Controller Showdown: Conclusion
It's about time I wrapped up my comparison between the Xbox 360 and PS3 controllers.
Form FactorAn important element of console controllers is their shape. For example, the corners of the NES controller had a tendency to dig into one's hands when tightly gripped--a problem which the SNES controller design effectively countered. The Playstation controller introduced "handles" that rest in the palms of one's hands, making the controller easier to grip overall. Gamers have been reaping the benefits of these advances for over a decade now.
Neither the PS3 nor the Xbox 360 controllers do anything radically new in terms of form factor. The Xbox 360 controllers have wider handles than the original Xbox controllers, which makes them more similar in shape to the Playstation controller design. The X360 controllers feel bulkier, but not terribly so.
When I hold the PS3 controllers, my pinky and ring fingers naturally wrap around the handles and provide a sturdy grip. These fingers to the same on the Xbox 360 controllers but seem to have to work a little harder to maintain a solid grip. This is one detail that contributes to overall hand stress when playing the X360.
Pad ButtonsAlthough I do not find myself noticing it while playing, the pad buttons on the X360 and PS3 controllers are quite different. The X360 buttons have a distinctive "pop" while the PS3 pad buttons feel mushy by comparison. The result is that the X360 pad buttons give a satisfying tactile feedback at the expense of being more work to press.
I tend to forget that the X360 pad buttons have some analog range to them. Most games treat them as pushed or not and turn to the trigger buttons when something requires a range of input (eg. acceleration in a racing game). The PS3 buttons, however, have a more definite feel of analog range. It's easier to consistently perform a soft push versus a hard push on the PS3 pad buttons than on the X360 pad buttons, largely because the X360 pad buttons have the initial resistance of that "pop". Not many games actually use this functionality, but there are some notable exceptions such as Metal Gear Solid 4.
It's worth noting here that between themselves, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft have managed to nearly maximize the amount of confusion generated over their pad button naming schemes. Between the SNES, classic Playstation, and Xbox controller designs, each one manages to put the X button in a different place. The SNES and Xbox "A,B,X,Y" button layouts are mirror images of each other, where on the Nintendo designs the A button goes on the right-hand side while being on the left-hand side of the Xbox 360 controller. Sony does it's own thing with square, circle, and triangle buttons, which takes some getting used to, but over a decade of
Parappa the Rapper doesn't leave one with much excuse for not knowing them.
ConclusionI don't usually notice much difference between the Xbox 360 and PS3 controllers while actually playing a game. The trigger buttons and analog sticks feel different, but my fingers naturally find the position of everything. Generally speaking, I would say that it's a close race between the PS3 and X360 controllers in that they are both excellent designs.
If pressed to pick a winner, I would have to give marginal judgment in favor of the PS3 controllers. The most obvious failing in the Xbox 360 design is the crappy d-pad, but another problem is that the X360 controller seems to contribute to hand fatigue. Sometimes my wrists and/or fingers bother me after exhaustive gaming bouts, and these symptoms are noticeably worse on the Xbox 360 than on the PS3. This problem is created by a combination of form factor, corners on the trigger buttons, stiff analog sticks, and weight.
However, a major point in the X360 controller's favor is that the convex design of the trigger buttons is superior. My right index finger is strained while playing games that make heavy use of the R1 button on the PS3, including racing games and FPSes. This difference is nearly enough to make it a draw between the Xbox 360 and PS3 controllers, but after much soul-searching, it is my conclusion that the PS3 controller is slightly superior, although both designs leave further room for improvement.
Mount & Blade
I've been taking advantage of the holiday sale on Steam to stock up on cheap games. Since the start of the sale I've picked up Mount & Blade ($15), Jade Empire ($12), Arx Fatalis ($5), and Sacred ($5) (actually "Sacred Gold" but the title is meant more like "Sacred: Gold Edition" than "sacred gold"). Given that a little over a month ago I picked up Titan Quest: Gold Ed. (now $15) and Spellforce 2 with expansion pack (now $23), that's a ton of RPG stuff.
