The Video Game Revue

New Blog

2009-08-15T11:39:00.000-07:00

Hey folks, I'm writing for a new gaming blog now, spearheaded by my buddy Matt: Nerdgasm. The tone of it is going to be rather different from The Video Game Revue. In particular, you'll find more frequent, shorter posts there than you will here, and it's not all strictly about video games. Whether or not I continue writing for this blog at all is uncertain at this point, but I may decide to post the occasional wandering rant here--who knows.

PS3 Disk Usage Boggle

2009-05-27T23:16:00.000-07:00

I had a bit of a shock today when my PS3 reported during a download that I only have 5 gigs free on it. I don't generally keep close tabs on how much disk space is left on my PS3 because a) you have to visit "System Information" under the settings menu to find out, and b) my PS3 has 40 gigs, which seems like overkill given that I only own 5 PS3 games on disc (not including another five or so downloaded games like Noby Noby Boy, Tekken 5, and Wipeout HD). A quick visit to the Game Data Utility revealed that my games have been installing a lot more data than I supposed.

For instance, Fritzkrieg brought over Fallout 3 one day and we played for about an hour, maybe two. Fallout 3 quietly installed 4 gigs of data in the background--data which has sat idle since. That's 10% of my total disk space used up without me knowing about it. Games like MGS4 and GT5: Prologue tell you when they're installing data to disc, and they aren't shy about taking up quite a lot of space (several gigs apiece).

By contrast, my Xbox 360 only has a 15 gig drive, and I own over 55 Xbox 360 games on disc (I was somewhat surprised by my tally, and that doesn't even include the roughly 20 Xbox Live arcade games that I own), but I currently have roughly 3 gigs free, and that's after using the install-to-hard-drive utility on Left 4 Dead to work around the annoying disc drive noise issue that I was complaining about earlier. It's easy for me to keep tabs on how much space is free on my Xbox because it reports the amount of free space right in several navigation menus that I see frequently, such as when I select a device to save a game to.

What freaks me out a little about this whole situation is that, at this rate, if I bought just a handful of other PS3 games, I'd run out of disk space. Presumably the system is smart enough to start uninstalling older game data at this point to make room for the new, but I still find it odd that on a home gaming console with a 40 gig drive, well over half of that could be consumed by as few as five games. I had expected space to feel very tight on the Xbox 360 and over-abundant on the PS3, but that hasn't been the case.

On a loosely related note, what's up with Empire: Total War being a whopping 15 gig install? Not only does that take quite a while to download off of Steam, but once I fired up the game, I honestly couldn't tell what all of that disk space is really being used for. Perhaps the problem is simply that I can't run it at full spec, but still... 15 gigs!

Latest Kotaku News

2009-05-19T14:06:00.000-07:00

Meh. Usually I just email this stuff out, but it seems like all of the people I email are subscribed to this blog anyway. There have been some exciting stories on Kotaku recently:

Capcom confirmed what was thought to be impossible: Tatsunoko vs. Capcom will be coming to North America, and the new version will have a playable demo at E3. Previously it was said that licensing issues would make a localized version of this game excessively unlikely, but perhaps Capcom was swayed by the wild success of Street Fighter IV. I'm simply speculating here.

Yet another Lunar remake is coming, this time in the form of a PSP game entitled "Lunar: Harmony of the Silver Star." Assuming that this is to be a straight-up adaptation of the original Lunar: The Silver Star, which was a Sega CD game, it will be the second remake. The first remake was Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete for Sega Saturn and the original PlayStation. If history continues to repeat itself, we can expect to see a remake of Lunar: Eternal Blue for the PSP before too long. This time, however, Working Designs is no longer around to handle the localization effort--although perhaps some of their employees are still available. Again, this is all speculation.

There's a new KoF XII trailer, which is very Japanese and rather entertaining. In related news, a detailed analysis shows that it will be impossible to look up Athena's skirt in KoF XII. I suppose that it is important to get the facts. o_O

Valve is going all-out with their "Meet the Spy" promo for Team Fortress 2, including an excellent animated short and some gag posts on their blog.

And finally, the survivors from Left 4 Dead were seen in Rock Band.

Now you're all up-to-date. :)

Lost Odyssey, Shadowrun, Midnight Club LA

2009-05-17T10:40:00.000-07:00

I took a bit of a break from blogging there... work stuff, mainly. I've covered a lot of gaming ground since my last post; probably too much to talk about here. I'll make this a long post. :)

World of Warcraft: Patch 3.1

Xzi (my World of Warcraft main) is finally level 79 as of yesterday (technically it was very early today, since it was after midnight). I've found that the WoW players among my friends fall into two distinct camps: those who are shocked that I'm only level 79 and it's the middle of May already, and those who are surprised that I could get so far so soon. Needless to say, these groups represent very different types of WoW players, and I find that I don't fit in well with either group.

I'm particularly happy about the new dual-spec feature. Xzi is a Priest (Undead), and through his first 40 levels I imagined that some day he'd be a formidable raid healer. Then I discovered PvP (Battlegrounds primarly; I'm not hardcore enough for Arena) and respeced Shadow. Xzi remained a Shadow Priest for three years. But now, thanks to dual-spec, I can finally have it both ways. Xzi's alter ego is a Holy spec healer. He's not quite up to doing raids yet, but he may get there eventually.

Sunny and I are in an excellent guild, which is entirely her doing. Unlike myself, she has reached a level of play where she can get the attention of a serious guild and make herself useful. They let me in only because I'm her husband and she insisted on it. With these people, I don't talk about the fact that my main just hit level 79. Most of the others hit level 80 with their mains more than four months ago, and many of them have also hit 80 with their Death Knights. I'm pretty sure a few of them have more than three level 80 characters now.

Lost Odyssey

I've cleared the first disc and then some of Lost Odyssey, and it's clear to me that this is a fine JRPG. It has a few hiccups; for instance, I found some of the boss battles and dungeon areas tedious. These parts of the game pass quickly, however.

Lost Odyssey is light on gameplay and heavy on story. The equipment system appears very simple since each character has only three equipment slots, but there is some equipment crafting involved and equipment ties in with learning magic, so there is some complexity there. Exploration is fairly linear (in Final Fantasy X style) and combat leans towards fewer and more difficult encounters (some of the combat mechanics remind me a little of Digital Devil Saga).

The story has a particularly heavy contemporary anime style to it and perhaps resembles shows like Fullmetal Alchemist or Scrapped Princess (I've only seen a handful of eps for these shows, so I'm reaching here). This actually hindered my enjoyment of the game initially since I was skeptical of that style being able to deliver much excellent content, but Lost Odyssey (not unlike Fullmetal Alchemist) does manage to hit some dramatic high notes despite often being corny.

