Review: Darkest of Days

A guest review this time, once again from occasional contributor Psyclone -

If there is anything both incredibly sad and unfortunately common in the gaming world, it's wasted potential: games that look promising only to be ruined by rushing towards a deadline, ideas that sound good on paper but just don't translate well into an actual game or developers that have great ideas but not the talent or resources to create a game that does those ideas justice. Darkest Of Days, the debut game of Iowa based developer 8monkey labs, seems to be all three of those things; a game with an amazing premise that manages to fail on pretty much everything else.

Story

You play as Alexander Morris, a soldier fighting in General Custer's army in the Battle of Little Big Horn. After you get an arrow to the leg, witness Custer's death and are just about to bite it yourself, a portal appears and a guy in a fancy space suit "rescues you" (it's kind of confusing: the guy gets an arrow himself, tells you to hurry and you suddenly go into the portal despite being paralyzed a few moments ago, but never mind), whisking you away to the 22nd century. You awaken in the (apparently one room) HQ of an organization called KronoteK. See, due to a paperwork issue concerning an early transfer, Morris was considered an MIA in the conflict, and KronoteK seeks out these MIAs due to their "recruitment" having a minimal impact in history and thus can be given a second chance at life researching and protecting history. As soon as Morris in brought up to speed by KronoteK higher up "Mother" (shown only as a pair of eyes in a computer monitor); the latter informs him that the organization's founder, Dr. Koell has gone missing and at the same time, disturbances has been appearing all over history, placing vital individuals in harm's way, requiring Morris and his new partner/mentor, Agent Dexter to aid in resolving the situation. It is also quickly established that said disturbances seem to be connected to another group of time travelers, known only as "The Opposition"...

Sounds pretty awesome, right? Well, that constitutes about 70% of the story and the rest goes downhill from there. While the premise would allow immense variety by featuring several individuals to save all across history, the vast majority of the game (about 3/4 to be precise) involves you rescuing TWO guys, one from WWI and another from the American Civil War. Apart from two missions in Little Big Horn, one in World War II, and one in Pompeii the entire game (consisting of X missions) takes place in these two time periods. The plot justifies taking so long to rescue these two idiots by throwing an enormous amount of plot bullshit your way, ranging from beaming in several kilometers away for some reason, the two guys being needed to deliver vital-to-the-success-of-the-war stuff, to mistaking the person you're meant to rescue for his twin brother. To make matters worse, until the very end, we are never even TOLD what significance to history these guys have, making you feel like you're going on a wild goose chase.

And then there are the endless illogical elements in the plot, of which the arrow thing in the beginning is only the first: if KronoteK is so worried about preserving history, judging by Mother's reaction to the Opposition's first attack, why do they allow your mentor to give you several future weapons, going so far as leaving one in a farmhouse full of hostile soldiers? Morris was rescued by having the time bubble appear ''right in front of him''. Why can't we do the same with the other guys? Why does no one pay attention to the Union soldier who seems to appear out of nowhere from time to time and obviously isn't part of the unit mow down Confederate soldiers with a weapon looking, sounding and firing like nothing ever seen before yet panic at the sight of people with the same weapons yet wearing space suits? Why is there a mission where you're accompanied by two redshirts who go missing after the zeppelin they are piloting crash and are completely forgotten about once Dexter tells Mother a fib about them being fine and sure to come back soon? Why does the leader of the Opposition occasionally kidnap you between time trips to tell you that KronoteK are the bad guys yet sends you back every time to mow down his flunkies by the dozen? Finally, why does all of this culminate in an ending so abrupt, pointless and anti-climactic that it makes you shout "What was the point of all this?" The mind boggles.

Gameplay

The core mechanics of the game are standard FPS stuff: no fancy cover system, you can only carry 2 weapons at a time along with grenades, and each one has a (rather weak) melee attack for close quarters combat. The first gimmick the game introduces is the use of weaponry appropriate to the time period of the mission you're on: therefore you'll be using stuff like the Mosin-Nagant rifle and the Mauser C96 pistol in WWI; and the Springfield Musket, Henry Rifle and Colt revolver in the Civil War, amongst other weapons. While the weapons of WWI and your brief jaunt in WWII (more on that in a bit) are pretty decent, for most of the Civil War portions you'll be stuck with the nightmare that is the Springfield single-shot musket. Yes, running around with a gun that only fires a single bullet before having to go through an excruciatingly long reload process is fun for a while but it gets old VERY quickly. And yet that is the gun that 95% of all enemies are carrying so you'd better get used to it. Add that to the terrible AI of the game and you have some hilarious moments, such as enemies standing in the middle of an open field shooting at you, then reloading for about 5 seconds while you take out your sidearm and shoot them in the head. Or, if you have no other weapon handy, get involved in the Civil War equivalent of a quick draw gun battle, where you try to reload before the other guy does. It's as ridiculous as it sounds. Then there's the future weaponry: every so often Dexter will give you a future weapon whenever there is the need to perform "numerical adjustment" (as he puts it) to opposing armies. As fun as this sounds, most of the time he'll give you the futuristic shotgun or the futuristic assault rifle, which despite looking flashy are your typical FPS shotgun and rifle. In certain missions you do get access to cooler weapons (such as a weird rocket launcher/artillery cannon hybrid, an auto aiming machine gun and an awesome sniper rifle), but these are few and far between.

Speaking of reloading, another thing the game introduces is an "active reload" system: every time you reload your weapon, a circular meter indicating your progress starts filling up and if you press the fire button when it hits a green section along the meter, the reload process is immediately completed. However, if you miss, the gun jams making said reloading longer. This mechanic ends up being a godsend for most weapons (especially the musket) yet appears to be slightly buggy: every so often, instead of getting the "jam" animation, your character simply holds the empty weapon making you having to switch weapons and back again to be able to fire, in a matter that is clearly a bug, not a feature.

The final gimmick is blue aura enemies. These are people that while not apparently as vital to history as the (gold aura) people whose rescue is the focus of the mission, are still important enough to keep alive. What this means in gameplay terms is that they must be taken down by either shooting them in the legs or using a bunch of pebble-like devices called "chasers" that when thrown seek out these special enemies and give them an electric shock that knocks them out. Unfortunately, every so often these chasers, despite being supposed to come back when thrown will get stuck or you'll be forced to run away from the place where you threw them so there may be times when you have none available. Not to mention they have some trouble seeking blue auras when not in a specific range, so you may have to throw them several times.

But what happens if you kill these people? Well, sometimes (this was probably supposed to happen every time judging by the trailer. Yup, yet another bug) this causes a bunch of Opposition mooks to warp in, which, due to their better weapons and body armor, often cause your survival chances to drop. Not killing blue auras also gives you a bonus to upgrade points you receive at the end of each mission to upgrade your weapons (in clip size, reload speed, accuracy and rate of fire). Why these upgrades carry to every weapon you pick up is never explained but whatever. Time travel.

Now you must asking: is all this stuff placed inside a decent game? The answer is no: 80% of gameplay resumes to "Go here" and "Kill these guys". Sure, every so often you have to protect those ever-so-important NPC characters, but since they seem to be not only bulletproof but also have the ability to teleport near you if you go too far away, those "escort missions" end up being exactly the same as the afore mentioned "Go here" and "Kill these guys" objectives. Apart from a few decent set pieces (such as a jaunt on a zeppelin and a really atmospheric mission in a Nazi POW camp, the game's definitive high point), you have one of the most barebones shooters ever.

And if that wasn't enough we have some utterly bizarre design decisions: in one mission in WWI, mustard gas is released and you put on a gas mask. The mask ends up covering more than half the screen and judging by it's placement, you'd think they either didn't put the eye holes in the right places or that Morris is a cyclops. And then when you bring up the map, said map ends up being almost completely covered by the mask. That caused me to wander blindly for at least 5 minutes before realizing that the place where I was supposed to go to was the opposite direction of the way I was facing initially, which I could have easily verified if I could look at the map!

