About the women who pretend to write about video games. You know, girls like this:
So go read this.
My favorite quote?
Yes, we like large-titted women in games. And we like washboard-riddled male jocks and giant hulking stupid space marines also. We also like lanky useless fucks who are just accidental heroes and people in horrible situations. I AM SORRY LARA CROFT HAD BIG TITS, GOD, LET'S MAKE A CAREER OUT OF COMPLAINING ABOUT IT.Read Full Article
Ok, Ok, I know. How comedic is it that immediately after ending a review with "starting next week, I'll start reviewing new games" I immediately disappear for umpteen weeks? I don't know why you people continue to put up with me.
Ok, enough of that. Here's what I got goin' now-
Settlers 7. My first thought upon seeing this title was "There were SIX more of these?" I remember hearing of "The Settlers," and maybe Settlers 3 I think at one point, but holy under-the-radar, Batman! Let's start off, though, with that boxart. I guess Ubisoft thought Americans would be put off by the game if the box art actually conveyed an accurate portrayal of the game. For that accurate portrayal, we turn to the UK box art -
Kind of makes the US box art look a little.. disingenuous? Perhaps even fraudulent?
It's a little hard to classify S7. To me, it sort of seems to be the sheltered child of an RTS and an Economics Sim that heavily favors its mother. "Heavy on resource management" doesn't even begin to describe what's going on here, though thankfully a great amount of it can be automated. This is good, because otherwise managing said resources would be a real nightmare and not give you time for anything else.
The basic premise of the game is that you, benevolent monarch that you are, want to conquer your neighbors so their people can experience your enlightened leadership. Now, to do so, you don't actually have to go kill the rival monarch. In fact, I've never actually completely eradicated one of the opponent characters by obliteration. Victory conditions are usually defined by having a combination of largest population, most territory, most money, biggest army, most combat kills, most trade routes, most prestige, most research done, and so on and so forth. Whoever gets 5 out of 7 or so of these conditions met is simply declared the winner.
So how you go about this sort of thing is rather convoluted. You need territory, obviously, because everything you do takes a building (or two, or three) and buildings take space. So you need an army to conquer neighboring provinces (or lots of priestly types to proselytize them), and to raise an army takes resources. You can just recruit men at your local tavern, but that costs a lot of gold and food. It'd be more economical to train them from scratch, but to do that you have to build a stronghold, which requires a prestige upgrade be claimed, and it requires weapons, which have to be made at a blacksmith, which requires coal and iron, which has to be smelted at a smelter, which requires iron ore, which has to be mined (along with the coal from earlier in the chain), and all this stuff has to be carried from the mine to the smelter back to your blacksmith to your stronghold, all of which might actually be miles apart. Oh, and the blacksmith needs wood, too, for the weapon handles I guess, so you better have somebody cutting down some of that, too.
It should also go without saying that the computer can usually do this faster than you. So it's lucky that if you set up things well, it will usually happen semi-automatically.
So you're building armies and conquering lands, all while trying to keep your populace fed, and keeping trade goods being manufactured so you can make money or get resources you're short on via trading with distant lands, and also trying to research technologies to gain the upper hand in production and war. I find it slightly ironic that the sole vehicle of technological advancement in S7 is basically the Catholic church... and that researching these technologies somehow actually physically consumes the clergymen involved. Oh, and the primary resource for training up more priests? Beer. (Which is made in a brewery you have to build from grain and water, which you have to grow at a farm and build a well to get respectively, etc).
I mean, really.. does it REALLY take the ritual sacrifice of four priests to teach your people the ability to chop down a tree if it is in the way of something you want built?
Combat also is incredibly mundane. Because there's no strategy or tactics involved, it pretty much 99% of the time comes down to who's got the most guys, and the most "advanced" guys. And considering there's a whopping 4 different types of units in the game, there's not a whole lot of advancement to do.
And don't even get me started on the whole "plain food/fancy food" dichotomy. Many of the tasks that can be performed in the game for no food cost double in output if you have it consume plain food, and QUADRUPLE if you let it consume fancy food. Explain to me exactly how it is that eating sausage makes a given artisan produce twice as much beer, cloth, whatever from the SAME raw materials as he did when he was only eating fish?