You may be wondering how many of these purchases have actually been worthwhile. The best buys for me have been Mount & Blade and Titan Quest. Both of these are solid games that would almost have been worth paying full price for, so they're a good deal at the $15 price range. Spellforce 2 is also worth picking up if you're in the mood for something with a Warcraft 3 flavor, although I'd say that $20+ is pretty steep; at that price point, I'd rather take a chance on The Witcher (now $30). Most of the other games I haven't spent a whole lot of time on, partly because none of them has particularly grabbed my attention.
Mount & Blade is particularly interesting for its sandbox gameplay style. Try to imagine a cross between
Elite (or, if you prefer, X3: Reunion) and Medieval: Total War. The goal is to make a living in an open-ended, middle-ages fantasy kingdom. You can live as a merchant, a bandit, a soldier, a gladiator, a warlord, a do-gooder hero, and many combination-hybrids thereof. Although it seems possible to play the game as a pacifist (I haven't actually tried), the game is heavily combat-centric and assumes that you'll make yourself out to be a warrior of some sort.
If you're looking for an RPG to compete with the likes of Oblivion or World of Warcraft, you're unlikely to find much of interest here. The visuals are crude, there's little in the way of a storyline, the game world itself is sparse and repetitive, and the gameplay can be tedious. There's not much to explore nor any guided path to follow through the game. Mount & Blade pitches itself as a sandbox experience, and that means that it does very little to hold your hand.
Of course, the lack of hand-holding could be considered an asset by those seeking a challenge. I had no trouble finding things to do in Mount & Blade, and it was difficult to tear myself away from it even after five hours. There's a fortune to be made, combat techniques to master, and even status and fame to chase after. Getting stuck-in on the battlefield where there are 30+ combatants fighting in your immediate vicinity is a very satisfying experience. It's also appealing that one's actions in Mount & Blade have a very real impact on the in-game world: you can help to save or destroy a village, castle, or kingdom. The fact that none of these feats is easily accomplished helps to make them worthwhile. If you're looking for that kind of Elite-style experience, Mount & Blade will deliver.
Mount & Blade provides some very useful options for tweaking the game difficulty. The default settings lean toward the low difficulty side, which helps a great deal to alleviate some of the tedium of building up a character in the early levels. It's nice to have the option to crank things up to balls-out hardcore, however. Also provided is a "realism mode" that forces you to save every time you quit the game. This means that if your character gets taken prisoner, your equipment gets stolen, or you lose the final round of a tournament, to name a few examples, you are forced to live with the consequences and keep playing. (An important detail that I haven't checked into is whether or not Mount & Blade actually deletes your save file after loading it, the way that Rogue does. This would make it more difficult to cheat, although still not impossible.)
Mount & Blade is a refreshing, un-tamed RPG experience that first piqued my curiosity and then exceeded my expectations. It has an old-school appeal, and yet it's not entirely like anything I've ever played before. Above all, M&B is both addictive and immersive--qualities that trump its shortcomings to make it a solid game. I strongly recommend it.
As for Jade Empire and Arx Fatalis, one thing holding both of these titles back is that they are both obviously Xbox ports. Jade Empire's UI is a little on the awkward side, but easily manageable (Arx's UI fares much worse).
One thing that I find jarring about Jade Empire is that the pre-rendered cutscenes look worse than game itself. Other than that, Jade Empire is clearly a BioWare style RPG, which shows in its writing and gameplay. I can't say much more about it until I've spent more time playing Jade Empire, although it has reminded me that I never did get very far in Knights of the Old Republic (or Mass Effect, for that matter) and I really should give it another go.
Arx Fatalis is a bit of a wreck. The UI is awful and I couldn't get comfortable with it even after 30 minutes of play time. I did see some promising exploration and puzzle elements, but combat was painful and I found myself getting stuck too easily. The game has mood and an old-school appeal going for it, but I'd choose it as the weakest of the RPGs that I listed in my introduction. I'd have to be pretty bored to really sink myself into Arx Fatalis.
