Thursday, December 17, 2009
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
Thursday, December 03, 2009
Another for the "maybe if I win the lotto" wishlist
From Kotaku
Man, I'd love to give this a shot... but it's 200 bucks just for the glasses, and on top of that you need a monitor that can run at 120hz... which then means you need enough video card power to run at 120fps I am guessing. According to their system requirements, my 8800 comes in right at the very bottom of their "cards badass enough to do this" list... but something tells me it wouldn't work quite right.
Ah well. C'est la vie de la technologie.
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Friday, November 13, 2009
Want to buy Evil Genius?
It's on sale for 7 bucks this weekend at GOG.com.
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Thursday, November 12, 2009
Friday, November 06, 2009
Review: Champions Online
Last weekend, I took part in the Champions Online free weekend and played my brains out on it. Coming away from it, I can't quite say that we have a true sequel to City of Heroes ... because generally, things are supposed to change and/or get better from the original, in a sequel.
This is the second time a de facto "spiritual successor" has let me down in recent memory. The first is when Mythic Entertainment forgot everything they learned when making Dark Age of Camelot, and took RvR in Warhammer Online a step backwards (but with prettier graphics and a popular Intellectual Property). Now, despite adopting the IP of the Champions tabletop game system, Cryptic Studios (and the similarities in the naming conventions of the two companies here blew my mind) has basically remade City of Heroes... except they forgot to put in all the neat stuff they added in later. That's right.. they've recreated City of Heroes as it was at launch.
Now, I didn't expect to be able to play a villain, that's not what I'm talking about. But it would have been nice to be able to do randomly generated missions like CoH/V, and the best thing going for CoH/V were the bank robbery missions. But none of that sort of thing is present here. The entirety of your gaming experience is doing quests (oh, excuse me, missions) which always consist of "go here, kill this, get that, come back." There IS an occasional escort mission, about 1 every gaming area it seems. There's also no player-created "lairs" either. And you can just forget about the player-created missions that are keeping CoH/V going. Champions online did hop on the "public quest" bandwagon that WoW ripped off from Warhammer Online, but being 3rd to the party, it doesn't feel new and fresh, it feels expected at this point, and fails to earn any bonus points, if only because it's a paltry replacement for the missing safeguard/mayhem missions.
There are, of course, new features and tweaks that make the game slightly different, but in essence we have all played this game before. In fact, we played it before and there was more TO it. It's like going to a restaurant, seeing they have a new dish on the menu called "Steak 2.0," and you order it to find that Steak 2.0 (despite costing the same as regular steak) uses less seasoning, is a smaller cut, and comes with no sides.
To make matters worse, the champions online engine feels exactly like the City of Heroes engine that is almost 10 years old - despite removing a lot of the good content, they've kept a lot of the bad tech. The movement controls are just as clunky and laggy. The camera controls are just as jittery and painful to the eyes. And frankly, the most visible change in the graphics is a huge step backwards - all the postprocessing (including the impossible-not-to-notice "comic book outline" effect), in my opinion just make the game harder on the eyes. Turning all that crap off made the game look SO much better.
Speaking of new things that don't improve the experience, let's talk about the new "block" dynamic. Holding shift makes your character block. Blocking makes you more resistant to damage and status effects such as knockbacks and such. I can appreciate that they're trying to make a more action-oriented experience, but here's the thing about MMORPGs - the reason they took all the "action" out of them is because when 40,000 people are all fighting at once on an MMO server, there tends to be a little more latency than when there's 10 people on a FPS server. The reintroduction of gaming elements that still depend on timing (and that timing has to be validated at the server level) just draws attention back to that latency and ends up being an irritation rather than an enhancement (because if you DON'T block when you're supposed to, you risk total annihilation). So, even if it looks like you blocked in time on your screen, you'll still take full damage because the server didn't know you were blocking when it rolled the dice on the attack against you. Nice try, but I'm afraid no cigar there.
The good news is, if you liked the costume design and character customizability options from CoH, they're back and better. There are still irritating little things about it - like, for instance, if your superheroine wears a corset for some reason this precludes her from wearing a cape. But, on the whole it is still the same robust character design system, and your ability to customize your powers is also improved. There is nothing stopping you from "multiclassing" this time around.. IE, if you want to be both fiery AND magical, you can! Want to have wolverine claws AND guns? Why not! Super strength AND ray guns? Go wild! Your ability to take powers from each power pool is only limited by the fact that some powers require you to have a certain number of powers in that pool already, so it's more like splitting your spec in other games, but it is still possible to do so. It also seems Cryptic remembered that people like to be able to choose what color their powers are, and that is brought over intact. Travel powers are also cosmetically improved, allowing for multiple flavors of flight, jumping, speed and such. Rocket Boots, winged flight, fire flight, ice bridges, super speed, even tunneling... you name it, they pretty much got it. And you're allowed to "try before you buy" every power, because there's an in-house "danger room" type simulator that lets you fight simulated baddies (for no exp or money of course) to see if the power you are looking at is really what you want. Definitely a good thing there.
