corrupted save

What, you haven't heard yet?

2010-04-21T17:31:00.001-07:00

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

No Review for this Week

2010-04-16T17:01:00.001-07:00

Gone Gamin'

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

Review: League of Legends (PC)

2010-04-09T20:43:00.000-07:00

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.

Review: BioShock 2 (PC)

2010-04-02T09:14:00.000-07:00

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.

Review: MAG (PS3)

2010-03-25T16:25:00.000-07:00

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!

Review: Halo 3: ODST (Xbox 360)

2010-03-18T20:02:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2010-03-08T20:01:00.000-08:00

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

Halo Reach Multiplayer Beta Trailer Looks Fishy

2010-03-07T08:50:00.000-08:00

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.

What's Wrong with Games For Windows Live

2010-03-03T20:01:00.000-08:00

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.

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

2010-02-23T18:32:00.000-08:00

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...

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

2010-02-17T18:15:00.000-08:00

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!

Review: Borderlands (PC)

2010-02-11T19:31:00.000-08:00

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.

What's had a massive effect on me lately

2010-02-07T19:42:00.000-08:00

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.

Review: Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes

2010-02-04T15:51:00.000-08:00

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

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

Theoverall premise is that the player enters a “battle” against anopponent with a rectangular grid as a workspace. Rows are 8 units wideand columns are 6 units deep. Whoever goes first gets to take twoactions during their first turn, and then each player gets 3 actionsfor each subsequent turn. The enemy’s gate is up, or to put it lessobscurely your units attack the enemy, whose own army is at the top ofthe screen. Actions consist of moving bottom-most units to differentcolumns, deleting units to move other units up or to free space in thecolumn, or summoning more units. Units must be “activated” to attackor 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 likefoot-soldiers or archers. Every faction gets three different kinds ofthese units. Depending on a player’s strategy, all three can be takenand each has a unique color, one type can be taken and will appearacross all three colors, or anything in between. When three units ofthe same color are lined up vertically in a column they will “group” upand start charging up for a number of rounds until they will eventuallycross into the other screen and damage enemy units or the enemyitself. Three or more like units lined up horizontally in a row willform a wall that moves to the top of the player’s screen and will takedamage from enemy units.

Mid-tier champion units: units in this category packa 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 uptwo column spaces and are one row wide. Examples are stags that willhop over enemy walls or vampires that will heal the player for anydamage they do. Champion units will come in any color and require twocommon units lined up behind them to activate, with the two commonunits merging into the champion and freeing up the space behind. Theplayer can have up to ten units of a champion type and will cost theplayer resources. When a champion is destroyed before it activates itis gone and will need to be re-purchased. A player can have up to tenunits of a particular champion type.

High-grade hero units: Like champions, hero unitscost resources and will be diminished if destroyed before activation. Heroes are fewer in number than the champions, with a limit of three tofive units, and cost significantly more too. Heroes are two columnspaces long, two row spaces wide, and require four like-colored commonunits behind them to activate. As with champions, when activated, thecommon units will merge into the hero unit. Heroes range from grimreapers that, after 6 rounds, will kill the enemy player automaticallyif they just hit them to acid-spewing dragons that cut off rows of thefield 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 givesthem a slight damage boost. Like units of the same color can be“stacked” if activated in the same column. For example, a group ofblue spearmen will attack in two turns. Two blue spearmen are lined upbehind them in the same column. You could add one more blue spearmanwhich would make them activate. The new group would then merge into or“stack” up onto the old group, doubling their strength and still readyto 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 gamewell by exposing the player to each of the five playable, uniquelythemed factions. Effectively, five teenagers survive an attack, arescattered across the fantasy world, and try to reunite with eachother. The player assumes the role of one of these characters in eachchapter and takes that character from level one to eight or higher,unlocking new items, units, and characters of each faction for use ineither multiplayer or quick-play against an AI opponent. As acharacter is leveled, their hit-points increase and they get a largerpool of total units that can be in play at a time. Items that can beequipped one at a time serve a variety of purposes, from having a hugeimpact on the conventions of the game like allowing walls to be movedas idle units are or letting the player summon reinforcements withoutcosting an action, to simply buffing the ability of a given unitslightly. Each character also has a special ability that charges upwhen units are activated and damage is dealt. Some characters dealdirect damage or attempt to mitigate damage and go about that throughdifferent means. One of the undead powers sacrifices every idle commonunit on their field to power an energy blast, while a knight’s powerwould be summoning a last-ditch wall to try and preempt such anattack. I would find myself sorely missing the offensive powers when Iwas stuck playing as a defensive character.

