http://scar3crow.posterous.com Inconsistently periodic reviews and commentary on games posterous.com Sat, 28 Jan 2012 18:59:01 -0800 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~3/FFwMNJrWM-k/kingdoms-of-amalur-reckoning-demo http://scar3crow.posterous.com/kingdoms-of-amalur-reckoning-demo <p> <p>Kingdoms of Amalur sounds like the ultimate mash-up dream for geeks and gamers. A story by R.A. Salvatore, concept artwork by Todd McFarlane, and talent from across the industry in a game that is both free world and story driven, with heavy RPG elements such as loot, leveling, skill trees, dialogue trees, and yet free flowing combat for those who like their activity to be punctuated with action.</p> <p>First off as a PC player, you may need to disable Post Processing in the menus. For some this means the minimap will render - for me it meant only the minimap would render. Supposedly these things are fixed in the final version, but it leaves me unable to see how the game would look on my machine with Post Processing effects on.</p> <p>That mishap and disinterest in insuring that the demo fully demonstrates their product isn't exactly the best foot forward, but the missteps continued for me. The controls follow the WASD standard with mouselook using a third person camera. W pushes you forward, so you would expect S to have your character step backward, right? No. Instead he turns 180 degrees, facing your camera, and runs forward toward the camera which continually pulls back to keep him in the frame. You cannot see what is in front of him during this state, and the entire controls system flows like they written for a top-down arcade game, that was forced to be a third person title instead without any adjustment. That aside, the chase camera seems to be asleep at the wheel, sometimes lagging so far back that my character becomes a distant shape before catching up, and wedging itself behind an object directly blocking my view, no matter what my action. Combine that with the interest in "cinematic" action which means I get to look at my character flailing about and I end up wondering why they bothered with a renderer at all considering their strong desire to have me only looking at the least useful activities. "You stun locked a troll and went to fight two guards, lets take a closer look at that troll now, and not the guards." "You are being shot with arrows, how does the door frame's left wedge support feel about this?" Perhaps in a previous life one of the programmers was a human interest story news reporter?</p> <p>Speaking of arrows, please, have auto-aim or not. Fickle auto-aim just makes ranged combat a struggle. I am tired of taking out innocent crates at an 80 degree turn from me, when I am being rushed by a guard who is slightly further away than the crate was. And now speaking of combat, I must admit I feel like such a non-participant. Sure in every game I am left clicking, but never before have I felt so much like a left-clicking machine than in KoA, with no satisfaction to it. If you want action, go elsewhere.</p> <p>What if you want role playing? Well, it may do just fine if your experience with role playing does not extend into the very rich history of PC RPGs. A Planescape Torment or Baldur's Gate this is not. A Fable? Quite possibly. The world seems tongue in cheek without clearly satirizing, like a build up without a punchline. The cutscenes seem to have two different systems, one of which for whatever reason wants to re-load the actor assets causing bizarre half second shots of empty rooms. Some of the dialog is humorous, but none of it ever seemed genuine and left me wondering if they were trying to make a comedy game or not.</p> <p>Ultimately, I would say don't bother, if the content of the demo is indicative of not only the full game, but the entire approach they took. The dream team approach is great from a fanboy perspective, but that doesn't guarantee a great product. For action, go play your preferred brawler, and for role playing, try something with real roleplaying such as STALKER, or just employ your own imagination with any solidly done title.</p> </p> <p><a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/kingdoms-of-amalur-reckoning-demo">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/kingdoms-of-amalur-reckoning-demo#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~4/FFwMNJrWM-k" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1036249/david2.JPG http://posterous.com/users/36ubUC45sXfz scar3crow scar3crow http://scar3crow.posterous.com/kingdoms-of-amalur-reckoning-demo Thu, 12 Jan 2012 20:57:25 -0800 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~3/uhkWP6Zh_9Y/a-response-to-george-weidman-of-truepcgaming http://scar3crow.posterous.com/a-response-to-george-weidman-of-truepcgaming <p> <p>Allow me to open with one credit here to TruePCGaming - I love the notion of the Second Look articles, it runs counter to the quickly consumed and excreted game that the typical review formula does. Now on to my response. This isn't going to be a long form eloquent article, but rather a sampling of quotes and comments. Think of it as a long comment that if condensed would just be posted on the article itself.</p> <p>I am focusing on the multiplayer aspect of <a href="http://truepcgaming.com/2012/01/11/tpg-second-look-modern-warfare-3/">George Weidman's article</a> as that is what I take issue with. It opens with an anecdote regarding a rather poor attempt at trash talking that George experienced in a public match, which seems to indicate that it is the foundation of the MW3 multiplayer experience. There are two problems with this, the first of which is how easy it is to mute other players so it isn't a factor. The second is the implication that this is somehow distinct to MW3, CoD, military games, or even first person shooters. The fact of the matter is any activity with a quantifiable goal and thus ranking is competitive, and jerks will be jerks.</p> <blockquote class="posterous_medium_quote"> <p>That&rsquo;s the thing about these Call of Duty games, someone&rsquo;s always more important than you. Online, a more experienced player is generally out-scoring you. Offline, you&rsquo;re generally looking at some other soldier&rsquo;s backside. Either way, you&rsquo;re being forcefully arranged into some kind of pecking order of superiority.</p> </blockquote> <p>That's the thing about any simulation of a military order which is managed through a hierarchy with power being derived through obedience to superiors. That's the thing about competitive play - why is it competitive? Because there are other players in a shooter, and someone will be shot. Why are there other players? Because of the more interesting and involved scenarios that happen when more than one human mind is engaged.</p> <blockquote class="posterous_medium_quote"> <p>Online, the game turns into an absolutely brutal arena of fast reflexes and snap aiming. Split-second reaction times and an almost instinctive knowledge of game mechanics are required to play with these folks.</p> </blockquote> <p>For other titles, this would be referred to as a "high skill ceiling", that which allows the multiplayer to last for more than a few months because the players can grow by honing their reflexes and accuracy, acquiring finer map knowledge (and the maps do have a substantial amount of nuance to them, I regularly pick up on a detail I hadn't noticed before that provides a different line of sight, flanking route, escape route, or bank shot). However this description is still simplistic, fast reflexes and snap aiming are important but they will not save you against an opponent of more average reflexes and aiming who approaches engagements better and chooses the more appropriate weapon to the environment - and sticks to that environment.</p> <blockquote class="posterous_short_quote"> <p>There&rsquo;s no trick to handling the guns.</p> </blockquote> <p>There is a trick to every gun in the game, each weapon is impacted by a myriad of minutia that accumulate in dramatic fashion. Bullet damage, bullet damage fall off over range, bullet damage variance, bullet penetration, weapon kick, weapon sway, hip fire spread, iron sights spread, kick angles, firing mode, reload time, tactical reload time, movement speed with the weapon, readying speed after sprinting, equip/dequip speed, aiming down the sights speed, and more. These are all tiny differences which significantly impact each engagement and require a different touch to each gun. The UMP45 kicks up and to the left and though it does good damage it has a low firing rate and a terrible hip fire spread. The PP90M1 has a circular kick making it great for short-medium range spraying, but when that spread is controlled it has a laser like focus - which at closer ranges actually makes its shots easier to evade and due to its damage fall off over range it will find itself outgunned by any Assault Rifle attempting such behavior. Those things deeply matter when you play against any one other than a dodo, and they make a difference as to the outcome of each battle and thus the match.</p> <blockquote class="posterous_short_quote"> <p>You just point and shoot at a faster pace than your opponents, and the maps are all too small for strategy.</p> </blockquote> <p>The maps are actually fairly large (as you will find in an Objective oriented mode when an enemy is capturing your control point on the opposite end) but there is significant space for strategy most any spot for a simple design choice: you will never fully cover your six without a teammate. Most areas have three points of distinct exposure with careful color variance to form distinct silhouettes and catch the eye which results in significant route decisions and their environmental impacts (the quick route: run out one of the doors; the loud route: hop out the window; the quiet but slow route: mantle the high fence and clamber onto an adjacent area). The better players are weighing these options as they determine where to pick their next fight.</p> <blockquote class="posterous_medium_quote"> <p>Take any longer than two seconds to think, and you&rsquo;re dead. It&rsquo;s all about a physiological bias that prefers raw reaction times and fast aiming, boiling all of its secondary mechanics down to a simple game of high-octane target shooting.</p> </blockquote> <p>What matters is not taking two seconds to think, but thinking ten seconds ahead while executing your plan in real time, taking one second to compensate for newly discovered variables you had not anticipated (the enemy running Assassin who didn't show up on radar, a claymore or bouncing betty trap, an incoming stealth bomber run, a sniper taking out a teammate running interference). This is a simple game in terms of getting started, and it is high-octane, but I am not aware of any target shooting where the targets roam the environment, hunting and adjusting to you.</p> <blockquote class="posterous_medium_quote"> <p>As expected, Modern Warfare 3 has a billion or so extra weapons, gadgets, abilities and features to be unlocked if one is a dedicated player. One of the most bizarre is the &ldquo;Callsign,&rdquo; which is a colorful, customizable banner that goes underneath your screen name. Significant chunks of game time end up being devoted to unlocking cosmetic stickers and backgrounds for this thing, and they&rsquo;re all macho and &ldquo;xtreme&rdquo; in a kind of offensive way.</p> </blockquote> <p>No game time is devoted to the unlocking of Callsigns or Emblems. They are bonuses to the experience gain from completing challenges, which encourages the player to diversify their play style by providing a wide variety of them. There is nothing devoted to them at all. You find them "macho" and "xtreme", I and others find them tongue in cheek, silly, or punny.</p> <blockquote class="posterous_short_quote"> <p>Either way, there&rsquo;s no avoiding this &ldquo;tough guise,&rdquo; this mightier-than-thou message that somehow comes with the ability to unlock stuff in Call of Duty.</p> </blockquote> <p>A large amount of the emblems are sourced from your current rank, using a direct depiction of the ranks name, such as a Four Star General being... four stars. They can also be for tasks such as calling in Support rewards, a decidely passive element. In your rush of being offended by some of the more tongue in cheek options you seemed to miss the ones aimed at good teamwork.</p> <blockquote class="posterous_short_quote"> <p>Watching a garrulous victory animation appear complete with trumpeting fanfare, I suddenly realized something: this whole game is about social Darwinism.</p> </blockquote> <p>Its not trumpeting fanfare but rather a simple positive piece, and the victory animation is not an animation in the typical sense but a slowed down shot of the final kill for the match from the perspective of the killer. It isn't chest thumping, it is acknowledgement. Darwinism has no mechanism to compensate for indefinite respawning of the same entity.</p> <blockquote class="posterous_short_quote"> <p>Think about that. If Infinity Ward truly interprets war as a naturally-occurring mechanism to preserve the fittest,</p> </blockquote> <p>Do they? There is no elimination of the weakest. Players respawn. You quoted the character of Price, but not everything a character says is something the writer believes - Price was depicted as quite the loose cannon and actually dangerous even with his good intentions in the previous game. On top of that, MW3 was primarily developed by Sledgehammer Games, under the banner of Infinity Ward with the assistance of Treyarch and Raven Software.</p> <blockquote class="posterous_short_quote"> <p>then no wonder their virtual version of war is a physiologically demanding target-shooting sport filled with aggressively vocal players.</p> </blockquote> <p>The worst trash talking and actually aggressive players I have ever seen were at Magic: The Gathering games. I don't think Call of Duty as a franchise is a significant factor in this.</p> <blockquote class="posterous_medium_quote"> <p>The multiplayer game ultimately boils down to a contest of lightning-fast reaction times and split-second ingenuity, and despite the series&rsquo; massive popularity, it&rsquo;s built to cater towards a very specific skill set.</p> </blockquote> <p>Actually it boils down to long form planning, adjustment, and knowledge. Those who focus on that and remain calm players are at the top of the scoreboard, not by a few hundred points, but thousands. The players who plan their routes including escape options and counter maneuvers, who choose their weapon based upon the route and vice versa often end up with double the score of the next best player who approaches it in your fashion - aim fast.</p> <blockquote class="posterous_medium_quote"> <p>But it&rsquo;s all so in-your-face, so &ldquo;xtreme,&rdquo; aggressive and macho that it appeals to a ubiquitous and unfortunate aspect of our culture&rsquo;s version of masculinity: the destructive desire to dominate others.</p> </blockquote> <p>It's in your face? It can be if you enter a large game with a lot of very aggressive players, and you yourself play very aggressively... It is fast, it is rapid, but not at a constant stream. It has a distinct rhythm. In Quake we had long battles with short time in between for the set up, in MW3 we have longer times in between for the setup with very short battles, in such a way that for me it plays out like a first person Frozen Synapse. Regarding our culture, masculinity, and the destructive desire to dominate others - how much of it is "our culture"? Why is this a masculine thing? Women are quite competitive in a wide variety of ways. How is it destructive? If anything it is constructive due to the respawn mechanic, and the KillCam which allows the defeated to analyze how they were beaten, from the perspective of the victor. What about the simple joy of testing yourself, and what provides a better test than a challenge supplied externally to counter you?