Lost Odyssey occasionally manages to be genuinely beautiful--not just in its visual style, but in its storytelling and gameplay elements as well. It is in those glimpses of excellence that I've been able to find the motivation to continue playing the game. I may even be able to finish it.

Shadowrun

I picked up an Xbox 360 copy of Shadowrun recently for $12. I knew going in that the game has a strict multiplayer focus, and that there really isn't a single player campaign to speak of (there are only bot matches). Many critics slammed Shadowrun for this, saying that it feels like an incomplete game, and perhaps compared to Halo or Gears of War, this much is true.

What immediately surprised me about Shadowrun is how good it is. The gameplay is solid and there are many subtleties to the game design. It has the class-based feel of Team Fortress 2, except that the classes are customizable. I was initially skeptical about many of the weapons and powers, but there are many surprisingly viable combinations to play with.

For example, I was convinced upon trying the katana that I would have to play Shadowrun obsessively for days in order to start getting kills with it. This was not the case at all: I was a threat pretty much as soon as I picked the katana up. This is not to say that the katana is overpowered, either; not everybody was using it, and I found myself easily able to fend off katana-wielders with an SMG or shotgun.

One thing that I was relatively sure of was that the online community playing Shadowrun would wreck the game for me. When I've tried to play games like Battlefield: Bad Company or Rainbox Six: Vegas online, my experience is generally ruined by the concentration of elite players who don't leave enough slack for novices to do much good. By some miracle, this is not the case with Shadowrun.

Perhaps it is because the multiplayer focus of the game forces even novices to play online rather than satisfying themselves with a single-player campaign. Perhaps it is a cultural thing and Shadowrun is not considered a hardcore gamer's game. I honestly can't say; all I know is that my experience with Shadowrun, as a first-day player, was overwhelmingly positive. Even the presence of Windows players did nothing to ruin the game for me.

This game was definitely worth the $12. It's one of the best multiplayer games that I've played on the 360 yet.

Left 4 Dead

Even though I already have L4D on Steam, I picked up an Xbox 360 copy. Partly I wanted to play it on my big TV screen. Partly I wanted more experience with console FPSes. Partly I wanted to support Valve for making such an excellent game. Partly I was curious as to how well the port stands up. Partly L4D is a cheap enough 360 game to make this option tempting. And partly I just wanted an easy source of achievement points (which L4D definitely is).

L4D on 360 is a nearly flawless port of the Windows game. The only problem that I have with the game at all is a hardware problem: it makes the disc drive in my 360 console buzz like a propeller plane. I don't know if this is a manufacturing defect with the disc itself or if its more of a software problem with the game asking the drive to spin at a particular speed. In any case, playing L4D makes my Xbox much, much louder than it normally is, and I worry that I'm shortening the lifespan of the hardware every time I play the game. I don't have this problem with any of the other games in my Xbox 360 library. Perhaps I should use the "install to drive" feature so that L4D doesn't have to load off of the disc at all.

One of the things that I like about L4D on Steam is that the player community is somewhat more casual than the community who plays Team Fortress 2 or Counter-Strike. I say "somewhat" because there are still a lot of obsessive douchebags playing L4D, but at least sometimes you'll wind up in a party of people who just want to enjoy the game. I've found this to be the case on Xbox Live as well: not everyone playing L4D is an elite nutjob, and that's refreshing (as per my Shadowrun rant above).

Midnight Club: Los Angeles

When I first fired this game up, I had a momentary crisis where I'd forgotten why I bought it in the first place. Then I realized that I was still playing in chase cam view, so I switched the camera to the cockpit setting and experienced immediate relief.

Yes, Midnight Club is a stupid street racing game. Other than the presence of licensed real-world cars, there's little reason to recommend it over, say, Burnout Paradise. The blatant culture of The Fast & The Furious is likely to drive away any intelligent player, unless that sort of thing is a guilty pleasure for you (welcome to the club). But Midnight Club LA has a cockpit view, and that, believe it or not, is a big fucking deal.

My first experience with cockpit cam in a racing game was Gran Turismo 5: Prologue. Initially I didn't like it because it made an already difficult game even harder: one can't see the road nearly as well (especially compared to the bumper cam), and I even found the movement of the in-game driver's hands on the steering wheel to be confusing. However, I toughed it out for a while and came to be hooked on this way of playing racing games.

Since then I've experienced cockpit cam in GTR: Evo, Grid, Race Pro, and now Midnight Club: LA. It immediately makes any racing game fully three times better. Racing games without cockpit cam are still playable, but it's like eating french fries without salt.

So my review of Midnight Club: LA is that, yes, it has cockpit cam. The game sucks in most other ways, but those ways don't matter as much as the fact that it has cockpit cam and you can almost feel like you're in an actual car when you play the game.

Resident Evil 5, Final Fantasy: Crystal Defenders

2009-03-19T14:54:00.000-07:00

Matt was asking me how RE5 is, and mentioned that he heard it was more of an "action" game than a survival horror game. There is some truth to that, but it's not quite accurate: aside from the co-op play aspect and the changes to inventory management, RE5 plays the same as RE4. What makes it more action and less survival horror has, so far, been the level design. I find that scrounging for items and fending off zombie hordes is roughly the same as it was in RE4, but exploration has been de-emphasized.

RE5 also has more of the style of an action game. The main characters are typical action hero stereotypes, whereas Leon Kennedy had a softer edge to him--by which I guess I mean that he looked like somebody you might bump into in a shopping mall (in his default outfit, that is). Chris Redfield would look right at home in a Predator movie. These stylistic differences go beyond the characters to encompass the setting, the dialogue, and the overall premise of the game.

The thing that originally struck me about RE4 was how shamelessly campy it is, but in a way that really works. It could be almost laugh-out-loud goofy at times while piquing my interest all the same. RE5 tones that factor down a great deal, which may be a refreshing change, but I still manage to be disappointed. I get the sense that RE4 will still be well worth looking back on in ten years, while RE5 won't be particularly interesting. It's pretty much the same feeling that I get when comparing Devil May Cry 3 (an utterly amazing game that propelled the series forward in a big way) to Devil May Cry 4 (more of the same with an upgraded graphics engine and not enough of a twist to really distinguish itself from its predecessor).

Another game that has been eating up hours of my life lately is Final Fantasy: Crystal Defenders, which is, from what I understand, a port of a cellphone game that borrows its theme and most of its artwork from Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2. It's a pretty run-of-the-mill tower defense game, but a well-made one; as such, it manages to be extremely immersive and addictive. It's a little on the pricey side at 800 MS points given that a) obviously not a resources went into producing it (no flashy 3D models or epic musical scores here), and b) similar experiences can be had for free with online Flash games and the like, but still, I'm glad that I picked it up.