And then there's the invisible walls. Not only is there a game developer with the audacity to use invisible walls in this day and age, said walls are all over the place: not just the borders of the map, there are invisible walls around lakes, invisible walls around cliffs (despite the game having both swimming and fall damage), invisible walls around cliffs that you could easily climb otherwise, invisible walls in the middle of nowhere, etc. It seems that the only way to get around without bumping into an invisible wall is to strictly follow what the map defines as a road, in essence reducing the area show in your map to about 1/9th of the size.

And in the moments where you're actually shooting people? Most of the time it's pretty standard until the several times when the game throws a crapton of enemies at you, all of whom are capable of shooting you from really long distances without you knowing where the hell they are. Sometimes it gets so irritating that it just makes you give up and try running towards the next objective. And it works too, though it can bite you in the ass sometimes (one particularly embarrassing incident occurred when I, armed with only a Colt revolver and facing off against 30 Union soldiers made a break for it...only to face off against two armored Opposition members armed with machine pistols). As you can imagine, all of this makes for a very aggravating gaming experience.

Sound

There's really not much to say here. The soundtrack is pretty generic and repetitive, and the weapon sound effects at times make you feel as if you are firing BB guns or lighting firecrackers. instead of actual firearms. The voice acting is all over the place: the NPCs have pretty flat dialogue, Mother's voice keeps changing between accents, Dexter does a good job but his voice is COMPLETELY wrong for his character: he is supposed to be a New York firefighter who went MIA on 9/11, but he sounds more like a cowboy mixed with an Army veteran.

Graphics

The developers have bragged in press releases and the like of their "Marmoset Engine", which allows them to render "Hundreds of enemies at once". Well, I can't fault them there: we do get a lot of enemies on screen at once and without any slowdown even on a mid-range machine. Of course, when the rest of the game looks like a PS2 title and all the enemies look the same with only a few different models here and there, that isn't much of an achievement. The textures are high-res but really repetitive. The level terrain looks incredibly dull and with hardly any points of reference, so you'll be stuck looking at your map most of the time (usually only stopping when someone is about to shoot you). The only exceptions to this are the aforementioned POW level and the final level set in Pompeii, which look rather neat but that ends up being too little too late. And even those levels end up being ruined due to the repetitiveness of the models: all of the great ambiance of the POW camp goes straight to hell once you find the guy you were sent to look for...in the middle of a crowd full of models looking exactly like him.

Conclusion

Darkest of Days has some high points, but its merits in no way outweigh its flaws. It's quite simply a terrible game. It's so bad it's not even mock worthy: if there was an MST3K for games, this game would be the equivalent to Monster a Go-Go or The Beast Of Yucca Flats, in the sense that not even riffing can make it bearable. I know this is a debut game, but there is such a thing as aiming your sights too high and this what happens when you do. Recommendation: stay the hell away from this game. Darkest Of Days, indeed.

Grade: D.

Psyclone has, in the past, also reviewed Burnout Paradise for GBG.

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Until the end of the month, Dell is selling 22 inch widescreen monitor E2210H for $169. If you need a bigger/wider monitor or have been looking to upgrade from a CRT to an LCD, THE TIME IS NOW! This is the best deal I've yet seen for a monitor of this size.

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Why Warhammer Online is on its Deathbed

Warhammer Online is currently the best PvP-oriented fantasy MMO on the market today. So why is it doing so badly? Why have subscribers been leaving it in droves, forcing server merge after server merge, still failing to solve the population problem on some servers or realms?

The biggest problem is they forgot the lesson of their greatest design triumph: DAOC's 3-faction system. Warhammer uses a 2 faction system, like WoW. And, like WoW, this led to horrendous amounts of problems with population imbalances that got ever worse because the side with the most soldiers would win, and winning sides would attract more players while losing sides would lose players faster. Thus, the 2-faction RvR paradigm is doomed the moment one side starts to eke wins over the other. Conversely, the DAOC 3-faction RvR paradigm is self balancing rather than self-imbalancing. In the 3 faction system of DAOC, it was shown that when one faction started to gain dominance over a server, the other two factions would almost always call a "truce" with each other and focus their efforts on bringing down the top dog of the moment. The effect wasn't immediate, but it was much more balanced.

That this lesson was either forgotten or abandoned during the design phase of Warhammer Online is absolutely astonishing, to say the least. To abandon a successful dynamic in such a way shows a colossal failure of planning and/or judgment. They can't even blame this one on the lore of the Intellectual Property - Warhammer has always emphasized conflict between numerous factions. In fact, it was Mythic's design which shoehorned 3 factions which fought each other as often as not (Greenskins, Dark Elves and Chaos) into one faction for the sake of having a 2 - faction paradigm. Even that aside, it would have been simple during the planning stages to conceive of a third faction consisting of, say, Skaven, Vampire Counts and Tomb Kings just as an example. Unfortunately, such decisions were not made in early development, and Mythic remained committed to the 2-faction paradigm. The reason why it is important that a decision such as this be made in early development is that because once the decision is made and development proceeds along those decisions, it becomes exponentially more difficult, time consuming and expensive to change paradigms with as each stage of production is reached. It costs nothing to change an idea while simply a concept, but now changing to a 3-faction paradigm is as good as impossible, since every zone of every tier of the game is designed explicitly around combat involving only two factions. To add a third faction now would necessitate not only introduction of new content for the third faction, but the complete re-design almost from the ground up of all existing content to support a possible 3-way fight. Thus, Mythic has painted itself into a corner and has no option but to remain committed to the 2-faction paradigm, as the time and capital no longer exists to go "back to the drawing board" with a title that is a year past launch with the rest of Electronic Arts standing over their shoulder wondering why the WoW-esque profits aren't rolling in as planned.

Another reason Warhammer is floundering so badly is because of another design element that WAR developers mistakenly believe is one of their greatest achievements: the "open party" system. This comes from a fundamental misconception about group dynamics - Mythic thinks that any tank, DPS class or healer is pretty much interchangeable with any other tank, DPS class or healer. The open party system is a breeding ground for PUGs (Pick-Up Groups, groups that were formed from whatever random people were available at the time, as opposed to "Pre-made" groups of people who know each other). PUGs are always at a disadvantage to premade groups because players of the same class are NOT interchangeable. A healer isn't a healer isn't a healer. Some players, frankly, are not as good as other players. And even the good players have wildly different styles of play - where they like to stand, how far they like to charge, who they guard, etc. No two players are alike, and an effective, cohesive group comes from players learning to play with each other as a unit, supporting and assisting each other to make the group better. But when the dynamic of your group, and the playstyles of any given member in it, can change at any given moment without warning or planning, party dynamics go all to hell. Melee classes that like to push into enemy groups to assault enemy healers first suddenly find themselves alone, unsupported and unhealed because, unbeknownst to them, the others in the group prefer a different tactic. Groups who came to rely on a "back-line" healer constantly healing from relative safety are suddenly knocked off balance by having to adapt to a new Warrior Priest who prefers to "front line" heal. "Assist train" enthusiasts grate on "AoE grind" enthusiasts and the whole thing just falls apart.

The Open Group element also discourages the community building that comes from forming guilds. Since anyone can find or start an open group at any time and have a reasonable expectation of grouping (though it probably won't be a GOOD group, as noted above) causes many to feel they don't need a guild because they can always find other people to play with. But what does not occur to these people is that the main advantage of having a guild is the organization and coordination they facilitate. Indeed, even many extant guilds already formed in warhammer forget this too, leaving guildmembers to their own devices (and the not-so-tender mercies of the various Open PUGs) rather than emphasize the cooperative benefits of doing things together as a guild. Thus, the already manifest performance difference between PUGs and pre-made and "Guild" groups becomes even more pronounced, leading to further discouragement among the majority of players (because let's face it, there's usually 10 PUG prey to every pre-made predator), leading to less subscribers.