One thing about thestory I did find particularly interesting was that, of the five maincharacters, three are siblings, and three are women. The sibling anglemakes the urgency in which the characters are trying to get backtogether have more meaning and explain the lengths for power that oneof them is willing to reach for. I’m not sure why there are morefemale characters though, and if that can be attributed to something inthe Might & Magic franchise or the fact that puzzle gamesreportedly have a large following of women gamers. Regardless, itwas nice to see some women characters being raised above the chain-mailbikini trope.

The unlocking of the items and units is where Itake contention with Clash of Heroes. Since there is no consistencyabout how many champion units a faction has available, I missedunlocking one somewhere for the demonic faction, which happens to bethe fourth chapter of five in the campaign. If I could have just goneback to that chapter it wouldn’t necessarily be worth mentioning, butthis is aggravating and soured my experience with Clash of Heroes whenhonestly I just wanted to play a skirmish match or two and instead sawa little padlock logo over the unit space in the selection menu.

Atthat point I really had to stop and think, and the temptation to justeject the cartridge and put it back in the game case was potent. ThatI didn’t and as of this writing still find myself whittling away at anew campaign for a few minutes before bed each night speaks to thestrength of the core game-play. I can’t wait to have a comprehensivechoice of units to try and crush the computer with since I don’t knowanyone else who has this deep, unique, and addictive little game.

Review: Uncharted 2

2010-01-27T17:02:00.000-08:00

To start with I currently do not have the means to take video or screenshots from my consoles, so my apologies in advance for the lack of both (until I break down and get something like a Hauppauge HD-PRV). Uncharted 2 was my first Playstation 3 (PS3) experience, and what a fun experience it was. I had such a great time with the single-player component of the game that I am perfectly content without experiencing either the co-op or multiplayer modes for now.

Being the proper gentleman that I am, when the system was unboxed, hooked up and the game was in the system, the controller went right into my girlfriend’s hands. I watched with youthful glee as she snuck up behind guys and snapped their necks, worried for naught as she shot advancing hordes of soldiers in their heads with an AK-47, and marveled as she navigated Drake through the well-designed and lovely playgrounds otherwise known as the levels in Uncharted 2. Even the act of observing somebody play the game was memorable and enjoyable, and I can’t say that about many other titles. Thinking back, I actually watched a friend play Metroid Prime for about 5 min. before that put me to sleep. So before I even got my hands on the controller I was impressed; Uncharted 2 was almost literally an action movie with an input device.

Eventually the hordes of soldiers became too much, and after hours of uninterrupted play and a couple of loaded checkpoints the controller fell into my lap. The controls were intuitive even in my Xbox 360-molded hands, and the platforming elements felt solid; I missed a total of two jumps on my journey to the rolling credits. One was at the very beginning, and the second miscalculation was a leap toward something that wasn’t actually interactive in the environment. I was worried that my girlfriend was just making the stealth kills look easy, but the melee system seemed to be well designed whether it was grabbing enemies from behind, punching them in the face, or slipping out of their grapples with appropriate quick-time events.

Uncharted 2’s cover system gets special mention though. Movement generally feels fluid, but then you get behind a wall or something and water turns into glue. This is disappointing, because frequently in combat there was something tripping me up enough to make the issue stick in my mind. If this was Gears of War it wouldn’t be so notable because in Gears you basically play a brick in a real sense of the word: no definition, no personality, and no real movement. Nathan Drake is the antithesis to this and probably has no idea of the concept of “trench warfare.” If you’re not constantly moving around the environments, staying one or two steps ahead of the enemy you’re playing Uncharted 2 wrong. If the cover wasn’t such a double-edged sword in how entangling it can be the combat would probably be more remarkable.

Another flaw with the combat was the gunplay. Aiming was straight-forward, as were the guns, and getting headshots was not difficult to achieve. The animation of the bullets registering on the enemies as I shot and hit them was very satisfying. Often enough though, that animation would go off, yet the enemy would not go down, and these were the run of the mill minions and not the tougher variety of bad guys that could maybe survive a hit like that normally. In an action game this kind of bug is absolutely distracting and damn-near unforgivable. Coupled with the cover system with assimilation on its mind these issues really pull the player out of the game that otherwise draws them in so well, and it’s kind of disappointing.

