Category Archives: Gaming

Aliens: Colonial Marines, or 2013′s greatest disappointment

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I regretted pre-ordering the game a day before it came out.

One of the first reviews to appear was one from a non-English site (I can’t remember the url, I think it was a French one) giving it 5/10. Fans who loved the Alien franchise rushed to the game’s defense immediately, but the majority of the apologists had not have a chance to play it yet.

Fast forward a day later, everyone who cared about the game had finished its woefully short campaign, and the opinion more or less gravitated towards a common consensus. Aliens: Colonial Marines was a train wreck. Right now, the Metacritic score for it is resting at 47/100. In an era where the pass for games seem to hover at around 70, 47 is downright abysmal.

The game plays a lot more like Starship Troopers than Aliens. It’s a shooter, and a very unimaginative one at that. Xenomorphs comes at you in waves, and you kill them, end of story. As a shooter, there really isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with it as far as controls and mechanics go. It could be better, sure, but there are certainly worse shooters with controls flawed in a myriad other ways out there. But as for the things done right, it ends there.

The game feels so hollow and lifeless that I do not even know how to begin to describe it. The story is haphazard and the characters all fall into staple templates that I could hardly care for any of them. The AI will stand in the middle of a walkway and let lose a stream of bullets into enemies it has no line of sight to, completely ignoring the fact that the enemy has gone under cover. Sometimes, it even completely runs past an enemy firing at it, woeful to whatever is going on. The weapons sound muffled and lack the feel of any actual impact. Grenades explode like they did in Counter-Strike 1.0. The cut scenes are reminiscent of FMVs in the 1990s. It’s hard to believe that 5 years of work were put into into a game that is over in about 5 hours.

Now if you excuse me, I’m going to down a fifth of whiskey and forget that I ever bought this game.

Games of 2012 in review

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An article on Metacritic lamenting that the game releases in 2012 did not do very well for video games is generating some degree on controversy, partly because it is Metacritic, whose scores of games from big publishers always seems to be higher than they deserved, and also partly because some feel that indie games were not well represented.

More importantly, it is controversial because it is true, at least in this author’s opinion.

2012 had a lot of big titles, but what happened?

By no means was there a lack of titles for 2012. On the contrary, 2012 saw a large number of huge titles being released, but the majority of them either missed the mark, or hype surrounding it died soon after its release, along with the players actually playing it. Mass Effect 3′s ending disappointed. The long anticipated Diablo 3 proved fun for about 2, maybe 3, weekends, and then everyone got bored of the grind. Likewise for Guild Wars 2, which despite a successful launch and overloaded servers in the initial week, had most people reached level cap soon enough and then disappeared. Max Payne 3 departed too much from its previous installments in the franchise, and became Just Another Shooter™. Warfighter bombed, and sunk the entire Medal of Honor franchise along with it. Hitman Absolution, to quote PCMag’s review, is ‘bland and uninteresting’, despite having a trailer that offended quite a number of people.

The real losers? Subscription based MMOs.

The most expensive game produced (not just counting MMOs), Star Wars: The Old Republic, went free-to-play in slightly under a year after its launch. This was then followed a month later by The Secret World, a game only a few months old, dropping the subscription model and going with only the box cost. While I’m not ready to herald that that the free-to-play model will be the future of MMOs, and I still have my doubts about such a model being sustainable AND still producing quality games, the MMO bubble that has been growing ever since every company tried to jump on the bandwagon after World of Warcraft’s success had finally burst. WoW and EVE still have their stable populations, but the barrage of titles coming out in rapid succession year after year has halted. In fact, I can’t think of any title off hand from a Western publisher that’s coming up in 2013. A quick look up just reminded me of The Elder Scrolls Online, but the reason I didn’t think of it in the first place is that I have doubts about the game being able to capture the spirit of The Elder Scrolls series in an MMO setting.

So, what was good?