People resent other players who run in pre-made or guild-only groups. Because (among other reasons) I want a fighting force that is familiar with the styles and tactics of its own members, I have a policy in the guild for which I am leader in WAR - we always run in a guild warband, whatever we do. I've seen the results for myself. Running in a guild warband means there's always a place for guildmates who come online to join the activity and enjoy the added effectiveness of teaming up with other players with whom they are familiar and comfortable. As a result, I've led keep defenses where a half warband (~12 players) of my guild has successfully repulsed attacks on keeps we were defending when the attackers were fielding four times our numbers. But our own realm-mates resent us. They call us elitists, or selfish, and accuse us of not being "team players." I respond that anyone who wants to join our guild can do so, and they'll be welcome in our guild warband, which is about as non-elitist as you can get. No matter your skill or background or class or level, my guild will welcome you and give you a try, and even share the fruits of our crafting and gear-farming labor with you. This is elitism? Apparently it is, since the default is the "open group," which the rank and file of the server feels makes them entitled to riding the coattails of a more effective group of players who practice and play with each other without having to put in the effort and commitment to also contribute to that group of players. It makes me feel like a woman who has been called a bitch because she won't engage in casual sex. If you want in my metaphorical bed, I want to know you're going to be there not only in the morning, but for the foreseeable future.

Yet another reason for Warhammer Online's troubles has been the absolute abandonment of the player economy and the crafting sector. In DAOC, mythic created a very robust and versatile crafting system which, when taken to its very end, produced the best gear in the game, absolutely customizable to your needs and your playing style in a straightforward (if time consuming) manner. It wasn't perfect, but it existed. In Warhammer, Crafting is the unwanted stepchild of the game. The methods of crafting items was intended to be new and original, but worked out being arcane and unintuitive as well as largely unhelpful. There is no way to craft one's own armor or weapons, though you can craft items that enhance dropped or quested items to a degree. Consumables are also craftable, but investment in creating them seldom matches return and most players consider the process to be more trouble than it is worth. Add into this problem that there is no real money sink in this game (the last major investment you make in Warhammer is at level 20, when you buy your mount for a paltry 15 gold which is easily earned before you need it), and you are also presented with hyperinflation combined with oligarchism - the longer you have played, the more money you have lying around doing nothing, which causes the price for higher end items to skyrocket because money becomes more and more meaningless... but meanwhile, the newer players who have not yet hit the point where their money is growing faster than the US federal debt find themselves unable to meet the ever-multiplying asking prices for the gear that is considered "standard minimum" at the upper levels. 500g+ for a single piece of level 40 set armor is not uncommon, and prices from there go up into the multithousands. Thus, the good gear generally gets sold back and forth between the longest-running players, with none of the money really finding its way down into the hands of the newer players. Even the seemingly exorbitant costs of castle ownership (often costing guilds dozens of gold per hour) does not seem to fight the inflation. Prices of "green" gear usually stays around a stable few gold per piece, but in the neverending arms race of RvR, where the oligarchs are ever increasing their destructive potential with better and better gear, stepping one toe into combat with green or even blue gear will usually spell your instant annihilation.

These are the three major reasons Warhammer Online has gone from one of the most anticipated titles to being practically on life support, even as it celebrates its first anniversary of launch. And that doesn't even include the myriad of other problems that are innate to any MMO - the bugs, issues of prompt response from customer service, controversies of class balance, etc. Warhammer's subscribers are being wooed away by the latest flashes in the pan (Champions Online even managed to catch my eye, despite its lack of meaningful PvP... and of course, Aion has been hyped beyond all measure even though it promises to be yet another unimpressive Korean grindfest). It's a pity that the company which created the best PvP MMO to date - Dark Age of Camelot - has now been unable to replicate that success, even when bolstered by one of the best and most prolific fantasy IPs in existence.

And it's a shame, because RvR is still the best PvP MMO experience there is in the world.

And that's the word from Bandit camp...

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Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2's Big Marketing Gimmick

Give you one hint. Well, two.



That's right.. sixaxis motion control for Ayane's boobies. I guess it's safe to label NGS2 a "DOA" game now.

But what happens if you shake the controller REALLY FAST?

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Zero Punctuation Reviews: Call of Juarez - Bound in Blood

Happy 100th show, Yahtzee. You liked COJ-BiB better than I did, but that's probably because you played the console version where the controls make sense.

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Review: Call of Juarez - Bound in Blood

I had a bit of a soft spot for the first Call of Juarez. Well, at least for the parts where you played Reverend Ray and not Billy Candle, because I liked playing as the aging ultimate badass bible-verse-spouting invulnerable gunslinger and not so much the stealthy weakling. This game is really a prequel, not a sequel, focusing on the earlier lives of Ray and his brothers, Thomas and William.

Despite having heard bad things about my old nemesis "unlockables" showing up in the multiplayer, I was really looking forward to getting my hands on this title because the "western" genre FPS is such a rare thing. Unfortunately I was a bit let down by this one. I'll just go down the list of gripes here -

1) The Control
CoJ1 had some issue with control, but Bound in Blood makes it worse. Clearly the game was written with console control sticks in mind, which is a terrible thing because there's no worse control for an FPS than a console stick. Yeah, that goes for Halo, too. Well, I take it back.. the only thing worse than controlling an FPS with a console stick is trying to control an FPS that was designed for a console stick... with a mouse and keyboard. The pinnacle of this annoyance is in the "boss fight" showdown sections, where the mouse movement is so divorced from the onscreen effects that it becomes infuriating. You have to move your mouse down and to the left to move your hand close to your gun.. but not TOO close or else you'll suffer a penalty. If you stop moving your mouse, though, the hand will also drift slowly away from where it needs to be. When the churchbell rings in the distance, you're supposed to quickly complete the down-left movement with the mouse to grab the gun and then shove upward to unholster and aim it, and the whole mess is just so counter-intuitive that often it almost made me just give up on the game in disgust, even when I got it right and won the shootout on the first try.

2) The Graphics
Maybe this looks a lot better on console, I don't know, but on PC, the creators of Bound in Blood have accomplished something amazing - they took the beautiful sweeping vistas and rolling wilderness of the american southwest and made them painful to look at. Playing this game for more than a couple hours made my eyes cross and my head hurt. I couldn't quite tell if it was the watery postfiltering, the industry-pervasive abuse of bloom, the impossible to miss mutation of polygons at a moderate distance (even on the highest settings available), the mannequin-ish rigid quality of the models (especially during cutscenes)and their unfocused, soulless eyes, and the overall clutteredness of every level where it becomes hard to distinguish one polygonal construct from another. There's a lot of that going around these days too, CoD:WaW was chock full of it.

3) The Level Design
Even apart from the eye-stabbing quality of much of the scenery is the fact that every bit of the action in the game is linear, if not scripted. Feels almost like a rail shooter at times. There are never multiple solutions to an obstacle, and you can forget running around to flank someone. It gets kinda old. Also, like the first game, it involves a lot more stomping about in caves and the wilderness than gunfights in towns, which goes against my personal preference.

4) The Paradigm Shifts
As part of the console-tardification of the property, Bound in Blood also starts heavily relying on aim auto-correction. It's not even subtle. Often your crosshair will just move itself for you to center on your opponent's head or something. It is at one both disorienting and insulting to the PC FPS player who is used to doing all his own aiming, thank you very much. Additionally, the dynamic of "concentration mode" (also known as bullet time) has changed; before, you needed only holster your weapons for a few seconds for it to become available, and then when you clicked you would invoke bullet time and be able to shoot with both guns independently. It worked very well in the first game. Now, that "independent gun slow motion" bullet time is reserved only for certain scripted events that happen 3 or 4 times per chapter that involve the brothers kicking in a door simultaneously. Two NEW concentration modes have been foisted upon the player (one for each brother), both requiring little to no skill in execution and also irritatingly limited. See, in order to earn a concentration mode, now you must kill multiple enemies within a short span of time to fill your concentration meter, and then you have 60 seconds to use your concentration mode before the meter falls back to half again. This means that whereas there were multiple perfect opportunities in the first game where you got to use concentration mode to awesome effect, in the second game concentration mode often goes to waste by being used on only one or two enemies, or by not being used at all. Also, the new concentration modes (as I said above) require no skill to use. Once slow motion is engaged, Ray's new concentration mode simply involves you dragging your cursor (no clicking required) across every enemy in sight, and when the timer is up ray will simply automatically kill every tagged enemy. Thomas' concentration mode is even worse... invoking it simply guarantees every enemy in view will die because you don't even have to target them, you merely have to shove the mouse forward and back to repeatedly shoot them all. I think this was because in console controls this would translate to someone holding their controller like a gun and strumming their whole hand across the stick as if it were the hammer on a 6 shooter. A perhaps clever gimmick that is entirely lost on the PC version.