At one point Uncharted 2 crashed my PS3. I finished a rather lengthy battle sequence near the end of the game, went into a hallway, and then my TV screen went black and the PS3 was frozen and no longer responsive. I had to unplug the system to get it restarted. The game reloaded and I was at a checkpoint just past the room with the conflict. It only happened that one time and nothing else even close has occurred since. It was slightly upsetting though, especially with a brand new PS3. To be fair though, I had to remind myself about this to get it into this review.

A conscious decision was made in Uncharted 2 to have the player constantly doing new things, and repeat was minimal. From chapter to chapter I had no idea what kind of crazy thing I was going to be doing next, and for the most part it added to the charm of the game. After a certain point though, the “think fast” moments started to feel a bit overused and the enthusiasm for having accomplished something like surviving something like a falling building or not dying in a deadly game of hopscotch was noticeably diminished. To be honest though, from a single-player perspective I’d much rather a developer takes the chance of fatiguing me rather than spoon-feeding me combat with a sprinkling of one or two neat little events. This view especially takes preference when the interesting situations blended into both the gameplay and the story of Uncharted 2 so well, and when an event was gratuitous a character usually finished my thought for me with a funny bit of tongue-in-cheek dialogue.

The puzzle elements are probably the biggest conceptual fault I need to take with Uncharted 2. At some point I was randomly prompted to press a button to bring up a journal. Apparently Drake was taking notes and drawing sketches between the microseconds that I was having him climb a wall or take a shot at somebody. With these sketches I was able to match foreign characters and align them in the proper way to unlock doors and whatnot. If I remember correctly, this only happened three times, but it just wasn’t handled well enough to warrant this particular mechanic’s existence in the game. It would be amazing if the player actively took the notes, or snapped pictures of some statuette with an iPhone and was subsequently rewarded later with an easier or more lucrative path or a new gun for having taken the initiative to use such a mechanic, without overly punishing less forward-thinking players who could frankly care less. Holistically though, this journal checking ends up as more of an annoyance that slows down an otherwise well-paced couple of levels, rather than being of a missed opportunity.

Second behind the worthless puzzles would be a schizophrenic approach to some of the skirmishes, or what might better be referred to as boss fights in Uncharted 2. In most cases, the player would be required to move around the environment and evade the boss character to scavenge ammo or acquire more powerful weapons to use in their present predicament. Ammo management is a simple enough a concept to understand, and something that the player presumably gains proficiency at over the course of Uncharted 2. Then there are some encounters where Drake conveniently finds a gun with unlimited ammo. Without spoiling the story, from a design perspective this actually makes sense because of the setting, and leaving the player with a clip of only 20 bullets would be ridiculous. But it is an incredibly lazy and unimaginative way to handle such encounters, especially in a game that is otherwise so creative and fun. A clip of bullets doesn’t always have to be the answer, and for a game where the environment is otherwise important, that the player couldn’t just outmaneuver these bullet-sponges into a trap is kind of stunning, especially since this concept is touched on in the final encounter of the game!

But I digress.

To say that Uncharted 2 was presented well would be an understatement. Save for some kind of weird glossy sheen over the characters’ eyes, there is nothing negative to mention. This eye-thing was pretty distracting during the cut-scenes, particularly with the character Chloe, who was voiced by Claudia Black. If you read my Dragon Age: Origins review, this factoid should provide better context for my fatigue with this actress. Otherwise, the voice acting, and the writing behind it was superb and of a caliber I would not expect to see in a console game. I mentioned above that characters would often finish my thoughts for me as I was playing the game, and this happened to an extent that would almost seem creepy except for the disappointing reality that original thought has been surpassed by cliché. That Naughty Dog’s writers have been able to harness this tells me that they really have a solid understanding of multimedia today when most everyone else is fixated on simply stealing superficial details from each other to try and make the next blockbuster a success. Uncharted 2 is a gourmet pizza when every other game in its section of the menu is fast food.

Uncharted 2 had an entertaining story that wasn’t allowed to take itself too seriously. It stands alone well enough that I don’t feel a need to go back and play through the first game which feels kind of liberating against some contemporary releases like Mass Effect 2. Additionally, everything wraps up without the cliffhanger every other release seems to afflict gamers with these days: this is excellent.