Some might argue that the best game for 2012 technically isn’t a 2012 game at all. Persona 4: The Golden, an improved port of an older game for the PS2, has been the largest time sink for me. I’ve clocked 89 hours on my saved game thus far, and I’m still not done with my first playthrough, and with plenty of ideas for the next. I don’t think I’ve sunk that many hours into a handheld game since Pokémon. For a single player game, I think it’s probably around the 3rd with the most number of hours clocked, behind Morrowind and Skyrim.

Dishonored was also a great title, which I covered in a previous article. I’m led to believe that Borderlands 2 and XCOM were also excellent titles, which I couldn’t quite get into. You apparently had to be a fan of the 1994 XCOM to appreciate the current title, which I wasn’t, having never played it then.

Sleeping Dogs is apparently a sleeper hit, but I can’t give my opinion on it yet since I’ve yet to play the copy I picked up during Steam Winter Sales. That is what I suspect I’ll be doing over the next few days.

Dishonored – Beautiful, but a tad short

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The new year is upon us and I’m still catching on games bought last year and the first of which I completed this year Dishonored. I’m typing this out just as the credits are rolling down. It’s a great game on the whole, although a few sore points could have made it shined even more.

What impressed me most about this game is the art direction and story-telling. The hints of steampunk, along with the alternating contrasts of a bright, resplendent and opulent world, against a dark, plague filled London-esque city works out well, along with the game’s unusual art style does really well. In the crowded video game market of 2012, where many games seem to be just an increment of its predecessor, a bold new world and setting feels extremely refreshing.

The environment is immersive, not only because of the beautifully done setting, but also in terms of audio cues and environmental sound effects, especially that of the pistol’s. Yes, you heard me right, I’m commenting on how awesome firing a weapon sounds. You have to understand, though, the most of the combat is done in melee, with a cool retractable sword, which I would dearly love to get a replica of, and the occasional wrist-mounted crossbow. Having a enemy cross sword with you, and them stumbling back and reaching out for and firing a circa 1800s pistol with an impactful and reverberating sound has a real kick to it. It made me jump the first time a shot rang out, and I still do when I’m suddenly thrown into combat when I fail at being stealthy.

There are, however, a few things that could have improved the quality of play. A minor nuisance is that the positioning of carrying out a stealth attack seems to be fairly limited to an area directly behind the target. I should be able to flank an attack at single angle, but I can’t, and this makes for frustrating situations where I’m hiding behind a corner, and an enemy passes me, but I have to wait until the enemy passes by me completely, and then take a step to the side so that I’m directly behind him before being able to execute my attack.

Another disappointment is that Dishonored is not an open world game. Although there is a certain degree of freedom when executing a particular mission, each mission is a semi-isolated stage on its own. There’s no free roam to go back and revisit places, which is a pity, considering how beautiful the world is. Furthermore, this means that if you miss out on gold, bone charms and runes in a mission, there’s no way to go back and get them, which means that you might be disadvantaged when it comes to spending on upgrades later.

I finished the game in about 10 hours, split over 3 or 4 game sessions. The game does feel a little on the short side, and my 10 hours did include a significant amount of reloading when I get discovered, so if you don’t care for stealth, you could probably cut off an hour or two off the play time. GIven the relatively short game duration, and no overwhelming desire to replay the game anytime soon, I’m glad I bought it at 50% off during the Steam Winter Sales instead of shelling out full price for it on launch.

Doom 3 – The survivor horror that Resident Evil 6 could have been

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It’s a strange state that video game industry is in when a purely FPS game turns out to have more elements of horror and holy-shit-what-was-that moments than a game from a franchise that defined the survival horror genre.

What am I talking about? Doom 3, of course. Doom 3: BFG Edition was re-released yesterday as part of a collection that comprised of an improved version of Doom 3, along with a few new levels, as well as a collection of all the past Doom releases optimized to work on modern versions of Windows (read: no DOSBox needed). Doom 1 played fantastic with proper mouse controls, but I digress  that’s not the point of this article. What I want to talk about is how Resident Evil 6 could have been both an action and horror game at the same time.

