tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37657633778884212222024-03-08T17:24:42.304-08:00> blorple cubeReflections of a guy who's just trying to find time to play more video games.Kevin Teichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08434460260302956640noreply@blogger.comBlogger16125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3765763377888421222.post-69425106488256559282011-05-29T08:37:00.000-07:002011-06-23T19:47:10.941-07:00Battlestar Galactica, on Emergent Gameplay for RealBattlestar Galactica is a board game in which three to six people work together to negotiate crises, manage political and military responsibilities, and fight off enemies in space combat. There are two sides: the humans, and their rebelling robotic creations, the Cylons. Each player is dealt a secret loyalty card. Roughly one third of the players are told they are on the Cylon team, either at the beginning of the game or part way through the game. The Cylon players must find ways to sabotage the human players' effort, yet keep from being discovered, lest the human players put them in the Brig and limit the amount of influence they have in the game. Ultimately, a Cylon player can reveal himself as such and gain access to a different set of abilities, but it's beneficial (and much more fun) for the Cylon player to remain hidden, working their evil plans while denying their true loyalty.<br /><br />It's quite normal for the accusations to start flying early in the game, as the players find bits of evidence of sabotage during the course of crisis management, in which players contribute help or sabotage anonymously (though careful deduction can point to the saboteurs). Near the end of the game, if no Cylon players have revealed themselves, it's usually because they have a particularly devious plan up their sleeve, and it becomes even more important for the human players to identify and oust the Cylons. The paranoia rises as the humans near their destination, and victory for their side.<br /><br />So the mechanic for identifying the traitor players is the loyalty deck, which is composed of cards that say whether or not you're a Cylon. Each player gets one card at the beginning of the game, and another one halfway through the game. If a player got a You Are Not a Cylon card at the beginning of the game, but received a You Are a Cylon halfway through, they have to switch sides immediately. Even the players have a certain trepidation about this event. The deck is constructed with enough cards so that about a third of the players will get a You Are a Cylon card.<br /><br />What I really love about the game is the emergent trash talk, accusations, and analysis of player behavior. You draw Politics cards but you say you can't help us negotiate this crisis that requires Politics? You must be a Cylon. You're hoarding your Quorum cards instead of using them to improve Morale? Sounds like a Cylon to me. You just repaired the FTL Control room instead of our damaged Vipers? Toaster loving fracker, to the Airlock with you.<br /><br />One time I screwed up and didn't add the You Are a Cylon cards to the loyalty deck, and everybody got You Are Not a Cylon cards. As the game progressed and we were all honestly playing for the human side, we became frantic as we realized that nobody appeared to do anything bad. The game was going quite well for us, but we became driven to find the traitors, and death threats were made over the smallest suspicious infractions; actions that were heroically helpful became reasons for indictment because of their superlativeness. I gave a few open suggestions of how a Cylon player might try to influence the game for their side, just in case one of the players was confused about what they should do, and for my efforts, the Admiral stripped me of my Presidency in a military coup. Of course, this made me think the Admiral was a Cylon. My girlfriend, who can usually guess which side I'm playing, didn't know what to think.<br /><br />When we won the game and all revealed our You Are Not A Cylon loyalty cards, our fervor turned to sheepishness and shame.<br /><br />It was truly the most interesting game of BSG I've played, even considering that the actual goal of winning was easily obtained (and was pretty boring without any opposition). The inter-player conflict that the game so carefully crafts was pitched to a level that the rules alone could never create (helped along by gin, tonic, and resentment - always a good time). The only problem is that now everybody suspects me of spiking the deck, and I could never get away with it again.<br /><br />But it's the thought that counts.Kevin Teichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08434460260302956640noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3765763377888421222.post-42609089128156652082011-02-09T19:15:00.000-08:002011-02-09T19:33:58.972-08:00Bionic Commando, on rediscovering old gamesAnd, no, I mean the new one, not the old one. I picked up the new Bionic Commando when it first came out, totally psyched to see a modern remake of one of my favorite NES games, only to put it down only a few hours later, frustrated beyond recovery at the difficulty and lack of save points. I was sad and angry at the same time, and turned to easier and more accessible games of the season.<br /><br />A while later, I became obsessed with Demon Souls, reveling in a game that forced me to master it, to love it for all its brutality and lack of comfortable reward schedule. I was happy and relieved to finally put it down, satiated, and turn to more friendly games. But lately, after a few months of World of Warcraft's polished caress, I've been looking for a little abuse.<br /><br />Returning to Bionic Commando, I rediscovered why I initially didn't like it. The controls are just a little too difficult, and the checkpoints way too far apart. Carefully picking my way across the elevated highways strewn across Ascension City, I had a familiar feeling. Spend twenty minutes fighting the controls, die, scream in frustration at lost progress, repeat. This time do it in ten, and make it a little further. Then in five, and a little further. Soon I was swinging through floating minefields with skill, feeling like I really earned it, when I had a flashback to the sound of crows and the glow of red eyed knights... and suddenly got it.<br /><br />Sometimes a game just doesn't arrive in your life at the right time, and it has to go back on the shelf, forgotten, until you're ready for it. But while my co-workers are shooting plasma bolts at space zombies or piloting sackboys around on giant cats, this week I'm happily swinging to my death and drowning by my own bionic arm.Kevin Teichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08434460260302956640noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3765763377888421222.post-40106407149749782582011-02-09T19:13:00.000-08:002011-02-09T19:15:35.729-08:00Cataclysm, on the M's in MMOWorld of Warcraft: Cataclysm has done many interesting things to the 1-15 and 80-85 level single player experience. The moment to moment gameplay has been improved all around; the quests are more interesting, the plot is more exciting, and a lot of the practical elements of travel and questing have been streamlined. However, these changes have affected the Massively Multiplayer part of MMO, and deserve some critical attention.<br /><br />For one thing, it takes a lot more suspension of disbelief to engage the story. There has always been a problem in creating a believable narrative in WoW. As you return to an NPC to collect your reward for killing the bad guy and saving the town, you see another player talking to the same NPC, picking up the quest to do the same thing. It doesn't make sense, but we excuse it because of the nature of the game. There's an acceptance of multiple things happening at the same time, in multiple states of progression, like some kind of collapsed quantum universe.<br /><br />However, with the expanded use of a technology Blizzard call phasing, in which the players are actually placed in different versions of the world according to what they've accomplished, the stories have expanded to make the player even more central. Now, you're not just the one who killed the bad guy and saved the town before moving on to the next self-contained segment of story, but you're a central character in eight hours of gameplay. This is cool for the player, but when you come out of it and realize that everybody else in your race had the same experience, it raises some questions about the point of MMO's in the first place. Maybe you could all have fended off the bandits of Westfall, but could you all have been the one to expose the Twilight Cult? Should an MMO be a single player experience in which you happen to be on a server with a bunch of other players having the same experience, and you just get together for dungeons and raids? Or should an MMO create stories in which players play roles that contribute to a shared storyline?