Thursday, January 29, 2009
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Review: Saints Row 2 (PC)
Good ports of console games to PC are the exception rather than the rule. Recently I found one of those surprising and pleasing exceptions in the form of GTA4... which probably biased me a bit against Saints Row 2, since the games are so very similar but the quality of each port have a wide gulf between them.
Comparisons between SR2 and GTA4 are inevitable, so hunker in and get ready for them.
Graphics -
While the overall look and feel of the game is a degree simpler than the detail of GTA4, the human character models I found to actually be of better quality, especially the textures. The plot love interest in GTA4 for example, Kate, often looked hunched and/or blurred and ugly, with dark smudges marring her face and really for a purported love interest I felt they did a horrible job. You don't run into this sort of unintentional ugliness in SR2. Oh, don't get me wrong, there are plenty of fat, ugly and old people who can look of varying degrees between comedic and revolting, but when they do it's intentional.
Where everything in GTA4 was dull, dark, muted, realistic and oppressive, SR2 is over the top, cartoony, bright, flashy and somewhat surreal really. At least that's what they were going for. The port was not kind here, and the game takes a noticeable performance hit vs the console version, where things often don't look quite as good or run nearly as smooth. There are frequent stutters and framerate drops for little reason. The lighting effects in particular are completely jacked up.
Inexplicably, several widescreen format resolutions are completely missing from the selection, as the widescreen resolution choices jump from 1280x720 to 1920x1200. That's basically a jump from a 17" wide LCD to a 24" wide LCD, ignoring the resolutions common to the widescreen LCDs ranging from 19 to 22 inches (where the best deals of size vs price are commonly found)... no 1440x900 or 1680x1050 to be found.
Sound -
One thing the game definitely has going for it is the voice acting. The delivery of the lines are believable, 99% of the time anyway. There's quite a bit of extremely foul language, sometimes bordering on the 13-year-old "I'm cussing because mom's out of earshot" level. I realize this is how "gangstas" talk for the most part, but it does get downright gratuitous to the point of sometimes sounding unnaturally forced. On the whole though, the dialogue is well done (and it's a b-star studded cast. I think I heard Doogie Howser at one point). I do wish they'd provided more audio "personality" options for your character, but seeing as how every personality option requires basically the entire range of dialogue for the main character for the entire game to be rerecorded by a different actor, I can see why they limited it to 3 men and 3 women.
Volume is a constant problem though... people talking even a small distance away from you can sound almost silent while you yourself can be incredibly deafening. I've seen this sometimes in other games (especially World of Warcraft), and the problem usually lies in Creative Labs' EAX. In the other games, disabling EAX support fixed the problem but I haven't found the way to do that here yet. Naturally, if this is the case, people without Sound Blaster cards won't experience this problem.
The radio selection, and the number of songs on each, leave quite a bit to be desired though. What can I say, I miss Vladivostok FM.
Control -
This usually doesn't get its own section in my reviews, but it does this time because it's such a problem. The graphics and sound have their little hiccups due to the transition from console, but the controls often have real problems. The cross from dual analog gamepad to mouse and keyboard here was slapdash, and it shows. Some activities, such as graffiti tagging, are frustratingly unresponsive because the mouse sensitivity and ballistics are suddenly shunted into the "insufferable" playability band. A number of the controls are unintuitive (sometimes bordering on the random), and at least once every minute or two the keyboard stopped accepting movement input for me altogether, causing me to miss a turn, crash, or stand there getting shot for a second or so until the game decided I was allowed to control my movement again. Some of the cars in the game are downright undrivable at any speed and in any circumstance.
One control gimmick that is not the fault of the conversion, but is just an inborn game flaw, is the "precision accuracy" shooting mode is frequently anything but. Since the view switches to zoom in AND move to the side, your shots often become blocked by things that don't appear to obstruct line of sight. Also, the targeting reticle lights up to indicate when it is on a target, but it does this even if you don't have line of sight... so if you're ducking behind a couch and try to shoot somebody, the reticle will trick you into thinking you CAN shoot them when in reality your bullets are just hitting the couch immediately in front of you. It would have just been better to have an option to switch to first person perspective for "precision accuracy" rather than this nonsense.
Movement as a pedestrian is also very much imprecise, with no way to turn your character's facing without also taking a step in that direction. The "walk" key is inconveniently bound to caps lock (and yet is counter-intuitively a hold-down modifier instead of a simple toggle on/off switch... and there's few things in the PC gamer's mind that will fry as many little circuits as having to hold down caps lock with your pinky to modify something).
