Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Review: Street Fighter IV (PC)
It's been out for console for a while, but it just recently hit the PC, so it's new to me!
Street Fighter 4, which unintuitively enough is actually something like the 10th Street Fighter (and that's only if you don't count the puzzle fighters or the marvel/snk crossovers), continues the somewhat annoying tradition of attempting to inject plot into a game where the only REAL plot is "I'm this guy and I have to beat up everybody else." Of course, sometimes it's fun to check out the backstory of what fighting game characters are up to, to try to learn their motivations... but any such inquisitiveness is quickly bitchslapped right out of any casual gamer who isn't looking to spend hours decoding the temporal mishmash which is the street fighter release order vs chronology. See, First there was Street Fighter, Then Street Fighter 2, which then had 2 "revisions" of itself, then the third street fighter series was Street Fighter Alpha which actually is set BEFORE Street Fighter 2 (I shit you not, I did not know this until today when I looked all this mess up, because frankly the art design in the alpha games turned me the hell off, not to mention I got tired of having to listen to unwashed teens at the arcade creaming their jeans over whatever the hell this "Akuma" thing is), which then had a revision and a sequel. Then came the fourth trilogy, Street Fighter 3 and its revision and sequel, which came after Street fighter 2, so at least they were trying to maintain the numeric progression. But then they had to go and muck THAT up as well by having Street Fighter 4 happen BETWEEN 2 and 3!
Trust me, just forget the plot. The plot is "You are this one guy and you have to beat up everybody else." I should have stuck with that.
Alright, mindscrambling plot-knots aside, the game is actually fun as hell. The last street fighter game I tried was Capcom Vs SNK 2, which made me want to murder people because SNK refused to port capcom's control scheme into their gaming system. Don't even get me started on the retardation that ensued with multiple "grooves" available for characters, ugh. That could be its own article right there.
I digress.
I was immensely relieved to be able to pick Ryu and find all his moves and buttons exactly right the hell where I expected them to be. It felt like slipping on an old, comfy pair of gloves that fit your hands perfectly. The controls feel like Street Fighter 2 but even more natural and smooth. Of course there were one or two little learning stumbling blocks, like I had to figure out that throws are now accomplished by hitting both "light" attack buttons at once, instead of just being automatic when you get close. There's also a new "focus attack" ability (both medium attack buttons) that seems to be some kind of DOA-esque fake opening with a counter attack, but I can't quite get the hang of it. They've also got buildup guages that have come to be standard in the fighting game industry nowadays, divided into two meters, one for supercharging normal attacks and a "revenge" gauge that lets you unleash "ultra combo" type moves which builds up by you getting beat on. For those of us who have forgotten (perhaps voluntarily) their childhoods, there's also a built in list of moves available for you to peruse at any time.
The developers of the game took an interesting approach - in a world where games are making ever more and more strenuous demands for more polygons, higher resolution textures and arbitrarily incremented shader models, SF4 has opted for a reasonable amount of polygons, fairly low resolution textures that are then run through an industrial strength post-processing routine a half dozen times that actually makes the whole affair rather pleasing to the eye when it's in motion (but makes screenshots look a little like ass warmed over). Many of the more powerful attacks also cause graphical effects reminiscent of brush strokes or ink spatters. Really, it all feels halfway to being cel-shaded but still retains the depth of the third dimension, and framerates are easily maintained very high, which is important in a game that relies so very much on reflexes. You can also tell the model designers and motion coders had a lot of fun with what they were doing and were not just going through the motions like that other set of 3D street fighter games that we all agreed never to speak of again 10 years ago. It should be noted, as well, that while everything is rendered in 3D, the gameplay is still limited to a two-dimensional plane, so there's no dodging to the sides and whatnot a-la Soulcalibur.
The game features 27 characters to choose from (though 10 or 11 or so have to be "unlocked" by doing the funky chicken dance at midnight on the south side of a spruce tree or whatever the hell passes for "reasonable expectations for unlocking requirements" these days), and contain a good number of old favorites as well as a handful of newcomers - a mostly grapple-based MMA fighter named Abel, a business-suit bitch with a wierd uniboob named Crimson Viper, a spastic luchador-come-gourmet-chef named El Fuerte, and my new favoritest character in the whole wide world, an extremely obese kung fu biker named Rufus.
