For the curious, I did stay awake for the Diablo 3 unveiling ceremony. I miscalculated time zone differences, so the ceremony started at 2:45, which was more sensible-seeming than 3:45. It was a fun time, even if it's a bit silly sitting alone in my home and yet feeling like I'm part of something in France.

People can laugh, but I honestly feel that Diablo 3 is a pretty significant cultural event. As far as I'm concerned, Diablo 2 was one of the great masterpieces of art that has been created in my lifetime, so anything new with the Diablo name is noteworthy. Certainly more interesting than, say, an award-winning play.

Labels: games

Blizzard is announcing a game this Saturday in Europe. That's about all we know. They've been running these enigmatic splash pages for days now on their sites to drop misleading hints and drive everyone crazy. It could just be an announcement regarding World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, and that's probably the most likely possibility, but this looks like it might be something bigger. Another Starcraft announcement? We haven't gotten much in the past year. A Diablo 3 announcement? A Starcraft or Diablo MMO? A new property entirely? There are conspiracy theorists on the internet with irrefutable evidence that it's each one of those things.

Earlier tonight I almost decided to stay up tomorrow night until 4:00 am for the announcement. Almost. But I'm a recovering fanboy; I need to work to avoid these sorts of temptations.

Labels: games

Hey, they finally released a patch for Diablo II that removes the copy protection, letting you play the game without the CD in the drive. Better late than never, I guess. It's pretty impressive that they're still making occasional updates to that game, considering how ancient it is.

Labels: games

I finished Mass Effect, at a few minutes shy of thirty hours. I imagine that if you don't try to finish every single little side quest in the game it's probably more like fifteen. The main storyline is where it's at; most of the side quests are pretty forgettable. It's not that they're not fun, but they're pretty repetitive, and their storylines usually don't tie in with anything else. Some of them are really well-done, and some are just weirdly abrupt and pointless. There's some definite fun to be had exploring uncharted worlds, but that gets pretty repetitive (and occasionally frustrating, given the vehicle controls) after you've done it a few times. Were I to play again, I don't think I'd bother with most of the side quests; without them, I don't think that the game would have felt repetitive at all. All of the main quest areas are very well-done, but the side quests reuse a LOT of architecture—there are like three building types for all of the different possible side quests, reused again and again and again. For as well-constructed as the rest of the game is, that's pretty puzzling to me.

But anyway, the core game itself is really great. The storyline and presentation are top-notch, and it's got a nice epic feeling and some fun plot twists. It's still in the vein of Neverwinter Nights and Knights of the Old Republic, but more of a departure in that the combat requires aiming instead of die rolls, and they were free to develop their own combat system instead of D&D. You don't get a lightsaber, but you can get a sniper rifle, a worthy but less pleasing substitute. All of the typical RPG stuff—killing monsters for shiny treasure—is in there, and while it's a space theme instead of the usual fantasy stuff, the world that they've created is really rich and full.

I played it on the PC, and I don't think it would have been nearly as fun on the console. Seeing it on the big screen and hearing it on the big speakers would have been a treat, but while it's an RPG, it still requires some FPS-like reactions, and my hatred of using a controller to aim a firearm is the stuff of legends. I can't even imagine how impossible the final battle would have been with a stupid little thumbstick.

Really, I can recommend it to anyone who likes RPGs, and if you liked Neverwinter Nights or Knights of the Old Republic, the chances that you'll love Mass Effect are very high, especially if you don't despise first person shooters. (I can't speak for the Xbox version, but if you like RPGs and console FPS games, I don't see why you wouldn't love it too.) It's a great experience. I'm looking forward to the inevitable sequel, though to the authors' credit, this game comes to a very satisfying and final conclusion.


