Tag Archive for 'Games'

Entertainment Overload!

Published on October 30, 2008 in Personal. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

For any connected and half-interested gamer, this October and November are sheer torture for the community. It’s been a long time before we’ve had some good titles come out, and now there’s a AAA title coming out every other week. Fable 2, LittleBigPlanet, Left 4 Dead, Mirror’s Edge, Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, the list goes on. I’m even interested in the Alone in the Dark release for the PS3: with some of the critical reviews that came out, they redesigned quite a few things for the release, and it will be interesting to see if the game’s reception turns around.

In the spirit of Halloween, I decided to re-play through Half Life 2. When I first bought it, I had gotten through a good portion of the game but I must have stopped and gotten focused on something else, as I didn’t remember *any* of the Citadel. Hopefully I can get through Episode 1 and 2 in the next few days, along with the BK:N&B demo with a friend.

Also, LittleBigPlanet is going to change the way we think about games. The game is a damn platform – the best description I’ve read thus far is: “a YouTube for games.”

Review: Call of Duty 4

Published on June 13, 2008 in Games. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Call of Duty 4I was able to finish COD4 on Veteran sometime last week, with the opportunity to play the last few levels on a 50″ LCD with a stellar sound system to boot. Needless to say, it didn’t hurt the experience. :) I don’t have much to say about multiplayer right now, because with friends and family around now, I’d much rather be playing a game that supports online multiplayer from one console.

Overview

From Wikipedia:

The story is centered around a fictional near-future conflict involving the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia, who are fighting against Russian ultranationalists in civil war torn Russia, and rebels that have staged a coup d’état in a small Middle Eastern country. It is told from the perspectives of a United States Marine and a member of the British SAS, and is set in multiple locations, including the Middle East, Azerbaijan, Russia, and Prypiat, Ukraine. The multiplayer portion of the game features various game modes, and contains a leveling system that allows the player to unlock additional weapons, weapon attachments, and camouflage schemes as they advance. The game was in development for two years. It uses a proprietary game engine, and includes features that include true world-dynamic lightning, HDR lighting effects, dynamics shadows, and depth of field.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare received considerable praise and has won numerous awards from gaming websites, including IGN’s “Best Xbox 360 Game”. It was the top-selling game worldwide for 2007, reaching over seven million copies as of January 2008.

Overall Reaction (Possible Spoilers Below)

I am continually impressed with the success of this game, both in my own eyes, and in the eyes of the entire gaming community. I’ve mentioned time and time again in a few of my more recent speaking engagements how successful COD4 has been – especially on XBOX Live, and how it could have the potential to be the next “Counter Strike” series, with the large amount of gamers already hooked to the series, especially the last iteration.

Furthermore, the campaign provides an incredibly immersive experience, which lays out the gritty details of war, and in no way glorifies the violence necessary in warfare. By the end of this game, if anything, the player is left with a sad realization of the major casualties that war creates. In the same way that I praise SOTC, I have caught myself time and time again comparing FPS titles to COD4.

Overall, the entire package of this game both campaign and online multiplayer has really raised the bar in the genre for developers to look to imitate and improve off of what Infinity Ward has delivered.

Campaign

The campaign in the game takes you through the experiences of a member of the USMC and the British SAS. The two characters give a collectively rounded story of the sad situation the world is in, and a broad range of experience from two of the different groups. As I mentioned earlier, this game does a great job in detailing the pains of war without once glorifying it. There were on multiple occasions where the game leaves you feeling helpless, lost, disparate, and generally frustrated about the positions you find yourself in, and what must be done to escape the situation.

COD4 takes some hints from the great experience I had with the ending of Shadow of the Colossus, where you’re left to control a player before his ultimate death. The frustration and realization that this emits from a player is always a strong one, and this game executes it well. Experiencing the death of your character after you aborted an escape maneuver to save a downed pilot, only to die alongside your entire team after a nuclear explosion is devastating. Everything in this scene is incredibly well done, from the controls, to the coloring, to the scenery (including wreckage, fallen buildings, and children’s toys) adds to the sinking feeling of exactly how much war truly destroys in its wake.

