PC game commentary

Scratches Directors Cut zomg tedious

2009-08-02T23:14:00.001-07:00

I suck at adventure games. The second I am stumped by a puzzle I quickly lose interest and give up. As a result, I tend to avoid them. But every so often I like to go to the store and browse the adventure section. I like the shiny boxes (oooh), the intriguing descriptions, and the pretty screenshots. It always captures my imagination. So when I saw Scratches, it seemed like an interesting enough game. Some writer dude named Michael Arthate moves into an old Victorian manor named the Blackwood manor, and begins to hear strange scratching noises at night. Seemed like a great haunted house story. Plus the reviews were fairly positive. I waited about a year for the price to drop to 5$ and finally snagged it in the bargain section, which is where I knew it'd quickly end up. lol

I failed miserably at the game. I'm sure people who grew up on point and click adventure games would love it. The last point and click adventure game that I beat were the Hugo games from the 90s (Hugos house of horrors, Wuhodunit, Jungle of Doom). So I was badly outclassed and out of practice. The game dumps you in the middle of the house with little to no guidance on what to do. The biggest puzzle often times is just figuring out what to do next. I quickly gave up and just used various online walkthroughs.

The interface is a little difficult, as you have to click to move around a room. That's fine, but sometimes just trying to reach the door is a struggle, because it often takes multiple clicks. The game is strict when it comes to movement: you have to click on a precise spot on the screen to move your character around. Simply clicking somewhere in the general vicinity of where you want to move is not allowed. In fact, it took me an embarassingly long time to figure out how to even enter the house. The game starts you off at the gates to the manor, and I intuitively clicked on the house up front, but it wouldn't move me forward. At first I thought that I had to use some other means to move myself in the game, so I tried to find a manual (the 5$ version had none, and I couldn't find one online either). After giving up and beating all the campaigns in Heroes 3 of might and magic: Armageddon's Blade expansion pack instead, I eventually realized that I needed to click on the side of the screen, which took me to the fountain, and only then could I click on the house, which brought me to the door, which I then needed to click as well, in order to be rewarded with an annoying door opening animation. There is no way to skip the door animation as far as I can tell. The game has a lot of doors. This equals a lot of clicking and animating. It got tedious. Fast.

The puzzles as I said are hard, because like all adventure games, it is incredibly nonlinear and open. Some hints would have been nice. The UI makes it even more difficult. The game changes cursors when you can and cannot interact with an object. Due to the fact that you can NOT interact with most of the items in the game, its easy to miss things. I didn't even realize you could open drawers until I read the walkthrough. Even after I managed to open the drawers, I still missed key items inside certain ones. The game essentially forces you to go through every room with a fine tooth comb to make sure you didn't miss anything important. I guess this is standard fare in adventure games, but in Season 1 of Sam and Max, it didn't feel nearly as tedious and it was much more obvious what I could and could not interact with.

Even after picking up every item, you still have no clue where the hell to go. The game is divided up into "days", and you cannot advance to the next day until you have completed all the specific tasks for that day. I had hints turned on, and I still got zero guidance on what to do next. Every time I entered a new area in the game, I had no idea as to whether or not I was "done" there. Granted I suck at adventure games, but it feels like the game should have had a more logical flow to it. For example, after chatting on the phone with one of the other characters, he tells you its time to leave the house, but you insist on staying. At this point, you are supposed to exit the house through the front door to trigger a scene that progresses the game. But there is no real logical reason to exit the house, because you just spent the last few minutes arguing on the phone about wanting to stay inside and solve the mystery! One could easily have spent the entire time wandering around inside the house trying to figure out what to do next.

The story and atmosphere is the game's strongest plus. After I resorted to using the walkthrough, I still enjoyed playing through the game. It became like watching a movie at this point, since I realized it'd take forever to figure the damn thing out on my own. Sadly, the game was not as scary as I was hoping. Compared to Doom 3, or Clive Barker's Undying, or Call of Cthulhu, this game didn't really get my heart pumping. It does manage to set a chilling mood through its music and dreary atmosphere.

And there are plenty of Lovecraft references, from a copy of the Necronomicon in the study, the De Vermis Mysteriis in the chapel, and a painting of Cthulhu on the second floor, and any game that pays homage to my favorite horror author is good in my book. But the "boo" moments that are intended to scare the player seemed kind of cheesy to me: The game quickly switches to a cutscene and then a "bad guy" will pop out from nowhere. But the awkward switch to cutscene gives it away. This, combined with the grainy quality of the cutscenes and the cheezy accompanying music tend to cheapen the experience. Furthermore, not a whole lot actually happens during your stay. Its relatively uneventful, at least compared with other horror games. However, the story is what made this game worth it for me. And despite the Lovecraft references, this game is not a part of the Cthulhu mythos. It manages to mantain its own uniqueness. It is the tale about a man, James Blackwood, the original owner of the manor, who comes home from a trip to Africa and ends up suddenly murdering his wife of many years. Unravelling the mystery was a treat, and without giving away too much, suffice to say it is both tragic and chilling at the same time.

So all in all, this is a game that the averange adventure gamer will love. Most of the rest of the population, afflicted as it already is with ADD, will not. I bought the "Directors Cut" version, which added a new game, "The Last Visit", which takes place years later, and is told from the point of view of a reporter trying to figure out what happened. Its quite short , and features roughly two total puzzles (which of course I still needed the help of a walkthrough with). It doesn't really add much to the original storyline so I didn't really get much out of it. However, at 5 dollars, the game is worth it. Even if you just use a walkthrough, it is like reading a well written short story.

Serious Sam 2

2009-07-26T16:02:00.001-07:00

History is filled with examples of trilogies that fail. The third in an installment is almost never as good as its predecessors, having lost or diluted what made the originals great. The Matrix Revolutions, Austin Powers in Goldmember, Spiderman 3, the list goes on and on. Serious Sam 2, unforutnately, is an example of a failed trilogy. And despite its misnomer of a name, it actually is the third in the series.

The first two games, Serious Sam First Encounter, and Serious Sam Second Encounter, followed a simple formula. It consisted of non stop killing action with a game engine that specialized in handling dozens upon dozens of enemies on the screen at once. It harkened back to the mindless days of FPS, when all you had to do was point at shit and kill it. The main hero is an amalgamation of Duke Nukem, Ash from Evil Dead, the Doom marine, and the Quake grunt, all rolled up into one. Think of a game of DOOM on nightmare mode, and then think of that game on PCP and crack, and you'll have a rough approximation of Serious Sam. The only thing keeping you from dying at the hands of legions of enemies are some fancy footwork, lightning reflexes, and a fast trigger finger.

Sadly, Serious Sam 2 just doesn't have the same feel as its predecessors. The first red flag occured before I could even start playing: A crappily rendered cut scene with bad acting and horrific dialog involving humanoids with humongous bulbous heads speaking in high pitched shrill voices.

Then the game actually started and things got even worse. I began in a village filled with cutesy looking blue humanoids, who also had humongous bulbous heads and shrill voices.

GAAAAH. And that is one of the unanimous complaints from old fans. The graphics had become cartoonish. Monsters and even bosses were no longer menacing, they were adorable. Levels involve cheerful locales such as fairy tale castles and carnivals. The color pallette used in most stages can best be described as bright and happy. Fuck it, here are but a few atrocious examples:

This is giant land:

This is a happy fairy tale village with an ugly villager:

This gross monstrosity is a boss:

The game engine also looked a lot better but it seems to have sacrificed the ability to render massive amounts of units at once. Most of the fights were lackluster. Perhaps there'd be a dozen units on screen at once, as opposed to the original games, which sometimes had a hundred. As a result, most of the fights lacked intensity. Making things worse, vehicles and turrets scattered throughout the game gave you serious firepower, making moderately difficult battles a walk in the park. There were very few parts in the game that captured the original games' difficulty. A couple of levels toward the end, reminiscent of running man, involved a race to finish the stage under a time limit, all while fighting off bad guys. The final level finally ramps up the difficulty as well, culminating in a ridiculously difficult final boss fight. Well, it is ridiculously difficult unless you hold off using a Serious Damage power up until the very end. If you do, the fight is a breeze. In fact, none of the bosses (save for the final one), presented much of any challenge.

The storyline is dumb and pointless, just as in the previous games. However, the previous games downplayed the plot's importance, and instead, wisely focused on the non stop action. In Serious Sam 2, despite the obvious fact that the story is yet another flimsy excuse to shoot things, every level starts off with yet another painful cutscene that drags the storyline (which nobody cares about) forward. Many of these are just flat out strange. One for example, shows a bunch of Kleers watching the boss, Kleeropolis perform a magic trick. Its completely irrelevant and just weird. The guys at Croteam do have a rather unique sense of humor. One can't help but wonder what kind of drugs they were on when they designed these cutscenes.

