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.

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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.