Since RE5, The Resident Evil franchise has been trying to reinvent itself as kind of a hybrid – an action third-person shooter while still retaining its horror elements.In RE6 Leon and Ada’s campaign were the highlight of the game, and the story writing felt decent. Chris’s campaign was a gigantic mess and played more like a game in the Call of Duty series. But lets face it, even in the best parts of the game, there was never a moment when I felt even the least bit terrified or felt that I was venturing into an uncomfortable territory. The only un-comfortableness I felt was from the erratic movements of a camera with a field of view that was too narrow.

Doom 3, on the contrast, was a excellent shooter, and there were moments that caught me off guard, like the moment when your vision suddenly turns into grainy red hue and and   you go “oh fuck, what is going on”, and then pentagrams starts appearing on the ground and a couple of demons spawn right out of them. I’ve played Doom 3 back during its initial 2004 release, and some moments still scare the crap out of me. And all this is coming from a game with an emphasis on just mindlessly shooting things.

So what does this tell us? It is possible to put both horror and action in a game, and do it right without compromising too much of either aspect.

How do supposedly bad games sell?

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Resident Evil 6 came out this week, and despite a huge number of mixed and some downright negative reviews (hell, even GameSpot who seems to give practically every game at least a 7, gave it a 4.5), it has been doing very well in terms of market performance. 4.5 millions copies have shipped, and while that is not an indicative of sales figures yet, anecdotal information from retailers seems to be that a large number of units are being moved. Capcom itself has a high projection, expecting 7 million units sold by March 31st, 2013.

My own reaction to it has been mixed, with a relatively interesting action play and horrible camera and controls. The graphics didn’t feel that great either, and color banding was a issue in a number of scenes.

Where does all this lead us to? A few very interesting possible conclusions.

This could be the problem of a vocal minority, or that the game is targeting a specific niche that does not have much of a representation within the mainstream community.

In the first case, people who like the game are actually busy enjoying instead of critiquing, and you have the problem of a small disgruntled player base but with access to media channels voicing out. Since we only hear the cries of the dissenters, we have assumption that everyone dislikes the game whereas in reality, people do actually like the game.

In the second case, it would be that the people reviewing the game, along with a number of people who bought the game aren’t simply the intended audience, and the intended audience are actually playing as per case one. This is why games like Darkfall received a lot of negativity despite being a good game on its own. Which brings us to the case of misrepresentation.

This misrepresentation case is interesting, because it represents some kind of a mismatched expectation. It could be the marketing department’s fault for misrepresenting the game, or simply because players attach their own biased expectations on to the game, pretending that it’s something it really isn’t. This seems very plausible, given how Capcom tried to appeal to both the survival horror and action fans at the same time. I would think that I myself fall into this category. Having a PS3, I desperately wanted a Resident Evil experience, and I couldn’t stomach playing through the original because they feel so graphically inferior. Once I bought the game, I’ve already contributed to the sales figure, regardless of me liking it or not, so my opinion really doesn’t matter.

But if enough people think that the game is terrible, shouldn’t there be some kind of a feedback and reaction after day 1 after word of it’s mediocrity or terribleness has spread? Logically, you’d think that people would stop buying after reading the reviews, but this isn’t the case. This is where the game starts to sell based on hope.

Hope. This is like entering into a relationship you knew from that start would turn ugly, but you still think that you could make it work. This is some kind of a cognitive dissonance where on one hand, you know for the fact that the game is going to be disappointment, but on another hand, you want to like it so much that you give yourself reasons like “maybe the reviewer didn’t know what he was doing” and “I could handle this”.

Hope is a powerful emotion, and it moves products.

Only Max Payne can pull this off

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With an unloaded gun. Click on the screenshot for a high-res version.

Max Payne 3 has a powerful engine that generates cutscenes dynamically, using the current state of the environment and your character, rather than being CGI generated. Unfortunately, a side effect of this accurate representation is that Max Payne can look less intimidating that he really is sometimes.