I would go so far to say that Uncharted 2 is Generation X/Y’s shot at Indiana Jones. In effect, Naughty Dog walked up to Spielberg and Lucas and kicked them in their baby-boomer balls after proclaiming that they can keep squandering their gold and turning it into shit because we’re ready for our time in the spotlight. And thank God that they did that! In turn, Uncharted 2 is pure and unadulterated fun with only a few hiccups in comparison despite my above, overly verbose criticism. I pray that Naughty Dog takes their time and further refines what made Uncharted 2 great for the inevitable third release that I find myself eagerly anticipating.

I would like to end this little piece with a challenge: If you can, name me better developed action-game characters than Nate Drake in the comments to this post. The list I can think of is pretty short.

Psychonauts $2 on Steam

2010-01-26T17:15:00.000-08:00

Get it. It's not the best game ever, but it's pretty close. For $2 how can you go wrong? In other news, working on my new review for a game that was much fun. Stay tuned!

Review: Dragon Age: Origins for PC

2010-01-21T18:16:00.000-08:00

Dragon Age: Origins (DA) was a good game that is as entertaining as it is progressive, but not exactly the perfect gaming experience I was hoping for. I played DA on normal difficulty on my PC and used a human noble for my first play-through. My character started as a rogue and transformed into a bow-specialized ranger. For most of the time played my party consisted of a mage, a warrior/templar, and the golem Shale from the collector’s edition of the game/DLC. By the end of the game I invested just over 60 hours of total playtime. My graphics settings and some end-game statistics can be seen in the below screen-shots.

Click image to see my graphics settings for the game.

Click this image to see my time played, world explored percentage, etc.

When looking at DA in comparison to earlier BioWare products, one would be hard pressed to find where DA doesn’t attempt to push forward the normal conventions of the role-playing genre. A clear and visible alignment system that plays off of dichotomies like right and wrong, or obedience or rebelliousness is moved and replaced with the player’s choice of action being instead shown through worldly impact. Quests that seem straight-forward at the offset invariably become muddled at some point as the player progresses through them, going so far as to change the very make-up of boss encounters. A more suitable tagline could exchange “Origins” for “Choices” arguably, as the player has no shortage of those to make during the span of their game. Admittedly, there are some instances where the choices the player makes have consequences that are difficult to discern, if anything really happens at all. The idea of dichotomy that has been a strong trend in recent Bioware titles and other games isn’t completely gone though as characters (some of whom can still be angered beyond repair by just one or two decisions, resulting in the character turning on you or leaving your party) are now managed through a visible love-hate meter and can be given gifts or choice words to influence that meter.

The aforementioned subtitle change would work doubly in the sense that the origin stories for the character seem lackluster. That’s not to say that the concept of character origins in DA isn’t a drastic change to how they have been presented in the past, but rather that there was not enough done in this respect, especially as how each origin branch is eventually visited through the main plot of the game and ultimately, the conflicts and achievements are ancillary to the game’s overarching story. Every character is ultimately a grey warden first, and a noble/commoner/whatever second, which makes the “origin” feel more like an afterthought than something that actually made the character who they are.

Initially, the combat system was rewarding and enjoyable, but over time some undesirable aspects began cropping up. The player will enter “combat” mode just by being in proximity to an enemy (which will sometimes be exactly at the limit of drawing distance on the screen by my settings at least), and breaking that combat can be difficult, requiring an exorbitant amount of backtracking or the death of the enemy, which isn’t always the desirable action. Stealth scouting is made especially difficult because of this particular mechanic. Similarly, attracting the attention of one party of enemies has the possibility to attract groups of other enemies from some distance away, turning a fun and balanced encounter into a frustrating exercise in loading the previous save, over and over again until the foes glitch or become aggressive in turn to the player’s favor.

With closed dungeon doors from adjacent rooms flying open mid-fight in this perpetual manner of the enemy dog-piling the heroes, a common tactic that would prove effective was to simply have the bulk of the player’s party hold back some distance away and pull enemies away in as small groups as possible. A loading screen prompt even advertises this method as a helpful hint. While effective, this tactic isn’t the glorious and violent blood bath that the marketing for DA was perpetuating. If the alternative is merely getting lucky after multiple failed attempts, resorting to “ganking” the enemy in this manner becomes a dull and unfulfilling necessity.

People who say skill-bar size doesn't matter are just trying to be polite.