<br /><br />Furthermore, in Cataclysm's attempt to make a stronger single player experience, its tools for doing so have shown lacking. There are times in the Goblin starter zone where the story is advanced by declarative sentences printed in big yellow letters on the screen. Instead of doing what other video games do through cutscenes or in-game animations, Cataclysm delivers with the awkwardness of a writing student who hasn't learned "show don't tell" yet. Cataclysm does have more cutscenes, though. Some are good; I enjoyed the Goblin flight from their exploding island. However, the assault on the Vortex in Vashj'ir, where the player has to sit alone, passively, in a submarine for almost ten minutes listening to NPC's deliver emotes and Saturday-morning-cartoon dialog, is exactly the opposite of what I want in an MMO.<br /><br />All this is bizarre to me, since most of the writing in WoW is a fantastic mix of high fantasy and pop-culture humor, and Blizzard is a master of constructing cutscenes and pacing gameplay. I'm not quite sure what happened, but in an attempt to create a better single player experience, it's grown some sore thumbs that would make me put down the game if there weren't such an excellent MMO behind it. However, as much as these things bug me, I still can't deny how it all still just works. Never once was I left not knowing where to go next or at a loss of things to do. The story is always in service of the gameplay, however polished or awkward it may have to be to do so.<br /><br />On the multiplayer practical side, grouping in dungeons has never been easier in WoW, and yet never more lonely. Gone are the long hours of trying to get a group together, traveling there, summoning people, explaining things, and preparing for the first pull. The new dungeon finder makes it easy for people across servers to find groups and jump into an instance in minutes. However, also gone are the interactions that let you really build connections with people on your own server that you would see over and over again. Because the dungeon finder places you in a group of people you will never see again, there is no incentive to get to know each other or even say hello. It's a little sad to me, though I think it's a net gain, as it's also never been easier to find a guild that fits with your play style and personality. So it's a little harder to meet new people outside of a guild, but it's much easier to run an instance if you only have an hour to play.<br /><br />Where the game still shines for me, though, is the class mechanics. I have spent the majority of my time in Azeroth being a healer, and out of the past five or six years, the mechanics of healing are the best they've ever been, which is to say they used to be pretty boring (though still fun enough for me to play for hundreds of hours). The new priest abilities provide flexibility and tactical decisions while still being fairly simple and not usually requiring more than six hotkeyed spells. While I won't stick around long enough to see end-game raids, the five man healing I've done has been challenging and fun. With the cheap and convenient dual spec system, there is no penalty for being a Holy priest, as anybody who leveled to 60 as Holy can remember.<br /><br />For all my bitching, don't get me wrong; I think that WoW is the best it's ever been, though it's really a very different game than it was when it first launched. While this is to be expected and commended, it raises some questions about the MMO-ness of the world's most popular MMO. At the height of its popularity, there has never been a better time for another game to come in and redefine what MMO's should be. Until then, I'll be doing Gnomer runs with my goblin guild and spending way too much time picking flowers.Kevin Teichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08434460260302956640noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3765763377888421222.post-58468931409289549722010-09-30T17:49:00.000-07:002011-01-05T17:50:55.817-08:00Video Game Day 2010Today I am taking the day off work to play video games. This is not a lazy shirking of my duties, but an attempt to expel that nagging feeling of regret I experience when I see a game on the shelf at work that I was so excited about, read so much about, but never played. I’ve borrowed four games that I have been wanting to play for as much as a year but have not had the chance. I plan to play each game for about an hour and a half, so what’s recorded here are merely first impressions.<br /><br />Darksiders<br /><br />I immediately like the art and cinematic direction; it seems straight out of comics and graphic novels. This is like an animated Image Comics title (I haven’t read comics in over ten years, so that may be way off base). Some of the frames look hand drawn, and I expect to see text bubbles any second.<br /><br />I’m struggling a bit with the combat mechanics. I think I’m doing okay... Until three deaths at the first miniboss. Combat has a different pacing then I’m used to; I’m trying to play as if the game had the even-tempered free flow of Batman: Arkham’s combat, or the measured, slow precision of Demon's Souls.<br /><br />I have much more success when I stop being a wuss and don't hang back and wait for an opening. Instead I powerslide in and start wailing on the guy, and when I see his attack animation, I powerslide back out for a second, and then back in more some more wailing. It’s less interactive, but it feels more bad-ass, and fits better with the game.<br /><br />I’ve reached my first hub-like zone and got a power to unlock one of the areas. This seems much more familiar, and I understand the associations I’ve heard made with Zelda and Metroid. This seems like a game I could really get into.<br /><br />I've played a few of the challenge rooms and have unlocked some of the ability upgrades and a new weapon - a scythe - and can definitely see where this game is going. The combat has clicked with me and seems very intuitive now. I don't really play a lot of combo based fighting games like this, so maybe this is something I should check out some more. <br /><br />Red Faction: Guerrilla<br /><br />I was super excited about this series for a long time, but never played them, for whatever reason. Aside with the grappling hook arm of Bionic Commando, I can’t think of another more exciting game mechanic than destructible buildings with full physics.<br /><br />I’m surprised by how quickly the game gets the story out of way, gives me a sledgehammer, and tells me to go wreck a building. Okay! Toppling buildings feels very good to me; it’s just complex enough that I have to think about destroying supporting beams and avoid being hit by the building as it falls, but I can still just go in there, start swinging, and have fun.<br /><br />Shooting is very easy, and unexciting. It's almost a matter of pointing and clicking, and lacks punch to the experience. Demolition is much more fun, so much so that I regret having to slow down and shoot guys. Throwing charges at them and laying traps for their vehicles is a lot more fun, and I forget I even have a gun. There’s an ambush mission that I failed a few times until I used explosives to drop a bridge on the invading convoy. Awesome.<br /><br />This was a solid two hours of fun. I finished the first zone. There were different kinds of missions with just enough variation to keep me interested, but never too overwhelming. I would like to play some multiplayer matches with friends or at a LAN party; flanking the enemy by bashing in the rear of their building and tossing in a few charges to flush them out is priceless.<br /><br />Infamous<br /><br />Pressing start was awesome! What a way to begin a game. I won’t spoil it for you if you haven’t seen it. That moment is enough to get me excited about the unfolding narrative and dive right in.<br /><br />After a slower moving game like Red Faction, this game feels really fast. The player moves and turns much faster, and the standard electronic bolt shot pops right off, with a high firing rate. I spend more than a few minutes running around and blasting cars, which feels very satisfactory. <br /><br />I’m not as annoyed by the moral choice moments that stop the game and ask you to make a decision. It gives me a chance to stop and think about how to role play my character, or just what reactions I want to see from the NPC’s. There’s a scene where I’m helping a dude try to escape across a bridge that really builds some tension and makes me feel like I’m caught up in an event. It seems like both types of pacing are represented.<br /><br />Uncharted 2<br /><br />I’ve gone through my hour and a half without stopping to write. I guess that speaks to the pacing and flow of this game. If you had asked me before if I wanted to play through an interactive Indiana Jones video game, I would’ve said, “no,” and instead pulled out my copy of Shadow of the Colossus. But I really like the story of Uncharted 2 despite that I don’t think I should. I think this is a sign of craft over genre winning me over.