Gaming Dementia

What's happening to the DS Wario franchise?

2007-03-07T12:29:00.000-05:00

I'm not quite ready to give up on the series yet, but 1UP has a review of Wario: Master of Disguise saying roughly that the game is pretty piss poor. In all fairness, Metacritic has it rated a bit higher, but not quite high enough that I'll pick it up. I love the WarioWare for the Gamecube, but every Wario outing on the DS I've tried, I've hated with a passion (all 1 of them). It's beyond me why WarioWare: Touched got such good ratings. The minigames are nowhere near as good as its Gamecube counterpart, and the non-skippable story mode drove me batshit. Maybe it's just the DS Wario games that are a problem, because I've heard the Wii version is pretty good (good reviews too).

I really do hope they start making better DS Wario games, if only because it'll be another few months before I can afford to get a Wii.

Psycho Crusher for the Win

2007-03-05T12:50:00.000-05:00

Sorry Bison, but the princess is in another castle.

New Resident Evil: Extinction trailer

2007-03-05T12:29:00.000-05:00

IGN has a new trailer for the next installment of the Resident Evil (movies). My guilty little secret is that I love watching all forms of zombie movies, including the Resident Evil series. After seeing the trailer I'm intrigued as to what the hell is going on (and how those monuments all got into one place). I'm all about the cheap thrills, and this definately falls into that category.

Shadowrun reimagined

2007-03-02T15:31:00.000-05:00

I've been in love with the Shadowrun series ever since I first rented the Genesis game. I didn't discover the pen and paper version until much later, but I rented that game so many times that my parents finally bought it for me. So it should really be no surprise that I was excited about the 360 Shadowrun game in the works. My initial enthusiasm about the game has worn off though. Over the past seven months or so people have been reporting two things which make me very nervous about the game:

First of all, there is definitely not going to be any single player aspect to the game. This is a purely multiplayer game. This is such a let down, since the Shadowrun world makes a fantastic backdrop for an FPS game. You have characters wielding frickin' huge guns, cybernetics, and magic while running espionage and assassination missions for anonymous clients. To me that smells like a great setup for a single player game.

The second thing which bothers me about the game is that the developers have said there will only be 8-10 maps for the game. That's still a good number of maps, but combined with the lack of any single player mode, I'm just worried it won't be enough of a game to keep my interest for very long. For the standard $60 fee you pay for 360 games, I expect to at least spend 20 hours playing it. For example, I played through the entire single player campaign in both Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, and Rainbow Six: Vegas on both difficulties in addition to playing massive amounts of it online. Can a game with only multiplayer and a few maps really stack up against something as complete as Rainbow Six?

I suppose it really all depends on how good that multiplayer is. The concept is certainly a good one: guns are for killing, magic is a toolbox to which increases your chances for survival and destruction. The trailer for the game may not have the best graphics I've ever seen but the gameplay looks interesting, and the developers' recent comments have assuaged my fears to some degree. FASA has really put all of their eggs into the multiplayer basket, lets just hope they do it well because if not the game will be a complete failure.

Don't get me wrong. Despite my griping, I will be the first in line to buy it if the multiplayer is as good as it looks. I've certainly spent more than 20 hours on multiplayer in some of the games I own, and I plan doing the same for this one.

Anyway, enough of that. This information has been around for quite a while, and shouldn't be new to anyone who has been keeping up with the game. Instead, I'd like to talk about what the single player game could have been, while still keeping it a first person shooter (though a squad based one):

Imagine a single player storyline made up of around 10-15 well designed levels which take place in corporate buildings, warehouses, and the back alleys of a decimated Seattle. These are the "storyline levels" in which the single player story unfolds, each taking between 10-30 minutes to complete. Each of these maps would be crafted for the storyline alone (i.e. no filler), and approximately 4-6 hours of gameplay would take place in them.

Here's the kicker though: In between these storyline levels, there would be randomly generated levels with randomly generated objectives to complete. Static world geometry would always stay the same in these levels, but the people and objects in the level would change. For example, lets say the mission is to take place in an office building. The program would randomly choose from one of a few pre-built building shells. This building shell would not change (floor plan, stairways, windows, etc), but the game would then fill in the building with security guards, security checkpoints, cubicles, computers, desks, chairs, objectives, enemy runners, and so on based on a heuristic. This is similar to technology used by many other games for instancing a randomly created dungeon (even Nethack is really this idea, on a smaller scale). These intermediate missions would fill up maybe 3-4 hours of gameplay in between the storyline missions. (Or perhaps they are optional, allowing the player to gain experience and money before taking on the next "real" mission.) It would be even better if the game could randomly generate floorplans and sprawling alleyways, but I don't really know the feasibility of this. It's possible it could work because we aren't allowing full exploration of the world (just a single ten story office building, thanks), but that would certainly be an interesting programming/technological challenge.

