Sunday, March 29, 2009

ATV + videogames = how could you go wrong!?

I like riding ATVs. It's up there with snowboarding as one of my favorite things to do. I actually rode earlier today in a soggy pasture as fast as I could. But I've never ridden quite like the folks do in Pure for Xbox 360. I'm okay with that though. Doing 200 ft. jumps and crazy tricks seems like something that's better left to the virtual world.

ExciteTrucks is about the closest thing I can think of to compare this game to. Lots of ridiculous jumps and stunts that you could never pull off in real life. The whole boost/trick system is well done but doesn't even try to be realistic. Which is where I was a bit confused with this game. The tutorial starts you off by teaching you how to pre-load to jump higher and what buttons to push to pull off the sickest tricks. Then you're set loose on a racing circuit. I was trying crazy tricks on every jump and often failing since I didn't have enough time in the air to do it. Or jumping really high just made me fall behind the other competitors. There's also a freestyle section of the game that rewards you with points and it doesn't matter who finishes first. But the race and freestyle sections are mixed together in the tour without much differentiation. You even run the freestlye ones on the same overused courses.

Once I learned to focus on racing or tricking, I did a bit better, but the game just doesn't seem to have enough to keep my interest for very long. I had almost the same reaction to playing Dirt last year. Maybe I'm just not into racing games? I dunno, I think I'll stick to real ATVs.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

RE: Your Brains


I was a little skeptical about Left 4 Dead when I first heard about it. It's a game designed around online play, something I rarely do mostly because I never seem to be playing the same things as people on my 360 friends list. And playing with random internet losers can be dubious at best. So it's a testament to the great job Valve did that I actually really enjoyed this game.

I was asked if I finished the game and the answer is...I guess? There are four unconnected scenarios with the same four survivors of a zombie apocalypse. The story in each is really no more than "Ok we're here, we need to get to that place far away and then we'll be safe. Go." I finished these four scenarios at least once. I think I only completed one of them all the way through with random others online. For the rest I relied on the computer AI to direct the other three survivors with mixed results. The computer didn't seem to get in my way too much but I was definitely voted the leader in this situation. They would never go first or end a chapter without me showing them the way.

Online I played with people that would breeze through the terrain since they'd obviously played it before and I was usually rushing to keep up. When I was able to save somebody it felt really satisfying. You almost get the sense that you're really the last people on earth and you've got to help out your buddies in this crazy situation. The voice chat was there to fall back on if I needed it, but most of the things you'd say to the others were said by the characters automatically anyway. Pointing out ammo, health, or special bad guys were taken care of. All that was left to communicate was strategy. I was told to stay at the top of the map at the end of the No Mercy campaign while we were fighting of endless hordes waiting for our escape chopper. Good advice.

Also, online or off, sticking together is a must. Cooperative play is really emphasized since survivors routinely get incapacitated and need saving. Another part that bears mentioning is the AI Director. If you seem to be breezing through a section, you'll soon have a massive tank zombie attacking or a huge horde coming your way. Often, you get through the chapters by the skin of your teeth, limping and bleeding to the safe rooms that mark the end of chapters. I usually hate not being close to full health when I play games, but in this one it completely fits.

So play this if you can. If you have a group of friends who'll play it with you, then this is a definite must-play.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Fallout 3


Not withstanding my scathing evaluation of Kanenko's 1992 Chester Cheetah title - which is still widely recognized as one of the most baroquely literate uses of the word "sucks" ever to appear on Usenet - I don't often write video game reviews. However, it's not often that I play a game like Fallout 3... or to be more precise, it's rare that I play a game in the manner that I played Fallout 3 this week. Normally I have hardly any time to play games, but this week I worked my way through about two-thirds of Fallout's main plot during a period where my wife was out of town and I was stuck at home with the flu. In other words, I had no distractions, no responsibilities, and I was on drugs most of the time. That means I played Fallout a lot and I got really into it. Yes, yes, I'm talking about a game that came out in October 2008, which makes me the last person on earth to play it, but I'm betting that if you've come this far you're just going to keep on reading anyway.