I was, of course, also disappointed in the unlockable aspects of the multiplayer, which is a shame because the multiplayer part of the first Call of Juarez was a fun-as-hell casual experience all in itself.

Now, it's not all bad. I do like the genre, I do like the shootouts, and I like the story (especially the origins of characters we came to know "later" in the first game, such as Calm Water and Billy Candle... though it never does give you the story on how or why Ray came to wear an iron conquistador's curiass with a huge cross on it, which apparently far predates his Reverend Ray days). I also REALLY like that they got rid of the "gun takes damage until it blows up from normal use" mechanic, allowing you to spend money to upgrade your weapons to suit your taste as the game progresses. I also like very much that it gives you a choice of which brother to play as in each chapter, letting you decide the dynamic of the level (Ray is tough and slow, best for direct confrontation, while Thomas is quick and nimble, working best with "finesse"). Maybe the problem is that they wrote a western screenplay and then tried to turn it into a game, and we all know how games based on movies usually turn out.

Grade: C-. I want to like it, but it's too irritating to ever play again.

Video Games | Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood | Launch Trailer

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

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Review: Street Fighter IV (PC)

It's been out for console for a while, but it just recently hit the PC, so it's new to me!

Street Fighter 4, which unintuitively enough is actually something like the 10th Street Fighter (and that's only if you don't count the puzzle fighters or the marvel/snk crossovers), continues the somewhat annoying tradition of attempting to inject plot into a game where the only REAL plot is "I'm this guy and I have to beat up everybody else." Of course, sometimes it's fun to check out the backstory of what fighting game characters are up to, to try to learn their motivations... but any such inquisitiveness is quickly bitchslapped right out of any casual gamer who isn't looking to spend hours decoding the temporal mishmash which is the street fighter release order vs chronology. See, First there was Street Fighter, Then Street Fighter 2, which then had 2 "revisions" of itself, then the third street fighter series was Street Fighter Alpha which actually is set BEFORE Street Fighter 2 (I shit you not, I did not know this until today when I looked all this mess up, because frankly the art design in the alpha games turned me the hell off, not to mention I got tired of having to listen to unwashed teens at the arcade creaming their jeans over whatever the hell this "Akuma" thing is), which then had a revision and a sequel. Then came the fourth trilogy, Street Fighter 3 and its revision and sequel, which came after Street fighter 2, so at least they were trying to maintain the numeric progression. But then they had to go and muck THAT up as well by having Street Fighter 4 happen BETWEEN 2 and 3!

Trust me, just forget the plot. The plot is "You are this one guy and you have to beat up everybody else." I should have stuck with that.

Alright, mindscrambling plot-knots aside, the game is actually fun as hell. The last street fighter game I tried was Capcom Vs SNK 2, which made me want to murder people because SNK refused to port capcom's control scheme into their gaming system. Don't even get me started on the retardation that ensued with multiple "grooves" available for characters, ugh. That could be its own article right there.

I digress.

I was immensely relieved to be able to pick Ryu and find all his moves and buttons exactly right the hell where I expected them to be. It felt like slipping on an old, comfy pair of gloves that fit your hands perfectly. The controls feel like Street Fighter 2 but even more natural and smooth. Of course there were one or two little learning stumbling blocks, like I had to figure out that throws are now accomplished by hitting both "light" attack buttons at once, instead of just being automatic when you get close. There's also a new "focus attack" ability (both medium attack buttons) that seems to be some kind of DOA-esque fake opening with a counter attack, but I can't quite get the hang of it. They've also got buildup guages that have come to be standard in the fighting game industry nowadays, divided into two meters, one for supercharging normal attacks and a "revenge" gauge that lets you unleash "ultra combo" type moves which builds up by you getting beat on. For those of us who have forgotten (perhaps voluntarily) their childhoods, there's also a built in list of moves available for you to peruse at any time.


The developers of the game took an interesting approach - in a world where games are making ever more and more strenuous demands for more polygons, higher resolution textures and arbitrarily incremented shader models, SF4 has opted for a reasonable amount of polygons, fairly low resolution textures that are then run through an industrial strength post-processing routine a half dozen times that actually makes the whole affair rather pleasing to the eye when it's in motion (but makes screenshots look a little like ass warmed over). Many of the more powerful attacks also cause graphical effects reminiscent of brush strokes or ink spatters. Really, it all feels halfway to being cel-shaded but still retains the depth of the third dimension, and framerates are easily maintained very high, which is important in a game that relies so very much on reflexes. You can also tell the model designers and motion coders had a lot of fun with what they were doing and were not just going through the motions like that other set of 3D street fighter games that we all agreed never to speak of again 10 years ago. It should be noted, as well, that while everything is rendered in 3D, the gameplay is still limited to a two-dimensional plane, so there's no dodging to the sides and whatnot a-la Soulcalibur.

The game features 27 characters to choose from (though 10 or 11 or so have to be "unlocked" by doing the funky chicken dance at midnight on the south side of a spruce tree or whatever the hell passes for "reasonable expectations for unlocking requirements" these days), and contain a good number of old favorites as well as a handful of newcomers - a mostly grapple-based MMA fighter named Abel, a business-suit bitch with a wierd uniboob named Crimson Viper, a spastic luchador-come-gourmet-chef named El Fuerte, and my new favoritest character in the whole wide world, an extremely obese kung fu biker named Rufus.

Rufus is just awesome in a can. Or rather, in an oversized yellow spandex biker's jumpsuit. I love the character design, the unconventional attacks, and I especially love how they chose to wobble his belly. Mai Shiranui and DOA's breast physics have got NOTHING on Rufus' belly wobbling. It makes me laugh until I cry. The writing on his dialog (especially his meandering, stream-of-consciousness victory quotations) is just hilarious. There's no "You must defeat sheng long to stand a chance," here. No, you get to hear about this one crazy time he put bananas in his peanut butter sandwich and was like "whoa."

The standard Arcade mode doesn't take that long to beat, consisting as it does of 6 random matches, a "rival" fight, and the boss battle. Playing by yourself you'll probably be ready to play something else in 2 hours or less, but you'll come back some other time. As with every other fighting game, the real joy is in getting some friends together and beating the snot out of each other in versus mode. And since the PC version supports Windows Live, if you really want to you can subject yourself to playing against random sugar-injected 14 year olds around the world.

All in all, I found it a very enjoyable game worth owning, particularly if you game with friends who also like fighting games. It also makes me salivate for a potential Marvel vs Capcom 3 written with this engine, which if they can take the custom tie-ins from MVC1 and the incredible number of characters from MVC2 and combine them with the artistry and control scheme of SF4, I am fairly certain would constitute the most incredible thing to hit the fighting game scene since Mugen.

Grade: B+ Also, is it just me, or do Chun Li's thighs get bigger and bigger with every single game? I swear, her hips are like 3 feet across now.

Video Games | Street Fighter IV | Preview

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

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Mechwarrior 5 Announced

Via Kotaku

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Surprise, Mechwarrior fans! That teaser from yesterday was indeed for a new Mechwarrior title, which is in development at Piranha Games, who worked on the latest Transformers title.

So at least you know they have experience with giant robots! Then again, it also means they have experience with making crummy games based on giant robots.

Though, let's give them the benefit of the doubt on this one. They only helped develop Revenge of the Fallen. And being a movie tie-in, it had a deadline to meet. Something they won't have to worry about with Mechwarrior, what with Battletech being 25 years old and all.

