Wednesday, April 21, 2010

What, you haven't heard yet?


The cool kids are all over at http://www.corruptedsave.com, reading about cool stuff like Splinter Cell: Conviction.

Friday, April 16, 2010

No Review for this Week


Gone Gamin'

And working on getting this blog moved to a different solution.

Friday, April 9, 2010

Review: League of Legends (PC)

League of Legends (LoL) by Riot Games is basically a new iteration of the Defense of the Ancients (DOTA) mod for WarCraft III. LoL is actually free to play, with the revenue stream being from micro-transactions in the game’s store. I really enjoyed my time I spent in LoL’s beta, and when the game was fresh playing in the matchmaking was pretty good until I reached a certain level where the ratio of decent players to complete scum diminished to a point where LoL was no longer any fun. Hearing about Monday Night Combat from PAX East reminded me that I had LoL installed, so I loaded it up to give it another spin.


Funny Money Doesn't make a Game more Fun, or even Funny.

Updating the client after a few months of inactivity wasn’t a great experience, particularly as one of the patches got stuck in a loop of updating that utterly broke the install. Riot’s support forum basically advocates uninstalling the game and reinstalling. You really do get what you pay for, and this is also indicated by the central game server for LoL, which is incredibly laggy and is a source of major criticism on the official game forums. Without fail, I will also get disconnected from PvP.net, LoL's battle.net-like interface, with a message that I will not be able to "end or receive messages." This has persisted since the beta, which is quite humorous.

With the client reinstalled and up to date, I was ready to get into a game. LoL games typically last about 30 minutes, and during that time players assume the control of one hero from a zoomed out, isometric perspective. The hero starts out rather weak, and gradually earns experience and gold for killing enemy AI soldiers, players, and neutral monsters scattered about the map. Each hero has a unique ability-set which increases their power and effectiveness as ability points are earned and spent. Similarly, heroes have six gear slots which can hold vital weapons, armor, and potions. The ultimate goal of LoL and similar games is to push past the enemy defenses and obliterate their base.

One of the saving graces of LoL is that there is a “practice mode” where players can make their own games outside of the matchmaking functionality, and bots are available to fill player spots. The downside of these practice matches, besides being incredibly easy and not yielding points after a daily limit is reached, is that the experience and influence points that are earned are reduced in comparison to what can be earned in the matchmaking games. These points that I’m talking about are LoL’s major innovation to the DOTA model of game-play, in that the player’s profile is earning experience points with wins and losses. With these points, the player gets skill points to spend in three different stat trees to further enhance their heroes.



Persistent Talents, one of LoL's Real Innovations for its Genre.

Additionally, the player also gets access to spells that have long cool-downs and have functions like helping the hero make an escape or fortifying tower defenses temporarily. Influence points are how the player can get access to new heroes without spending real money to do so, and can also be spent to purchase runes, which are yet another way to enhance hero stats.

The practice mode is my preferred way to play LoL these days. As is usually the case, video of a game in action does more justice than words, so a small clip of game-play with some bots can be found below.



Here's me PWNING some Stupid Bots.  It's actually pretty fun.

If that was a “real” game, I would have been metaphorically chewed up, spit out, and then defecated on in the game, by players on both teams. I will be surprised if youtube comments to this video wont backup that sentiment. I don’t know what the deal is with DOTA and its games it has inspired, but they have the absolute worst gaming communities I’ve ever seen, and I play everything. Since I’m trying to keep this blog relatively professional, I can’t even begin to accurately display just how scummy and vile the community surrounding LoL and similar games really are. Kids with cracking voices playing unhealthy amounts of FPS games seem downright civil next to many of the players of these games. The thing is that I think the way that these games are designed encourages their anti-social behavior.

The first issue is that dying to an enemy player makes them stronger. After a few deaths a sizable advantage emerges that cannot be easily overcome as the person repeatedly dying has “fed” the opposing team experience and gold. This effectively leaves little room for mistakes on the part of the players.

Second, the open means to achieve the end of the game is problematic. I’ve had armchair generals telling me that my build order was dumb when I was outperforming them in the game. I’ve had enemies complaining that my “backdoor” tactic of attacking unattended towers was a “scrub” move that would never work in “pro games,” when clearly we were all in a match-making Pick-up Game (PUG) that was nothing close to a truly competitive match. Everyone has their own opinion, and even in the face of irrefutable evidence like victory, their opinion is better than yours. Though it is amusing to watch some of these LoL players ultimately insult themselves for losing to “scrub” strategies performed by a terrible player like myself, it really gets tiresome and is detrimental to the core gaming experience.

Not that Riot Games really cares. Just looking at their business model of selling playable heroes and hero skins for exorbitant amounts of money that would make Microsoft Xbox LIVE Avatar marketers blush is enough to show that LoL isn’t targeting an educated, let alone intelligent, base of gamers. League of Legends would be a great game for LANs if there was no grinding or pay-to-play mechanics involved beyond just buying a disc with all the content on it and available. Unfortunately, LoL is just mediocre.



Hmm... Still looks like a Ripoff even with Pretend Money.

As this quirky genre expands its tendrils into other styles of gameplay, like first-person shooters as Monday Night Combat seems to be doing, it will be fun to watch the evolving discussions. Currently, there’s no set name for this genre that encompasses DOTA, LoL, and the latest entry Heroes of Newerth, as various forum threads and even Wikipedia discussion pages capture. As a fan of general chaos, watching all this “meta” strife is incredibly satisfying as the game developers and their rabid zombie fans try and push their ideal label for marketing, be it Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) or RTS Arena, on everyone else. Hopefully Monday Night Combat (if it comes out for PC) will prove to be a better experience all around, with a community that I can accurately portray in good company.

Friday, April 2, 2010

Review: BioShock 2 (PC)

BioShock 2 is an interesting game. Originally I wanted to record audio diaries similar to what can be found in the game, but I had other stuff going on and didn’t quite get the time that I wanted to devote otherwise for that project. So in some quantum splinter universe, this review could be considerably cooler and/or funnier. Oh well. I played the game for around 18 hours on the hard difficulty. Screenshot of my video settings can be seen below:

Graphical Settings

In terms of combat BioShock 2 (BS2) is pretty fun, but it is taken way too far. One stage in particular, Dionysus Park, basically existed for the transparent purpose of killing splicers and defending little sisters. In the 18 or so hours I clocked in on the hard difficulty this felt like a slap in the face after a few minutes of the level.

Rapture is as Creepy and Ideologically Polarized as Ever

This was particularly painful because the story was otherwise really good and the other levels didn’t feel nearly as forced in this regard. The core story of BioShock 2 involves family matters, more so than the first game did, and the relationship seems much more… healthy as well. Thematically, this family bond that’s presented in BioShock 2 was a good design decision as so many other games ignore this important and prevalent facet of being human. The statement that was so strongly made in BioShock when the player comes face to face with Ryan was incredibly mean-spirited and negative, and it really resonated with me. But BioShock 2 makes a similarly heady statement, if not with a more subdued voice. Instead of making me want to turn the game off, put my controller down, and take a shower though, BioShock 2’s message was positive, redeeming, and made my eyes a wee bit watery from emotional impact. Few games can effectively manage this well, and that a sequel could do it when it seemed like a cheap money grab really took me, pleasantly, by surprise.