Currently listening: Death Cab for Cutie—Your New Twin Sized Bed

Labels: games

Well, I own a Playstation 3 now. I didn't really want to own one. There are no games that I want for it, and I already have one more console than I really want. But I was left little choice. If you're going to get a Blu-ray player, which I was, it doesn't seem like there's a great reason right now to get a standalone player when a Playstation 3 is at most like fifty bucks more. For those extra few dollars you get something that can play games, is known to have great playback capabilities, and is guaranteed to have system updates in the future. I figured that it was the sensible choice for getting a Blu-ray player, since Microsoft has announced so many times recently that they absolutely, positively aren't going to be making any Blu-ray Xboxes or add-on drives, since digital downloads are the future or some idiocy of that kind.

So there's the story of how I'm a big fat traitor and now own the competing game console. Overall, I like the device. The first Blu-ray movie that I'll be watching will be, it seems, National Treasure: Book of Secrets from Netflix. I also bought Weeds Season 3 and Juno, but they haven't arrived yet.

Shut up. I see that face you're making. I thought the first National Treasure was fun.


Currently listening: NERD—Laugh About It

Labels: games, movies, technology

I've been playing Mass Effect (the critically-acclaimed virtual orgasmic rape simulator) recently; it's pretty fun. It's basically the same game as Neverwinter Nights and Knights of the Old Republic, but more streamlined, and a requirement that you actually aim your character's attacks instead of them being totally roll-based. The basic story formula is the same too—you start off in a training area for an hour or so until you get to the big city, where there is one big quest and lots of little quests. After that, you had off on your own.

One nice touch that I really like about the game is the flexible character generation. Oblivion is the only game I've played where you could create your own character with such a customized appearance, but most of the sliders in Oblivion went from ugly to fugly. A popular description is that Oblivion's characters all look like burn victims—it's strange considering how great the rest of the game looks. But in Mass Effect you can create a hero you wouldn't mind looking at for the length of the game.


My character from Mass Effect


A guy in Oblivion


Currently listening: Goldfrapp—Human

Labels: games

I downloaded and played the demo for On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness Episode One at dinner tonight. It seems amusing enough. If you've ever wondered what it would be like to throw a fruit at an evil robotic juicer to distract it, and then watch it rapidly rape the fruit in glorious semi-3D, it's the game for you. Other than the violent produce deflowering, though, what really struck me about the game was just how much style it exudes. The character creation and cartoon cutscenes in particular felt extremely well-done. I'm not a huge fan of 2D cartoons being translated into 3D, but this seems as good as any.

Polish and style mean a lot to me in games, and not many games make such a good impression. Those that did? Blizzard's games, Crysis, Assassin's Creed, Gears of War, Half-Life 2, Doom 3, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Heroes of Might and Magic II, Nox, and Malcolm's Revenge come to mind. Those are games that don't feel like they were rushed, and games where you can almost feel the love and care that went into them from the very first play.

Labels: games

After finishing Crysis, I'd intended to get into Assassin's Creed. I'm about two hours in; I'd mostly just tried it out before I got around to starting Crysis. But now I'm not so sure that it's the sort of game that I want to play right now. I got my mom the weird puzzle/RPG hybrid game Puzzle Quest for Mother's Day, since she likes puzzle-type games, and she and my dad have become addicted to it. (Mom's into puzzle games, and Dad's into RPGs, so it seems that they both found something they like.) They had run into some questions about using spells and constructing buildings, so I decided to download a demo on the Xbox yesterday and try it out for myself. I only played it for about 20 minutes, but it was entrancing. I had to stop myself. Now I've been finding myself thinking about it from time to time. Twenty minutes! That's all it took.

This Bejeweled-Plus-Hit-Points infiltrated my mind in only twenty minutes, and now there is a greater-than-zero chance that I will succumb to temptation tomorrow and buy it. I almost feel like the veteran gamer in me should be immune to the allure of these gem-matching parlor tricks. But it's not.