In the end, I beat the game, because I am a stubborn fan. I admit I did have some fun. However, I, like many others, had some Serious complaints (hahahaha horrible pun intended). The game feels like its lost its roots and turned into something else. That is never something you want to do with a franchise. What you want to do is mantain the formula so that you still have your old fans, and tweak and modify it to bring in new fans. Instead, this game drastically altered the look and feel, alienating old fans, and ended up with a weird game. I can't even find it in the bargain bin anymore.

RED ALERT 3 GDLK CHEESE

2009-02-25T23:54:00.001-08:00

The Command and Conquer series has had a long and illustrious history.    Its trademarks are visceral, mindless, fast paced action combined with cheesy and over the top full motion video cut scenes.   Spamming out units and blowing shit up via weapons of mass destruction is what every C&C game promises.    And boy does it always deliver!    Red Alert 3 carries on the proud tradition of its forefathers with giant robots

ninjas

scantily clad commandos, and war bears.    Yeah, war bears!

   That’s just one step away from bear calvary!    Perhaps in the expansion?     Not only that, you get to build shit ON TOP OF THE WATER!

In addition, the game has eschewed its bargain budget B actors in favor of an all star cast. You’ve got hot babes like Kelly Hu and Jenny McCarthy, joined by legendary actors like George Takei , Andrew Divoff, and JK Simmons. Yeah that’s right, they got Lieutenant Commander Sulu of the starship Excelsior, the Wishmaster, AND J Jonah Jameson to star in the same game! Holy shit! They even threw in UFC champion Randy “The Natural” Couture. How awesome is that? The only weak chain in this cast is MMA fighter Gina Carano, who doesn’t say a single word throughout the entire game. She probably couldn’t figure out how to do a Russian accent.

These legendary actors and models star in the full motion video cutscenes in between levels, and serve as talking heads during the in game cutscenes. Everything is incredibly sexist and racist, which makes it all the more awesome. The women are scantily clad in short skirts, high heels, and low cut blouses that expose their cleavage. To say that they are easy on the eyes is an understatement. Most of the characters speak in a fake and stereotypical British, Russian, or Japanese accent. Normally the bane of straight to DVD movies (Hi Mummy 3: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor), these accents are entirely appropriate in this context. What makes all this campy and tongue-in-cheek dialogue work is that the cast know they are here to have a good time and not take themselves too seriously. They all went in with the mind-set that nobody would be winning any Oscars. After all, they probably took one glance at the script and realized what they were in for.

The single player campaign has your typical forgettable and throw-away story. It involves the Soviets using a time machine (sans flux capacitor) to travel back in time to assassinate Albert Einstein. The catastrophic rift in the space time continuum results in Japan becoming a superpower and owning everyone with their giant robots. In other words, it’s a thinly veiled excuse to kill things, blow shit up, and introduce a new faction: The Empire of the Rising Sun.

Each campaign has a mutually exclusive storyline, meaning that you take each faction to ultimate victory over the others. There are only nine levels for each faction campaign. Of course, since the first few levels for each faction consist of your standard “tutorial” fluff that introduce you to your units, this results in each campaign feeling like its over before it even started. This problem is compounded by the fact that most of the levels themselves feel quite short, and very few of them require longer than an hour to beat, thus missing that epic feel that levels in other C&C games have had. Of course, since most people play RTS for the multiplayer, this may not be a big problem. I however, have always been a huge fan of the singe player component of the C&C series, so I was a bit disappointed.

Luckily, all is not lost. One of the coolest new features is that the campaigns are designed with co-op in mind. A co-commander ally will be helping you out on every level. They are AI controlled by default, but you can find a friend who can play along. This is a very cool idea, and hopefully more games will offer this feature in the future. However, the multiplayer implementation isn’t all that good. Trying to find a stranger to join your game is not easy. Unlike on battle.net where you create a game and people join, you must manually (and randomly) ask people to join. It feels like I’m propositioning street hookers in front of the local 7-11. Not the best user experience. I definitely like the idea of co-op campaigns though; the idea has plenty of potential.

Not to mention, playing with an AI ally isn’t so bad. Of course, once in a blue moon the AI gets into some kind of bad state, where it just sits around and does nothing. But path finding issues have plagued RTS since the dawn of time, so the fact that your AI ally sometimes ends up getting a lobotomy shouldn’t be that big of a shock (Oh and FYI, path finding issues plague this game as well). Now, normally the AI ally is quite dependable. There’s even an interface with which you can command them. You can order your ally to attack an area immediately with all available forces, or to first build up an army and then attack. You can also order them to take up position at a specific area, or you can give them autonomy and let them command themselves and do whatever the hell they want (which is usually fairly competent).

The gameplay itself is quite fun. However, one of the biggest problems with C&C (or plusses, depending on how you look at it), is that every game quickly degenerated into a contest of who could spam out more units. Lower tier units such as infantry tended to be worthless and died far too easily. As a result, strategy and tactics would quickly get thrown out the window in favor of pumping out mammoth tanks. However, the designers introduced some key changes to make micro and macro more important aspects of multiplayer skirmishes.

On the micro side, every unit has a special ability that must be manually activated. In addition, you get a number of support powers that you can deploy on the battlefield. Some deal direct damage, others serve as buffs. They each have their own recharge times. This provides the player with a diverse set of tactical combinations.

To make macro more important, several changes have been made, the key one being to the economy: resource collection is now done at ore mines, rather than mining ore that was scattered across the map as in previous games. Only one ore collector is allowed in a mine at a time, so if you build too many collectors they will get bottlenecked. What this prevents you from doing is spamming out a ton of ore collectors, getting a ton of cash, and spamming out units. By limiting the rate at which you can mine ore, it makes managing your economy all the more important. True, it does slow down the pace of the game, but that was the intention.

Naval battle also plays a much larger role in this game. Previous games featured naval yards and naval units. In Red Alert 3, many buildings, including air fields, construction yards, and static defenses, can now be built on top of the water. Ore mines can now be found in the ocean as well, which now makes contesting strategic spots on the ocean all that much more important. As a result, land, sea, and air are now all viable attack vectors. To capitalize on this, the developers have made a number of units amphibious. This added flexibility provides the creative player with many strategic and tactical possibilities.

The three new factions are relatively symmetric, at least compared to a game such as Starcraft. All three feature a vulnerable, slow moving, long range artillery unit. All three feature a powerful, tier three naval unit with lots of hit points that deals shitloads of damage. All three have your standard engineer, infantry, and anti vehicle infantry. All three have war factories, ore refineries, naval yards, barracks, and so on. There are enough differences between the three to keep things interesting though. Obviously at higher levels of play, these differences manifest themselves more clearly. As mentioned before, the unique special abilities of every unit help keep them distinct. The three factions also have different styles of support powers. The Soviets have more direct damage type powers, such as orbital strikes. The Allies provide more buffs. The Aeronautics upgrade improves aircraft units, and the cryshot freezes enemies. The Japanese provide a mix of direct damage and buffs.

The three factions also have different methods of building as well. The Allies use your typical C&C deployment method. You click on the building you want, and after construction is completed, you then click on the map where you want it to appear. This allows them to do things such as drop a turret on top of an attacking army out of the blue. Of course, the building must appear within your base. The Soviets on the other hand, require you to choose where you want to build beforehand. The building goes up in real time, exposing the building to enemy attack as its being constructed. The Japanese have the most tedious method of construction. The construction yard merely produces mobile “cores” that you must manually move and then unpack at the desired location. These cores are incredibly vulnerable. However on the flip side, expansion for them is a breeze, as they can literally build anywhere they want to.

I don’t play Red Alert 3 competitively, but by lurking various forums it sounds like there are still balance issues concerning unit spam, despite all the efforts of the developers. Of course, no RTS is ever perfect the first time it is released. Multiple iterations of patches that address glitches and imbalances must be released before a game can “get it right”. Starcraft, the national sport of Korea and considered to be the best RTS ever made, is still getting patched, and has been for years. EA however, doesn’t exactly have the best track record for caring about player feedback and making out good games, instead opting crank out sequels from their cash cow franchises. How unfortunate, especially since Red Alert 3 definitely has the potential to be a great competitive RTS. The developers put a lot of thought into how to make it less about spam and more about tactics and strategy. So only time will tell if EA wants to devote the time to make it good. As it currently stands however, I prefer Tiberium Wars and Kanes Wrath to Red Alert 3 in terms of sheer entertainment value.

Fallout 3 is a fine game; haters can die in a fire

2009-01-20T01:20:00.000-08:00

Note I will use OG Fallout to refer to the original Fallout game by Interplay

I remember when I first purchased Oblivion and started browsing the Oblivion General Discussion forum on the official Bethesda site. I quickly noticed that there were numerous hate threads about how Oblivion was a hideous abomination of a game. The sheer vitriol and bile contained in those posts was incredible. You'd think that Bethesda had released Daikatana, as opposed to the game of the year. So naturally, when it was announced that Bethesda was working on a Fallout 3, the shit hit the fan. The Oblivion haters were suddenly joined by the rabid old school Fallout fans, fearful that the franchise would be desecrated and ruined. Everyone feared that Fallout 3 would be nothing more than a heavily modded “Oblivion with guns”.