These randomly generated missions would work in this case for a few key reasons. First of all, they fit into the overall "style" of Shadowrun in that you work a lot of odd jobs for shady characters and it wouldn't make a lot of sense if the story progressed completely linearly in the same way Halo does (for example). Secondly, as much as possible, the storyline missions should be completely devoid of "filler" content. Each of those 10-15 levels should be entirely related to the story must drive forward the game's plot. It is the job of these standalone missions to provide a logical break in the storyline, as well as some mindless fun. Third, having these randomly generated missions are not there to pad the length of the game. These standalone missions should be enjoyable by themselves and the player should want to play them (much in the same way that the Terrorist Hunt mode in Rainbow Six: Vegas is incredibly fun despite the fact that there isn't any storyline or point to it other than killing terrorists). I still go back and play Shadowrun missions for the Genesis despite having beat the game eons ago primarily because the mission structure was well designed. Lastly, this serves as a good way of having infinite missions for online play. I really enjoy playing Terrorist Hunt in R6 with friends, but I really wish the enemies had more than the two or three layouts that they currently do. If you could add a randomly changing floor plan to buildings, and objective targets which could be anywhere in the building you would have a highly replayable system.

Missions themselves (both storyline and standalone) would have one or two primary objectives, and one to three secondary objectives. To complete a mission, you have to complete the primary objectives. To get a bonus payment, you have to complete the secondary objectives as you find them, but you may leave the mission any time you have completed the primary objectives. The randomly generated standalone missions could pick objectives randomly from a few preprogrammed objectives (eliminate character X, hack into the such-and-such terminal, and so on).

With this game we could also add back in the concepts of experience, character levels, and equipment. Other games (such as Planetside and Rainbow Six: Vegas) have added the concept of experience and levels to first person shooters with a good degree of success. The only thing I'd add to this is adding more of the Shadowrun rules, and using money as a limiting factor in the single player game. You actually have to buy new weapons, armor, and cybernetics as they become available. The two sticking points I see with this are combat rules and decking. Pen and paper Shadowrun obviously has specific rules for combat, but I don't see those fitting in at all here. It's possible to slightly increase accuracy (and possibly damage) as the character gains levels, but this is an FPS, and we shouldn't monkey with too much with the mechanics in this department. Decking is right out. It's fantastic in the Genesis version of Shadowrun, and a good DM can make pen and paper decking ridiculously fun, but I really think a game of this nature should focus on meatspace instead of cyberspace.

Lastly, just so we are clear, leave magic in! It's probably a good idea to tone it down slightly though. This is not only to make the game a bit closer to the source books (teleportation, for example, is explicitly forbidden in Shadowrun), but also to increase the challenge of some areas. Even if your character can walk through walls, I doubt Joe Shmo security guard can do the same, so why not just drop through two floors to get away? The ideas the Shadowrun team has for magic would work great for a multiplayer game, but some of them may be problematic for a single player game.

This is what I would do with the Shadowrun series, if given the chance.

Is such a game possible? I'd like to think so. This kind of game would require roughly the same amount of content as a game like Rainbow Six: Vegas does, but some of the hand-created content would be replaced with randomly generated areas. We have seen in other games that randomly generated content is possible, but I bet it would take a good deal of work to ensure that the generated maps are playable. Thankfully, for multiplayer, you wouldn't need to pass these generated maps over the internet, just seed the map generator with the same heuristic and everyone will generate the same one.

Oh well, I can dream can't I?

Further homebrew updates...

2007-02-27T19:14:00.000-05:00

This guy seems to have the state of homebrew on the big three platforms correct. Nothing really new to add except it looks like Sony is opening up an API of some sort to be announced soon. I guess we'll see at this year's GDC.

Old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!

2007-02-26T16:40:00.000-05:00

Wow a lot of turtle news today. About a week ago someone leaked a video of a the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game for Xbox Live Arcade. That's fan-fucking-tastic. Especially the fact that you can cooperatively play 1-4 players locally or over Xbox Live. This is definitely a release day purchase for me.

I spent hours playing the NES TMNT game as a child which, to my eternal shame, I have never beaten. Then around a year later I found the arcade game in my local Domino's Pizza and played to the detriment of many an allowance. In fact, I can remember three arcade games I played more than any others while I was growing up: Street Fighter II, Area 51, and this particular game. I am even more excited about this than I am about the new game coming out.