It's a fairly silly concept, really. To use a cliché, it feels wrong, but yet so right. It's an RPG in which all battles are fought by playing Bejeweled. Honestly, there are plenty of RPGs that are very entertaining when combat consists of clicking a fight button a dozen times, so I guess it makes sense that Puzzle Quest is fun when the fight button has been replaced with a grid of gems—something proven to be fun in and of itself. The RPG mechanics really do seem to add depth to what's normally an extremely casual game. It's certainly good to see that people are innovating and mixing and matching genres.


Update from the comments: I indeed bought Puzzle Quest from the Xbox Live Arcade, and I played it a bit last night. It has already helped me to nearly miss one workout.

Labels: games

I finished Crysis, the spiritual sequel to Far Cry, and I have to say... it's a pretty fantastic game. It looks gorgeous, and it plays great. The one-sentence synopsis is that you're a soldier on an island in Korea, equipped with a "nanosuit" that gives you a choice of special powers: superhuman strength, speed, or resilience, or a cloak. The nanosuit idea actually works very well in practice, because it leaves your options open. Say you're facing an enemy base. You can switch your suit to speed mode, dash in across the bridge, and hide when you get there. You can use armor mode and try to fight your way in before you're killed by snipers. Or, you can put on strength mode to give yourself incredible jumping ability, and then fall down to the rocks below, engaging your cloak before the enemy spots you, and then finding a stealthy back way in. Most of the time, you really do have a wide variety of options for how you'll tackle each situation, so the game fits a bunch of different play styles. Your suit recharges power and heals you very rapidly between battles, so there's no need to be anal about hit points, yet you're still fragile enough (especially when not in armor mode) to make you think and play smartly.

It might sound like I'm overstating the open-endedness of the game based on how poorly most games that purport to give you a choice end up implementing it, but in Crysis the levels are massive just so you can do things at your own pace in the way you want to. It's like the Oblivion of shooters. And like Oblivion, the environments are fantastic, and every once in a while make you want to stand around and gawk. The detail level is incredible; you can stand on a hill, put on your binoculars and zoom in to the maximum level, and see trees and rocks on another hill elsewhere on the island—a part of the island that you might not even have a reason to ever visit, but they put the details in anyway. There's no real limit to the draw distance, unlike most games that would start to draw "fog" to keep the framerates high.



And did I mention it's gorgeous? Everything about the game's visual quality is topnotch—the models, the terrain, the textures, and the special effects. When there's electrical interference nearby or you take heavy damage, your suit's visuals begin to distort in a very believable way. You can even get blood splatter and ice crystals on your mask, and some levels have night/day transitions. Even the computer screens in-game are high-resolution, interactive, and believable, like Doom 3. It comes at a price, though—my computer's specs are pretty decent, but even my machine could only run it at medium settings. I had to turn off antialiasing to get a decent framerate in some areas. I can't imagine there even exists a computer today that would render Crysis playable at the maximum settings. (All of the screenshots in this post are at the settings I played with—medium—except with 2x antialiasing because that's how I started the game out.)



The story plays out well, though the last third of the game doesn't have the massive scope or open-ended feel of the first two-thirds. The story isn't exactly incredible, but it's not a liability, and it's presented very well, like any good blockbuster action movie.

If you're a fan of shooters and have a computer that can run it, I can wholeheartedly recommend Crysis with no reservations. It's one of the best I've ever played. Versus Gears of War and Half-Life 2 it wins out in graphics, and is right on par in gameplay. Gears of War is more visceral, Half-Life 2 has better storytelling, and Crysis is far less linear than either.

Labels: games

I think that next, I'm going to get a little more Culdcept Saga time in. Culdcept is a card and board game for Xbox 360, and it's strangely addicting. I think that the audience for a game like it is pretty limited—a certain subset of board game fanatics. The gameplay is slow and methodical, but pretty rewarding. There's a strong luck component, but tactics and deck construction are still more likely to be the defining factor in any match. A large portion of the game is the acquisition of new creatures for your army, new items to equip them with, and new spells to cast during battle. By that I mean getting new cards that let you do those things, which you assemble into a custom deck of exactly 50 cards to tailor your strategy for the next battle.