The Good:


The size and scope of the game world in Fallout 3 is one of its most impressive aspects. I'm sure that Elite has a bigger game universe, but that hardly counts since most of it is procedurally-generated. I'm pretty far along in the game and I bet I've only been to a quarter of the game world so far. But in addition to breadth, there's also depth to it; the number of side-quests and random NPC encounters and strange little details they've filled the world up with is just incredible. This bodes well for replayability, too - maybe my next character will strike off towards the west, away from the areas my current guy has explored. I think that if you were so inclined, you could spend many hours of play time just walking from one end of post-apocalyptic Washington DC to the other, simply looking at stuff. In fact, the place is so huge and byzantine that it could get very frustrating if you couldn't alt-tab over to the Fallout Wiki to get a clue about where to go next. Still, they've managed to realize a very ambitious game world and I salute them for it.


On a related note, the whole retro-future timeline they've concocted is quite interesting, and I enjoyed picking up little bits of alternate history here and there in ruined museums and so forth. As near as I can tell, the Fallout world is basically the same as ours up until about 1950, at which point their world developed cheap nuclear power but skipped most of the advances in electronics and computers that we take for granted. Hence, in 2077 everybody was driving around in huge 50's-looking cars with onboard reactors (think Ford Nucleon) but their computers are primitive, there's radio but no TV, and most stuff still works off of vacuum tubes. Now that I think about it, the future of the Fallout world is pretty much what people in the 1950's thought their future would be like. What a neat design aesthetic.


Anyway, it's two centuries after the nuclear holocaust and things are bad all over. It's obvious as you play Fallout 3 that the designers made a conscious effort to make goodies scarce to keep you from finding too much loot too soon. Bullets, medicine, repairable weapons, and non-radioactive food are all in short supply, and it feels completely in keeping with the game world. You can't just rush into a firefight without being forever vigilant about your ammunition and health supplies, and you learn to target certain enemies who you know will usually be carrying something you can use. I found out very quickly that I had to do a lot of sneaking around, so I could ambush a bad guy or otherwise take him down with as few wasted shots as possible. In Fallout 3, you gain levels and skills but you never really reach the stage of Ultimate Badassery that you inevitably do in other games. Part of this is due to how the difficulty scales as you advance in rank, but scarcity also plays a big part: you may have found a l33t gun, sure, but what good is it going to be when you run out of l33t bullets?


Going hand in hand with the issue of limited resources is the way the designers let you make your own choices about what's right and wrong. Since you have to hoard your supplies all the time, when a situation comes along that (for example) requires you to give away your last bottle of clean water to help out some poor desert-dweller, you often have really to stop and agonize over it. They give you plenty of chances to do good or cause harm, and to be generous or selfish. Sometimes your character has to do bad things just to stay alive, which is certainly not something you see often in a Star Wars game. Even though I was trying to play my character as a good guy, it was surprisingly easy to start thinking "do I help these guys, or should I just shoot them and take their food?". Not often does a video game make me ask myself that, and I appreciate it.


Once the shooting starts, I found myself using the very handy VATS system an awful lot. They way they worked a turn-based combat system with action points and percent-chance-to-hit into a real-time FPS game is quite well done and feels very natural. The slow-mo cinematic combat effects are fun (it's like being in my very own John Woo film!) and popping up from behind some cover to land a headshot with a critical hit and blowing off some monster's head... well, it just never gets old.


Finally, no list of positives for Fallout 3 is complete without a mention of Dogmeat. Almost every NPC companion I've ever encountered in any game has been cheap cannon fodder at best, and a deadly hindrance at worst (I'm looking in your direction, Half-Life 2 squad members who block you from going through a door while alien soldiers are shooting you in the back). But this little guy is different - he's a genuine help in combat, he follows quietly without saying stupid stuff, he growls to alert you to nearby danger, and he usually doesn't get in your way. Plus, you can tell him to go fetch useful stuff for you (I think I once even saw him open a locked ammo box?!). I really liked having him around, in a definite Boy And His Dog kind of way. However, I must say that I wish they had done a little more with him. You can say things like "good boy" and "bad dog" to him, but as far as I could tell, there's no in-game effect no matter what you say. And, although you can tell him to "stay" so he doesn't go chasing after a too-strong group of bad guys, they missed an obvious trick by not letting you whistle to summon him again. And that leads us to...