Anyway, once you get your mind wrapped around the bizarre rules of the economy, you then have to learn to contend with the "gotchas." I hate "gotchas." Gotchas are surprises (usually intentional) that developers put in to force you to replay a given section of game multiple times. For example, in one level of the single player campaign, when invading a given territory I was forced to fight double the number of static defense emplacements as was present in EVERY SINGLE OTHER part of the game. It looked like it might could have been accidental due to poor pathing, but there it was.. because there were twice as many cannons to go through, my army got annihilated and the CPU stomped all over me. And this was already over an hour into that level... so I was forced to replay the whole level from the beginning.
So you learn how bizarro-economy works, and you start to expect the "gotchas," and it's about this time that the game crashes. Yes, the game has some serious technical problems. The fairly regular game crashes are somewhat mitigated by the autosave feature at least, but the problem with the autosave feature is that when autosaving, the game locks up for about 45 seconds. And to top it all off, this is a ubisoft game, which means (you guessed it) "Go go gadget super-tattle DRM!" Sickening. And speaking of revolting game components that connect to online servers, the game asks if I want to post my latest achievement to my facebook status practically every time one of my settlers sneezes. Ugh! Of all the horrible things game developers have done to us over the years, I'm putting facebook integration right there at the top of the list of "most abhorrent."
Well, despite all that, it was a bit engrossing for a few days. But I don't feel the need to play it any more.
Grade: C-.
And speaking of disingenuous promotional media... I can't believe they seriously expected this audio to match this video.
And that's the word from Bandit Camp...
[17:58] (overflight> What I really wanted to try was Metro 2033
[17:58] (overflight> But I'm not sure if my laptop will run it
[17:58] (overflight> Plus, it's currently on the fritz
[18:00] (gasbandit> hmm, metro 2033..... google... wiki.... "and mostly the player has to rely only on their flashlight to find their way around in otherwise total darkness" PASS.
[18:00] (overflight> lol
[18:01] (overflight> Not only that, but it's a flashlight that you have to MANUALLY recharge!
[18:01] (gasbandit> Got tired of "our game is goddamned dark" years ago. Doom 3 was the final straw
[18:01] (overflight> You actually have to hold down a button and see him pumping his portable generator thingie
[18:02] (overflight> You also have a dart gun that you have to manually pump
[18:03] (gasbandit> That just sounds like a great big 55 gallon drum of irritation
Ok, I know this isn't exactly gaming, per se, but holy crap on a crap cracker, this "Content-Aware Fill" thing in the upcoming Photoshop CS5 is a freakin' forum goon's wet dream.
There are some constants in the universe. The sun will move from east to west. The Yankees will be in the playoffs. Even numbered Trek movies don't suck. And, of course, the bots in a Battlefield game will be hilariously buggy.
I never played the first Bad Company game, so it's a new experience to me to have a battlefield game with a narrative other than "here's some guys and flags, shoot them and take them, respectively!" The Bad Company series apparently tries for a more cinematic FPS experience, much like Call of Duty... but it takes itself less seriously. Where Call of Duty games feel like action or war movies, Bad Company is definitely a "buddy flick."
The gist of the game is this - It's an alternate reality world where the russians are invading, and this time they're digging up an old WW2 Japanese superweapon project codenamed "Aurora" to try to use it on their current-day nemesis: The US of A. The secret weapon is what is called a "Scalar" weapon, which if you google, you'll have to spend hours afterward trying to scrub the grease off your skin from all the tinfoil hats you'll rub up against. It's like the holy grail of WMDs - part EMP, part Nuke, with all the heat and electronics frying goodness and none of the pesky fallout. And apparently in the Battlefield universe, it takes a few minutes to power up, and during that time it bugles loudly in the distance, sounding like Godzilla rising from the depths.
Anyway, the russians are digging up this old scalar tech, and the only ones who can stop them are a squad of four stereotypes - A nerd, a redneck, a token gruff black authority figure, and an everyman (played by you, of course). It sounds like the recipe for a really bad movie, but it makes for an entertaining game, actually. The banter between the other 3 members of Bad Company really do a lot to enhance the game.