I'm pretty sure that anyone who reads that and hasn't played Culdcept Saga is going to be either pretty excited or pretty repulsed, and I'd guess that whatever your intuition after reading all that, it's probably correct. I finished about half of the campaign while waiting for Kane's Wrath to arrive, so I think I'll go back to that for a while. Then I'll probably move on to Crysis, unless Mass Effect or Assassin's Creed gets me first. I haven't had a ton of time to play games recently, but I try to squeeze some time in when I can to keep from going crazy...

Labels: games

I really liked Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars. So, I was really excited that an expansion, Kane's Wrath, was coming out. Unfortunately, it's fairly disappointing. I wouldn't say it's bad, but it's kind of sitting at the lowest bar of expectations from a C&C expansion pack, especially since the last one, Command and Conquer Generals: Zero Hour was absolutely phenomenal.

First the good parts: There are some really awesome new units in the expansion. They round out the different sides while keeping in character. Each of the three sides has a "hero" unit now that you're only allowed to build one of, requiring a special structure to be built before you can even start to construct it. While expensive (the same price as a superweapon, without taking the structure into account), they're absurdly powerful. GDI gets the MARV, a tank that's as big as any of GDI's structures and has just about every type of gun imaginable mounted on it, and can be garrisoned with four infantry squadrons. But that's not all—it's also a mobile refinery. Simply driving it over tiberium increases your finances—you can literally recover your initial investment in a few seconds after you trek it very slowly to a tiberium patch. It fills me with absolute glee. The Brotherhood of Nod has the Redeemer, a towering, colossal robot that is essentially the same thing as a MARV without the mobile refinery capabilities. It's a sight to behold. The Scrin get a huge mechanical spider that absorbs tiberium from destroyed units. All three are very awesome.

There are other interesting toys to play with: Nod gets a stealthed artillery that, with the aid of a shadow team spotting the target, can bombard any location on the map, just like GDI can with the juggernaut and a sniper team. The Scrin get what is probably the coolest-looking unit I've seen in an RTS, the Mechapede, which starts out as a small little bead of a unit, but then you can build eight additions onto it depending on what you want it to be good at. You can make it a jack-of-all-trades by mixing and matching, or a harbinger of death for infantry by giving it eight add-on sections that all spew toxic chemicals.

Each of the three factions now has two additional subfactions that you can choose. For example, GDI players can now also play as a Zone Command squadron, and get access to expensive, high-tech weapons while losing some of the more well-rounded units. Or, they can play as the Steel Talons, dropping almost all of the regular infantry types for mechanized walkers, and missing out on all of GDI's sonic technology. (Steel Talons also get the Combat Engineer, which can defend itself somewhat versus enemy soldiers, and says "uh, they gave me a gun?" when you click him.)

There's also a new play mode, Global Conquest, which makes the game play out a bit more like X-COM or Heroes of Might and Magic—there's a turn-based world map where you build your bases and recruit troops, and then conflicts on the world map are fought out in short RTS battles, capped at a few minutes each.

But unfortunately it doesn't all really add up. There's only one campaign, for Nod; there are no GDI or Scrin missions, so to play with those units you have to do skirmishes, which just aren't the same. The storyline is really weak, and even nonsensical in some spots. The new global conquest mode is interesting for a while, but doesn't hold my attention like a normal RTS campaign would have. And while the subfactions open up new gameplay possibilities, they're not done nearly as well as they were in Zero Hour, where the subfactions were very clear and distinct—there was the guy who loved nukes, the guy who put frickin' laser beams on all of his units, and the woman who barely had ground units at all, choosing instead to focus on base defenses and superweapons. All of those personae are well-defined, and you got to fight versus all of them in a silly, campy Mortal Kombat-style tournament bracket. It didn't take itself nearly so seriously, and that made it a lot more amusing than Kane's Wrath ended up being.