This new game is called simply MechWarrior, and will serve as a reboot of sorts for the franchise. You'll still be piloting mechs, but the developers reckon that current console technology will for the first time let you feel like you're really behind the sticks of a giant fighting robot.

They're also shooting for a "dynamic battlefield", and rather than feature a food chain of mechs, instead want to let players choose a style of mech and then upgrade that to suit their tastes as they progress through the game.

MechWarrior is coming to the PC and Xbox 360, with no details yet on either a publisher or a release timeframe.

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Zero Punctuation Reviews: Ghostbusters

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Review: Overlord 2

I enjoyed Overlord 2 more than I did Overlord 1, for a number of reasons. These days it seems a rare thing that a sequel genuinely improves on the original, but this one does in a number of ways - which, given that the original Overlord wasn't all that shabby to begin with, is all the more pleasing.

For those of you who missed it, Overlord is a game franchise about being evil, doing evil, and inevitably, overcoming some other evil that is getting in the way of you exerting your own evilness. You're a hulking, muscular brute with demonic glowing eyes and a suit of armor copypasted off of an artist's concept sketch of Sauron. You have dozens of little impish minions who you send to do most of your dirty work, though you yourself aren't bad at chopping and stomping either.

When Overlord 2 begins, you are put into the boots of Overlad, the 6 year old progeny of the previous Overlord and his tower mistress, who then fled the tower and abandoned you in a sleepy snowbound northern village. Called "witch-boy" by the locals and cruelly ostracised by most of the other children, Overlad is then discovered by a small handful of evil minions who were part of a large, scattered effort to locate him after the untimely demise of the previous Overlord in a mysterious magical explosion that destroyed the Dark Tower and most of the surrounding area. They help him put paid to his squabbles with the local kids and escape to the netherworld.

Fast forward through 13 years of being raised by demented goblin henchmen, and Overlord Jr. is now ready to settle old scores and claim his father's birthright.

The first and most obvious improvement is also probably the most expected one - with the increase in available graphics horsepower out there now, Overlord 2 has more visual complexity than the first. There's more dynamic foliage, the fur lining your armor wafts in the breeze, many more destructible objects in the environment that shatter and crumble in a much more spectacular fashion, more particle effects, and so on and so forth. It still abuses the hell out of bloom, but what doesn't, these days?

The second, and most needed improvement in my eyes, is the "be evil" paradigm got an overhaul. One of my larger gripes with the first overlord was that there were far too many chances to be good, and the evil that you did do was very "saturday morning cartoon" type evil, which made it really just mean-spirited slapstick and not really any kind of dark humor. While you're still not exactly peeling people out of their skins and hanging them by their entrails or anything, the evil has gotten more Darkseid and less Gargamel. For instance, your first task as a grown overlord is to slaughter 25 baby seals to harvest their life force for use in summoning minions. There's no retrieving a lady's lost freaking baggage here. There are still choices to be made, but rather than choosing "good" or "evil" like in the first game, now the choices go between enslave and dominate, or kill and destroy. The ending of the game changes as well, depending on whether you enslave everything, destroy everything, or use a mixture of both.

Just for the sake of one-upmanship as well, Junior does not share the same "one tower, one mistress" limitation that daddy did. Over the course of your rise to power you will aquire not one, not two, but three mistresses. Which of course leads them to squabble over who is your harlot-in-chief, which of course gets you out of the netherworld and doing nefarious things more often.

Another new addition is the ability of your minions to obtain mounts which improve their performance. Browns can ride wolves which increase their fighting ability, reds can ride salamanders which let them toss fire on-the-run, and greens can ride spiders which let them climb vertical surfaces. Your enemies have some new tricks as well, particularly the new human "empire" which uses phalanx formations that are hard to break up and require much strategy to overcome. There's also fun catapults and ballistae to play with, new weapons and armor to forge (as well as some of the better items from the first one... the helmet that gives you double life energy for each orb you collect is my favorite), and new spells to use. I particularly like using the "evil presence" spell to dominate the minds of local civilians and using them as cannon fodder when I confront the military that is supposed to be protecting the town. Delicious irony.

Sadly, the control scheme did not improve from 1 to 2, and we're still left trying to emulate thumbstick movements with the mouse. However, they did improve the camera angle a little bit, making it easier to see what's right in front of the overlord instead of being blocked by his body. There's also new fighting moves associated with holding down different directions while swinging.

All in all, the game improves on the first one in almost every way, and is an enjoyable experience to play through once and revisit once in a great while.

Grade: B+. If they could get more replayability into this game via dynamically generated content or something, rather than everything being married to the in-game plot, it'd be an epic game.

Video Games | Overlord II | E3 09: 10 Reasons Trailer

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

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Zero Punctuation Reviews: Sims 3

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Starcraft 2: No LAN, cuz of pirates

Via Shacknews

We don't currently plan to support LAN play with StarCraft II, as we are building Battle.net to be the ideal destination for multiplayer gaming with StarCraft II and future Blizzard Entertainment games. While this was a difficult decision for us, we felt that moving away from LAN play and directing players to our upgraded Battle.net service was the best option to ensure a quality multiplayer experience with StarCraft II and safeguard against piracy.

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Mark Jacobs "restructured" out of Mythic, BioWare takes over

Press release from Warhammer Online Herald

06/24/2009 @ 11:03:28 EST
Today we have important news to share with the community. EA is restructuring its RPG and MMO games development into a new group that includes both Mythic and BioWare. This newly formed team will be led by Ray Muzyka, co-founder and General Manager of BioWare. With this change, Ray becomes Group General Manager of the new RPG/MMO studio group. BioWare’s other co-founder, Greg Zeschuk will become Group Creative Officer for the new RPG/MMO studio group. Rob Denton will step up as General Manager of Mythic and report to Ray. BioWare’s studios remain unchanged and continue to report to Ray.

Mark Jacobs, co-founder and current General Manager of Mythic, will leave EA on June 23, 2009. We thank Mark for his contributions at Mythic and wish him the very best going forward. Mark played a major part in the success of Mythic with his contribution as General Manager and Lead Designer of WAR.

Mythic retains a strong team led by Rob who co-founded Mythic in 1995. Rob played a critical role in the development of Dark Age of Camelot. In his previous role as COO, he was responsible for all day-to-day management of the studio including all development, operations and support.

Please join us in celebrating the union of these two award-winning studios.

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Zero Punctuation Reviews: Prototype

Gee, I'm sure glad I reviewed Prototype yesterday or this would have taken the wind out of my sails to do my own review after ZP'd already done it.

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Review: Prototype

I have to admit I wasn't all that jazzed about this game going in. The marketing campaign was a little too... I don't know... self-aggrandizing and yet emo. Reading about it made the game's concept sound like something a bored junior high school student came up with in an hour when handed an assignment entitled "come up with something totally rad."

But, after playing it, I have to admit, that middle schooler has a pretty good idea of what's "rad."

Prototype is a 3rd person action game that puts you in the shoes of an amnesiac anti-hero who has been infected with a genetically engineered disease that gives him superpowers. He's a super-angry badass with a gravelly voice who, thanks to his infection, can shapeshift to look like other people, physically absorb people into his body to heal himself and/or take their place, form cutting blades and smashing clubs and any other number of weapons, sprint up the side of buildings and, of course, absorb an unbelievable number of bullets without dying. You get plopped out with no memory in the middle of manhattan with the disease "outbreak" coming into full swing, turning people into mutant killer zombies and the army coming in to try to contain the situation. And everybody wants you dead, but you're just too goddamned badassedly deadly for them to get the job done.

I know it sounds corny and over the top. I groaned as I installed the game. But you know what? Give your inner Jr. High student a hug because he hit this one out of the park. Yeah, it's like somebody took Venom, Hulk and Wolverine and threw them in a blender and poured this out as the result, but you know what? It's goddamned fun to be Venulkerine. I also felt echoes of Assassin's Creed, GTA and Resident Evil. Put em all together and you've got one big amalgamated game of "you are unbelievably powerful and you can pretty much do anything you want."