At least, it would, if not for the fact that 9 times out of 10, the three of them get so bugged they completely stop moving to have their conversation, and then never start moving again until you pass a magic plot point. And some of these banter sessions are astonishingly long, like the "do you believe in God" conversation which lasts a good 7 minutes. But the banter is entertaining enough to stop and listen to. And I had a good laugh at the "What? I can know stuff!" line delivered by the redneck when everybody was shocked that it was him, and not the nerd, who rattled off a name and detailed description (complete with trivia) of the plane they were observing.
And of course, the writers aren't above putting in a few digs at "the other guys." The end showdown felt directly like the end of Modern Warfare 1, where all you have is a pistol and you need to squeeze off a fast headshot or it's all over... only in the name of one-upmanship, here in B:BC2, you have to make that shot AFTER JUMPING OUT OF A PLANE WITH NO PARACHUTE. I have to admit I laughed when the nerd member of the group said "Come on, Sarge, if not us, then who? You know they'll just send a bunch of douchebags with sissy heartbeat monitors out here otherwise!" - a clear dig at Modern Warfare's propensity to make you rely on gun-mounted heartbeat monitors in snowstorms. But at least I didn't have to physically use my body to constantly jostle Gaz or Captain Price toward the next objective, DICE, so careful about the stones you throw.
Sometimes it's just easier to leave them behind, really. When an important plot point comes up, they'll magically warp right next to you, and then it's back to business for a little while until they are once again struck with catatonic amnesia, and stand there in a state of torpor pointing their gun at nothing in particular.
I know I'm harping on that a lot, but you know, it's only annoying sometimes. Most of the time it just elicited a roll of the eyes from me, because honestly they're not that much of a help anyway. If left to their own devices, the bots in this game would shoot at the same entrenched position forever, waiting for you to flank the enemy and dig them out. So really, it only makes it marginally less easy if they aren't there, and only then because they have a chance to draw the enemy's fire while you absolutely murder all 20 of them. In fact, I most got worried when my comrades stopped moving forward because I thought I might miss out on another banter session while I was slogging my way up Hamburger Hill alone. And you wonder how they manage to miss the enemy so much, when you yourself are aim-assisted all to hell and back, where even a casual spray in the enemy's direction will usually headshot them.
What was far more annoying was the massive performance hits I experienced during cutscenes. I don't know what they're doing differently in cutscenes, but almost every cutscene struggled along and desynched the subtitles from the audio, whereas every part of the actual gameplay was pretty much seamless and fast, abarring one or two parts that went completely over the top with fog and lighting effects. They're also doing something wierd with the audio processing, as every house I entered suddenly sounded like I was in the most echo-inducing of tunnels, and even when there were explosions and gunfire all around me, it was somehow quiet enough to hear the sergeant grumble about how he's gettin' too old for this shit.
All in all, though, the game was an enjoyable playthrough, even if it was only 6 hours long. I can honestly say I'm just as likely to go back and replay B:BC2 as I am COD:MW2. I like that you don't HAVE to have your eye jammed against the butt of your gun to stand a chance at hitting something. I like the convenient supply drops that let you change weapons loadouts at convenient intervals. I REALLY like how damn near every structure in the game is completely destructible, which is the real selling point of this engine as I understand it. And, of course, I like the dialogue, and the cheesy, goofy plot. It goes a long way to making up for the AI bugs and other minor annoyances... and the one major annoyance of having no LAN hosting mode for multiplayer. I mean, I know it's a console port and everything, but that should have been a no-brainer for PC, guys. Bad call. Also, I would have liked a co-op mode for the SP campaign.
Verdict: B-.
And that's the word from Bandit Camp.
I can't remember the last time I was so pumped over a game coming out. Supreme Commander 2. The sequel to, hands down, the best RTS game ever made. It had some pretty enormous shoes to fill. All these high expectations, though, are probably why I find myself disappointed in the direction they took with the game.
Supreme Commander 2 takes place 20 years after the defeat of the Seraphim in the Forged Alliance expansion for Supreme Commander 1. In the absence of a greater external threat, the various races have found one thinly plausable reason or another to start shooting each other again, if only on a small scale. But nobody really cares about the plot, right? The Supreme Commander franchise attracts those who value complex strategy without micromanagement, right?