The Veteran difficulty frustratingly (and enjoyably) gives experienced players some levels which test the ability of the gamer, making you rethink your routing, the order in which you clear hallways and rooms, down to the timing and placement of grenades. There were two or three sections of the game where I had to play over fifty times in order to finally succeed. If you’ve played the game up to the last “Epilogue” scene, I swear that my beating that level was a fluke.

One thing that really impresses me about this game is how diverse it is in letting the player get a full experience of some of the things involved in wartime. From being airdropped on a ship, to infiltrating buildings, to operating mounted guns from a helicopter to a bombing run, to a covert ghillie-suit level, not once did I feel that some content of the game felt out of place, or thrown in. The flow from level to level was smooth, enjoyable, and coherent with the context of the story.

There were a few times where this game really had an impact on me. In the “All Ghillied Up” scene, where you jump back 15 years as Capt. Price was just a Leftenant doing some “wetwork” as a covert sniper, I was constantly enjoying the scene, where you could make the choice of either staying stealth, or taking some well aimed sniper shots (seriously, who turns down shooting someone in these games with a sniper rifle?) before continuing. At the point where you need to crawl in the grass to avoid the oncoming tanks and walking guard, I became incredibly paranoid, and even felt myself scrunching up in my seat, worrying that the computer AI will hear me breathe.

The second instance of this intense immersion into the game is an experience I had at the end of the game. I tell this to everyone who has played the game, and thus I think it merits its own paragraph. At the end of the game, where you see Griggs die, and Captain Price struggling for his own life, you yourself are injured are dishelved just like the Marine was before he had died. Watching Zakhaev assassinate a comrade in cold blood right in front of me, I figured, “I’m done for.” Just then Price slides the pistol over to you, and you pick it up. Figuring I was dead anyway, I took out Zakhaev with one shot and let his guards kill me, figuring it was a honorable way to go out. Then I got ripped from the story as the game made me play it over. “What?”, I thought, “What did I do wrong?” I then realized that I would live if I killed his guards. This was awesome though; the game had brought me to a point in the game where I felt my situation was so hopeless that I had no choice but to die, and that I had given up my characters will to live but to at least accomplish the task in taking out the last target that we had in our achievements before I died. A game put my mind in this position! Not a critically acclaimed movie, or a prized work of literary accomplishment, a video game.

It blows my mind. The writing and execution of this game are so well done, that if this is the direction games are going to be taking from now on, I am so happy to be in the position that we are as gamers.

Online Multiplayer Experience

The online experience is very enjoyable, and well done from what I’ve been able to experience so far. I don’t have too much to say about the experience itself because I don’t feel I’ve spent enough time to truly evaluate the bits and pieces of the COD4 multiplayer yet. I enjoy the level-system and equipment increases you get, which allows the game to increase its depth as you spend more time playing it. Hopefully down the road I’ll be able to revisit the online multiplayer to check back about my total views about this aspect of the game.

Weaknesses (What I’d Change)

AI

My first and biggest frustration of the campaign came from the AI of your supporting teammates throughout the story. Since I was playing on Veteran, the levels were considerably hard, and there were many times where I was playing a specific section over and over again, and I would be dying because of dumb mistakes a freaking twelve year old wouldn’t make, let alone a Marine or SAS agent. Covering my back when I move forward or take a turn, covering fire, using flashbangs and grenades just to name a few of the things that weren’t present when playing through this. At points, the presence of the teammates just gave me a false sense of security that if I went one way down a path, that the other would be covered and taken care of, yet time and time again, I would be killed by enemies that I considered to be my teammates responsibility. Many times I would be cussing the teammates out, wishing that I would have been doing the mission on my own, since at least I would know that no one is covering my back. Not only that, but especially in close quarters, the AI seemed to be moving slowly along scripted paths, and was non-responsive to any nudging by the player. In my fifty-sixty tries at the “Mile High Club”, there were about 15 times where I was too slow, and got behind one of my teammates who were crawling through the aisles in the airplane, and were killing the mere 60 seconds I had to clear an entire 747. Sadly, I needed to restart these levels because apparently “Friendly fire will not be tolerated.” Know what else shouldn’t be tolerated? Crappy AI that gets in your way. Intelligent? Yeah right. Artificial? Definitely.