The gameplay itself is extremely reminiscent of The Incredible Hulk with one important difference: They did it right this time. Similarities? It takes place in New York, you have full freedom to explore the entire game area, you can take part in minigames or go find trouble on your own or just go straight for the plot advancing missions. But everything else is better. The graphics are better, the controls are better, the fights are more fun and less bullsqueeze, New York feels like a crowded city again with hundreds of people on every street, and as laughable as it sounds, the character progression is more believable.

For the achievement/unlock crowd, the game has lots to do. There's the usual "find all 400 of these glowing balls in the world" scavenger hunt, of course. But the game also takes a page from the drug dealer handbook: The first mission gives you a taste of your character's full power... and then it takes it all away for the second mission. From that point on, you have to buy upgrades to your abilities and whatnot using points you collect from doing all the things you do in the game.

For the exploration/sandbox junkie, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from just going on a rampage and doing your own thing for as long as you want. There's plenty of guys to fight outside of doing missions or minigames. You don't even have to be a particularly good guy, as the game doesn't seem to penalize you for hacking up innocent civilians along with infected zombies or military troops.

Of course, no game is absolutely perfect. There are a couple issues - the plot takes itself WAY too seriously, and the dialog is often locked in "see how much we curse? That's how you know this is a mature game" mode. The camera and controls, while better than Hulk's, still have some issues, especially when trying to turn quickly or fight something behind the camera. Sometimes it isn't entirely clear exactly how you're supposed to go about accomplishing the mission objectives, and often the description of a power or upgrade isn't really informative enough to help with the decision to buy it or not. And finally, often the minigames feel a little too contrived and the requirements to complete them successfully are too stringent for too little reward.

But by and large, the game is a fun romp through slaughtertown. And yes, you get to kick helicopters out of the sky with gusto. I heartily recommend it to anyone who isn't afraid to paint the town red with entrails and isn't fazed by a little blue language.

Grade: A.

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Zero Punctuation Reviews: Second Annual E3 Hype Massacre

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Mythic delivers human skull to Kotaku

http://kotaku.com/5286265/mythic-delivers-code+laden-human-skull

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Zero Punctuation Reviews: inFamous

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5 Bloody Minutes of Left 4 Dead 2 Footage

Again ... at Kotaku.

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Supreme Commander 2 impressions

From Kotaku - Gleeeeeeeeeee

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Gas Bandit's Recommended Warhammer Mods

As I did before with Gas Bandit's Recommended WoW Mods, here is the Warhammer version that shows you what mods I tried, kept, and why.

LibSlash
The simple fact of the matter is, you need this mod to make most other good mods work. That's all there is to it.

AutoDismount
There's a category of mods that I like to call the "Mythic should have done this anyway" category, and right at the top of the list is this mod. In Warcraft, using an ability while riding a mount automatically dismounts you and starts the casting of the ability. Not so in Warhammer... you have to manually dismount before using an ability, or face gigantic white letters slowly scrolling up the screen in an annoying fashion reminding you YOU CANNOT USE THIS ABILITY WHILE MOUNTED. This mod changes things to closer to how they should have been. It's not as seamless as WoW, but it's light years better than mythic's default.

BlackBox
Another "why the hell did mythic do this" fix to the UI. When you die and click "respawn," you are treated to a countdown timer in an unnecessarily large black box that obscures the center of your screen. This mod removes that black box and replaces your countdown timer with a small progress bar that is more out of the way.

Bloody Mess
This one is purely for aesthetics. Whenever you take damage or deal damage, the damaged party will have a bloodspray cloud rendered over them. Reminds me of the one thing I really liked about age of conan. Now if only I could arrange for complete dismemberment...

HideItPlease
Most people have experienced the glitch in the default UI, where if you enter a scenario while a PQ timer is still on your screen, the PQ timer will continue to obscure the scenario information even after the timer has expired, often causing you to have to relog to fix the problem. This mod is a band-aid fix for that, hiding the PQ information window whenever you enter a scenario, so that the PQ information can never obscure scenario status.

Killing Blow
Probably my favorite UI mod. By default, if you score a kill, Warhammer barely makes note of it in the combat channel. How anticlimactic. This mod causes a kettledrum to beat and giant letters of recognition to come upon the screen whenever you score a kill proclaiming "YOU HAVE KILLED SO AND SO." Much more gratifying.

Moth
Short for "Mouse Over Target Hover," this makes the tooltip for whatever your mouse is on (which is normally crammed down in the lower right hand corner of the screen where you can't read it and look at the target at the same time) appear and follow your mouse cursor. It takes a little getting used to, but you will do so quickly and then come to wonder how you ever did without it.

NerfedButtons
By far the most complicated mod I use, NerfedButtons allows you to assign multiple functions based on conditional statements to single hotbar slots. By using NerfedButtons, you can, for instance, put all your debuffs on one button, pressing it multiple times to cast each one, complete with automatic checking for "do I already have this debuff on this target?" logic kicking in and selecting appropriate abilities each time. My engineer uses this to stack and refresh dots. My warrior priest uses it for dot and debuff abilities, as well as offensive-invocation buffs (hit person A to buff person B). A guildy of mine uses it to make sure that his target isn't immune to knockdown before it lets him use the knockdown ability. It is wonderfully versatile and frankly almost feels like cheating. Its only drawback is that to set up your custom buttons is very unfriendly and arcane, relying entirely on slash command lines input on a command line without a UI. It takes some real homework to understand how to make this mod work right, and then even more to learn all the different things it can do for you. But if you can put in the time, it will enhance your play greatly. Example, my engineer has one button that basically goes, "If I press 3, if my target doesn't have my acid bomb debuff/dot on him then throw acid bomb, else if target doesn't have my frag grenade dot then throw frag grenade, else if target doesn't have my incendiary rounds dot then shoot incendiary rounds, else if target doesn't have my signal flare dot then fire signal flare, else if target doesn't have my sticky bomb dot then throw sticky bomb, else throw firebomb DD grenade." Basically, this means under any circumstances I can just spam the "3" key at my target and I will always use an appropriate ability ensuring that all my dots are going on a given target at all times, and flawlessly doing direct damage when no dot needs refreshing. This leaves hotbar space and brain capacity free to worry about things like napalm placement, crowd control, knockbacks, morale abilities, pets and everything else.

SmartAlert
This mod is another in the "fix something mythic did in a stupid way" line. For some reason, common error messages were deigned to need to scroll slowly up the screen in gigantic type, so that a rapid pressing of a wrong key (or a right key on a target out of range) would cause a backlog of error messages that would continue to block visibility on your screen for long seconds after you had stopped performing the erroneous action. SmartAlert removes these error messages from the announcements scroll area and simply places them in the chat window as normal text, like it should have been all along. A slight tweak is required to make this mod play nice with the Killing Blow mod.

StateOfRealm
State of Realm is a must for any RvR enthusiast. Combining data from server-provided map updates with a secret unseen SOR chat channel to disseminate information among SOR users, State of Realm (usually) provides the most concise, accurate and up-to-date information on the state of the realm war between Order and Destruction. Who has what keeps, what BOs, percentage controls of zones, time left on sieges, everything you could need to know in a handy, efficient panel with customizable colors and levels of information. SOR takes you from being largely in the dark to being informed about nearly everything... except for the 5% or so of the time that it "wigs out" and stops showing factual information.

TargetRing
This mod puts an additional "ring" graphic over your current target(s) that is visible even through walls, floors, ground and other obstructions. It is very handy for finding targeted friends and foes alike without having to puzzle out extrapolated vectors from the arrow at your feet.

ThankTheHealer
Healers like it when you say "thank you" when they rez you. I know when I'm on my warrior priest, I can't help but bump rezzing grateful people a little higher in my priority list. This mod automatically says one of a customizable selection of indications of gratitude when you accept a resurrection. I wish it included the name of the healer for personalization, but that's a small gripe. One warning, the default text strings include l33tspeak/IMspeak... "thx 4 rez," which I went in and edited out post haste.

