So I finally ditched the desert background tile. Now you guys can stop ridiculing my terrible site layout and start ridiculing my terrible authoring.
Read Full Article
Monday, June 28, 2010
Subscription Fees, DLC, and In-Game Advertising
A surprisingly level-headed soapbox rant from Tim over at Ctrl-Alt-Del today about the above topics and why they're here to stay. Recommended reading for all three of my readers.
I mostly agree with him - MMO games need subscription fees because servers and patches take money. Lots of money. In-game advertising is fine, if done right. The geico billboards in my Burnout Paradise do not harm my experience in any way, shape or form. DLC usually is a good thing, there have been countless times in the past where I would have gladly paid $5 more to have a favorite game that I just beat have more content... EXCEPT! Here is where I differ - all too often (I'm looking at YOU, Dragon Age) DLC content feels like it is NOT a bonus. It feels like it was developed concurrently with the title, if not being ripped right out of the main game itself to be sold separately. That's the kind of DLC I object to - the kind where it was ready before the game launched and should have been in the game to begin with. If you wanna see DLC done right, take a look at Borderlands and the General Knoxx DLC. DLC should be that. An expansion pack that adds new content beyond the main arc of the game. Now, some games abuse this a little, charging you 5 dollars a pop for things that should have all been lumped together as one single DLC (cough*MassEffect2*cough), but if the market will bear it, more power to them, I suppose.
So yeah, that's my two cents.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Review: Split/Second
One thing's for certain, I never thought Disney would put out a game in it with more 'splosions than a summer action film festival.
Split/Second is a heavily marketed racing game with a destructive twist. While playing it, you can't help but be reminded of the Burnout game series. There's a very manifest difference between the two properties, however - in Burnout, you bump and smash your opponents off the road with your own car; in Split/Second, you remotely detonate explosives, collapse buildings, crash planes, rupture dams and otherwise devastate the world all in an attempt to work your way to the front of the pack - where the other racers will all do the same to you.
The game can basically be summed up in such a manner. While the graphics are on the cutting edge of today's expectations (and I hope you like motion blur and post processing), the feel is actually closer to that of mario-kart, where everybody gets multiple blue tortoise shells.
Speaking of Mario-Kart, let me digress a little bit to tell you a story. Years back, all my school buddies and I would often play Mario Kart 64. There's one track in there that has a boulder roll down a cliff and across the road, always with perfect accuracy to smush at least one player. This became known to us as the "Exquisitely Timed Boulder." It became something of a metaphor for us, representing unexpected and unfortunate events. Your particular "Exquisitely Timed Boulder" could be getting extremely sick the day you were supposed to take a trip, or it could be getting a traffic ticket right when you had no money to pay it off, or it could be getting kicked in the nuts by a child as you traveled to your girlfriend's house to spend the night.
Well, Split/Second is a game that revels in, courts, marries, and has babies with the concept of the Exquisitely Timed Boulder. Then it sends those babies to "Coincidentally Unfortunate Happenstance" university, and populates the track with the graduates. The better you race, the more danger you are in of having something extremely unlikely come out of nowhere and squash you or shred you or send you plummeting 800 feet to a wet and rocky demise.
It's actually pretty fun.
The game doesn't concern itself with trivialities such as speedometer, course maps, or anything of that nature. The HUD consists entirely of your standing, the lap counter, and your "power" bar. You build power by drifting, tailgating, jumping and avoiding opponent-triggered explosions and whatnot, and then you can use the accrued power to set off those ETB's on the other cars. The power meter has three levels, and most simple attacks use one level of power, and huge ones that can alter the actual racecourse take a full 3 bars to activate. The lesser ones generally involve a single explosive set off at the side of the course or dropped in the middle by a helicopter, but the big ones involve things such as collapsing a building onto the course, crashing a plane onto it, launching a ship out of drydock across it, flinging a dump truck down a long straight stretch of it, destroying a dam and wiping out half of it, and so on. They can be very satisfying to trigger, and can potentially take you from last to first place.
There are also a variety of race modes. There's the standard race with laps, of course, but there's also an elimination mode where every 20 seconds the car in last place is 'sploded, continuing on until there is only one car. There's also a timed lap where you drive solo and the course itself tries to kill you, a race that involves passing the most semi trucks you can while they fling explosive barrels out of the back at you, and a mode that involves dodging missiles shot at you by a helicopter. Your standings in these events gain you "credits" which then unlock further races and cars.
While there are a variety of cars to choose from, the way it presents them is a little disingenuous. They have ratings for speed, drift, strength and acceleration, but the difference between the cars is a lot more subtle than the stats would lead you to believe. Furthermore, the stats of the different cars have absolutely no bearing on the performance of those cars when being driven by AI - the monster trucks (in the hands of the computer) can outrace the formula 1 racers for example. The AI is very "rubberbandy," a vice most racing games these days have. If you don't know what that means, imagine a giant thumbtack shoved in the top of the cars, and a rubber band strung around the tacks between your car and your opponent's car. When you pull ahead of the enemy car, he suddenly drives faster. When you fall behind the opponent, he inexplicably drives slower so that you catch up. The intention is to make for a better experience for the driver, but to pull it off you have to make it subtle - and this game where everything gets BLOWED UP is anything but subtle. So the obvious rubberbanding gets a little demeaning at times. Of course, the farther you progress in the game, the rubber band stops being attached to YOU and starts being attached to the finish line, and you'll constantly have to be blowing things up and smashing things down all while driving perfectly to stand a chance of placing in the top 3.
The game styles itself as a "reality show," with opening and closing credits around each "episode" and previews of what's coming up next... but during the race, there isn't much of that. I guess the developers thought that a play-by-play would get a little annoying after 50 races, and they're probably right. But what is still annoying is the multiple layers of unskippable "information" presented to you before and after each race that won't hurry up no matter how much you press the key it is telling you to press to continue.
The game has good replayability though, with single races being selectable after you beat them, and multiplayer both in the form of online and split screen competition. The video options are rather simplified (only letting you select with a slider between 4 presets), but the game runs well on previous gen cards on low settings (which still look pretty good) and looks very impressively cinematic on the highest setting. Some of the audio seems a bit off, as every explosion and crash is actually lower in volume to the "whoosh" of your car passing a signpost. I suppose that again is meant to heighten the experience rather than overwhelm you with a constant cacophony of catastrophe.
In summary, I found Split/Second to be a solid, enjoyable title with impressive visuals and engaging gameplay... even if it is gameplay built on making other players scream "OH THAT WAS BULL%#@*!!!"
Verdict: B+
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Friday, June 11, 2010
Broke into
My apologies for the delays. I have a Split/Second review in the pipe, I promise, but between experiencing a home invasion (with some stuff stolen) and a family reunion... it's going to have to wait a little longer.
Read Full Article
Starcraft 2 Theatrical Launch Trailer
I guess I couldn't rightly call myself a gaming blogger if I didn't copypasta this.
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
Thursday, May 27, 2010
I like this article.
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
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Monday, May 17, 2010
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Review: The Settlers 7
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...
Friday, April 30, 2010
Why I didn't review: Metro 2033
[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
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Thursday, April 08, 2010
Thursday, April 01, 2010
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Photoshop CS5 - All Too Easy
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.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
