Monthly Archive for September, 2008

Resetting VMWare Fusion

Published on September 30, 2008 in Hacks. 0 Comments

Long story short, I wiped my XP partition on my MBP and installed Vista. Part of it was because I had created the partition too small to be able to play any games on the Windows side at my leisure, part of it was because I’ve got a friend at Microsoft who says Vista SP1 is much more of a complete product than what everyone seems to be complaining about.

Since I had jumped for a copy of Ultimate way back when, but became too apprehensive when all the reviews started rolling out, I finally installed the beast, and have had it running since.

Only problem was, VMWare Fusion wasn’t booting it because it still had remembered that my Boot Camp was originally Windows XP. Here’s a quick fix:

Turn off VMWare Fusion
Delete /Users/<your username>/Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion/Virtual Disks/Boot Camp/%2Fdev%2Fdisk0/Boot Camp partition.vmwarevm
Restart VMWare Fusion
Boot your Windows Partition

Enjoy!

Quality, or Lack Thereof

Published on September 27, 2008 in Games and Personal. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

One thing that has continually frustrated me time and time again has been the output of design studios, game manufacturers within the past decade. There has been a steady decline of quality from all outlets, as games are pushed further, deadlines are cut, and developers (both hardware and software) are pushed to the brink of their respective physical, mental, and emotional limits. With a myriad of issues surfacing more and more each day, those limits are either beginning to be realized by consumers, and ignored by the offending companies.

From a hardware standpoint, there has been a massive speculation about Microsoft’s latest console, the Xbox 360. With varying reports saying that their latest console showing anywhere from 16% upwards to almost a 60% failure rate. When the Wii launched, it’s update service was bricking a small number of consoles. There were a few recalls/fixes for some major game accessories as well – Nintendo sent out a batch of straps and wiimote sleeves for added protection, and Rock Band’s guitars were suffering from issues with the whammy bar. I’m sure I’m missing a few on this list, and I am only going back a few years in terms of hardware issues.

I guess I should give some slack to the issues that have spawned up in the manufacturing process, as there will always be a small failure rate for any mass produced product. Bad CDs will be made, and defective consoles will get out there, and it will normally be a small majority (with the exception of the widespread issues with the 360) who have the bad luck and inconvenience to deal with the problem, and get a replacement.

However, I’m not so quick to hold my tongue on software releases, as there is a bit more involvement of putting together the game from start to finish, then declaring a product gold, and sending it out for mass duplication. From conception to gold, it’s all input: the development process, the investors, the studio, and your distributors.

For instance, I searched Kotaku for “bugs”, and “issues”, and I came up with a few recent games with some slightly annoying to fairly serious issues:

GTA IV (PS3)- Crashing/Freezing and multiplayer issues

Castle Crashers – Online play issues causing players to lose their entire save files

Bully: Scholarship Edition (360 Port) – Freezing Issues

Guitar Hero III (Wii) – Mono sound in a music game

The list goes (The Orange Box (PS3), Saints Row, Rainbow Six Vegas, Battlefield 2), and I only went back a few pages for each search to get a broad idea of what’s come up recently. Some of these issues are near unforgivable, so glaring that it would seem that any competitent programmer/tester should have been able to see the issue from a mile away, and have made note of it before this was released to the masses. When you look back, how many consoles had recalls, or huge defects, or games went out so buggy that they were unplayable? While it wasn’t something that I noted when I was that young, it seems like the rate of failure and growing issues post-release seems to be coalescing at an alarming speed.

Before I piss off any game studio employee that may be scouting this blog to check me out for employment, I don’t outright question the quality of the employees that are creating and testing these products. In one hand, the problem lies on the gaming community. Gaming as a socially accepted hobby has become much more mainstream than it was twenty years ago. The competition between genres, studios, and product sequels is so fierce as new features, upgraded graphics, larger environments, and hours upon hours of gameplay are crammed into the products that it is forseeable that losing sight of anything is not possible — but probable. And why is there such a frenzy for all these additions? Consumers flock to the shiny, new features that are released. Media tends to highlight games with something new to offer, rather than focus on simple design and elegant gameplay. Because of this, studios can’t ignore what is inevitably required of them, and the laundry list of things to add piles up fast. The involvement of people in one major game release jumps into the hundreds, development cycles jump into multiples of years, IP and projects change hands as publishers, producers, marketing and corporate execs clash heads over features, content, the release timetable. And none of this aids in speeding up the release of the game by any means.