TokenMachine
This mod lets you preselect automatic choices on rolling for medallion and crest loot. Simply change settings in its UI attached to the inventory screen to set need, greed, pass, or always-ask for recruit, scout, soldier and officer medallions as well as conqueror, invader, warlord and sovereign crests. The mod will also pop up a colored link in your chat window every time you receive a crest or medallion.

Warhammer Scrolling Combat Text
I'm still not entirely sold on WSCT. All most of what it really does is change the way damage and healing numbers are presented on the screen, and I'm not entirely sure the way mythic was doing it by default was bad. But what I do like about it is the alerts that tell you when you gain or lose buffs, and especially the alert that pops up to let you know you are low on health.

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Zero Punctuation Reviews: Bionic Commando

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Zero Punctuation Reviews: Duke Nukem Forever

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Zero Punctuation Reviews: Velvet Assassin

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Kotaku Preview: Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood

Over at Kotaku they've got a preview of the multiplayer aspects of the upcoming Call of Juarez prequel.

It looks similar to the multiplayer for the original COJ, but now you have to level up and unlock characters and abilities. Forcing online multiplayer unlocks is a pet peeve of mine, and I think if this stays in, this game just fell off my pull list.

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Champions Online Delayed

source: http://champions-online.com/node/47780

We wanted our fans to hear this from us first... We’re changing our Champions Online launch date from July 14th to September 1st of this year.

Why? Here’s what our own Bill Roper, Design Director and Executive Producer on Champions Online, had to say about it:

“It is critically important for an MMO to be as good as it possibly can be at launch. Through our constant dialogue with our vocal and supportive community of beta testers, we quickly realized that in order to implement certain features that we all considered important the development of Champions Online would require more time. So that's what we're going to give it. Cryptic has a proven track record of releasing solid games and we want to maintain that with Champions Online.”

I'm still grumpy I didn't get into the beta, personally.

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Review: Zatikon

Zatikon is a turn-based strategy game from small indie developer Chronic Logic, who some of you might remember made an incredibly fun little bridge building simulator called Pontifex (later called "Bridge Construction Set"). The folks at CL are here to show they're not just a one-trick pony, however, as the two games are completely different.

Graphics
Being an indie game developed in Java, the graphics of Zatikon are rudimentary. The playing field and all units consist of tiled images with only the most very basic of animation occurring during moves and attacks. It is clear a lot more time and energy went into planning the "inner workings" of the game than into the visual experience. That said, the units are all visually distinct enough to identify them by sight alone (once you learn what each unit is, of course), and the game does not exhibit any of the glitching or artifacts common to many simple 2D games. While they won't "wow" anyone, they won't annoy either. This also of course has the happy side effect of making the game playable on just about any computer that runs, not needing a powerful graphics card.

Sound
There's not much to the sound of the game, either. Aside from a few sound effects of clanging weapons, arrow strikes and the like, there's not a lot to the auditory experience and the game can safely be played on mute without jeopardizing much. There's some contemplative background music going as well, in the classical style, which does help punctuate that you're playing a thinking game, not a reflex game.

Gameplay
Zatikon reminds me much of the strategy boardgames and wargames I would often play with my father and uncles at family gatherings in years gone by. It also throws in a bit of a collector card twist in that victories are rewarded with "gold" currency, which you can then use between games to buy new or additional unit types.

The game begins with a basic army and a tutorial which teaches you the fundamentals of play. The object of the game is to move one of your units into the enemy's castle tile, without allowing him to do the same to you. You start with some basic units of familiar configuration that allow you to get comfortable with how the game works before you worry about customizing your army.

Each "turn" of combat consists of you giving "commands" to your units. Some units can make more moves and attacks per turn than others, and depending upon your number of "commands" available to you and the size of your army, you may or may not have enough commands to move all of your units to their maximum potential. Players (or computers, if you're playing single player) take turns issuing all their commands until one side loses, surrenders, or both agree on a draw.

What really gives the game its replayability appeal is the ability to customize your army by purchasing units with the gold you earn from victories. To ensure balance between contestants, armies are limited in power to 1000 "points," with some units worth more points than others in a reference to relative strength. For instance, the "Ranger" unit is worth 200 points because he is a very powerful unit which costs no commands to use, gets many actions per turn and can attack from range as well as melee. For the same 200 points you could have 4 footmen or pikemen in your army, which depending upon your strategy may be more or less formidable. Once you have purchased a unit with gold, it is added to your deck, available for insertion into your custom army as you see fit to rearrange.

There are quite a number of unit options as well, affording a vast array of strategic options. The categories are Archers, Black Mages, Clergy, Commanders, Cultists, Horsemen, Nature, Scouts, Shapeshifters, Siege, Soldiers, Structures, White Mages and Wyrms (with multiple unit types under each category). Many units perform how one would expect given their names: Pikemen make good defensive melee units, Priests heal other units, Archer types generally do damage from a distance while being weak to being attacked themselves, and so on. Some also function as "wildcards," such as the "Possessed" cultist unit which has the fearsome ability to take control of any unit which kills it, the "Mimic" shapeshifter unit which can transform itself into a copy of any enemy unit on the field, or the "General" commander unit which gives you an extra command just for being deployed and reduces the command cost of deploying other units by 1. Each unit has its strengths and weaknesses, even if sometimes the only weakness is an extremely exorbitant point cost, such as the "Archangel" clergy unit which is a fearsome fighter, can instantly kill any unit which has killed another unit from any range, but costs a staggering 550 points... the equivalent of as many as 11 other units.

Once purchased, a unit remains at your disposal until you decide to sell it back (for reduced gold, of course), even if you decide not to use it. You can reconfigure your army as often as you like, and you can save configurations for later loading convenience. There is also a random "buy unit" button which sells you a unit at an extremely discounted rate, though you have no control over which unit you will receive.

You can either play against a computer opponent or other players. You are "ranked" by your record of defeating or losing to other players, and computer opponents do not affect your rank but still award you gold for defeating them. Defeating a computer opponent means the next computer opponent will be 1 order of magnitude more difficult, and losing to a computer opponent has no negative effect (other than decreasing the difficulty of your next computer opponent). Finding an online human opponent to play is very simple.

The basic game is free to download and play (you can also play the online version of the client here, which naturally requires the Java runtime environment to be installed on your computer). However, the free version does not grant access to all the units in the game, though you will still go up against them. Access to these other restricted units is granted through buying "expansions" for the game, which are $12 and $8 for the first two, respectively, with a third expansion on the way.

Conclusion
Despite being of modest appearance and production, Zatikon is very heavy on the strategy, particularly when playing against other players. I have to admit I was a little skeptical going in, as I'm not much of a turn-based game fan and I have a deeply-rooted animosity for the inherent problems of the Java programming language. However, my misgivings were for naught and the game is an intellectually intense contest of strategy and planning with unlimited replay value. I'd recommend it to any fan of strategy or war games, and since the cost to get your feet wet is zilch, you've got nothing to lose from trying it.

Grade: B
And that's the word from Bandit camp...

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Zero Punctuation Reviews: Valkyria Chronicles

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Alleged Duke Nukem Forever Footage

May be moot now, since 3DRealms has closed its doors, but interesting to see none the less. If you're at work, be advised there are boobies.

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Thief 4 is coming

Glee!

http://www.thief4.com/

Hope eidos-montreal doesn't muck it up like Ion Storm did for Thief 3.

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Review: The Tomorrow War

Seems like there's a lot of games coming out of Russia these days. The 1C publishing company has released 3 of the last 4 games I've reviewed: Cryostasis (which was good), Necrovision (which was so bad it should have incurred criminal charges), and now "The Tomorrow War."

The Tomorrow War is a space/flight sim based in a hypothetical 27th century galaxy, where it has been eons since humans have left Earth for the stars.