Not quite Tahrir square

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Not quite Tahrir square

The fog gave way to a sandstorm, and I found myself in Egypt. Egypt, which itself is subdivided into a few zones, is the second major setting in The Secret World, after Solomon Island. Having grown weary of Ak’abs and mountainous regions, a vast, open and mostly level desert was much welcomed.

Here in virtual Egypt, the people have much worse than Mubarak or the military council to contend with. Other than being besieged by a doomsday cult, Egypt is a picturesque place, more reminiscent of One Thousand and One Nights than the Arab Spring. Quests often had me navigating areas in a Prince of Persia fashion, or had me take on Rick O’Connell’s role in The Mummy.

Egypt continues the story arc involving black oil The Filth, and the first zone in Egypt culminates in a dungeon, The Ankh, a zone evocative of Nazi occult fantasy, with the big bad aptly named ‘Doctor Klein’. After a few runs of the instance, I was mostly in QL8 gear and had also completed my soldier deck, unlocking a nice looking appearance set.

Reward for completing the ‘Soldier’ deck

I can’t decide what deck I should go for next. Magus comes with a outfit that I like, and the elementalist spells look fun, but it would be wiser picking up a healer or a tank spec instead of another dps spec as that would give me more options for grouping. Picking up the assault rifle/blood magic healer spec wouldn’t be too hard as I already have one of weapons, as well as the inner ring of assault rifle completed. The other specs would take more work.

Hmmm, decisions.

Pixel Hunt

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Adventure games can be broadly divided into two different categories, namely, guess the verb, and pixel hunt. A large number of The Secret World’s investigation missions fall into the latter.

That’s not to say they’re all bad. I’ve a few favorites, like decoding a radio transmission in morse code, and placing a subset of objects in a certain order to open vaults, but some of them, or some parts of the quest, unfortunately, degrade into a painful and retina traumatizing pixel hunt. It’s not that bad in the old days when you only had somewhere in the area of 300,000 pixels (640*480) to work with (okay, it is bad), but now there’s 2 million (1920*1080) of them, and these wonderful Direct X 11 effects don’t make things any easier.

Some items are helpfully outlined, some are not. Despite, the outline, some are woefully small enough only to be obvious when zoomed into first person view and hugging any objects in your vicinity. The ones which aren’t outlined require a combination of mouse dexterity and fortitude as you make a scan of the entire area until you notice your cursor change into that of a gear, meaning you found something that you can interact with.

I’ve played a fair share of adventure games in the past, including those from CD-ROMs that came tucked in cereal boxes. Despite the huge nostalgia I have for the many tropes of the genre, pixel hunting is definitely not one of them.

The (previously) Secret World

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Because Ragnar Tørnquist smashed my heart into a thousand little pieces by pretty much announcing that he wouldn’t be working on the sequel to Dreamfall in a response to an interview on Rock Paper Shotgun, an excerpt of which is provided below, and also because Aelyrra wouldn’t stop pestering me, I picked up The Secret World.

RPS: Do you ever plan on going back to single-player games, especially single-player adventure games?

Tornquist: I think right now I’ve made an MMO, and it’s taken six years of my life. I’m going to stick around and stay with The Secret World for a while, but I would love to do something [single-player again].

Congratulations, Ragnar Tørnquist, you just made it on to my mortal enemies list.

The Secret World’s no longer so secret world is a refreshing break from the littered landscape of fantasy MMORPGs. The game belongs to the urban fantasy sub-trope, something that’s surprisingly not at all common these days, glittering teenage vampires not withstanding. Casually, I can only think of one game, Vampire: The Masquerade, and one author, Laurell Hamilton in the genre.

Being based on a modern world setting has it usefulness, such as making cultural references and other allusions to things that would have been anachronistic in a usual fantasy setting. There’s a character named Ann Radcliffe, who is uncomfortable with having being named after a person of such accomplishment. There’s also a store that sells outdoor supplies named ‘Call of the Wild’. And then there’s this.