Rufus is just awesome in a can. Or rather, in an oversized yellow spandex biker's jumpsuit. I love the character design, the unconventional attacks, and I especially love how they chose to wobble his belly. Mai Shiranui and DOA's breast physics have got NOTHING on Rufus' belly wobbling. It makes me laugh until I cry. The writing on his dialog (especially his meandering, stream-of-consciousness victory quotations) is just hilarious. There's no "You must defeat sheng long to stand a chance," here. No, you get to hear about this one crazy time he put bananas in his peanut butter sandwich and was like "whoa."
The standard Arcade mode doesn't take that long to beat, consisting as it does of 6 random matches, a "rival" fight, and the boss battle. Playing by yourself you'll probably be ready to play something else in 2 hours or less, but you'll come back some other time. As with every other fighting game, the real joy is in getting some friends together and beating the snot out of each other in versus mode. And since the PC version supports Windows Live, if you really want to you can subject yourself to playing against random sugar-injected 14 year olds around the world.
All in all, I found it a very enjoyable game worth owning, particularly if you game with friends who also like fighting games. It also makes me salivate for a potential Marvel vs Capcom 3 written with this engine, which if they can take the custom tie-ins from MVC1 and the incredible number of characters from MVC2 and combine them with the artistry and control scheme of SF4, I am fairly certain would constitute the most incredible thing to hit the fighting game scene since Mugen.
Grade: B+ Also, is it just me, or do Chun Li's thighs get bigger and bigger with every single game? I swear, her hips are like 3 feet across now.
Thursday, July 09, 2009
Mechwarrior 5 Announced
Via Kotaku
Surprise, Mechwarrior fans! That teaser from yesterday was indeed for a new Mechwarrior title, which is in development at Piranha Games, who worked on the latest Transformers title.Read Full ArticleSo at least you know they have experience with giant robots! Then again, it also means they have experience with making crummy games based on giant robots.
Though, let's give them the benefit of the doubt on this one. They only helped develop Revenge of the Fallen. And being a movie tie-in, it had a deadline to meet. Something they won't have to worry about with Mechwarrior, what with Battletech being 25 years old and all.
This new game is called simply MechWarrior, and will serve as a reboot of sorts for the franchise. You'll still be piloting mechs, but the developers reckon that current console technology will for the first time let you feel like you're really behind the sticks of a giant fighting robot.
They're also shooting for a "dynamic battlefield", and rather than feature a food chain of mechs, instead want to let players choose a style of mech and then upgrade that to suit their tastes as they progress through the game.
MechWarrior is coming to the PC and Xbox 360, with no details yet on either a publisher or a release timeframe.
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Monday, July 06, 2009
Review: Overlord 2
I enjoyed Overlord 2 more than I did Overlord 1, for a number of reasons. These days it seems a rare thing that a sequel genuinely improves on the original, but this one does in a number of ways - which, given that the original Overlord wasn't all that shabby to begin with, is all the more pleasing.
For those of you who missed it, Overlord is a game franchise about being evil, doing evil, and inevitably, overcoming some other evil that is getting in the way of you exerting your own evilness. You're a hulking, muscular brute with demonic glowing eyes and a suit of armor copypasted off of an artist's concept sketch of Sauron. You have dozens of little impish minions who you send to do most of your dirty work, though you yourself aren't bad at chopping and stomping either.
When Overlord 2 begins, you are put into the boots of Overlad, the 6 year old progeny of the previous Overlord and his tower mistress, who then fled the tower and abandoned you in a sleepy snowbound northern village. Called "witch-boy" by the locals and cruelly ostracised by most of the other children, Overlad is then discovered by a small handful of evil minions who were part of a large, scattered effort to locate him after the untimely demise of the previous Overlord in a mysterious magical explosion that destroyed the Dark Tower and most of the surrounding area. They help him put paid to his squabbles with the local kids and escape to the netherworld.
Fast forward through 13 years of being raised by demented goblin henchmen, and Overlord Jr. is now ready to settle old scores and claim his father's birthright.
The first and most obvious improvement is also probably the most expected one - with the increase in available graphics horsepower out there now, Overlord 2 has more visual complexity than the first. There's more dynamic foliage, the fur lining your armor wafts in the breeze, many more destructible objects in the environment that shatter and crumble in a much more spectacular fashion, more particle effects, and so on and so forth. It still abuses the hell out of bloom, but what doesn't, these days?
The second, and most needed improvement in my eyes, is the "be evil" paradigm got an overhaul. One of my larger gripes with the first overlord was that there were far too many chances to be good, and the evil that you did do was very "saturday morning cartoon" type evil, which made it really just mean-spirited slapstick and not really any kind of dark humor. While you're still not exactly peeling people out of their skins and hanging them by their entrails or anything, the evil has gotten more Darkseid and less Gargamel. For instance, your first task as a grown overlord is to slaughter 25 baby seals to harvest their life force for use in summoning minions. There's no retrieving a lady's lost freaking baggage here. There are still choices to be made, but rather than choosing "good" or "evil" like in the first game, now the choices go between enslave and dominate, or kill and destroy. The ending of the game changes as well, depending on whether you enslave everything, destroy everything, or use a mixture of both.