Graphics
The game has some very nice visuals, out in space. Since space sims generally aren't very cluttered, the game takes advantage of the spare video processing power with high poly fighter models (though some of the capital ships are a wee bit simplistic) and expansive environments. The planet surfaces however tend to be a little more on the sparse side, reminding me of a flight simulator from approximately 10 years ago. The cloud rendering is particularly disappointing, since a cloud consists of a single 2D white polygon that doesn't even turn to face the camera... it gives the effect of somebody having cut a cloud out of a sheet of paper and left it hovering in the air for you to be disappointed in. Also, on the first mission of the game, you are tasked at one point to fly through the rings of saturn, which are comprised of giant chunks of rock and ice. Flying around the rings is pretty... flying into the rings is also pretty except for one thing - the "transition" between rendering the rings as solid bands of color, distant 2d rock sprites, and a wall of true 3D asteroids you need to fly around and between is pretty apparent and almost immersion-breaking. There's also some severe range-clipping issues with these things, but I suppose it can't be expected to render every asteroid in the rings at all times and all distances. Still, when flying through them at low warp speed, the "poof an asteroid appears" effect is pretty obvious. The portions of the game that take place inside the crew areas of ships (as well as the rendered insides of your cockpit) have textures that are a little on the low quality side, and there's lots of sharp angles on objects.

Sound
The sound requirements for a space sim aren't very demanding. You need sounds for the weapons, the engines, some explosions, and some ambiance. They have all these, and they do the job. The music isn't bad either but can get kind of repetitive. But my oh my, does this game fall flat on its face in the department of voice acting. Not only has the translation from Russian not gone particularly well, the voice actors also telegraph that they are reading lines from cards with no knowledge of context or proper emphasis. Thus, when your character approaches the flight deck engineer to inquire about his ship and says "Where is my hunk of iron?" it sounds like he is irately inquiring about a ferrous slug which has gone missing from his apartment, rather than playfully asking about the location of his ship. It also seems that most of the dialog meant to play during missions has been entirely left out. Maybe the translation didn't get done or something, but often the face of a wingman or officer will pop up chattering away in the corner of your viewscreen, but no words come out and the game doesn't give you a caption of what they say. To top it all off, in the cut scenes which involve talking, the movements of the models' lips do not even remotely sync to the words. They look like they're syncing to SOME words, just not the words they're saying. Honestly, the effect is even worse than in the old Wing Commander games... at least then the computer knew to stop moving the lips of the people when the sentence was over.

Gameplay
The first thing you find about this space/flight sim is that the learning curve is very steep and helpful directions are practically nonexistant. By the time you slog through the dozens of cutscenes between you and your first mission, somebody STILL has yet to actually inform you about important things such as "you will be expected to target your wing leader and press 4 to join his formation before anything else." So once you figure that out, which may take any number and combination of wandering off and running out of fuel, crashing into your wingmen, accidentally shooting your wingmen until they get pissed off and destroy you, etc... you'll eventually learn how to target your wingleader and press "4" to join his formation.

Once you're in formation, you and your buddies fly around looking at how pretty the universe is. And I'm not just talking about the first mission any more... an extraordinary amount.. check that, an excruciating amount of your game time will be spent flying in formation across hundreds, if not thousands of kilometers of scenic empty space. You practically need a second computer on your desk, so you can play something else while the autopilot keeps you flying in picture perfect unity with your wingmen.

So you formate, you fly out to where something to shoot is, you shoot it, you formate back up, fly back to the carrier and land on the carrier (which is also handled via autopilot). Frankly, I'm a little surprised they didn't just include a combat autopilot as well... you could start the game and go to the movies while your computer plays for you, then. Cutcene, rinse, repeat, and apparently there you have your game.

The controls are a little unintuitive as well. You have the option to make your mouse the targeting reticle, which sounds neat but it doesn't always behave as expected. 9 times out of 10, instead of your weapons shooting where your mouse reticle is, they will fire straight ahead anyway, making you wonder what the hell the point is of giving you a mobile reticle if the weapons don't train on it.

The story, or what little of it I could make out through the bad translations and worse acting, is also laughable. It deals with an interstellar war bent around the 27th century rediscovery of Zoroastrianism. It feels a little silly that peace in the 27th century is threatened by the resurgence of the proto-religion that eventually gave us the "big 3" standard religions. That'd be like a nuclear physicist suddenly deciding that pulleys and levers are a neat way to generate energy. I understand it's based on a book famous in Russia, but that didn't help "Hard to be a God" either.

The final breaking point for me with the game was when on the 3rd or 4th mission or so, I returned to formation after succeeding in the mission, only to have my wingmates sit like lumps, refusing to fly anywhere. Getting bored of that after 2 minutes, I broke off and flew back to the mothership by myself. But despite the fact that the next item on my mission list was "return to the carrier," I was not allowed to land because I didn't arrive via formation with my wingleader. I tried a manual landing (they do give you the manual controls to lower your landing gear and land yourself) but despite the ever so gentlest of touchdowns, the moment my fighter contacted with the flight deck I exploded in a giant fireball of sucky russian game.

Conclusion
While it is neat to finally play a flight simulator that has a "seamless" transition from stellar to atmospheric flight, it's not enough to carry this game. It's awful. It's not as bad as Necrovision, but it's still way too terrible to bother with. I want it off my computer, out of my memories, and I want those few hours I spent playing it refunded to me.

Grade: D-.
And that's the word from Bandit camp...

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Zero Punctuation Reviews: Chronicles of Riddick - Assault on Dark Athena

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Warhammer Online: Bad Live Event, Bad Patch

Recently Mythic had the "Beyond the sands" live event, and also patched to version 1.2.1. I don't think they did a very good job with either.

First, the live event was buggy and poorly planned. Part of it required every single person to pick up 2 crates. Each tier had its own location where the crates spawn, and that location was always in "contested" ORvR territory. So far so good. But here's where the problem starts... the location is an airship crash site, and the crates you need could be anywhere in the vicinity, though there will never be more than two "spawned" at any time for the taking. That means, even if one faction masses up and invades the crash site and holds it like a fortress... they still have to squabble amongst themselves, wait in line, play "ninja grab" for the dumb boxes. Another part also involved lining up and waiting for your turn to kill a single mob in the capital city. Furthermore, the third chapter of the event's quest was bugged so many couldn't get it (though it was eventually fixed). To top it all off, the rewards for the event were completely cosmetic and largely meaningless.

WO's past live events have been much better than this. Despite the "kill 9 billion snotlings" part, I loved the Keg End event. The battlebrew backpack was a genius reward. Heavy Metal featured an excellent new Scenario, as did Bitter Rivals. The Night of Murder valentine's event featured an excellent "marked for death" quest dynamic that was lots of fun. All these events also had their downsides as well (I never want to be told I have to kill so many hero/champion ogres, for instance), but they all had something to commend themselves. This was not the case for Beyond the sands.

As for the 1.2.1 patch, it made two major mistakes: First, it increased the difficulty of attacking a claimed and upgraded keep without first addressing the fact that even unclaimed and unupgraded, the keep siege dynamic already overwhelmingly favors the defenders. Since the patch, I've seen entire warbands and more wipe on undefended keeps that were upgraded to rank 5. At least on my (ORvR) server you can move down a tier so higher levels can help, I can't imagine what those poor schmucks on core servers are going through. Second of all, it introduced "medallions" which are granted as a consolation prize for taking keeps but not winning loot and also randomly drop off of enemy players. They serve as a form of currency to acquire the rewards of keep takes (armor sets) in an alternate fashion if you're the world's unluckiest random number generator. The problem is that the "prices" are set TOO HIGH on the gear. A single piece of Devastator (the tier 2 armor set) costs 135 medallions. You get 2 medallions per keep take, and at best 6 for flipping an entire zone's control to your side. You can pretty much write off medallions dropping from enemy players, because they drop on about 1 kill per 50 and then you have to roll against your whole warband for one. By the time you've gathered even half the medallions required for one piece of gear (and let's not forget, the gloves and later the shoulders are pieces that HAVE to be bought, not won or found), you've outleveled it and need to start working on the next tier's armor set instead. The medallions also bind on pickup, so you can't even donate them to friends/guildmates or auction them off on the auction house.

Mythic has really been dropping the ball lately. It's still the best MMO out there though.

And that's the word from Bandit camp...

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