As a quick aside to anyone who has been living in an underground cave with no contact with the outside world, the original two games, Fallout and Fallout 2, are critically acclaimed RPGs beloved by nerds everywhere. They take place in a post apocalyptic world that was nearly annihilated by a nuclear war in 2077. A few humans manage to take refuge in the Vaults, which are essentially shelters in an underground cave with no contact with the outside world. In OG Fallout, the year is 2161 and you are one of these lucky Vault dwellers living in Vault 13. Unfortunately for you, you are tasked with finding a replacement for the Vault’s water purification chip, which has broken. As you emerge into the outside world, you find that humanity has managed to survive despite the nuclear fallout. Although you ultimately succeed in finding a replacement chip, you are permanently kicked out of the Vault as a reward, and forced to roam the desert that is is Southern California. Fallout 2 picks up the story 80 years later in Northern California, telling the story of the Chosen One, the direct descendant of the original Vault dweller. Fallout 3, on the other hand, takes place in the year 2277, and the protagonist is from Vault 101, which is located all the way over on the east coast, near Washington DC.

Adding to this east coast west coast rivalry is the tone of the games’ respective settings. In the OG fallout, the humans were well on their way in the process of rebuilding civilization. People had jobs, hobbies, and homes and lived in large cities with farms, stores, casinos, and bars. In Fallout 3, the settlements are few and far between, ranging from the bustling city of Megaton, to the occasional wastelander holed up in some irradiated, burned down shack barely eking out an existence.

Housing values have gone down since the nuclear war

Outside these living areas is a grim and hopeless no man's land where its every man/mutant/ghoul fends for himself. Desolation, despair and decay are the norm. Probably the best way to describe the difference in the two games is that Fallout 3 closely resembles a post apocalyptic world set a few years after a nuclear Armageddon, whereas OG Fallout is that same post apocalyptic world a few decades later. Ironic, considering that storyline wise, the situation is the exact opposite.

If land were emo, this is what it'd look like

Before I continue, I want to take this moment to confess that I only just recently beat OG Fallout. This was after I had beaten Fallout 3. I know, I know, talk about putting the cart before the horse. Even worse, I haven’t even played Fallout 2 yet. Its somewhere on my queue of classic-awesome-games-that-I-know-I-should-play-but-haven't-gotten-around-to-yet-because-i'm-a-horrible person. So I have not grown up with these games in the same way that I did with say, Doom, Civilization, or Warcraft. Naturally I don't have any strong opinions about whether or not Bethesda has produced a game that has lived up to its legendary legacy. My off the cuff reaction is that the game seems to be pretty faithful to the originals. At the very least, they got the names of the monsters, weapons, and items right. Deathclaws, radscorpions, ghouls, supermutants, the Brotherhood of Steel, their buddies in the Enclave, mentats, buffout, pip boy, the G.E.C.K and more all grace this game. Hell, everything is rendered correctly as well. In fact, power armor has never looked so good!

Although many things have remained the same, just as many have changed. The biggest difference of course, is the switch to a first person 3d view (there is a third person view too, but its garbage and not really worth mentioning). I’ve always been a die hard fan of the old school side scrollers and their overhead RPG counterparts. I am saddened by the death of them, but at the same time, there is no denying the powerful feeling of immersion that can be achieved with a first person view. Fallout 3 is an excellent example of this. The game world is epic in scope and breathtaking in its beauty. Nothing captures this better than the moment you first step out of the Vault and your eyes adjust to the sunlight. A barren yet majestic wasteland greets you. Everything is still and silent, save for the lonely howl of the wind. I remember being awestruck and trembling with excitement at the prospect of exploring everything the game had to offer.

The game does not disappoint in this regard. In addition to familiar D.C. landmarks such as the Lincoln Memorial, the White House, and the Washington monument, scattered throughout the land are little vignettes that give a window into the lives of those who lived before the nuclear apocalypse, and insight into the lives of those who currently roam the wasteland.

Here is just one such moment captured in time. At least they died spooning.

It is a treat just to discover them. Many do not give any reward to the player aside from a good story. One of the most emotionally moving encounters I had involved a distress signal that I encountered on my wanders across the wasteland. The signal was weak and I could barely make out the message. A man and his family had taken refuge in a drainage chamber, and his boy was very sick and needed medical attention. It took a bit of trail and error trying to home in on the source of the signal, but I finally found the drainage chamber. Inside were two rooms. In the first room were two adult skeletons, some rotten food, miscellaneous supplies, and some childrens toys scattered about the floor. In the other room was the radio transmitter that was playing the distress signal on loop. The scene was as subtle as it was touching. It was nothing more than a collection of various items, and yet it told a powerful and moving story. It also leaves an open ended mystery that may never be resolved. Why was there no body of the child found by the parents? What happened to the kid? Did he manage to make it out alive? Was he eaten by super mutants? Judging by the posts of other members on the Bethesda forums, it appears that this scene made an equally strong impression on a number of other players as well. Encounters such as this one are scattered throughout the capital wasteland and are a real treat to discover.

Familiar landmarks in DC that need no introduction

There are many more such places to discover, too many to mention, but as a fan of HP Lovecraft, I feel I must make special mention of the Dunwich building. It is essentially a tribute to one of the greatest horror authors of all time. Fans of Lovecraft will immediately recognize the name of the building from the short story, the Dunwich Horror. Inside the ruins of this abandoned and derelict building are a set of holotapes which tell the story of a man named Jamie. Jamie is trying to find his father, who went insane and abandoned him after obtaining a strange black leather bound book (the Necronomicon by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred). Each new holotape is nestled deeper within the ruins of the building and contain the increasingly incoherent ramblings of a madman. The light grows dimmer the further in you venture. It’s a subtle change that I didn’t even realize until I noticed that everything was almost pitch dark. Along the way, doors open by themselves, objects move on their own accord, a flashback reveals the past, a legion of feral ghouls attack you, and references to Lovecraft’s mythos are scattered throughout. Unfortunately, you don’t get to fight any elder gods. The whole thing brings to mind one of Oblivion’s quests, Hackdirt, which was yet another homage to Lovecraft (Shadow over Innsmouth). Delightful gems such as the Dunwich building are just waiting to be discovered in one’s wanders across the wasteland.

This brings me one of my biggest gripes about the game – fast travel. Many angry people complained long and hard about this “feature” from Oblivion. To many of us, it detracts from the gameplay. Fast travel is disruptive, and makes it so that you don’t have to experience and explore all that the world has to offer. You can simply skip it. It also makes things considerably easier. Low on health and ammo and deep in hostile territory? No problem! Simply teleport back to the safety of town! Gone are the tough decisions to make about when or if one should turn back, what equipment to jettison to free up space for loot, and how best to ration remaining ammos and supplies. Countless PC RPGs have done better fast travel systems. OG Fallout let you fast travel, but the further you travelled, the greater the likelihood of a random encounter. I see no reason why Fallout 3 did not choose this simple implementation. Most, if not all, Oblivion haters blame Bethesda for pandering to the lowest common denominator, namely console gamers. They accuse Bethesda of dumbing things down for the legions of stupid kids whose ADHD was so bad that they needed the ability to instantly teleport anywhere on the map. These aren’t my words, mind you, I’m simply paraphrasing some of the hate filled interwebz posts I’ve encountered. That isn’t to say that I don’t agree with their assertions. It’s a real shame, considering that the journey in itself is an adventure and a challenge. Why did Bethesda take such great pains to make such a wonderful world to explore when the simple click of an XBOX 360 controller bypasses all of it?

However, Bethesda does manage to get a number of things right. It really does appear the Bethesda has taken a lot of criticism to heart. Probably the number one complaint about Oblivion, one shared by both fans and haters alike, is the broken level scaling system. This system essentially punished players for leveling up. In Fallout 3, these complaints have been addressed. Although the level scaling system still exists, it has been toned down quite significantly. No longer do enemies gain extra hitpoints, better equipment, and deal more damage when you level up. When you reach level 20, there will be little that can stand in your way. Neither will you face weak monsters at level 1, allowing you to just waltz in and complete any quest. Certain areas of the game will be significantly more challenging than others and are best avoided until you are stronger. No longer are dungeons randomly populated by enemies and loot based on your level, making every area feel like it’s the same level with just a different layout.

Subways are the new dungeons in this game:

One unfortunate aspect of city exploration is that a lot of sections in DC are blocked off by rubble, which "force" players to explore areas via connecting subways. It constrains the otherwise open exploration:

Every location will have a distinct set of monsters and loot – some will even have unique weapons. Sure, there is some level scaling, but not enough to remove the desire to explore or to stop your heart from pounding with the nervous anticipation of entering a tough area.