The meager choices from the original BioShock, in how one deals with little sisters or reacts to mortal character NPCs, are back in BS2; in terms of the game-play these choices are just as stale. However, the “good” ending that I received felt much more rewarding and involved than the montage of distant scenes in the future that were the extent of BioShock’s endings. Even though it really boils down to almost superficial differences in presentation and detail, I was nonetheless impressed by this game again.


BioShock 2's Continuation of the Original's Reliance on Theme is Great 

Another thing that BS2 blindsided me with was that, except for its narrative and visual style, BioShock is otherwise pretty forgettable in regard to game-play mechanics. So much so in fact that to save my life I couldn’t begin to explain which weapons or plasmids are even new to BS2, or how any previously existing ones have been modified, save the wrench being exchanged for the drill. As fun as BioShock was, only so much of it was actually unique in terms of what it had to offer, and BioShock 2 is no departure in that regard. You go around and take care of bad guys, run errands for people you need cooperation from, and harvest resources to make you more powerful. The plethora of means that the BioShock games provide the player doesn’t change the ends. I may be spouting heresy here, but I think this point is worth considering, especially when a game like BioShock can garner so much devotion just for having thoughtful themes (the likes of which are studied in English literature) ingrained in it. If more games are treated like art instead of Hollywood blockbusters I wonder if that wouldn’t automatically make games better?

Glitch-wise, BS2 gave me quite a few headaches. There was an issue where I couldn’t get my key re-mappings to stick so I had to go in and manually edit a config file. After I did that, in-game prompts didn’t update to display to correct keys which was annoying, and the re-scavenge key to reload the loot on corpses never did work properly for me. Lastly, BS2’s integration with Games For Windows LIVE caused me serious grief as I couldn’t get the game updated properly; you can read more about that experience here.

After having completed BioShock 2, I’ve been having fun with some of the controversy surrounding it. I really think that BioShock 2 would have benefitted from having controller support, especially with the use of guns in the right hand and plasmids in the left. The kicker here is that your mouse buttons are then flipped by default, and when you’re playing many games at once like I tend to, using a fire key on the rightmost mouse button for one game is going to mess me up. With triggers there would have been no issue, and that’s what the game felt designed for. No inclusion of controller support is really just sheer laziness on the part of 2K.

There’s also been some on-disc DLC for BioShock 2. Whatever, I’ve beaten the game, enjoyed a good story, and I’m just not interested right now in going back to BS2. It’s really too bad and it’s not really 2K making a show of good faith for their customers, a sizable portion of which seem to think that BS2 doesn’t even really deserve to exist. I initially thought this same way, but then considered just how bad of an opinion it is. I’m tired of cliff-hangers, and I’d like to see more definitive endings to games. As such, I don’t want to see any franchises punished for taking this approach. With the story that BioShock 2 has to tell, I won’t make the assumption again that something doesn’t need to be revisited.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Review: MAG (PS3)

Zipper Interactive’s PS3 exclusive, MAG, proves that being a brick in the wall can be fun. While I haven’t gotten my “character” to level 60, I did get to level 25 with about 20 hours of total game time. Out of three factions, I went with Western European founded Raven Industries, which for whatever reason was based in South America. I settled on Raven because they focus on “technology” and seemed like the least popular faction, which to me translated to shorter queue times. What’s really interesting is, short of making a new account or something, your character is basically married to the faction you choose. When your character reaches level 60 you can then make an “alt[ernate]” character in a different faction. Please forgive all the MMO terminology in this article for I assure you it’s quite apt despite MAG not having a monthly fee.

I think I’m probably in the minority, but I really like the setting and visual design of MAG. Conceptually, I think putting the focus on private military companies (PMCs) was a really smart decision on the part of Zipper. While there are, of course, nations in proximity to where the different companies are operating, there are no actual ties that the player gets stuck in. It’s pretty interesting hearing French, British, and Polish speaking players in a game that is based in our world but transcends current geopolitical issues; this works as every character is effectively a mercenary. Unique aesthetic then, of which each PMC can claim, can be more influential in drawing a player than nationality or ideology. At the same time, MAG can sidestep any potential controversy because the soldiers are removed from any real-world conflicts and are instead killing other mercenaries.

I went ahead and recorded a load of video for MAG and decided to try and narrate one round of the 256 player game-mode, which lasts for about 30 minutes on average. The first part of this narration can be seen below, and the other three parts can be found as video responses. If you just want to see some of the game-play, watch the first part until you get bored. But if you’d like to see what makes MAG really unique, watch most of the whole thing.

Let's Play MAG

Zipper’s approach to the player-character is probably one of MAG’s biggest limitations, and it’s really strange given the actual setting of the game. If every character is a mercenary: why isn’t quitting one employer and taking your collected experience to another faction that your friend is playing on an option in MAG? Creating a new character from scratch is almost painful too as there is so much character progression in the game, to the point that all weapons outside of the standard issue sniper rifle, assault rifle, machine gun, and pistol are unlocked with skill points. By the time you have enough experience to obtain a final tier rifle with a good scope and some kind of stabilizer you don’t really want to give it up. Add leadership points to the equation, which are earned by leading squads and are essential to assume command over greater units of men in the larger battles, and clearly it’s not a contractual obligation or love of a faction that ties a player to it but artificial limitation. Admittedly though, after all this build up and explication, if you’re a lone wolf like me none of this really matters because you can join a faction and play on with no conflicts.

What is a problem to me though is a player’s role in the battles, which feel like actual warzones thanks to the sounds, level designs, air strikes and mortar shells coming down on your head, and players parachuting onto the field in the distance. My predilection in most first-person shooters is to adopt the role of a sniper as I love picking off guys at extreme range. This works really well when trying to protect an objective like a control point where players have to stop, drop their weapons, and pull out some kind of PDA for a few seconds. Where it doesn’t work is trying to take an objective, particularly in a building that is being defended vivaciously by the opposing team.

Each character gets five load-outs that they can save and edit as they see fit, and when respawning can select a different load-out, so in theory it’s possible to change your role on the fly. Starting weapons though are just that, and it’s hard to compete against somebody (or multiple enemies) who are specialized, or spec’d, for a combat role your character is not. As a result, I had to make the decision to respec my character from a sniper to a “rapid assault,” automatic rifle-toting soldier. Given the fact that my assault rifle is pretty accurate at range, I can sometimes out-shoot snipers, which is kind of depressing in just how much more versatile my current character is. Being at the front line now, there are plenty of easier and unobstructed shots (something that makes finding good sniper spots difficult), objectives to take, and plenty of other guys to revive for effortless experience. As I already have the best available assault rifle at level 25, I’m sure that I could get the top sniper rifle before 60, but now I’m not sure that I’d want to since aside from extreme range lethality, the sniper role just doesn’t really have anything to offer me.

As a sniper though, there were more than a few times when I got killed at significant distance by somebody, usually a SVER soldier, with a heavy machinegun. This continues to happen after the most recent patch. Obviously, I think Zipper still has some balancing work to do.