Just for the sake of one-upmanship as well, Junior does not share the same "one tower, one mistress" limitation that daddy did. Over the course of your rise to power you will aquire not one, not two, but three mistresses. Which of course leads them to squabble over who is your harlot-in-chief, which of course gets you out of the netherworld and doing nefarious things more often.
Another new addition is the ability of your minions to obtain mounts which improve their performance. Browns can ride wolves which increase their fighting ability, reds can ride salamanders which let them toss fire on-the-run, and greens can ride spiders which let them climb vertical surfaces. Your enemies have some new tricks as well, particularly the new human "empire" which uses phalanx formations that are hard to break up and require much strategy to overcome. There's also fun catapults and ballistae to play with, new weapons and armor to forge (as well as some of the better items from the first one... the helmet that gives you double life energy for each orb you collect is my favorite), and new spells to use. I particularly like using the "evil presence" spell to dominate the minds of local civilians and using them as cannon fodder when I confront the military that is supposed to be protecting the town. Delicious irony.
Sadly, the control scheme did not improve from 1 to 2, and we're still left trying to emulate thumbstick movements with the mouse. However, they did improve the camera angle a little bit, making it easier to see what's right in front of the overlord instead of being blocked by his body. There's also new fighting moves associated with holding down different directions while swinging.
All in all, the game improves on the first one in almost every way, and is an enjoyable experience to play through once and revisit once in a great while.
Grade: B+. If they could get more replayability into this game via dynamically generated content or something, rather than everything being married to the in-game plot, it'd be an epic game.
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Starcraft 2: No LAN, cuz of pirates
Via Shacknews
We don't currently plan to support LAN play with StarCraft II, as we are building Battle.net to be the ideal destination for multiplayer gaming with StarCraft II and future Blizzard Entertainment games. While this was a difficult decision for us, we felt that moving away from LAN play and directing players to our upgraded Battle.net service was the best option to ensure a quality multiplayer experience with StarCraft II and safeguard against piracy.Read Full Article
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Mark Jacobs "restructured" out of Mythic, BioWare takes over
Press release from Warhammer Online Herald
06/24/2009 @ 11:03:28 ESTRead Full Article
Today we have important news to share with the community. EA is restructuring its RPG and MMO games development into a new group that includes both Mythic and BioWare. This newly formed team will be led by Ray Muzyka, co-founder and General Manager of BioWare. With this change, Ray becomes Group General Manager of the new RPG/MMO studio group. BioWare’s other co-founder, Greg Zeschuk will become Group Creative Officer for the new RPG/MMO studio group. Rob Denton will step up as General Manager of Mythic and report to Ray. BioWare’s studios remain unchanged and continue to report to Ray.
Mark Jacobs, co-founder and current General Manager of Mythic, will leave EA on June 23, 2009. We thank Mark for his contributions at Mythic and wish him the very best going forward. Mark played a major part in the success of Mythic with his contribution as General Manager and Lead Designer of WAR.
Mythic retains a strong team led by Rob who co-founded Mythic in 1995. Rob played a critical role in the development of Dark Age of Camelot. In his previous role as COO, he was responsible for all day-to-day management of the studio including all development, operations and support.
Please join us in celebrating the union of these two award-winning studios.
Zero Punctuation Reviews: Prototype
Gee, I'm sure glad I reviewed Prototype yesterday or this would have taken the wind out of my sails to do my own review after ZP'd already done it.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Review: Prototype
I have to admit I wasn't all that jazzed about this game going in. The marketing campaign was a little too... I don't know... self-aggrandizing and yet emo. Reading about it made the game's concept sound like something a bored junior high school student came up with in an hour when handed an assignment entitled "come up with something totally rad."
But, after playing it, I have to admit, that middle schooler has a pretty good idea of what's "rad."
Prototype is a 3rd person action game that puts you in the shoes of an amnesiac anti-hero who has been infected with a genetically engineered disease that gives him superpowers. He's a super-angry badass with a gravelly voice who, thanks to his infection, can shapeshift to look like other people, physically absorb people into his body to heal himself and/or take their place, form cutting blades and smashing clubs and any other number of weapons, sprint up the side of buildings and, of course, absorb an unbelievable number of bullets without dying. You get plopped out with no memory in the middle of manhattan with the disease "outbreak" coming into full swing, turning people into mutant killer zombies and the army coming in to try to contain the situation. And everybody wants you dead, but you're just too goddamned badassedly deadly for them to get the job done.