I've been playing a ton of other games lately. In particular, I played all of the way through Bully: Scholarship Ed., I got back into Mirror's Edge for a couple of evenings, and I picked up Noby Noby Boy from the PlayStation Network Store. I'm also continuing to make gradual process through Final Fantasy VII (my long overdue second play-through) and Lost Odyssey. The primary reason that I haven't written more about these is simply that I've been busy.

Indie Games on Steam

2009-02-20T21:46:00.000-08:00

Steam has continued to have amazing sales every weekend, with last week's being every Ghost Recon game for $20, and the week before being a big discount on Left 4 Dead that reportedly increased sales by 3000%. This week's sale gives gamers a chance to support the little guys by offering five indie titles for a mere $10. Naturally, I wouldn't be writing this post if I didn't succumb to the temptation to take Steam up on their offer.

I've already tried all five games and they make a nice little ensemble. Four of the games are well suited for playing in a window, which can be a nice feature if you want to grab a quick game while doing something else on the side; I exclude Multiwinia in this regard because, well, it's a pretty freakin' intense RTS and really deserves to be played fullscreen. The overall verdict is that the package is definitely worth $10 if you feel like trying something new, and there's even a chance that one or two of the games will strongly appeal to you. Read on for particulars.

Trials 2

Trials 2: Second Edition is one of the strongest titles of the bunch, in my opinion. It's a motocross stunt racer--a cross between Excitebike and Trackmania. There's a pretty steep learning curve involved, and I didn't make it very far in the roughly 30 minutes that I played, but it seems like a worthwhile game if you stick with it. I'm likely to revisit this one from time to time and may even get hooked on it.

Eets

Eets is a Flash-based puzzle game that's a little bit like Lemmings crossed with The Incredible Machine. I only played this one for about 15 minutes because it didn't particularly grab me. The concept is good, but unoriginal, and the visuals are on the loud side, although the fun animations are certainly a plus. It's not a bad game, but I can't see myself investing much time in it.

Gravitron 2

Gravitron 2 must have started out with somebody writing their own clone of Lunar Lander and deciding to throw guns into the mix. It's a fun concept and reasonably executed, but this is easily the lowest budget title in the mix and it shows. I had fun with it for about 10 minutes, but I'd be hard-pressed to play this game for very long even if it was free. On the plus side, I'm glad that I tried it, and it's not a bad option for some quick, simple fun.

Multiwinia

I didn't expect much from Multiwinia because I played the Darwinia demo years ago and decided that it wasn't for me. Since then I haven't paid much attention to all things Darwinia related, so it was surprising for me to see how far the series has come. The controls are still awkward but not as bad as I remember, and the variety play modes and levels is appealing. I easily lost an hour to this game without batting an eye. So far this is the strongest game in the package and possibly worth the $10 on its own.

I-Fluid

WTF? There's another game? Shit... I forgot to play this one. Well, I can't very well review it without even having seen the damned thing, but check out the trailer video for some idea of what I-Fluid is all about. It shows promise. If I'm strongly impressed by it, I may even post a follow-up about it. Right now the Steam servers are complaining about being too busy, so I can't install it.

Time to go play Street Fighter IV. :)

Street Fighter IV

2009-02-19T11:08:00.000-08:00

I sat down to play Street Fighter IV yesterday thinking that I'd get in an hour or two before moving on to something else... some Warlords III: Darklords Rising, some Final Fantasy VII, some Skate 2, some Bully... something else. My gaming focus has been spread out of late. But it turns out that Street Fighter IV had other plans for me: I played pretty much four hours straight.

Initially I was put off by SF IV's visual style. It didn't look as good on my home TV as it did when I first saw trailers of it on the web last year. But the solid gameplay was enough of a hook that I stuck with it, and as the hours went by the visuals bothered me less and less. They've even started to grow on me.

Two massive hooks kept me glued to my Hori Fighting Stick EX2 last night: the first was the variety of play modes available, and the second was how rapidly I found myself climbing the learning curve. Initially I tried playing a standard Arcade game on Normal. I have some Street Fighter experience--although not a lot--so I figured I could handle it, but I was wrong. In order to beat the final boss, I had to dial the difficulty back to "Very Easy," which was discouraging.

Once I got warmed up, I decided to try the online play. SF IV has a great idea on how to manage online matches: you can configure the options to let you play a standard Arcade game and interrupt you when an online opponent is available. These options are accessible using the RB button from the main menu, and at first I was rather confused by them. Turning this mode on basically means "interrupt me every 10 seconds with a new online match," although it did once happen that I went about 15 minutes without a new match coming up, which made me wonder if the matchmaking servers were experiencing an outage.

I also found that going into the Xbox Live Game menu and trying to join an existing game lobby was futile. Every game I tried to join was gone by the time I selected it, which suggests to me that most of the players online are in this menu hammering away on existing game lobbies rather than using the option to play Arcade mode while they wait for an opponent to challenge them.

The other thing I found, unsurprisingly, is that there aren't a lot of Street Fighter noobs on Xbox Live, at least not by my rather low standards. Out of about twenty matches, I had about two opponents of clearly lesser skill (these would be your basic noobs), and maybe five others of comparable skill (relative noobs). All of the others beat me easily.

After the online play, I ventured into the Challenges mode, which is really where I should have started. The challenges essentially teach you how to play the game, with the lowest level ones being extremely easy. A combination of it being bedtime and finding myself losing my focus stopped me from playing challenges for what could have easily been another couple of hours.

The most frustrating thing about stopping is that I was just getting good enough to be able to beat Arcade mode on Normal difficulty.

In other news, I borrowed a copy of Bully: Scholarship Edition, which is great because I've wanted to try it but find it hard to justify buying since I already have the PS2 version. Scholarship Edition is roughly the same excellent game, but at higher resolution and with a better framerate. Bully really is a terrific game: the writing is excellent, the concept is novel, and the gameplay is as solid as GTA IV's. It has that "just one more mission" quality that keeps me playing for hours, and in some ways I find the smaller setting (compared to GTA games) and carefree theme (schoolyard pranks) to be a liberating change of pace.

Bully is also a good length. I've played maybe 10 hours of it and only finished a third or so of the game. By the time I've hit 100% completion--if I even get that far--I'll be ready to shelve it indefinitely. I will be nagging Fritzkrieg to play it, however. :)

R-Type: Dimensions, FF VII

2009-02-05T17:11:00.000-08:00

At the price point of 1200 MS points, I was wary enough of R-Type: Dimensions to try the demo before buying it. It didn't take long for me to decide that it was worth the 1200 points, but then I am a sucker for classic shoot-em-ups, and R-Type is one of the most classic there is.

R-Type: Dimensions offers two features in particular that make it worthwhile. The first is the ability to toggle between updated and original graphics at any time simply by hitting the Y button. The updated graphics look fantastic and are very true to the source material, which creates a neat effect when you toggle between them. The toggling uses a cross-fade effect rather than an instant switch, so right before your eyes you see the next gen R-Type engine morph into a retro title.