XNA and Homebrew

2007-02-26T10:41:00.000-05:00

I found this while Digging; a quick rundown of what's going on in the various homebrew scenes. I am actually quite surprised that XNA for the 360 doesn't have a bigger interest. In his article, he points out 'Microsofts XNA platform is at the moment the only "Homebrew" but paying to use XNA doesnt appeal to me.' Funny, because a few paragraphs later when talking about the DS he says "all you need to run homebrew on the Nintendo DS is the Console (obviously), and a Flash Cart Combo." The Flash Cart Combo costs more than XNA does! Well, at least for the first year. XNA is a subscription based service, but for the first year it clocks in at just under $100.

In fact, speaking from experience, the XNA development process is much cleaner than DS homebrew. With DS homebrew I've been using a combination of C libraries (libnds and palib) along with the modified version of the gcc arm7/arm9 cross compiler offered with devkitPro. This makes it possible to build C and C++ applications for the DS, but it certainly doesn't make it easy by any stretch of the imagination. You have to be an experienced C or C++ coder to really do anything with the system, and while it certainly has some documentation for the systems, you have to learn a vast library of esoteric function calls to do some basic things, and many of these functions are under documented. I've even had to resort to ARM assembly in order to implement a mutex for processor synchronization, which was completely lacking from either api.

XNA on the other hand, is very well documented, and offers a better development environment. Simply install Visual C# Express (which is free), download XNA (which is also free for the PC version), and start working. You don't have to pay the XNA subscription until you want to run the game on your 360. With some clever, platform independent programming you can write and test your homebrew on your own computer without having to run the game through an emulator. The XNA library is exceedingly well documented, and you have the entire C# library at your disposal when you go to write games. There is even an NES emulator already written for it (XNA has only been out for a few months).

There are, of course, things which are bad about XNA. Development is limited to the Windows platform, and forcing the users to use C# will drive away some of the hardcore C/C++ developers. I don't think that XNA is purposefully neutered, as Steve so eloquently puts it, but I doubt we will see a PS2 or Xbox emulator for XNA any time soon because of it. In order to prevent a lot of exploits which would lead to game piracy, you really need to limit pure C/C++ code from running on the platform...or at least turn on massive amounts of protections such as making the stack and heap non-executable.

I see XNA as a small step in the right direction, but I do wish they would further open up the 360...since I'm not sure I'm ready to risk breaking my 360 with a mod chip for C++ homebrew quite yet.

New Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

2007-02-26T09:01:00.000-05:00

This is going to rock something fierce. Though I do wonder, with all of those target systems, if they are making multiple games or porting the same game to multiple systems (or a mix of the two). Despite rumors saying the opposite, I'm really hoping they have around 3 completely different games of which 1 is targeted for the hand held systems, 1 is for the next gen systems, and 1 is for the previous gen systems. I can't imagine a port to that many systems would be any good. Just look at what happened to Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. It was fantastic on the 360, bad on the original Xbox, and simply terrible on the PS2.

I really hope it does well on at least one system that I own...

Space + Vampires = Awesome !?

2007-02-24T15:29:00.000-05:00

Lunar Knights is surprisingly good, given the track record for space vampires in other forms of media. I had never heard of the series until stumbling upon this one, and I am impressed enough that I think I'll go back and pick up the previous games in the series.

On the surface, the game is standard adventure fare with a high degree of polish. During the first dungeon, however, the game quickly adds more elements to the combat system and exploration, adding a few layers of complexity to the game which works out very well. The terrenial system allows you to change the element of your weapon at will at a cost of using energy with every attack. Time of day plays a big role in deciding which character you are using in combat, since one character can only recharge his energy with moonlight, the other with sunlight. Weather affects the environment, since you can only recharge your energy if the sun or moon is not behind the clouds, and being able to reterraform map locations to change the environment can change a level's layout as well. This all combines for a subtly deep playing experience which I find lacking in many other games of this genre.

The space battles were an interesting thing to add to the game, but I'm not entirely sure I like them. On one hand they are a great break from the standard action adventure in the game, and they don't come up very often. On the other hand, the action is a bit too simplistic (click on enemy to destroy it, change elements for some enemies, drag your ship to move), and aside from the bosses, nothing really poses that big of a danger to you...especially since the direction things attack you from are semi-predictable and not at all randomized. On the third hand, they did do a fantastic job making some of the battle sequences incredibly frenetic and chaotic. Those rare portions remind me of Ikaruga. As long as the space action continues in a similar fashion for the rest of the game, I think I'll be satisfied with it.