<br /><br />It also has some gamey elements. I was captured about ten times in the beginning of the level where I had to sneak past some palace guards; that was annoying and felt somewhat like I was playing a plat former, trying to find the exactly correct path through a maze.<br /><br />It doesn't seem very open to different playstyles, but small increments of progression are very rewarding with all the in-game dialog, camera angles, and art, so the challenge of figuring out what they want me to do doesn't ever become annoying.<br /><br />The next level has become a cover-based firefight, and this is where I start to lose interest. I haven’t given the game enough time to discover the right rhythm of combat, like how much I can run-and-gun and how much I have to sit and cover and take pot shots. A few times I was flanked and felt like guys were spawning in behind me. But throughout, I can tell there is a lot of attention to creating a very particular experience, and I really appreciate that in a game. I think if this game were more to my esthetic liking, I’d be all over it, but for everything it does well, it doesn’t have the mechanics gimmicks to draw me in (which totally says more about me than the game).<br /><br /><br />This has been Video Game Day 2010.Kevin Teichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08434460260302956640noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3765763377888421222.post-52896356442136240902010-08-12T07:54:00.001-07:002010-09-15T19:29:11.517-07:00Board Gaming on the iPadI'm primarily a video gamer, but I play my share of board games. I would rather play Settlers with than talk to people at parties, I have stress dreams about Arkham Horror, and I've recently started teaching and running board games at a local yearly convention, Templecon. While friends and co-workers often provide enough of an outlet for board gaming, I often find myself wanting to have a similar experience in a more solitaire or smaller scale.<br /><br />Apple marketed the iPad as being a magical, revolutionary device. While most people will be a little critical of that statement, I can wholeheartedly agree that it has opened up a new form of board gaming. With several implementations of popular board games, offering simpler set up and single player modes for a few of my favorites, the iPad has the potential to at least be a small revolution in board gaming.<br /><br />SmallWorld is a great, fun game that is generally accessible and appealing to new gamers, yet deep enough to have legs for veterans. But with over a hundred tiles and tokens to maintain, it can be a little unwieldily. Anybody ever ask you if you want to play a quick game of SmallWorld? It's not really possible. While experienced players can complete a game in 20 or 30 minutes, the setup, teardown, and tile pushing during turns extends that a significant amount. The iPad version, while limited to two player games only, makes a strong case for digital board gaming. Setup is instant, stacks of tiles are a breeze to manipulate, and the medium suits the game perfectly because SmallWorld doesn't have cards, and therefore doesn't require closed hands. The device can sit in between two players and emulate all the good parts of the real world experience. The art really shines on the iPad, and the display's high resolution faithfully represents the board and pieces. <br /><br />Settlers of Catan for the iPhone and iPad fares less well. The problem here is that hands are secret, so there's a lot of dialog boxes like, "please hand over to player 2." When it comes time to trade resources, each trade requires multiple handing back and forth of the device. However, as a solo experience against AI, it's great; I can finally play Catan when I want, where I want, and with a bunch of dumbass opponents who I can usually beat. The creators did a good job with this version, but if they could solve the problem of hidden hands, maybe like how Scrabble has done by allowing iPhones and iPods to act as peripherals to view your tiles privately, this would be a fantastic iPad game. The same developers are working on an iPad version, so we'll see.<br /><br />I picked up the tile-placing game Ingenious on the iPhone without having played it in board format, and after seeing the digital version, I don't think I ever want to. The game requires tactics that live up to its name, but I can only imagine that scoring by hand is Infuriating. Here's an example of computers doing what they do best; calculating numbers. I love the game, but I would never want to have to count all the points each player is getting every turn. There are a few other Reiner Knizia card games out there which fare as well.<br /><br />I've also been logging a lot of time in the solitaire version of Carcassone for the iPhone, which has the player placing gorgeously rendered tiles to build roads and castles in a particular order. The multiplayer version is as good. At some point in every game, though, I just wish the screen were bigger; as the game progresses, the board's play space only gets larger, and a device like the iPad can only be surpassed by one with a larger screen. Please port this to the iPad! Perhaps Apple can start thinking about a table-sized device like Microsoft's?<br /><br />As much disdain as you might have for the explosion of casual games on the iPhone and iPad platform, there are some really great ports of board games coming out, made by developers with obvious love for the games. If anybody knows of any others, please share! Until then, I'm waiting patiently for an iPad version of Arkham Horror.Kevin Teichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08434460260302956640noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3765763377888421222.post-88251601409327823432010-08-12T07:12:00.000-07:002010-09-15T19:33:33.763-07:00PC GamingI've been a Mac user since 1990. I saw SimCity in a store, and was captivated by the colors, the menu system, and the iconography. I demanded that the next family computer be a Macintosh LC. I bought a Mac Classic with my own money on which to run a BBS. In the late 90's I installed MkLinux on a Powertower 180. Gaming without a discrete graphics card, BBS server on an all-in-one, and Linux on a closed platform; for a very long time I have been using the right platform for the wrong reasons. Ironically, the advent of Steam for Mac finally inspired me to build a gaming PC.<br /><br />My current computer is an iMac from 2007. It has a huge, beautiful 24" screen that looks just as good as the day it arrived. I originally bought it to placate my World of Warcraft gaming, but soon after gave up the game. Since then it's been a fantastic machine for all that other stuff that you use computers for, like spreadsheets and Flash games. And when Steam came out, I thought I'd finally get to play some real games on it. I downloaded Portal (which I had played years earlier on Xbox, don't worry), booted it up... and found out that my video card was too old. What do iMac owners do when faced with such a problem? They have to buy brand new computers.<br /><br />That's just wrong, right? I want a gaming computer, but one that I can plug into my TV and use from the couch. After looking at new Mac prices, considering the underpowered 2010 Mini, and doing some research, I found that I can build a machine that will play everything I wanted to play on the PC right now for $800, while a comparable Mac would cost twice as much or require me to sit at a desk. Apple just isn't interested in making a gaming computer for me. <br /><br />What Steam for Mac really did was make me realize how much I was missing by not being able to play PC games, and by offering me some of that, it made me want the whole thing. So come this fall, probably with the release of Cataclysm (which I just want to check out, just a little, I promise), I will be building a gaming PC.Kevin Teichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08434460260302956640noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3765763377888421222.post-21724738180400085422010-08-12T07:08:00.001-07:002010-09-15T19:46:32.046-07:00Batman Arkham AsylumI picked up a copy of Batman: Arkham Asylum based solely on reviews, despite having no interest in the subject matter. The podcast Gamers With Jobs, whose tastes generally fall in line with mine, raved about it when it came out, but it took the accolades of co-workers before I gave it a chance. I mainly picked it up because it was cheap and reportedly had a fantastic melee fighting system, but before I knew it I was totally engrossed.<br /><br />Engrossed--despite the subject matter. I don't really like the old DC Golden Age treatment; I think the heroes and villains have goofy names and look dumb, but I think the game walks a good line by making Batman and Joker interesting characters. But the animation and character art of Batman totally sold me. I still find myself using Batman's door opening animation on the bathroom door at work, pulling it open as I whip my cape around and hurl myself through the doorway. I set myself up to only like only the combat mechanics, but ended up loving the character treatments and animation.