</p> <blockquote class="posterous_medium_quote"> <p>Proving oneself through a contest of skill has been a reliable outlet for a euphoric adrenaline rush for centuries. Nowadays, you can experience it through something as slovenly as winning a video game.</p> </blockquote> <p>Is article and review writing slovenly in comparison to in person debates in the marketplaces and parks? If it is negative to experience competition through a video game because it is slovenly, that is a mark against video games, not any one game in particular.</p> <blockquote class="posterous_medium_quote"> <p>I eventually climbed the learning curve, increased my rank, unlocked a majority of the unlockables and won a few first-place matches here and there, but I never really felt good about it. The adrenaline high of victory lead to more negativity and frustration than it did genuine enjoyment, and I can&rsquo;t recommend it for anyone who isn&rsquo;t desperate for a meaningless feeling of superiority. ... I slowly noticed the game turning me into the same kind of bitter and angry sob that he was. I think it&rsquo;s time I stopped.</p> </blockquote> <p>I do mean no offense here, but this speaks more negatively of you than the game. You need to learn to appreciate the value of competition as a means of recognition in the case of victory, and as a means of evaluation and broadening in the case of defeat.</p> <p>Few things are mindless if you approach them mindfully, and popularity does not necessarily indicate a shallow experience.</p> </p> <p><a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/a-response-to-george-weidman-of-truepcgaming">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/a-response-to-george-weidman-of-truepcgaming#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~4/uhkWP6Zh_9Y" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1036249/david2.JPG http://posterous.com/users/36ubUC45sXfz scar3crow scar3crow http://scar3crow.posterous.com/a-response-to-george-weidman-of-truepcgaming Sun, 20 Nov 2011 17:36:00 -0800 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~3/3YLtVdQOnH4/modern-warfare-3 http://scar3crow.posterous.com/modern-warfare-3 <p> <p>In some ways it is difficult to write a review of Modern Warfare 3 simply because due to the franchise's success and fame, it is a title many had already decided what they thought of it before playing it. It marks for me the first Call of Duty game I have purchased with my own money (having won a copy of World at War previously) because as someone interested in games, the industry, and general design principles I felt I should be aware at an early date as to the condition of the 8th entry of a franchise and one that was managed by a third party company rather than the creators.</p> <p>I have played the title on a nearly daily basis since 7:12AM local time on the date of release and have completed the campaign and reached level 37 in the multiplayer. That statement alone should tell you it did not immediately repulse me or cause me to look elsewhere for my gaming time. In fact, I even tried to look elsewhere. I downloaded STALKER: Call of Pripyat Complete, being a huge STALKER fan, and that didn't even last long. I was drawn back to Modern Warfare 3.</p> <p>The title is a true sequel. It does not reinvent the wheel, nor the T-square. It takes place in the exact same universe and resumes minutes after the second title ended. It is in vogue to criticize the game for having the same technology and same assets, something which would frustrate me if the naming was just a continued branding, but what it creates is a sensation of unity and coherence. It also is nice to know that the developers did not invest their time remodeling an M4A1 since it has been the same weapon for all three games in the franchise.</p> <p>What is new to the game are things casual players will not mind, hardcore players will appreciate, and the in between players who have committed to disliking it will not notice. The changes are simple but they resonate deeper the longer you play. I am going to break this into two sections below the cut for single player and multiplayer.</p> <p>Single Player</p> <p>As I said, MW3 resumes exactly where MW2 ends. Soap is in bad shape, Price and Nikolai are rushing him to get aid. America is under attack by Russia, and Makarov (still hate that name) is at large working his ever expanding machinations. The gameplay kicks off directly in New York City battling through streets and iconic locations with the immediate goal of repelling the Russian invasion and securing the harbor. The game maintains its multiple character perspective to create a sense of an event which is larger than any one character, something which in a lesser known title would be considered fairly refreshing but is an opportunity for criticism when MW3 maintains consistency with in itself for doing such. The character switches only happen between missions during load sequences and are used to vary the gameplay pace, shifting from larger groups directly confronting enemy forces to small groups who are performing a sort of globe trotting investigation trying to pin down Makarov by rounding up his supporters and dealers and thus offering stealth options from time to time.</p> <p>The gameplay continues to be the Whack-A-Mole we have come to expect since the first Medal of Honor reared its head in 1999. It continues to be the submissive move with the group experience since the first Modern Warfare which I still don't care for but at this stage is no worse than its competitors (much to my chagrin). I sometimes sigh at the sight of "Follow" over an NPC's head, but I appreciate it when they are successfully moving forward while I dawdled and had made their way into cover, with the cover actually effectively hiding them. Whack-A-Mole and Follow aside, the game does a good job of the gun play which is the cornerstone of its genre and so that alone should be recognized as significant. It also has within its rigid scripting a fair number of sequences where I found my player agency fairly actualized. Replaying an area I found it going from a bitter gunfight to a smoothly executed and tight infiltration sequence because I had quickly killed two guards before they noticed us. Their not sounding the alarm changed the tempo for much of the remainder of the mission. This happened multiple times and always pleasantly surprised me, where I found approaching the situation differently did indeed bring about fairly different results.</p> <p>If you have played the other two titles, or even just one, you should complete the campaign for MW3. It is short (6 hours-ish here) but contains no filler or padding and more importantly, it actually concludes. They seriously actually wrap up the story line without any dangling strings left hanging in front of the player's face to justify any DLC or another installment.</p> <p>I need to take a moment to address the RockPaperShotgun review of MW3 single player, because I am a fan of the site, but I have numerous issues with their review (and thoroughly engaging such would be a post unto itself). A few things they state rub me the wrong way: The game forces you to observe civilians being executed - I can think of three scenes in the game where you play the role of a combatant where civilians are being executed. In one, you are actively encouraged to stop it and it is part of the mission. In the second you are under cover and the enemy vastly outnumbers your group, but you can engage, the game doesn't restrict you but rather an NPC advises you that it would be suicide. I have replayed that segment numerous times. It is suicide, there isn't any substantial bullet stopping cover to survive the engagement - but the game does not prevent you from doing this. In the third the mission begins with yourself and your allies not having weapons drawn. You then submerge into neck deep water, and are moving under strictly visibility cover (nothing that would stop a bullet). You are surrounded by 50+ professional enemy military with heavy armor. Yes you can not draw your gun, but you are also nose deep in the water. These deaths are not happening "for the greater good" as the reviewer claims, they are happening because though the characters are daring, they are not suicidal.</p> <blockquote class="posterous_medium_quote"> <p>The checkpoints are regular, and exquisitely well placed, but for some inexplicable reason you cannot save-and-quit and then return to one. It&rsquo;s start the entire mission over, soldier, because you dared to stop playing.</p> </blockquote> <p>This is untrue, it was untrue on the first day and it is untrue as of an hour ago. Quitting the current game, or the whole game (ending the process thread) and resuming at a later point does put you back at the last triggered checkpoint, not the beginning of the mission as the author had claimed. The only way I can see him having this impression is if he was saving and quitting, and then instead of clicking Resume Mission, he was going to Mission Select, selecting the Act, and then the individual mission, confirming that he wanted to overwrite the current checkpoint data and selecting the difficulty to start the mission anew from.</p> <p>Multiplayer</p> <p>It is good. No it is not Modern Warfare 2. MW2 was somewhat entertaining but did not bring me back multiple times, and often frustrated me. Very rarely have I been frustrated in fact, I often find myself reviewing what caused my death and going "Oh, I had not taken that into account" or applauding my killer on their skill or ingenuity. Infinity Ward seems to be the lesser party on this title and it shows. Gone are the obvious "I'll just use this" perks that increase damage, health, or grenade count. Player decision on perks is more actualized thanks to the absence of Stopping Power, there aren't so many obvious perk decisions resulting in a broader variety of class loadouts. Everyone in MW3 multiplayer is a soldier, but what are you doing as a soldier? In previous titles everyone was just opting for "kill more" but now I see a lot more support, as well as an increase in polite and congratulatory language, even across teams.</p> <p>MW3's features do not bullet point well, they aren't flashy or trendy, but they are substantial. Players are divided through self-selection into Strike Packages in the form of Assault which is what we typically think of for Modern Warfare, Support which is not, the pointstreak rewards are for your team's gain and the streak does not end when you die. It is very simple but is actually game changing, most player's I encounter go with this package in some form or another and it shows in spades as it results in a lot of supportive and cooperative gameplay in public pick up games. The last is the Specialist which is the not actually literal lone wolf package (though you do become a loner using it). It is the high stakes form of gameplay where instead of getting air support or sentries for pointstreaks, you get additional perks - but you lose them all and start fresh the moment you die.</p> <p>The guns are (mostly) balanced (I'm looking at you dual machine pistols) and have individual personality which comes through in extensive play. And that is the core of Modern Warfare 3 - substance that reveals itself slowly. Modern Warfare 3 is a sequel for the fans, not a last ditched effort to convert those who have decided they don't like it and have determined that those who enjoy it must be of a lower intellectual capacity.</p> <p>It is telling that in one simple aspect, it took me a while to get around to writing this review because every time I set down to write it, it occurred to me that I could be playing it more. And play it more I shall, it is a good game. The single player gave me closure without frustration or significant eyerolls, and the multiplayer has provided some of the best times in a multiplayer experience since the late 90s. I'm not going to tell you to buy it, but I will tell you it is most likely quite a better game than you would have anticipated - and a lot more <em>game</em> than any of us expected.</p> </p> <p><a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/modern-warfare-3">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/modern-warfare-3#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~4/3YLtVdQOnH4" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1036249/david2.JPG http://posterous.com/users/36ubUC45sXfz scar3crow scar3crow http://scar3crow.posterous.com/modern-warfare-3 Sun, 09 Oct 2011 19:19:00 -0700 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~3/bxdRXczL4wg/rage-additional-impressions http://scar3crow.posterous.com/rage-additional-impressions <p> <p>I continue to play RAGE, though slightly adjusted with the following command line options:</p> <blockquote class="posterous_medium_quote"> <p>+vt_maxPPF 16 +vt_pageImageSizeUnique 8192 +vt_pageImageSizeUniqueDiffuseOnly 8192&nbsp; +vt_pageImageSizeUniqueDiffuseOnly2 8192 +set com_allowconsole 1 +cvaradd g_fov 15 +set com_skipIntroVideo 1</p> </blockquote> <p>The loss of the (not so bothering to me) texture reloading was nice, as was the increased FOV, and the removal of the intro videos (I know who made it, thanks) brought it closer to feeling like a PC title. The console is there, because it should be.</p> <p>I have found myself not compulsively saving during combat. Why? Because if I die, I get to replay the combat segment again. RAGE actually feels that nice to me to run and gun in, I actually enjoy replaying segments and trying other methods. Guns blazing is a grand 'ol time in the land of RAGE, but stealth and ambush are also feasible, as you can crouch-walk in and go for Crossbow and Wingstick kills. However enemies are usually in groups where they can see one another, so it only goes so far, in a satisfyingly limited aspect. (As an aside, it is a fun challenge to see how many I can pick off from a group before they notice, using crossbow headshots on bandits not in line-of-sight of one another, or with their backs to the other).</p> <p>The vehicle aspects are alright, not great, but not Borderlands bad either and more engendering of a respectful approach as the vehicles do not regenerate, nor do they have infinite ammo. They really are vehicles - methods of travel.</p> <p>Quests feel fairly natural as part of the game world, you really do follow the role of Have Gun, Will Travel. Most everyone else (wisely) stays put inside the confines of their shelters so you logically become the go to person to resolve any issues beyond the walls of the towns. This simple trait of having strong walls or significant distances turns what feels like in other games an errand boy situation into the sensation of being a unique provider to the people. They also feel less ham-fisted in lieu of any leveling system, skills or experience. Payment is in cash of some sort, a tool, schematic or weapon - usually correlating with your work. I once completed a guarding quest, where I acted as a sniper protecting an engineer outside of the city walls. In order to make me a better defender of the engineer, my sniper rifle was modded to be semi-automatic, and part of my compensation was keeping the rather nice modification.