I know it sounds corny and over the top. I groaned as I installed the game. But you know what? Give your inner Jr. High student a hug because he hit this one out of the park. Yeah, it's like somebody took Venom, Hulk and Wolverine and threw them in a blender and poured this out as the result, but you know what? It's goddamned fun to be Venulkerine. I also felt echoes of Assassin's Creed, GTA and Resident Evil. Put em all together and you've got one big amalgamated game of "you are unbelievably powerful and you can pretty much do anything you want."
The gameplay itself is extremely reminiscent of The Incredible Hulk with one important difference: They did it right this time. Similarities? It takes place in New York, you have full freedom to explore the entire game area, you can take part in minigames or go find trouble on your own or just go straight for the plot advancing missions. But everything else is better. The graphics are better, the controls are better, the fights are more fun and less bullsqueeze, New York feels like a crowded city again with hundreds of people on every street, and as laughable as it sounds, the character progression is more believable.
For the achievement/unlock crowd, the game has lots to do. There's the usual "find all 400 of these glowing balls in the world" scavenger hunt, of course. But the game also takes a page from the drug dealer handbook: The first mission gives you a taste of your character's full power... and then it takes it all away for the second mission. From that point on, you have to buy upgrades to your abilities and whatnot using points you collect from doing all the things you do in the game.
For the exploration/sandbox junkie, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from just going on a rampage and doing your own thing for as long as you want. There's plenty of guys to fight outside of doing missions or minigames. You don't even have to be a particularly good guy, as the game doesn't seem to penalize you for hacking up innocent civilians along with infected zombies or military troops.
Of course, no game is absolutely perfect. There are a couple issues - the plot takes itself WAY too seriously, and the dialog is often locked in "see how much we curse? That's how you know this is a mature game" mode. The camera and controls, while better than Hulk's, still have some issues, especially when trying to turn quickly or fight something behind the camera. Sometimes it isn't entirely clear exactly how you're supposed to go about accomplishing the mission objectives, and often the description of a power or upgrade isn't really informative enough to help with the decision to buy it or not. And finally, often the minigames feel a little too contrived and the requirements to complete them successfully are too stringent for too little reward.
But by and large, the game is a fun romp through slaughtertown. And yes, you get to kick helicopters out of the sky with gusto. I heartily recommend it to anyone who isn't afraid to paint the town red with entrails and isn't fazed by a little blue language.
Grade: A.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Friday, June 05, 2009
Gas Bandit's Recommended Warhammer Mods
As I did before with Gas Bandit's Recommended WoW Mods, here is the Warhammer version that shows you what mods I tried, kept, and why.
LibSlash
The simple fact of the matter is, you need this mod to make most other good mods work. That's all there is to it.
AutoDismount
There's a category of mods that I like to call the "Mythic should have done this anyway" category, and right at the top of the list is this mod. In Warcraft, using an ability while riding a mount automatically dismounts you and starts the casting of the ability. Not so in Warhammer... you have to manually dismount before using an ability, or face gigantic white letters slowly scrolling up the screen in an annoying fashion reminding you YOU CANNOT USE THIS ABILITY WHILE MOUNTED. This mod changes things to closer to how they should have been. It's not as seamless as WoW, but it's light years better than mythic's default.
BlackBox
Another "why the hell did mythic do this" fix to the UI. When you die and click "respawn," you are treated to a countdown timer in an unnecessarily large black box that obscures the center of your screen. This mod removes that black box and replaces your countdown timer with a small progress bar that is more out of the way.
Bloody Mess
This one is purely for aesthetics. Whenever you take damage or deal damage, the damaged party will have a bloodspray cloud rendered over them. Reminds me of the one thing I really liked about age of conan. Now if only I could arrange for complete dismemberment...
HideItPlease
Most people have experienced the glitch in the default UI, where if you enter a scenario while a PQ timer is still on your screen, the PQ timer will continue to obscure the scenario information even after the timer has expired, often causing you to have to relog to fix the problem. This mod is a band-aid fix for that, hiding the PQ information window whenever you enter a scenario, so that the PQ information can never obscure scenario status.
Killing Blow
Probably my favorite UI mod. By default, if you score a kill, Warhammer barely makes note of it in the combat channel. How anticlimactic. This mod causes a kettledrum to beat and giant letters of recognition to come upon the screen whenever you score a kill proclaiming "YOU HAVE KILLED SO AND SO." Much more gratifying.