The other great feature is the ability to choose between "Infinite" and "Classic" game modes. Infinite mode gives you unlimited lives and has you respawn immediately when you die rather than going back to the last checkpoint. How many times you die in each stage gets posted to the leaderboard along with your score, which gives you a strong incentive to improve at the game. At the same time, having unlimited lives allows you to easily experience all of R-Type's brilliant stages without having to become a slave to the game. Players who want to play R-Type with the traditional rules can use "Classic" mode for that.

Overall I am very impressed with R-Type: Dimensions. It's exactly the kind of remake that I wanted, and failed to get, from Galaga Legions and 1942: Joint Strike. Perhaps the only better XBLA titles in the same genre are Ikaruga and Geometry Wars 2.

In other news, Battlefield 1942 is getting a remake using the Battlefield: Bad Company engine. So far, BF42, BF2, and BF:BC are the only entries in the series that I've enjoyed, and I am hopeful that this one will be a goodie.

I should mention that I've started a long overdue (about ten years overdue) play-through of FF VII. When I originally played through the game, I got within a few hours of the end and then watched the ending when my brother beat the game, so I never actually finished FF VII. Additionally, I was a university student at the time, which made it difficult to focus on the game's story. I've been on a strong RPG kick lately while simultaneously being on a World of Warcraft break, which makes this the perfect time to revisit FF VII. So far I am twelve hours into the game and thoroughly enjoying it.

Fritzkrieg and I often discuss how way-ward JRPGs have become, and it comes up from time to time on this blog. The general trends we've noticed include the spread of gimmicky combat systems that aren't much fun, characters becoming shallow and/or jaded to the point of being uninteresting, and plots becoming vapid and pointless. The stereotypical JRPG these days would be about a young man with a head full of haircare products who is chasing his ambition to become more powerful for power's own sake in a troubled world where people are generally only out for themselves. Also the combat system would likely involve something like spinning slot machine dials or awkward button combos, while lacking tactical challenge.

Twelve years ago, the stereotype I just described did not exist, although JRPGs were very much alive. Then came games like FF VII and Grandia, and it's been a continual downward spiral from there. For years I resented FF VII for that, and for years after the resentment faded, I just didn't care about FF VII. The thing that surprises me going back to FF VII now is just how much heart and soul are in it. Compared to some of the major JRPGs before it (like Chrono Trigger and FF VI), FF VII comes across as jaded and a little shallow. Compared to the decade's worth of JRPGs that have followed in FF VII's footsteps, FF VII is bursting with creativity and feeling.

One factor at play here is certainly that I only now finally have the attention necessary to truly appreciate FF VII, but there's also definitely something to be said for the fact that so many JRPGs these days try to copy the superficial elements of FF VII while missing out on the core of the game. Taking the time to go back and revisit FF VII has been a very interesting experience for me in that context.

RPG Madness

2009-01-24T17:27:00.000-08:00

My RPG adventures continued this week, as I played the first couple of hours of Lost Odyssey, succumbed to an impulse to assemble a CD wallet collection of classic PC RPG discs, and spent about six hours playing Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Let's review.

The first thing I have to point out is that Mount & Blade is only $7.50 on Steam this weekend. They're having a sale. It's unlikely that this news will reach anybody who cares through this blog post, but whatever: I've had far too much fun with Mount & Blade in the last month to fail to point this bit of news out.

Lost Odyssey is so far better than I expected. It has a solid combat system, the visuals are excellent, and story is surprisingly good even though the characters so far haven't been. I was well aware that Lost Odyssey got better reviews than Blue Dragon, but I somehow expected to prefer Blue Dragon--perhaps because Blue Dragon is a more traditional JRPG, or something like that. To the contrary, Lost Odyssey is fast becoming the most engaging JRPG that I've played since FF XII. I'm still pretty early in, however, and I don't know yet if the pace will start to become drawn out.

The idea to organize a CD wallet full of PC RPGs came to me as I was cleaning out part of my game collection. I had a CD wallet full of various PC game disks (stuff like F.E.A.R., Oblivion, Rome: Total War, and Quake IV) that wasn't doing me much good, and I felt that it would be useful to have a bunch of Blizzard discs in one convenient location. The project started with the install DVDs for World of Warcraft (that is, a trial DVD, the Burning Crusade Collector's Edition install DVD, and a Wrath of the Lich King DVD), as well as the contents of a WarCraft Battle Chest and a Diablo Battle Chest all neatly arranged. (These titles are especially useful for office jobs, by the way.) But this only filled half of the wallet.

For the other half, I organized the following:

- The four discs out of a Game of the Year Edition copy of The Elder Scrolls III, including Morrowind, Tribunal, Bloodmoon, and the construction set tools
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (I don't have The Shivering Isles, though)
- Neverwinter Nights: Diamond DVD (includes both expansions), Neverwinter Nights: Kingmaker (official collection of community content)
- Warlords III: Darklords Rising
- Ultima Collection (that's Ultima I through VIII)
- Quest for Glory Anthology (QfG I through IV)

That's a concentrated dose of classic CRPG goodness, and I've been savoring the collection for the past thirty hours or so. Having so much RPG content in one place makes me euphoric.

The funny thing is that I get nostalgic for many of these games even though I never actually had the time to play some of them. Out of the Ultima series, for instance, I barely touched V, VI, and VIII, which are some of the better ones (my Ultima experience is primarily with III, IV, and VII--and even then I didn't play them heavily). I thoroughly played Quest for Glory I and II back in the day, but barely played III and IV. Sunny did most of the BioWare RPG gaming back when Neverwinter Nights came out; she finished the entire main campaign and both expansion packs, while I didn't even get past Chapter III of the first game. Worst of all, much of the Blizzard content remains untapped (including the expansions for both WarCraft 3 and Diablo II). Finally, although I played enough Oblivion to get familiar with it, I'd only played a few hours worth of Morrowind and never any of the expansion content. For shame.

But, as my buddy Matt once pointed out to me, it's often more useful to have a collection of books (or games, in this case) that you expect to enjoy and haven't read yet than to have a collection that you're already well familiar with. It was in that spirit that I fired up Morrowind to dabble around in, and I quickly found myself drawn in.

There's a bit of a learning curve involved in Morrowind, but my previous experiences trying to play both Morrowind and Oblivion came in handy. Overall I would say that Morrowind is an excellent and classic RPG, but one thing that grates is how sparse the content is. The world of Morrowind is vast but mostly all looks the same and doesn't have a lot going on by today's RPG standards.