The maps, particularly the 256-player ones, are pretty good. Each one feels lived in with natural looking places to take cover. There are plenty of things to fight over, like motorcades that spawn vehicles, or anti-aircraft guns that prevent planes from flying overhead or helicopters moving in. As a result, the strategy of battle can fluctuate from instance to instance, which is nice because sometimes it’s possible to capture burnoff towers while ignoring the bunkers where enemies spawn from, while in other games said towers are the focus and the bunker becomes a good lynchpin for the attackers to take out. This variability in tactics is good because the 12 maps or so that are in MAG do start to feel worn out. A common subject of discussion in the game chatter is whether or not new maps or coming, and speculation on just how committed Zipper is the future of MAG, which is a bit disconcerting to hear so early in the game’s lifespan.

Rolling off the subject of chatter, I really like the MAG community. There are, as always, the occasional jackasses to be found, but the squad can actually vote troublemakers out of the game. Admittedly, the lack of an included headset with the PS3 probably helps weed out most of the jerks who advertise their defective personal nature out of simple convenience otherwise. I suspect the design of MAG has something to do with this too. There is always an objective to attack or defend, and in the bigger games if you are screwing around odds are good that a decent number of enemies will seize the opportunity to drop you. Instead of wasting time corpse humping a downed player, the more prudent action is to quickly shoot them in the head or knife them so that they can’t be resuscitated, which will after a certain number of times actually assign the player with a trophy called “angel of mercy.” MAG is constantly challenging and rewarding players for actually playing the game, and as such most players are focused, on task, and not an annoyance.

I would be remiss to not mention the few glitches I’ve encountered in MAG. The most common I experienced was shooting and seemingly having my bullets blocked by invisible walls between rails. Aside from this and some ragdoll corpses fritzing out, I didn’t really experience any significant problems until I turned my PVR on and started recording. Since the new patch I’ve been getting dropped from servers quite a bit without losing my internet or PSN connections. By far the worst error was getting revived into a piece of geometry with no means to get out. If I had a grenade perhaps I could have performed a suicide as solution to the problem, but I didn’t and instead had to wait for an enemy to come and finish me off. I couldn’t have asked a teammate to do me in as team-killing results in lost experience points, which under normal circumstances is a very good thing. All in all though, this was a nasty glitch that’s only come up once, and otherwise MAG has been a fairly stable experience.



Unexplained disconnects are terrible...

...but getting stuck in level geometry is worse.

I’m really enjoying MAG, but it’s a bitter-sweet prospect. I paid $60 for it, but I have no idea how long the servers hosting these huge games will be up for. Given that Zipper has already announced SOCOM 4 and with no future plans revealed for MAG, it’s hard not to feel like they’re ready to just move on. With no single-player, the online play is all MAG has to offer, which is disheartening because the game-play is so fun. If MAG were a PC game with the option for third-party servers this would be a non-issue, and I can’t really figure out why MAG is on the PS3 to begin with except that Sony wanted it. 256 players in a map, even with the map being instanced to an extent, is a pretty ambitious undertaking for a video game, let alone for something spinning in a console. But Zipper somehow managed to make it work, and they designed a system of play that puts PC MMOs to shame frankly. Nobody has to bark about “DKP Minus” because all of the tasks are clear and achievable. If something isn’t working stubborn leaders can be booted out, and if things go really bad the games only last between 20-30 min. depending on game-type. It’s really weird to be typing this out, but MAG actually makes raiding fun, which is something I’ve never felt about any other massively multiplayer game.

UPDATE: After writing this review but before I could get it published Zipper recently announced that free DLC in the form of 3 new guns is coming. Awesome: I’m thrilled to see that there will be some support from Zipper yet!

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Review: Halo 3: ODST (Xbox 360)

Halo 3: ODST is Bungie’s attempt to move away from the traditional Halo formula with baby-steps. Featuring a slightly larger cast of named characters, ODST takes the player out of the Master Chief’s armor and places them into the roles of slightly more conventional soldiers with a smaller-scale objective than saving Humanity from certain extinction. In equal parts of remarkableness and inexplicability, the game’s main character, “the Rookie,” is even less talkative than the Master Chief and even more one-dimensional while exploring a limited open-world and killing aliens as needed.


A representative clip of Halo 3: ODST's overall tone.

Atmospherically, ODST’s departure from vibrant, natural, colorful, light environments to a dark, muted, and abandoned city works quite well. A jazzy and somber tone to the more conventional music of past Halo games helps nail down the film-noir theme of ODST as the player roams the city alone trying to find and piece together various clues of what happened to his squad. Enemy encounters in the open-world are also paced slow enough to make the city feel more like a ghost town. Isolation is further underscored by the removal of a vocal Cortana-like companion for the player to give hints and explain what the next course of action should be.

This brings up a fun contradiction I find when evaluating ODST: the Rookie’s squad-mates all have distinct voices delivered by an all-star (science-fiction) cast and have varied personalities, with some slight character development occurring. The best character though is that of Virgil, the A.I. that handles the logistical operations of the city and has no voice of his own outside of manipulating the environment and setting way-points for the player to follow. Virgil’s primary involvement with the player is aiding them in finding audio clips of a side-story that occurred hours before the game proper during the invasion of the city, and of which Virgil is also a participating character. Had Virgil been as involved in the main game as he was in the audio clips ODST would have probably been closer to a great game instead of just being good. Despite this missed opportunity, Virgil is the only character I’d like to see appear in any type of a future game and I’d bring him along in my head over Cortana in a heartbeat.

As far as the side-story goes, I’ll be replaying ODST soon to finish the story as I crossed the “point of no return” in the game and couldn’t hunt down the remainder of clips. If you enjoyed the audio drama of the ILoveBees ARG prior to Halo 2’s launch, the story presented in ODST is definitely in the same vein, is just as enjoyable, and would justify the purchase of the game.

Adequate is probably a sufficient descriptor for ODST’s narrative though. When not playing as the Rookie and exploring the city, the player is participating in flash-backs from the perspective of one of the other squad-mates which feel more similar to previous Halo games. The problem is that while none of these characters, Rookie included, are Spartans like the Master Chief, they seem to perform near-identically. That none of the characters are defined by any game-play short of weapon load-outs diminishes their uniqueness. There’s a part where one of the squad members suffers an egregious wound, but instead of doing something interesting like making that character playable in a reduced capacity or to fulfill a different role in the operation at hand, this character just gets relegated to cut-scene dressing.

There is also a really lame choice that the player can make by either doing something specific in one of the levels or refrain from. Either action, or inaction, will result in a corresponding achievement. Aside from the gamerscore bump though, this has practically no impact on the game and feels tacked on and incomplete. But I guess it’s better than nothing and I’m interested to see if it doesn’t signal progress in the future.