I've barely touched Sacred, but it's obviously a Diablo clone, which I count as a good thing. Sacred is rough around the edges to say the least: the game has such a wildly chaotic style that I was reminded of those free-to-play Korean style MMO games. Some of the visuals are impressive, but at the same time I feel bombarded with useless information while playing it. I also got the sense that the game's combat system is awkward and lacks challenge, but that could simply be a function of not having played enough of it. I need more time to make a real assessment of Sacred, but on first impression I don't see how it will provide anything beyond what Diablo II and Titan Quest already offer.
Cheap Gaming on PS3
Earlier this year I ranted about how it's just not possible to walk into a store with under $100 and walk out with a satisfying load of PS3 games. Today I defied that assertion by purchasing three PS3 games for only $40 on the online Playstation Store (although one of those games is actually a Playstation One game): Soldner-X, Castlevania Chronicles, and Wipeout HD. I've only spent a handful of hours with these games collectively, so I can give only quick impressions on them--but the bottom line is that none of these titles is a serious "must have".
Soldner-X is a classic side-scrolling shoot-em-up in the same vein as Gradius and R-Type. It looks nice in HD, but it doesn't seem to do much to distinguish itself within this decades-old genre already saturated with classics. While playing it, I found myself considering switching to the PS1 game R-Types (definitely recommended) and wondering when they'll finally bring Einhander to the Playstation Store in North America. That said, I have to cut Soldner some slack since it is only $10. I will probably get my money's worth out of it before tiring of it, but it hasn't got much chance of cracking into my top 10 list of favourite shooters.
I was pretty excited about Castlevania Chronicles, but it turns out that my enthusiasm was somewhat misguided. The good news is that the X68000 version of the original Castlevania is pretty good, and the bad news is that the extra "Arrange Mode" manages to be pretty freakin' ugly. At least, that's the impression I was left with after playing the first couple of stages of the Arrange Mode and then switching to the classic version.
If you're the kind of Castlevania fan who can still sit down and enjoy the original NES version so much that you'd like to see more of it, then Castlevania Chronicles will be a slam dunk for you. If, on the other hand, the idea of sitting down to play the original Castlevania makes you cringe, Castlevania Chronicles isn't going to have anything for you.
As for Wipeout HD, it's a rock-solid entry in the Wipeout series. I've never really been much of a Wipeout fan; I find the gameplay to be awkward, although it's possible that I'll warm up to it with time. Wipeout HD is pretty enough that it may be up to the task, so I'll give it some time.
On a different note, one game that I've been spending some time with this week is Diablo II. I hadn't really played it before this year, mostly because I wasn't really a Blizzard fan for roughly ten years after I got sick and tired of WarCraft II back in, what was that... 1996? (December 1995 according to Wikipedia.) I'm not really sure what happened there. I thought StarCraft was good but overhyped, and I was too busy to play Diablo.
Fritzkrieg and I have talked a lot about how JRPGs just aren't as good these days as they used to be. Final Fantasy XII was really good, and I'm getting some entertainment out of Blue Dragon, but even titles like these can't compare with old-school classics like Chrono Trigger. And speaking of Chrono Trigger, it seems like Square-Enix is doing better with a re-release of a decade-old classic than they are with new ventures like Infinite Undiscovery and The Last Remnant. This just goes to show how far they've slipped.
One difference between Fritzkrieg and myself is that I've turned to Blizzard to fill the gap. I've come around to realizing that not only is World of Warcraft an RPG masterpiece, but Blizzard's other games (including Diablo II and WarCraft III) are also truly great. I've just been too busy looking the other way this whole time.
One of the things that occasionally grates on me about World of Warcraft is that it demands so much time. Such is the trade-off made in exchange for WoW being the epic experience that it is, but I sometimes find myself unwilling to fire up WoW because I know that it's difficult to only play a quick 30 minutes of it. Diablo II makes a nice compliment to WoW in this sense because a short session of Diablo II can still be enough time to cover a lot of ground. I find myself turning to Diablo II when I need a quick fix of Blizzard action.