Gameplay -
But unlike GTA4, at least you don't have friends and relations calling you up every 30 seconds to go to bowling alleys, bars, and strip clubs or else they won't like you any more. That alone was enough to merit some kudos from me. There are other differences, of course, some better and some worse.
The best way I can summarize the difference is GTA4 feels more like a simulator and SR2 feels more like an arcade game. GTA's pace is more sedate, the action more cerebral, the controls more precise and responsive, the effects understated and often subtle. Saints Row 2 doesn't really encourage you to fire from cover or be careful and precise in any way... or even to think things through. You run, you gun, you blow stuff up. Sometimes it's satisfying to be much more direct and less convoluted in your methodry. The phrase that first occurred to me while playing it was "Fisher Price My First GTA Clone." But as you play it, it grows on you, and once you accept it isn't GTA and adapt to the direct, brute force style the game wants, it grows on you.
Basically how the game progresses is thus... to do the missions that advance the plot, you have to earn enough "respect" to start a mission. The respect meter is filled by doing stunts, driving recklessly, and playing subgames they call "activities." These activities are all over the city, and entail such things as causing as much monetary damage as possible in a given area, spraying graffiti, acting bodyguard for celebrities, impersonating police officers to commit acts of atrocity on camera, vehicle racing, or ultimate fighting. The entire city is open to exploration from the start, so it is very open ended to the player to decide where to go and what to do first.
The missions themselves are much what you'd expect. Go here before time runs out, kill these people, protect this other person, destroy that other guy before he gets away, storm the rival gang's hideout and kill them all, rob this other joint, get away from the cops, and so forth. This isn't to say the missions are boring, just that those familiar with the genre will not be stretched too hard. Speaking of which, the amount of damage you can take, and how your health regenerates on its own if you don't take damage for a while kind of makes things a smidge on the easy side, even on normal difficulty level.
One nice touch is how customizable the player's character is. You can be male or female, skinny, fat, muscular, or anything inbetween. You can customize a far-too-numerous-to-actually-be-worth-bothering-with number of aspects of appearance, ranging from control sliders that control cheekbone position to ones that control how much your body sags from age. You can also visit a plastic surgeon to change any aspect (or all of them at once, even gender and voice/personality) of your appearance for a very small fee during the game. As previously mentioned, there are also 3 male and 3 female voice personalities to choose from, which change your character's voice during all cut scenes and other spoken lines. Throw in the number of clothes stores scattered around town, and you can pretty much completely customize your character how you want. This part actually reminded me a little of the character generation process in City of Heroes, which got me thinking that while I never considered GTA a likely candidate for a MMO, Saints Row got me thinking such a thing might not be so far fetched.
Speaking of which, there is multiplayer to the game as well. The single player experience can be played cooperatively by 2 players, and though I haven't tried it myself reports seem to be that it works rather well. There's also competitive modes with the usual deathmatch/team deathmatch variants as well as competing in the activity subgames.
Conclusion:
Saints Row 2 is a decent gaming experience sullied by a very poor job of porting the game to PC. If you want to play the game, I recommend doing so on its native consoles if at all possible. Definitely not for the kids, of course.
Verdict: C-. Would have been much better if I'd played it on console, most likely.
Friday, January 09, 2009
Games I played when I should have been blogging roundup
Left 4 Dead - A+. Excellent cooperative zombie horror experience. Great replayability. Best played with friends.
Fallout 3 - A. A very good post apocalyptic FPS/RPG hybrid. Decent story, lots of side quests, completely open ended. Some minor annoyances.
Call of Duty 5: World at war - A-. Nice game. Kinda short. Excellent Co-op. Limited color pallette, "real is brown" and bloom abuse.
Grand Theft Auto 4 (PC): A. Extremely good job porting to PC from console. Annoying that I have to load rockstar social club and games for windows live to play. Some ugly models, but a great next step in the series. I especially like the GPS in every car so I don't have to memorize a million damn streets in a completely fictional city.
Forumwarz: B+. Pretty cool free online RPG based on forum flame wars. Have to pay 10 bucks for the second half of the game, but first half is free. Very addictive. Kind of in the same vein as Urban Dead or Kingdom of Loathing.
That'll do for now. Hopefully I can get back to full review structure shortly.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Zero Punctuation Reviews: Sonic Unleashed
The embedded video problem seems to be something wrong with escapist, not with blogger or how I'm copying the embed code, because the videos from a month or two back are still working. So here's the url because I know the embed just won't work-
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/472-Sonic-Unleashed
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Yes, I Know I Suck
So I haven't written a review in quite some times. The ZP updates are stacking up. Here's why -
First and foremost, I'm still having too much fun in Warhammer Online to stop to play something else.