That last sentiment is probably the crux of my thoughts on ODST in that ODST feels like a proof-of-concept that Bungie put on a disc. That Bungie dubbed ODST an expansion initially reinforces this view of the game, and given the fact that ODST is a suffix of Halo 3 and the design and relevance of the game I think it would be hard to argue against. While the multiplayer Firefight mode looks promising, there’s no online matchmaking for it which immediately cuts down its viability as a popular and accessible online game mode. With everything in mind, the value of ODST just doesn’t feel there at the $60 price-point that it was released at, and I’m really glad that I waited to pick ODST up as a part of Amazon’s black Friday sale last year. What ODST has done successfully, in addition to being a satisfactory game and selling another copy of the ODST soundtrack, is given me a glimmer of hope that Halo: Reach will be something more than a Halo title that has assimilated elements of Modern Warfare. I’d really like to think there’s something to this potential I saw briefly in ODST.

Monday, March 8, 2010

An Open Letter Regarding the "Teabagging" Bug in Halo: Reach

Wow, I was kinda joking in my earlier post about the lack of teabagging in the Halo: Reach beta trailer. But then a friend pointed this little nugget out to me from Kotaku. I guess the joke's on me. Anyways, I sent Bungie an email which you can read below if you're so inclined.

-----------------------------------------

Dear Bungie,

Please don’t fix your now infamous teabagging bug in Halo: Reach. Seriously, it’s really great that you guys can have a healthy office environment where your games can stay friendly and teabag moves are given and received in good spirit. Sometimes the rest of us can experience this at LAN parties and whatnot with friends and indeed, it can be a real hoot. But in case you haven’t noticed, Xbox Live is an experience far-removed from these more ideal situations where everyone is capable of getting along and having fun. In fact, one could go so far as to say that Halo, or nearly any other FPS, is the antithesis of a fun gaming get-together on XBL.

It seems like more often than not in any kind of a public match somebody will assume that their free XBL headset gives their ill-informed opinions enough value to be shared with everyone else. This alone makes the very idea of picking up a controller and playing a round or two of Halo 3 after a hard day of work seen like more trouble than it’s worth. But the voice chat is in some ways a necessary evil, and one that you don’t really have that much control over, so it can be tolerated.

Teabagging animations, on the other hand, are just not excusable at this point in XBL’s life-cycle. It’s like giving a dog a big bag of cat poop: you know that the dog just doesn’t have the self-control to not eat it. I understand that you guys have to make money, and that frat boys and kids with rich parents make up a sizable chunk of your customer-base, but these people are going to buy your game no matter what. Look at many of their profiles and I bet all you’ll see are Halo game achievements. This is the “low-hanging fruit” in the truest sense of the word.

I love the gun-play in the Halo games, but it’s to the point now where I can’t convince anyone I know to invest in the series because of how tarnished the franchise is by its online community. For four games now, Halo players have been able to hone their skills to a point where the bar of entry is practically unreachable, and that many of these players will rub that fact in by means of teabagging and other acts of mean-spirited bravado is just a turn-off for many more mature, yet unskilled, players. You have the ability to step up to the plate now and show people who are turned off by Halo’s dark underside that you want to provide a better experience through more than just the game-play tweaks.

Or hell, leave the teabagging in. But give people an optional “bag-buster” loadout with a dead-man’s switch that, when they are teabagged will, instead of humiliate the dead player, show their killer getting blown up thanks to their own hubris. And after somebody dies to this two or three times in my game, if they’re on my team, give me the option to eject them from the game for wasting precious time not going after the objective at hand. Electrified armor would work just as well in this regard. I don’t know, you guys make the games, you come up with something better.

Please, give me a reason for people to buy Halo: Reach instead further excuses to shun it.

Thanks,
Matt

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Halo Reach Multiplayer Beta Trailer Looks Fishy



As cool as this trailer looks, I call bull. One minute and thirty-four seconds of Halo game-play without a single tea-bagging incident? Yeah, right.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

What's Wrong with Games For Windows Live

Problems: Could not log into Bioshock 2 Live Profile, could not update Bioshock 2 or Games For Windows Live, could not install games via Games For Windows Live.

Error Codes: Error Code 80080005 from Windows Update, Error Code 80131501 from Games For Windows Live Client, Error Code 2203 from Games For Windows Live Client.

Fixes: Checked/changed permissions on and took ownership of Windows profile Temp folder, Games For Windows Live folders, and C:\Windows\Installer hidden folder.

The real downside about PC games is the whole PC aspect of them. If you would’ve been keeping an eye on my brand new twitter feed, you’d know that I had some serious issues trying to play more Bioshock 2 over the weekend. So instead of a MAG review this week, which got a new patch and I want to put some more time into, I think I’m going to outline what I experienced, what I did to try and research the problem, and how I ultimately got things resolved.  For reference, I'm running Windows 7.

Games For Windows Live is a broken system in that it is integrated too deeply into the Windows operating system. As a result, my entire weekend was shot in terms of getting any decent gaming time in. My first indication that there was a problem was that loading Bioshock 2 as I normally did left me at the GFWL login popup indefinitely. I assumed that the problem was with the Live service or a broken download released by Microsoft and neither of which is unheard of. Boy did I assume wrong.

There was an update for the GFWL client in Windows Update that wouldn’t install, with an error message that there was probably something wrong with the package and to try again later. I let that one slide for about a day with no mention of a problem in the news circuit, twitter, and only isolated instances on the official and Steam forums for Bioshock 2. Afterwards it became apparent that something more was at work. User Dougamer on the Valve forum suggested launching Bioshock 2 outside of the Steam client, which I tried to interesting results.

First, Bioshock 2 loaded up fine and my Live profile defaulted to being offline. Signing in was possible and prompted me to download a title update, and then restart the game. Things were not working out my way though. The Bioshock 2 patch installer started up, but then I got error code 80080005.

My next step was to uninstall the GFWL client and install the latest version. I was almost surprised when it worked. I initiated downloads of Tinker and Batman Arkham Asylum which were then reported as being unavailable and I was instructed to try again later. After some googling I found another possible solution in other forum threads that referenced the same error code but for different aspects of Windows. The advice given consisted of there being a permissions conflict, conducting “startup repair,” and running Window’s virus scanning service. At this point, I was genuinely concerned about the health of my system that is normally in perfect health, so I did both of the latter actions.

As I had expected, there were no viruses afflicting my Windows Update abilities or anything to that end. As Microsoft programs utilize the “temp” folder, I reset the permissions on it and also just took ownership of the folder which was time consuming as everything under it was also included. The temp folder permissions/ownership fix actually allowed me to commence downloads of both Batman and Tinker though! Imagine my severe discontent when neither would install and gave me a new error code, 80131501. Since the permissions trick actually made headway, I checked the folders that GFWL used and applied the same trick to each of them. This allowed the installation to continue to a point where I actually got a reference to a useful log of what the next hang-up was and error code 2203.

“C:\Windows\Installer,” a hidden folder, needed to have the permissions fixed in the same way as everything else. When this folder was updated, both games installed correctly, and Bioshock 2 was able to update with no further issue. This whole saga probably took up close to twelve hours of my weekend, including complete system virus scans, which I will never get back. This is probably more hands-on time than I have spent with similar content-distribution systems like Steam and Impulse in the entire lifetime of those services. Similarly, I have never had a problem applying a patch to a game through Steam until this instance with Bioshock 2.