But the problem is, all the fun is in the creation of your heroes and not in the playing thereof. As previously mentioned, the missions get very repetitive very quickly. Another design decision that got carried across from CoH/V is the "the higher you level, the weaker you feel" dynamic - IE, my munitions hero could kill 3 henchmen his level without running out of energy at level 5, but struggles to finish 2 at level 15 despite having triple the energy reserves and having specced completely for damage (and energy)... and it takes much, much longer to do so. The game also does not refill your "energy" (stamina, mana, whatever) while you are in combat - you have to do that by using whatever your chosen power pool's "energy refilling" attack is - which is almost always a low damage channeled attack that replenishes energy over time. Healing is an absolute joke - you'll spend an entire bar of energy to heal perhaps a quarter or half bar of health on a single target... and because there are no dedicated support power pools, that means your group is out the damage you would otherwise be doing. So it's really a much more effective use of your time and energy to try to kill the enemy faster rather than to support your allies with heals. Also, the targeting system is absolute balls.
And of course, we come to the great achilles' heel of every MMO - the other players. It even manifests at the costume level. Just like in CoH, pre villains, you still get people whose costumes consist of a giant, horned, demonic, batwinged, black-on-black-with-black-smoke "hero" named "Dark Lord Deathdark of Evil Darkness." Bwuh? And, it's easy of course to tell who the fat kids or middle aged men with small penises are - they generally have the super-ultra-massive strong-guy heroes whose shoulders require a two car garage and have more ridges on their muscles than the entire Ruffles potato chip factory. And then there's the virgin comic book nerds, all playing their scantily clad plastic sex puppets. Never has such a robust and customizable character creation system been (yet again) so abused in such a predictable manner. Though, it makes the awesome costumes feel that much more awesome when you come across one. You should have seen this one guy who was a dead ringer for George Washington, I kid you not.
Animosity between fellow heroes is also exacerbated by another great step backwards in the mission design - in open world missions (and the vast, vast majority of them are open world, remember), only one hero (and his teammates) can do a quest or start an escort mission effectively at the same time, and sometimes it's even so badly set up that even being on a team together doesn't help. This just encourages people who all want to do the same mission to be dicks to each other and try to grab the macguffin or whatever before anybody else.
There is a crafting system, and once you figure out how it works, it IS pretty well set up.. until you start to realize that very little of the stuff you can make is of use to you. Generally, most gear you find (or make, for that matter) raises contradictory stats... like they were trying to make "one size fits all" hero apparel and accessories that suit (or more often, don't suit) tanks or blasters in equal measure.
Verdict:
All in all, I was highly dissatisfied with the playing experience in Champions online. I loved the character creation experience... but I'm not willing to pay a subscription fee just for that. At any rate, after playing one weekend up to level 20, and trying a few different archetypes, I can honestly say I have no desire whatsoever to continue with the game... which, from what I read on CO-related forums, is just as well because (as was the case back in the early days of CoH), the endgame content is rerolling a new character. Le FAIL.
Grade: D+. That plus is for the character creation and customization options... the D is for, well, everything else.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Monday, October 26, 2009
Champions Online free for haloween weekend
From over at kotaku
From Friday October 30th to Monday November 2nd, Cryptic is opening up Champions Online to any and all who want to come try it out. Simply head over to the free play promo page, sign up for an account, download the client, and then wait. Perhaps you could make a sandwich or something.Read Full Article
Monday, October 19, 2009
The Cost of Gaming Addiction @ Kotaku
There's an article up on Kotaku where one of the contributors talks about his early 2000s addiction to Everquest, and how he ruined his life with it (thankfully not irrevocably). The article is here. It really struck a chord with me, because I, too felt the narcotic tug of Everquest in 99-01, and I'd be lying if I said my time spent in Norrath didn't affect my job performance and severely hamper my relationships with people I knew in "real life."
So take it as an all-too common cautionary tale for the generation of 20 and 30somethings today - Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to play MMOGs.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Review: Tropico 3
"Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power." - William Gaddis
I often thought I might like to play the first two Tropico games, but I never got around to it. When Tropico 3 came down the pipe, I snagged the demo and was immediately hooked. So I had to get the full game. It's right up my alley - an economic/political simulator with a sardonic flair for depicting Caribbean banana republics with a tongue that never strays far from the cheek.