What's especially painful is how long it takes to travel from place to place on foot, which is frequently required. It's a shame because I found Morrowind to be both immersive and challenging, and yet I keep getting snapped out of my suspension of disbelief by long stretches of walking in a straight line. Occasionally I just aim in a direction, hit Q (auto-walk), and get up to fetch some water or prepare a snack. There should at least be siltstriders (transport) between each of the towns instead of only between the major cities.

The funny thing is that I remember Oblivion (Morrowind's sequel) being criticized for its travel system being too convenient. In Oblivion, one can simply use the world map to select a destination and effectively "warp" there (in-game time still passes). This removes most of the incentive for the player to explore the land on foot, but having seen how tedious walking in Morrowind gets to be, I have a better understanding of the decision to make travel so quick in Oblivion.

And yet Oblivion still suffers from the problem that walking around in dungeon areas can be quite slow, which makes the player all the more aware of how repetitive many of the areas in-game are. What Elder Scrolls games need, perhaps, is a time acceleration feature like many flight simulators have, so that the player can fast-forward through dull parts of the fantasy experience. Alternatively, the game content could be less spread out--but then The Elder Scrolls might not feel like The Elder Scrolls.

Combined with my recent RPG acquisitions on Steam, I'm now doubly reassured that I have more RPG content at my disposal than I reasonably have time to play, and that's not even counting the numerous handheld titles that I picked up last year. :) It's good to be a gamer.

The Sorry State of JRPGs

2009-01-12T12:04:00.001-08:00

Having noticed the price cut that The Last Remnant has gotten both on Amazon and GameStop / EB Games, I went to my local EB Games yesterday with the intention of picking up a copy. In addition to there being $40 copies of The Last Remnant available, there were $40 copies of Infinite Undiscovery and $45 used copies of Lost Odyssey as well. I already have Blue Dragon, but for those paying attention here who don't, it's under $20 for a new copy. Finally, I did notice a used copy of Eternal Sonata, but I didn't check the price.

As I approached the counter and handed the copy of The Last Remnant that I was holding to him, I asked the EB Games employee if he recommended it. He had been talking about Final Fantasy XIII's release date and obviously cared about JRPGs. In response to my query, the clerk made a minor production of throwing The Last Remnant to the floor in disgust, announcing that it had utterly wasted valuable hours of his life. He then handed me Infinite Undiscovery, saying that it wasn't great either, but it was certainly better than The Last Remnant.

I haven't been keeping up on JRPGs as I ought to have. For the last couple of years, I've been strangely resistant to their lures--with the one big exception of PSP and NDS games. Even then, while I've collected a few portable JRPG titles, I haven't spent much time with them. Yesterday I found myself wondering how things got this way.

World of Warcraft has been a factor, no doubt. As I've mentioned in previous posts--and as my friend Ace-High commented on--Blizzard RPGs really are great productions. I've never been able to really stomach BioWare RPGs en-masse; I can only appreciate them in doses. Blizzard is really the only North American RPG company whose games I find genuinely enthralling, and that wasn't even until a few years ago. But I only really turned to Blizzard games in the first place because the JRPGs of recent times weren't able to properly hook me.

A couple of bizarre and potentially disturbing trends emerge if you look at the major console JRPG releases of the past two years: this includes Blue Dragon and Eternal Sonata from 2007, and Lost Odyssey, Infinite Undiscovery, and The Last Remnant from 2008. I've been neglectful of these games and have only played Blue Dragon and (as of yesterday) Infinite Undiscovery, but there are still two clear trends that haven't slipped my attention:

The first trend is that all of these games, with the sole exception of Eternal Sonata, have been Xbox 360 exclusives. It seems to me that the majority of JRPG fans on both sides of the Pacific would naturally be Sony fanboys, since the Playstation brand has dominated the JRPG market ever since the last days of the SNES, starting with Wild Arms and Suikoden, with the release of Final Fantasy VII as its grand coronation. I have been well aware these past two years that Sony is largely losing the console war, but if the PS3 is a viable platform for anything, it ought to be viable for JRPGs, right? This line of reasoning is consistent with the profiles of the various PS3 owners that I personally know.

The second trend is that all of these games have Metacritic scores in the 70s (except that the PS3 version of Eternal Sonata, for whatever reason, scores an 80). My own experience having watched video reviews of these games and played a couple of them is that they're all fairly lukewarm, with some of them (The Last Remnant, for instance) clearly being more tepid than others (Blue Dragon). I think it's fair to say that none of these games has really lit a fire under the fan base out there. How can it be that for two long years we haven't seen any JRPG excellence?

I'm planning to pick up Lost Odyssey in the not too distant future, and The Last Remnant at some point much later--the line of reasoning here being that this early price drop on The Last Remnant is possibly the first of several price drops, and that I'll eventually be able to snag it for $20. I'll probably have to get Eternal Sonata eventually as well, but as much as I'm able to handle anime-style artwork, that one looks so kiddie and cartoonish that I'm afraid to merely touch it. It is supposed to be good, somehow...

In the meanwhile, I'll quickly compare my Blue Dragon experience (roughly 12 hours of playtime) with my Infinite Undiscovery experience (roughly 2 hours playtime). In a nutshell, Blue Dragon is like a weak-sauce version of Dragon Quest VIII, and Infinite Undiscovery is like a weak-sauce version of Final Fantasy XII. Each one clearly benefits from being a next-gen title and is capable of producing some gorgeous screenshots, but at times they don't look much better than their PS2 counterparts.

Blue Dragon's biggest failing to me is its generic characters and uninteresting plot. When I play Blue Dragon, it's as an RPG combat game with an Akira Toriyama art style. Over the course of 12 hours, what little plot and character development I was treated to in the beginning has rapidly atrophied into nothing important. Even given this major failing, there's enough appeal left to make Blue Dragon a decent JRPG. It's just a shame that it doesn't truly excel at much, apart from some of the visuals.

Infinite Undiscovery's biggest failing is the awkward gameplay. The are certain design decisions here that I can't reconcile at all, like spacing out save points too far apart and not providing the player with an opportunity to save before some boss battles. Much of the game is clearly FF XII in style, yet FF XII's excellent combat system has been replaced with fairly weak action combat that strips out a lot of the RPG appeal. Fritzkrieg had a look at the game, and he commented that action combat systems are a hallmark of Tri-Ace games (Tri-Ace being the developers of Infinite Undiscovery). It's too early to tell whether or not there's enough appeal in Infinite Undiscovery that I'll be able to muddle through the game in spite of its mediocrity, but early signs are promising.

In the meanwhile, I continue to pour hours a week into World of Warcraft. I hardly played at all over the Christmas break, so my character is still only level 75, but I should hit level 76 today. I still haven't rolled a Death Knight yet, so there's plenty left to do in Northrend.