The open ended nature of the gameplay is another one of the key strengths of Bethesda games. You have considerable leeway in the design of your own character, controlling everything from the physical appearance to his/her actions. If you want to play a fat black psychotic serial killer who butchers people with a combat knife and then cannibalizes victims, you can! Here, Bethesda had a chance to address a lot of the criticisms by Oblivion haters. Many felt Oblivion had far too many linear quests that only offered one possible “solution”. In the mage guild quests for example, you had to destroy the necromancers. Joining them was out of the question. Morrowind on the other hand, had quests which allowed the player to choose sides, and/or resolve things through diplomatic means. Fallout 3 represents a return to this freedom. Are you a goody two shoes? You can join the Abolitionist movement and eradicate the slavers. Or, if your alignment is more lawful evil, you can help capture escaped slaves and find and destroy the Abolitionist hideout. Or if you are just plain chaotic evil, you can kill everything in sight. This is but one of the many choices you get to make as you deal death and diplomacy across the wasteland.

Fortunately, you get plenty of chances to engage in the latter. Speechcraft and charisma, while ultimately no replacement for a good gun at your side, factor into many of your quests. Gone also is the stupid and asinine speechcraft minigame from Oblivion. Instead, dialogs with NPCs will occasionally present you with the option to pass some speechcraft checks, succeed, and you will have successfully negotiated a peaceful solution, haggled for better pay, or convinced somebody to give up some information. Many encounters in the wasteland however, involve enemies attacking you on sight, which leaves you no opportunity to employ your charisma. Its unfortunate, but then again, it reflect the situation of a post apocalyptic world: People who are tough enough to survive are often going to end up being violent psychopaths (hi raiders!)

The main quest slowly unfolds across multiple missions that involve tracking down your father who has escaped from the Vault. The game literally starts with you being born. Ewwww. The intro is part character creation and part tutorial, and in this way mirrors the intro for Oblivion. In fact, they are so similar that both feature highly paid voice actors who disappear after the opening: Liam Nielson plays your father in Fallout 3, whereas Patrick Stewart plays the emperor in Oblivion. I’m partial to the whole Bethesda style of openings. On the one hand, certain sections felt long and tedious. On the other hand it did give me a chance to “grow up” in the Vault, someething that OG Fallout did not do. I grew a slight emotional attachment to some of the Vault characters. Unfortunately, these relationships are severed, as the intro ends with you escaping from the Vault. Sure, you get to return later on in the game, but it’s only for a short while. As with the rest of the game, the main quest is open ended. Whether or not you even want to pursue the main quest is completely up to you, and you are free to do it at your own pace. Unfortunately, Bethesda gives the player a little too much leeway here, as it is entirely possible to accidentally large portions of the main storyline by running into the right NPC or stumbling across the right location. The Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave both play a huge role in the main quest storyline arc. For those who have never played the original games, the Brotherhood are the “good” guys, and the Enclave are the “bad” guys, but of course its not so simple. While you can’t join forces with the Enclave, you can help them achieve one of their goals, the “purification” of all mutants from the wasteland (purification means exactly what you think it does). This is a slight improvement over Oblivion, where even offering to assist the main villain of the game, Mehrunes Dagon, is an impossibility. Likewise in Morrowind, a game hailed by many as offering the player more choice, helping the main villain, Dagoth Ur, is simply not an option. The ending to Fallout 3 however, is probably one of the games weakest points, and many people felt underwhelmed. After an awesome super duper epic battle where you fight alongside a giant 40 foot robot named Liberty Prime who shouts classic catchphrases such as “COMMUNISM IS DEAD” and “COMMUNISM IS THE VERY DEFINITION OF FAILURE”...

Yeah, this is every bit as amazing as it looks.

You then engage in a wimpy boss fight, engage in some dialogue, and listen to a few seconds of narration. And then its all over. Reactions to the end, including mine, involved a combination of the interweb expressions: “LOL”, “WTF”, “BBQ”, and “!!!111”. It was a bit anticlimactic, IMHO. Bethesda RPGs usually allow you to continue playing after the main quest is complete. In Fallout 3, the game ends once you beat it, period. This is because you die at the end of the game. There are some endings that don’t involve your death, but even then, the game still ends. Of course, as mentioned previously, you are free to ignore the main quest. The world is your sandbox, and you are free to play, and kill in it.

Naturally, the combat system has been drastically altered, by necessity of the switch from 2D to 3D. In an attempt to emulate the turn based combat system of the first two Fallout games, Fallout 3 introduces the Vault Assisted Targetting System. The same sound that is played when you enter combat in OG fallout is also played when you enter VATS. The idea is similar to that of the original: At any point in time you can freeze the action, and spend a limited number of action points with which to target various body parts on your enemies. Once action points are spent, they slowly regenerate when you exit VATs and return to normal real time combat. The body part targetting system does involve some amount of tactics, tactics that mirror those of the original: Head shots deal a lot more damage, but you have a lower chance to hit. This is in contrast to the torso, which is easy to hit, but does less damage. When an opponents arm is crippled, their aim is worsened and they drop their weapon. When a leg is crippled, they move much more slowly. This is helpful when chasing down pesky bad guys who try and flee.

Boom headshot

The implementation has a few minor issues. One noticeable problem is that it was obviously designed for consoles, as switching targets cannot be done via mouse click, but rather requires a keyboard press. You cannot target body parts with meelee attacks, which takes a lot of the fun out of playing a meelee character. Accessing the inventory does not require any action points, taking away a lot of the tactical depth of the first two Fallout games, where trying to heal yourself with a stimpack while a deathclaw is mauling your face off cost you precious action points that could have otherwise been spent putting some distance between the two of you. Also, you can’t shoot a guy in the balls, something that you could do in the original. This is unfortunate because every time you target a specific body part in VATs, the camera pans out and shows the results of your attacks in slow motion; it would have been nice to see a raider doubled over in pain, shrieking shrilly as he grabs what remains of his manhood.

Its also important to note that this “chance to hit” mechanic in VATs also applies to the real time combat; An element of error is introduced when aiming. This is so that the game feels more like an RPG and less like an FPS. The higher your skill in the firearm you are using, the less likely your bullets are to stray from your crosshairs. In Morrowind, this resulted in ridiculous situations where despite hitting a person with a sword, no damage would be dealt because the combat system determined that the attack had "missed". This "chance to hit" mechanic was removed in Oblivion, and again reintroduced in Fallout 3, with much better results. It affects only ranged weapons and the disconnect is not nearly as jarring.

In the end, the flexibility of being able to play the game as an FPS (albeit with hidden behind the scenes dice rolls), and then switching into what is essentially bullet time as needed, creates opportunities for many tactical encounters. It rewards the players for not going in guns blazing, but rather being able to plan ahead and switch between the two modes as needed. A common tactic is to lay mines at chokepoints, and then engage the enemy at a distance, ducking behind cover to recover action points, and using the mines to prevent flanking maneuvers from bad guys. This hybrid system is well implemented enough to make up for any shortcomings. Slow motion kills and rag doll physics is a combination that will never get old. I don’t think I will ever get tired of slamming my power fist into an Enclave soldier and watching his broken body fly into a nearby wall.

In case you ever need the help, you can recruit an NPC who will join you. Which NPCs will join is based on your alignment. You can equip, heal, and give them suggestions on their tactics. Its kind of like the OG Fallout, except you can only have one follower (you can get one additional follower, a pet dog named Dogmeat, who is from the OG Fallout). NPCs run into the same pathing issues that have plagued computer games forever, but luckily they “teleport” next to you after being separated for a while. I found that based on which NPC I picked, I didn’t have to do too much babysitting. Such is the A.I. in this game. It isn’t bad but it isn’t spectacular either. Its merely okay. I swear that I’d occasionally notice teams of bad guys working together, with ranged units taking cover and laying down suppressing fire, while their meelee units flanked me. This happens so infrequently though that I could just be imaging the whole thing. I am behind on my sleep. And of course, every so often the A.I. will do horrifically stupid things. I remember one particular battle in the ruins of the White House. A huge free for all involving the Enclave, the Talon company mercenaries, and a Behemoth was going down. I decided to simply wait it out and kill off the survivors. My idiotic follower, Star Paladin Cross, decides it’s a good idea to run in guns blazing. She died almost instantaneously. Luckily, you can bring up the console using "~" and enter in a code to make certain NPCs invincible, which certainly takes the headache out of that. Playing on console and can't bring up the console command line? Too bad, should have gone with the superior PC gaming platform.

The character design system has been streamlined. Many people would argue that it was horribly butchered. Many perks, skills and traits from the originals have been dropped. Even more blasphemous, perks and traits were merged. To cater to noobs, perks are granted at every level up instead of every three levels. Worse, the Intense training perk allows you to raise any one of your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. attributes by 1.