<br /><br />I honestly didn't really get the game at first. I played an hour or two and was confused by the scope. I wasn't sure where the game was going to take me and how big or small it would be. Then I picked it up when I was home with a cold and played it for three days straight. Batman has exactly what I like about Zelda and Metroid games: overworlds and repeated trips through content that is opened up with new items. It has a perfect mix of size and variability that rewards exploration, yet I could pick up the game in the middle and instantly know where to go and what to do next with solid level design and a good map system. It's rare for a game to leave that kind of impression on me, especially when I wasn't really looking for it.<br /><br />In fact, I kind of hope that the new Zelda learns a little bit from Batman. I really appreciated that the combat and item use mechanics in Batman built up evenly through the entire game, and that all boss battles up to the final one used skills you had learned throughout the game. It never switched things up and introduced a new mini game you just had to pound through to kill a boss; every boss battle had me feeling prepared and confident, yet still challenged me and left me feeling accomplished. The combat permeated the entire game, and it was simple, elegant, deep, and satisfying, and reminded me that a game franchise doesn't have to break new ground to be just right.Kevin Teichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08434460260302956640noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3765763377888421222.post-87132840242414710332010-04-24T14:53:00.000-07:002010-04-24T14:55:30.536-07:00Mass Effect 2Due to my spotty gaming history and never having owned a Playstation 2 or Xbox in their heyday, there are few current gaming franchises to which I feel very connected in that I have expectations of their sequels. However, in my job as a game developer, the first Mass Effect was my life for almost two years, so it was excitement and trepidation that I sat down to play Mass Effect 2. This article is about my impressions of how the game has changed in this sequel.<br /><br />The biggest problem of making improvements to a game like Mass Effect 1 is that they bring to light all the shortcomings of the first game. For all its flaws, ME1 was a triumphant lovechild of action and story. ME2 is that child all grown up. In story, gameplay, and characters, ME2 does almost everything better than the first go around. <br /><br />As a whole, the story of ME2 simply comes together better and makes more sense than the first. It’s more immersive, paced better, and makes a better game. In ME1 you're told to rush out and save the galaxy, but are presented with seemingly inconsequential side quests. While we all know this is standard RPG fare, it lessens the urgency of your main objective; enjoying the game content is in opposition of the fiction of the story. In ME2, the side quests are reasonable to pursue because the main fiction is that you're on a suicide mission, and any new crew members and ship upgrades increase your survivability. Not only that, but by making your crew members loyal to you by helping them out with personal issues, they contribute to your overall success, and present you with additional abilities. At a few points, characters even argue over whether you should do more side quests to build up your forces or rush into the final battle. Rather than ask the player to accept the necessities of the game mechanics, it turns them into an interesting conflict and choice. The game would not have been less fun without these touches, but they do much to make the story and game structure support each other.<br /><br />The mechanics of character interactions in a BioWare game, while old hat to old school gamers, can be a bit tricky to grasp to newcomers. It’s not clear when new conversation options will become available. Yeoman Chambers addresses this problem. She is your in-game notification system that there is interesting NPC content to be had. As we now can't imagine playing an RPG without a journal that keeps tracks of our current quests and where we should go next, soon we won't accept anything less than our own personal Yeoman Chambers telling us which NPC's have new conversation options. I missed a lot of the teammate interaction in the first game simply because I didn't know when I should go try talking to them again, but I feel like I hit them all in ME 2, thanks to the Yeoman.<br /><br />The shooting mechanics are greatly improved over ME1. The cover system works a lot better, and shooting areas are provide enough cover to make using it fun. Weapon selection is simplified, and there's no need to enter an inventory screen to switch ammunition types. I still felt a few rough spots. I found myself popping out of cover unintentionally, and playing a infiltrator, I used my sniper rifle often, and found myself stuck in or unable to get into zoomed mode after using the powers menu. This inconsistent behavior made the combat get in the way just a tad too often. Otherwise, the combat was pleasant, to the point of feeling too easy; I played on veteran and hardly ever had any trouble. Similarly, I never felt like I had to use squad commands to give me an edge in combat, with a single exception (the final battle when you pick up Grunt). On one hand, that could be a testament to good AI, but on the other hand, it never left me with the feeling that my squad just barely survived. All in all, my complaints are few and minor, and what I take away from the game are memories of good action sequences and some interesting combat scenarios. <br /><br />Side missions feel a lot better in this version. They almost all have some individuality and relate strongly to the plot. They also almost always have battle situations, so if you're ever bored of talking to people, just go scan planets until you find a side mission. They are good breaks from the plot and usually digestible in short gaming sessions. And often, these side missions will eventually result in you getting an email regarding the outcome of the missions, which gives them a nice bit of resonance. <br /><br />The game's lore is expanded from the first game. I found the story of the krogan genophage to be some of the most interesting and compelling writing of the game, and brought the other races into a different light, challenging me to make tough choices about where to put my support. Beyond just trying to guess which choice would take me down the Renegade or Paragon path I thought I wanted to follow, ME2 made me think about how I wanted to affect the world and progress the story. On the other hand, while we find out more about the previously mysterious and faceless bad guy geth race, it only serves to make them a more familiar science fiction archetype. The universe of Mass Effect is getting wider and deeper and continues to be comfortably familiar as well as surprising at times.<br /><br />Shepard feels much more like a leader and commander in this game. In ME1, and in many other games that put the player in a role of leadership, I never really felt like a commander. Sure, I got to pick my squad and make some inspiring speeches, but I never felt like the character deserved the role the game told me was mine to play. The decisions Shepard has to make in the sequel are a lot tougher, and challenge the player to think like a leader. Some times it seems like there are no right answers to avoid crew casualties (though I guess there actually are, and I just didn’t find them). He isn’t just a player avatar that you can make good or bad by choosing the right dialog options; he is a character that you have to actually have to become, and in doing so, build a level of empathy that is absent in too many games.<br /><br />And yet, there are problems. While ME2 omits long Mako safaris across barren planets, there is the planet scanning mini-game. There is an awkward and contrived plot device near the end of the game that exists solely to allow a dramatic confrontation. There are side quests that feel like they got tacked on at the end of the project. But whatever, they’ll probably fix them all in the next game.<br /><br />All in all, ME2 is a wild success, not just compared to other games, but compared to itself in ME1.Kevin Teichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08434460260302956640noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3765763377888421222.post-32013349554892592872010-04-21T20:35:00.001-07:002010-04-21T20:35:40.753-07:00Mass Effect 2, on the best mini-game everI’m finishing two articles on Mass Effect 2, and this little item didn’t fit into either, but I don’t want to let it die. It’s about the planet scanning mini-game.