The only logical conclusion I can draw is that another Windows update, completely unrelated to GFWL/Bioshock 2, somehow messed up my permissions settings on select folders and subsequently broke a process that worked without incident up until then. Games For Windows Live is already an abstract and ambiguous enough platform without actual, invisible tendrils penetrating any Windows OS. Aside from sharing resources, I can’t fathom any reason why GFWL isn’t standalone in the sense that Steam is, and with no real benefits or advantages aside from smaller file sizes, the integration of GFWL into the operating system seems like nothing but a big headache when incidents like I experienced with Bioshock 2 are the end-result, especially with error codes that are shared across both the GFWL platform and the OS and cause unnecessary confusion as a result.

Additionally, the error codes are just too unclear and the Windows support too sparse to be of any real use in expedient problem solving. If installers and whatnot are not going to function out of the box, they should give a reason why and provide helpful information right off the bat and let the user get to playing games as soon as possible and having fun instead of a negative experience.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

No review this week so enjoy a short game-play clip instead!

Well, another week just rolls right on by as I've been thoroughly enjoying myself. Left 4 Dead has been a go-to lately, I finally unlocked my missing unit in Might & Magic, and I'm level 18 in MAG. Additionally, I started playing through Darksiders and Bioshock 2. I have to say that I feel utterly spoiled with the quality of games that have been assaulting my wallet since late October of last year, and there's only more on the horizon. Oh, and I ordered a Hauppauge HD-PVR as well, so I can start capturing stuff from my consoles too, but it's on back-order so I will have to wait.

I really feel bad for neglecting my second, renegade play-through of Mass Effect 2, which I want to finish up before writing a wall of text up on that game. But to be honest, after some technical hiccups, I am absolutely loving Bioshock 2 and really looking forward to seeing how the big daddy resolves Rapture's latest problem. As things stand now, I think I'll take a week off from publishing a review and have a relatively comprehensive MAG one ready for next week. For Bioshock 2, I feel inspired to take a different approach in how I present my thoughts on that game, and hopefully I can come up with a fun surprise.

My usual zombie-killing crew played a custom Left 4 Dead Campaign called "Die Screaming" that was put together really well, except that we broke it at the end. Video of the ensuing antics can be seen below.


It was jokingly suggested that I review all of the custom campaigns we've played, but I think it could be beneficial to note some of the really high-points that I had with quite a number of the maps that were fresh, innovative, and something Valve could stand to learn from. That might be a fun project when I get closer to the bottom of this stack of games next to me...

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Review: [More Like SPOILER-Filled Essay] Mass Effect (PC)

This review-essay hybrid is spoiler-heavy, because I don't think there can be meaningful discussion of Mass Effect otherwise.  If you have not yet completed Mass Effect do not read any further.  I am not your average Mass Effect gamer.  I played through the game multiple times to get the different permutations possible in the end.  On the Xbox 360 I ended up having four complete character saves, all of them an infiltrator, because I had so much fun with the game and was so excited about the prospect of the game’s choices being carried over into the sequel.  Of course, when the PC port came out with an improved user-interface, inventory system, and faster load times the entire Mass Effect package was soured by Bioware/EA’s DRM scheme which was complete with activation limits and no initial license-revoke tool.  Then Circuit City was going out of business and I got the game for $15.  My settings I recently played Mass Effect PC with, as well as time-played and my character build can be seen below:

My graphics settings for Mass Effect.

My total time played in Mass Effect near the end of the game.

How my Mass Effect character looked and was built near the end of the game.

As I am unabashedly biased in favor of Mass Effect, let me first open up with my criticisms of this game.  The effort that was put into level design is questionable much of the time, as often you’ll find yourself herding your Shepard and teammates of choice through the same “pre-fabricated” colony buildings and mine shafts.  Combat is literally hit or miss, with more of the latter as targeting enemies with skills is a challenge at best.  Enemies will also make insane charges or “fly-by” attacks that make no sense in terms of strategy, and come to think of it, your allies will sometimes fall into this pattern too.  Piloting the MAKO is a generous term to use because of imprecise driving controls, and having timed how long this takes, 4 min. and 30 seconds is way too long for a shield to recharge to full protective capacity.  Creating a realistic looking character seems much more difficult than it should have been, and it’s hard to get a good idea of how your character actually looks until you’re actually in the game and moving around.  There are all kinds of graphical issues, slow loading times and unbelievably long elevator rides, and problems that essentially make Mass Effect seem, in a word, sloppy.  From my last play-through I captured the following footage illustrating some of these annoyances.

Some of the easier to capture annoyances I had with Mass Effect.

A common complaint that I don’t share with many other people I know who played Mass Effect is that of the pacing, particularly with the sheer amount of quests that are given in the Citadel starting area and how overwhelming  that can be.  Maybe it’s just my completionist play-style that overtakes me when playing Bioware games, but I had no problem with a full quest log and new tasks around every corner.  Knocking quests out one at a time on the glorified space-station seemed quite achievable, and most if-not-all of said quests contributed to shedding more light on the masterfully created universe of Mass Effect.

Which is what really hooked me about Mass Effect: the vision of the Milky Way presented in Mass Effect turns out to be a fun, exciting, and unique galaxy to get immersed in.  Almost everything from the technology to the inhabitants has displayable thoughtfulness to it, which I would argue stands in stark contrast to other space operas I enjoy like Star Trek, Star Wars, or Farscape.  In these other sweeping science fiction visions, so much of everything is basically eye-dressing… ancillary and serving little to no purpose.  Thinking about how many throw-away races, anomalies, situations, and plots litter these different franchises really makes me appreciate the focus and attention to detail that each encounter in Mass Effect really has.

Where similar universes in scope to Mass Effect will try and explain themselves with encyclopedias or handbooks sold to the most ardent of their respective fans, the in-game codex was so sufficient that the official message board community anticipating Mass Effect 2 had a fair amount of discussion about the retcon that was made to ammo, or more specifically “thermal clips.”  For almost any other game that I can think of, most of the small “message board” segment of fans would essentially talk down such a change in lore to better suit game-play as an exercise in semantics at best and ultimately regard any complaints as a waste of forum space.  This point illustrates to me that is Mass Effect Bioware succeeded at creating a viable universe that even such a minor detail as how ammo is discharged is a) strongly relevant to game mechanics, and b) is willingly discussed to some degree by more than a fringe of already fringey group.

This is similar with the races introduced in Mass Effect as well.  While the total number of races introduced in the first game is small, I think this serves Mass Effect quite well.  Each race has purpose, meaning, culture, and history: enough so that I found myself relatively jarred me when a stereotype I formed was effectively broken, and with some frequency.  This is not to say that in all regards of Mass Effect that all races were created equal.  The most enigmatic of the races is probably the least humanoid in the form of the Hanar, which amount to little more than talking space squids.  If I was a writing a review of a Star Wars movie, that would probably be the greatest extent to which the Hanar could be portrayed, but this is Mass Effect.  I can tell you that the Hanar seem to be aloof when it comes to day-to-day activities but are deeply concerned about religious matters and worship a past civilization as gods.  Due to a side-quest, it became apparent the Hanar are evangelical to some extent, and I postulated (correctly I can argue, as it turns out from Mass Effect 2) that the Hanar had an imperial nature about them.