But is it really so bad? People are upset, so the argument goes, because your initial S.P.E.C.I.A.L. (strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility, luck) attribute allocation is meaningless, since its so easy to raise those stats later. The player is not forced to make any difficult decisions about whether or not he wants to play a nerdy (8 intelligence) loser (2 strength and 1 charisma), or vice versa. In other words, the system makes it too easy to make a godlike character without forcing the player to make any serious tradeoffs. Now I understand the complaint, and it has merit, but having min maxed the fuck out of OG Fallout, I found it relatively easy to make a godlike character in that game as well. I set my charisma to 1 which freed up a whole bunch of points, picked the gifted trait, and upgraded my stats at the brotherhood. Presto, I had a badass character. I didn’t need to make any difficult sacrifices except for charisma, which has traditionally been the most expendable attribute for min/maxers ever since Gary Gygax invented D&D. Likewise, the argument that getting a perk every level removes any difficult decision making regarding which perks to take is also rendered irrelevant once you realize that in OG fallout, most perks were completely useless. So at the end of the day, while Fallout 3 might make things a little easier, its not nearly as bad as people make it. Really, it maintains the status quo.

At the end of the day, Fallout 3 is an incredible game. Haters will be haters, and some people will never be satisfied. A quick glance at the Bethesda forums confirms this. Of course, as we all know, the interweb is serious business. Every ancient generation thinks the current generation is going to hell in a handbasket, and long for a return to the good old days. This phenomenon is magnified 100x on the Internets.

This about sums it up

Personally, I don’t think PC games are getting better or worse. Its almost silly to argue either way. What cannot be argued though, is that things are changing. Fallout 3 represents a huge change to the franchise. It has been a huge success, is fun to play, and introduces the classics to fresh blood. Hell, an old gamer like me finally got around to playing Fallout as a result of immensely enjoying the third installment in the series. A quick look at the top selling games on sites like gog.com which sell classic games confirms that I am not alone. So while the bitter old fans can slit their wrists and spew bile all day long, they cannot deny the positive impact Fallout 3 has made on their beloved franchise.

Zombie Panic a fun and FREE Half Life 2 mod that offers an alternative to Left 4 Dead

2008-10-20T23:01:00.000-07:00

Its feeding time!

I've never been a big fan of zombie movies. I've always found them so depressing. They're a tale of hopeless and despair as humans futilely try to stave off legions of hungry hordes. Come to think of it, I don't really like most horror movies. I seek entertainment and escape from reality. I like it when good beats evil, not the reverse as is the case for the vast majority of horror movies, since its a too painful reminder of what happens in real life.

So surprisingly, I have loved playing as a zombie in the Half Life 2 mod, Zombie Panic. The premise is simple, yet brilliant. A team of human survivors is pitted against a small handful of zombies. As the humans die off, they return as the living dead, and hunt their old teammates. This has been a tried and true formula in many mods, and its refined in Zombie Panic.

The humans have many advantages. They can run faster than the zombies. They can wield weapons and use items such as first aid kits. They have flashlights to help see in the dark. They start off with superior numbers. Their disadvantages are that ammo is limited and it does not respawn.

The zombies on the other hand, can respawn. They have a feed-o-meter that allows them to sprint. They can regenerate hit points. They have zombie vision that amplifies light to help them see in dark areas. Mobile humans will glow red under zombie vision. Even humans in hiding will glow red after a while.

The carrier zombie, aka whitey, distinguished by its pale white skin, has 50 more hp, and has a 10% chance to infect victims. However, they are much slower than humans and only have a simple meelee attack.

Both humans and zombies can manipulate objects such as beds, sofas, carts, crates, and so on to form barricades. Both can communicate via microphone. Zombies can see a list of whose a zombie and whose not, whereas humans have no clue. This leads to creepy situations where those who are still alive will start to ask "is anyone still out there?" as the human numbers start to dwindle.

And creepiness is a big draw for this game. The levels radiate with menace and are intended to disturb. The power is often out, and even when its on, the lights are dim and flicker. Cars are abandoned in the middle of the street, blood splatter and corpses are strewn across the empty streets. Missions cover a wide variety of areas such as the subway, a biotech lab, a police station, an insane asylum, and even a tanker for good measure.

This is a multiplayer only mod with two types of game play. You have your standard objective based missions. This is exactly what it sounds like. Humans have a set of goals they need to accomplish in a fixed order. Zombies have an unlimited number of respawns to stop them. The other mode is last man standing, which pits humans against zombies (who have a limited number of respawns). In my experience, the objetive missions heavily favor the zombies. The unlimited respawns means they can throw themselves at the humans with reckless abandon, forcing them to use up their ammo. On the other hand, in the last man standing, competent humans who are good with head shots can use up all the zombie respawns quite easily by camping in certain easily defensible areas. For example, the police station level has a great camp site. The ONLY way through this narrow hallway...

is through this boring shooting gallery here.

The dynamics of the game are such that they mirror that of a horror movie. Those who split up and go solo are quickly picked off. Nothing like going out on an ammo hunt only to get brutally taken down. Nothing is scarier than going out with a group of people who fan out, only to realize you've been left behind. Or being the last survivor after a wave of zombies decimated your group. But its not so scary that you can't also laugh at the situation, which is one of the mod's goals. One hilarious moment in the game involved a guy asking for help in the church. Everyone else was camped out by the gas station. One other player commented: "Yeah, that guy's dead". Everyone had a good laugh about that one. The guy was soon killed, as he had no backup.

It was an example of how vital teamwork is in this game. Teams who coordinate their moves and actions do far better than those who don't. Sharing of ammo and weapons is encouraged. The more weapons and items you take, the slower you walk. Its an invitation for zombies to feast on your brains. Luckily, a useful "panic" button drops all your stuff and lets you run faster. Good for when you need to run for your life. Different weapons take different ammo, and its relatively easy to drop ammo for others to use. Hence you have teammates asking via the mic coordinating who needs what ammo.

Playing as the zombies is fun too. You are here to reenact a horror movie, but from the point of view of the blood thirsty horde. Your job is give a good challenge to the humans that ai could never do. Because of the speed and reach disadvantage, a different set of tactics must be employed. A zombie must master is to bait the humans into wasting ammo. Zig zagging, darting in and out of hallways, feinting a rush, all induce trigger happy fools to expend those precious clips. In addition, zombies can hit objects, which sends them flying. This includes weapon and ammo. Zombies who "hide" weapons and items in this manner make life that much harder for humans. After a while, a party of survivors holed up in an area must eventually leave to forage for new ammo. That leads to the next tactic - ambushing. Most head on attacks will fail miserably to head shots. The best way to score kills is to hide in various areas, block off the retreat of the humans, and attacks from multiple angles. On well designed maps, there are multiple entrances to a given position, making it hard for the humans to hold. I remember one time when we all assaulted a cabin, pouring in from the front door and all the windows. It was just like a scene from the movies. The humans shit themselves and we ate them.

This is a great game that still has some balance issues. The zombies are pretty weak in the last man standing and fall prey to camping. There are a couple of things that I think should be improved. Zombies should be rewarded damage bonuses for ambushes. An attack from behind should do more than a frontal charge for example. Ideas being thrown around in the forums include giving the carrier zombie a short ranged attack (that could infect humans) that would help discourage camping. Then again, the humans are pretty weak in objective missions and fall prey to endless rushing. The unlimited respawns are what gets them here. One good suggestion thrown out is that the next objectives are always displayed, even for the zombies. This makes it all too easy for zombies to set up ambushes in the next objective area. For example, in the bio lab level, one of the objectives is to restore power down in the basement. Humans are usually too scared to go down and for good reason. By the time they get there, there's a zombie infestation. A good change to make would be to display the next objectives only to humans. The scoring system also needs work. It is still entirely kills based. Zombies and humans however, should get at least partial credit for kill assists. Zombies who regenerate wounds should be rewarded some points for their patience. Humans who give ammo to one another should be given some points for their teamwork. And so on.

The mod will obviously need further tweaking. After seeing how fun the premise is though, I can't wait to try Left 4 Dead.

In the mean time, here's some advice for newbies who want to play as the survivors. Finding ammo and weapons is critical in this game. If you want to learn where they spawn, its good to play a couple of practice rounds on your own. Here are the simple steps to do so:

1. Go to options, and click the box for enabling console commands.
2. Create a server
3. Pick a map you want to learn
4. Once it loads, bring up the console (hit the tilde ~ key)
5. Type "sv_testmode 1" (without the " ")
6. Press F1 to join Survivors.
7. Learn where all the weapons and ammo spawn

Kane's wrath

2008-10-12T03:48:00.001-07:00

Command and Conquer 3: Kanes Wrath is a fun little expansion to Tiberium Wars. It features a new NOD campaign with 13 levels, new sub-factions with corresponding unique units, three faction specific epic units (and yes, they are epic), and a Global Conquest game mode.

The campaign is more of the same found in C&C3, although it is much shorter. The story is told from the NOD perspective, covering events before, during, and after the Tiberium Wars. The difficulty is slightly more challenging, since as an expansion it doesn't need to bother with any of the boring tutorial levels. It jumps right into the action. The game follows the same formulaic design of its predecessors, which means if you loved Tiberium Wars, you'll love Kanes Wrath. Joseph Kucan stars in yet another masterful reprisal of his role as Kane, with a supporting cast of cheesy actors, cheesy dialog, cheesy sets, in addition to laser beams, giant robots, explosions, high body counts, and nukes. What more could you ask for?