The game isn't without its flaws of course. Despite reviews to the contrary, I find the game to be a bit too forgiving. As long as you watch enemy patterns, time your defenses, and don't over extend yourself while attacking, you won't run into any problems with standard enemies. I'm not quite done with the game yet, but thus far I've only died in adventure mode once, and that's because a cannon shot me off of a platform...and I fell to my death. The continue system makes you pay a very small amount of money to start back from the same room you died in, and you may save at virtually any time during the game...so even if you have trouble with the combat there's really no way you can get completely stuck along the way.

Space combat has the same problem, except that you can only save before the beginning of the action. This is mildly irritating since nothing poses a challenge except the boss, so if you die at the boss you have to play through the entire sequence over again, which really doesn't involve any risk. I consider that a negative because I really only enjoy games which require you to concentrate and to do well, or suffer the consequences. I'll understand if anyone else has a different opinion on the matter.

Anywho. I completely missed the Supreme Commander release date because I bought Lunar Knights after a friend showed it to me. I'm just hoping it will have enough hours of gameplay to tide me over until the next pay day.

Improving your fighting game

2007-02-21T11:40:00.000-05:00

It's true, Jake is infuriatingly good at fighting games. He does bring up a good point though. When you hear someone screaming at the top of their lungs that they are the best there has ever been, chances are you won't have any trouble beating the pants off of them. It seems that a lot of people have a terrible gauge as to where they stand in fighting games.

The reason for this is simple. In an FPS or RTS, it's very easy to know how good or bad you are: simply play online with real people and see how well you do. Until recently, there hasn't been any way to play fighting games with people who aren't sitting next to you in front of a console or arcade machine. Without a human playing against you, there is no way you can hope to be skilled enough to dominate in a competitive match.

Some newer and rereleased games such as Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, Dead or Alive 4, Street Fighter II, and Street Fighter 3: Third Strike are playable on Xbox Live. I haven't tried Dead or Alive 4 or Mortal Kombat yet, but I can say that lag in a Street Fighter game is killer. At the beginning of last summer, I first got my hands on the Street Fighter Anniversary Collection for the Xbox. I had long owned it for the PS2, but the first time I jumped on Xbox Live with it I was literally shaking with excitement. After a good while of non-stop online play (several weeks worth), I put the game down and never played it on Live again. The problem is the Street Fighter series is very dependent on timing, and even a minuscule amount of lag can completely ruin any chance of parrying an attack. (For those of you who have never played Street Fighter 3 or beyond, pressing forward at the exact instant of attack stops the attack with no damage. See here and here.) Street Fighter II is not quite as bad (since there is no parrying), but playing it on Live can be quite irritating if you don't have a ridiculously low ping.

So without online play, how do you get good at fighting games? I've made a list of 10 things you can do to improve your game. For some of you these rules will be very obvious, but I would not have written it if I had not seen so many people guilty of each of these. Note that even though I wrote this with a Street Fighter or Guilty Gear-like game in mind, these simple rules should apply to most fighting games. So, here they are, from the most obvious to the least:

#1: Play against people. This is by far the most important thing you can do. Play against your friends, play against strangers. This is so obvious you are probably wondering why I put this in the list. The simple matter is, not many people do this, or if they do play against other people, they only play against a small group of friends. Without playing against lots of different people you will never know how good you are.

An important corollary to this is that you are only as good as the people you play against. If you can beat all of your buddies at Street Fighter, great, but you are never going to get any better unless you play people better than you are on a regular basis. For recently released games, the local arcade should be your best friend. I spent gobs of money playing Soul Caliber II when it first came out, and I got much better as a result. I quit when I couldn't find anyone better than me to play against. Just remember, if you are the best player you know of...that doesn't mean you can play at a tournament level. It just means you need to find better people to play against.

#2: Play against the AI. This is a crucial first step towards mastering a game since you cannot always play against a human. If possible, work your way up to the hardest difficulty and get good enough to beat it regularly. In some games this isn't possible, for example the AI in Street Fighter II cheats like crazy (on the highest setting, Chun Li can throw M. Bison out of a Psycho Crusher...which is impossible and wouldn't come up in a versus match). For for most games though, it at least gives you something to practice against.

Being able to beat the at the hardest difficulty AI does not mean that you will fare as well against a real player. I could beat the hardest AI in Street Fighter 3: Third Strike long before I could go toe to toe with Jake, and he still beats me a majority of the time. Use the AI to your benefit, but don't use it to judge your skill.

#3: Practice with multiple characters. It's just sad to watch someone pick Shotokan characters over and over, and still not be any good with them. It doesn't matter if [insert character] is the best in the game, you must play a variety of characters. In doing so you may not only find a character you like more, but you will also learn how the other characters work. This is how you will be able to counter common attacks and super moves. For example, if you are playing Third Strike and you don't know what Chun Li's third super is, you are going to be in for quite a surprise when you try to jump in for the first time.