Animations

While I’m no expert, I have watched clips and some short shows on the hand-signals for SWAT teams, and it’s pretty cool how the game’s animations do a good job at putting these into play in the characters that are playing with you (regardless how stupid they are). I did notice though a few times where the movement of your teammates was very scripted, and seemed choppy towards what I would consider a in game cut-scene. This wasn’t incredibly prevalent, but when it was there, it was noticeable and took me out of the moment, if for a few seconds.

Modern Weapons

When you’re moving up the coverage for a tank in the Middle East, and your tank pulls up to a corner of the building and says “switching to thermal”, and then blows the crap out if through the side of the building, I became a little jealous. This is “modern warfare”, we’re using positioning for air-strikes, battling nukes, using guided rockets to blow up tanks, and the most advanced weapons we get to use is sticky C4 and night vision? Where’s my thermal imaging, and other neat technology that these counter terrorism groups get to use nowadays?

GUI

This isn’t that big of a complaint, but the GUI doesn’t always lend to letting you know what you’re holding onto. The air-strike logo looks more like a bayonet attachment to your rifle, and there was no way for me to know what type of grenades I’m holding, until I’ve thrown one. The one scene where you need to fight your way up to the farm, then fight your way down back the hill to get to the landing zone annoyed the crap out of me, and was pretty hard, until I realized I wasn’t holding onto flashbangs, but smoke grenades. After that, it only took me two more tries to figure out the best placement of the smokes before I was able to get to the bottom of the hill to the helicopter. Small thing to nitpick on, but it’s important to properly convey this information to your players.

Keybinding

With a game that is presumably feature rich, why do you force me to a specific set of button choices for the game? I stuck with the defaults for the game, but switching between this and Halo has been annoying, and I wish I could have moved some of the buttons on my own to fit my own play-style.

Sniping

Sniping in this game was fun, and probably had a perfect balance with everything else but I wish there were some bonus features that let you play with the gun a little more than what the game offers. Moreover, when you needed to snipe Zakaev, you’re told to remember about the “Coriolis effect“, and that threw me off guard. Some sniping practice like the initial training in the game would have been pretty fun.

Local Online (Multiplayer)

I’m not sure who to blame for this, because I’m sure internally, stories could differ from department to department. COD4 has online play, and it has split-screen local play, yet it doesn’t have split-screen online play. Maybe we could attribute this sole reason to why COD4 has had consistently more players playing on XBOX Live than Halo since Janurary. So, you’re not going to tell me its hardware/software limitations. This is just unforgivable, and incredibly annoying to me, as I can’t enjoy a game – which is preferably the best FPS out there right now, with my friends unless they’ve got an XBOX hooked up too, which means we can’t be playing in the same room unless we’ve got two TVs as well. Come on!

Match Searching (Multiplayer)

While I’ll talk about it a bit more next week, one of the few redeeming things about Gears of War is that you can filter your online search for maps and gametypes that you want when you play online. Halo and COD4 have a veto system, which is not as feature rich as things could be. This frustrates me when playing online, because there are definitely enough players that would allow for the filtering to exist in a fun manner that allowed players the choice of what they wanted to play, rather than forcing a seemingly normal distribution of map-play.

Own this game, it’s worth every penny.

The next step in evolution?

Published on June 6, 2008 in Games and Personal. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

A few months ago a friend and I were talking about the movie I Am Legend, and he was telling me the ending of book was far different from the movie. In the end of the book, the “zombie” leader explained to the protagonist that he not fighting a disease but was merely impeding the progress of evolution.

I’ve been thinking similarly along the lines of where console gaming has been taking the industry over the recent years, and wondering if we’re experiencing a similar response, are consoles the next step in gaming? Sure, there’s been a pretty defined split between the two throughout the past, with certain genres (most specifically FPS) generally being dominated in the PC market, while other genres would dominate the consoles (such as platformers, racing, sports, etc.). That line has become more and more split with the growing success of the consoles, and there aren’t many games for the PC that you can’t pickup for a console nowadays.