How bout some EPIC UNITS?!!?!?111!1 Each faction now gets to build a big, gigantic behemoth to rampage across the tiberium infested wastelands. Granted, they are huge moving targets that crawl along at a snail like pace and fire equally slowly. But they add another level of tactical depth to the game. They can be garrissoned with infantry, and have special abilities. Groovy! There are also two new sub factions for each of the three factions, for a total of six "new" factions. They each have strengths and weaknesses and represent tweaks to the original. I wasn't a big fan of them and preferred plain vanilla, but it was a nice touch on their part.

Probably the coolest part of this game is the new Global Conquest mode. Its gameplay style loosely analogous to Total War. Its essentially a turn based game played out on a huge strategic map of the world, with real time combat. The basic gist is that you have a huge long running campaign with tons of real time strategy combat missions. Each player takes turns building bases, upgrading shit, and fighting one another. Its innovative but a bit rough around the edges. For example, you can build bases anywhere on the map, which I feel detracts from the strategy involved. While this might work for a purely turn based game like Civilization, it doesn't for a mode that emulates Total War style of play. The problem is that all the RTS combat essentially all feels the same as a result. The maps are based on a set of templates. Once you've played on a few maps, you've literally played them all. If instead, there had been preset base locations that factions had to fight over, and each city had a certain layout, look and feel, it would have made every fight unique. All in all though, the new mode is sweet. You can upgrade your bases each turn, spending money to increase power plants, revenue, and so on. As bases get upgraded, they advance in tier, which allow them to create better units. Each base can create custom strike forces. These have a certain number of movement points per turn, which you can use to attack or defend. In addition, you can also call in air strikes / super weapon attacks /reinforcements and etc, and each of these has their own recharge timer. The mode is incredibly fun, has a lot of potential, and adds a lot of replay value. I was disappointed to see that it wasn't in Red Alert 3. Hopefully they keep it in future versions.

Classic Gaming on Steam

2008-09-20T16:00:00.000-07:00

Being the slow adopter of technology that I am, I started using Steam. I was lured into their online store after hearing about the Id Super Pack being sold on there. What's more, as I was browsing around, I stumbled across the XCOM Complete Pack as well. I couldn't pass up a chance to get in on some classic gaming, so I purchased both packs.

The XCOM Complete pack was only 14.99$ and contains:

UFO Defense
Terror From the Deep
Apocalypse
Enforcer
Interceptor

The Id super Pack was a monster package. I was able to purchase it for only 34$ as part of a special limited time deal. It currently sells for 69.99$ and has:

Quake III Arena
Wolfenstein 3D
Ultimate DOOM
Final DOOM
DOOM II
QUAKE
QUAKE II
QUAKE II Mission Pack: The Reckoning
QUAKE II Mission Pack: Ground Zero
QUAKE III: Team Arena
HeXen
HeXen: Deathkings of the Dark Citadel
Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders
Spear of Destiny
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
QUAKE Mission Pack 2: Dissolution of Eternity
QUAKE Mission Pack 1: Scourge of Armagon
DOOM 3
HeXen II
DOOM 3 Resurrection of Evil
Master Levels for Doom II
Commander Keen

Granted, I probably could have these games on various torrents for free, but I don't like pirating software. Plus, it was so cheap that I didn't really mind. I figure that shown enough support by the gaming community, other companies might have incentive to support their old games. They could eventually be released as abandonware, or better yet, as open source.

The importance cannot be understated. When you play old games, you often have to jump through multiple hoops just to get things to work. Right off the bat, when I tried playing terror from the deep, I found that the mouse scroll speed was way too fast on the battlescape screen. I googled various forums, and found that others had this problem too, especially those with a laser mouse. Workarounds were avaiable, such as downloading Turbo and slowing down the effective CPU speed. The other XCOM games ran fine, as they were set up with DOSBOX (a DOS emulator that is a godsend for anyone who wants to play their beloved DOS games) - the config files and ISO images of the game CDs were already set up too. This was a nice touch by Steam. Unfortunately, DOSBOX did not have support for Terror from the Deep, hence the scroll speed problems.

In addition, I found that many of the games did not come with the game manual. Terror from the Deep did contain the manual in PDF, but others did not. I do not know if this is for legal reasons, but the XCOM games have always had a steep learning curve, and having a manual to refresh my memory after not having played these games in years would have been nice. Luckily, the various faqs on the internet were able to get me back up to speed.

I ran into a few hitches with the ID Super Pack as well. When I tried launching the Doom 3 expansion pack, Ressurection of evil, it gave me an error saying that my Doom 3 key was invalid. Confused, I launched Doom 3 first, and then launched Ressurection of Evil, which then worked. Games like Quake 2 and Hexen 2 do not allow you to change the resolution in game, and require you to do so from the command line. It was not immediately apparent how to launch these games from Steam to set the appropiate resolution. After experimenting around, I found that by right clicking the game from Steam, selecting properties, general tab, set launch options, and typing: "-width 1280" I was able to get it to work. Probably the worst problem I encountered is that the really old games such as Doom were run in Dosbox, and not being able to set the resolution made it look absolutely horrendous. Why didn't they include their Doom95 engine instead? Or better yet, package it with some of the newer open source Doom engines out there, such as Doomsday? Luckily, I can access the wads and launch them via the previously mentioned enginers, so its a moot point.

So while it is true that I was able to work around these minor issues, they really detract from the user experience. If there had been some minor patches released that allowed these packs to work better with Steam, that would have been great! Naturally, there are probably legal reasons and other issues that prevented this from happening. After all, the original Microprose has long since been disbanded, so not much could have been done there. Still, attention to detail seperates the excellent products from the good. Issues such as this should have been addressed or dealt with in some way. Having the games preconfigured via Dosbox is a great step in the right direction. As I said previously, perhaps when companies see how well loved these games still are, they will have financial incentive to provide some more support for them in the future.

Steam does have forums for each of the games, which is nice. However, they fall short there too. For some reason, the forums are not integrated with the steam accounts. I soon that I had to register seperately for their v-bulletin forums. This is pretty inexcusable. But whatever, I'm having too much fun with XCOM to continue complaining. Cydonia and T'leth await!

Quake 4 - Just like it did with Hexen and Heretic, Raven manages to improve on Doom engine

2008-07-31T21:50:00.000-07:00

Since the first Doom game, Id and Raven have always had a special relationship. Id would come out with a new game engine, and Raven would make some improvements to it and release a game of its own. When Doom was released, Raven made Heretic and gave players the ability to fly, use items, power up their weapons, and look up and down. Doom 2 brought Hexen, which had doors that could open sideways, inward, and outward, moving walls, rotating objects, and destroyable objects. Quake -> Hexen 2, and Quake 2 -> Soldier of Fortune and so on. So it was only natural that when the Doom 3 engine was released, Raven would work on Quake 4.

The biggest criticism of Doom 3 was that it was essentially the world's longest linear and indoor corridor. True, the game did create a scary atmosphere that was straight out of a hellish nightmare, but it didn't really showcase the engine, nor was the gameplay terribly revolutionary.

So, the goal with Quake 4 was to show off what the Doom engine was truly capable of. The game would involve waging an epic war with your fellow Marines against the Strogg in vast open terrain complete complete with tanks, walkers, space ships, and gigantic monsters. At least, that's what I remember reading years ago when the game was first announced.

Years later, as I get around to finally playing all these games and crossing them off my list, I found Quake 4 to be an enjoyable single player FPS, albeit with a forgettable and completely un-noteworthy multiplayer (death match only). I guess if QuakeWars had a single player campaign, it would be Quake 4. I thought that the game did start out capturing the feeling of fighting in a war really well. But then as the levels progressed it would often degenerate into Doom 3 solo corridor crawls. I thought, "damn, if only they had stuck to keeping this as a squad based FPS with vehicles". But they didn't and its a shame. Hell, I remember feeling the exact same thing when I played Command and Conquer Renegade back in the day. The entire game feels like its struggling to figure out what it's supposed to be.

Sometimes I feel like I'm playing a horror game. In the Strogg medical facilities, I fought off hordes of zombies in a dimly lit blood drenched medical waste processing facility that store the mutilated corpses of the botched Strogg experiments. My heart was pounding and I was having some serious Doom 3 flashbacks.

Other times, it felt like more of a feel good shoot em up, ie serious sam. On the tram rail level, I'm riding a tram car outside in a big bright canyon and mowing down legions of pursuing enemy Strogg with a mounted turret. A casual, fun and mindless shoot em up mission! The general trend appeared to be that anytime there was indoor fighting, there would be very little lighting and plenty of tense and scary moments, and anytime the fighting was outdoors or when it involved vehicles, it was a lot less frightening.