#4: Learn combos, lots of them. Gamefaqs has a great collection of combos for most fighting games, and you can learn a lot from videos on YouTube. For example, searching for "Chun Li Third Strike" comes up with lots of interesting combo videos. Be careful with these videos though, as a lot of them show "trick" combos which can't reasonably be performed in an actual game. It's important to learn combos for the characters you pick, but it's equally important to know what common combos are for other characters so you are prepared for them.

#5 Learn to vary your playing style. It is crucial to know a variety of combos and openings for combos. A devastating combo for a character is useless if you try it over and over since people will know exactly what you are going to do. In addition to combos, you should learn how to vary opening attacks. For example, in Third Strike you should be able to start a combo with a jump-in attack, a jumping crossover attack, a ducking medium attack, and a hop attack at the minimum. Every character has other in Third Strike has special moves and regular attacks which are perfect for starting combos as well, and the only way you will learn them is to experiment with characters to see what each of them are capable of.

#6: Learn general game knowledge. Read gaming forums specific to your game of choice. Chances are if you don't know what kara throw is, you don't play Third Strike on a tournament level. Hell, if you don't know what the importance of a kara throw and are able to use them with regularity, you don't play on a tournament level at all. The exact same thing can be said about wave dashing in Smash Brothers Melee. Aside from sheer random accident, the only way to find out these things is to read faqs and forums where people post these tricks.

Over time you should also start to notice other common things about characters to watch out for. On the absolutely most basic level in, you should know that Remy, Alex, and Urien are charge characters, and you should start watching for certain attacks when the character is ducking or walking backwards. On the intermediate level you should watch for common openings to combos which can be tricky to parry, such as if you are standing directly next to either Chun Li or Ken in the neutral position you should always parry twice. This is because both characters have a two hit combo lead-in if they are standing close (for Chun Li it's back and medium punch or a neutral medium kick, and for Ken it's neutral medium punch followed by hard punch). On the advanced level you need to know how to parry super moves, including how many hits and what timing order they arrive in. Even if you aren't able to parry the entirety of a super move, for certain characters you can parry the last hit rather easily and immediately go into a combo before they can recover.

I realize this point was very Street Fighter specific, but the similar information for whatever game you are playing is very important to know. Another example would be the Soul Caliber series. You need to know the various attacks characters use, the stances they use and how that affects their actions, and so on. This is a lot of information you need to know, and the only way to know it is to play a lot of different characters against a lot of different characters, as well as keeping up with various faqs and forums.

#7 Practice multiple ways. When you can't play against a human, you can always practice against the AI. Playing against the AI as if it was a human opponent is a good thing. However, it is also important to practice techniques against the AI without worrying about winning or losing the match. In Street Fighter, parrying is a very important thing to learn how to do well (it is in Soul Caliber as well). Other fighting games have similar things, such as Just Defending and counters. The only way you will get good at these techniques is to practice it until you have it. Equally important things to practice are wake-ups, throws, dashes, and super combos. Being able to utilize all of the game mechanics to your advantage is the key to winning a match. To get better at these things, play against the computer with one of these things in mind. Throughout every match practice using one of those as often as you can until you learn when to use it (and when not to use it).

One last note, you should start practicing a combo on a stationary target to get it down (most games have a training mode for this reason). Once you have done this, you must practice on a live target (be it AI or human) or you simply won't be able to use it when you are actually playing to win.

#8 Practice against people. In addition to playing against people (that is, to win), also practice against people. When you sit down to play a match against someone, decide before you begin if you are going to play to win, or if you are going to play to practice. When I sit down to play with friends, there are some nights I only practice parrying or various wake-ups and combos, but end up losing many more matches than I usually do. This is a good thing, and it lets you try something with a human punishing wrong moves instead of the predictable AI.

#9 Learn to evaluate risk versus reward. Once you know all the ins and outs of a particular game, you can start making value judgments about what to do in a particular situation. For example, if you are playing Guilty Gear XX, and you are about to lose the match, why not try an instant kill? What do you have to lose if it misses? In Third Strike I can parry most fireball based super moves, but I can only do it successfully maybe 40% of the time. If I'm low on health and someone goes into a super move which will kill me on block damage alone, there is no reason to not try to parry it.

The most famous instance of this was Daigo's performance during a tournament. In this situation, it was 1 to 1 and he was about to lose the match when his opponent threw a super move which would kill him on block damage alone. The amazing thing is not just that he parried the entire super move, it's that he jumped to parry the last hit. This is a very dangerous thing to do in the situation, but he knew he needed a jumping combo to kill his opponent...a ground combo would not have sufficed. Risk versus reward.