</p> <p>So of course an id game has great gunplay, but what surprise me was how one session involved almost no gunplay at all. It involved a lot of town walking and NPC talking, with a dash of racing. When I saved and quit the game, I reflected on how much fun I was having, and then I realized I had managed to have a very good time in an id first person shooter, without firing a shot. This in a game where I am happy to replay combat segments because of how satisfying the fighting is, trying different configurations of the weapons because of how significantly different their impacts are - and its an id software title. This fact alone tells me the release of RAGE is ultimately a victory for the studio, and though I am not going to say "id is back" simply because they are such a different studio than they once were in scope, size and people, it is nice to point to a contemporary title that show cases their quality.</p> </p> <p><a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/rage-additional-impressions">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/rage-additional-impressions#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~4/bxdRXczL4wg" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1036249/david2.JPG http://posterous.com/users/36ubUC45sXfz scar3crow scar3crow http://scar3crow.posterous.com/rage-additional-impressions Tue, 04 Oct 2011 22:44:00 -0700 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~3/GzRK3mf5j2Y/rage-first-impressions http://scar3crow.posterous.com/rage-first-impressions <p> <p>As one of the privileged few who was able to play RAGE apparently, I've been able to get in a few hours of gameplay among daily life obligations. No, I didn't experience terrible sound, abysmal frame rates or weird artifacts (the screenshots in this post were taken in my first half hour of gameplay on my machine). I did experience "texture popping" as people keep calling it, where the textures are re-loaded on a screenspace change and fade into their proper quality - but its not eye catching outdoors, or while driving, nor do I notice it when in the thralls of combat, which leaves indoor settings when no combat is occurring, a very rare scenario thus far.</p> <p>Comparisons of genre, setting and quality always crop up with the drop of a new game. Having just come off a long stint of Borderlands (as in, last serious session of it was yesterday morning 14 hours before I first played RAGE) and also just watching The King's Speech, I am moderately confident in my ability to gauge the title on issues of over similarity, as well as eloquence of story.</p> <p>RAGE is not groundbreaking in any major way. This isn't an indictment of it, other than perhaps Minecraft we haven't had a groundbreaking game in 15 years and none look to be on the horizon. RAGE is however thus far a good game for driving around a wasteland, shooting bandits and mutants, and being the go to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Have_Gun%E2%80%93Will_Travel">Paladin</a> for the people living in this world, to whom you are indebted as one of their own rescued you when you were defenseless, and took you in at great personal risk.<div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <a href="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2011-10-04/kFnclwnGehDoviGAafFDpHsAkyhfcaykcngiDbpzEAuBrlbHnpbCflmvwxEb/2011-10-03_00003.jpg.scaled1000.jpg"><img alt="2011-10-03_00003" height="313" src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2011-10-04/kFnclwnGehDoviGAafFDpHsAkyhfcaykcngiDbpzEAuBrlbHnpbCflmvwxEb/2011-10-03_00003.jpg.scaled500.jpg" width="500" /></a> <a href="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2011-10-04/wEuFrBCuoseJknzkvDsJdocBwGosEhrHAGppAkGlAynGiiqFqDuydqpasqug/2011-10-03_00002.jpg.scaled1000.jpg"><img alt="2011-10-03_00002" height="313" src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2011-10-04/wEuFrBCuoseJknzkvDsJdocBwGosEhrHAGppAkGlAynGiiqFqDuydqpasqug/2011-10-03_00002.jpg.scaled500.jpg" width="500" /></a> <a href="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2011-10-04/apDFaptBFGoDHfFCznlJhnsIjsfmnCzolIEBzrBItmccgfqhsjlkvGztqhxc/2011-10-03_00004.jpg.scaled1000.jpg"><img alt="2011-10-03_00004" height="313" src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2011-10-04/apDFaptBFGoDHfFCznlJhnsIjsfmnCzolIEBzrBItmccgfqhsjlkvGztqhxc/2011-10-03_00004.jpg.scaled500.jpg" width="500" /></a> <a href="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2011-10-04/evpkzdyepBpFAqAkcDExfHDjmufJfHfodeyxtafxHwctvgvnbkwpgjldHuBz/2011-10-03_00005.jpg.scaled1000.jpg"><img alt="2011-10-03_00005" height="313" src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2011-10-04/evpkzdyepBpFAqAkcDExfHDjmufJfHfodeyxtafxHwctvgvnbkwpgjldHuBz/2011-10-03_00005.jpg.scaled500.jpg" width="500" /></a> <a href="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2011-10-04/fIhdGwkhmtwicADBphIEvbocJGeHmkCJtxswjBcJAqHqFgJdwCEItehEHkDw/2011-10-03_00007.jpg.scaled1000.jpg"><img alt="2011-10-03_00007" height="313" src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2011-10-04/fIhdGwkhmtwicADBphIEvbocJGeHmkCJtxswjBcJAqHqFgJdwCEItehEHkDw/2011-10-03_00007.jpg.scaled500.jpg" width="500" /></a> <a href="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2011-10-04/bzikzaxgAouFqehDGBlbkerDeoxhJGwIAIHJHoeGjrhAtBoBGHFedfgAEodi/2011-10-03_00006.jpg.scaled1000.jpg"><img alt="2011-10-03_00006" height="313" src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2011-10-04/bzikzaxgAouFqehDGBlbkerDeoxhJGwIAIHJHoeGjrhAtBoBGHFedfgAEodi/2011-10-03_00006.jpg.scaled500.jpg" width="500" /></a> <a href="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2011-10-04/oruxDksDgBCAIixcsqoqottaCAlrGuevvpkgCvmtDFiInmDBiiCHezictfie/2011-10-03_00008.jpg.scaled1000.jpg"><img alt="2011-10-03_00008" height="313" src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2011-10-04/oruxDksDgBCAIixcsqoqottaCAlrGuevvpkgCvmtDFiInmDBiiCHezictfie/2011-10-03_00008.jpg.scaled500.jpg" width="500" /></a> <a href="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2011-10-04/ypaFlnjusaJiqxDleygEDalEssvlkwccojtgGktvkogjdtehivCDilDfqmwg/2011-10-03_00009.jpg.scaled1000.jpg"><img alt="2011-10-03_00009" height="313" src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2011-10-04/ypaFlnjusaJiqxDleygEDalEssvlkwccojtgGktvkogjdtehivCDilDfqmwg/2011-10-03_00009.jpg.scaled500.jpg" width="500" /></a> <a href="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2011-10-04/HDJmwFedrineixGdzAzccluDIlgIorAqCasyCvEJznmgceBwamfgruCCJrhi/2011-10-03_00010.jpg.scaled1000.jpg"><img alt="2011-10-03_00010" height="313" src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/temp-2011-10-04/HDJmwFedrineixGdzAzccluDIlgIorAqCasyCvEJznmgceBwamfgruCCJrhi/2011-10-03_00010.jpg.scaled500.jpg" width="500" /></a> <div class='p_see_full_gallery'><a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/rage-first-impressions">See the full gallery on Posterous</a></div> </div> </p> <p>It feels good to shoot in, the pistol is fair for fighting, and great if you get a headshot. The shotgun is decimating at close range with great satisfaction and acts as a good suppressor beyond that. Just as importantly, the enemies are fun to fight in AI, personality and animation. Jonathan "Nelno" Wright first introduced me to real personality and diversity in AI with his Zeus Bot for Quake, and that same quality shows up in RAGE, but far more professionally honed. Replaying early areas, I've been flanked differently and surprisingly caught off guard by brutal charges. The bandits move around the environment akin to their group and the animations do not feel canned as they work so well with gameplay mechanics. I was pleased to see little details such as a bandit laying in wait, would peek his head around a corner for you first, and then may expose his upper torso to properly shoot. This feels very natural, but also telegraphs in a non-jarring way to the player what is taking place. During a gun fight I witnessed this and in a twitch shot caught the bandit with a shot, he grabbed the wound and fell over still. Moments later I saw him use his free hand to drag himself back into cover, and then lean back out to shoot again, this time lower as he was cradling the wound.</p> <p>Its an id game. If you like shooting and being shot at (virtually of course), it does its job, and unlike Doom3, it seems to realize this strength early on. But it does a good job of transcribing what are typically just video game mechanics as we accept them in to part of the game world. The fact that you are an Ark survivor is why you are so special, you are from the time before the asteroid. You are visually distinct from all around you due to your Ark suit, which holds financial value giving reason for bandits and the Authority to want to get their hands on you, but also makes you very easily identifiable as being so valuable. The suit's technology involves healing the wearer, explaining regenerating health and why others do not have it. The gameplay mechanics are more integrated in to the game world, rather than being an abstraction layer for the player that they just have to accept.There are some more controversial elements, for example the absence of a graphical settings menu, something I understand on principle and agree with - though I don't miss it as the game benchmarks your machine each time you load and thus far has provided a great visual and framerate experience that is silky smooth at 1680x1050 with 2x AA. Sure more options would be nice, and I do love to tinker, but at least thus far the automatic benchmarker has done a great job. Great job aside, id should seriously consider offering a toggle to disable it in a patch and open up the options.</p> <p>The save game system is much maligned. This seems to be a holdover of people who are used to the game babysitting them. RAGE follows a traditional save game system with the addition of checkpoints on quest completion, otherwise it offers Save Anywhere functionality, meaning that it is up to the player's discretion how cautious they are with such, as well as offering a real cost to death without impacting your in-game items, a step above the recent trend of some ephemeral charge for death such as we see in the like of Borderlands, making death so bizarrely insignificant for a game where your primary difference in the world is your combat skill. Death does not feel insignificant in RAGE, nor does it feel like a punishment. Rather, it is a consequence.</p> <p>There are flaws of course in my own experience. Little odds and ends. The platform where you readjust the radio tower alignment has the wrong sound material on it, resulting in squishy sounds in a small region, followed by proper clanking thuds a few feet away on the same material. The ATV acceleration and deceleration sound changes are annoying to the point of making me want to just walk, and I really want to be able to look around at least a tiny bit while driving.</p> <p>All the flaws I can think of for quests or NPCs are the exact same problems I have with Borderlands, STALKER, Oblivion and pretty much every other title I have played with such. The heaping of the general failures of those mechanics onto the sole head of RAGE by the likes of reviewers without acknowledging how widespread these shortcomings are is more a criticism of the reviewer than the game. However I will defend slightly more, RAGE feels more natural about NPC greetings and quests. You are helping people via your combat skill, rather than checking off a To Do list from Outlook.</p> <p>So first impressions? Not perfect, far from it. But promising. I'd rather be playing it than writing this and it is nice to have a game with a little more sense of place about being a game without feeling like it has to break the fourth wall and poke fun at itself in a desperate attempt to seem relevant. I am looking forward to playing more.</p> </p> <p><a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/rage-first-impressions">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/rage-first-impressions#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~4/GzRK3mf5j2Y" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1036249/david2.JPG http://posterous.com/users/36ubUC45sXfz scar3crow scar3crow http://scar3crow.posterous.com/rage-first-impressions Sun, 18 Sep 2011 23:09:00 -0700 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~3/Us7-gVRfQ9s/medal-of-honor-2010 http://scar3crow.posterous.com/medal-of-honor-2010 <p> <p>DISCLAIMER: This review only concerns the single player campaign created by Danger Close.<p />Medal of Honor is a title most in gaming know well by name alone, being the spin off point for much of the gritty but still arcade feeling military shooters such as Call of Duty and Battlefield. Nonetheless, the most recent installment in the franchise, which takes place in modern times rather than a romanticized World War 2 seems to get reactions among gamers of idle disinterest, a shrug. Among some others the modern setting and reboot under Danger Close has the air of aping Call of Duty and Battlefield. Being not a significant fan of other people's opinions, and being a fan of Steam sales, I picked up a copy of the 2010 Medal of Honor a few months prior and recently sat down to play it.<p />What Medal of Honor did right was give me, the eponymous soldier, a real enemy. I was not inexplicably yet again fighting the Russians for some bizarre reason, or faceless random South Americans. I was in direct warfare in specific regions with Taliban and Al Qaeda combatants. This alone brought me very well into the fold of it being a contemporary military exchange, an enemy that is so probable, it is actual. This actual enemy greatly assists making the rest of the game world feel believable.</p> <p>Medal of Honor is very linear, though in no way that its competitors are not but it still can pain a player more used to some autonomy. You are often the <em>man of action</em> in situations, kicking in the doors and designating targets for air strikes, but unlike its competitors, you do not seem to be the only competent member of your squad - I found myself pleasantly surprised many times to see that my task was one of support, for something other titles would make a major high-five objective scenario. You do not always kick in the door, sometimes you actually hang back and lay down the covering fire (which matters) while your teammates push forward and you are not the only person around capable of throwing a grenade or taking down a target, in fact your accomplices can aim decently as well.</p> <p><br />The game does not concern itself with a huge overarching globe trotting storyline of conspiracy and intrigue, its experience is one of a small episode out of the lives of a handful of highly trained American soldiers with particular focus around a single mountain. There are no double crossings or slowmo shoot out sequences for you to headshot the hostage taker at the last second. There are however lots of shoulder tapping for spare ammo as the battles get leaner on resources over time, with actual consequences of other soldiers having to resort to their sidearm as they go low - and turning you down on the requested ammo if you have plenty. Many times your squad makes smart decisions with little interest in bravado, in fact the only bravado seems to occur in saving a life, never in conquest. One mission involved sneaking into a Taliban controlled village where supply trucks had stopped, not too destroy them but to mark them for tracking to help locate other hideouts. Sure it lacks the big bada-boom that we are trained to think is the ultimate reward for any action by other franchises, but it felt very nice doing something tactfully intelligent rather than simply rife with gumption and quick payout. Not to say that it is lacking in good old fashioned explosions and saturation of firepower, the run and gun is broken up periodically by laying down instructions for Predator drones, AC-130s and other forms of air support, as well as a helicopter attack sequence where you play the gunner. These are essentially mini-games however and provide a rhythm change without making the title feel too Hollywood.