Command and Conquer 3 is a great game, and Kane's Wrath improves on the core gameplay in interesting ways. Just not enough—it doesn't really seem like an essential expansion. Play the base game if you like RTS games and haven't picked up C&C3 yet, but I don't see a good reason to get Kane's Wrath too. I think I might have preferred to just dig out Zero Hour again.


Currently listening: Hooverphonic—My Child

Labels: games

I am annoyed by people who are annoyed by artists who they feel are doing the "wrong" thing with their creations. Let me elaborate. Probably the best example of this is when the original Star Wars movies (IV-VI) were released on DVD, and subtle changes were made, such as inserting Hayden Christensen's image briefly into a scene to make it fit better with the prequels. I totally support George Lucas doing what he feels like with the Star Wars movies, and I can't side with those who feel that just because they're really attached to the Star Wars universe, somehow he doesn't have the right to make changes to things. Now, once he dies and his kids start tinkering around with things to milk more money out of the franchise, I'd be more inclined to side with the raving fanbase. But Lucas is alive and kicking, and I think that gives him the right to creatively control his own story.

Same sort of deal with JK Rowling revealing after the last Harry Potter book was published that one of the characters was gay, despite this not being stated in one of the books. A bunch of people went nuts, saying things to the effect of "well, you published, so it's out of your hands now." I think that's absurd.

The area where I see the worst instance of this is (you guessed it) in World of Warcraft. The Warcraft storyline is constantly evolving, as there's a new product in the franchise every couple years. But the bitching... oh, the bitching. People complain about everything that they do with the story. I don't even get what these people want. People complain every time one of the villians of the Warcraft universe is killed off. Back in the base game, people were angry that players were able to kill Kel'Thuzad. In The Burning Crusade, people are angry that players are able to kill Illidan and Kael'thas and Zul'jin. And people have been bitching for a year now that when Wrath of the Lich King is released, they'll be able to defeat the new Lich King Arthas. When new characters are introduced, people complain that they weren't already introduced earlier, so clearly they shouldn't be playing a vital role in the story. It's as if these people don't want the story to advance at all. But then the same people complain that the story never advances.

I don't get it. Sure, I'm attached to the Warcraft universe. The games have always been fun. I didn't even think that I'd have any interest in World of Warcraft, but I bought it years ago because I liked the universe and the story that the authors had created. But that universe is not mine. It's theirs. They're in control of it. I think that they utterly, completely have the right to move it forward. If that means killing off characters that people like and introducing new ones, good for them. The producers of creative works deserve control over their own creations, and people who insist otherwise annoy me.

Labels: games, movies, tv

(This is a games post, not a World of Warcraft post, I swear.) One thing that bothers me when I'm playing (or reading about) World of Warcraft is the phrase "it's just a game." Well, yeah, sure, it's just a game, but it's also a game you're playing with other real people. I've occasionally heard this in reference to board games and sports, but I hear it all the time referring to WoW, and I hate it.

"It's just a game" is the phrase you use when you do something that you know somewhere in your mind is not acceptable, but you want to pretend that it's excused because you're playing a game. Actually, it's kind of like the phrase "just sayin'."

• "Hey, you're an ass-ugly dickface and not even your mom likes you."
• "Hey, you're an ass-ugly dickface and not even your mom likes you. Y'know, just sayin'."

Surely you've heard something like that before. Apparently you can defuse anything by adding "just sayin'" to the end of it. Anything's fine as long as you're just sayin' it.

• "Hey, I know we've been working on this dungeon for 90 minutes and it took us half an hour to get the group going and we're about ten minutes away from finishing so we can all get our rewards, but I'm kinda hungry so I'm going to go get something to eat. Bye."
• "Hey, I know we've been working on this dungeon for 90 minutes and it took us half an hour to get the group going and we're about ten minutes away from finishing so we can all get our rewards, but I'm kinda hungry so I'm going to go get something to eat. It's just a game!"