The Not As Good:


It only takes about ten minutes of playing to recognize that Fallout 3's in-game map is terrible. Yes, I realize that computers in the Fallout universe are very primitive compared to what we have today - but did the map really have to be green-on-green like my dad's TRS-80? Not to mention, showing every story of the building you're in at the same time is so not useful. I can't count the number of times I got confused, thinking I was in the right room but actually being one floor above or below it.


Speaking of moving around - I know I gave props the combat system just a minute ago, but I need to call back a few of those same props. Allow me to un-prop thusly: I love the turn-based VATS system. I do not so much love the "freehand" real-time combat that you're forced to rely on once you use up all your VATS action points. Part of my problem is that I'm just not that great at FPS games, but I think I can legitimately pin some of the blame on the game itself as well. The first-person mouse controls are just kind of clunky and hard to aim. In the third-person view (the POV is switchable between the two) the camera is all over the place, the targeting reticule is often obscured by the back of my character's head, and the lack of any kind of auto-aim makes it even tougher to hit. Even when not in combat, I tend to switch back and forth between first- and third-person depending on the situation; neither one is ever quite right all the time.


Now, remember how I said the game world is super huge and the locations are varied? Well, that openness and lived-in feel has an evil, bearded counterpart called "I keep picking up the same ten items". I'm not saying I don't like my standard run-of-the-mill guns - they kill giant irradiated roaches real good, after all - but in thirty hours of play I've come across exactly two unique weapons. It doesn't have to be Diablo II (you find: Scintillating Ochre Longsword of the Dragon!) but some additional minor variation in the kind of stuff you pick up would be most appreciated. Or, let me do like KotOR and buy upgrades for my various weapons to make them deadlier or more accurate. I kind of hoped they were heading in this direction with the "buy schematics to make weapons" thing they do, but it's still not quite what I was looking for.


One thing that's not in short supply is in Fallout 3 is NPCs to talk to - there must be a couple hundred scattered across the whole wasteland. And that brings me to my last ding on the game: dialogue trees. It's funny, but after playing Mass Effect with its (genius) dialogue wheel, I just can't willingly go back to the same old "pick a response from these three choices" thing we've been doing for the last couple decades. In terms of suspension of disbelief, it is almost literally the difference between playing a part in an interactive movie and navigating the menu options at your ATM. Sure, you're given plenty of chances to have an effect on the outcome of the game by choosing to say one thing versus another, but it seems there are just as many times where the only thing you can do is exhaust every possible reply until they're all grayed out. Luckily you can click through most of the NPC speech.


Conclusion:


Wow, I didn't think this was going to end up being quite so long. Anyway, I'll wrap this up in an uncharacteristically simple way: Fallout 3 is a great game and you should play it if you haven't already. It has a few definite faults, which for the most part are both overshadowed and made all the more obvious by its many high points. Enjoy, and have a Nuka-Cola on me.


- guest blogger Matt



Monday, March 16, 2009

Restive Thoughts


I used to laugh at other RPGs when I'd go into town during "night" and see all the NPCs standing exactly where they always were, and find all the shops still open. "Ha ha, as if the blacksmith would really be awake to sell me a new helm at 3AM!" I'd laugh, smugly. But now that I'm playing through Fallout 3, where people disappear and shops close up at night, I find myself longing for the old and unrealistic ways. For example, right now I need to buy some more ammo to finish my quest to rid the subway of mutated fire ants, but it's the middle of the night and I can't find anywhere that's open at this hour where I can trade all the useless junk I've picked up in the post-apocalyptic wasteland for some more bullets that I can use to keep playing the game! Argh.

Luckily you can press "T" to make your character wait for a specified number of hours, which is okay. However, I find this kind of clunky, and you also don't regenerate any hitpoints while you're waiting unless you're sleeping in a bed. The problem is, there are only a few designated sleeping areas, and so far my character hasn't found any that don't cost money to use. I'm too stingy (and my character too poor) to pay for a room in the common house, so when my guy comes back to town in the middle of the night, I have to make him stand still for eight hours. I also had a really cool suspension-of-disbelief moment ruined by this mechanism early on... I was travelling through the wasteland towards a town that I was supposed to raid for supplies. It was starting to get dark and I thought it would be easier to fight in the daytime, so I found a sheltered area that was protected by rocks, and made my little "camp" there. I was getting into the whole role-playing thing, but the sight of my guy just standing there like a tree while the sun set and then rose again was too stupid to not break the illusion and make me mad at the game designers.