Second, ZP keeps beating me to the punch >_<
Thirdly, it's the holiday season and between travel and sickness my free time's gotten pretty... not free.
Seriously, I actually have managed to take a look at the odd other game (such as Fallout 3 and Call of Duty: World at War), but somehow the spirit just doesn't move when it's time to put pen to metaphorical paper. I have other games stacked up ready to go for review, but as I mentioned my ability to churn through them is a little choked right now.
But I do intend to do something about it. At some point.
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Monday, November 10, 2008
Review: Command and Conquer Red Alert 3
Well, I have to say that my expectations going into this were not very high. Whether or not that had some kind of buoying effect on the final outcome, I'll leave to you to decide.
The reasons my expectations were low was because of my disappointment in the Wrath of Kain expansion for C&C3. Now, granted C&C3 itself was an ok game. Maybe not spectacular, but not terrible. RA3 doesn't make a whole lot of improvements over C&C3, but it slathers on the kitschy alternate-timeline jingo cut scenes and really amps up the amusement factor, transforming a mediocre RTS into an enjoyable show (if for not all the right reasons).
The single player campaigns, however, are unforgivably gimmicky. Only in the last mission of each campaign do you actually get unfettered access to the whole tech tree and every other mission also gives you dozens of little hoops to jump through (some admittedly fun, some aggravating in the extreme). Some missions, the gimmick is a simple tech handicap (only lowest tier vehicles, or no tanks, etc), and others it's the C&C signature "you have 1 unit and 1 unit only and if it dies before you pass all the scripted checkpoints you LOSE" horseapples. It makes the game not feel like quite up to being called an "RTS" in the same way you can't quite really in an unqualified manner call a Zelda or Final Fantasy game an RPG. Perhaps I'd better explain that before I upset triple the fanbois in one sentence.
See, in most of the Final Fantasy games, which are billed as "RPGs," you don't actually pick a role and play it. The role is already defined, you just step into control of a brooding spikey-haired protagonist with an oversized sword and set about advancing the plot in the exact same sequence of events every single time with absolutely no open-endedness whatsoever. Compare this to a true RPG such as Baldur's gate, which has so many sidequest diversions and such freedom of exploration that the multiple methods of advancement are absolutely staggering. Not to mention that you roll your protagonist completely from scratch, with an appearance and development path entirely customized by you. This is a similar feeling to RA3, which obviously falls into the RTS category but doesn't actually let you do any strategizing - there is usually one and only one solution to the obstacles set before you, and it becomes more of a point and click action game. The single player campaign experience is practically on rails, as opposed to RTSes such as Dawn of War or Supreme Commander where the entire array of tools is set before you and it is up to you to decide how and when to accomplish the mission (which is invariably destroy the other guys). Though, it is a nice touch to be given the option to play the single player campaign cooperatively with another player. Perhaps it should be classified as a Diet RTS, RTS lite, or to take the opposite metaphor, McRTS (as in the MacDonald's reference to indicate something is lacking substance and overloading on visual appeal, a la McMansion).
The campaign issues can be largely alleviated by simply playing in skirmish mode, but that deprives you of the cut scenes, which really ARE the Red Alert experience. If you're a fan of bad cinema, you'll love this stuff. Scads of second string actors hamming it up while half-dressed infobabes carry on the transition of cutscene to playfield, delivered with groanworthy dialog in hilarious accents. If you put a gun to my head right now, I couldn't describe Ivana Milicevic (the Russian infobabe)'s face to save my life. They also include more cheesecake shots of the RA3 girls on the quick-reference cards provided in the box, so I guess it's pretty obvious who their demographic is and what they think about them.
They seem to be using the same costume designers from C&C3 who never quite figured out how to get clothes to fit women properly, but having come to realize this, they incorporated push-up bras and plunging necklines into all female costumes to distract from otherwise mis-tailored uniforms. Gemma Atkinson, who plays the "Allies" infoblonde, has possibly the worst English accent I've ever heard on an English actress - it's like she can't decide if she's from London or Scotland. Andrew Divoff's accent also vacillates between Russian and English, which is a bit puzzling since he married a Russian girl and speaks fluent Russian, so one would think being inundated by it all the time he would have remembered to roll a few more Rs, slur a few more Ws and lift a few more As into Es. And I shouldn't have to say anything about Tim Curry's russian, if any of you has seen the movie Congo. Autumn Reeser is way too goddamned perky, but when is she not? Jenny McCarthy makes a thoroughly repulsive Agent Tanya, reminding us all that McCarthy is a sexy woman only until the instant she opens her mouth to say something. It also doesn't help that the wardrobe department has apparently bisected a golden tabby cat, cleaned out the blood and guts, and put it on her head for a wig. JK Simmons makes a chuckleworthy pastiche of J. Jonah Jameson and George Dubya Bush (and he's forced to spout off every predictable "ugly americanism" from "they hate us because of our freedom" down the list), and as everybody's heard by now, George Takei is cast as the Emperor of the Rising Sun, and does the best with what he's given. Actually the entire asian cast does a passable job as compared to the others. But don't even get me started on the atrocious acting of all the co-commanders of every faction.