Beyond extreme situations like these, it's also important to make these kinds of decisions on a smaller scale. When next to an opponent in Third Strike, should you try a ground attack to start a combo, a hop to start a combo, or a throw? If the opponent is waking up, should you try hitting him immediately before he can do anything about it, or should you try to parry the inevitable wake-up attack? In Soul Caliber when you are in a parry battle (where players are parrying back and forth), should you try to continue the status quo and hope they make a mistake, should you try to purposefully delay a fraction of a second in hopes they parry at the wrong time, or should you try a completely different attack with a strange parry timing? These are the things that you should start thinking about once you have a very good grasp on the game mechanics.

#10 Know your goals. You really need to understand what your goals are plan accordingly. If you are practicing to play at a tournament level, you need to find other tournament level players to practice against. You will need to be good at aspects of the game which you can practice alone (eg, kara throws and parrying in Third Strike), but that can never replace practice with a real opponent.

If you want to get better at arcade play, buy a joystick! I play the Soul Caliber series very well on a joystick because I play in the arcade. I cannot, under any circumstances, play Third Strike on a joystick. I've never found a Third Strike arcade machine, so I have no real interest in learning to play it on one.

Though this should be bleedingly obvious, if you want to play online better, you need to also practice online instead of playing to win. When playing online there is a big pressure to win. You shut off most of your active thought process and really focus only on the immediate situation. The problem with online games is that there is lag, and practicing offline alone does not entirely prepare you for the subtle change in timing when you transition to online play. Practicing online will certainly affect your win loss record, but you will get better as a result. On the other hand, if your entire goal is to increase your win loss ratio, you should clearly never play online without the express intent of winning. Instead you will have to do all of your practicing far, far away from Xbox Live.

Gamespot for the win

2007-02-19T18:51:00.001-05:00

Way to go with your Room 215 review, Gamespot. I'm sure it's really tricky figuring out what people have to hide when you don't friggen read Japanese:

Katamari Damacy online

2007-02-19T09:52:00.000-05:00

Oh for the love of the King of All Cosmos! I wonder how this is going to work. PS: Awesome pics on the site. I hope that this works better than the multiplayer modes for the two previous games. Assuming this game will support more than two players I have great hopes. Of course my dream is for a Katamari MMO that you can only pick up and grow larger from other players and then it could be like a massive king of the hill. Actually scratch that. My dream is to be the King of All Cosmos and try to disrupt other players as they develop their katamaris. Mmmm yes, that would be grand.

Halo

2007-02-18T15:45:00.000-05:00

Lets just come right out and say it. The original Halo is a fantastic game, the sequel to Halo is so awful I cringe every time I hear someone talking about it. Of course, I don't think I can win for losing. Hating Halo is the trendy thing to do, loving Halo is the trendy thing to do, and here I am riding the fence.

It's easy for some to dismiss Halo as a fanboy delusion, but there are some things about the game which make it one of the best first person shooters I've ever played. Here is a quick summation of them, in no particular order:

The story has a compelling storyline (for a first person shooter anyway) which goes above and beyond the standard FPS modus operandi of "get the story out of the way so you can start killing lots of interesting creatures."
The weapons system was well thought out. All of the weapons, except the pistol, are very well balanced. The human weapons act exactly as I feel they should handle, and the alien weapons feel...well, alien. You aren't given ridiculously overpowered weapons such as the beam sword, and the flow of battle is very natural.
The vehicles in the game are very well designed. The Warthog (lightweight vehicle) is very agile, the Scorpion (tank) feels slow and tank-like. The vehicles which provide you protection (IE you are not hurt while in them) all have health of their own, and you are hurt when hit inside an invincible vehicle.
The game has a nigh perfect PC translation, so you can play with a mouse and keyboard with all it's wonderful benefits.

The only things I can say bad about Halo is the pistol needs to be rebalanced, and the console version cannot be played over Xbox Live. All in all, if you are an FPS fan, and you have missed the original Halo, you should pick it up. Aside from being the trendy thing to hate, there's no reason not to.

Halo 2, on the other hand, is FPS gaming gone horribly, horribly wrong. I honestly cannot fathom why people aren't up in arms over the various aspects of the game. For the sake of fairness, lets look at what Halo 2 got right:

Online multiplayer! This was incredibly lacking from the original.
Matchmaking is done very well. So long as you aren't on the bottom of the ladder, you can find a match of equal skill level almost instantly.
Better graphics.