<p />Medal of Honor is not realistic, health regeneration can attest to that, but it does feel more substantial simply due to lacking many video game elements we have come to accept such as objective markers. Many times I was confused through my own fault alone, I wasn't paying attention to another soldier giving instruction and found myself wondering what I was supposed to do without a nice objective marker holding my hand. I learned quickly to actually pay attention to the chatter, which was for the most part delightfully absent of attempts at high drama or humor. Because I needed to listen to the NPCs and the writing remained fairly even handed, I actually did get a sense for them, and I found the title's end to be a melancholy one, which surprised me.<p />What did not surprise me were the faults, endemic to the genre and arising out of such linear and highly scripted scenarios. AI struggling to resolve their current frames as defined by a state change and their own autonomy against the requirements of a script, a checkpoint system which frustrated rather than made for convenience and the fuzzy line between being able to take action and when a script is to cut in. These are all problematic, but were expected as I have seen them dozens of times now at the hands of Infinity Ward, DICE and Treyarch.<p />On a twist return to the surprise, its length startled me; it is very short and painfully so as I was really just getting into it when it came to the conclusion, though it was a well realized conclusion which led me properly dissatisfied as I should be in this case. However the impact of that resolution is marred by the inclusion of a Linkin Park song in the ending credits which grates against the whole atmosphere of the last act, especially considering how excellent the game's music often is.<p />So in summation? It is flawed, but very worth the price, more so than its competitors which it is seen as an imitator of. It is not an imitator in my eyes, it is a progressor and an indicator that the genre can grow and demonstrate some degree of taste. I can only hope that in Danger Close's future work they continue to deviate from following Hollywood, as it led to a much richer experience. It is due to its linearity a far cry from what games can be, but it too is a far cry above what its direct competitors are as it possesses a degree of nobility, scope and most importantly, sobriety, that I have not been able to find upon the Battlefield or while answering the so claimed Call to Duty. For what it is, I do recommend it.</p> </p> <p><a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/medal-of-honor-2010">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/medal-of-honor-2010#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~4/Us7-gVRfQ9s" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1036249/david2.JPG http://posterous.com/users/36ubUC45sXfz scar3crow scar3crow http://scar3crow.posterous.com/medal-of-honor-2010 Wed, 14 Sep 2011 20:56:00 -0700 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~3/YJrzK8X9r7o/there-and-back-again-a-scar3crows-tale http://scar3crow.posterous.com/there-and-back-again-a-scar3crows-tale <p> <p>Nearly a year has passed, and what has passed? A bout of unemployment, a multi-thousand mile road trip and job hunt, settling down into a new job, home and another spot in the country - and right as I got comfortable, my vehicle and my desktop PC died within a few days of the other. However I am now back up and running, or at least skipping a little bit. I hope to resume reviews, as well as general articles and commentary.</p> <p>A few games I am looking forward to, hope to comment on, am currently enjoying, or just have strong feelings about:</p> <ul> <li>Medal of Honor (2010)</li> <li>Torchlight 2</li> <li>Grim Dawn</li> <li>Path of Exile</li> <li>Diablo 3</li> <li>Serious Sam 3</li> <li>Rage</li> <li>Skyrim</li> <li>Limbo</li> </ul> <p>I am also looking to talk more about the mechanics of gaming, and the meta level beyond that. I hope to generally provide a more critical eye than what I myself have been able to locate in modern game coverage.</p> </p> <p><a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/there-and-back-again-a-scar3crows-tale">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/there-and-back-again-a-scar3crows-tale#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~4/YJrzK8X9r7o" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1036249/david2.JPG http://posterous.com/users/36ubUC45sXfz scar3crow scar3crow http://scar3crow.posterous.com/there-and-back-again-a-scar3crows-tale Tue, 26 Oct 2010 20:40:00 -0700 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~3/O1XYnGkm_Z8/amnesia-the-dark-descent http://scar3crow.posterous.com/amnesia-the-dark-descent <p> <p>Amnesia: The Dark Descent is the latest title by indie developer Frictional games. It is a horror oriented puzzle/adventure game in the first person with lots of physics and lighting, and for a change of pace is properly cross platform on Windows, Mac and Linux, as it uses OpenGL instead of DirectX. I am a few hours into the game now, to where first impressions are no longer only impressions and I feel I have a bit of a hold on it, and what a greasy hold it is.</p> <p>Greasy, or perhaps inky? The game is dripping and oozing in the figurative and literal senses, from the lantern fuel and fleshy growths taking over the environment to the nigh labyrinthine darkness and threat of shadow, held at bay by defiant candelabras. You move smoothly and slowly through this environment, very aware of every shadow and every sound, turning as quickly as you can in reaction to a hint of a whisper, or the movement that turned out to just be settling dust in front of a window. The contrast of light and shadow matter in the core of the game's mechanics. Your body may fear monsters, but your mind fears the dark, and consequently you must tend to both, avoiding harm but also staying in the light as prolonged exposure to the dark slowly bleeds away your grasp on things, as depicted through various visual effects, and the only way to heal it is through puzzle solving.</p> <p></p> <p>Puzzle solving is the true point of contention, other than the economic battle for more light against the dark, and this is done through physical manipulation of the environment. Not via an all purpose Use key, but rather specific mouse drags, allowing you to slowly open a door, or fling it wide - and of course, stacking barrels and crates. It is an experience both natural and unnatural, as we get so used to games knowing what we "mean" when we Use a switch, whereas in Amnesia it is up to you to turn the crank, or push up the lever. A great example of the visceral aspect of this comes when you face down a water creature. Not that you can literally face it, being invisible the only way you can detect its presence is the splashing in the water or you know, by <em>dying</em>. The fact that dying hurts makes for a very tense experience rapidly rotating your mouse in a counter clockwise fashion to turn a heavy valve, as you hear that steady splashing getting closer and closer behind you. After all, you need to get through, and getting through is easier when living.</p> <p>I don't know why I really need to get through though, I know the game is titled Amnesia, and my character has apparently drugged himself against his past, but I have a hard time taking interest in the story, though some of the random asides you find on scraps of paper about creatures stalking the forest, silent other than the sounds of their victims being dragged in sacks behind them makes for excellent flavor. I suppose it is an element of the character's sanity? But this, though an interesting notion, almost seems superfluous because of its simple implementation. Your sanity is one dimensional, and it becomes another health meter to keep up with, if you actually feel the need to because of how often the game autoheals it at the completion of puzzles, some of which are so simple, I would not consider them as such. The simplicity of the sanity system comes into a full force collision with the quality of the game, as your character does such a better job of interacting with the environment around him, but yet cannot carry a torch. He can light one, and move on, with only a lantern as a portable source of illumination. It is an inconsistency in the physics and puzzle element which runs hard into survivability, in a way that sharply reminds you, "You are in a game." Hardly conducive to horror.</p> <p>Amnesia works under a chunked hub system, with a collection and assembly puzzle gating the exit found in the central hub, which has a transition period followed by another hub, leading to a Hexenish design. The locations look the part, and they do it beautifully with thus far no noteworthy defects, however the design of the flow and how it changes at times actually brought me to a genuine eye roll. The problem is in the lack of organic change, obstacles arise at too much The Right Time so as to slow you down, lengthening things or emphasizing a specific mechanic, another moment that feels like Designer Ex Machina, but for the sake of padding an element or gameplay time. Thus far the game has not hit me with any monster closets, but it has put me in a closet and then spawned a monster outside of it, and spawned it exactly when I picked up an item. Monsters do not seem to be part of the game world, but rather part of the game pacing, I am yet to legitimately stumble across a monster, nor have I had one come upon me, it has always been a case of spawning in response to my getting an item or completing a puzzle, and not only that, but I've had monsters disappear because I hid for thirty seconds, though there wasn't exactly a wealth of options for them to take in their wandering - they existed as a special case for that moment.</p> <p>The game has no combat, which at a glance makes the designer bones in me jump with interest, but this turns most monster encounters into "douse the lamp, crouch, find a dark corner, and stare at it" as looking at a monster may cause your character to gasp, getting their attention. Following that exact prescription usually works just fine, except in one case where upon picking up an item (as always), a monster spawned just down and behind me. I took the normal action, but the monster stayed. I checked my peripheral vision multiple times, and it kept idling, cycling through its animations. After a few <em>minutes</em>&nbsp;of this, I got fed up, turned my lantern back on and walked toward the monster, who turned away from me, walked away, rounded a corner, and was not heard from again. That experience as the only exception to the prescription, I unfortunately now come to view monsters as a mere stall tactic from the game, with the exception of the creatures in the water.</p> <p>Amnesia gets atmosphere and visuals quite right. The physics are fun to work with, and the setting is well established, but it really needs a sense of organic persistence. Early on I am told that I am being chased by a shadow, yet the shadow never seems to chase me in actuality. I can understand the developer's hesitance about more persistent (ontologically and aerobically) monsters, but that could be resolved by introducing some very simple combat. Perhaps a flintlock pistol? Vulnerability is important, but so is basic competence. Horror as a rollercoaster is exhilirating, but as an oubliette is truly horrific. These problems aside, Amnesia is entertaining, particularly when you are between these problems in the game flow. Play it for the atmosphere, and to encourage Frictional and other indie developers, as well as cross platform development.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> </p> <p><a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/amnesia-the-dark-descent">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/amnesia-the-dark-descent#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~4/O1XYnGkm_Z8" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1036249/david2.JPG http://posterous.com/users/36ubUC45sXfz scar3crow scar3crow http://scar3crow.posterous.com/amnesia-the-dark-descent Tue, 05 Oct 2010 20:34:00 -0700 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~3/Yc9XIQ68AHU/oblivion http://scar3crow.posterous.com/oblivion <p> <p>Oblivion is an open world role playing game of the closer to actual role playing variety rather than role receiving. For full disclosure I ran this modded to add additional NPCs in the various cities, as well as a more realistic economy, and a banking system as those elements felt a bit hollow before hand. I focused on the Dark Brotherhood guild line, as it seemed the most interesting and involved.</p> <p>If Oblivion is anything, it is a visual and audible experience, traveling through its locales on foot or horseback. The foliage, though not perfect, often looks amazing and convinces you that you are within a magical yet still natural realm. A good shader on the water front and a usually very appropriate soundtrack creates a grand feeling of potential for your heroics, or misdeeds. Such elements make you want to burst forth through the game world living up to what you feel is your character, something which is left somewhat up to yourself, so long as you keep away from the main storyline (which made me feel a bit pressured, and seemed <em>very&nbsp;</em>staged). This urge to spring forth is a good one, as the game is excellent for exploring and discovering, as so little of the game content is marked on the map, and it is very rewarding unto itself to see that map get populated. This can also lead you to the minor quests from what appear to be random NPCs that give you reason to continue in a particular direction. These directions help you to uncover some of the stunning landscapes and features of the world.</p> <p>However not all are so perfectly stunning, though usually the visuals do their job, after so many caves, ruins and shrines it starts to feel samey. Thats because it is, the same prefabs are used a dozen times over and it is at this inevitable point that the game starts to feel like a game, and not a world. But these places have a nice variety of traps, traps that the keen eye can in fact spot, and safely intentionally trigger which always makes you feel clever, but is limited and so I found myself giving way to focusing on the combat. Oblivion thankfully dropped the pure chance mechanic of blocking, and made it a proper impulse such as swinging a blade, but still you can't shake the sensation of two bounding boxes (or in this case, ellipses) changing states to decrement a health value. There is little sense of a body swinging the sword, versus the visceral violence felt in the likes of Dark Messiah of Might and Magic.</p> <p>You have a certain weightlessness to you in the game, a sensation which is exacerbated by the inclusion of Fast Travel, which removes the charm of distance, and the adventures which can happen between locations. It is the journey after all, but Oblivion seems to continually prioritize the destination, whether it is urging you on to the main plot line, or simply through the time mechanics. Speaking of the main plot line again, it involves Oblivion gates opening up into the world, essentially teleporters from hell, spawning demons. But this isn't concerning in the slightest, the demons hardly spew out of the gates, so much as put two or three underlings nearby and otherwise idle there harmlessly. The entire world waits on you, and not in the heroic sense; they really have nothing else to do.