It all makes for a circus of the hilariously bad, silly and (incoming saving grace) self-consciously tongue-in-cheek.
But, even in skirmish mode, there are things about the game itself that just rub me the wrong way. Whereas other RTS titles in the genre try to push the frontiers of RTS play with new paradigms, grandiose scale and versatility, the C&C franchise seems chained to just shuffling existing ideas around like cards and then dealing a new hand and calling it a new game. Everything "new" in RA3 is something we've seen in a slightly different combination or configuration in previous C&C or RA titles. In C&C3 I also felt a vague sense of "wrongness" or disconnectedness with everything I did in the game, and it persists in RA3 but I think I've nailed down what it is... nothing moves as I quite expect it to. Airborne units move a smidge too slow, tank units move a smidge too fast, and frankly the whole "strategy" dynamic takes a great big back seat to the "rock paper scissors" dynamic (which admittedly is present in every C&C RTS previous to this one, but) which is ratcheted up and feels like they're trying to squeeze the last bit of toothpaste out of this paradigm. Other games (especially the two aforementioned ones) have shown us that there's more to strategy than configuring the right mix of units in your battlegroup and going gallivanting around the map celebrating invulnerability through diversity. I also found, however, that you don't even necessarily have to do that either... Many a game I won simply by building 3 airfields, building as many Kirov bomber-blimps as I could and winning by explosive attrition.
I was also disappointed to see that the resource gathering dynamic has taken a huge step backwards. No longer are the days where you must worry about the safety of your harvester vehicles as they rumble out into no-man's land to scoop up resources... RA3 now simply allows you to build your "ore processor" immediately adjacent to the "ore mine," allowing your "ore truck" to simply drive back and forth between the two facilities loading and unloading cash-generating "ore" as swiftly as the driver can shift into and out of reverse gear. I don't see why they even really bothered with the separation instead of simply providing you with a building that you build directly ON the mine resource node, which then periodically provides cash every few seconds. And most of the levels thoughtfully provided not one, but TWO such resource nodes in each starting camp, and since your partner player/ai and you split resources (and he/she has their OWN two starting nodes), most levels I never even found the need to go out and claim more mines. You don't even have to build silos to increase your maximum funds cap... it just keeps rolling right in.
It's not all bad though (just mediocre as opposed to terrible). C&C3's brilliant interface scheme returns, allowing for quick and intuitive management of construction at multiple sites and types. The graphics are absolutely beautiful, the action is smooth, the unit models are novel and idiosyncratic, the sound and music are very appropriate and immersive (and a reminder of why some people still listen to C&C music soundtracks even without the games), and as long as you let your brain slip into neutral the live action exposition will make you cackle. The fidelity of the cutscene material is crystal clear and artifact-free.
Unfortunately, as the game emphasizes flash, twitch and (perhaps unintentional) comedy over cerebral strategy and innovation, the replayability suffers despite the skirmish play option provided. But overall I considered it a more positive experience than Kane's Wrath, and so I find myself hesitant to be too hard on the McRTS. I feel it's right on the cusp between C and B, in that I probably will come back and play it again from time to time, but only briefly and not often.
Grade: B-
And that's the word from Bandit Camp...
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Thursday, October 30, 2008
The Video Game Name Generator
http://www.norefuge.net/vgng/vgng.html
Barbie's Insect Syndrome
The Secret Weapon of the Dating - The Card Game
Ultimate Karaoke Football
Everybody hates the motorcycle epidemic
Funky Moped Jihad
Drunken Quiz Conspiracy (my kinda game!)
Papal Carnival Hell (Here's my money! Make the game already!)
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Monday, October 27, 2008
The Whiners of Warhammer
I've been noticing a trend lately. I play both Order and Destruction characters, each day choosing one just purely on whim. Despite my experience and better judgement, I also occasionally peruse the IGN warhammer forum, mostly because from time to time Mark Jacobs, Mythic GM posts there.
As I knew from my time in Dark Age of Camelot, the place is a gathering spot for whiners and haters of the highest caliber. You thought the WoW official forums were bad? Welcome to Butthurt Central.