I only have one really negative thing to say about the UI: unless I missed the option somewhere, a second skill-bar would have been a godsend near the end of the game. Otherwise, the game makes going back to Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, or Neverwinter Nights an almost painful experience. A big selling point of the PC ver. of the game was the isometric camera view that the console versions of DA are lacking. The feature is a nice inclusion, and definitely helps call back mental images from the lazy filled RPG-full days of yonder, but the use for the pulled back view is severely limited by the three-dimensional design of some of the environments. Ultimately, an over-the-shoulder view better served better my interactions with various elements of the environment, like treasure hunting for specific items or places to click hidden in bushes or under trees for example.

Unless the player has a specific cast of like-minded characters, the love-hate relationship system mentioned earlier will be a constant flux of positive and negative points at the bottom of the screen, no matter what the player does or says. This is largely mitigated through “plot” gift items which can be found scattered throughout the land and give a massive boost of positive points in favor of the player character. Lesser gifts can also be found or purchased with lesser and diminishing returns. If this is a thinly veiled commentary on how materialistic Western civilization is, it is a rather humorous mechanic, but it cheapens the relationships amongst the characters. This is strongly accented in that this gift-giving is the most prevalent way that a given character will really open up to the player and give them a character-specific quest, almost as if they were a victimized child opening up after receiving a cup of hot chocolate or a new toy in any derivative crime drama. Subsequently, the relationship mechanic feels less fluid than in other games, particularly other BioWare titles like Mass Effect or Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR).

The characters themselves are archetypal but with some interesting twists, which the player generally doesn’t get to learn about until having purchased their love or approval. Particularly remarkable characters include the drunkard, near-outcast dwarf Ogrhen, the older mage Wynne, and the stone golem Shale. The party banter will often entertain and distract from whatever the current task at hand is. The main drawback to this will be disappointment in that the player cannot necessarily form the party of their choice characters because the classes just wouldn’t mesh well, which is maybe a good problem to have in that it makes additional play-throughs even more appealing.

Speaking of Shale, I don’t want to imagine the gameplay experience without this character. Initially Shale appears to be a knock-off of KOTOR fan-favorite HK-47, but through events in the game Shale grows and changes like any decent protagonist should. Shale was the penultimate “outsider” character looking at some of the intimate areas of the DA world, and offered a black humor-tinted insight that actually lightened the mood for lots of otherwise dark and depressing stuff. The instances that were open because of this DLC felt like they fit naturally into the story and world, which makes the argument that they weren’t cut out just to make an extra buck for the Electronics Arts shareholders difficult to refute, especially as the other DLC pack has a badly needed and otherwise absent storage chest (if you play on PC there are good mods to address this storage for free). If you play DA and don’t have this character, I’d highly recommend grabbing it even though you’re rewarding bad behavior.

The romance options seem pretty par for the course, unless the player wants to take the time to set up a crazy foursome that is reportedly possible or pick the “surprise me” option at the Denerim brothel. Ultimately it’s a pretty small aspect of the game vs. what I remember hearing about it hype-wise. Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but I feel this was less effectively handled in DA by Bioware and executed much better in Neverwinter Nights and KOTOR.

Plot-wise, DA takes the perspective that the overarching conflict is secondary to other problems in the world that the player is in the unique position to solve. This approach is satisfying and even rewarding to an extent, because the player isn’t just saving the world like so many other games, but is instead actively building and shaping it. Like the problem mentioned earlier with ambiguous consequences to some of the choices made, the visuals that could have accompanied some of this world-building are incredibly limited, and by the end of the game are represented in what can only be considered a disappointing manner. For as great as the actual game is, the ending to DA was a complete letdown because the player doesn’t really get to experience what they built, and if this was instead included the obvious and condescending cliffhanger would be forgivable.

A really bad Dragon Age: Origins glitch.

There were other bugs and issues in DA outside of the combat. In the above embedded video my party was randomly teleported past an annoying puzzle sequence to the room that would have been locked otherwise. I was able to kill everything inside with little problem and got some nifty treasure, and it would have been cool if I wasn’t locked inside the room. Unfortunately, my previous save was near half an hour old, so that was half an hour of playtime wasted. Even more perturbing was that I could not recreate this particular bug, the unpredictability of which adds more tension and apprehension about what can happen than an otherwise good dungeon crawl deserves. Another problem was that dagger damage wasn’t incorporating dexterity correctly, but that issue was patched relatively quickly. This was relevant because if I switched my control to other characters, like to direct heals better or cast a particular spell, my bow ranger had a nasty habit of switching to daggers and engaging in melee combat. Lastly, while the scripting system for what your AI partners do in combat is impressive, I had problems with it working as it should have intended as AI partners stopping action completely mid-combat needing direction to reset, or in the case of my ranger pets not saving any of the scripting info at all. One last issue was stealth-scouting, where my ranger would sneak around without the rest of my party. He would trigger ambushes that resulted in enemies charging and then crashing into each other and glitching out because, while he was there, they couldn’t detect him.