The other lesser-developed races of Mass Effect would be the Elcor and Volus peoples, who for the most part serve as little more than comic relief.  Conveniently, the lack of explication on these races is offered in their uniquely “shared embassy” on the Citadel space station, where the player learns that they are effectively discriminated against unfairly by the more powerful or influential of the sapient races.  While this explanation seems admittedly flimsy, that it exists at all is a testament to the attention to detail that Mass Effect was given, rather than many of the superficial constructs that Industrial Light & Magic, the Jim Henson studio, or whoever MGM uses put in front of the camera because, accurately in most cases, “they look cool.”

When, early in the course of Mass Effect’s story, the player learns that all sapient life in the galaxy is in grave danger, this realization actually carries some weight because the galaxy actually seems worth saving!  This value that can be attached to the setting gives the story of Mass Effect a credibility that few other video game yarns can match.  I can think of many examples of games that mocked a player’s choices, inadvertently or not.  Included in this list would be Doom 3, which gives the player a choice to call for reinforcements that would likely become possessed and then used as a vanguard for a campaign against Earth, or refuse to carry the action out.  Regardless, the transmission goes out.  Bioshock’s big twist was probably one of my favorite moments in gaming because it took the position that whenever the controller is in a player’s hand they have no choice.  Mass Effect’s story involves, instead, choices that fall into one of two categories: character development or plot-altering.

Character development choices are probably the more inconsequential of the two categories, and typically involve the player deciding whether to help an NPC out with a task or brush them off entirely, or the “tone” in which the player responds to a given circumstance that cannot be brushed off.  These choices at face value appear to contribute little to the overall story of Mass Effect and serve to provide the player the opportunity to shape their character’s temperament through their alignment while at the same time enhancing in some small way Mass Effect’s galaxy.  One of the memorable choices involves whether or not a mother should get her child genetically modified against the chance that it could die from the ailment that killed its father.  Compared to some of the plot-altering choices, this decision seems to be petty in comparison to the greater task at hand, but despite that is still an interesting predicament which, like any good science fiction, requires that the player actually stop and think about a question that we’re already seeing crop up with contemporary technology in the real world.  This is a fantastic example of how side-quests should be approached in all games, and what helps make Mass Effect stand out as a true work of art, even if most of the other side-quests are more in the realm of being forgettable.

The plot-altering choices in Mass Effect are much bigger in how they will (or can be seen as inferring to) impact the larger story of the game trilogy as a whole and have consequences.  Some of these choices are pretty obvious in just what will happen, like deciding which character will be left behind to die, or if the player will go to the trouble of trying to avoid killing infected colonists or write them off and shoot through them to get to the root of a problem.  Obviously, these feel like thinly veiled plot devices and don’t really foster the sense of freedom that true choice should.  The real exception here is the decision to either let the Rachni queen die, as a menace that was supposedly eradicated at great cost to the rest of the galaxy, or try to reverse the possible mistake that the attempted genocide could be interpreted as.  The situation really is thought-provoking as the outcome can possibly come back later to bite the player in the ass either way and the outcome is ultimately uncertain.  Is racial guilt for something humanity wasn’t even responsible for enough of a reason to risk a well-developed galaxy full of interesting characters that is already at peril?  Without the aforementioned value I attribute to Mass Effect’s setting this decision wouldn’t be worth this degree of reflection.

Mass Effect, like Dragon Age: Origins, hides the real story behind that of an impending menace.  The crux of Mass Effect is humanity’s ascendancy into the galactic stage, and the choices are not about the ends but rather the means.  To put Mass Effect into a real-world context a good historical example would be the European colonization of the Americas, which could have ended so differently if some key choices were examined with more scrutiny.  Progress is inevitable, but will the player choose conquest or coexistence for humanity?  This is the binary alignment system of Mass Effect, and much more than just choosing “good” or “bad” actions.

This decision isn’t as cut and dry as it may seem at face value, which is to Mass Effect’s credit.  While the setting makes the galaxy of Mass Effect as a whole worth saving, some of its inhabitants will seemingly go to any means necessary to prove they are not, and they do so in a realistic capacity for the most part.  Enter the Council, three representatives from the three most powerful and influential races in the game, and who hold Shepard’s leash.  These people are bureaucrats in the strongest sense of the word and will constantly criticize, second-guess, and be condescending to the player as they rush blindly toward the oncoming cliff of epic destruction.  Opting to save them in the end is one of the most difficult decisions I make in the entire game.  Given the Council’s past and present treatment of the Volus, Elcor, and Rachni, is supporting the status quo really a “good” action?  I find this amount of depth beyond simple right and wrong refreshing.

For all the reused assets and levels, there was some truly great level design in Mass Effect, which is crystallized in the final Citadel level.  When the trusty elevator breaks down and Shepard and friends say “fuck it” and start scaling the side of the building instead with blazing guns, that’s when the designers at Bioware recognized their game-defining flaw and addressed it.  Come to think of it, the MAKO crashing and burning, and being left behind is rather symbolic too.  That entire sequence redefined the game-play experience for me as I raced to stop Saren and had no clue what surprise was in store for me next around each sweet, perfectly placed corner.  I still get shivers thinking about that perfect level.

An improvement that I really found striking in the PC version of Mass Effect is how Demiurge Studios handled the security-bypasses and hacking, which was actually pretty fun compared to the unimaginative quick-time-event method that was employed in the Xbox flavor of the game, and even over what was employed in Mass Effect 2.

The entertaining bypass and decryption mini-game for Mass Effect in the PC version of the game.

I believe Wrex is one of the best characters I have had the pleasure to encounter in a video game.  He is brilliant because Wrex represents a potential future for the other characters in the game.  His people, the Krogans, fought a costly war for the bureaucrats of the galaxy and were repaid with betrayal that is effectively genocidal in nature.  Wrex is defeated, as are his brethren, and are stuck in their own culturally and biologically driven behavior to fight.  While Wrex is actually thoughtful enough to recognize that his people need to come together and try a different approach to actually survive, he himself isn’t above falling into the same cycle afflicting every other Krogan at the wrong end of Shepard & Co.’s guns.

Personal defeat makes Wrex’s evolution in the course of Mass Effect the most pronounced out of the entire cast.  He’s literally along for the ride, unlike anyone else on the Normandy.  His dialog is initially curt and to the point, but he starts dropping comments off-hand that practically have the player begging for more information, like the fact that he had previously met Saren before the events of the game started up.  As the player starts peeling their way deeper into Wrex, the surprising thing isn’t finding an observant mind with a sharp tongue to match his wit, but rather hope.  To prove that the journey is what really matters though, when Wrex finds a potential answer to cure the genophage, the respect that Wrex has in Shepard to set that hope aside and replace it with faith feels like it was actually earned and subsequently believable.  If the player for whatever reason chooses not to invest in Wrex, his abrupt and needless death is quite fitting in every way imaginable.