So anyway, I have a passing familiarity with some of the gripes the gripers make about this game, from my (as brief as possible) visits to the IGN vaginalogue fest and of course from hearing the occasional whine in /1 or /sc while I play. I've noticed that Order seems to whine about how Destruction outnumbers them in open world RvR (though that is becoming less and less the case with Mythic's recent incentives to roll new characters on numerically disadvantaged realms), and especially at low levels they whine about the nigh-invulnerability of the Orc. Destruction, however, whines about Bright Wizards and scenarios.
My order characters never seem to have a problem getting into a scenario as quickly as they like, and they can pick and choose. Don't want Stonetroll crossing or Tor Anroc? No problem! Just queue for the others and wait a couple minutes. I am absolutely loving Highpass Cemetery, btw. But they do seem to have some trouble hanging on to keeps in the non-scenario RvR arenas. The whining is actually pretty sparse there.
Ohhh but destruction. Never have I heard more mealy-mouthed tear-streaked mewling crybabies in one spot since... well, since closing the window that had IGN's forums open. God forbid more than 3 players on the other side in a scenario should happen to be bright wizards, that's just grounds for logging out right there. And one of the recurring whines is how the only tier 3 scenario that ever comes up is Tor Anroc. Never mind that if all these people who hate tor anroc simply didn't queue for it, they'd have a grand time in the other ones.
For instance, just last night I managed to get into Temple of Isha on destruction side (by simply queueing for everything and then removing myself from the Tor Anroc queue, go figure) three times in a row. The first time, Order claimed the flag first, and we didn't manage to fight them away from it until they were up by about 280-50 or so. General consensus in /sc was "just hold the flag and we can still win" even though there was less than 8 minutes left to go. But certain dumb players couldn't help running off where the healers (who stayed at the flag) couldn't get to them, and kept feeding the enemy points so that we finally lost... by three points. It was a gutwrenching defeat. So close.
Second time in, we started out rough again. Many on our side didn't join in a timely manner, only appearing 30 or so seconds after the clock started running, so naturally Order got the flag first. Then people started whining about how order had FIVE! FIVE! five bright wizards! This was intolerable to them. They started whining about wanting to log out. I remember this one dark elf called Ysr or Ysl or something like that in paricular, because she was one of the brainless twats handing the enemy extra frag points by hustling to her death in the first match. She vocalized her intent to log out and then did so. So did some others, mostly the brain dead simps of similar bearing as her. This meant that in mid-match, some poor bastards got brought in from the queue to fill those who logged out, only to get their butt handed to them in less than 5 minutes and get pushed back out (probably running back to Tor Anroc with their tail between their legs) because some big girls' blouses couldn't handle a challenge.
I wanted to haul the quitters back into the scenario and yell at them. "You know what Ysl? Go ahead and bail, because you're useless anyway. I saw you last match, running off to hand victory over to Order by trying to solo the entire Order team while out of healer range. If you really want to do the forces of evil a favor, just log out and stay out. Don't requeue for another scenario, ever. Better yet, delete your character. Better still! Roll order and subject THEM to your incompetence and whining! Or why don't we just cut to the best solution of all and have you go die in a fire??"
Fortunately the whiners didn't come back for the third round. Despite Order getting the flag first as always, we rallied, kicked them off, and held the flag. Without the Short Attention Span Special Forces going and getting themselves farmed one at a time, we managed to overcome the exact same situation we were in first match and win. How about that. Who'd have thunk that the loudest whiners were also our least effective fighters?
There's a big debate at good'ol IGN about whether or not people who log out of scenarios because they are losing are complete wankers. For me, there's no debate. Undeniably they are the biggest wankers since wanking was discovered. They'll tell you that "getting my ass kicked is not fun. Why should I play if I'm not having fun?" So let me get this straight... only winning is fun? You can never be allowed to lose or else you're not having fun? Why don't we just get you a game that consists of a single big red button marked "WIN" that you can push and it will play fanfare for you every time you do?
These are probably the same kids that when they realize they're going to lose at chess or checkers, their answer is to slap the board across the room and storm out. Listen you pasty retards, when you joined that queue, you signed up to play a team game with other people. While not exactly as binding as a commitment to the armed forces, it still labels you a dick if you then take your ball and go home the instant you start to lose. It's PvP! Someone has to lose if someone's going to win, and if you're routinely experiencing crushing defeats perhaps it's time to start looking for the problem in the mirror! In a soccer match, do players on the losing team start driving home at halftime? No! The entire attitude of these "I quit when I'm not having fun" people just absolutely reeks if immaturity and possibly developmental/personality disorders.
Well, it's just further proof that even in the best MMOs on the market, the worst aspect is always the other players.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
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