All of this is beyond me, and far removed from my biggest issue that has been plauging the industry lately. When it comes to games released in the past five years, I have grown increasingly sick of companies using the internet as a crutch for their development cycle. It seems that games now have a release schedule that extends far beyond going gold, and the definition of “gold” is almost unquestionably turning into “beta”: A studio finishes a game to get as complete as they can, to get as close as they can to the wishes of their higher-up’s for both the feature set and the timetable requested. The game is then packaged and sold to millions in its released locations. The developers then field the mass of bugs and issues that come up with the game, and release a patch over the ‘net shortly thereafter to fix what has come up. With PC games, this is okay – you can’t expect a developer to be able to test every driver, every setup that exists out there. But consoles? Come on.

As much as I am giddy for LBP’s release – they are only going to be releasing the online “create” functionality down the road. While their marketing spin on it almost makes sense (give the gamers time to actually learn the tools before you go working with others), it doesn’t remove them from hitting the principle problem.

Don’t rely on the internet to release an unfinished, unpolished product. It’s your job to keep your feature set managable in the time that you require to finish it in, including proper time to thoroughly test the product.

Review: PixelJunk Monsters

Published on September 21, 2008 in Games. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

PixelJunk Monsters

When I had originally picked up my PS3, I had a few plans for it – Blu-Ray Player, some games from the PSN, and a few games. Mainly, I sprung for the system in anticipation of the release of LittleBigPlanet, and knew there would be some other games that would come along and find their home on the console. Sadly, the few games that I would have been interested in, I already own on the 360 (Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty 4). I’m considering Ratchet and Clank, and The Darkness, but I hadn’t heard enough about the game itself for me to jump on the game from the start.

From the time of my purchase, the PS3 had 194 games in its library. With the exceptions of cross-platform titles that I already owned, I wasn’t drooling at any games other than a few gems in the PSN’s store. (Echochrome, flOw, Everyday Shooter, Crash Bandicoot 1, and PixelJunk Monsters)

Overview

From Wikipedia

Gameplay in PixelJunk Monsters borrows similarities from various tower defense titles. The objective is to build defense towers along the enemies’ path to keep them from reaching a hut, or base. Several small creatures dwell at the base. For each enemy that survives the defense towers and reaches the hut, one creature is killed. If all creatures are wiped out, the level is failed.

Towers have distinct attributes, such as rapid fire, long range, air-focused, etc. Destroyed enemies usually drop coins and occasionally give gems, which then can be used to build and upgrade towers.

There are a total of 21 different levels (36 with the expansion pack) at 3 stages of difficulty. There are also 3 special stages that unlock unique abilities for the player character.

Overall Reaction

From Desktop Tower Defense, Gem Tower Defense (a custom map for Warcraft III), and a few others, I’ve always had a small place in my heart for tower defense games. They’re simple, fun, and easily can waste a good amount of time without much effort. Beating tougher levels from these games generally take a good amount of strategy, preparation, and trial and error before you can beat the final levels of the game.

So when I was browsing the PSN, looking to purchase some games that I could actually begin to make use of my PS3, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to try another tower defense game. While this game wasn’t the best tower defense I’ve ever played before, I do enjoy the re-playability of these games, and look forward to be able to eventually play through with someone who’s familiar to the genre.

Weaknesses (What I’d Change)

Earning your keep
This was the first TD game that I’ve played where you needed to actually earn your gold (used to upgrade/build more towers), by scrambling to pick it up. Not only did it have a timed-life before it disappeared, but it also could be lost if your character hit any of the incoming creatures. While this adds a bit of difficulty to the game, I don’t think its the type of difficulty that the game needs. The focus of the difficulty should be designing a defense that stops the onslaught of enemies, not avoiding them with your character. Other games have allowed placing towers with the mouse, or at least not having collision with your character be an issue.

Variable Money
Monsters drop both gold and (sometimes) jewels. Gold is used to build towers, where jewels are used to upgrade towers and unlock new towers past your three generic starting towers. However, there is no way to convert one into the other. That means if you really needed to unlock that special anti-air tower, and you are one jewel short but have mass amounts of gold, your only hope of winning the round are building a mass of lower grade towers, and hope for the best. The separation of these two elements add quite a bit of frustration to the pool, and I’m sure they really add to the strategy scenario that well.