It seems these days that a good game is going to have a good amount of Meta surrounding it, and DA is no different. I feel particularly sorry for anyone who purchased DA for the absurd marketing campaign and not because it was a good throwback to retro-PC role-playing games. The excess gore was a silly, forgettable gimmick that was quickly overshadowed by the rest of the details in the world, and I didn’t hear one beat of nu-metal on the soundtrack that I can recall. There was also some considerable hype about sex being in the game, too. What many may have wished to be a vivacious cry for attention from a developer was merely a whimper that didn’t get in the way of an entertaining story. Digital Rights Management (DRM) has been a contentious point between a vocal consumer base and EA/Bioware, and DA is a good compromise in that to use the DLC stuff like Shale you must activate online with an EA account, but otherwise there is only disc-check running, which isn’t unreasonable.

Even though I am just about sick of listening to Claudia Black, the voice acting in DA is top-notch and so common that when it’s missing from a narrative perspective it’s a glaring and distracting omission. While I don’t necessarily care about graphics, the world looked believable and the environments were varied and capable of inspiring a wide spectrum of different emotions, with one level almost too creepy for what I thought I signed on for with DA, all of it backed with journal entries and characters that made the world feel alive. Despite the meager ending, DA is an enjoyable game that is presented very well; with the recently announced expansion set for a March 2010 release, it is a game that I look forward to revisiting soon. I will just be sure to save and save often when I get pulled in again.

Full Stovetop

2010-01-19T21:08:00.001-08:00

I’ve currently got a review of Dragon Age: Origins for PC that I need to finish editing, as well as set aside the time to collect screenshots and capture some video from the game for this week. Between that, a new and exciting campaign project that my girlfriend and I have cooked up for L4D2, and work/life stuff, I am clueless as to how I will have a play-through of Mass Effect on PC ready when the new game lands at my doorstep next Tuesday. Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes has been a good reason to keep my DS charged lately; it’s a great little game that I look forward to expounding upon further in the near future.

Left 4 Dead vs. Left 4 Dead 2

2010-01-13T22:00:00.000-08:00

Due to some friends recently picking up the original Left 4 Dead (L4D) because of Steam sales and whatnot over the holiday, I’ve had the unique experience of “down-grading” (you will see this term is not exactly accurate) a gaming experience, having recently spent time with Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2). In response I compiled a simple bullet-point list about what I enjoyed in each game, what I disliked, and included some of the unique Meta controversies surrounding the series. What surprised me was that my initially more negative attitude toward Left 4 Dead 2 has been lessened significantly since having actually compared and contrasted the original game against the new, improved version.

First, let me break down my general experience with both Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2. Generally, my girlfriend and I played co-op on Normal difficulty exclusively, forsaking the other modes for the most part. We did try a round or two of survival mode, but the bots just couldn’t hack it and the game-play in regard to that was more a chore than anything else. Recently I've had the full-human party campaign experience, which is definitely much more fun than playing with bots, but doesn't seem to impact the actual gameplay too much, if at all.

With that out of the way, Left 4 Dead is a great game. L4D changed up the survival-horror genre in the one way I would willingly play such a game. Going down a dark alley with a fully loaded, automatic shotgun feels much safer than going down one with something like a radio, a flashlight, and some running shoes. Unlike the newer Resident Evil games which have also adopted this more action-packed strategy however, L4D retains a relatively scary tone despite the decent arsenal available thanks to the sheer number of obstacles that the game can throw at the player at any given time.

L4D is effectively the new standard for co-op; it completely redefined the concept of teamwork in a videogame and made that concept an integral part of the core game in a way that has never really been done before. Some of the Splinter Cell games may have come in some distant proximity to what L4D has achieved, but for the most part co-op in games is an excuse to grab some friends and steam-roll through the single-player campaign with each other, and maybe you get split up for a little bit and your friend has to push a button for you or something similarly mundane. In L4D if you try and go lone wolf you will be dead because there is no way a single player can counter every enemy that is stalking them or laying in wait. This is one aspect of the sheer genius that is L4D.