Three years ago, PricewaterhouseCoopers released a report predicting the rise in console success and the slowing of the success of the PC. I used some of this data to show the aggregate growth of online gaming as a whole for Zapdot’s business plan, hoping that they’d be wrong down the road. I was primarily a PC gamer then, and have my roots in gaming from the PC FPS (Rainbow 6, Quake 2&3, UT2K3, and CS and CS:S). Competitive gaming had bloomed on the PC platform, and has had some amazing appeal to network television through its success: from interviews to short segments, to full blown TV shows. Not surprisingly, PWC wasn’t off their marker three years down the road. While I haven’t had access to current numbers to correlate to their estimates, it goes without saying that console gaming is flourishing now, with thousands making the switch daily.

Wednesday’s Penny-Arcarde post made me revisit these thoughts, and they made some of the same arguments I’ve been barking at for awhile.

First and foremost, Computers have been always the best platform out there in terms of the technology that can be utilized for the games themselves. They have always looked better, provided more vast experiences in online play, and for awhile, put you in touch with a much larger community. The biggest selling point for me (and the deciding factor for most hardcore PC gamers) was the precision of input on the computers always trumped that of its console counterparts.

However, I’ve even found myself spending more time on consoles lately, and the answer as to why is pretty easy: comfort. I can sit down on my comfortable couch, and pick up a game for a few hours on my HD TV, enjoying surround sound if the system I’m in provides it. Moreover, the TV and surround system I’m using doesn’t have to be solely set aside for just a gaming system (or systems). With broadband I can just as easily play online with my friends as I could with my computer, with an interface that is centralized around the gaming experience

To get a similar experience on a computer, the price is higher, and includes more wires, more setup time, and potentially, a bit more of frustration and hassle. Tycho put it best, saying that someone who would prefer this simplicity doesn’t make them an idiot, it makes them pragmatic.

So take the PC Platform, and look at what made it better than the console system: online interaction, hardware, and input devices. These major issues are being addressed by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. Microsoft’s Xbox LIVE service is utterly amazing compared to what is out there right now. Integration with its games are near seamless, communication and community itself work very well, and with online collaborations like bungie.net to allow screenshot and movie sharing is a giant leap in the right direction. Sony had the right idea with the hardware, putting out the most powerful gaming console that the market has ever seen. This is effectively their biggest issue right now though, as it will take years for coders to even fathom the use of six cores to their benefit in game design. Regardless of this point, we’ve got the “power” concept that we are constantly revisiting in the PC segment being addressed and dealt with. Lastly, we come to the incredible precision that a mouse and keyboard provides to the user. I won’t go out and say that Nintendo has covered this angle, but they are pioneering the industry in the right direction. Nintendo had the melons to release a completely new form of input into games, and tear the industry away from the standard stick-button controller approach that it had been comfortably relying on for the past two decades. This input isn’t the best in the world for trying to convert PC gamers into a hardcore FPS shooter, but it’s a step in the right idea that we need to rethink the hardware we are giving gamers to interact with their virtual environments as they toil through them, and that we should take a direction that is not only fun, and simple but intuitive as well.

So I wouldn’t jump and say that PC Gaming is starting to see it’s demise, because the lines of what PC Gaming is has become more and more blurred, where the typical boundaries that defined PC Gaming has been adopted and translated into today’s modern day consoles. Furthermore, while a PC will be considerably more powerful than the latest console, console hardware specifications are catching up. I think (and certainly hope) that while games will still be available on the PC as time continues, we will start seeing a movement towards a better input system that potentially mimics or improves the PC’s dominating stance in this area, and a more unified console experience for gamers. As a whole, I think this generation is just the final step before we get to see the next evolution in games in how they’re delivered, played, and experienced by gamers.

But until then, I still need to decide if I want to buy Bioshock for the PC or my 360.

Review: Shadow of the Colossus

Published on May 23, 2008 in Games. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

The second colossi

By the end of this past semester, I had been able to beat about six of the sixteen colossi in this game, before the push to finish all of my projects got in my way of finishing the game. Last week I was able to set up my PS2, pop in the game, and beat the rest of it over the course of a few days. Needless to say, I needed to sit back for a few days to wrap my head around the story, and the numerous strengths this game had. Plainly stated: this was one of the best games I have ever had the opportunity to play.

For those of you who have never heard of Shadow of the Colossus, here is the description provided in the game’s Wikipedia entry:

The game focuses on a young man named Wander who must travel across a vast expanse on horseback and defeat sixteen giants, beings collectively known as colossi, to restore the life of a girl. The game is unusual within the action-adventure genre in that there are no towns or dungeons to explore, no characters with which to interact, and no enemies to defeat, other than the colossi.