The other character that I really liked was Garrus, or Garrus as a clone of Saren as Saren appeared in the prequel novel Mass Effect: Revelation.  That Bioware put this character into the game was a clever move and Garrus serves as an effective foil to Wrex.  Where Wrex is, for a good part of Mass Effect, disillusioned, Garrus is all too eager to get the opportunity to serve the greater good at the expense of anyone who gets in the way.  That the player has the option to either foster this or try to mentor Garrus out of his natural predilection makes me ponder just how Garrus will fare at the end of the initial Mass Effect story arc.

A character that I think gets an unfair shake from many players is Ashley.  Yes, Ashley is xenophobic and more often than not will strive to put humanity’s interests above any other consideration, but she’s also a warrior poet with a family history that puts her philosophy into a context that can be defended to an extent.  It’s not like Ashley is some kind of loose cannon mutineer either, as the player can easily put Ashley in her place, so she’s at least willing to be a team player (unless that team consists of a manly Shepard with Liara and involves activities best left unmentioned).  In regard to the race-centered self-interests, while this is perhaps most pronounced in Ashley, it is far from being a unique characteristic for her even on the Normandy, let alone off the ship.  A paragon Shepard may in fact be one of the few examples of somebody even contemplating against this way of thinking that I can offer up, while everyone else either has prejudices or is neutral at best.

Ashley also provides one of the most classic sci-fi dialog segments in the game as there is a conversation about spirituality and a “higher power” that I really appreciated.  While many connoisseurs of video games disregard such notions as outdated hocus pocus and superstition, the fact is that historically some degree of spirituality has been rooted in the foundations of the human psyche and this element will likely continue to persist wherever we go.  The inclusion of this discussion in Mass Effect is just one more masterful brush-stroke on the part of the Bioware writing staff, and I find it amusingly ironic whenever somebody writes Ashley off as nothing more than a “Space Nazi.”

When it comes to criticism on a character, I have to agree when Kaidan comes up.  Unlike Ashley, I'll be a hypocrite here and sum Kaidan up, and that can be achieved with the word “Byronic.”  Where Ashley has some baggage, this seems to be all Kaidan can bring to the table; to be fair, I’m really not sure that, given his history, much more could have been done with him.  My girlfriend disagrees with my assessment though, because the damage that Kaidan has dealt with isn't readily apparent as it is with other Byronic heroes unless the player really tries to get a deeper understanding of him.  I never really thought about this type of hero being defined by how much attention they draw to themselves before, and it's a good point, and pretty remarkable that a videogame conversation enhanced how I look at character analysis.  That said, I have a hard time disputing my original assessment that Kaidan is a simple character, and in turn, I don’t really give Kaidan much consideration when Mass Effect tries to make me choose his fate on Virmire.

I will admit that Kaidan  does have one really compelling line.  If, after Kaidan confronts the player to make a decision between a romantic relationship with either him or Liara and the player chooses him, he smugly says something to the effect of “what, you think I’ve never been in the position to have to make a choice before?”  This makes me wonder if most of his talk wasn’t really just an act, but that alone wasn’t enough to dissuade me from thinking that Shepard losing Kaidan (and leaving Liara well enough alone) wouldn’t make for the more interesting story as it developed past the first game.

Speaking of Liara, I don’t really understand the fascination that some people have with this character.  Unless there is something alluring about awkwardness with family members or in social situations, or archaeology is really just that cool, I can kind of take it or leave it regarding anything involving Liara.  Maybe it’s just due to her being a somewhat exotic and incomprehensible humanoid, but bringing her along to off the Matriarch doesn’t seem as impactful as such a situation normally should, and I would expect her to express at least some anger at Shepard for the resulting events.  Where Wrex’s faith in Shepard’s line of reasoning absolutely makes sense, Liara’s same faith feels incredibly flimsy in comparison.  I don’t really want to say that Liara has all the backbone of a doormat, but it’s hard to argue anything else when she takes no issue whatsoever with Shepard wanting to keep her/his romance options as open and busy as possible, happily assuming that Kaidan rejecting a threesome means she is accepted.  Maybe with a little more real-world experience Liara will grow into somebody more defining.

Fan-favorite Liara misses Shepard's point.

Tali is another fan-favorite I don’t quite get, but she has a couple of things working in her favor.  The whole mystery angle in terms of her masked features can definitely pique the curiosity of the player, as can the whole vagrant theme and the persecution by almost everyone else of the Quarians as a whole.  As a character, Tali also serves nicely in the function of giving the player elucidation on the Geth.  There’s really not much more to say about Tali except that I was glad to see she would be returning in Mass Effect 2.

As video game antagonists go, Saren is really high up there for not only being an effective foil to Shepard, but being sympathetic as well.  The only reason the player has any room to really doubt Saren when he says that nobody stands a chance against the reapers is because he lied to the Council about his involvement on Eden Prime at the start of the game (and his actions with Anderson in the Revelation novel).  Otherwise, Saren has a valid point in that collusion with the Reapers could be the most beneficial action to take, especially as Saren possessed unique knowledge about them.  I did love having the ability to talk/goad Saren into taking what little action he had left and free himself from Sovereign’s control.  I really do wonder though if at any time during the development of Mass Effect the player could choose to be persuaded by Saren, and how differently the game could have turned out in that respect.

As things are though, I stand by my original assessment that Mass Effect is a great game despite the game-play working against it to a degree.  Thanks to a rich setting with nearly infinite possibilities, and a cast of interesting, truly human characters of which some aren't even human at all, I think Mass Effect is the sci-fi intellectual property to keep an eye out for in the foreseeable future.  Now if you'll excuse me, I need to start writing up my thoughts on Mass Effect 2!

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Review: Borderlands (PC)

In Borderlands for the PC by Gearbox Software, I have a level 43 soldier in a second play-through with a total playtime of 34 hours. Screenshots of what video settings I could get in one shot and of my save information are below:

The video settings I played Borderlands with.

My character playtime, level, etc.

As you can see, the menu is pretty reminiscent of what you'd see in a console game. That's pretty much because Gearbox just ported the game from one of the console versions and assumed it'd work if they compiled it to run on a PC and slapped Gamespy onto the backend. You can see how well that turned out in the following game-play video. 

Video of Borderlands Co-Op.  Names are blacked out to protect the innocent.

This is pretty ridiculous because Gearbox released a patch that supposedly fixed these issues on Feb. 2nd, 2010. Back to the drawing board for them I guess! Coupled with a subpar narrative in the loosest sense of the word, hidden options that need to be manually edited in the game's configuration files, and only displaying 4 of the possible 6 lines of weapon stats, it's a real testament to the core game-play of Borderlands that I haven't uninstalled it yet. 

One of the things that really irks me about gaming journalism is that while all the news outlets are apparently happy to keep giving Gearbox's DRM-infested DLC publicity, I don't remember seeing any reviewer talking about any of these issues. 

I wish I never bought this stupid game.