These things cannot make up for the flaws though. In no particular order:

The single player game is basically unfinished, and the storyline is rather disappointing.
The weapons have been changed, and mostly for the worse. The plasma pistol acts like a cruise missile, making it impossible to get out of the way unless you are at point blank range...and even then it's iffy. You have to be using a two handed weapon or dual wielding to be competitive. The beam sword instant kill is irritating, but not completely unbalanced. And so on.
The vehicles in the game have been completely changed, mostly for the worst.
The most damning aspect of Halo 2 is the huge head hit boxes combined with crazy impossible auto-aim corrections.

It's really hard to stress how much point 4 ruins the game. You really have to see this to believe it:

In most FPS games you need at least a modicum of skill to pull off a headshot or even just to hit the other players. All of this combines to make multiplayer farcical, and a complete waste of time. Why not just play a real FPS and see how you stack up?

Edit: It's really just the hit boxes and auto-aim issue which makes me hate the game so much, but I suppose I really should have added a more as to what my specific problems with the vehicles are. That's what I get for rushing a post out the door.

I have two complaints about the vehicle system: The warthog is entirely too destructible. I can't seem to get from point A to point B without it blowing up due to small encounters which I was trying to avoid anyway. The banshee is the same way, only good for 2 to 3 encounters with ground units (minus rocket launchers) and it's ready to explode.

On the other hand, Halo 2's vehicle system is still better than a lot of the other FPS games we see out there. Perfect Dark's jetpack and uncontrollable hovercraft come to mind. Those two honestly seem like they were tacked on as an afterthought.

If you are ever looking for a PC gamepad...

2007-02-18T14:54:00.000-05:00

If you ever need a PC gamepad for gaming goodness, I suggest you try out a wired 360 controller. Aside from the plethora of buttons and joysticks (well ok, 8 buttons, 6 axes, and a d-pad), it has worked better than the other gamepads I have tried. Note you need to get the wired gamepad and not a wireless one, since the wireless gamepad cannot talk to a PC. Setup is extraordinarily painless too, since if you tell Windows XP to search on the internet for drivers, it finds it immediately. No special software or CDs to keep up with.

First Person Shooters

2007-02-17T14:08:00.000-05:00

For the longest time I didn't like console first person shooters (Goldeneye and Perfect Dark being the exceptions). I grew up with Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, and Doom. I even spent an unhealthy amount of time playing Unreal Tournament in high school. By the time I put down the original Unreal Tournament, I could beat the hardest bot setting in a 1 on 1 death match.

I did play some console FPS games as well, but really the only things which were out there worth playing were Goldeneye and its sequel, Perfect Dark. I never thought of them as being in the same category as PC FPS games since the playing style was completely different. The primary difference was the fact that you never really had to worry about more than one axis of rotation when lining up a shot. Auto-aim took care of when an enemy was above or below you; you simply had to point the crosshairs in their general direction and they are dead.

When the X-Box generation consoles started getting FPS games, I immediately hated them. They fixed the problem with the previous generation of console FPS games: auto-aim. These new-fangled games require you to use two joysticks to control your crosshairs, adding skill back into the game, but they lacked one thing which the PC games got right: finesse. If two players of equal skill are playing an FPS against each other, with one person using a controller and the other using a keyboard and mouse, the mouse would win every time.

For those of you who have never seen a skilled player on a PC FPS, you may have a hard time believing this. A skilled player will set the mouse sensitivity very high, so that they can quickly adjust their crosshairs when they see a target. As an example, lets compare Unreal Tournament 2004 for the PC to Halo for the original X-Box. If you compared the crosshair movement in Halo to the mouse sensitivity I set UT to play at, you would see my mouse sensitivity is roughly 4-5 times the speed of the crosshairs in Halo. Now you can increase the sensitivity in Halo up from its default, but this will not give you as much control as a mouse will when you are moving your cursor.

What is the result of this? When I see someone in a PC FPS, I use the mouse to perform a "Sweeping Shot," meaning I sweep the crosshairs directly to the person I want to shoot and pull the trigger. This is done so fast that I sometimes sweep past them, but I still click at the right time, landing the shot roughly 90% of the time. For something analogous to the Flack Cannon in UT or the Shotgun in F.E.A.R., this is usually an instant kill within the first split second of the encounter. This is in contrast to most console FPS games I've played where the average 1 on 1 encounter lasts slightly longer, requiring extra time (but still not very long) to line up the shot.

Maybe this all is just a result of my upbringing. I'll be the first to tell you I'm no expert in console FPS games. I'm pretty good, but my cousin still kills me in Halo multiplayer, and I slaughter him at Unreal Tournament. Initially it was hard to convince him that I was actually good at FPS games until we started playing UT in Assault mode on the same side. At the end of the match I had roughly 100 kills to his 40, and I died half as much as he did. He was so used to stomping me at Halo it took a while to sink in.