Unlock this tower again and again and again…
After playing one level, you may have been able to save up and unlock for a specific tower, but you are back at square one again the next level. Even after you pass to the next level of play (medium, hard levels), you still only have your lame first three towers that you get to start off with, grinding again to get the towers you enjoy using unlocked again. I think at a very basic level, certain towers should be allowed to be unlocked as the difficulty of play increases (again, create difficulty with the actual point of the game, not the side-pieces that were added in for flavor), rather than having to start at square one every level. (Note: I think they did something to fix this complaint in the expansion pack, which I have yet to buy)

Useful towers?
Aside of the three main towers, I used the laser tower for anti-air, and the napalm tower for anti-ground. That’s all I really needed. There was one certain type of monster that was resistant to fire-based attacks, but they seemed to fall incredibly fast to just the regular arrow towers. So out of a total of something like 11 towers, I usually found myself using five of them, and a sixth when hard bosses came around (the mortar tower). If you’re going to offer a variety of towers, make them versatile enough to offer use to the players so that they can be included in the strategy. For instance, the ice tower should have either had a faster rate of fire, or been able to hit multiple enemies at once. (Normally you use the ice tower in TDs to slow down large amount of monsters while your other strong towers pound on them). After one frustrated game of unlocking the ice tower to only find out how pathetically useless it was, I never unlocked it again.

Sparse abilities (spoiler)
You get a total of three unlockable abilities throughout the game, one is running fast, one is remote mines, and one is a lightning tower. I don’t think I have had the chance to unlock the tower yet, but I have unlocked the other two. Using a remote mine costs a whooping 5 gems, which are better used in unlocking and upgrading towers, so I never once used it. The running fast was necessary, as the character originally moves MUCH too slow to be enjoyable, and I found myself holding the run button for the entire game after I had unlocked the ability. While this was a somewhat fresh idea to be able to unlock abilities, it seems the execution of what was unlockable, and what came out from it was ill-concieved. The running should have been inlcuded from the beginning, and if this were the way to unlock towers, I would be much more content – provided those towers stay unlocked at the start of a new game.

Underused “Special” Modes
There were a few modes where you had a ton of money, or you had all the towers unlocked, or you only fought one type of monster the entire game. These were gems, and probably some of my favorite levels, but these should have not been individualized levels, but “modes” that you could either select from, or unlock, so you could enjoy every level with these options.

Anti-Climatic Ending
First, the game let me “beat” it before I had beaten all the levels. I would understand if it allowed this before I had gotten rainbows (perfect games) on every level, but beating the “final” level was enough for the game to consider itself conquered. And after that? Absolutely nothing. No unlocks, no special modes, nothing. Boo.

I think this game has more to offer, and will prove to be a bit more fun with someone else playing along, and I look forward to the remote play once I get a PSP, but until then, I’ll play away with my gripes and deal with it. (Maybe the expansion will make some of these things slightly less annoying)

Review: Castle Crashers

Published on September 2, 2008 in Games. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

I had been spending the past few weeks playing a bit of Call of Duty 4 online, trying to figure out what game I’d be hitting up next. While lazily browsing a few gaming blogs last Wednesday, I came across some news which restructured my entire weekend. It had turned out that on the 27th, a little game known as “Castle Crashers” was released by The Behemoth. I heard about this game a year or so back, and was very excited at the prospect of a fresh beat-em-up to come to the picture, especially with the same art style of their first game, Alien Hominid. With the release being so far away, I must have tried to forget about it a bit to quash my anticipation.

Needless to say, I rushed to download the game, and convince some of my friends to do likewise. When I was younger and arcades were still common, beat-em-ups (Fists of Rage, Final Fight) were incredibly common. One franchised beat-em-up, The Simpson’s arcade game had received the majority of my spending money. With The Behemoth behind this project, and the promise of four player online co-op, I was nothing less than giddy.

Overview

From Wikipedia

The game is a side-scrolling beat-em-up in which up to 4 players can play, online or locally. Playing as one of the available knights or an unlockable character, players must defeat enemies to progress using attacks and magic. As enemies are defeated, the characters level up, giving access to new combos and abilities, and players can improve attributes such as attack, magic, defense and agility.

Overall Reaction

Great art, great music, a creative story progression, a pretty good combo system, and a ton of replayability make this game well worth its purchase. I have personally beaten the game probably about six times or more, either by myself or with friends. Despite the large amount of playtime, I have failed to truly get bored of the game. After you’ve beaten the game, you can revisit levels to find 60+ hidden or acquirable weapons. To aid you in your quests, you can currently collect up to 26 “pets” whom either alter your character’s stats, or they preform actions of their own (attack the enemies, find/point out hidden items, or bring you food). After your character’s leveled up and can fly through the regular game without a sweat, you could try your hand at Insane Mode, where your enemies are much harder to put down. And either before or after you’ve collected all the weapons and pets, you can unlock up to 23 characters by beating the game with different characters, or unlocking characters by beating the single player arenas.