The Secret to Enjoying Bionic Commando: Rearmed

2009-01-11T23:40:00.000-08:00

...is to play it multiplayer. I've known for a while that Bionic Commando: Rearmed has a 2-player co-op mode, but it wasn't until today that I realized there's an arena battle mode as well (which includes play modes such as Deathmatch). It supports up to four players at once, which makes for a decent party game.

The 2-player co-op mode does a lot to make the game more palpable. There's so much about Bionic Commando: Rearmed that I like, such as the visual style and the old-school challenge, but I'm rarely in the mood to play it because it's somewhat too challenging. The co-op mode does a lot to make the game less tedious and more exciting, assuming both players are able to get the hang of the game and stick together.

Now if there was only some way to make 1943: Joint Strike worthwhile. :(

Controller Showdown: Conclusion

2008-12-30T19:58:00.001-08:00

It's about time I wrapped up my comparison between the Xbox 360 and PS3 controllers.

Form Factor

An 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 Buttons

Although 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.

Conclusion

I 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

2008-12-30T18:22:00.001-08:00

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

2008-12-20T22:18:00.001-08:00

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

2008-12-10T08:20:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-06T15:00:00.000-08:00

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.

Controller Showdown: Part 2

2008-11-21T21:58:00.000-08:00

Picking up where I left off...

D-Pad

The story of the directional pad or "d-pad" is pretty much the inverse of what happened to the shoulder buttons: the d-pad was once the single most important feature of a console controller, and has since languished to the point where it is typically used for in-game menus or similar auxiliary functions. Modern console games have gravitated toward the use of analog thumb-sticks and left the d-pad in the dust.

That having been said, the d-pad is not entirely unimportant, since some popular games do make good use of it. It's often used for weapon-swapping in FPS games like Gears of War, and some players prefer it over the analog stick for old school fighting games like Street Fighter II and Soul Calibur. The d-pad is just important enough to matter, but not enough to make or break a system.

This is fortunate for the Xbox 360 because it has one of the most finicky and difficult d-pads of perhaps any popular console since before the NES--more than twenty years ago. Between the 360 and the PS3, there is no contest here: the PS3 d-pad is flat-out superior in every way.

Tilt Controls

The PS3 offers some motion controls built-in to the joystick, while the 360 does not. However, the PS3 tilt controls feel laggy and inaccurate, and I have yet to see them used for much more than novelty purposes. Most of the time I forget that this feature of the PS3 even exists, so while this is another victory for the PS3, it's a hollow one.

Weight

One of the nice things about the PS3 controller is that it's nice and light. The DualShock 3 is significantly heavier than the rumble-less Sixaxis, but the 360 controller is heavier still--particularly with those battery packs that the wireless controllers rely on.

In all my years playing console games to date, I've never really thought about the weight of my controllers before. This is because it's never been severe enough to make me notice the weight contributing to fatiguing my hands until now. That is, in a nutshell, how heavy the 360 controllers are.

Don't get me wrong: this is not a serious problem. I hardly ever notice the heft of my 360 controllers, but it's one of those small factors that combines with other things like a slightly uncomfortable R-Trigger and stiff analog joysticks that makes the 360 controller a little hard on the hands. Honestly, most players will never notice or care, but since I'm going into detail to compare the 360 controllers against the PS3 controllers, this is worth mentioning.

Analog Sticks

This is by far the most important aspect of the two controllers, since they are heavily used in all kinds of console games these days. It's only over time that I've noticed much in the way of differences between PS3 and 360 analog sticks; when one is "in the zone" and not thinking at all about one's hands, there doesn't seem to be much difference.

The first thing to notice is that the placement is different. The PS3 analog sticks are aligned horizontally, while the 360 controllers place the left analog stick higher up--in a spot where the D-pad traditionally resides. At first I expected for this to make some kind of significant difference in how the controllers handle relative to each other, but I haven't been able to notice any.

The shape of the tops of the analog sticks is another story. I initially found that the 360 analog sticks tend to dig into my thumbs, partly because of the concave design of the tops, and partly because the analog sticks themselves are stiffer (provide more resistance). Over time I got used to these features of the 360 controller and sometimes I even feel like I can get a slightly better grip on the 360's analog sticks than on the PS3's. However, I would say that the convex design of the PS3 analog stick tops is more comfortable and works well.

The difference in resistance is the biggest factor in how these analog sticks affect my gameplay. I find that because the 360 controller requires more force, it is easier to snap to a certain direction accurately with the 360 sticks. That is to say that if I suddenly need to make a hard motion in a certain direction, the extra resistance seems to make my motions more accurate once I've adjusted to using the 360 controller. The PS3 controller, by contrast, requires more finesse.

There is a trade-off here, however: not only does the PS3 controller require more finesse, but I find that it allows more finesse. It is easier to hold the PS3 stick in place only a small way from center than on the 360 controller--in other words, it is easier to make soft movements.

The general gist of all of this is that I find that the 360 controller works a little better for twitch action titles like fighting games and FPSes, while the PS3 controller works a little better for games with more sim style controls like driving and flying games. That having been said, any game that appears on either console should be tuned with that platform's hardware in mind and will therefore account for the particular strengths and weaknesses of that system's controller.

Overall, I would call this category a tie. I started off liking the PS3 analog sticks better, but I've gotten so accustomed to the 360 controller for certain titles that I think a PS3 controller would throw me off. If there is any victory to be had here one way or the other, I think it is marginal and would play a distant second to individual taste.

Coming next... still more?

Controller Showdown: Part 1

2008-11-15T19:44:00.000-08:00

Fritzkrieg got me thinking about which console has better controllers: the PS3 or the Xbox 360. My initial reaction to the issue was to declare that I prefer the 360 controller flat-out, but upon further reflection this isn't entirely true. Over the course of a few posts, I will share some observations on how the controllers differ and why it matters.

R2 vs RT

Consistent with the button naming convention started by the DualShock controller for the original PlayStation, the lower shoulder button on the right side of the PS3 controller (either the DualShock 3 or the regular Sixaxis) is called the R2 button. For the first time in the PlayStation line of controllers, this button has a great deal of analog range, which makes it consistent with the Xbox 360 contoller, which calls this same button the "right trigger" or RT.

Shoulder buttons have become a big deal. When they were popularized by the Super Famicom or North American SNES back in the early 90s, shoulder buttons were not widely used; some games flat-out ignored them, while others relegated them to seldom-used functions. Street Fighter II actually had use for 6 buttons, yet many players re-assigned the strong punch and attack actions to other buttons so as to minimize the use of the shoulder buttons. Simply put, the shoulder buttons didn't get much respect.

The N64, PSX, and Saturn continued to provide shoulder buttons, and the shoulder buttons continued to not be heavily used for the most part, even though the PlayStation decided to double-up the number of shoulder buttons to make four (L1, L2, R1, and R2). The tide began to turn when racing games like Gran Turismo and FPS games started using dual-analog functionality of the DualShock controller.