They almost could have fixed this little problem, and in an interesting way too. Just let me buy a sleeping bag at the general store, which I could then use to go to sleep anywhere I want. Maybe it wouldn't let me sleep in the middle of the town square or inside the enemy base, but that's fine. I want to be able to camp out in the boonies to regnerate HP. Maybe sleeping under the stars would only regnerate a certain percentage of health, but that's believable. Maybe the twist would be that paying to sleep in a real bed is always safe, but when you're camping out you have a certain percent chance to be woken up by wild dogs or raiders or whatever. They could've even added a cool layer of strategic decision-making to it by giving the enemies a chance to totally surprise you while you're alseep, based on your perception stat... if you're caught unawares, you have to fight them off bare-handed.

See? That would have been a cool feature. Oh well.

- guest blogger Matt

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Puzzle Quest is back and it's mostly okay


I mentioned that I went snowboarding for a week recently and I got a chance to spend a lot of time with Puzzle Quest: Galactrix. In fact, I think it might have been the only game I played. My wife played a bit as well, but she was having a bit more trouble with it than the previous one, which she loved. In fact, there were a few times when we were both playing it on our DS's and I'd think, wow, we're super nerdy. Super nerdy and awesome!
Anyway, this one seems to be a bit more difficult since it's less linear. You can basically go anywhere you want and buy anything you want from the start. Which means you have several moments of "uh...where do I go?"
The familiar Puzzle Quest addiction is still there though. My wife and I seem to be in perpetual competition on what level our character is. There are lots (maybe too many) ways to upgrade your arsenal and customize your character. I've bought several items that sounded like a good idea but I quickly realized they weren't that helpful in an actual battle. So the game is deep and I feel like I'm just getting the hang of it after several hours.
The DS version, it seems, is not the one you really want if you have a choice. Load times are ridiculous, the touch screen sensitivity is a bit off, and you're frequently running into situations where you can't see all the information you want to even with two screens. So I may pick it up when it comes out on Xbox to see if that one's better.

WWII...again


Since I've been back from snowboarding, I haven't had a whole lot of time to get back into console gaming, but that should change this week while the wife is out of town. It's just me and the dog, and he's pretty bad w/ a controller.
I've been playing some Call of Duty: World at War campaign and trying to decide if I like it. It's certainly no Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. I think I really prefer the modern setting for better weapons and relevant settings. WWII has been way overdone in games. In fact, I keep getting this confused with the other ones I've played. Medal of Honor: Airborne comes to mind, but I'm sure there's others. Treyarch has certainly picked up a few few tricks from the folks that did Modern Warfare (Infinity Ward), but I don't ever remember being this frustrated with COD4. I know that endless streams of enemies and frantic action is kind of the thing for the COD series, but in this one it seems like I keep crossing an invisible line where the game decides "oh, okay, he made it past the checkpoint guys, everybody stop shooting!" It's sort of eerie, really. There will be crap blowing up everywhere and your vision is obscured by dust and blood but when you advance past a certain rock and the commander yells that it's all clear and the enemies seem to disappear all of a sudden. Ok, it's a bit more subtle than that, but still sort of annoying.
I also seem to find spots where I get killed about 5 times in a row but decide to try a slightly different strategy and get past it no problem. So I'm sort of frustrated with it, but I guess I'll push on through to the end. I looked it up and I guess I'm on mission 12 of 15, so the end is not too far away.
One thing that I do appreciate is that you play sections in the Pacific Theater and as a Russian soldier pushing into the heart of Germany. This, at least is sort of new for WWII games. Also, the cut scenes are great multimedia presentations that give you a sense of the progression of the war including real footage (which is sometimes surprisingly graphic) from the time. My wife told her friends about this and they thought it was terrible that a game uses these graphic scenes, but I think it's nice to remind you that this stuff actually happened.
I doubt I'll bother with the multiplayer much even though I just cashed in one of my One Free Month of Xbox Live Gold cards. I did that mainly to play Left 4 Dead, which I'm loving, but will talk about in another post.