit….

I wonder if the emergence of the slim edition might finally push MS to produce a slim 360 soon though. Come on guys, the 360 has remained fat, noisy and hot for almost 4 years now, with some improvements but not really enough. The PS3 slim makes it look like even more of a sweating hulk – time to get that machine’s ass on the treadmill! ;)

[edit]I’m disappointed to read they dropped the Linux support with the slim though. It’s the ‘official’ support they dropped, I don’t know if it will continue to be possible to do it anyway (preferably without firmware hacks), but despite the RSX lockout it was quite a nice idea, and I’m obviously always in favour of giving developers tools to play with rather than keeping people at arms length. I’m not sure what the reasoning was, I wouldn’t have thought it would be that onerous to maintain the status quo. Hmm.

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