Sunday, February 7, 2010

What's had a massive effect on me lately

This week has been kind of crazy.  Last weekend I finished up a rushed playthrough of the original Mass Effect on PC so that I'd have a complete save to transfer over.  I ended up finishing somewhere during the wee hours of Saturday morning, Mass Effect was ejected, and Mass Effect 2 was installed and played for a short bit before I crashed.  Finished my first play-through of that over the course of the week, and Mass Effect 2 is definitely a worthy successor, and deserving of quite a bit of the praise that it's getting.  With Might and Magic on my mind, I also purchased Critter Crunch, by Capybara Games, on PSN and enjoyed that for a few hours.

Finally, I gave the new Aliens vs. Predator demo a spin.  That's a real head-scratcher Rebellion put out.  Multiplayer deathmatch only, and not even team deathmatch.  So as an alien, I'd get the drop on a predator, one-shot them, and then have another alien tail-stab me from behind; it was a disorientating experience.  I pre-ordered it because I'm going to give Rebellion the benefit of the doubt on this, but it should make for some good subject material either way.

My other purchase this week was MAG, the 256-player tactical-shooter MMO hybrid for the PS3 by Zipper Interactive.  The premise to the game seems interesting, as well as the player progression.  As if I didn't have enough other stuff to play!

I'm not sure what I'm going to run with this week.  It'll either be a review for Mass Effect or Borderlands, so let the anticipation begin.

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Review: Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes

My old Nintendo DS was probably my most played system for a while before last year.  Looking back at 2009, I tried some Professor Layton, which is fun, but slow-moving and something I feel no need to play for more than one or two puzzles at a go-through.  Otherwise, I went back to Brain Age and did the majority of the Sudoku puzzles.  To be fair, I did mess with Phantasy Star 0, but that’s really only a good game with other people and not in bed after hours.  I recently completed Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes by Capybara Games, and that cartridge really gave me a reason to recharge my DS.

Clash of Heroes is a turn-based puzzle strategy role-playing game.  The game-play of Clash of Heroes is intuitive and seems pretty simple, until you actually try and write it all out like I attempted.  To delete most of the paragraphs following this and just say, “Play the tutorials” because they demonstrate everything more than adequately enough would work, but this was a fun challenge so I’m going to stick with it.

The overall premise is that the player enters a “battle” against an opponent with a rectangular grid as a workspace.  Rows are 8 units wide and columns are 6 units deep.   Whoever goes first gets to take two actions during their first turn, and then each player gets 3 actions for each subsequent turn.  The enemy’s gate is up, or to put it less obscurely your units attack the enemy, whose own army is at the top of the screen.  Actions consist of moving bottom-most units to different columns, deleting units to move other units up or to free space in the column, or summoning more units.  Units must be “activated” to attack or perform abilities, or are otherwise “idle” and take up space.  Activated units cannot be moved while idle units can be, obviously. 

The tools at the player’s disposal are:
  • Throw-away common units: these are guys like foot-soldiers or archers.  Every faction gets three different kinds of these units.  Depending on a player’s strategy, all three can be taken and each has a unique color, one type can be taken and will appear across all three colors, or anything in between.   When three units of the same color are lined up vertically in a column they will “group” up and start charging up for a number of rounds until they will eventually cross into the other screen and damage enemy units or the enemy itself.  Three or more like units lined up horizontally in a row will form a wall that moves to the top of the player’s screen and will take damage from enemy units.

  • Mid-tier champion units: units in this category pack a bit more of a punch than the common units.  Depending on the faction, there are two to three types of this unit available.  Champions take up two column spaces and are one row wide.  Examples are stags that will hop over enemy walls or vampires that will heal the player for any damage they do.  Champion units will come in any color and require two common units lined up behind them to activate, with the two common units merging into the champion and freeing up the space behind. The player can have up to ten units of a champion type and will cost the player resources.  When a champion is destroyed before it activates it is gone and will need to be re-purchased.  A player can have up to ten units of a particular champion type.

  • High-grade hero units:  Like champions, hero units cost resources and will be diminished if destroyed before activation.  Heroes are fewer in number than the champions, with a limit of three to five units, and cost significantly more too.  Heroes are two column spaces long, two row spaces wide, and require four like-colored common units behind them to activate.  As with champions, when activated, the common units will merge into the hero unit.  Heroes range from grim reapers that, after 6 rounds, will kill the enemy player automatically if they just hit them to acid-spewing dragons that cut off rows of the field for a short period of time with their attack.
Units of a like color can be “linked” if they are set to attack in the same turn, and this gives them a slight damage boost.  Like units of the same color can be “stacked” if activated in the same column.  For example, a group of blue spearmen will attack in two turns.  Two blue spearmen are lined up behind them in the same column.  You could add one more blue spearman which would make them activate.  The new group would then merge into or “stack” up onto the old group, doubling their strength and still ready to attack in two turns. 

The campaign mode in Clash of Heroes took me about 27 hours to complete, and this is where any RPG aspects of the game come into play.  Story-wise, Clash of Heroes is on the cutesy-side of things but serves the game well by exposing the player to each of the five playable, uniquely themed factions.  Effectively, five teenagers survive an attack, are scattered across the fantasy world, and try to reunite with each other.  The player assumes the role of one of these characters in each chapter and takes that character from level one to eight or higher, unlocking new items, units, and characters of each faction for use in either multiplayer or quick-play against an AI opponent.  As a character is leveled, their hit-points increase and they get a larger pool of total units that can be in play at a time.   Items that can be equipped one at a time serve a variety of purposes, from having a huge impact on the conventions of the game like allowing walls to be moved as idle units are or letting the player summon reinforcements without costing an action, to simply buffing the ability of a given unit slightly.  Each character also has a special ability that charges up when units are activated and damage is dealt.  Some characters deal direct damage or attempt to mitigate damage and go about that through different means.  One of the undead powers sacrifices every idle common unit on their field to power an energy blast, while a knight’s power would be summoning a last-ditch wall to try and preempt such an attack.  I would find myself sorely missing the offensive powers when I was stuck playing as a defensive character.

One thing about the story I did find particularly interesting was that, of the five main characters, three are siblings, and three are women.  The sibling angle makes the urgency in which the characters are trying to get back together have more meaning and explain the lengths for power that one of them is willing to reach for.  I’m not sure why there are more female characters though, and if that can be attributed to something in the Might & Magic franchise or the fact that puzzle games reportedly have a large following of women gamers.  Regardless, it was nice to see some women characters being raised above the chain-mail bikini trope.

The unlocking of the items and units is where I take contention with Clash of Heroes.  Since there is no consistency about how many champion units a faction has available, I missed unlocking one somewhere for the demonic faction, which happens to be the fourth chapter of five in the campaign.  If I could have just gone back to that chapter it wouldn’t necessarily be worth mentioning, but this is aggravating and soured my experience with Clash of Heroes when honestly I just wanted to play a skirmish match or two and instead saw a little padlock logo over the unit space in the selection menu.

At that point I really had to stop and think, and the temptation to just eject the cartridge and put it back in the game case was potent.  That I didn’t and as of this writing still find myself whittling away at a new campaign for a few minutes before bed each night speaks to the strength of the core game-play.  I can’t wait to have a comprehensive choice of units to try and crush the computer with since I don’t know anyone else who has this deep, unique, and addictive little game.