Some cool, some yuck, all popular... for one reason or another.
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Friday, December 17, 2010
Monday, November 22, 2010
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Spelunker HD
Of all the games of my NES-dominated youth, I never thought they'd end up remaking Spelunker 25 years later.
Friday, November 12, 2010
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Minecraft - It's hooked me
So, yeah, I'm playing some minecraft. Here's a video I fraps'd last weekend. Maybe I'll make another one soon.
Friday, September 24, 2010
Thursday, September 23, 2010
GOG.COM: J/K LOL.. U MAD?
Looks like we all just got trolled. GOG.COM is not, in fact, out of business, nor even sold to someone else. The whole thing was apparently a stunt to generate buzz for the launch of their new website.
Since when was trolling (or even worse, a forum GONE FOREVER post) a marketing strategy?
Monday, September 20, 2010
RIP GOG.COM
Too bad. I had hoped these guys would do well. At GOG.com, there is now:
Dear GOG users,Read Full Article
We have recently had to give serious thought to whether we could really keep GOG.com the way it is. We've debated on it for quite some time and, unfortunately, we've decided that GOG.com simply cannot remain in its current form.
We're very grateful for all support we've received from all of you in the past two years. Working on GOG.com was a great adventure for all of us and an unforgettable journey to the past, through the long and wonderful history of PC gaming.
This doesn't mean the idea behind GOG.com is gone forever. We're closing down the service and putting this era behind us as new challenges await.
On a technical note, this week we'll put in place a solution to allow everyone to re-download their games. Stay tuned to this page and follow us on Twitter and Facebook for updates.
All the best,
GOG.com Team
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Review: Wings of Prey
I'd been jonesing for a good flight simulator for some time, practically ever since Chuck Yeager's Air Combat fell off the radar. Is Wings of Prey a good simulator? Well, it depends on two things: How much you like or dislike realism, and how important to you the between-mission fluff is in a game.
Wings of Prey is a technologically impressive WW2 flight simulator from Russian developer Gaijin Entertainment. And when I say it's a flight simulator, I mean it's a simulator. The ground, the sky, the planes, the water, the boats, even the cockpits are all very detailed and impressively rendered. Combining 3D rendering with high resolution textures and some very good postprocessing, WoP manages to convey a very immersive flying experience.
There are 3 settings to the game: Arcade, Realistic and Simulator. Arcade mode has lots of HUD "augmented reality" instrumentation like most games do these days, and on top of that it plays "physics nanny" to help keep you from smashing into the ground like a hefty bag full of beef stew. In arcade mode, the game is almost too easy... not much of a challenge at all. 
But when you flip that switch to Realistic mode... hooo buddy.
Realistic mode still keeps the augmented reality targeting and instrumentation of arcade mode, but when it comes to flying, physics and damage, the training wheels are most definitely OFF. The phrase "punishingly realistic" kept coming to mind. And I'm not talking "100 different switches and buttons to pay attention to" realism like in Falcon 3.0 (for those of you who remember it back in the day), I mean in regards to physics, damage, and the scientific principles governing flight.
Never before have I played a flight simulator where I could stall simply by maneuvering. I don't mean "whoops I pointed straight up and now I have no speed" stalling like just about every flight sim, this is different. See, what makes an airplane generate lift is the uniform and rapid movement of air past the wings, the shape of which cause lift. In previous games, including my fondly remembered CYAC, I've never experienced a stall by rolling 90 degrees and pulling back on the stick all the way. That, I had been led to believe by every sim ever, was your standard way to turn.
How misinformed I have been.
The performance characteristics of your average WW2 fighter plane apparently are such that you can change your bearing faster than you can change your momentum - IE, if you start out facing north, roll to the right, and pull back on the stick, your nose will be facing southeast about the time your velocity will still be sending you northeast. This means that air is no longer rushing toward you from the front, but rather rushing "up" from "under" you... no longer generating lift, and pretty much guaranteeing you to go into a spin and start spiralling toward the ground. Assuming you can wrestle your way back to control (and you have to do it firmly but gently or it just gets worse), you'll still lose several hundred feet of altitude. Hopefully several hundred feet you had to spare, otherwise you're now an impromptu bonfire.