</p> <p>They should though, the AI was much touted before release. NPCs travel from town to town, go to sleep when they are tired, have their own personal haunts, and don't like you in their homes late at night. They can be seen eating, and having active discussions. These discussions are usually hilarious in the sudden changes of tone, and the fact that the audio is devised to act as random tips for the player to overhear. However the world of Oblivion seems populated almost entirely by moderately wealthy hobos, who just hang around all day. You see some chores being accomplished, but there is little sense of industry or import about their activity other than some tend to snarl at you as you approach. In fact, everyone reacts to your approach, very blatantly, as if you are The It Girl in a slow-mo scene from an 80s teen movie and it can be more than a little jarring. Oblivion suffers from the Uncanny Valley in that you sometimes wish Bethesda had simply not tried and just left that element alone.</p> <p>Perhaps this is what they decided to do on the issue of age? Despite mentions of such, there is no one under the age of 25 in sight, the world of Cyrodill seems poised for a massive population bust as everyone appears middle aged, with few youth, and certainly no children. This creates an emptiness to the world, and an emptiness to the AI's activities. I can understand why for political reasons the developers ignored this issue rather than tackling it, but it served as yet another reminder that I was in a game world, a game world that was part of someone's vision, but was tied to the financial well being of a studio, and thus could not risk approaching significant controversey. Oblivion has a great foundation of behavior in their AI, but it needs several more passes, more so than it needed horse armor DLC, and it could have created something far grander than what we have now.</p> <p>I do not regret my time in Oblivion, but it will be a while before I return, as it is a indirectly empty place. It is worth a visit however, if simply for the first impressions, and watching the sun set through a forest overlooking a golden lake. It will always have that.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> </p> <p><a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/oblivion">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/oblivion#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~4/Yc9XIQ68AHU" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1036249/david2.JPG http://posterous.com/users/36ubUC45sXfz scar3crow scar3crow http://scar3crow.posterous.com/oblivion Mon, 20 Sep 2010 19:57:00 -0700 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~3/1qtiLVEoVpQ/a-response-to-shamus-young-of-experienced-poi http://scar3crow.posterous.com/a-response-to-shamus-young-of-experienced-poi <p> <p>Shamus Young semi-recently wrote an article for the Escapist Magazine titled "<a href="http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/experienced-points/8066-Experienced-Points-Before-There-Was-Halo">Before There Was Halo</a>" which focuses on how Halo changed things, and it certainly did, however I do take great issue with which he looks to the past, and the way he depicts it to paint Halo, and console shooters, in a more positive light. Let us first hit upon the characterizations which suggest a lack of "experienced points" in the article, and then we shall address his positive claims about the input.</p> <blockquote class="posterous_short_quote"> <p>Those old PC shooters were all about aiming.</p> </blockquote> <p>This phrase by itself should make your ears perk up, of course a shooter is about aiming, much like how role playing games are about staying in character, and platformers are about not falling into the pit.</p> <blockquote class="posterous_short_quote"> <p>Being "good" at the game meant being able to snap your wrist and headshot a guy the moment he came into view.</p> </blockquote> <p>Note the quoting of good, as if that amount of control isn't in fact a quality of skill. He seems to think someone being able to outaim him is a deficiency on their part rather than a testament to his own quality at dodging. Also, not all games have headshots, or many one shot kill weapons and so getting the drop on someone or simply landing the first hit does not determine the conclusion of the fight.</p> <blockquote class="posterous_short_quote"> <p>It meant circle-strafing: orbiting a foe while keeping their vulnerable bits in the center of the screen.</p> </blockquote> <p>This is an element of any competitive exchange, minimizing your weaknesses while exposing that of your opponents. Watch a boxing match, or a chess match. Watch a political debate. Even a match in a first person shooter where the opponents are rooms apart and cannot see each other, they are still performing this action, they keep their eyes on the wider expanses, and keep their backs to solid structures. Shamus casually dismisses the entire schema of competitive relationships.</p> <blockquote class="posterous_short_quote"> <p>There was never any reason to take cover in those games because hiding would just delay the inevitable.</p> </blockquote> <p>Games exist in time, they have specific outcomes, via fraglimits, timelimits, or standard elimination. The only inevitability here in refusing to use a tactic is death and thus defeat. Once again Shamus speaks to his inefficiency at something, and blames it on the game (this isn't to say that many games don't have poor design, they really do, but this is not a ubiquitous element, most games at least marginally reward hiding). Often in hiding from a superior opponent, you can resupply and take the battle somewhere to your favor, or you can wage a war of attrition on the opponent. Shamus was either bad at these, or refused to try them. They do not delay the inevitable, they coerce your opponent onto your terms.</p> <blockquote class="posterous_short_quote"> <p>Gameplay was about diving head first into the sea of bullets and dogfighting your way out.</p> </blockquote> <p>The implication of the past suggests that Halo evolved from this, and therefore does not have it. It is also a bold faced lie, unless you play any of the earlier PC shooters without any regard for your survival. Before Halo, it was actually far riskier to dive head first, why? Regenerating health or shields. They were not a common feature, which meant that any damage taken from such an activity would tap into the very real economy of healing powerups. Diving in headfirst in many older shooters would get you cut down quickly. Try any Doom combat scenario involving shotgun zombies, chaingun zombies, revenants or arch-viles with a pure diving head first tactic. Unless you are exceptionally skilled, you will most likely die, and if you do survive, you must now consume some of that finite health supply to continue onward, creating distinct repercussions for your decisions. Try it in Quake, the tracking nature of the Shambler and Vore are problematic, the horizontal fanning of the death knight magic, the leap of the fiend and the bounce of the ogre grenades from up high... It is a very dangerous thing, and if you can pull it off, it is a testament of skill. This design enables the elite players and gives the less potent players both plenty of methods of playing.</p> <blockquote class="posterous_short_quote"> <p>If you charge out into the open like the Doom Marine you're going to get blasted back to the Game Over screen faster than you can say Larry Niven.</p> </blockquote> <p>If you charge out into the open as the Doom marine against conditions you can't handle easily, you are a dumb player.</p> <p>Shamus' comments on shooter gameplay reveal if anything that he is simply a bad player who won't learn from his mistakes, and now shuns the games of his past which actually challenged him in favor of glorifying a title which forced him into certain positions and contained numerous crutches to mitigate player decisions in the long run, essentially making it less of a game in and of itself.</p> <p>The defense seems to rely on a false split of aiming and timing, of the mouse versus the controller.</p> <blockquote class="posterous_short_quote"> <p>But if you watch someone play a console shooter you'll see the game is less about precision aiming and more about precision timing. Instead of trying to line someone up with the stick, a player will get close with the stick and then run sideways, pulling the trigger during that split-second when the enemy's head passes through the reticule.</p> </blockquote> <p>This is not a statement of higher achievement, this is a method of overcoming a short coming, duct taping a flashlight to your carhood because the bulbs on the vehicle proper are out. It is a good adjustment, but it does not bring it to a level on par with the mouse which does a much better job of emulating the chief mode of interaction in a shooter, the aiming. Designing the gameplay to match this behavior is a concession that their players do not have sufficient input devices for the gameplay of the genre.</p> <p>It also makes a false division, separating aiming and timing, when timing is a component of aiming (just ask anyone who has ever successfully lead a moving player with the railgun). Emphasizing the timing is because the console controller is not good at precise input, leading to overaiming or underaiming on the target, hence the need to wait, or use the strafe keys - because they cannot rely on the input for adjusting their aim directly. Bungie realized that their players spent a lot of time waiting, or readjusting, because of the impracticality of the controller, and since they couldn't back out, they made a wise decision on adjusting around it. Monsters behave in such a way so as to give the player "their turn", which is a change of pace from the cut throat behavior of monsters from older first person shooters who wanted to kill you; shields regenerate which kills two birds with one stone, the fact that the player spends a lot of time waiting, and that they have difficulty avoiding damage due to poor navigation input.</p> <blockquote class="posterous_short_quote"> <p>Moving in and out of cover is an exercise in timing your shield, weapon, and enemy movement patterns.</p> </blockquote> <p>Indeed it is, however the only difference between this and any other shooter that has ever had geometry which stopped enemy vision or shots is the presence of the shield, which comes at the cost of not having player decisions impact the item economy of the level, which is a very grave decision to make.</p> <blockquote class="posterous_short_quote"> <p>This is what Halo fans are talking about when they say the game is "more tactical."</p> </blockquote> <p>This is what PC shooters call "the basics of first person shooters," a bare minimum of achievement upon which you build a game.</p> <p>Shamus may congratulate Bungie on this, I merely nod, they did what they had to do to give the impression of a palatable first person shooter experience, on input devices not at all designed for it. The fact that he could not acknowledge this, and had to rely on tearing down games of the past through misinformation and bad logic shows how like Bungie, his main priority is pleasing an audience. The only difference is Bungie actually had a sizable award to seek, and so you can chalk up those decisions to business.</p> </p> <p><a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/a-response-to-shamus-young-of-experienced-poi">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/a-response-to-shamus-young-of-experienced-poi#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~4/1qtiLVEoVpQ" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1036249/david2.JPG http://posterous.com/users/36ubUC45sXfz scar3crow scar3crow http://scar3crow.posterous.com/a-response-to-shamus-young-of-experienced-poi Sat, 04 Sep 2010 17:57:00 -0700 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~3/zlxjGl85Drk/borderlands http://scar3crow.posterous.com/borderlands <p> <p>I have now played a lot of Borderlands. I brought Mordecai the hunter to level 43, having completed the campaign, the Zombie DLC and part of the way into the General DLC, Roland the soldier to level 10, Brick to level 29 and Lilith the siren to level 22. I've played it a lot, and enjoyed its positives. This is not to suggest that it is a good game.</p> <p>However it isn't horrible. I don't regret the time spent playing it. The game pushes you forward by rewarding with XP every little thing you do, including intermediary steps in a quest, and this helps out a ton in the beginning of the game. You start out fairly genericly, your class having impacted only what your starting weapon is basically, you must level up to level five before you get a skill point, which must be put into unlocking your special ability. This allows you to get comfortable with the game in general, and then you get some sandbox time to grind up for the first boss fight with the assistance of your new found skill, and can begin putting skill points into the tree for your class. The game world is populated by what could be called "lower class peoples", of crass regard, slow intellect and a fondness of beer hats. This usually leads to pretty humorous and casual commentary from the NPCs and the game's sense of humor is definitely one of its strongest points.</p> <p>The combat is a mixed affair, as much of the game is dominated by simple saturation of projectiles, playing whackamole with the local populace. Thankfully the indigenous creatures have a variety of weak and strong spots. Skags roar from time to time and their open mouths are a critical location. All of&nbsp; their flesh is weak to fire, except for the plated elements which are prevalent on the more mature of the species, and so you must either favor acid weapons (rare early on), hope for their hubris to betray them, or dodge them and focus on the unprotected backside. Most of the creatures seem to have about this depth of strong/weak spots, so you do play differently depending on what you are encountering.</p> <p>Within humans you basically have the average combatant, melee focused ones, and tank types. The only real variety in this is whether or not they have a regenerating shield like you do, which makes for an element of time in battle, and the rare chance that they will be "Bad Ass" (a moniker which can be applied to creatures as well). Your longest battles will take place against humans, as they take cover, retreat, and throw a variety of grenades. I once had a 5 minute battle against just 8 guys, because I had unfortunate combination of one being a BadAss who loved grenades and wielded a Static SMG which chew through my shield, and another BadAss tank with a hefty machine gun that just wouldn't go down. I survived that battle just barely on multiple occasions through judicious use of Transfusion grenades which can heal me. Later on the game will shift your inventory by hitting you with enemies that wear very heavy armor which practically mandates acid weapons, and fast moving opponents with very high shields and low health, so you begin rapidly prioritizing corrosive and shock attacks.