<br /><br />To acquire mineral resources that purchase upgrades, you need to find planets and scan them to find mineral deposits. Each planet has, maybe, twenty or more deposits to find. The interface for this has you use a thumbstick to move a reticle over a spherical model, like a cursor with a radius. When you hold down one trigger, the reticle moves slower, painfully slower, but you are able to detect deposits. A display on the right tells you if you’ve detected any resources and to what degree; you can find deposits with a range of amounts of one or more elements. When you’ve found a node, you can make smaller adjustments to find the local maximum, honing in on the greatest payout. When you’re ready, you hit the other trigger to fire a probe that magically scoops up your loot.<br /><br />Yeah, we all hated it. It is simply a time filler. That said, the implementation is incredibly pleasing; when you hit a deposit, you receive graphical, physical, and audible feedback that indicate the presence and amount of minerals. For each of the four different mineral types, there is a distinctively different type of vibration and sound. The rumble feedback varies from a slow, pulsing throb, to a fast jackhammer. The graphical display is a series of squiggly lines, like an EEG, that spike at different points according to what mineral you’ve found. Maximizing your take involves moving the scanning reticle very small distances to make the line the biggest and the vibration the strongest. It’s captivating.<br /><br />Yet, it goes over the top; I'm not sure why the screen shakes and there's an explosive shooting sound when a probe is launched, as if I'm firing a torpedo from a submarine instead of the most advance spaceship in the galaxy. And really, don't I have a science officer? Should I really be spending my time scanning for minerals? Furthermore, the game doesn’t let you know when you have ‘enough’. I ended the game with over 100,000 units in three categories of minerals; even after buying every upgrade I kept going as I thought there might be something more to do with them. I wish Yeoman Chambers would've leaned over and been, like, "Hey Shepard, I think you may have a problem. Put down the probes."<br /><br />It’s a charming, annoying, captivating, and completely interesting little piece of this massive game. For what could’ve been a forgettable mini-game, with the amount of player feedback it gives, it’s the most polished and pleasing mini-game ever, and I’m still not sure if I love it or hate it.Kevin Teichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08434460260302956640noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3765763377888421222.post-74047458766474511032010-01-23T11:02:00.000-08:002010-01-23T11:10:16.692-08:00Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, on making horror scary againSilent Hill: Shattered Memories is the game I've wanted to make ever since I played my first survival horror game and was left excited by the idea but utterly let down by the implementation. Sure, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Fatal Frame were scarier than any games I've ever played, but they all boiled down to combat, at which point they elicited the same emotions as the FPS games to which I was more accustomed. There was a comfort zone there, even if I was so frustrated by the experience that I threw down the controller and never played the game again (which happened with pretty much all survival horror games I played before RE 4 on the Wii), and that comfort zone drew me out of fear and dread that the games created. I wanted to see a game that was different, that turned into gameplay the main thing that comes into my mind when I think of "survival" and "horror": running like hell.<br /><br />I love the concept of this game. Flashlights, ghosts, psychological elements that change the game according to your answers, and "combat" that consists only of running away from enemies. And Silent Hill to boot! It should be perfect. But as close as SH:SM gets to my ideal, it fails in such a major way that the game is only of academic interest to me at this point. Its fatal flaw is that it is completely modal: you are either safely exploring, or running from danger, and the transition is clearly delineated in cutscenes. You are never in any danger while exploring, and there is no risk of attack. As creepy as the environments are, there is absolutely no danger, and therefore no scariness. <br /><br />I've long wondered how to make a game about running away from enemies, and SH:SM is as good as I could have imagined. First, to anybody who plays this game, I have one piece of advice: when it's time to run away, turn off your flashlight. If you don't, you will attract so many enemies that the running sequences become unbearable (the first version of this article was a scathing condemnation of this mode). However, if you turn it off, and use the couple of neat game mechanics intelligently -- knocking over objects behind you to impede pursuers, hiding in cupboards, and letting your attackers catch up to you and grab you just in time for you to throw them off into walls -- it's not too bad. I'm sure there are many people who will reject this type of gameplay outright, but I think it deserves a lot of credit for its efforts.<br /><br />Despite the problems I have with the modality of the game, although I'm only five hours in, I've been excited by the psychological profiling elements, the gimmicky but cool puzzles, and just the overall ambiance of the game. This is breath of fresh air and a great new direction for the franchise, and I really hope they get the change to really nail it in a sequel.Kevin Teichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08434460260302956640noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3765763377888421222.post-55241001493760656362010-01-23T10:44:00.000-08:002010-01-23T10:45:43.319-08:00Demon's Souls, on difficultyDemon's Souls has a multiplayer gameplay mechanic that lets a dead player join a live player's game to either help or hurt them. In the helping case, you use a blue sigil to offer yourself to be summoned by another player, and the two of you can play a level or boss cooperatively. In the hurting case, you use a red sigil to invade another player's world; the game finds somebody of a suitably close level, lets them know you're invading, and the hunt is on. Going to another player's world to help takes you there as a Phantom, while invading takes you there as a Black Phantom. If you successfully kill a boss while a Phantom in another person's world, you regain your life. If you kill the player you're invading as a Black Phantom, you also regain your life (if you don't, you lose a level).<br /><br />So I was at the last level in the Tower of Latria. I had just killed the previous boss and died on the way to the last boss, so I figured I'd help another player defeat the boss I had just killed to regain my life and have a better chance at the next boss. I ran back to the area just outside the boss's door and threw down my blue sigil. After a minute, the game gave me the message that I was being summoned to another player's world, but it was as a Black Phantom, not a regular one. Thinking I had encountered some weird bug, I was surprised to see the screen fade into a cutscene depicting a magician summoning a Black Phantom, and then adoring its head with its own headscarf, before dying and turning black. Then the game faded back in... and I found that I was the Black Phantom that was just summoned. I was the final boss of this world. Sure enough, in a few minutes I heard the sounds of the last guardian on the stairwell outside die, and a player rushed into the room. I saw a boss health bar pop up on the bottom of the screen with the name of the world boss, but it was linked to my own health bar. I defeated the player with the help of some magic missiles undoubtedly bestowed upon me by my now-blackened summoner and benefactor, and a message congratulating me for killing a hero, as I regained my life.<br /><br />Demon's Souls is a hard game. Every review seems to relish this point, but it's interesting to examine why it's a hard game, or more precisely, why everybody thinks it's so hard. The action-RPG combat gameplay is challenging; each enemy offers a different method of attack that must be analyzed and countered. There's no rushing in to a group and mashing the attack button. When you first meet an enemy, it can generally kill you in one to three hits, depending on your armor and what kind of attacks it has, so there's a sense of urgency to learn the enemy's attacks as quickly as possible. The threat of unknown imminent death is challenging.