Another aspect of genius is that of the inclusion of another character to L4D in the form of the AI Director, or the Director for short. In any other game, the AI is limited to a feature, nothing but scripts and If/And/Or statements for the enemies that get killed by the player. The closest preexisting example I can think of is the counter-op mode of Perfect Dark where the second player would actually control the enemies as the first player went through the levels, but I'm not sure the same freedom was there. The thing is that if one spends enough time with L4D, the Director becomes just as real as your player counterparts and will inspire laughter, fear and everything in between. I think the L4D Director is probably a pretty cool guy generally, and I wish I could buy him a cold beer and reminisce about some of the situations he put me in. My girlfriend is convinced he spawns more hunters when people wander off alone. Everyone develops their own opinions of the Director and that the players do speaks loudly to quality of programming the Director was given and the sandbox he can play in.

Spoiler Alert: Aliens did it.

The last thing in general I’d like to touch upon is the narrative of L4D, which is both masterfully done and confusing as hell. In general, the story of L4D is told through scrawling on the walls of the safe rooms and short bits of random dialog between the player-characters. This is fantastic because these mechanics are simplistic, optional, believable, and effective; I will never look at a sharpie pen in the same way ever again, and that will be the first commodity I seek in the post-zombie apocalypse. The player isn’t bogged down by endless cinematic cut-scenes, walls of text, or equally lengthy speeches, but the details are there if they want to invest the time in finding them.

Where the narrative falls apart in L4D is that the campaigns had no continuity or relationship to each other, with the possible exception of the DLC campaign Crash-Course that was released later. On the one hand, this style makes sense in that each campaign is a stand-alone experience, designed to be played through multiple times with a slightly different experience for each instance. On the other hand, players get attached to these quirky characters that exist in each campaign and want to see them “make it” through these horrible situations; the natural assumption on the player’s part is that the campaigns are linear with an overarching end-goal to be achieved. There would have been more clarity if each campaign had its own unique cast of characters, but this oddly was not the case. Similarly, if Crash Course was conceived as a literal follow-up to No Mercy this contradiction in design is downright baffling in that it came up so late and offers so little to the overall story.

All of the weapons available in Left 4 Dead.

For as great an experience as L4D was, there were some real issues in how it was presented. First, there were only the four campaigns and half as many versus maps at launch with more promised in the future. L4D had an incredibly small weapon selection for a first-person shooter. The impression I, and I presume many others got as well, was that L4D would be supported to the same extent that Team Fortress 2 (TF2) has. If one looks at how TF2 was at launch and how it is now they would see that it is a completely different game, and has undergone the changes at no expense to the players. Historically though, TF2 really is the exception for Valve in that new content is released for free and relatively frequently. When holding up L4D to L4D2, with the exception of the short release window of a year and the full-game price-point, these two games do seem to be on par with everything else Valve has put out. A $20 credit for L4D owners toward L4D2 could have gone far toward canceling out much of the negativity that began surrounding the latter game when it was announced so soon after L4D and met with healthy doses of skepticism and cynicism. That stigma will probably haunt L4D2 until the game sees similar deals as L4D has been experiencing lately.

Left 4 Dead 2 is also a great game, but it ultimately boils down to being a stunning departure from its predecessor. The changes made in such a short amount of time (especially for Valve) are so drastic that near the end of its development Valve must have anticipated L4D would fail in the market and took action accordingly to try and save the franchise. If I remember correctly, L4D was almost 50% for a weekend right after its release (and I felt pretty burned except that the gameplay was so good). From a perspective that the apparent flaws in L4D would be much more aggravating than they ended up being, the quick release of L4D2 makes sense, especially if those flaws were identified close to the end of the game’s production and could not have been rectified short of a full, new release.

The new cast of characters are still badasses in L4D2, and they have an expanded, balanced arsenal including new guns and a new class of melee weapons. Gunplay in L4D2 feels tighter and more refined than in L4D. L4D2’s co-op is a deeper experience than it was in L4D because of new balance tweaks made to the survivors and twists to the normal conventions of L4D’s campaign design. Complaints from versus mode play are essentially rectified in that the survivors now have a cool-down for their push-away move that knocks zombies back, whereas it was a viable tactic to have one survivor abusing the ability and keep zombies at a safe distance while the others freely attack. The new additions to the cast of the special infected also make the popular strategy of holing up in one location a bad idea with devastating area-of-effect attacks and player-movement manipulation. New “uncommon infected,” less threatening than the special variety, pose interesting problems that spice up the normal gameplay encounters. Everything from L4D has received some degree of attention, but not always for the best.