Not surprisingly, the story is pretty forgettable, but that's ok. Its a sequel to Quake 2 and a simple tale of good (Humans) vs evil (Strogg). Sadly, you do not get to play the hero from Quake 2 who destroyed the Big Gun and defeated the Makron. Instead you are Matthew Kane, of the elite Rhino Squad. Neither Kane nor Rhino squad are mentioned in Quake 2, but soldiers seem to be in awe and reverence of you for your past exploits - kinda like how everyone kissed Gordon Freeman's ass in Half Life 2 - except you have no idea what these exploits are. The opening scene starts off with a zoomed in view of a marine's face. It slowly starts to pan out and you realize the marine is missing half his face. After some more panning you see he's missing the lower half of his body as well. This lovely scene is a taste of the gore to follow. A bunch of drop ships then begin their descent to the Strogg homeworld, only to get shot down by the anti air defenses, a scene that has played out before in Quake 2 and its various mission packs before. Those silly humans never learn.

After crash landing on the planet, you receive your first objective from Sergeant Morris, who tells you to rendezvous with the rest of the squad. From here on out, you will be assigned missions in game from various people. The more epic missions are explained via cutscenes, but the large majority of them unravel in real time, which is great for pacing. I'm not a big fan of cutscenes advancing the story anyway, especially after playing the Half Life series and seeing how it could be done without any at all. Anyway, everything is just a thinly veiled excuse to start killing stuff. Hey, no complaints here!

There is plenty to kill. You've got all your standard enemy types in an FPS. In addition to the standard humanoid Strogg soldier armed with a machine gun, you've got short, fast and heavily armored grunts that engage in meelee. These are joined by tall, fast and heavily armored berserkers that engage in meelee. Their slower counterpart, the gladiator, are tall and heavily armored as well, armed with a shoulder mounted railgun and protected by an energy shield. There are quite a few more baddies in the game, and they will all give you a run for your money, to speak nothing of the boss fights. These involve epic battles against giant monstrosities that tower above you.

The harvester is a giant arachnid robot that shoots homing missiles at you. Ouch.

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The Network Monstrosity is a hideously deformed beast that stalks you for the last levels in the game, before engaging in a final showdown with you on the top of the Strogg processing towers.

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And the Markon, who was defeated in Quake 2, reprises his role as one of the final bosses. Good times!

Luckiy, you will have the same bread and butter weapons from Quake 2 to help you defeat the bad guys. You even get access to the lightning gun from the original Quake! Better yet, at certain points in the game, various squad mates will mod your weapons for you. For example, you are able to lock on to targets with your nailgun after a technician upgrades it. Taking a cue from the complaints about Doom 3 about having to switch between the flash light and the weapon, your standard machine gun has a duct tape mod - no more fumbling about in the darkness for a light.
Unfortunately, the BFG does not make an appearance in this game. A shame. Its replaced by an anti matter gun which shoots out this black ball that sucks in surrounding enemies and then explodes.

Squad mates surprisingly are useful. I did not play at the hardest difficulty, so they seemed to be fairly resilient. Hell, they even know how to use cover. Medics even heal you and technicians repair your armor. Perhaps they die quicker in the harder difficulty levels, but I did not have any issues. Hence the escort missions are actually enjoyable, instead of becoming the horrifying babysitting nightmares they become in other games. I would have liked it, however if I had squad mates with me for most of the game. As is, you spend more time alone than you do in a team. Your buddies will often be separated from you for a number of contrived reasons: they are recalled back, you are recalled back, they need you to go off on your own to investigate something, etc. It seems kind of silly that with a major war going on, that they'd let soldiers go solo. I mean, I'll go through all this effort in an escort mission, and then they'll recall me back, and leave him there all by himself? and this is after we had just fought through a legion of bad guys, indicating that this is an unsafe area with a large number of hostiles? WTF?

The vehicles in the game are great and give the levels variety. Its definitely a nice change of pace. There is a set of back to back levels where you get to use the tank, and a set of levels where you get to use the mech. Both have regenerating shields and hit points. In other missions, you ride in vehicles such as an APC or a tram car and control the mounted gun turret, and get to blast away with impunity at the bad guys. Unfortunately, you don't get to control any flying vehicles, but given the restrictive feel of the levels, I'm not surprised.

After playing the game, I'm not really convinced the Doom 3 engine is good at large outside areas. The outdoor levels still felt confined and small, and you can't help but notice all the boundaries and borders that restrict exploration. This is due in part to the linearity of the level design. You're presented with very few choices in terms of places to explore or how to beat a mission: there is only one path from point A to point B. However, because the game is so enjoyable, it really isn't really an issue here. So at the end of the day, it was a great game, but its not something I would probably play again anytime soon. The replay value is especially limited given the lackluster and unimaginative multiplayer.

Thief: Deadly Shadows - the long hiatus and transition to console went over well

2008-06-25T21:55:00.000-07:00

I finally got around to playing Thief: Deadly Shadows. Its been on my backlog of games to play for a while now. Being a huge fan of Thief: The Dark Project, and Thief 2: The Metal Age, it came as no surprise that I enjoyed the third one just as much. True, Looking Glass Studios, the company that made the first two critically acclaimed games had gone out of business, and thus would be unable to make the sequel. However, the torch was kept burning by Austin branch of Ion Storm (not the crappy Dallas ofice which released the infamously and horrifically bad Daikatana). The founder, Warren Spectre, had worked on System Shock and Ultima. Ion Storm already had the critically acclaimed Deus Ex under its belt. Not to mention Stephen Russell, the voice of the main character Garrett in the first two games, would be returning for yet another masterful performance. So the game was in pretty good hands - and it shows. Some tweaks to the original gameplay was made, but all in all it remained faithful to the original.

The story basically picks up where the last two left off. Garrett, the main character and master thief of the first two games, had played the role of maintaining balance between the two diametrically opposed religions - the Hammerites and the Pagans. The latter worship the Trickster, and revel in the chaotic freedom and primal anarchy of nature. The former worship the Builder, and delight in civilization and order. In the first game, the Trickster manages to return to earth, by duping Garrett into helping him. Garrett loses an eye for his efforts. The Trickster wants to unleash his tree hugging, nature loving minions upon the earth and destroy civilization as part of his "dark project" to bring humanity back to its original chaotic and primitive state. By defeating the Trickster in the first game, Garrett weakens the Pagans, swings the balance in the other direction, and unwittingly triggers a new era, a metal age. Thus in the second game, Garrett allies with the Pagans in order to defeat the Mechanists, a cult that splintered off from the Hammerites. The leader of the cult, Kharas, wants to wipe out organic life in order to create a mechanical paradise. Garrett foils Kharas' plan and saves the day yet again.

In Deadly Shadows, Garrett must once again play the role of the hero. This time the problem stems from the Keepers. The Keepers are an ancient faction that Garrett had originally apprenticed under. Fed up with their ways, Garrett left them in order to put the thieving skills he learned from them to more practical use. The Keepers represent neutrality and maintain balance. Unfortunately for them, one of their order is a brethren betrayer, who is trying to usher in a dark age. Figuring into all of this is a creepy old woman known only as the hag - a boogeyman type monster that performs unspeakable acts upon her victims. If this all sounds terribly plain and generic, it really isn't. Thief games all have a way of immersing you into their worlds.

A quick side note here. The game is named Thief: Deadly Shadows, not Thief 3: Deadly Shadows, even though it is technically a sequel to the metal age. The reason being that Deadly Shadows was released for consoles as well as PC. Not wanting to alienate players who had never heard of the first two games, they decided to just call it Thief Deadly Shadows. I'll just refer to the game as Thief 3, since it is the third installment of the series in everything but name.

In fact it was so similar to the first two that it shared the same glaring flaw as the first two, despite being developed years afterward: Since the game is a bit old, it could not handle my dual core processor! It caused the game to be stuck in an infinite loop where it played the opening movie over and over again. This was solved by permanently setting the affinity of t3main.exe and t3.exe to one of the processors.

I downloaded imagecfg.exe and created a batch file in my C:\Program Files\Thief - Deadly Shadows\System directory with these lines:

imagecfg -u t3.exe
imagecfg -u t3main.exe
imagecfg -a 0x1 t3.exe
imagecfg -a 0x1 t3main.exe
pause

and that fixed the problem, allowing me to actually play the game.

And what a great gameplay experience it was! As I said earlier, some tweaks to the original formula were made. The basic idea remains the same though. You play through a series of missions as Garrett, a master thief who favors stealth over strength. Each mission involves burglarizing various locales. Each area will be swarming with guards, servants, and various other NPCs. You won't get very far by going in guns blazing. In fact, you don't even have a gun, let alone a rocket launcher. You have a dagger and a bow. No, instead the idea is to use stealth. Light and sound are your main enemy. You will prefer to hide in the shadows and be careful of where you tread, as certain surfaces make louder noises than others. When you do strike, it will be fast, quick, and painless; your enemies will not see you coming. It will be your best interest to clean up the evidence. People will take notice of blood stains, missing items (stolen by you), and bodies.