That's not the only way things "get real." As you take damage to your airplane, it suffers. Damage to your engine makes it harder to maintain airspeed. Damage to your wings (Actually visible in the form of real polygonal holes in them) makes them generate less lift and makes it harder for you to roll your airplane, thus making you easier to kill. And let me tell you, these planes don't take much to kill. I was under the impression (again from previous flight sims such as CYAC) that it took many seconds of sustained gunfire to shoot down a plane... such is not the case. A withering half-second barrage from most planes (especially those with large bore cannons) will start you streaking for the earth... and much more than that will cause such structural damage that a the wind might rip a wing right off you. Also, so many of these planes only carry so much ammo. I had no idea that the machine guns on an ME-262 could basically be exhausted by 10 seconds of continuous fire. Light, quick bursts are the name of the game here. And it goes without saying that you have to lead your target.
Switching from "arcade" to "realistic" mode is a shock, like going from "easy" to "expert" in terms of difficulty... but heaven help you if you crank it all the way to "simulator." In addition to the physics realism of the previous mode, Simulator mode takes away all the augmented reality. You want to know your airspeed, heading, or altitude? You have to LOOK AT THE INSTRUMENTS in your cockpit! That plane coming toward you, is that a friend or foe? Well, I hope you've boned up on silhouette recognition charts, because there's no "targeting" feature or any kind of labels. 
If you can't distinguish a Messerschmidt from a Mustang in pretty quick order at 100 yards (while being shaken like a wet dog), you're probably going to be having a hot lead sandwich for lunch, and it's all you can eat.
Now, I'm a fella who enjoys a challenge, as long as the BS factor is kept to a minimum. I find Arcade to be too easy, but I find Realistic to be very difficult. Forget about Simulator mode. Fortunately the developer realized that it would probably be too difficult for most people, so the game gives you (now hear me out on this), infinite lives. Well, not lives so much as "do-overs." If you get shot down or crash for whatever other reason, you simply hit enter and you're back up in the air a little behind where you died, at full speed again. "Well, what's so hard about that?" you might ask - well, it keeps track of how many times you get killed, and at the end of the mission it rates your effectiveness. So there's still the achievement factor for those who want it, and yet the content tourists can still progress through the game instead of being denied access because they aren't aces.
These are the guts of the game, and for the most part it's pretty solid. The garnish, however, leaves a little to be desired. Much like other games I've reviewed from Russian developers, the localization leaves something to be desired. While the voice actors don't have inappropriate accents (in fact they usually have correct accents for their nationalities), the verbiage is just ever so slightly off, the emphasis usually in the wrong places, or the vernacular out of place. It's clear they were reading from cards without knowledge of context. Some of the tertiary controls are also a little confusing, and the joystick throttle controls are a little too sensitive - pushing the throttle all the way to the stop takes it past 100% and into WEP, or "Wartime Emergency Power," a kind of super-nitrous flank speed that will burn out your engine before too long... and it becomes difficult to find 100% throttle without bumping over into WEP.
I have to say this is probably the best Russian game I've played since Tetris. Unfortunately, as loyal readers will no doubt recollect, this is relatively faint praise. There's also a point where it becomes possible to have too much realism. Wings of Prey flirts dangerously with that area, yet I can't bring myself to dislike it. It's not a bad game, but it'll never replace Chuck Yeager in my nostalgia hall of fame.
Verdict: B-, or if you aren't into realism, C+.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Review: Starcraft 2
It's been over a decade in coming. Starcraft 2. Probably the most anticipated and definitely the most hyped title of the last couple years. Those are some pretty big shoes to fill. It's interesting the road that Blizzard/Activision has chosen to go down.
I'm going to get this out of the way right off the bat: Starcraft 2 is fun to play. Starcraft 2 is beautiful to see. Starcraft 2 continues the story that we were left hanging in the middle of back in the 90s. The cutscenes and production values are top notch, which is what we've come to expect from blizzard as long as we've known them.
Now that that's all out of the way, I can start griping uninterrupted.
A lot of people say that instead of Starcraft 2, it should be called Starcraft HD. That's what it feels like. The game is a lot prettier and fully 3D, and despite the addition of new units and situations to the game, it still plays exactly like Starcraft 1/Broodwar. The units still clump the same, behave the same, are ordered around the same. Unlike the transition from warcraft 2 to 3, Starcraft 2 does not have the option for your units to move in formation (they just all clump and move the exact same way they did in starcraft). There's the same amount of moderate micromanagement, the same resource gathering, the same... well, everything. It feels like a pretty polish job on a new starcraft 1 expansion.