Normally when you use a gamepad style controller, your left thumb is on the D-pad and your right thumb is used to hit pad buttons. When you use a dual-analog controls, however, both thumbs are on analog sticks--so how do you hit pad buttons? The shoulder buttons solve this problem since you can hit then with your index fingers.

With the current console generation, the shoulder buttons have become some of the most widely used buttons on the controller--particularly the R1/RT button. The reason for this is simple: R1/RT is the gas pedal for most racing games and the gun trigger for most FPS games. There are notable exceptions to this rule (the default for gas in Gran Turismo 5: Prologue is still X), but you'll probably find that when you're playing modern console blockbuster titles, your right index finger is used a lot.

So which does a better job--the 360 or the PS3? I've found that the outward curved design of the 360 controller is easier to grip, which makes it easier to hold down over extended periods and somewhat easier to get a range of input out of (eg. only holding it half-way down versus holding it all of the way down). By comparison, I've heard comments that the PS3 R2 button feels "mushy," and this is fair to say.

In this category, I would award my preference to the 360 controller, but there is a trade-off: I find that the 360 controller's outward curved triggers wear on my index fingers after prolonged play. This is one factor (and not the only one) that contributes to the 360 controller tiring out one's hands during a marathon gaming session.

Coming up: talk about the analog sticks, vibration, motion sensors, and weight.

Sunny Tried Halo 3

2008-11-14T15:24:00.000-08:00

Jeepers, Friday already! Time flies...

Fritzkrieg was over for some gaming last Sunday, and he, Sunny, and I ended up playing three player Xbox 360 games. We warmed up with some Geometry Wars 2 before putting in some time with Castle Crashers. Following that, I decided that we should try some 3-player Halo 3 deathmatch.

Two minutes into the fight, Sunny was bored. It seems that nothing could be more tedious for her than pointing and shooting at things, so she occupied herself for several more minutes with exploring the level and literally looking to see if there was any fun to be had at all. She didn't find anything satisfactory.

Afterward I found myself wondering what sets Halo 3 so much apart from the likes of Castle Crashers or World of Warcraft. Is shooting at things that much more tedious than beating them with a stick or zapping them with a spell? Then I realized that the co-operative aspect of it was missing. In both Castle Crashers and WoW, we are playing as a team to beat up other guys, rather than fighting among ourselves.

I did once get Sunny to play--and briefly enjoy--Unreal Tournament 2004. It was a match where she, Matt, and I were playing together on a team against bots, and we were playing CTF. Sunny's comment at the time was that it was rather like Warsong Gulch, but with shock rifles.

Given that, one might think that I could get Sunny into other co-op FPS experiences like, say, Gears of War. No dice, though. The co-op factor helps, but ultimately Sunny wants something... I dunno, cute and kinda girly, I guess. Castle Crashers and WoW qualify. GoW is a shameless testosterone fest.

The next time I get Fritzkrieg, Matt, and myself together, I want to try the Halo 3 thing again--without subjecting Sunny to it. :) I only have three controllers anyway. Matt is the biggest FPS fan among us, but like any true FPS fan, he shuns the console variety in favour of PC games. I expect that he'll resist playing Halo 3 for exactly this reason, and I've figured out what to say in response:

Less QQ, more pew-pew.

Remebrance Day, Mirror's Edge, WotLK: Day 1

2008-11-13T14:22:00.000-08:00

I try to take note of Remembrance Day each year, as I feel that it is important to honor the memory of soldiers in various conflicts throughout history. In years past I've often set time aside to play something WW II themed, and this year was no different: I logged a total of 7.6 hours of Day of Defeat: Source on Nov 11th, according to my Steam community page. This would have been a satisfying way to mark the occasion in itself, but I managed to top that by finally convincing Matt to partake of DoD, which lead to him becoming a fast convert. He tells me that he plans to play DoD regularly from now on.

Between Day of Defeat: Source, Gears of War 2, and Wrath of the Lich King, I had just enough time to squeeze in an hour of Mirror's Edge. I've heard that it's very short, but that doesn't bother me so much--the game is very good, perhaps even excellent. It's an immersive, cinematic experience with a novel visual style and solid gameplay mechanics. It may not be the kind of classic game that will be remembered decades from now, but for a seasonal hit, it is very satisfying. I need to play more of it before I can decide if there's anything about it that I really don't like.

Actually, as a quick aside, there is one thing that I don't like about Mirror's Edge: the writing. It's easy for me to forget that the writing is even there because, like Battlefield: Bad Company or Gears of War 2 before it, I'd given up on the writing in Mirror's Edge before I'd even started with it. The dialogue is generally painful in the few spots where it isn't bland, and the story arc in general does not aim to be very challenging. I was both taken aback and shaken out of my suspension of disbelief at one point during a cut-scene where one of the characters stops to explain (obviously for the benefit of the player) what the legend of Icarus is. A note to the game directors: fans of the game who are gripped by the story and don't get the reference to Icarus will look it up--don't insult the intelligence of everyone else by spelling it out.

So, Wrath of the Lich King. 'Tis a big deal. Sunny and I lined up at the local EB Games for the midnight release, which went smoothly and was fairly quiet. When we got home we played for a couple of hours and powered through many quests in the Howling Fjords. Unfortunately, I need to work today, or I'd be playing right now. :) I don't know if there's really much to say about WotLK. It's WoW, it's more of the same with a lot of new stuff, and it's totally fucking awesome. Even the mere intro movie blows me away.

So sorry, Little Big Planet and Gears of War 2. I'll be back for you someday.

How To Fix World of Warcraft Config on Mac OS X

2008-11-05T21:41:00.000-08:00

I just ran into a little trouble with World of Warcraft on Mac OS X. Sunny and I have separate user accounts, but mine has admin privileges and hers doesn't. (Actually, I'd feel better if neither account was an "admin" and there was a separate root account entirely.) What Sunny found was that WoW wasn't saving her Interface Options configuration, such that if she enabled Auto Loot, for example, it would be turned off again the next time she started WoW.

Finding information about this issue on the web was difficult. There are more articles out there discussing how to run WoW on Ubuntu than talking about Mac OS X issues. I even managed to find a thread where some Windows Vista users were having the same issue while running WoW with a non-admin user.

It didn't take much digging around to figure out where WoW writes it's config files in Mac OS X:

/Applications/World\ of\ Warcraft/WTF/

There's a simple Terminal command that you can use to make all of the files in this directory write-able for all users:

chmod -R a+w /Applications/World\ of\ Warcraft/WTF/

Having made this change, I now find that Sunny's user can save config data. She's still not able to install patches, though, but I won't try to tackle that issue here.