The game places you in control of a small island nation in 1950, and depending upon the map you are playing and the difficulty options you have set, you have until anywhere between 1980 and 2000 to turn a small collection of huts and farms into a thriving modern city-state. Along the way you will be beset by rebellions, military coups, worker strikes, earthquakes, hurricanes, political unrest, humanitarian crisis, imperialist foreign superpowers, assassins, elections, protests, national debt, slovenly tourists and lazy workers. A multitude of variables will affect your play session, ranging from the selection of natural resources on your island to the particular aptitudes and personality flaws of your avatar Presidente.
You can choose from a list of famous historical presidents and dictators, or you can custom design your own. I recommend designing your own avatar, because then you get to pick the bonuses and penalties you get that will most compliment your playing style. Every Presidente has an "origin story," two positive traits and two flaws, which will affect the productivity of your citizens and alter their view of you as a leader - for instance, the "Administrator" trait will increase productivity in your factories, the "womanizer" flaw will decrease your popularity with educated women and those of a religious nature, and the "Generalissimo" origin story will increase your popularity with the militarist political faction.
The duration of your administration will be a balancing act between the financial needs of the island, the various political factions of the residents, and of course your own need to pad your retirement fund in a swiss bank account. An easy and cheap investment early in the game would be to build a lumber industry, later maturing with addition of a furniture factory, but this would upset the environmentalists in the population. Agriculture is, of course, an important component of feeding your populace but the financial allure of exporting tobacco, sugar and fruit makes for a compelling option as well, and being on an island you have very limited space in which to conduct agriculture. The communists in the populace want cheap housing and health care, the capitalists want upscale entertainment and high wages, and your appeasement of one or both of them will affect the attitude of the two global superpowers, governing how much foreign aid money you receive from them... or how likely they are to invade!
Space on the island being limited and the ground not always being ideal for construction make building and expanding an often challenging prospect. Everything you do takes up space on the map, and some endeavors (such as farms, ranches, logging camps etc) even need to be in proximity to a large amount of undeveloped territory which is suitable to their purpose, further limiting your ability to build. Additionally, you have to plan and construct roads between distant parts of the island, copiously supplied with parking garages - because time spent travelling between buildings is time not spent being productive.
You can also spend money to issue edicts that alter the variables of the game. These edicts can run the gamut from providing social security to the unemployed and retired, to promoting literacy, to enacting martial law or instigating book burnings. You can also praise a superpower, garnering goodwill from the one while hurting relations with the other, organize trade missions to increase revenue, or even allow nuclear testing around your island for a payoff. Every edict has its cost and its payoff, with those with the largest beneficial effects also incurring the largest costs or penalties in other areas.
As for the little people, the citizens themselves, you can micromanage them as much or as little as you care to do so. Each individual "Tropican" has their own priorities (some want a good job, others want good housing, others still think access to good health care is what is most important, and some even cannot be happy unless they have a leader they can respect, etc). You can click on any person living on the island to see "need" bars, much as if this was a sims game, to gauge how well his needs are being addressed. You can fire or evict people from any building you choose, you can listen to the thoughts of your citizen in real time for clues about how to make them happier or more productive... or you could just ignore them like the ants they are and continue to govern from an ivory tower, because sod the plebes, YOU know what's best for them.
I do, however, have a couple gripes about the game, as enthralling as it is. I don't know if it is because the game is supposed to simulate dictatorships exclusively, or if it is satire, or if the designers just didn't know any better, but the entire game's mechanics function in a manner that belies a hard leftist's understanding of the world around him. Even though everything else about the game is configurable and has a price, food, health care, higher education and transportation are all provided free to the people, entirely at government expense. While you can set wages for individual buildings, entire career types, or entire levels of education, you can't actually set wages individually or based upon merit, effectiveness, experience or productivity - it doesn't matter to the game whether the people working in your factory are new and untrained, or 20 year veterans with triple working speed, everybody in the building gets paid THE SAME. Setting wages is really only used to incentivize people applying for jobs that are vacant or to increase general happiness. Every depiction of communism is that of championing the people (they want housing and health care, remember?), while every depiction of capitalism is of excess or misanthropy - they want fancy houses, expensive entertainment, and high economic disparity (though no mention is made of the capitalist benefit of high economic MOBILITY, which is so taken for granted in our culture that even in this game it exists as a matter of course which has no bearing or influence on anything else in the game).