Now, that can be good or bad, depending on your perspective. The original starcraft definitely had its merits - there was a reason why it sold so well, and why in Korea, to this day, they still have professional Starcraft Leagues where players can pull down 6 figures... from playing starcraft. This sequel is probably the least jarring sequel I've ever experienced - an expert at Starcraft 1 will find no real new learning curve to starcraft 2, as no inputs or tactics have really changed all that much. It will make the Koreans pretty happy, I'm guessing. But for those of us who long ago moved on from Starcraft to Company of Heroes, Dawn of War, and Supreme Commander, it feels like going back down to the minor leagues. The genre has grown and developed since 1998... evolved. Cover dynamics have come in to play, new gameplay modes and victory conditions, epic changes in scope and scale... but starcraft 2 remains stubbornly loyal to its roots, and it feels like going back to read Dr. Seuss after you've spent the last 10 years reading Tolkien, Heinlein and Tolstoy. Sure, it can stir good feelings of nostalgia, but it's a bit bland.
If you've got steam shooting out of your ears at this point, just go back and read paragraph 2 again. It was fun to play, I guess I was just expecting something as revolutionary again today as the first Starcraft was in 98. Perhaps that's my fault for believing the hype. But the blame for that hype rests firmly on Activision/Blizzard's shoulders.
So those were the design decisions that I found "interesting." Sticking to the formula of what worked in SC1, not breaking out into any new experimental paradigms, for better or worse. Now we get into the business decisions... most of which are the reasons why the amazon ratings for Starcraft 2 are pretty much evenly split between 5 stars and 1 star. Bobby Kotick, head honcho of Activision/Blizzard has made it no mystery where he stands when it comes to gamers. He sees them as cash cows to be milked and discarded. He has no love for video gaming. If you needed an example of the stereotypical businessman who cares about nothing but the bottom line, you need look no further than Bobby Kotick. If he could find some way to legally kick you in the crotch and take your money from you while you twitch on the pavement, he would form a business empire around it. His influence is clearly felt in the business model for Starcraft 2.
There's no LAN play allowed, for one. The game is absolutely, positively, inseperably married to the battle.net service. Plainly, Blizzard was in mind to curb piracy AND to force every single person who wanted to play multiplayer to buy their own copy. I can't speak to how successful the latter has been, but judging from statistics on torrent sites, there's still been quite enough piracy to go around. Despite that, however, Starcraft 2 has been the fastest selling strategy game in video game history. Tell me again how the PC gaming market is dead, Mr Video Game publishers?
Battle.net "2.0" also doesn't let you play with people outside your region. If you live in australia or europe and want to play with an american friend, you're pretty much SOL. Features from previous battle.net games are missing, to the annoyance of many. Also very unsettling is the idea that adding "friends" or posting on the official forum reveals your real life information to the not so tender mercies of the internet. Maybe you don't care if your name is John Smith, but people with unique names or who are revealed to be "a girl IRL" might find themselves unduly harassed. Now, Blizzard HAS decided to back off on this requirement... for now. The uproar was just too overwhelming I guess, but I personally do not feel comfortable that they might not do something else similar in the future and NOT back off from it, considering their recent track record of bad ideas and disregard for their customer base as individuals (to which anyone who has ever tried to get support in World of Warcraft can attest).
But, by far the most egregious sin of B/A and Starcraft 2 is the pricing and the division. Starcraft 2 only comes with the terran campaign. It costs 60 dollars. We've been told that the other two campaigns will be made available later as for-pay expansions. Can't you hear Bobby Kotick wringing his hands and smiling? In my opinion, it is NOT a good thing that games have been becoming shorter and shorter over the last decade. Probably the most blatant example of this are the notoriously short single player campaigns of the Modern Warfare games. These days, 9 or 12 hours of single player content seems to be the average, and that's just sad. Remember how many levels there were in Doom 2? Remember how long you spent on Starcraft 1 and its expansions? It's more than a little disappointing to find that the only concept that Starcraft 2 has adopted from its contemporaries is diminished length of content. And don't give me "multiplayer," every game has that (or should), and it doesn't count any more than the ability to make custom maps - it's players making the game longer and more interesting, not developers.
So let's sum up my impressions of Starcraft 2: Expensive, content starved, fun but dated gameplay, flashy and pretty visuals, no LAN, and a dash of invasion of privacy thrown in.