More ranting later, more gaming now. :) Family's coming to town for Christmas, so I'll be unable to game-it-up for a while; gotta do some questing now while I still can.
Torture Quests in WoW
I recently noticed the
news story on Kotaku about Richard Bartle's
arguments on why torture is inappropriate in WoW. It hadn't escaped my attention that there are Horde quest chains involving torture in WotLK--in Dragonblight especially. Bartle's arguments got me thinking about whether or not they're appropriate.
I most want to address the following argument:
When I signed up to play WoW I knew it had fireballs, so I expected killing. I knew it had rogues, so I expected thieving. I had to wait until the second expansion to find out it had gratuitous torture. This does not fall within the parameters of what I was expecting.
Contrary to what Bartle says here, I don't believe that torture quests are a new thing in WoW. Players who've done certain quest chains for the Undercity already know that certain Forsaken NPCs do things like intentionally infect captive Alliance NPCs with horrible plagues for the purposes of experimentation. These quests have been around longer than either of the expansion packs.
Another thing to consider here is that Blizzard is using these quests as a means to establish that a certain faction within the Forsaken is, in fact, evil. On this point, Bartle has the following to say:
I wasn't complaining about some Death Knight quest that involves torture. See, at this point Death Knights are evil — so evil, they torture people — so it makes sense. It's in context.
It's my experience with WoW that the characters who give the Horde torture quests are also evil. Not that the Horde is evil, of course, but certain characters and groups within the Horde are. These torture quests are used as one means of establishing that.
I don't entirely disagree with Bartle's main points, but I do disagree that the torture quest
The Art of Persuasion is as bad as Bartle makes it out to be. Torture commonly plays a prominent role in fantasy storytelling (see Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, The Princess Bride), and I didn't find Blizzard's treatment of the subject to be an endorsement of torture at all.
Sam & Max, Titan Quest, Spellforce 2
Steam has been having great deals on games lately. These past three weekends I've picked up Sam & Max Season 1 for $12, Titan Quest Gold (that's with the expansion pack, The Immortal Throne) for $10, and Spellforce 2 with expansion pack (Dragon Storm) for $15. Each of these has been worth the money.
Sam & Max is a quest game in the style of the LucasArts
SCUMM engine classics (the one that I'm most familiar with is Full Throttle), which is not surprising given that
Telltale Games was started by some of the same people that worked on those old LucasArts games. It also plays out a lot like a graphic novel--which happens to be what the original
Sam & Max is. Go figure.
I've only played through about the first episode and a half of Sax & Max. The highlight so far has been the writing; the grand achievement of which has been getting me to laugh aloud, which games these days have rarely been able to do. The low point of Sam & Max has been that there's not as much of an exploration element to it as I'd like.
Each of the first two chapters is short (takes only a few hours to beat) and takes place within a relatively small geographical area. What I've found is that there's a lot of walking back and forth within that area which makes the game feel tedious at times. This effect is compounded sometimes when the solution to various situations is both obvious and requires backtracking to a prior location, thereby creating the effect of a dull errand.
That having been said, Sam & Max is excellent, and a bargain at any price under $20. On top of that, it's nice to see that the quest game genre hasn't fallen completely by the wayside. Sam & Max is a must-try for players who have never had the opportunity to play classic LucasArts or Sierra quest adventure games from the 90s.
Titan Quest is, basically, a Diablo II clone set in ancient Greece. As such it has addictive, fast-paced gameplay, and powerful multiplayer potential. On top of that, the game has good visual appeal and a decent atmosphere. I was really excited to get this for only $10.
After playing about 11 hours of TQ, I've found that the game is--unfortunately--flawed. I progressed through single player with a Conquerer class character (Warfare and Defense masteries) to level 9, and then through 2-player co-op play over the internet with a Ranger class character (Nature and Hunting masteries) to level 11. I'm not finished with the game yet, and may end up playing it for a long time to come, but there are definitely things that grate on me.