Moth
Short for "Mouse Over Target Hover," this makes the tooltip for whatever your mouse is on (which is normally crammed down in the lower right hand corner of the screen where you can't read it and look at the target at the same time) appear and follow your mouse cursor. It takes a little getting used to, but you will do so quickly and then come to wonder how you ever did without it.
NerfedButtons
By far the most complicated mod I use, NerfedButtons allows you to assign multiple functions based on conditional statements to single hotbar slots. By using NerfedButtons, you can, for instance, put all your debuffs on one button, pressing it multiple times to cast each one, complete with automatic checking for "do I already have this debuff on this target?" logic kicking in and selecting appropriate abilities each time. My engineer uses this to stack and refresh dots. My warrior priest uses it for dot and debuff abilities, as well as offensive-invocation buffs (hit person A to buff person B). A guildy of mine uses it to make sure that his target isn't immune to knockdown before it lets him use the knockdown ability. It is wonderfully versatile and frankly almost feels like cheating. Its only drawback is that to set up your custom buttons is very unfriendly and arcane, relying entirely on slash command lines input on a command line without a UI. It takes some real homework to understand how to make this mod work right, and then even more to learn all the different things it can do for you. But if you can put in the time, it will enhance your play greatly. Example, my engineer has one button that basically goes, "If I press 3, if my target doesn't have my acid bomb debuff/dot on him then throw acid bomb, else if target doesn't have my frag grenade dot then throw frag grenade, else if target doesn't have my incendiary rounds dot then shoot incendiary rounds, else if target doesn't have my signal flare dot then fire signal flare, else if target doesn't have my sticky bomb dot then throw sticky bomb, else throw firebomb DD grenade." Basically, this means under any circumstances I can just spam the "3" key at my target and I will always use an appropriate ability ensuring that all my dots are going on a given target at all times, and flawlessly doing direct damage when no dot needs refreshing. This leaves hotbar space and brain capacity free to worry about things like napalm placement, crowd control, knockbacks, morale abilities, pets and everything else.
SmartAlert
This mod is another in the "fix something mythic did in a stupid way" line. For some reason, common error messages were deigned to need to scroll slowly up the screen in gigantic type, so that a rapid pressing of a wrong key (or a right key on a target out of range) would cause a backlog of error messages that would continue to block visibility on your screen for long seconds after you had stopped performing the erroneous action. SmartAlert removes these error messages from the announcements scroll area and simply places them in the chat window as normal text, like it should have been all along. A slight tweak is required to make this mod play nice with the Killing Blow mod.
StateOfRealm
State of Realm is a must for any RvR enthusiast. Combining data from server-provided map updates with a secret unseen SOR chat channel to disseminate information among SOR users, State of Realm (usually) provides the most concise, accurate and up-to-date information on the state of the realm war between Order and Destruction. Who has what keeps, what BOs, percentage controls of zones, time left on sieges, everything you could need to know in a handy, efficient panel with customizable colors and levels of information. SOR takes you from being largely in the dark to being informed about nearly everything... except for the 5% or so of the time that it "wigs out" and stops showing factual information.
TargetRing
This mod puts an additional "ring" graphic over your current target(s) that is visible even through walls, floors, ground and other obstructions. It is very handy for finding targeted friends and foes alike without having to puzzle out extrapolated vectors from the arrow at your feet.
ThankTheHealer
Healers like it when you say "thank you" when they rez you. I know when I'm on my warrior priest, I can't help but bump rezzing grateful people a little higher in my priority list. This mod automatically says one of a customizable selection of indications of gratitude when you accept a resurrection. I wish it included the name of the healer for personalization, but that's a small gripe. One warning, the default text strings include l33tspeak/IMspeak... "thx 4 rez," which I went in and edited out post haste.
TokenMachine
This mod lets you preselect automatic choices on rolling for medallion and crest loot. Simply change settings in its UI attached to the inventory screen to set need, greed, pass, or always-ask for recruit, scout, soldier and officer medallions as well as conqueror, invader, warlord and sovereign crests. The mod will also pop up a colored link in your chat window every time you receive a crest or medallion.
Warhammer Scrolling Combat Text
I'm still not entirely sold on WSCT. All most of what it really does is change the way damage and healing numbers are presented on the screen, and I'm not entirely sure the way mythic was doing it by default was bad. But what I do like about it is the alerts that tell you when you gain or lose buffs, and especially the alert that pops up to let you know you are low on health.
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