There are other less abstruse annoyances in the game as well - and at the top of the list of "things that will irritate everybody" is the grating repetitiveness of the in-game radio announcer. If you go more than 2 games without going into the options to find out how to shut Locutor Juanito up completely, I'll be surprised. Another source of displeasure is the shortsightedness and seemingly limited attention span of the two most crucial workers in the game - the construction workers and teamsters. If a building site isn't within easy walking distance of your construction office, often it will often go untouched by your construction workers, even though the office has a built in garage for driving to distant construction sites. Often the only way to overcome this is by either micromanaging to raise the priority of the job (though, if EVERYTHING is top priority, doesn't that really mean NOTHING is?), or building extra construction offices until you have a triple redundant workforce... that STILL often enough won't drive a quarter mile to build an apartment without it being micromanaged into "top priority" status, and sits around soaking up wages when there's no construction work going on. Teamsters suffer from much the same problem. They have a garage in their building, so they should be able to drive to anywhere quickly, yet often enough materials will not get hauled from one place to another, or finished product won't make it to the dock in time for export, which directly hurts your bottom line.
And speaking of problems with driving around, the representation of vehicularized transport in Tropico 3 is downright surreal. Nobody actually owns a car, they are just all communally supplied at no charge from parking garages or from the attached motor pools of specific buildings. Furthermore, every trip by auto is one way - a teamster traveling to a factory to take a shipment of goods to the dock will be driven to the factory by a truck from the teamster's garage... but the truck will drop him off there and head to the nearest parking garage (or if one is not built yet, just go right back to the teamsters office). It is, for some reason, incapable of waiting the 15 seconds it takes for the teamster to walk into the factory and come back out with a wheelbarrow full of stuff. He then has to either go to a nearby parking garage to pick up ANOTHER one-way-trip vehicle to the docks, or just walk there overland with his wheelbarrow. Even more confounding is this also happens at buildings with attached garages - the teamster getting ore from a mine will not be able to get a car from the mine's attached garage, presumably because those vehicles are only usable by miners. So really, a mine may as well not even HAVE an attached garage because you're going to have to build a parking garage near it ANYWAY for the teamsters to use.
And I have one more peculiar observation of perplexing paradigms - gender identities in Tropico 3 are a little arbitrary. Sure, only women can get pregnant and have children... but for some reason, the game enforces certain gender roles for certain jobs. Despite the fact that either men or women are capable of being construction workers or work in factories, only women can be high school teachers, journalists, engineers (who work at oil refineries and power plants), bureaucrats or cooks. Meanwhile, only men can be teamsters, police officers, or college professors. Why can't a woman instruct at a collegiate level? Why CAN a man, despite his inability to teach at the high school level? I could see being indiscriminate about gender in the name of political correctness I suppose, but this just seems random.
Speaking of arbitrary, there's an overlay in the game that enumerates the "scenic beauty" of every square inch of your island. This "beauty" variable is important to many buildings intended to cater to tourists (beach resorts, botanical gardens, etc). But confusingly enough, this "beauty" doesn't seem to have any actual connection to the topography of the island. Oh, certainly heavily wooded areas are always very beautiful, and crowded urban areas are always ugly, but the most bewildering thing happens on a beach. A certain square meter of beach can be rated absolutely gorgeous, while it sits immediately adjacent to a square meter of beach that is apparently the most hideous thing since cystic acne, despite that with the overlay turned off there is actually no discernable difference between the two spots. And frankly, I think the whole "beauty" dynamic is overdone. Any tourist who lays eyes upon a poor tenement on your island is apparently going to burst into flames and write scathing letters to every travel agency in the world - but I've been to a couple Caribbean places myself, and despite the proliferation of ramshackle huts and dirty tenements I saw in, say, Progreso, I would still rate it an extremely enjoyable place with a great tourism industry... though perhaps that is because of the copious amounts of extremely cheap booze available there.
All that aside, the game is still very addictive to people who like economic or political simulators. Replayability is very good, as there are both sandbox and campaign modes, with the "campaign" consisting really of a large selection of islands, each of which has its own permutations to the game's setup to make it a unique challenge (island A has no farmland, and has to rely on fishing and mining, island B is oil rich but politically turbulent, etc). Multiplayer doesn't really exist, but there is a "challenge" mode where you and others online can compare scores against each other after playing identical scenarios. The graphics are detailed, bright and colorful, and the game's soundtrack consists of 15 jaunty latin tunes that really set the atmosphere (though you may get tired of them after a while).
All in all, despite its flaws the game is an enjoyable addition my collection, and one that ranks up there with some of my other favorite economic/management sim games such as Startopia or Dungeon Keeper.
Grade: B+.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
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