And that's pretty much how it goes. Yes, sure, it's just a game, but you're playing it with real people. If you're an asshole, World of Warcraft makes it strikingly easy to waste an hour or two of four other peoples' time.

It's a perhaps-unfortunate design decision of World of Warcraft (and from what I can tell, basically just ripped off of EverQuest) that dungeons take a group of people of a specific size (five) that includes two people filling specific roles ("tank" and healer). This increases the possibilities of tactical complexity in the various dungeons, but it also makes things a lot less flexible. In Diablo, people could pretty much come and go as they please, and the game would adjust difficulty accordingly. It takes a tank, a healer, and three other people to make their way through the Magister's Terrace and kill Kael'thas; in Diablo, you can basically do anything and everything with any kind of group. (Hellgate: London tried that in an online game, and it seemed to reasonably succeed in it, but I put it on hold since it was so crashy...)

I think that a lot of it is that the anonymous nature of the internet and games played online brings out the worst in people. There's no real accountability, so you can be as much of a jerk as you want most of the time, and it doesn't hurt you. You don't lose friends or even have to hear someone else nag you about it the next day. That's why a large number of people only play with people in their own guilds—there is a sense of accountability since you're playing with only people you know. But none of that excuses the lack of respect given to games outside of the online world. Fine, it's just a game, but that doesn't excuse you for only paying attention to your own desires and ruining someone else's leisure time.

Labels: games

I dreamed that I was at a team-wide meeting at work, and one of the program managers was up in front of everyone arguing that we should change the UI styles of the feature I'm working on.

Him: What font is it using?
Me: Um, Segoe UI 9.
Him: That's so boring. Everything uses that font. What colors?
Me: Um, black, white, and blue.
Him: That's stupid. We need something exciting.

He complained that it wasn't sleek enough. For a demonstration, he logged into World of Warcraft to show us his UI (WoW lets you replace the UI with your own), which was minimalist and futuristic, with a superhero theme. He had added a lot of mods that made the game look like a comic book—when he attacked monsters or they attacked him, Batman-style "BIFF!" "BAM!" starbursts would appear on his screen. During this "presentation" my own program manager just yelled out "come on, this is bullshit!" which was fairly awkward.

He played for about five minutes or so, and never got to the thing he wanted to show as inspiration for our UI. At that time, he got a Facebook notification popup, and it appeared over his WoW window. I don't remember the exact text, but it was somebody's status update, and it was pretty offensive, at least as things that appear in popups while you're giving a presentation go. It was something very close to this:



At that point, my manager's manager stood up and told him that that was enough. He was pretty annoyed that he never got to show his idea, but he sat back down and shut up. Then the dream ended.

Labels: dreams, games, work

My email alias at work is very frequently mistyped by other people, so I end up getting a lot of peoples' mail. Sometimes it's weird personal stuff, like information about someone's kids' upcoming cheerleading competitions (this one has happened three times or so already), or someone's travel itinerary, and rarely it's particularly confidential, like some corporate strategy in some area of the company that I didn't know existed, and the sender will follow-up with what I call the "holy crap please destroy that mail immediately and don't share it with anyone" email. (Serious business is serious business.) I get some sort of misaddressed mail on average about once a day.

Today I got another misaddressed package delivery. It turned out to be a box of hardware for Microsoft Game Studios. I informed the person it was supposed to be for, and he came and picked it up from my office a couple hours later. For my troubles I received copies of Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties for Windows, and Mass Effect for the 360. Finally, misaddressed mail pays off!

Now I just have to decide whether it's worth waiting for the PC release of Mass Effect (May 6) and making a trade.