<br /><br />But there's also a sense that death has a penalty. The main currency in the game for buying weapons, upgrading them, and raising stats, is the same: souls that you earn by defeating enemies. So you can be making your way through a level, earning souls and doing well, when you slip up and don't block just so, and you die and lose all your progress. That is, unless you can make your way back to the same point and reclaim your body, Diablo-style. But only your last corpse counts, so if you die on the way to reclaim that corpse that has five thousand souls on it, those souls are gone for good. The threat of losing your stuff is challenging.<br /><br />But the death penalty is not really hard to avoid; souls are easily invested in levels, repair bills, and consumables. If you're just short of a stat increase and don't want to risk losing it by entering a new zone, you can easily return to an old zone and farm for a bit to make up the deficit. It's not difficult to avoid the death penalty with some forethought. Once you have 0 souls earned -- that is, you've spent them all -- there's really no risk of jumping into a new zone.<br /><br />And really, while the combat action gameplay are well-balanced and elegant, it's nothing new; there's blocking, attacking, countering, and dodging, and as long as you're good at recognizing animations, you can predict them well enough. I'm sure any skilled or experienced gamer can figure out this stuff pretty quickly, especially with a little experience.<br /><br />So what's the big deal?<br /><br />The challenge is that the game demands mastery in order to progress. Most games you can kind of eke your way through; your first run through a level leaves with not enough health packs for the boss, so you restart a save and redo it, and then you have a good three shots at the boss, and you're through. Demon's Souls difficulty is due to a lack of save points. It's also a beautifully bleak world; there are no bright colors, no balanced gamuts, and not even any music. It's dark and scary and lonely. Progression towards bosses becomes a trial in and of itself. You might have to slog through hordes of enemies just to get a chance at a boss, and the first couple times you face one, it will probably kill you within seconds. We've gotten used to games being 'fair' and giving us save points right before a boss, but Demon's Souls does no such thing; you must master a level simply out of the necessity of getting through it in an efficient amount of time to have a chance at a boss.<br /><br />Demon's Souls is challenging because it requires you to work. You can't play this game drunk, and you're not going to enjoy losing yourself in it after a long day at work. I've found myself taking weeks off this game to play more fun and regularly rewarding games like Borderlands, Dragon Age, and even Silent Hill: Shattered Dreams. But like a job undone, Demon's Souls keeps pulling me back. I'm fine with giving up on games and not finishing them because they're too hard or not fun enough. But even though Demon's Souls has been both things at various times, I feel the effort I've invested in the game demands justification. I'm driven to finish it, and that's making it a challenging game to put down.Kevin Teichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08434460260302956640noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3765763377888421222.post-23803365767398894412009-11-15T10:55:00.000-08:002009-12-02T16:58:05.410-08:00Demon's Souls, on the fun of falling into pits<span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:Times;font-size:medium;"><div style="margin-top: 6px; margin-right: 6px; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-left: 6px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; min-height: 1100px; counter-reset: __goog_page__ 0; line-height: normal; "><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; ">I'm making my way down Stonefang Tunnel. I've been dealing with these little glowing balls strewn throughout the level that explode when you get too close. I discovered this by walking too close to one; as it began to expand and get brighter, I instinctively rolled backwards right as it exploded, taking most of my health. As the tunnel went from a wide mining cart passage to a cramped tunnel that looks more like it was burrowed by some worm, the fireballs have been appearing behind switchback turns, prompting many panicked runs for cover. So I'm being careful, inching along, barely able to see more than ten feet ahead anyways. Out of the gloom, the spidery letters of a message left by another player in a different world emerge; its presence reminds me that I'm not the only one going down this tunnel somewhere in another world, but that I'm still utterly alone in this world. The message warns me of an ambush up ahead. A few steps later I see a bloodstain on the ground; activating it, I see a ghostly figure of a previous explorer, looking much like me with shield and dagger, hesitantly taking a few steps forward, swinging at the empty air, then thrown backwards backwards by a massive force and crumpling to the ground. The image fades away and I'm sure I'm about to die. Inching forwards, shield raised, leaning forwards on the couch as if I could see deeper into my TV. I don't realize the wall opened up into a side chamber on my left, and hear the grunt of a misshapen miner demon just in time to see his pickaxe come at me. I'm facing the wrong way so my shield doesn't take the hit, and it rocks me backwards, stunning me, giving him enough time to make the second strike... and for the millionth time, I've died.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; "><br /></div>I really like Demon's Souls. After Fallout 3, Fable 2, and Brutal Legend, it's pleasantly not open-world, there's no journal to keep checking, there are no mini-games to master, and there's no world travel to get to the action. You just choose your level, get through it, and kill the boss. It's way hard, but not unapproachably so. None of the mechanics are individually punishing; as long as you're careful, approach enemies with tactics instead of rushing in, and keep an eye out for the numerous ways to fall to your death, you can make it through a level on your first try. The game does a good job of making sure you know that if you die, it's your fault, which is exactly the kind of challenge I like. However, death means you're back to the beginning; there are no save points, and some of the levels are long.<div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; "><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; "><br /></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; ">Dying puts you in Soul Form, in which you have diminished max health, but a little bit higher damage and stealth, and you kinda glow a little, though not nearly enough to keep you from walking into a hole. When you beat a boss, you return to life. So you'll generally be alive for your first run in a level, and then spend the rest of the time dead, until you beat its boss. It's a weird dynamic, as being alive is more of a trade-off than an obvious benefit, though it has an effect on your multiplayer options. Having the extra health while alive is a nice perk, but you know you're going to die before the next boss fight, so it's almost a relief when some dude jumps out at you and one-shots you... or when you walk into a pit you didn't see because it's too dark.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; "><br /></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; ">The multiplayer elements are simple but contribute nicely to the game. Players can leave messages that other players can see, using a list of preset words and phrases. There's a shortcut down to a boss that requires dropping off a series of ledges at exactly the right place. Because it's so dark, it's very difficult to see the right place to drop off. But by leaving messages, I marked my own path down as well as showing the way for others. You also see ghostly images of other players, so I could sometimes see other players using the trail I marked. Messages can also warn you of ambush, tell you not to waste your time pursuing a dead end, tell you to use certain tactics or equipment on an enemy, or warn you of the pit right in front of you. Players can recommend others' messages, giving the author a health boost. It's a communal walkthrough that fully fits into the game's fiction.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; "><br /></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; ">There's more direct co-op play, too. In Soul Form, you can use an item at certain points in levels and allow yourself to be summoned to another player's world to help kill a boss. If you're the one that's alive, you can summon other people who have offered themselves. Bosses have higher health, but if you beat somebody's else's boss in Soul Form, you come back alive and get a share of the souls that dropped, so it's a good way to get some extra cash and your life back. It's also a nice break from beating your head against a level to jump into a quick boss kill run on somebody else's server.