Like Diablo II, TQ just isn't as much fun single player. It's a good experience, but you can practically taste the great experience just around the corner if you could get somebody to play with you. That's why I twisted Matt's arm into it, and he was happy to oblige. Together we've had a great time playing the game, and it was easily worth the investment of both time and money. The single player experience just can't compete.
The flawed part of the game is simply that there's not enough polish put into it. Multiplayer play sometimes lags, and it gets frustrating during the heat of battle. Looting items is unnecessarily painful, as quite often items are stacked over each other on the ground and you have to hunt for the right pixels to click in order to get what you want. Targeting spells and abilities could be a lot easier and more responsive. The framerate is sometimes noticeably bad, and one time Matt and I had multiplayer connection issues that were fixed by restarting the game. All of these are flaws that are made glaring by the ever-present World of Warcraft, and all of them are things that could have been addressed with more technical production resources put into the game.
On the up-side, there's a massive amount of content in Titan Quest (not when compared to WoW, but still). There are thirty-six distinct classes defined by choosing among the game's eight masteries, and another nine classes are added by the Immortal Throne expansion pack by introducing one additional mastery. Each mastery has its own skill tree (the equivalent of WoW's talent tree), the gear system is classic Diablo II style, and the game world is nice and large. The only thing I'd like to see is if the world was less linear in layout and allowed for more open-ended exploration (that reminds me, I picked up a bargain bin copy of Dungeon Siege long ago and never did play very much of it; I wonder how it stacks up).
I also have to wonder what kind of balance issues are lurking within the character leveling system, but that may end up being part of the game's appeal for many players. In fact, playing Titan Quest reminded me of just how polished and somehow "tame" World of Warcraft ends up feeling. You never really get into a situation in WoW where a boss fight, a loot drop, or some such event is ridiculously unbalanced; everything has been fine tuned. TQ seems to retain a bit more of a wild edge to it, which is refreshing.
The end result is that TQ is a really good game that could have been a great game except that it feels somewhat cheap. I've had excellent fun playing it and I do recommend it, but if you're a Blizzard fan you will notice the difference in quality. On the plus side, Titan Quest may help to sharpen your appetite for the looming release of Diablo III.
And then there's Spellforce 2, which is as much a Warcraft 3 clone as Titan Quest is a Diablo II clone. I was actually surprised to find out just how much of an RTS game Spellforce 2 plays like, given that what little I'd read about it described it only as an RPG. It certainly emphasizes RPG elements--in much the same way that the WC3 expansion, The Frozen Throne, plays like an RPG.
I've only played a couple of hours of Spellforce 2, and I'm happy with it but I'm already questioning whether or not it can hold my attention. It's very polished, the writing is surprisingly decent, and as an RTS-RPG hybrid it has managed to raise my curiosity. But it requires more than solid execution for a game to sink its hooks into me.
One issue with Spellforce 2 so far is that the game has been too easy (I'm playing on "Normal" difficulty) and the levels have been extremely linear. Titan Quest captured my imagination because within minutes of playing it I'd already gotten in over my head and died--that's part of the "wild" aspect about it that appeals to me. I hope that Spellforce 2 manages to incorporate that somewhere, but so far I haven't seen it.
Another thing about Spellforce 2 is that the character leveling system seems to be dumbed-down. This is in keeping with the game as an RTS style game rather than a true RPG. There are many levels to play and areas to explore, but they have the feel of Warcraft 3 style maps rather than a proper RPG world. I find all of this disappointing because I bought the game hoping for an RPG rather than an RTS, but when I'm in more of a RTS mood I may not find these things to be such a problem.
I'm already starting to wonder if Steam will manage to keep the ball rolling next weekend. Will there be yet another $10-$15 deal up for grabs that's just too good for me to pass up, or will I be able to content myself for now with what I've got? If there's a lack of tempting budget gaming available, I may hunker down with something a bit pricier, like Fallout 3 or The Witcher.