All in all, I'd have to say my recommendation for this game is to wait until it all comes out in a battle chest, then wait for that battle chest to hit the bargain bin. You waited 12 years, you can probably wait a couple more. Not that you ever listen to me.
Grade: B-.
Friday, August 13, 2010
Zero Punctuation Reviews: Shadow of the Colossus
Yahtzee refuses to review Starcraft. I expect to have my review of Starcraft 2 done by next week.
Tropico 4 goes to the dogs.
Via Kotaku:
Fresh from the success of last year's Tropico 3, Kalypso Media and developer Haemimont Games bring El Presidente into the 21st century, adding in Facebook and Twitter functionality into next year's Tropico 4.
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
. Read Full Article
Friday, August 06, 2010
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Saturday, July 17, 2010
So apparently I write like David Foster Wallace
After trying a few of my posts in this analyzer, the most frequent author that came back was -
I write like
David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
One thing that was interesting though, was my review of Necrovision came back as William Gibson. Read Full Article
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Review: Singularity
I left this title languishing at the bottom of my to-do list, mostly because it's gimmick sounded a little too similar to that of Timeshift, a game which thoroughly failed to impress me. Now, after having played it, I must say that was a mistake on my part.
Singularity is a first person shooter that borrows a lot from previous titles. One could almost use the word "derivative" except that this word carries a negative connotation of unoriginality which would not entirely be deserved by the title. Rather, it does what I wish so many other games and genres would do - they take good ideas from myriad previous games and use them all in a new game. Sometimes it gets a little obvious, even egregious, but for the most part it serves to make the player comfortable and pleased with the gaming experience because the damn game plays like it should. I suppose as some others may have pointed out in other reviews, the comparison that most readily leaps to mind is Bioshock, as the game uses the same health meter and first aid kit dynamic as Bioshock, and also has a second bar that is EVE in that game and E99 in this game. You're also gathering a numbered resource to buy upgrades to your equipment and yourself, and there are a number of abilities of Singularity's "Time Manipulation 
Device," or TMD, that mirror plasmids from Bioshock, such as the ability to catch airborn projectiles and hurl them back at enemies. There's also the fact that everything around you is rusting, falling apart and awash in 50's paraphenalia, but that felt a little more to me like Fallout 3 than Bioshock, slim differentiation though that may be. The game also borrows the "aiming down the barrel turns anything into a sniper rifle" dynamic from Call of Duty, as well as the grenade danger indicator and the ability to only carry two weapons. There's also a heated spike launcher that feels suspiciously like the Half Life 2 crossbow (not to mention you also get a gravity gun power later), a boss fight right out Borderlands, a "sidekick" NPC that looks suspiciously like a certain L4D survivor, the "listening to audio logs that fill in the backstory" dynamic that just about every game has used since Doom 3, quickdraw/shoot sequences like in Call of Juarez, and a weapon called the "Seeker" which fires bullets you remote control in slow motion that brings back memories of the drones you use in Frontlines - Fuels of War. There's even a little bit of "companion cube" type puzzling a-la Portal.
It's all crammed together into the Unreal 3 engine (the prolific nature of which is why so many games these days all feel like each other) in a way that plays well. As much as the game might have borrowed from Bioshock (another U3e game, incidentally), it left behind the clunky, plodding, inaccurate feel of the controls and also reduced the operation of the TMD to one or two context-sensitive keys, making the use of multiple effects easy and intuitive without having to juggle and switch between umpteen plasmids. The conventional weapons also perform well, being as accurate down the sights as in Modern Warfare but unlike it, still being acceptably accurate when fired "from the hip" instead of turning your assault rifle into a rapid fire blunderbuss. The rate of turn feels natural, and the movement speed feels right as well - two areas that bioshock didn't quite feel like it got right.
But enough about what Singularity borrowed, let's talk about its originality. The game takes place on a moon-shaped island called "Katorga 12" just off the Kamchatka Peninsula. Back in the 50s, the Soviets discovered a new element deep underground there called "E-99" which (apparently, apart from displacing Einsteinium in the periodic table) causes chronological distortions in matter. Unfortunately for the Russians, research involving E99 proves to be hazardous and fraught with accidents, and as such the research is suspended indefinitely and the island is abandoned. With anomalous radiation readings coming from the island in 2010, the Americans decide to risk international incident to send a military expedition to the island to investigate. An EMP burst of unknown nature causes the helicopters to crash, and in trying to reach the extraction point after the mission is aborted, the protagonist unknowingly stumbles through a time rift to the past where he saves a Russian scientist who would have otherwise perished in a fire. When returned to the present, suddenly the only two remaining soldiers are unable to contact their base, and the statuary around the island has changed from depicting Stalin to depicting the scientist you rescued. Something in the timeline just got screwed up... and you're about to spend the rest of the game trying to figure out how to fix it.