</p> <p>The menu and inventory is a dreadful thing. For a loot oriented game, it makes it a pain to manage all the loot you can get (they should take notes from Titan's Quest and Torchlight). If they completely revamped these, I might reevaluate the whole title a bit more positively. The field of view is small enough that it can get a bit disorienting, particularly in tighter areas. Thankfully the bulk of the game takes place in fairly wide open spaces. Borderlands is supposedly a cooperative game, but on this notion it fails incredibly. All of the classes have very useful skills which kick in for a period of a few seconds following a kill, which encourages players to pick off the weakest enemy first (or last, depending on the benefit of the skill such as rapid health regeneration). These are very rewarding in single player, but in cooperative it makes a kill less valuable to the group and more valuable to the individual player, and when you combine this with the low number of monsters, a limitation that seems inherited from the console support, you see players racing to get their kills rather than working together for the death of the enemy. Combine that combination with the fact that the game is either dull or very difficult if you are too high level or too low level for the area, so everyone must be approximately the same level or start new characters together, and you really just prefer to spend your time in single player.</p> <p>Borderlands is entertaining, and it certainly fulfills that Pavlovian need to continue playing "because I've almost leveled." It has good personality, but lacks professional polish in many aspects, and a game design that wasn't mindful of its overall goal. If you are looking for something with a sense of humor, and its on sale though, it wouldn't be the worst way to spend your gaming dollar. Nor would it be the best however.</p> <p>P.S. I actually was fine with the ending, which seemed to have annoyed everyone else.</p> <p>P.P.S. Claptrap is a far better character than anything Valve has given us, and hes just comedic relief who doubles as a skeleton key!</p> </p> <p><a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/borderlands">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/borderlands#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~4/zlxjGl85Drk" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1036249/david2.JPG http://posterous.com/users/36ubUC45sXfz scar3crow scar3crow http://scar3crow.posterous.com/borderlands Tue, 08 Jun 2010 22:50:00 -0700 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~3/ToEt30eavFQ/battlefield-bad-company-2-singleplayer-first http://scar3crow.posterous.com/battlefield-bad-company-2-singleplayer-first <p> <p>Bad Company 2 is considered to be EA's answer to Modern Warfare 2, so generally one would expect that the challenger would not make the same very public and egregious mistakes as that which it is challenging. Much like Modern Warfare 2, Bad Company 2 places you in the role of the child of an artistic horse and a mutant salamander, as you perpetually wear opera glasses with blinders, run in a bizarre gallop, and can rapidly regenerate from sustained machine gun fire and even explosions - on the normal difficulty setting.<p /> There isn't a lot to say yet, where the game isn't poorly executed, it is generic. Your field of vision is so dreadfully low, its easy to get mixed up on a 4 foot wide bridge, and the player movement seems choppy, as if the game is periodically trying to redecide whether or not you are clipping with the terrain properly, and giving small nudges just to be sure. The combat is standard, as you face off against ragdolling cardboard cutouts who apparently make their AI decisions with the Turok renderer, mired in a fog so deep in areas where you are supposed to be stealthy that you can only assume that they give homage to the 80's and wear their sunglasses at night. You are fighting a bland, horribly unintelligent, unobservant enemy who are so concerned with proper procedure that after shooting them on their four wheeler, they will come to a proper stop first, and hop off before raising a weapon to defend themselves. They also have berets which make any bullet impact to the exposed face or neck need to happen twice (with the corresponding aiming reticle bolding feedback to the player to let them know they're winning) before they have the good courtesy to die.</p> <p></p> <p>It is yet another title where you take up the role of the only soldier who can aim, or perform any momentous event, yet you cannot open a door by yourself. You are in a world of scripts, where in the midst of a battle with invading forces and attacking air support, you can still find soldiers not at the ready and quite placid until directly fired upon. Not to suggest that your teammates are particularly intelligent, as the game has already demonstrated that the level design and writing are not created with the player in mind, but strictly in body. Thus far the game lacks simple logic checks for validity of basis before executing a script. Round a corner and see a soldier standing at a mounted machinegun, what do you do? You shoot the soldier. Four seconds later as I am already addressing new soldiers on the scene, my commanding officer shouts "Machinegun! Frag it!" Apparently we grenade corpses in these parts (this has nothing on CoD:WaW's Japanese soldier in a pillbox whom I sniped, who came back to life so as to burn to death for the flamethrower troops script, but the presence of this is still worth mentioning as it happens so early on, it is indicative of both franchise's lack of consideration for player involvement). Also don't worry about lagging behind collecting ammo, your CO understands, and besides, the wilderness has lots of boulders and immensely thick tree lines so every road leads towards the next script.<p /> The game world looks great sometimes, when its not covered in particles animating various masked alphaed sprites of dust, smoke and fog, and then smeared with depth of field suggesting a dream sequence, all to hide the jarring material transition that is terrain to character or detail mesh. This would work out okay despite being nothing but a makeup job for acne, but it doesn't always come through so the seams are particularly distracting. I have heard the destruction is lovely, but I haven't seen it through all the particles, other than a few glimmers of concrete falling away.<p /> I am not very far into it at all, but already it seems like in its rush to get out there as a contender against Modern Warfare 2, it has made all the same mistakes, and has delivered the exact thing that got Infinity Ward into the rut they are in now: doing more of the same.<p /> Oh, and it closed itself when I alt tabbed out to close Firefox in the hopes of a performance boost, so fair warning there.</p> </p> <p><a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/battlefield-bad-company-2-singleplayer-first">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/battlefield-bad-company-2-singleplayer-first#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~4/ToEt30eavFQ" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1036249/david2.JPG http://posterous.com/users/36ubUC45sXfz scar3crow scar3crow http://scar3crow.posterous.com/battlefield-bad-company-2-singleplayer-first Sun, 24 Jan 2010 16:42:00 -0800 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~3/ucSl-sQQZ0M/hexen http://scar3crow.posterous.com/hexen <p> <p>Hexen (1996) is the sequel to Heretic (1994) by Raven Software, though that is mostly through a connection of mythos, as the atmosphere of Hexen is far darker and foreboding than Heretic, and though still being very action oriented, it has many more aspects of an RPG to its nature. Hexen uses a modified Doom engine, allowing for jumping, looking up and down, and some very, very active levels. You are immediately prompted with a choice of player class, which not only affects health and visual depiction, but also each has a unique set of four weapons, the final of which must be assembled from pieces you collect as you travel through the game world, and travel you will.<p /> Hexen uses a hub system, where each major chunk of the game is linked in only one route, but the inner workings to reach that route have you crossing multiple environments (and multiple loading screens, though the load times are so negligible as to be difficult to see the loading image for at this time in technology). Hexen expects more of players in terms of patience, creativity, and dilligence. The first level, where most games baby the player and train them up, is decently exploratory despite its small size, has multiple traps, uses the z-axis a decent amount, and requires seeking out switches along with keys. At its conclusion you will find the soon to be common sight of a shimmering red portal, "Ethereal Travel" which is the game's term for loading, which takes you to the first hub, and possibly its most involved one as you travel from level to level, returning to this central one to find what has changed. And I mean that, you find out, the game sometimes messages what you have accomplished, but other times it is deathly silent; "Alright I flipped that switch, time to revisit every corner of every level I've been to thus far until I see something new." This can be very tiring, but has the flipside of making for some very rewarding moments of "OH! That!" which are so rare in contemporary titles. Hexen is not a game to grind through, but rather to take in episodes, as often a fresh mood will reveal more in casual play than a continual tired search can.</p> <p>That search though however can prove to be rich, though it uses dated technology (the fate of all technology, so this is hardly a negative), it uses it well, with consistently done artwork making for a more believable world despite the sprite oriented nature, well crafted midi music, ambiant sounds and a general atmosphere of foreboding and decrepit livelihood. Leaves blow in the wind from dead trees, stained glass shatters, pottery breaks, and creatures roam (as the game frequently repopulates itself mildly) under an always brooding sky, sometimes alive with thunder and lightning which light up the level. The levels have a breath unto themselves, as the caves will shudder with the earth as bats take flight, swamps gurgle and are patrolled by pockets of fog and far more corporeal things, and cathedrals dramatically light themselves with torches which ignite at your approach. Hexen is rife with these triggered, yet not rigid, events and they are well dispersed through the game, so it was with genuine surprise near the end when a stained glass ceiling shattered as groups of Ettins dropped in, or when the ice cracked, and the floor plummeted in pieces changing a once even plain into a stalactite rich cavern with slippery surfaces and perilous drops. Hexen is to at times be admonished for its lack of messaging, but is worth examination for how it keeps its levels so fresh throughout the entire game despite repeating themes.<p /> Give Hexen a try at some point, even a casual one, just to see how much life a Doom powered environment crafted almost 14 years ago can still have when made with the hands of level designers and texture artists who understand pacing, and enabling of the player. Far from perfect, but aged excellently.</p> </p> <p><a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/hexen">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/hexen#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~4/ucSl-sQQZ0M" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1036249/david2.JPG http://posterous.com/users/36ubUC45sXfz scar3crow scar3crow http://scar3crow.posterous.com/hexen Mon, 04 Jan 2010 19:25:00 -0800 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~3/DiqY_PL8BNk/legacy-of-suffering http://scar3crow.posterous.com/legacy-of-suffering <p> <p>2009 having come to close, everyone is in full swing about tabulating lists regarding that year, and looking towards this new one. It makes for easy writing in both format and content. Thankfully before this year came to a close, I swung by <a href="http://www.doomworld.com">Doomworld</a> for their annual Cacowards, and though I've only had the time to sample one entry, what an entry it is. 2009 was looking to be a very sad year for first person shooters in both quality and volume, however a group of Brazilian Doomers set out to prove me wrong (as I'm sure I was on their mind during development, of course). I am happy to be proven wrong.<p /> <a href="http://www.brdoom.com/mtm/los/">Legacy of Suffering</a> is a Doom partial conversion using Doom2 and GZDoom, and is a storyline running partially parallel to the one we saw in Doom 3. What the LoS team has done however is taken the setting of Doom 3, the combat of Painkiller, and a dash of FEAR, and outdone all three in their respective disciplines. True you will not find real time shadow volumes as in the id tech 4 title, or Havok physics, or slowmo battle, but what you will find is wonderfully paced combat that would sometimes literally leave me breathless, not daring to exhale during many tight and narrow exchanges with my numerous enemies. This is accomplished by arming the player with a particularly potent weapon, a quad barreled shotgun, with a tempting alt fire (four barrels unleashed) and a wonderfully counter balancing reload phase. The quad barreled shotgun is not only your workhorse but your advocate in LoS, as the altfire can really help overcome the bigger baddies, but the rapid primary fire is great for dispatching spread out groups of weaker monsters. You may also find the single barrel and double barrel shotguns, but I used them far less. The rocket launcher and chaingun are consolidated into a single weapon (but you're going to have to fight to get it) directly pulled from Painkiller, but you will definitely need it at times, and the plasma rifle has altered graphics.</p> <p>I said you will definitely need it, and that is no overestimation, as LoS is not afraid of hundreds of monsters in a single level, and these are usually presented in large clusters. In fact this is what LoS excels at, presenting you with nigh impossible circumstances that you somehow overcome (though I did die on occasion, but I always had a sense of "I can do that better..."). I recall one moment dashing out in front of a horde of chaingunners and shotgunners, with 1 to 3 shells to my name, glancing shotgunners as they got near my cover to scavenge the shells from their body, trying to hold them back just long enough to use one of my last rockets to nail the group of chaingunners. The ammo is sometimes generous, and sometimes very tight, but always Just Enough which leads to many "self-heroic moments" that leave you feeling very accomplished at the end of each exchange. LoS is certainly lacking in the casual mowing down of monsters, because though they may not be brilliant, they are potent. A shotgun or chaingun in the hands of a zombie is just as potent as one in your hands, and consequently has the same limitations, including the spinup time which puts an end to Doom 3's chaingunners with the instant spinup.<p /> LoS does Doom 3 one better by capturing that distant planet dark military installation so well, and still providing the cool demon corpse burn away effect, which has the added bonus of keeping Arch Viles from resurrecting them on top of looking nice. LoS does Painkiller one better by structuring battles that seem to always press your ability, without punishing you for playing it. Despite these achievements, LoS contains two of my most hated aspects in games: very linear level design, and regenerating health; and being LoS, it does them in such a way I actually liked them. The level design being so controlled does allow for the very exact and exacting battles, and the regenerating health lets mistakes be punitive, but not eternal infractions, and is checked by the presence of very helpful armor that does not regenerate, along with any bonus health which will not regenerate as well. Where games like Call of Duty use regenerating health to essentially make up for bad player mistakes and/or poor level design, LoS health regeneration allows it to turn the game up a few notches in intensity, while keeping reasonable retreat a potential, but not foolproof option. I wouldn't say that LoS does health regeneration "right," but it certainly does it better than most cases, and creates a dynamic of combat best likened to quality music: rising crescendos, periods of calm, bursts of sound, and tension as the tones never quite recede. You will be thankful for the regeneration, but you will be cursing how its not quite fast enough for your needs, or so it feels at the moment, when you're reloading while a shotgun zombie lurches around the corner.