Game Meanderings

2008-11-03T10:26:00.000-08:00

There are a few people at work who know enough about me that they occasionally ask me what I've been playing lately in the hope of hearing some kind of amusingly esoteric answer. Once it was Disciples II, once it was Barkley Shut up and Jam Gaiden, once it was Daisenryaku VII, once it was Castlevania: Lament of Innocence, once it was X3: Reunion, and once it was IL2: Sturnovik. Those are all since the start of 2008. One time I answered with something completely mundane like Mercenaries 2 and drew a decisively disappointed reaction.

Yesterday was one of those glorious "random gaming days" that helps to solidify my reputation as somebody who plays a lot of games seemingly at random. There's not much rhyme or reason to what I choose to play--I just get a gaming itch that needs to be scratched, and sometimes it leads me in chaotic directions.

Things started out innocently enough with a desire to play Team Fortress 2, which I did for the better part of an hour. I had a great time playing primarily Soldier and Medic, with occasional forays into Demo and Heavy. When I had had my TF2 fill, I briefly considered playing some Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, or Unreal Tournament 3, but something a little less common caught my eye.

It is strange for me to contemplate now that although I was a total addict of id Software games back in the mid 90s, it wasn't until later that I was old enough to afford copies of most of them. As a consequence of this, for the longest time the only id Software games I had were copies of Quake, Quake II, and Quake III: Arena without any of the expansion packs. When the id Super Pack was released on Steam, I officially filled in all of the blanks.

Because of this, I happened to have a copy of Quake III Team Arena kicking around that I'd never actually played. And so it came to pass that yesterday I had my first duel against Fritzkrieg, the Q3A bot that is, not my buddy who goes by the same alias. Although the graphics are dated and the gameplay feels awkward now that I'm accustomed to more modern FPSes, Q3A has aged well and I probably could have played that for the remainder of the day if I'd really wanted to.

World of Warcraft interjected for a little bit and then I took a break. I'm pretty sure I also played Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection on PS3... or was that the night before? I remember contemplating Dead Space at one point, but I ended up playing GTA IV instead. Then Fritzkrieg came over and the Little Big Planet started.

LBP would have dominated the remainder of the day, and for Fritzkrieg it did, but at some point I got tired and passed the controller off to Sunny. I then decided to fire up some old SNES games.

I nearly started playing F-Zero but quickly switched to Donkey Kong Country (and got my ass handed to me by the barrel canyon stage). Following that was a fair sized helping of Super Mario All-Stars, which segued into a taste of Seiken Densetsu 3, and I finished off the night with a bit of Chrono Trigger.

Days like that make it hard to go to work in the morning.

Little Big Planet - Day 4

2008-10-31T23:28:00.000-07:00

Only now is LBP starting to lose some of its awe and wonder on me, and what's left is still a very worthwhile game--particularly as a creative outlet or a party experience. Sunny has finally warmed up to online play and asked me to set up a keyboard for the PS3 (it's not much of a setup, really: plug in pretty much any USB keyboard and it'll work auto-magically).

An important detail that I forgot to mention about the God of War level in my last post is that it involves some gratuitous violence. At one point a prisoner begs you not to kill him, but you can't progress past that point in the level until you've dragged his cage over to an open, flaming pit and dropped him to a gorey doom. This gruesome endeavor is made all the more absurd by the cutesy general atmosphere of LBP, which does not let up even in such situations.

The viral nature of LBP became clear to me when Sunny grouped up with a random goof online this evening, and they proceeded to share entries from each other's "Hearted" (favorites) lists of online levels. Sure enough, Sunny had the other player running through the God of War themed level with her.

In other news, I was playing WoW last night, trying to get the Anti-Undead armor sets for the Scourge Invasion event. All in all I took out six rare mobs and, being alone, collected all six drops of the pants. Two of them were plate, two were leather, and two were mail. Needless to say, as a Priest, I was frustrated by this turn of events. I want that gear for grinding Argent Dawn rep in Stratholme and Scholomance.

Video Games Live, LBP Day 2

2008-10-30T15:35:00.000-07:00

The Video Games Live concert last night was excellent--better than I expected, even. One thing that I wasn't prepared for was the PAX-like atmosphere of the event; it was crowded with the same kind of gamer mentality. In hindsight I should have expected that, but I was anticipating a more typical concert experience. Sunny and I were glad that we went.

Now that the Little Big Planet servers are back online, Sunny and I got to experience some of the community content. One particularly impressive level was a God of War themed one that Sunny played. It was so high quality that it could have been a level that shipped with the game, and there's no way that somebody created that since LBP's release unless they were in the beta or they're somehow professionally involved with LBP.

Sunny found online play to be too high latency for her taste, and I don't know if the bottleneck is more on the server side or if it's my wireless network at home that's the culprit. Sunny has obviously been spoiled by the high quality online experience of WoW. :)

I did find that downloading levels goes quickly, and it's nice that when one gets stuck in the single player Story mode (which is likely to happen), one can jump online and explore the user submitted content.

On a different note, I've been reading a bit about Fallout 3 and have decided that I need to pick up a copy at some point, however I'm pretty swamped with other stuff so that might not be anytime soon. I haven't decided yet whether it will be an Xbox 360 copy or a PC copy, but I'm leaning towards PC--perhaps even Steam. Speaking of Steam, I've already pre-ordered Left 4 Dead and I've been tempted to order Empire Total War. Steam is hotter than usual lately.

Little Big Planet - Day 1

2008-10-29T11:00:00.000-07:00

Finally picked up LBP yesterday. Sunny and I started playing around 7 pm, had a short break for dinner, and played pretty much until midnight. I went to bed. Slept in, found out Sunny had pulled an all-nighter to play more LBP. She was still playing when I left for work.

We couldn't connect to the LBP online servers last night; I assume that the heavy traffic is causing or exposing technical difficulties on their end. We also toyed around briefly with the tools for creating levels, but we were mostly too impatient to stick with it and do much. The level-building experience so far has been very reminiscent of Gary's Mod: it's very easy to do hilarious things, but requires practice and patience to create something of lasting appeal.

LBP so far has reminded me of just how dormant the "platformer" genre has been. It is fully worthy of the legacy left by classics like Mario Bros., Sonic, and Wonder Boy. You've probably heard ad-nauseum by now about how fantastic the multiplayer experience with LBP is, if not experienced it first-hand, but I'll reiterate it here: Sunny and I had many moments of laugh-out-loud comedy, reverant wonder, and edge-of-your-seat drama while playing LBP last night. The experience provided by LBP is right up there with Portal; it is a perfect game.

Video Games Live is playing a concert in Vancouver tonight, and Sunny and I have tickets. We'll probably manage to squeeze in some more LBP as well; it's the first video game in what seems like ages that we've been able to play together apart from Castle Crashers and the ever-present World of WarCraft.