I had a similar experience my second year of college. There was a LAN party hosted on campus where the primary tournament featured Quake 3: Arena. One of the local gamer groups, consisting mostly of frat boys who considered themselves gods of FPS gaming (both console and PC), showed up and talked non stop about how good they were and how they were going to dominate the tournament. They shut up after the first two rounds. In their defense, they were fairly good, taking home second and third place, but I'd bet for all their bragging about how good they are at first person shooters, they had never met anyone who was actually good at PC FPS games.

More recently, I've started adding that twitch reflex into my console gaming. In Rainbow Six: Vegas, I do pretty well with a shotgun by upping my controller sensitivity and using sweeping shots. This is effective, but not as effective as it is with a mouse. Maybe I'm just asking for too much out of the controller.

Limbo, pc game with amazing art direction

2007-02-16T17:09:00.000-05:00

Check out the absolutely brilliant art direction of this 2d platformer that is coming out. There is a small teaser video on the site as well as more pics. Simply brilliant.

You have been killed by a Grue. Continue?

2007-02-16T16:33:00.000-05:00

Despite the many graphical and other improvements in modern PC gaming, I have recently found myself going back and playing the classics. In part this is due to my cousin, who doesn't have a modern computer, so playing any PC game with him really has to be older.

This all started with Command and Conquer: Red Alert. My cousin was visiting, and I thought it would be a great idea to dust off this oldie for some old fashioned Soviet vs USA goodness. Unfortunately, the game just would not work right with Windows XP. After a few hours of trying to get an IPX connection working, we gave up and moved on to Warcraft III. A definite step up.

I'd never played any of the Warcraft series when it was new. In fact, I completely hated Starcraft, and this turned me off to trying out the other *craft series. It wasn't that it was a terrible game, and it wasn't the genre either. Rather, I had grown up on the Command and Conquer and Total Annihilation series, and I felt Starcraft was too fast paced and didn't contain enough strategy elements. My feelings on the matter haven't changed much.

After this, I've gone back and picked up some of the classics which I've missed over the years and some games which I just wanted to play again. The highlights of which include Unreal Tournament, Diablo II, Neverwinter Nights, Warcraft III, Uplink, and Nethack. All great games, and if you have missed one, I suggest you check it out.

I've always enjoyed the concept of randomly generated dungeons ever since I first played through Lufia II. The 100 floor dungeon in that game is intense and kept me coming back for more for many years until my SNES finally died. Nethack is another game with a randomly generated super-dungeon. You always begin the game as one of a few classes, and try to make your way through punishing levels to find an artifact which wins you the game. Despite having played the game off and on for the last 10 years, I didn't even know until recently that the game was winnable. Unlike Lufia II, where you keep going back into the Ancient Cave with things you found from previous expeditions into the cave, when you start a game of Nethack you are completely on your own from beginning to end. In all this time, I thought the point was to get a really high score before you died...

I always seem to come back to Nethack, no matter how long its been since I've last played it. Despite being one of the few games which I haven't beaten or mastered, I am loathe to head to Gamefaqs or elsewhere for answers. I started playing this game before I knew of such a thing as a "game FAQ," and I damn well intend to finish it without the help of one. Maybe one day...

I'll be your other host for the evening...

2007-02-16T16:20:00.000-05:00

I'm not one for long introductions, so here it is in short: I'm Lee Culver (though many people know me as Clay), and I am a gameaholic. I'm a computer programmer who has dabbled in game programming (working primarily with Ogre, and homebrew DS applications). I'll be adding posts to this blog about many gaming related things, though most of them will be related to the 360, DS, PC, and tabletop gaming.

I hope you enjoy the show.

Wii weights

2007-02-09T09:17:00.000-05:00

What a fantastic idea. Although it needs a few more tweaking I might get some. Next thing we know you can tell who is a gamer by their popeye-esque forearms.

Long Exposure Photos of 80's Video Games

2007-02-09T08:56:00.000-05:00

Beautiful

WiiTube

2007-02-09T08:33:00.000-05:00

A video viewing site while on your wii browser. Slick.

I'm Old Greg! A Classic

2007-02-08T11:00:00.000-05:00

Mmmmm. Creamy

Shirts to go with the scarves.

2007-02-08T10:07:00.000-05:00

Very cool clothes, Silent Hill, Elite Beat Agents!, Shadow of the Colossus and more!

If only I had money to buy all this crap!

Awesome videogame inspired clothing

2007-02-08T09:50:00.000-05:00

Wii sports song as a sitcom theme

2007-02-08T09:23:00.000-05:00

Quite clever.