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; "><br /></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; ">I'm still collecting thoughts on the implementation of difficulty and how it affects gameplay, so more on that later, but I definitely enjoy that it's a hard game. For me, it's hit a perfect balance of being challenging but also rewarding my efforts enough to keep me playing it almost exclusively. I'll be falling into pits for a bit longer, while Borderlands sits in my Amazon queue, unpurchased.</div><div><br /></div></div></div></span>Kevin Teichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08434460260302956640noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3765763377888421222.post-25095390168391397312009-10-28T20:51:00.000-07:002009-10-28T20:53:09.896-07:00Brutal Legend, on expectations and let downsOne of the best parts of Brutal Legend, apart from the cut-scenes, is driving around. The open world environment has just the right mix of detail and size; you don't drive around forever trying to find a point of interest, but nothing feels too cluttered together. Considering all the things in the world you need to discover for completion, you'll find yourself getting out of your car and doing something every minute or so, at the most; no five minute long treks where you rubber-band down the trigger and go make a drink. However, as rewarding as exploration is, when you die, you respawn at last your last checkpoint, which, because you had so much fun exploring, could be halfway across the world. The environment doesn't do a very good job of warning you environment hazards; jumping off a cliff may lead to a totally sweet jump or sudden death. A minimap might help with this, since they often demark the active gameplay zone, but there's no minimap. So be careful there.<br /><br />The RTS aspect of the game becomes a lot more central in the second half, where you basically go from stage battle to stage battle, doing side quests in between to upgrade your abilites (which, while usable and useful in stage battles, are probably not that important if you're actually good at commanding your troops). The game does a good job of introducing you to the practical details of RTS gameplay in an incremental manner; one battle you're just directing troops, the next you learn about upgrades, the next you learn about the important of structures, etc. However, there's a lot of details there, and around my fourth stage battle, I forgot how to upgrade the tech level of your troops.<br /><br />Stage battles are pretty cool to watch. The units have a ton of style; too much, really, as it's hard to tell what kind of units an enemy is using against you. The seven foot tall dude who barfs rats? Short-range infantry killer. The pram that launches babies at you? Long range infantry. If you complete the mission or die and have to restart, you'll get info about the units added to your tour book, but they definitely chose form over function on this one. The visuals are great, mostly because the units and battlefields are just so metal, but there's not enough useful info for you.<br /><br />It's incredibly hard to split your units into squads and send them in different directions, since a command affects 'everybody in the range of your voice', whatever that is, and one misstep would ruin everything by giving the same command to all squads. I had to change my tactics for the limitation of not being able to efficiently split and direct my troops, like, send my main force out to the front lines so I can make some dudes and send them to guard a merch booth, which was dangerous because I wasn't ready to go to the front line, but I wouldn't be able to split my squads unless there was sufficient distance between them. There is a method for selecting a subgroup, but it just doesn't quite work in the heat of battle.<br /><br />The pacing is unfortunate. You spend the first quarter of the game doing solo stuff, advancing the plot. Then the next quarter is stage battles against the first evil faction. Then the next quarter is stage battles against the second evil faction. By this time you've seen elements of the third faction around the world, so you expect there to be a fourth quarter of stage battles against them, but after the last battle against the second faction, there's a single mini-battle against the third faction, and then a boss fight and game over. Furthermore, the penultimate stage battle is much more grueling than the final one, so the last battle is just not rewarding at all. A co-worker last week wrote in his gmail status line that he "accidentally beat Brutal Lenged", so I was prepared for an abrupt ending, but even so, it was kind of surprising. After beating the final boss, I spent another hour exploring the world and doing some completion stuff, but then I was just done with it.<br /><br />It's too bad. The game is just full of fantastic art and style, top notch writing and voice acting, and the balls to do something really different, but in the end, the disappointment I feel due to failed expectations will last longer than the joy of the game's triumphs. Like a relationship gone bad, I want to cling to the great parts and forget that it was ultimately a let down. I want to rave about the game more than complain about it, but I feel jilted, and in video games, like in love, it's worse to have high expectations dashed than have low expectations surpassed.Kevin Teichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08434460260302956640noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3765763377888421222.post-82865384427403543912009-10-21T20:58:00.000-07:002009-10-21T20:59:42.151-07:00Dead Space Extraction, no reallyAt work, we have My Game is Better Than Your Game, in which people nominate games for the company to buy, add to the library, and generally spend all week playing during lunch time until we get the next one. Everybody votes on the nominees and majority wins, so it's often a game that is super popular, but sometimes it's something that is kind of weird and about which everybody is curious but on which nobody wants to spend money without checking out first. So last week, we got Dead Space Extraction.<br /><br />I actually really liked Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, which follows the same kind of formula: take an existing franchise and make a prequel or midquel (I just made that word up, but it's true, right?) that is heavily story-based and involves pointing a Wiimote at the screen and slamming the B trigger. While the on-rail shooter genre deserves criticism, I think they have their place. For one thing, have you ever watched somebody play a game really carefully, exhaustively exploring every area, and you just sit there like, "dude c'mon, blow some shit up already?" This is often what spending lunch hour watching a QA tester play a game is like. You can't do that in an on-rails shooter.<br /><br />The production quality of Dead Space Extraction is pretty high. It's a really good looking game for the Wii, though that may be because it's really, really dark. It's definitely Dead Space; the assets are right out of the original, just blurrier. The voice acting is pretty good, though in the five missions I saw, there's too much of it. You spend a lot of time watching what are basically cutscenes and listening to dialog, with some shooting necromorphs in between. The shooting captures the feel of the original Dead Space fairly well; you can't just blast everything, and you have to aim and wait for clean shots. There's even a stasis shot that freezes enemies for a short while, so it's a common tactic to freeze one enemy, take out another, then return to the first. Overall, it feels like the game succeeded in doing what it set out to do.<br /><br />Using the line gun to mow the limbs off of multiple enemies is much more pleasing in Extraction than the original game. This is where the Wiimote interface shines. Turning the Wiimote sideways to activate alternate fire is something I've been waiting for every since I heard this game was in the making. For everybody who turned their hands sideways to blow zombies away gangsta style in Chronicles, this game is for you. ... Okay, was it just me who did that in Chronicles? Never mind.<br /><br />There is co-op here, though it's unapologetically fictionless. Instead of one reticle representing your character's aim, there are two, with two sets of weapons. You share the same health and weapons, though you have different ammo counts, so there's either some negotiation for resources, or perhaps just competition, depending on who you're playing with. The hacking mini-game is also co-op; you take turns completing steps in the game while the other person fends off attackers. This keeps the tension going very nicely and involves both players equally; if you're going to have a mini-game, this is way to do it.