Left, the Director, Left 4 Dead, growing up. Right, his cousin, the Director, Left 4 Dead 2.

Take the AI Director from L4D, and find his sociopathic, psychotic, sexually abused cousin and you have the Director for L4D2. This character completely eclipses the original Director in his downright evil and unforgiving nature. It’s possible to laugh at the worst the L4D director can throw at you, like with one person constricted and everyone else covered in boomer bile: that is a fun and manageable worst-case-scenario challenge on the normal difficulty. Conversely, the last time my girlfriend and I tried to complete the final campaign of L4D2, I got so frustrated I wanted to quit and play Borderlands instead. We were playing with two bots, which were up with me on the high ground at a crescendo event that would summon a horde of zombies. My girlfriend was below to start the event, with the idea being that she would run up and join us. Things went fine until she pressed the button, when I got charged by one of the new special infected from behind, which then knocked me down three stories to the ground, and then proceeded to fertilize the lawn with me. A smoker was on one of the nearby roofs, and a swarm of zombies joined by a tank were hopping the fence we were trying to get over. The two bots died pretty quick, and somehow my girlfriend was able to save me and we got up, only to be attacked again by another group of special infected with no time to breathe. In other words, the new Director will kick the shit out of players relentlessly while they are on the ground. We managed to survive, but that experience felt really unfair.

Left 4 Dead, Normal.

Left 4 Dead 2, Normal.

Almost like an admission of guilt for L4D's unclear story, L4D2’s narrative structure changed drastically. Each campaign, instead of being a self-contained, stand-alone story, is an integral chapter in the short novel that is L4D2. Instances in previous campaigns are even referenced at times, usually to humorous effect. Unlike L4D, the player essentially spends five hours with the characters as they progress, which makes their interactions with each other have more meaning thanks to historical, albeit brief, weight. Why the survivors are where they are is explained satisfactorily, as are the motivations behind their new objectives that change the conditions of rescue beyond just holding out for a given time against waves of zombies and tanks. New technological improvements to the environments compliment these new goals nicely. The one thing that suffered was probably the wall-scrawls, which seem more infrequent but can be found outside the safe-houses.

By the end of L4D2, the player can have enough story detail to be contemplating the implications of what all is happening around them. While L4D had various tidbits and raised some interesting questions about the nature of the infection and the survivors, L4D2 basically underlines these and further emphasizes them with a couple of exclamation points. It is incredibly rewarding to go back into the L4D campaigns and find some more of these references in the margins of the game with the knowledge from the L4D2 campaigns in mind. Ultimately, the presentation of the story seems to be a vast improvement in L4D2 over L4D.

Even more drastic a difference between the two games than how the stories are treated is the difficulty of each. L4D can be challenging but stays fun. It’s really difficult to say the same thing about L4D2, in large part thanks to the Director, but it could also be related to too many changes at once that weren’t cumulatively accounted for. The weapons changes, the new special and uncommon infected, and the more complex objectives added to L4D2 equal a mutation of a fun challenge resulting in a different monster called frustration. As a result, finishing a campaign in L4D2 is definitely a rewarding experience, probably more-so than what L4D offers, but I can’t claim that it’s as fun. Admittedly, I haven’t played a full-player co-op round of L4D2 (yet), but that just wasn’t an issue with L4D. I even did some achievement whoring on my own in the first with no bad incidents, and when a campaign is finished I’m ready and eager for the next. After a campaign of L4D2 I’m so stressed out and exhausted that I just want to quit. Maybe the new “realism mode” in L4D2 has bled through into the normal gameplay?

With that griping aside, L4D2 seems like a logical and defensible evolution of L4D, although the timing is still incredibly suspicious in just how quickly so many of the problems of the first game were so thoroughly corrected in the release span of one year. The rift between the fun and the difficulty is disconcerting; it makes me wonder if L4D3 isn’t already in the works to address this new conundrum. The reward of being able to complete L4D2 is still there though, and it feels like a real accomplishment to make it through some of those campaigns, and that last campaign is still lingering in the air around me like the cries of a witch that needs to be silenced with cocktails and bullets. I will not go so far as to say that L4D2 is the better game, but it is certainly a welcome one.