The game succeeds immediately through its incredible simplistic (yet detailed) movement and weapon system. You have two main weapons (a sword, and a bow with an infinite amount of arrows), and two main methods of transportation (your feet and your horse Argo). All of these methods of attack and travel are given to you at the start of the game, and there are no tasks required to acquire them. By the time you reach the first colossus, you have learned all of the major movements needed to beat the entire game.

The battles against the colossi are incredible, both in that they are challenging, and incredibly rewarding. Each battle is a puzzle as you must find a way to first get atop of the colossus, and then you must find its vital points to attack to defeat the monster. Retrospectively, games of the past where “boss battles” were the culmination of a level’s worth of beating through the motions of a platformer, SOTC is a collection of sixteen of these epic boss battles one after the other, bringing you closer and closer to reviving your loved one. Without going into too much detail, the last boss battle was perfect in so many ways. The various levels of complexity that needed to be seen through to beat the boss, along with the difficulty made it exactly what I’ve been looking for in a game for so long. Too often nowadays games have been “dumbed down” to make the play-through easier on casual gamers looking to play titles that would be enjoyed predominately by the “hardcore” titles. By example, by no means is Super Mario Galaxy considered a “hardcore” title, but I was incredibly disappointed when I beat Bowser on my first run-through without even breaking a sweat. So needless to say, the three and a half hours it took me to learn the motions to figure out what needed to be done to beat the boss I was contented by the entire experience. Although incredibly frustrating, I respected the fact that the final boss was not handed to me on a silver platter.

(SPOILER NOTE: Stop here if you want to save yourself from spoilers about the end of the game.)

In hindsight, the main strength of the game that makes me find it so compelling against the small (but growing!) library of games that I’ve beaten is the emotion that the game successfully evokes throughout the game, especially at its conclusion. With Wander having absolutely no interactions with NPCs or players other than your horse, and being surrounded by a vast, seemingly unending landscape to explore and discover the locations of your enemies, you are reminded how truly alone you are throughout the quest. From time to time during the colossi battles, the one hint you get from Dormin (the omnipresent voice in the game) just isn’t enough to tip you off on what to do to defeat the colossus, putting into perspective what your character is doing for love.

Finally, after defeating the sixteen colossi, after 8-12 hours of gaming you realize that you are finally able to have your love revived, and you will live happily ever after. In the final cutscene, your progress is interrupted by what would be interpreted as the shaman from the town/city/area which you are from, castrating you for stealing the sacred sword you have wielded all this time, and entering a forbidden land. Dormin, the creature that had been guiding you through defeating the sixteen colossi was ultimately an incredible evil that had been broken up into sixteen pieces to protect the world from its reign. With the sixteen colossi having been defeated, you now have unleashed true evil, opening up a proverbial pandora’s box on the world, tricked under the guise of an undying love for a woman. Dormin then assumes itself manifested through your body, and you control him as the shaman escapes with the sacred sword in an attempt to seal you off back into temple, again banishing Dormin to protect the fate of humanity. You briefly control Dormin, attempting to kill the shaman and his henchmen, and then trying to retreat from the gravitational pull towards the enchanted pool of water that will lock your soul away. All attempts at recovering from this fate are futile, which make the ending of the story so incredibly powerful to the gamer. You are given control of the player which has but one doomed fate, with no ability to change the outcome, but the opportunity to believe that there is a chance. This event makes you think not only to the last few minutes of the game, but the entire story, and every story driven game you have completed in the past. Ultimately, we are dragged along a predefined path until we reach the conclusion that was decided before we even loaded up the game for the system in the first time. It’s an ultra-realistic view at story-driven gaming as a whole, and your entire journey that you just suffered through ultimately for an outcome you will never be able to enjoy or experience. The game itself hits on every major point that I look on in a game, removing all the bullshit developers put in to increase gameplay and add to the feature set of their ultimate product. Shadow of the Colossus is a pinnacle of game design, development, story, and intertwining all three aspects into an awesome, amazingly entertaining experience

The game itself is a prequel to Ico, a game by the same Sony development team. While I recently purchased the game, I have yet to dive into it, but I can’t wait to see how the gameplay and story of Shadow of the Colossus leads into Ico.