Well, that may not be the case any more. While still mercifully devoid of micromanagment, the game has been stripped of the vast majority of its complexity. Why would they do this, you might wonder? Well, here's another travesty the blame for which we can lay at the feet of a developer's desire to dumb things down for the console tards. Since SC2 is being released on both PC and XB360, the lowest common denominator of both man and machine had to be pandered to.
So what did they do? Sheesh, where to begin... The very first thing I noticed was that they bolloxed up the "right click and hold" formation command, which irritated me all the way through my time in the game. They also removed the tech tier system, and now instead of building and upgrading structures and units in this method, they've added a third "resource" to the game called "research" which is generated by combat and by "Research Lab" buildings which constantly generate it akin to mass extractors. You can then spend these resource points to buy new unit types and upgrades to existing ones, and the effects immediately propogate to all your existing forces. This means there's no such thing as a "tech 2 tank" or a "tech 3 gunship" or anything like that. You never have to ramp up to the higher tech generators nor upgrade your mass extractors. There is only 1 kind of point defense gun per faction, and one kind of air defense turret, just to irritate more those of us who liked the old paradigm. Additionally, the bonuses you used to get from placing resource structures next to other structures is gone. There's also no cap on resources anymore (or rather, every resource is capped at 99,999 and that cap doesn't change ever), so no need to build storage structures. As the company promised, there are more experimental units... but they do less. Take the good ol' UEF "Fatboy." For some reason, the Fatboy 2 is *weaker* than the first incarnation - its guns are less devastating, and it is no longer a self-contained factory. It's gone from the must-have unit of the UEF to a unit I only use if nothing stronger is available, a pale shadow of its former glory. Cybran fans take heart though, your precious experimental gunship is just as overpowered as it ever was... which I guess is a good thing because the rest of the cybran military seems to be paper mache and terminally nearsighted, but I'm getting off track. The tradeoff for simpler (and in some cases weaker) experimental units is that experimentals now cost much less to build in both time and resources. The longest build time is 2 minutes and 30 seconds. I remember in SC1 having to use every engineer at my disposal to get certain experimentals done in as short as 20 minutes. That reminds me - engineers can no longer assist each other in building or repairing. What this means is that instead of grouping 3 or 4 engineers to build things more quickly, you have to get used to using 1-engineer-1-project concepts and strategies. They've also dumbed down how resources are spent. Instead of using the resource cost over time as in the first games, and slowing production (or stopping it) if and when resources run out, you now have to pay the full resource cost up front like every other RTS in the genre. Way to stop standing out from the crowd, GPG. Energy management is also practically a non-issue because energy generators are now the cheapest structure in the game, and are fast to build and take up little room, so if you're ever actually low on energy, you're a goddamned idiot who needs to be kept on a leash to stop you from wandering into traffic.
The one thing I can say that HAS improved since the first game is engineer AI. Engineers will now, by default, repair any damage within their range and salvage any wreckage in range without being told to do so. This means an idle engineer or two amidst a cluster of defensive structure dramatically increase its longevity, and therefore utility. So they did find a way to improve something.
But there's also some things they made worse that can't even be explained by the console factor - when building shields, the radius of the shield generator no longer is displayed during placement, so you have to sort of "guess" where the furthest extent of the shield will be. None of the defensive structures are particularly long range, so the few units that DO have range longer than your basic tech 1 point defense cannon are suddenly a whole lot better at tearing apart a base from outside the range of its defenses (hello, Megalith). Most of the maps are smaller (so small in fact that I wonder if Demigod slept with Supreme Commander 1's wife), and even on the ones that aren't tiny, it doesn't particularly matter. There are new "cheese factor" experimentals that let you put units right smack into the middle of an enemy base with absolutely no countermeasure other than to keep a huge number of units or defensive structures built throughout the entirety of your base at all times. Because if there's any part of your base not defended like fort knox, that's where the opponent's "noah unit cannon" or "Space temple" or whatever is going to drop a bajillion units that will rip out your guts through your back door and leave them steaming gently on the pavement. The funny thing is, the AI never thinks to do this, but once YOU do, you can pretty much beat any level pretty quick. And you DO think of this strategy soon, because there's a mission in the early part of the single player campaign that SPOON FEEDS YOU THIS STRATEGY. Then, in case you're dense, there's ANOTHER level later that has you do it again! At this point, even the console kids who other console kids think are slow, the ones who only have a brain stem, will be thinking "gee, this 'teleport into the enemy base' tactic sure makes this easy. I should do that all the time, huh?'"