Reference from Fight Club

My character, Calreth, is a Templar on the Huldra server. I also have an Illuminati alt, and I seem to prefer the Illuminati story more, but since my friends are on the side of the Templars, that is where I spent most of my game time. As an initiate of the Templars, my handler seems to be a technologically incompetent M, and the head guy (I have no idea what to call him), a Samuel L. Jackson impersonator. Unlike the other two societies (Illuminati and Dragon), the Templars seem be living out the in open, with their headquarters as a copy of the Vatican City but smack down right in the middle of London, and populated by the entire cast of Downtown Abbey.

On the other hand, the Illuminati, headquartered in an up market part of New York City’s sewers, has it parallels with the Syndicate in X-Files, which is perhaps what drew me to it. I can go around pretending to play the role of the Cigarette Smoking Man, a character of questionable qualities that is involved in every major conspiracy, and in a world whose future is determined by my words.

We predict the future. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Good day, young lady.

The setting of the story, written by someone who used to do adventure games, is elaborate and rich in lore. If you spend the time to explore, there’s history behind almost everything, and knowing some of them is going to be crucial when it comes to solving investigation quests. Or you can just Google it

Knowledge is power, especially with Google on your side

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Vanity is a huge part of the game, and if dressing up in Second Life was what you liked to do, you’d find similar options available here.

Game mechanics wise, there is some change, but nothing too huge of a deviation from other MMORPGs. You have hot bars, you devise a rotation, and you rinse and repeat. There’s perhaps more movement than usual in the sense that instead of kiting, I find myself having to circle strafe endlessly. With regards to the game having no levels, that’s over-hyped. Although levels aren’t explicit, Skill Points (SP) more or less determine your level. Progression is still more or less on rails, meaning you finish up one area, and then go to another, all in a linear order. The only major difference is that if you choose to spend enough time grinding, you could ultimately have all the skills available, which is break from the traditional character creation process. Asides from that, the holy trinity of tank-healer-dps is still there, so don’t expect a revolution or anything.

I’m not going to pass any judgement on the game, as spending two days playing an MMORPG is too early to divine the future of it. Funcom has its share of both successful (Anarchy Online) and failed (Age of Conan) MMORPGs in portfolio, and there’s no telling where The Secret World would end up.

Baghdad with g strings

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Max Payne was on sale for 50% off on Steam, and I trust you to be smart enough to finish the rest of that sentence.

I love voice overs. My favorite cut of Blade Runner was the one that had voice overs, and I like film noir partially because they often included generous portions of voice overs.

It’s a shame that voice overs have lost popularity as a narrative tool over the recent years. Properly done, it adds depth and perspective to a character. One thing I’ve always favored about books was that you could read the character’s thoughts. No matter how good an actor is, some things just can’t be conveyed through body language alone. Taxi Driver would be half the movie that it is without voice overs.

It was good to discover that despite the vastly different setting of the game compared to the previous two in the series, Max Payne still packs a healthy dose of cynical inner thoughts along witty punch lines. Although I haven’t completed the game, I’ve put in a good many hours at the time of writing this post, and it doesn’t seem to be that bad of a game. It’s different, but it’s not bad. The environment is well constructed, and along with the Spanish laced dialog proved immersive. Having huge swaths of dialog in a language unfamiliar to the player (unless you’ve taken Spanish before, then I guess it doesn’t quite apply for you) reinforces the sense of detachment Max has with his surroundings.

I didn’t particularly like the art direction taken with the cut scenes, especially the whole random text from the dialog being splashed across the screen. Initially, it seemed just keywords were highlighted, but then as the game progressed, the highlights just felt like as if they were arbitrary picked. Another nitpick I have was that it auto-save points are too far in between. I’m playing on hard, so I’ve died enough so that it bothered me.

I’ve yet to give the multiplayer aspect of the game a go, and I doubt it’ll hold much interest for me. I’ve Battlefield 3 for that. Besides, I’ve picked up a ton of other games that I’ll have to plow through. This flash sales thing on Steam is really a huge money sink.