What makes this game truly shine however, is the multiplayer co-op. When you add the ability to throw friends in the mix (both online or locally), one play through to the next is a different, yet enjoyable experience. Surprisingly, even playing online co-op is just as responsive as playing locally. If anything, I can count the momentary slowdowns I’ve experienced on one hand.

Lastly, some of the community members at the GameFaq and NeoGAF forums have impressed me with the determination to find every unlockable item within the game. From pets, to weapons, to characters, it’s been a 24-hour manhunt for almost a week now, trying to figure out what sequence it takes to unlock some characters and weapons that have surfaced in some testing/press images that were released. The Behemoth is obviously having a good time with the community of hunters, as they gave no outright explanations to begging fans at the past PAX 2008, only to leave the mobs of unlockable-hungry (myself included) players searching in the dark for the few holy grails left in the game. It would seem that the game has quite a bit of room for some DLC to come into play to potentially unlock these characters, I would hope that The Behemoth plays to the stingy and reveals free means to obtaining the unlockables.

What I’d Change

Abracadab…
Magic in this game seems to be very one-dimensional. While it does seem to have some sort of effect against the type of enemy you’re fighting, there doesn’t seem to be some sort of teaming-up aspect between the skills when playing co-op. Other than the attacks themselves, it feels like magic could be easily  expanded on as an improvement to the game. I remember in The Simpson’s beat-em-up, players could combine to form one unit, with one player attacking and the other controlling movement. You could combine something like fire and ice, the ice magic would freeze the opponents feet while the fire burned his head, or make fire more potent when someone was poisoned. Either way, I wish there was more depth to the differences and cooperation of magic that would make choosing a varied amount of characters important to gameplay, rather than just feeling like the majority of magic was merely a sprite switch.

No Sea Legs
Sadly, the entire “water” bit of the game, where you fight ninjas aboard a ship lasts only for only two waves of enemies. With a few long desert levels following, why was so much cut (or not added) to the ship level? That level had my  favorite music throughout the entire game, and it ended sooner than it started. You could have characters jumping from ship to ship, fighting off  waves of ninjas, avoiding cannon balls, and the like. It’s not like we’re worried about repetition here, the entire game is comprised of beating up several enemies, moving on, and beating up several more enemies. Lastly, I agree that ninjas are awesome, but why didn’t we get pirates too? I’d love to play through the game hobbling on a peg-leg and slashing my enemies with a hook or sword.

One road diverged in a yellow wood..
To get all the known characters at this point, one would have to play the game through twelve times. While I may find myself doing that eventually, the game could offer some sense of multiple passages that offer different means to reach the boss at the end of the level, either a way requires more magic, or stamina, or just provides a different experience to the player, it could ease up on the monotony of wanting the play through the game several times, without the ability of being able to do a play through with your  eyes closed.

QA Issues
While my issues with QA as of late will be saved for a post on its own, it seems that some of the bigger known bugs in the game may have been able to be caught with either better managed QA, or simply a larger team, or more time in testing before release. There are multiple instances of glitches and bugs in the game that others have found. One that my friend and I found while playing (that hasn’t been posted on YouTube yet), is when you are in the desert, and go inside to where you can see one pet (I think it’s ScratchPaw) hiding behind a screened window. If you walk up the stairs on the left side, and jump quite a bit, you end up glitching into the ceiling and are walking outside of the building. We were able to fall down into where ScratchPaw was (before we found a bomb would have gotten us back there), and then we found ourselves stuck in the level, not being able to progress to the next room. On top of these in game glitches, it seems the game has had a myriad of online play and saving issues when 3-4 players get together to play online. Coupled with matchmaking problems over Xbox Live, we can only hope that any next iteration is throughly stress tested before it’s next release. Thankfully, for the current players of CC, we should be seeing an update/fix to our online/saving woes soon.

End Scene
I’ve almost memorized the names of all the people involved and thanked in this game. Can we please skip the ending scene after we’ve seen it five times already?

Episodic Content/DLC
While this isn’t something I would necessarily change in the game, I would go and say that a few things could be added that would continue to keep me coming back for more. I think this game could easily continue bringing in money if more levels were added, and new content/abilities were tossed in the mix to keep things fresh. I wouldn’t mind paying for things to add to gameplay, but I don’t know how excited I would be if The Behemoth simply just threw new weapons and characters up for purchase. I’m not too fond of the Bad Company approach, and I hope it doesn’t become a habit.

If you own an Xbox 360, you need to pickup this game.

I’ll be spending the next few posts going over some more XBLA/PSN downloadable games.