The missions run the whole gamut and present a diverse variety of challenges. Among the places you will be robbing are a museum, a church, a mansion, and a castle. They managed to capture the magic of the original thief games. The levels are nonlinear, huge, offer plenty of places to explore, hide, and steal. The NPC conversations are hilarious as usual, and bits and pieces of lore can be found everywhere that really flesh out the world and mythology. For example, in the sunken citadel you learn the history of the kurshoks, who were banished deep beneath the sea by the Trickster for their pride. Really, my biggest complaint is that the loading zones between areas were lame. The other nitpick is the level: gamall's lair. It wasn't quite a full blown mission, and it occurs right before the final level, so its kind of anticlimactic and sort of throws off the pacing. You're expecting a showdown with the final boss, but you don't even encounter her in her lair. And when you finally do, that too feels anticlimactic, since it takes place in the city, and not in a level of its own.

My favorite mission by far is the Robbing the Cradle level. To put it bluntly: it scared the shit out of me. Judging by other people's responses, I am not alone. What makes it so unique is that the Thief Series is not a "horror" game, like Clive Barker's Undying, or Silent Hill. But it always has elements of horror in it. There will be a hint of it here and there, and then BAM, it hits you hard in the head with it. Anyone who has played through the Return to the Haunted Cathedral level in the original Thief knows what I'm talking about. The Cradle manages to capture that same creepiness and intensity that made the Cathedral such a chilling experience. Its really hard to put into words but I'll try anyway.

The Shalebridge Cradle is an orphanage that was later converted to an insane asylum. The kids, who remained behind in the nursery, started disappearing. Then the place caught on fire and much of it was destroyed and abandoned, left to rot in decrepitude. An atmosphere of gloom pervades the whole area, and it fills players with a sense of foreboding and dread.

The ambient sound effects really contribute to the feelings of unease: Groans, whispers, tortured shrieks punctuate the silence. Even the steady ticking of the clock and the crackle of a flickering light seem sinister in such an environment. Probably the best moment of the game was when I first began to hear the barely perceptible sound of someone knocking on the door. It was quite subtle and I wanted to dismiss it as yet another harmless, albeit frightening, noise. But it didn't seem quite right and felt out of place, so I investigated. I began to head towards the sound, and sure enough it grew louder. It led me up some stairs, and to a door. This then, was where the noises were emanating from. It was at this point that the knocking was not so slow and subtle anymore, but had suddenly become a furious pounding noise. I opened it of course, but not before being completely freaked out.

I thought the former patients that populate the Cradle made for a great monster. They were every bit on par with the Hammer haunts in the Haunted Cathedral. For me, the key thing that made the haunts so horrifying were the sound effects: the slow and steady rattling of their chains, their hoarse and sepulchural groans to "join us", and their hideous laughter is enough to test a man's nerves. The patients in the Cradle tend to be far more quiet, save for the occasional hiss. This too is effective, but in a different way. You never know when they're just around the corner. And they are every bit a terror to behold as the haunts. They appear to be little more than rag dolls, with barely any vestige of humanity left in them. Their bodies are covered from head to foot in decaying restraints, a metal cage is bolted to their heads, and they walk with an unnatural and awkward shambling motion. This inhuman limp is the essence of the monster, so in this case, a picture is not worth a thousand words, as it cannot do this monster enough justice:

You know a monster has been designed well when you can barely suppress a shudder every time you encounter it. You also know a level is scary when you are glad to be done with it. Funny enough, that's also one of the criteria used to determine when a game sucks. But I was glad to be done with the cradle in a good way; my heart beat could finally stop beating so fast.

The Cradle level really steals the show, but the whole game manages to shine. Thief: Deadly Shadows is a great game that did justice to the legendary Thief legacy. For my own notes and reference, here are the main differences between Thief 3 and Thief 1/2:

1. Lock picking mini game
In the first two thief games, you had two lockpicks which you alternated between to bypass any locks. The more complex the lock, the more you had to alternate between the two picks. In Thief 3, they have added a lock picking mini game which involves you moving the mouse to various "sweet spots". The more complex the lock, the more sweet spots. I didn't care too much for it, but didn't mind it either.

2. Blackjack handles far differently
In the original game, you used the blackjack to club people unconscious without killing them. You simply ran up behind them and swung the thing and down they went. You could do this in rapid succession and take out a whole bunch of people in a room at once - providing they all did not see (or hear) you coming.

In Thief 3, the blackjack now has some startup and recovery time. Now you must be positioned directly behind your victim, which will then cause Garrett to lift the blackup over his victim's head. If the blow is not made in this position, it will not knock them unconscious. Furthermore, once the blow is made, there is some recovery time where Garrett is unable to move.

I liked this change, as it made it more challenging and slightly more realistic. After all, to deliver a knockout blow, you would need some time to gather up the necessary power, and of course you would need to follow through with it and recover.

3. You cannot knock someone out once they have been flashbombed.
In Thief 1/2, you could toss a flashbomb, and then club everyone with your blackjack to take them out as they fumbled about blindly. In Thief 3, the second you hit them, they are able to see once more and attack you immediately.

I liked this change as well, since it definitely made the game more challenging. The flashbomb has been nerfed so that it is no longer an offensive weapon, but rather a getaway device. Actually that's not entirely true, flashbombs still damage the undead (thankfully, or else the Cradle level would have been that much more nightmarish - more on this later).

4. No more speed potions

5. Oil potions
These cause enemies to slip, slide and fall on contact. Admittedly, being an old fashioned Thief player, I never actually used these.

6. No more rope arrows
In Thief 1/2, these were the equivalent of grappling hooks. Simply shoot an arrow up onto a wooden surface, and a rope drops down for you, which you can then use to climb up to that surface. In this case there is no rope arrow, but instead you get to purchase these broken climbing gloves, which allow you to pretty much climb up any surface. This means no epic jumping puzzles such as the Lost City pharaoh's tomb where you had to traverse a whole section of lava by shooting multiple rope arrows in succession.

7. The city
This is probably by far the biggest change to the game. In Thief 1/2, you played the missions one after the other. In Thief 3, the game is divided up into "days". On each day, you have two missions to complete, and in between each mission you get to explore the city, pick pocket civilians, rob stores and homes, sell your goods to fences, purchase equipment, and complete extra side quests.

The city where Thief takes place is quite large and is divided into different sections. There is plenty to see, do, and explore here. It adds additional replay value and provides a great open ended and immersive experience that supplements the gameplay of the missions, which are themselves already quite open ended.

8. Factions
In Thief 3, you can ally yourself with either the Pagans or the Hammerites. You start off as enemies of both and they attack you on site. You can improve your standing with them by doing favors/quests for them in the city. This will cause them to become neutral toward you. You can continue doing favors and become allies - at which point they will fight alongside you, as well as allow you into their base. Note that your standing is only relevant in the city. Even if they are your allies, when you perform the actual missions themselves, any allied pagans or hammerites will still attack you. In the end, it doesn't make a huge difference on the game ending which side you ally with. In fact you don't even have to ally with either side. But it definitely makes the game more interesting.

9. Loading areas
I did not like this and blame it on consoles. Every mission in the game (Except the training mission at the start) is now divided into two parts. To travel in between parts you step into a misty portal that takes you to a loading screen where you wait for that section to load. It totally ruins the game immersion and feels lame. It makes every level feel the "same", because you know there are going to be two sections. In thief 1/2, even though the levels were huge, they were not divided into different sections. I understand that the city needs to be broken up into different loading areas - after all - they are pretty big, but the missions? Come on now. And at the very least don't use the same misty fog type portal to indicate a new area. In Oblivion, at least they used doors and gates that didn't feel out of place.

10. Generic objectives
This is a nitpick, but the objectives in this game aren't nearly as descriptive or interesting as those in the previous games. True, every mission will have some unique objectives, but it will also tell you to steal x% of the loot, and steal y amount of special loot. These same plain objectives will appear on every level.

Compare this to Thief, where instead of the same bland "steal 90% of the loot", it instead says: "The Opera House is filled with precious adornments and attracts the city's wealthiest patrons, so don't leave without at least 2000 worth of loot." And instead of "steal y amount of special loot", each piece of special loot will have a description that really fleshes out the game world. This is also taken from the Song of Caverns level:

"When he was alive, your informant Giry often bragged about the cash take in just a single evening at the opera house. Find out if he was telling the truth - get to the ticket office and steal the contents of the cash box."

Its the attention to the small details such as this that distinguishes a good product from an excellent product. So it was a bit disappointing to see they skimped on the mission objectives.

11. Loot that glows in the dark. In this game, the loot glitters and sparkles, so its easier to spot and steal. I'm guessing the justification for this is that finding the necessary amount of loot at the harder difficulty levels was a problem. On the one hand it kind of ruins immersion and feels like the game was dumbed down, but on the other, I understand the need. On more than one occasion I had to reference a walkthrough to find some loot that I had missed in the original Thief games.

Well that about covers it. Unfortunately, Ion Storm has also gone out of business, so at the moment, it doesn't seem like there will be any new thief games. But between Dark Project, Metal Age, and Deadly Shadows (to say nothing of fan made mods such as T2X: Shadows of the metal age), there's more than enough gaming goodness to satisfy Thief lovers everywhere.