Soon after, you are contacted by a member of a resistance group who call themselves "MIR-12" who helps explain what is happening and gets you to once again travel to the past to prevent the scientist you rescued from killing another scientist to co-opt his work. This leads to you getting the TMD, which for the rest of the game lets you rejuvinate or decay various objects and organisms around the island (there being a convenient plot device in place that the TMD only affects things that have been "infused" with E99... a plot device it happily ignores whenever convenient). But it seems no matter how much you try to fix the timeline, it only gets more and more screwed up, leading up to a dramatic final confrontation and decision that will decide the fate of the entire world. Not that I'll spoil it any more than I already have.
The trek across Katorga 12 involves a lot of shooting, both of mutant beasties and more mundane soldiery and some basic problem solving, but by and large the path through the game is linear to the point of almost being on rails. What little 
side-trips there are are extremely short, mostly of the nature of opening a room off the main hallway to loot it for items. The story is interesting (and unlike Timeshift, actually able to be followed) and keeps you wanting to play further. The graphics are excellent, and I am very thankful that the developers saw fit to let you customize your visual experience to your liking (IE, letting me turn off bloom and depth of field, two of the most overrated and overused visual abominations of the current generation of games). I was a little disappointed that there was no subtitles option, but I suppose it didn't hurt too much.
The game does have some shortcomings, even if you don't consider a vast repertoire of borrowed paradigms to be a negative. Sometimes textures are a bit slow to load, some details have been left out (such as walking in front of a movie projector doesn't cast the player's shadow on the screen), and probably the biggest gripe of mine is that the game's autosave points have been tailored in such a way so as to always let you know when something tense is about to happen, even more obviously than the spike in the music's soundtrack. The flashing words "SAVING - DO NOT TURN OFF" at the top of the screen might as well be saying "GET READY TO DO A LOT OF FIGHTING IN A SECOND." On the sound front, Steven Jay Blum is everywhere. He narrates some parts of the game as well as voicing the primary antagonist. Now don't get me wrong, he's a great voice actor and he does a good job, it's just he feels a little overused in this title. And, of course, there's also the fact that as you start to progress through the second half of the game, your character has become so strong that the challenge noticeably depreciates. The game clocks in at about 7 or 8 hours on the single player campaign, which is not as long as some but certainly longer than others... still, it feels like it could have gone on to have a much more epic storyline if it wanted to put in the time.
But all in all, it's an enjoyable experience I recommend to any fan of first person shooters. Your time is not wasted in Singularity.
Verdict: B+. And that's the word from Bandit Camp.
Tuesday, July 06, 2010
Via Kotaku: A Visual Guide to the First Person Shooter
Article here.
Every time somebody talks about how good a FPS Goldeneye was, I feel a little sicker on the inside. It wasn't bad.. for a CONSOLE game. But it couldn't hold a candle to Quake, Duke3D, Unreal, or even the original Doom.
It's depressing, because the only reason the PC gaming market isn't completely dead right now is because, despite having perfectly good USB ports, console makers and developers are still inexplicably ignoring the mouse as the world's best analog input device, one that is prerequisite for FPS dominance. When they DO figure that out, you can pretty much kiss PC gaming goodbye. There were already some PS2 games that had USB keyboard support... keyboard and mouse support on XB360 would mean you no longer have to spend ~$1000 on a gaming computer, when you can get a console for less than $500 that plays every bit as good, has less support issues due to hardware standardization, and is much less complicated for your average person to use... all while now getting the same games and comparable experiences.
With the glass barrier of input type shattered, other genres that have been up til now largely exclusive to PCs would also be fair game... particularly MMOs and RTSes. Heck, the PS2 might have had a trimmed down version of Sims 2, but you know with access to KB&M, the next Sims sequel would blow away all sales records if released on consoles.
Then we'll ALL be console 'tards.
Monday, July 05, 2010
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