<p /> If you enjoy solid FPS combat, you should play LoS, and even if you find it a bit hard, there is still the I'm Too Young To Die difficulty, which increases your health regeneration, and shotgun reload speed. Get it now, play it through, and thank me later; thus far this is the peak of more rigidly structured FPS, and definitely stands heads and shoulders over any Call of Duty, Halo or Half-Life, and it is free (assuming you have Doom2, which you should if you like FPSes).</p> </p> <p><a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/legacy-of-suffering">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/legacy-of-suffering#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~4/DiqY_PL8BNk" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1036249/david2.JPG http://posterous.com/users/36ubUC45sXfz scar3crow scar3crow http://scar3crow.posterous.com/legacy-of-suffering Sun, 06 Dec 2009 17:38:00 -0800 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~3/AQf2zbJG8J4/serious-sam-the-first-encounter-hd http://scar3crow.posterous.com/serious-sam-the-first-encounter-hd <p> <p>Speaking seriously, CroTeam recently released Serious Sam: The First Encounter HD on Steam. Should you get it? Well that ultimately depends on if you liked Serious Sam: The First Encounter. There is nothing redundant about that statement, they really did just release the same game, again. Only this time they HDed it. In fact they capitalize in their marketing on the fact that they didn't change the game itself, with statements such as the probably misquoted "More Polygons = More Fun" and similar precepts. This is one of those moments where a blatantly incorrect statement yields more honesty. This release is strictly graphical, in fact you could say it contains 'graphic content.'<p /> How graphic is that content? Shadowvolumes with shadowmaps, tonemapping, normal maps, water refraction and ragdolls. That's pretty graphic.<p />So once again, is it worth getting? Once again, if you did like Serious Sam: The First Encounter, yes. The gameplay is not hindered, and it certainly looks less dated (but with time, it too shall as well). The shadowmaps give each monster a much more weighted presence in the game world, though inexplicably they still have circular shadows rendering on top of the shadowmaps, however this can be removed via a console command which I do not recall for sure at the time (but tab completion is present, so experimentation with ren_ as the start will you get there). That little oddity aside, the game often looks gorgeous, with the sands looking positively cool in the shadow of a charging Werebull, though the blooming hot dust trail left in his wake, particularly at the peak of a dune, is gorgeous and really serves to announce his presence. Blood streaks seem to be progressive, spreading over time, and streaking with some inheritance of their originator's velocity, making the downfall of a charging enemy all the more pleasant, and is even more rewarding when you topple an Arachnoid Minor from the peaks of the Memphis metropolis, watching then ragdoll over the edge, their stinger trailing as they leave a thick streak on the wall as they plummet.<p /> Co-op is still a blast, and truly calls for cooperation on harder difficulties (not the false cooperation of L4D where the game forces the action of cooperating, versus the requesting of it through meaningful odds changes), however it isn't without defects. Playing with a flag to respawn where you died, one player fell into a spike pit, and then continually spawned and died on the spot, which was very annoying, but we neared the end of the level, so he waited it out. At the next level, he was still spawning and dying, though we never saw where he was. This continued until he oddly enough changed his player model, and from then on spawned normally (and continued to do so after changing it back). This moment aside, a great time was had, as the original release offered, only now it was far shinier (by contemporary standards of shininess of course).<p /> An aside, and borrowing a rant from my good friend Jehar, a lot of people cite the likes of Serious Sam, Painkiller and even Will Rock as hearkening back to "old school gameplay", a statement which must be curious to "new school gamers" who then check out such games for an example of what first person shooters were like before they got into them. This is problematic for one simple reason: these games are not old school in style, they represent their own distinct form of shooter best demonstrated in and of themselves. If you say to me "old school gameplay" and reference first person shooters I will assume you are speaking of Doom, Blood, Quake or similar, pseudo non-linear titles with a powerful central character facing large odds in many different combat circumstances in an episodic manner. Serious Sam is focused primarily on the horde subset of gameplay within the aforementioned titles, and is an exploration of that manner of gamepacing and level design via arenas. Serious Sam, Painkiller and Will Rock all largely focus on arenas with hordes of monsters, which is usually a decidedly very linear process, though nowhere near as linear as what the likes of Infinity Ward or Valve deliver. Serious Sam is not old school, or retro, but rather it is arena combat against hordes, something it does very well, and delivers alongside a tongue in cheek approach to games as a whole (the only good example from another game I can think of being Blood 2's research lab level with the objectives of running around shooting and pushing buttons). Of course this is not to say that Serious Sam is simple, and if you think fighting its hordes is a simple task, likely you are playing on too easy of a setting.<p /> Is it worth $10? Yes, unless you didn't enjoy it the first time, then quite simply don't bother. But if you got any joy from the original, this is $10 well spent simply to enjoy it all over again, with fewer harsh edges.<p /> One last thing though CroTeam, when applying an Achievements system, surely you can come up with some unique ones? These are all fairly grindy, and really doesn't suit your creative history.</p> </p> <p><a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/serious-sam-the-first-encounter-hd">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/serious-sam-the-first-encounter-hd#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~4/AQf2zbJG8J4" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1036249/david2.JPG http://posterous.com/users/36ubUC45sXfz scar3crow scar3crow http://scar3crow.posterous.com/serious-sam-the-first-encounter-hd Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:56:00 -0800 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~3/7GC99MmGZjQ/left-4-dead-2-demo http://scar3crow.posterous.com/left-4-dead-2-demo <p> <p>There is something awkward about having a sequel number for a title that already has a number in the name, it really breaks the speaking flow, but also makes for awkward abbreviation, such as L4D2. It reads like the beginnings of a Megaman level skip code, or maybe a strain of the flu. Without Megaman or the flu in mind, I loaded up the Left 4 Dead 2 demo.<p /> Where Torchlight could be summed up, though not fully justified with "Diablo", Left 4 Dead 2 can be articulated with "mod" fairly succinctly, if the demo is an indicator of its quality (as a demo is typically supposed to be). It really is more Left 4 Dead, only during the daytime, with more accents, and some horrendous music. I don't mean anything negative to the cultural music of that region, but just shoving it in with Left 4 Dead's original themes, and set to the action of shotgunning hordes of zombies... that just doesn't make good gumbo for me. Left 4 Dead was already plenty silly, putting marching band bass drums and bright brass in the middle of it just seems like a parody.<p /> The combat is very much the same, the AI Director still seems to be little more than a counter which resets itself if you make enough progress, the melee weapons are... exactly as you would imagine: various model files with an associate hit sound. They all seemed to behave the same, and also worked very well through grated windows somehow. In short, the main thing they add is to a bullet list of features. The new special infected are... decent, though their combination with the returning special infected almost makes it seem like these variants are a "southern thing." Where the Hunter shook things up by jumping on you and removing player input, and the Smoker shook things up by dragging you away and removing player input, the Charger shakes things up by ramming you and removing player input, and the Jockey shakes things up by riding you away and mitigating player input- oh who am I kidding, they don't add much and their health is so low that the slightest bit of concentrated fire makes them just another infected, only with a larger bounding box. The infected seem much more agile, at least more so than I recall from Left 4 Dead, in fact they seem practically compelled by their past live's gymnastics calling. If you want to slow down a horde, simply get a lightpole between you and them, not only will it buy you time, you will get to witness at least a dozen of them immediately climb that lightpole, and then hop off the top in their pursuit of you. They react this way to most anything actually, if they face a wall, they will leap to reach the top of it and climb over. It reminds me of the soldiers in FEAR who would senselessly jump and roll through windows, looking very cool but exposing themselves to fire - only the soldiers in FEAR didn't leap 12 feet to reach the top of a wall, or scurry up every tall cylinder they could find.<p /> There is certainly more visual variation in the zombies, making them feel less generic despite still feeling like test models for a ragdoll experiment (we've already had Painkiller and UT2003, we know about ragdoll), however you do get to encounter an armored cop infected. By armored, I don't mean kevlar and a hardened plastic visor and helmet, though they would have you think that. No, apparently this is a time traveler, clad in the flesh of fierce dragons of old, but he forgot to get any for his back. I actually put three Uzi clips into this guy at a range of 3 feet or so, but nothing harmed him, until he turned his flank slightly. These are the sorts of things that really just make the game feel arbitrary.<p /> As you may have seen with my repetition earlier, L4D2 (zombie flu) still holds close to the tried and trite cooperative school of taking hostages, and in fact the only special infected that don't do this are the Boomer and Spitter; the latter of which is reminiscent of a horrible CRACKED magazine drawing depicting a slovenly trailer park woman with a cold, and fails to elicit any sense of threat. True, the damage of her toxin is not only cumulative but apparently exponential, but it expires so fast its but a mere pause to reload your weapons, and if you were somehow confused by the red flashes, your decreasing health, the pain sounds and the sizzling sounds, the game will actually message you about how you need to keep away from the slime.<p /> In fact, that is one place where L4D2 excels so well that it fails, it messages everything. I mean everything. Floating icons point out weapons and ammo, which are already outlined, it tells you to melee close enemies to push them away, or to turn around if someone hits you in the back. I am waiting for the game to instruct me on when to fire the gun... It messages so much, apparently they are very concerned about winning over the paramecium sales, in hopes to capture the ill treated protozoan market.<p /> So what of Left 4 Dead 2? Well, I don't feel the 2 is with merit. Maybe 1.25? Left 4 Dead: Reloaded? I've got nothing, and this release doesn't feel like much to me either. I might purchase it at some point, if I ever catch up on other games to play, but only for $10 or less. Until then, there are plenty more interesting and developed things to try. I'm just glad they released a demo.</p> </p> <p><a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/left-4-dead-2-demo">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/left-4-dead-2-demo#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~4/7GC99MmGZjQ" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1036249/david2.JPG http://posterous.com/users/36ubUC45sXfz scar3crow scar3crow http://scar3crow.posterous.com/left-4-dead-2-demo Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:51:17 -0800 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~3/MiVpY-0vEDE/torchlight-demo-again http://scar3crow.posterous.com/torchlight-demo-again <p> A good bit more playing through the Torchlight demo has revealed an important thing: the gunplay in this game is awesome. Steampunky, good visual and audible feedback, and a satisfying reaction from the monsters. You can duel wield pistols (or a pistol and a staff just to be crazy) or carry two handed rifles with longer range (I think), higher damage but slower fire rates. They also can carry elemental effects, and this is reflected visually. It is nice to wield a poisonous ax, emitting toxic green fumes, trailing behind me, even nicer to dual wield it with a frost sword, mired in chilling fog - but to switch to an alternate of a wood handled, bell-curved barrel rifle, swirling in flame? That is when you really feel capable of doing some damage. This folks, is where graphics count.<p /> I am very much enjoying how though the main campaign is rather linear, there are tons of off-shoots, quest oriented, and simple dungeon crawling (you can actually buy scrolls which will give you access to long abandoned and otherwise unreachable areas, rife with treasure and tyrants). The inventory juggling is made all the better by being able to not only give things to your pet to hold on to, but you can send your pet back to town at no cost, where they will sell all of the items on them, and return with your money, surprisingly quickly - and you never have to leave the dungeon (now if only I could give it a list... 5 identify scrolls...). This is good because it lets me keep on fighting, and the fighting is for the most part very fun, but also because it avoids load times (please fix the load times...).<p /> Still running into difficulty picking through items on the ground when they&#39;re bunched together, there does seem to be some sort of depth sorting logic which you can trigger, but the detection radius on that seems to be slightly above the label, which can get... awkward. Also still facing the ever present genre problem of &quot;I clicked on that guy to shoot him, why is he running towards him? Oh hes running to get in range with his gun. Thats a short range gun. Now hes in his face... ...and he came to a complete stop without attacking.