Ok, all snarkiness aside, you know what? It's a passable RTS. If there was a world where SC1 didn't exist, and this came out, I'd call it a pretty, somewhat bland RTS that doesn't really stand out from the pack all that much. But you know what? This is supposed to be Supreme Frickin' Commander. I expect better from you, Gas Powered Games. Shame on you. Shame. On. You.
Grade: C. And that's the word from Bandit Camp.
The fourth and final chapter of the "why the hell hasn't Gas Bandit reviewed a game in 4 months" quartet. Next week or so I'll start reviewing much more recent games. Borderlands is a genre-spanning titan of a game, blending RPG elements with FPS action, with the campaign being both single and multiplayer friendly. It had a lot of hype leading up to it, and rightly so, as it was such an ambitious endeavor. I must admit that the hype biased me against it a little, as is usually the case in overhyped games, but I have to admit: The hype was there for a reason.
Borderlands is the story of (up to) four mercenaries of varying origin and motivation, none of which makes absolutely any impact on the progression of events whatsoever. What was Roland's reason for leaving the Crimson Lance? Who is the woman Lilith came to this planet to find? Does Brick do steroids? Who knows? Who cares? The game certainly doesn't, because on a bus ride across the garbage-strewn dystopian planet of Pandora, they have a vision of an ethereal woman calling herself their guide, their guardian angel, and that she will help them find the Vault. The Vault is, apparently, something every child on Pandora heard about growing up - a hidden cache of treasure and alien technology guaranteed to make whoever finds it stupidly wealthy. So, they all completely shed their backstories and motivations, never to be mentioned again, to take up hunting for the Vault.
Pandora is a pretty desolate place, but I'm convinced that half the mass of the planet is made up in firearms. There's so many firearms the local wildlife seems to often attempt to ingest them as food (of course, they spill out for you to pick up once you kill the critter). There's a lot of shooting, a lot of dodging, a lot of reloading, and a WHOLE lot of deciding whether gun A is better than gun B. Most often it will not be, as despite the fact that it was ripping you a new one 10 seconds ago, as soon as you put it in your hand it suddenly devolves into an airsoft pistol.
There are those around the 'net that will tell you that Borderlands is "the next Diablo." In many ways, primarily the good ways, they are correct. The items you get are randomly generated, and the flow of time seems rather arbitrary because at any given time (depending on who is hosting the game) you could be entering the plot either near the beginning or the end of the story. But, like Diablo, Borderlands is a game best experienced with friends, and a diverse group will fare better because the classes compliment each other. Having more people in your game makes the enemies tougher, but also makes them give more experience and better loot.
The game gives you a pretty linear string of quests, along with a multitude of optional side quests. Most of the missions are pretty straightforward - go here and kill this, or go here, kill these until you collect x of those and bring them back. There's also the occasional scavenger hunt. Of course, the main drive of all these missions and rewards is to level up and get better gear. The health bar paradigm is in use here, and healing can often get pretty cumbersome - unless you have a special shield to enable you to do so, you won't heal on your own, and health kits take up precious backpack space and are cumbersome to use in a pinch. Fortunately, you get a personal force field that will take the brunt of the damage, and if you can stop taking damage for a few seconds it will start rapidly recharging itself.
As you level up you will also be able to spend points to get new passive abilities added on to your character, such as rapidly healing or repairing your shield every time you kill someone, better accuracy or more damage with certain weapons, decreased cooldowns for your class-defining ability, and so on. There are also special items called "Class Mods" which are only useable by certain classes and drastically alter how your character performs - it may boost damage by 40% on a certain type of weapon for example, or grant you and all your allies ammo regeneration, etc.