<br /><br />I found the game a bit slow, but then again, we were playing in a well lit room with twenty cyncical and outspoken game developers, which is definitely not the right environment for this "guided experience." It deserves a dark room and a big TV, and the willingness to let yourself be guided. If you're the kind of person who loudly berates horror movies for being unrealistic, you probably won't enjoy this, but if you enjoy being scared, this will do it.<br /><br />My biggest complaint is the method by which you obtain ammo and other items; you have to hover over objects to pop up a label for them (much like the original game) and then use the A button to fire a glowing yo-yo that springs out, grabs the item, and pulls it back to you. The fiction for this is that it's the telekinesis beam, but really, it's a glowing yo-yo, and it's pretty annoying, especially since you're constantly spamming it during conversations to try to open lockers in the background and steal ammo from your partner. Chronicles' method of handling this was much less intrusive, and Extraction, which does a much better job of building the mood, really suffers because of this.<br /><br />Also... unless we missed something, save points only happen at the end of missions, about thirty minutes apart. What is this, Resident Evil?<br /><br />I'm definitely picking this us as soon as I'm done with Brutal Legend and Demon's Souls, and maybe even sooner, though switching the TV from Component 1 to AV 2 is pretty inconvenient, so we'll see. But if you are at all intrigued by this game, it's worth a look.Kevin Teichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08434460260302956640noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3765763377888421222.post-3857119145798026662009-10-15T21:47:00.000-07:002009-10-18T21:49:11.632-07:00Brutal Legend, on why hot games have to be easy<div>I'm three hours into Brutal Legend. We played the demo three times at work; the humor and pacing and unimpeded progress made it a big hit. It only went downhill from there in my three hours of gameplay. Which isn't a bad thing at all; the cutscenes are well-acted and written, the story is pretty decent, I love it when I can catch a reference (I'm not very metal), driving is way fun, and the art and sound are absolutely top notch. I'm left a little wanting with the gameplay, though.</div><div><br /></div><div>I don't know if I just wasn't paying attention or was too busy only paying attention to what I wanted to see, but I didn't realize the combat was so squad-oriented, and I had no idea that it'd be so heavily RTS-y (you can pronounce that "ritsy", I just made it up). The squad aspect became apparent on the trip up to the Kill Master. This is set up as a classic escort mission with a squad. I kept losing the mission because Lars kept dying. The team-combo with the headbangers was key here, as you seem to do a lot more damage when teamed up with a group, and the formation was especially helpful with the mission at hand; I got the feeling that this was how the mission was designed to be played. But then I tried just sending my dudes to the back, and found I could just snipe enemies with Clementine without endangering Lars. Was this a genuine alternate solution, or was the encounter not flexible enough to balance other approaches?</div><div><br /></div><div>There is a lot of modern gameplay elements here: button mashing combos, unit combos, squad orders, and ultimately, RTS battles. The side missions include a lot of racing elements. There's a steady stream of tactical ability upgrades. But it seems that you can eventually bumble through a lot of the challenges without necessarily being good at any of these things; I think the difficulty level decreases with successive failure until you can almost let the game play itself. That's the right solution for a game like this, but it begs the question; if you're going to let the player off the hook in order to progress the story, why bother in the first place?</div><div><br /></div><div>Nevertheless, I'm enjoying it a lot. The world is just so cool. I read that the designers wanted you to be able to make a heavy metal album cover out of any view in the world, and it really shows. Look, there's a giant stone dude holding a sword in the distance. If I turn to the right, there's a plain of rusty metal crosses. Behind me is a statue of a snake in bondage gear. To the left is a gloomy, barren field of sinister shrubs and trees. It's a pleasure simply to travel from mission to mission.</div><div><br /></div><div>The gameplay is there if you want it, but it's not challenging enough to really have to get good at it to progress. I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing here; the draw for me is the story and art, so frustrating gameplay would just get in the way of enjoying that, but at the same time, if it's the right kind of challenging gameplay it can really support the theme, like Shadow of the Colossus, and bind the whole experience together. I think a year from now I'll remember cutscenes and landscapes from Brutal Legend, but the RTS gameplay will be forgotten. The gameplay doesn't get in the way, but I'm not sure I need it or even want it to enjoy the rest of the experience.</div>Kevin Teichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08434460260302956640noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3765763377888421222.post-58751380860938282892009-10-08T23:55:00.000-07:002009-10-09T21:35:08.080-07:00Oblivion, on system over story<div><div>"Blorple cube" is from the game Spellbreaker, by Infocom. It's the first game that left a real impression on me, though I'd played games on Atari and Commodore 64 before that. I took a short break during the college years, skipped the Nintendo and Sony consoles in favor of a Dreamcast, and then squeaked by on Mac ports and World of Warcraft. I've recently purchased the necessary hardware to get back into gaming mainstream, and am still trying to catch up on those lost, dark years. As such, I try to split my time playing modern games and classics that I missed.</div><div><br /></div><div>Currently I'm making my way through Oblivion for the first time. I spent most of the night doing the Glarthir quests in Skingrad. So this dude Glarthir suspects a series of people are spying on him, and you're tasked with following them as they leave their houses each morning, and reporting back to Glarthir every night. So there's a lot of doing things at certain times of the day.</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm fascinated by open-world sandbox games because of the systems behind them and how they make the game compelling, or fail to. Time-oriented quests are interesting in that it's very boring to have to wait until a certain time to do something, but very easy when there is a "wait for x hours" command. The mechanic of having to wait seems superfluous with such a feature, but what it really draws attention to is that the world looks different at different times, from cosmetics such as the color of the sky to the number of NPC's present on the streets. While it risks boring the player by having him stare at a closed door for long minutes in real time, it shows the player that the game makes different things happen at different times.</div><div><br /></div><div>While following people around Skingard, I watched them pass each other in the street and stop to exchange a few words before moving on. Sarah commented on how ridiculous it seemed compared to actual written narrative: generic greeting, generic response, comment on subject X, comment on subject X, farewell, farewell. Most of the time the exchanges don't make sense: "Enough talking!" "You, too." The mistranslated dialog of Final Fantasy VII was more compelling through sheer quirkiness, but I like being able to perceive, through the flaws, that these interactions are more programmatical than scripted. It makes me feel like the game exists on a level independent of a designer's intention, making it more real to me. I wonder if the difference between the American RPG player and the Japanese RPG player is the appreciation of system rather than story, and that there is value in creating systems that are just flawed enough. Fable 2 tried harder and was a little more successful, I think, but when it failed, man, did it fail. Oblivion, so far, seems a little more honest about its abilities.</div><div><br /></div><div>However, at the end of the day, do I want to feel as though I've played a system or enjoyed a narrative? Ultimately I like hanging out with designers more than programmers, so we'll see.</div><div><br /></div><div>Although I didn't enjoy the Glarthir quest line so much, I enjoy reading stuff like this in the <a href="http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Paranoia">walkthrough</a>: "If you tell Glarthir to to take care of his problem, and you pickpocket his lockpicks, he will be unable to break into their houses and will be forced to stand outside their doors all night." Now that's some emergent narrative.</div></div>Kevin Teichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08434460260302956640noreply@blogger.com0