&quot; Not that these cases are particularly dangerous, as playing on Normal I rarely find myself even looking at my health, and in fact only once have I felt the need to use a health potion before continuing. Nonetheless, I shall continue my torchlighting, and enjoying what is thus far a very long demo.<p /> A last note, my character is no longer Unremarkable, he has ascended to Tolerable! I feel so loved, thank you NPCs. </p> <p><a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/torchlight-demo-again">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/torchlight-demo-again#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~4/MiVpY-0vEDE" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1036249/david2.JPG http://posterous.com/users/36ubUC45sXfz scar3crow scar3crow http://scar3crow.posterous.com/torchlight-demo-again Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:03:00 -0800 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~3/NKuszDLm5PU/torchlight-demo http://scar3crow.posterous.com/torchlight-demo <p> <p>Torchlight as a phrase is perhaps the penultimate statement of dungeon crawling, more than hack and slash itself, as without that torch, the other aspects fall behind. Torchlight as a game does not stick quite so close to its name, as the dungeons are not so dark or dank, and actually you have both hands free to wield all manner of weapon. I am but a short ways into the demo, having just reached the exit for level 3, playing as a Destroyer, a character with a torso larger than my body, but legs smaller than my own. Torchlight is very much a cartoon world, it looks drawn, it feels drawn, and the women have a 2:1 bust:waist ratio. However cartoony is a good thing, the lines are mostly clean, the game world is visually well messaged, it is coherent and consistent, and everything seems to be made of "the same stuff." This goes nicely hand in hand with the fact that it seems to be rather simple, graphically speaking. I'm yet to spot any fancy post processing, no screen space ambient occlusion, no depth of field or penumbral wedges; rather the game uses a simple draw distance fogging to enhance a sense of distance (as well as dungeon) and runs great with system requirements on par with, and I am only partially joking, a web browser.</p> <div>So how is the game? It's Diablo. I mean this in the most positive sense, if you have played Diablo, Diablo 2, Titan Quest or many others, you will be comfortable in Torchlight, and get straight to the excellent feel of the game, and begin hoarding your loot. You click on things you want broken, or want to buy things from with which to break things. You right click on them to break them harder. Of course it goes deeper than this, and I can only speak on one class at the moment, but the interface is nice, particularly in equipping and purchasing. Want to buy something? Shift+click on it in their inventory. Want to sell something? Shift+click on it in your inventory. Want to compare things? Hover them, it will show your current item's stats, and the stats of the item you are considering (and for weapons this is made all the simpler by a DPS calculation prominently displayed); and if you like the way the comparison pans out, right click and it will switch the items out, literally trading places in the inventory. Speaking of places, everything seems to be a single cell in the inventory, which means no more carefully rearranging your inventory to pick up one more item, or shouting at the game "Why can't I rotate this spear? Why do you have it at a 45 degree angle? It will fit at a 90 degree angle, theres enough space!" Combine this with a town stash, and a shared stash (a nice nod to PlugY) and you have far fewer concerns of inventory micromanaging. But wait, theres more, you can send your pet (yes, you have pets, and they can transform by eating fish, it must be the Omega 3s) back to town with things to sell to clear out your inventory, while you keep on... ...torchlighting?</div> <p /> <div>Theres a fair bit more to it, more than I am aware of I know. You have reputation/fame (I ascended to the rank of Unremarkable this morning), there are robotic bards, mercenaries, summons... But for now, I am enjoying the very solid core gameplay; isometric whacking stuff, and collecting the loot that falls. If anything, get it for Matt Uelmen's music.</div> <p /> <div>I do have a few bits to note however, namely in the item drop display. It still has the hold ALT to display whatever is clickable nearby, but it bunches items, so you might see a green Unidentified Ring, but you end up picking up, just to set down a moment later, numerous Leather Boots and Leather Gloves and Rusty Blades, but I might just be doing it wrong, I hope I am. It does seem to suffer more from the Click Past behavior on Diablo, where you are rather confident you click on a monster, but the game interprets it as a navigate command, and will run past the monster taking damage, then stop, then you can click the monster again. I know this is usually largely user error, but it has happened to me quite a bit more than it did in Diablo/2 and Titan Quest. There is also a Click Through situation which comes up from time to time... For example, I rolled over a corpse, who dropped a Town Portal scroll (yes, they actually call them that) and when I held ALT, the label Town Portal appeared, however the label was obscuring some terrain in the distance. When I clicked the label, my character grabbed the scroll, and then ran to that spot on the terrain in the distance. One other thing is in the mines, you can often see rat miners in the distance, chipping away with pickaxes at the rock and minerals, and you can hear them as well, and its all very nice. However from time to time, the sound will play, the particles for the pickax striking the rock will appear, but the rat is nowhere to be seen. Comparatively minor problems for something with thus far, such solid gameplay. I am looking forward to playing the demo more, and I do plan on making a purchase.</div> <p /> <div>Torchlight gets a lot of things right, and so far, nothing quite wrong, just not perfect or optimal. The inventory management is much nicer than what we've seen before, the system requirements are almost adorable, and there are lots of nice touches, such as mentioning AI behavior in the monster hover (flees when allies are killed, immune to knockback, etc) that I wouldn't mind seeing become a standard in &nbsp;the genre. The demo is certainly worth the download, and unless I am missing some hideous horrible problem deep within the very heart of it, definitely worth the $20 (and I hear modding tools are on the way).</div> </p> <p><a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/torchlight-demo">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/torchlight-demo#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~4/NKuszDLm5PU" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1036249/david2.JPG http://posterous.com/users/36ubUC45sXfz scar3crow scar3crow http://scar3crow.posterous.com/torchlight-demo Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:02:00 -0800 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~3/pWpxyTNyDYs/bioshock-part-one http://scar3crow.posterous.com/bioshock-part-one <p> <p>Late to the game, pun intended (as always) I dive head first into the world of Bioshock. I imagine most everyone who might be reading this is already familiar with the game, and if not then you can skim the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioShock">wiki article</a> to your minor curiosity's content. I started the game back in September, and played for about an hour. I then saved my game, exited, and forgot about it until late October. The capacity for a game to not even cross my mind as something to do is a rather foul note to start on, and though this can be defended by citing that I was only in the first hour of gameplay, an hour is a lot of time to ask of someone with even the most meager of responsibilities; however, I loathe leaving a game "unfinished."<p /> Bioshock could be called a first person shooter, as it is first person, and you do shoot (and cast spells, called "plasmids" and tied to gene altering in the storyline, yielding a combat system eerily like 2001's also Unreal engine title, Clive Barker's Undying), though the game seems almost decided to make the whole process very unpleasant. Low fire rates, small clip sizes, significant kick, loud sounds, and lots of screen effects for shooting, being shot at, and being shot mixed in conjunction with the low movement speed makes for a very groping style of gunplay. Though the game does seem to have the always satisfactory Flat Footed scenario where you can deal critical damage to an unaware enemy, making for the ambushing one shot kill, if the opponent is in their active state, their health always seems a little arbitrarily high, and they are generally unaffected by your attacks (they do not seem to have the parallel to the full screen bloom and blur you experience when damaged), and their transitions in combat are very quick, from being completely unaware, to zeroing in on your position, from being incapacitated by lightning to being fully capable of any form of combat, from having a shotgun blast go through them to watching keenly for your next move. All of this from chaps in party gowns, vests and manual labor getups; true they are hopped up on gene alterations, but it doesn't stop it from feeling silly when combined with how weighted down the world feels in its movement. Never mind that the AI has the attention span of a strobe light with a short circuit. I've had enemies enter into combat with me, and when I backpedal through a door, they chase after, but when the door closes right in front of them everything seems to stop. I go and open the door, and they're walking away in their idle frames, cuing one of their random idle chatter sounds. I've had this happen more than once, and I've also had enemies take aggressive shuffling maneuvers as if seeking cover under fire, while I am stationary, not firing.</p> <p>The game world seems to run on a restrained inventory mechanic, ammo counts are low to persuade the player to use plasmids more, for which the plasmid ammo called Eve is in comparatively more ready supply. Even then, you only have so many slots for your plasmids and gene tonics (passive skills), and the game quickly has you bump against that restriction so as to create a desire to expand it, which encourages combat over stealth in the scenario of the Little Sisters, which I will get to later. It does allow you to switch out your active and passive skills via a vending machine of sorts, meaning you can coerce a player to make repeat visits to the same area, and thus cue a monster spawner to create a sense of the game world being inhabited, despite the fact that the levels do often feel like just setpieces, rather than part of a coherent city built at the bottom of the sea. Through this, it is established that you will likely be doing even more back and forth behavior than what the quests will have you. Of course, if you have more slots (and don't ask me about more gene tonic slots, I've not figured out a way to purchase additional ones yet) you can keep more active skills available, but this costs Adam, which can be taken in small or large amounts depending on which set of animations you want to see after you encounter a Little Sister. Little Sisters seem to be the game's attempt at a moral mechanic, but it feels so directly pressed against me, that it creates a resentment towards the whole situation; I don't feel torn by the decision, especially when if I try to avoid the whole situation, the game seems to wag its finger at me about exiting the level without saving/harvesting all the Little Sisters, which of course entails fighting the Big Daddy, a beast of horrendous ammo consumption.<p /> Bioshock thinks you are stupid. Seriously. There are tool tips for everything, and tool tips for things you didn't think could dare to be simplified any more. Don't progress fast enough? Hold H to get a hint. Moving about aiming down the sights of your gun, perhaps because you're hoping to get in the first shot on a nearby monster? Hold Z to exit zoom. A Safe, press V to Hack, or What is this? (press M) (hint: it's a safe). They prompt you with your own controls at nearly every moment, as if you can't hit Escape and look at any or all of the controls. Saving the game? They recommend you not turn off your machine while it is doing this. This is all well and good if you are new to gaming at all, but I can't help but chuckle that I still can't find a way to replenish my Eve via a Eve Hypo like I do my health with a first aid kit. Maybe I'm just reading past it every time I look over the controls screen? I also can't see what section a gene tonic is for when I purchase it, I just have to purchase and hope it isn't for a category that I already have two strongly preferred tonics in. A word to the wise, the weapon upgrade booths, theres a reason they don't list the prices, there are none, its free, but you only get one. Yeah, thanks for the warning game.<p /> There is a lot more to be said, which does speak not necessarily to the game's depth (as tempting as that pun may be), but to its breadth. Bioshock thus far has introduced a lot of well garbed mechanics, but has been inconsistent in its delivery, messaging, flow and over all compelling nature. I really don't want to get to Andrew Ryan, in fact I actually just want to get back to my land of origin, the only reason I ended up in this place was a plane crash, so why am I now the only person capable of doing any good in the game world? There are many other troubling things about Bioshock, and it is thus far shaping up to be... very much the same as we've all seen before, only more heavy handed in controlling the pacing, and more arbitrary in the reasoning for that hand. I know I skipped a lot of things, but I'm not far into the game yet, and I will cover some other aspects in another post.</p> </p> <p><a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/bioshock-part-one">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/bioshock-part-one#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~4/pWpxyTNyDYs" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1036249/david2.JPG http://posterous.com/users/36ubUC45sXfz scar3crow scar3crow http://scar3crow.posterous.com/bioshock-part-one Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:31:02 -0800 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~3/BeScOpimLxA/general-about http://scar3crow.posterous.com/general-about <p> The main theme of this is basically mini-reviews of whatever I am playing at a given moment. These will usually be small observations, notes, comments, and relative to where I am in the game. The game may be new, old, very old, or it could be a community made mod or level. I might also randomly comment on something that has happened in gaming news, though I will try to focus the content towards my at the moment impressions of a given game experience.<p /><div>I do not exclude other subject matter from posts, but I will try to keep it focused towards being my outlet of immediate thoughts on a game. Because irc doesn&#39;t satisfy my vanity of grievances quite well enough. Hope you enjoy.</div> </p> <p><a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/general-about">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://scar3crow.posterous.com/general-about#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Intermittentscar3crow/~4/BeScOpimLxA" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1036249/david2.JPG http://posterous.com/users/36ubUC45sXfz scar3crow scar3crow http://scar3crow.posterous.com/general-about