In addition to regular guns, there are many guns all throughout the game that do "elemental" damage - that is, they do damage based on fire, electricity, corrosion or explosion. This damage is considered different from regular bullet damage, and usually these guns have a chance to cause a special damage type, such as setting your target on fire to burn for damage over time, electrocuting to stun, exploding for area damage or corroding to cause damage over time plus take more damage while corroding. Different shields also can have added resistance to these 4 elemental damage types, though electricity always seems to do the most damage to shields and fire always does the most damage to bare flesh. When you start out, you have a small backpack, limited resources, and a sucky gun. As you level up and complete quests, you'll make money, find better weapons, be able to keep up to 4 ready for use and also increase how much you can carry. It quickly becomes apparent, however, that elemental weapons are definitely the way to go - no normal gun, no matter what its stats say, can compete with a similar level elemental weapon of roughly equivalent quality.
The game's graphics are pretty good. I'm sure its performance is augmented by the simple textures used - as the game is going for a "comic book" artistic vibe we've seen in other games such as Champions Online. The textures are a bit on the cartoony side and post processing adds a thick black line to the outline of every model. Even so, there are times (especially toward the end of the game) where framerate does start to suffer a bit, but you can quickly remedy this by killing off some enemies. There's lots of voice acting of good quality, and the game's auditory experience is very pleasing.
In addition to running around on foot, the game provides you an unlimited supply of vehicles (after a few quests enable you to get to them) which let you traverse the areas of the game faster, although the mounted weapons soon become nigh-useless because their damage doesn't scale appropriately with level. In fact, neither does the vehicle's structural integrity (though it looks like it is trying), so that toward the end of the game they're more prone to explosion than a Ford Pinto.
Borderlands blends RPG elements into FPS action, which is a fun way to game, but it also makes for some audaciously dischordant situations... for instance, enemy humans will take more damage if you shoot them in the head rather than the body, but there are some humans so tough that they can take multiple dozens of bullets to the face before they die, despite wearing no visible armor. This is, of course, part and parcel of RPG fare and those familiar with RPGs primarily won't even consider it odd, but FPS diehards might consider it a bit odd, or in some cases, outright BS.
Once you beat the game, which you will do long before you reach maximum level, you are then permitted to go through again from the start on a more difficult setting. Believe it or not, this is funner than it sounds. Also, two expansions have been made available via DLC: The Zombie Island of Doctor Ned, and Mad Moxxy's Underdome Riot. What these two DLC packs do is introduce new areas to the game that aren't connected in any way with any other event going on in Borderlands. As the name suggests, The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned is a horror-movie type setting with zombies and werewolves and whatnot, with more quests and such to do. Mad Moxxy's Underdome Riot is an expanded arena system where you (and your friends, if you want to get anywhere in the second tier) take on wave after wave of multiple enemy badguys, culminating in repeat appearances of many of the bosses from the Borderlands campaign proper - all level adjusted for challenge, of course. While the loot isn't as good and no experience is gained on your character, you will get the opportunity to get extra skill points, basically letting you spend more points than you would otherwise have gotten at maximum level. All-in-all, however, I'd say the DLC is primarily for those who absolutely can't get enough of playing Borderlands, because the experience of playing them is supposed to be its own reward.
In summary, this is an excellent multiplayer co-op game. The campaign is designed around it from the ground up, the writing includes a lot of silliness and grim humor, and the dialogue is often hilarious ("He's my friend, and by friend, I mean 'asshole what messed up my mama's girl parts.' You may want to get what you can from him while he's still alive from me not having killed him yet and whatnot.") While I can't say I'll still come back to play it years down the road, for a brief period there was a time where Borderlands was king of the roost, and it wouldn't let me go till I had played it to death 3 times over.
Verdict: B+. And that's the word from Bandit Camp...
I love the guys over at GOG.COM. You should head over there. This week, they've added Interstate 76 (with the Nitro Pack addon) for only 6 bucks. This was the best vehicle combat game of the 90s (though the Carmageddon series was a close second), and now you can have an updated and compatibilimitatimized version of it for less than it costs you to eat lunch! Go! GO NAAAOOWWW!