Labels: games, work

Now that I've finished up BioShock and Unreal Tournament 3, I'm not in much of a "shooting things" mood. The Next Big Thing that I'm interested in is Command and Conquer: Kane's Wrath coming out next month, which should be a lot of fun. In the meantime, I'm going to play around with the Xbox a bit. I've still got more cars to crash in Burnout, more cities to build in Carcassonne, and when it arrives on Thursday, cards to play in Culdcept Saga. Those should tide me over until I get to command my tanks to blow things up.

It feels good to be finding a little more time each day to play games, after a bit of a dry spell.

Labels: games

In parallel with BioShock I was playing Unreal Tournament 3, as the former is best suited to long stretches of time, and the latter is best suited to short ones. Unreal Tournament is very clearly a multiplayer game. But, unlike most multiplayer games, the Unreal series allows you to play offline versus bots, and unlike most games with bots, the Unreal series has had excellent enemy AI. Each release, they change things up a bit, while keeping the basic structure of the game the same: your objective is just to beat each map once. Each deathmatch, each capture the flag, each objective-based warfare map.

The graphics are phenomenal—basically on par with Gears of War (In fact, the character you play as is pretty close to Marcus Fenix, and you have a Cole-like sassy black guy sidekick.), and UT3 is generally "prettier" in addition to the level of technical excellence. The gameplay is fast, furious, and well-tuned as always. All of the weapons feel "right" to me, and they handle exactly as I'd expect them. The story is ridiculous, and for a while it's pretty amusing that there even is one. (Previous incarnations of Unreal Tournament, the story was just "you're in a tournament; win.") It's a generic story of aliens invading Earth, and you fighting back. But the single-player game still plays exactly like the multiplayer component, with things like constant respawns, and flags that demand to be captured. The first time I heard capture the flag explained I burst out laughing.

Main guy: To take this territory, we need to disable the enemy's respawners. To do that, we need to remove their Field LAttice Generators.
Sassy black guy: You mean the things that look like flags?
Main guy: Yes, those are Field LAttice Generators, or FLAGs for short.
Sassy black guy: They look like flags. They wave like flags. I'm pretty sure they're just flags.

There are a bunch of little scripted conversations like that that show up at proper times during battles and really give the game an unexpected personality. And classy lines like the girl yelling out "Bullshit! Why am I always the first one to die?" really make you feel like you really are playing with jerks online. (Well, not really. Not playing with jerks online is the reason I like single-player UT in the first place.)

UT3, though, has a lot of missteps... probably more than any game in the series so far. They dropped three of my favorite game types in this edition: the ultraviolent basketball game, the objective-based assaults on enemy bases, and domination, where you have to control points of interest for a period of time to score points. I was really shocked to find those missing. What you're left with is just deathmatch, capture the flag, and the outdoor game in which you must control nodes that link your base with the enemy's, renamed to "warfare" from "onslaught." That's half of the game types missing. Not cool.

The warfare game mode has two great improvements, and one really bad addition. Since the game features huge maps that relies on vehicles, each character now carries a hoverboard that they can use when they don't have any other vehicles, drastically reducing the time wasted running from place to place. Also, the maps are more varied in their objectives, with many secondary objectives to pick up rather than just "connect to the enemy base so we can destroy it" every time. But the terribly obnoxious change is that each side now has orbs that can be used to instantly control a node, instead of it taking like 30 or 40 seconds like it normally does. This makes the game disgustingly random at times. I hate them.

The AI is also strangely bad, in an unfortunate departure from the legacy of the series. Maybe it's just because I was playing the campaign on "normal," but my teammates were at times dumb as bricks. Maybe they suck less on higher difficulty levels. The guy on my team who was good at sniping and base defense was always the first one to grab the orb, basically the most powerful offensive weapon you have. And then half the time he'd just stand there confused, seemingly not sure what he was going to do with it. If I didn't know that I was playing with bots I'd have assumed that the guy picked up the orb and then left the computer to go to the bathroom or something. (Disclaimer: apparently the just-released patch improves the AI.)