What I would change/improve:

One thing Cory Barlog (creative lead of God of War 2) suggested at a symposium we both talked at was that every game you play has flaws and features that could be changed for the betterment of the game. He said that coming up with a list of ten things you didn’t like about the game can show your creativity and mindset in game design. Shadow of the Colossus was one of the greatest games that I have played, but it wasn’t without its flaws. I will not always come up with ten items, but at least explain a few of my rants about the gameplay and story as I see fit through my future game reviews.

Air collision, movement. For all the simple movement with complex implementations that the game had for movement, I was thoroughly disappointed with the little control you had with Wander after he had jumped. Jumping onto Ando was not always as easy as it should be, and you would have to mount him from a direct position on either side of him. This was very easy in Zelda: Twilight Princess, and coming back to this game was somewhat of a disappointment for how specific you had to be in order to mount Ando.

Ando’s movement. Ando is animated incredibly well, keeping the mannerisms of what riding a horse is like from its acutal animation to the controls that integrate with riding the horse. There are even incredibly minute details that I notice that impressed me. When you turn into a direction on Ando, the reign becomes taut on the side you are turning, just as you would when riding a horse. Having ridden one myself, the game accurately displays the wide turning radius that a horse has when running, but I found this – coupled with the collision with trees and cliff edges that steering Ando through thinner sections of land was tedious and annoying at times.

Lack of animation/movement changes. Maybe I was spoiled rotten by the beautiful playable cutscenes of God of War 2, where you would be able to preform incredibly epic movements by simply pressing a button on time, but the animation potential of Wander when fighting the colossi left something to be desired. I can think of one colossus fight, I think the 13th or 14th that you come up to, where you need to deflate the bubbles on its stomach, then use Ando to get near its lowered wings and jump on to get atop the colossus. With the exception of the final boss, this was my favorite fight as the movement required of you was intricate, and looked incredibly cool when you pulled it off correctly. I think there could have been more of these scenes that kept the frailty of Wander that was trying to be displayed, while giving the player some eye candy to do some great looking tricks when fighting a colossus. For instance, using your bow as a zipline piece when fighting the wall-climbing colossus would have been sweet!

Camera. Throughout the game the camera is the clutch of the game, as it creates a beautiful long shot for the traveling sequences with Ando, and the fighting sequences with the colossi. All this hard work however quickly falls apart when you find yourself in close quarters (both on Ando and off), and makes movement incredibly frustrating and your position in the game incredibly disorienting at times. Some experiences come to mind when riding Ando in a forest near the walls, or fighting the colossus that you needed to bang the tooth-looking crown on his head to move him. The swimming to get onto his back was very frustrating and took me much more time to figure out which way I was going versus what the camera was showing me.

Improper difficulty distribution. The difficulty of the game increases as you continue on with the colossi, having to figure out more interesting puzzles, dodge colossi fire, and continual movement changes. My major complaint is that 50% into the game, I fought some colossi that I figured out how to beat in the first camera fly-over before I had even started. Since there (for the most part) no real order to the colossi fights, I would argue that the ordering of the battles should have been rearranged to create a increasing challenge to the player.

Story holes. The game itself does a great job at telling its story, but I would have liked to see more about the girl, why she was dead, and what Wander had to do to get her out there, out of the village. I liked being surprised at the end by finding that he had stolen the sword, but seeing the whole “escape” from his village may have put a larger stress on the importance he placed in the task at hand.

Direction/Map resolution. Overall, finding some specific colossi was not as easy as I had hoped it would be. I understand that the difficulty of finding all of the colossi adds to the gameplay, but I became frustrated finding maybe two of the bosses and needed to seek some information as to find the missing pieces for where I should be following my sword’s beam of light. A few more in-game hints (via posted billboards) that I could have read or hints from Dormin after it was recognized that I was riding around for more than 15 minutes and had not found the colossus yet would have made the gameplay slightly smoother and left the frustration for the battles, not reaching them.

Again, I would stress to anyone that has not played this game to get their hands on a PS2 and a copy of the game to see what the hubbub is all about. It is a must-play if not a must-own for any one serious enough to look into the industry’s crowning achievements.