The maps are strange. Some are mediocre, some are terrible, and some are absolutely fantastic. The core FPS gameplay is still excellent, and they didn't do anything to ruin deathmatches—they're still, in my opinion, the best around. But the lack of what I consider very key game types for an Unreal game really hurts the game and its replayability. I expected something great, but UT3 is just... incomplete.

Labels: games

Well, I've finished BioShock. My main complaint is that after about an hour or two of the game, and your first Big Daddy (pictured) kill, you've seen almost everything that you're going to see other than the various environments and a couple of the weapons. That's not necessarily bad—Doom 3 was one of my favorite shooters, and the gameplay doesn't change much either. It doesn't help, though. The weapons are all pretty standard, but you also have what are essentially magic spells ("plasmids"), and a lot of passive enhancements ("gene tonics") that you can swap in and out. I didn't care much for the plasmids, but choosing between which tonics I used (move faster, swing my wrench harder, take better photos, fire resistance, get more health back from first aid kits, etc.) was definitely amusing. The environments are unusual for the genre, and diverse, but there is only a small handful of different types of enemies you'll encounter in the game, and that's assuming you count "guy holding a lead pipe" as a different enemy than "guy holding a machine gun." With all of the incredible hype the game got, though, I guess I was somehow expecting more from the core gameplay, or at least something new.

BioShock tells much of its story using the Doom 3 model: through diaries left behind by the previous residents. If you don't listen to these, you're missing out on most of the storyline, just like in Doom 3. (Like Doom 3, the game occasionally rewards you for paying attention to the story, as a few of the diaries contain unlocking codes for supply containers or other tips on where to find a nice surprise.) Skipping the diaries would be a shame anyway, because the storyline is really the only reason to play BioShock. It starts off a bit slow, but eventually it becomes quite intriguing. It's very different from Half-Life 2, where you feel like you're right in the story... in BioShock, you are very much an observer most of the time. I was lucky enough to not know really anything about the story going in, and I think that really helped. If you have any interest in trying the game, don't read anything about the storyline.

The "sameness" of much of the game wasn't as bad as perhaps I've made it seem. Really, the only things that really got on my nerves were listed on the box as features, and they're the "dynamic world" sort of features. It's cute to hack a security camera or turret so it comes under your control a couple times, and then after that it just gets tedious. I found myself doing this dozens or even a hundred times, and then finally I just gave up on the hacking minigame and just brute-forced everything. The game lost a lot of its uniqueness at that point, but at least it wasn't so obnoxiously frustrating. The hacking minigame is basically the same every time you play it: it's essentially just Pipe Dream. If you have always wished that your first-person shooters were broken up with about three hundred games of Pipe Dream, BioShock is the game for you. Me, there's only so much I can take before I go insane.

So yeah, I'm a bit behind the times just getting around to playing BioShock now, but it's worth picking up if you haven't. It would not get my vote for game of the year, but it's still certainly worthwhile.

At the end of the game, everything is tied up nicely, though there are some areas of the plot left (probably intentionally) vague. They're planning a prequel, though, which has me a little scared...


Currently listening: Muse—Unintended (video)

Labels: games

Tonight's board game wisdom:

A cock is a cock.

Specifically, it doesn't matter how much the die is tilted to the side; if it's resting against something, it needs to be rerolled.

Currently listening: Muse—Sunburn

Labels: games

For some reason, on the way to work at least once or twice a week, I am suddenly reminded of the gargoyles from Heroes of Might and Magic V. I don't know what it is that I see or hear that reminds me of this, but it happens a lot. The gargoyles were just absolutely adorable. In previous Heroes games and in most games in general, gargoyles are these scary stone creatures that rip your face off. In Heroes V, they were these cute little bookends that hopped around (or flew for short distances) and hit you over the head with a stone tablet that they carried around. When they weren't doing anything (Heroes is turn-based, so that happened a lot), they'd just sit there looking innocent, hiding behind their stone tablet.

Labels: games