I’ve Been Playing on BNet Too Much

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Somewhat related to my previous post, this comic seemed to resonate with me. We were adventurous this weekend and played a 2v2 co-op game against hard AI opponents. We got curb stomped pretty badly during an early AI rush the first time. Subsequent tries on Saturday and Sunday evening versus the hard AI were successful (though my lovely co-op partner had to come to my rescue several times <3). He shits out cannons and what not and I shit out marines and what not. Together we shit things out.

We also managed to beat a 2v1 co-op game against one AI opponent on insane. Though I am not sure that really counted. We may have uuuh cheesed the AI a bit as shown in the screenshot above. For some reason, the AI doesn’t like attacking Protoss Motherships. I mean, I stashed an entire army of banshees underneath it and the computer just let it float around killing everything?

I can consistently beat the AI on medium solo if I defend against the first wave and don’t flub my opening game; Still don’t get how people build so fast, but I officially consider myself graduated from remedial StarCraft school! I guess I should play games against actual Battle.net people now that I officially don’t suck too much. So I guess the secret to getting better at something is to just do it a whole lot. If anyone is interested, a couple of replays are attached below for the hell of it.

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So anyway, guess what I have been playing in lieu of WoW for most of the week :P. The yearly summer wave of attendance attrition in addition to pre-Cataclysm apathy is sort of killing the 25-man raids as of late (doesn’t help that it’s a busy social period for most folk)s. 25-man ICC didn’t pan out on Friday so we made it a guild 10-man run. Oh, and my stupid loot sponge hunter was invited along and boy did he sponge loot. His gear score went up from 3k to 3.6k! At this rate, all of his green and blue items may be replaced before the expansion. Maybe I can sneak him for Lady Deathwhisper next week. I kind of want that bow >_<.

I have been experimenting with Mumble this weekend. It’s an open source voice chat alternative to Team Speak and Ventrilo. There is a video floating around on YouTube comparing the latency between game chat clients: Mumble’s voice quality is fantastic with almost no latency (I have a bad habit of talking over people because of the chat lag). It doesn’t seem to resource intensive either; But then again, I only have and will probably only have two people on the chat server at any time ever. The client is slightly more finicky to setup though and voices still sounds little roboty every once in a while. I am not sure if it is a server side thing or some setting in the client.

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Also: Are RP servers really that bad? Do horny players really sit in Goldshire and fondle each other’s digital crotches out in public all day long? Out of curiosity in response to this wow.com post, I rolled a human character Saturday morning on Moon Guard. I don’t know, maybe everyone went moved over to another server already? Or maybe Blizzard already started cracking down on people. You know, you know that your realm is pretty damn bad when an employee is assigned to patrol your specific server.

This (screenshot on the right) was the only interesting thing that happened.

AFK StarCraft 2

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Absolutely nothing productive was accomplished this past weekend. I didn’t do any chores, I didn’t run, I didn’t work on any projects. Hell, I only left the house twice: once to quickly pick up something and another time to eat. A good chunk of my time, obviously, was spent fawning various games ending in the word “craft.”

I am not a huge real-time strategy player and I never latched on to the original StarCraft. I mean, I enjoy playing RTSs but unless the campaign is compelling most games of this genre are forgotten in a week. In fact, I was going to hold off on purchasing StarCraft II but caved in because everyone was…talking about it. The single player campaign has a surprising amount of variety in terms of mechanics and design for a strategy game. I am surprised at how much fun I am having playing this game.

I’ve really only played solo matches and co-op matches against the AI. One day I will reach the stage where I feel the urge to compete against actual human beings. But first I need to master playing against he AI on medium! (I am sad. I know). If anyone uuh can point me in the direction of a good newbie guide I would be most appreciative.

Review: Alien Swarm

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I lament, often on an almost daily basis about the lack of co-op support in our modern gaming society. So lo and behold what do the Valve Gods gift us with? An up to 4-player co-op game for free! Alien Swarm was originally an Unreal Tournament mod released in 2004. This release was actually developed by the original team after they had been scooped up by Valve (according to Wikipedia). It’s a top down 3rd person shooter with a sci-fi flavor. There’s not a whole lot in terms of plot, but that is not important. The only facts that need be known are that there are waves of aliens to kill on a space ship with your real life buddies.

You have a choice between four different classes and eight unique characters. Each player gets to choose a main and secondary item. You have 40 to choose from, they range from rifles, shotguns, sentry guns, to health and ammo packs. Most of the items are unlocked via a horizontal leveling system as in, you get more items at each level not better. Each class also has a unique class item. With two people playing co-op it took a bit of strategy in terms of what to pick. We had two people total playing last night and it took a bit of trial and error to figure out what worked for us.

Alien Swarm is a very nice looking game. The texturing is very nice, shadowing is very nice, the lighting is very nice. If there’s one thing that the Steam engine has always been good at it’s scalable graphical output per performance. Even with the graphics turned up to high and with the nice particle effects, I didn’t notice any slowdown or frame drop at all, no many how many mobs were on the screen. I will include a couple of screenshots at the bottom of this post so that you all can judge yourselves. If anyone wants video, I am sure that by now hundreds have been posted on YouTube.

The interface is for the most part very nice with a plethora of nice Steam touches: Steam stats, achievements, integrated voice chat, the ability to doodle on the map, etc. A few of the interface elements are confusing though. I feel as if there is probably a better way to handle the ammo and health notifications. Reloading confused me for a bit since you have to continuously glance down at the corner of the screen. There’s also little notification as to when you are reloading save for a small animation. I suppose I should know better. I mean, the party bars at the bottom are laid out in a WoW like fashion.

The controls are fairly straightforward: It’s a dual stick shooter. WASD for movement and mouse for aiming and shooting. Most of the weapon options are introduced as you play the game, though you may want to glance at them for reference. The keybindings are by default setup oddly. A few of them weren’t intuitive to how I usually bind things. It’s not that big of a deal, you just may want to check on all of the keybinding settings before jumping online to play.

Alien Swarm is short: It is one campaign with six levels. But fear not. Conveniently enough, the SDK was also released with the game so hopefully it won’t take people too long to jump on the player generated content bandwagon. Valve provided a sturdy foundation from which to build from; The rest is now up to us. Either way it’s not like one could complain too much, being completely free and all. Pick Alien Swarm up, grab a friend or three and play it. It’s fun and you have absolutely nothing to lose.

Winning, Losing, Death and Consequence

I was reading this article the other day and thought that it was interesting. This post was originally going to be a response, but it kind of went off on a tangent. So by, “Winning, Losing, Death and Consequence,” I really mean “Death and Consequence.” The other part of the title just sounded nifty. Anyway, gaming deaths should have consequences, given that they are appropriate to the nature of the game. The player should have to feel the weight of a bad decision as to not trivialize the game. At the same time, these consequences need to be reasonable.

I am not certain if it is because I have gone increasingly casual over the past couple of years, but as a working adult with relatively little free time (in comparison to uuh college), I don’t have that much time to enjoy my media of choice. I like a challenging game and I like my decisions, poor or not to have significance, but I really do not enjoy the time wasting aspect of a rough death mechanic. On any given week night I have about 3 to 4 hours of playtime after eating and what not. A half hour to an hour of time making up time after reloading a game after dying is a significant portion of my evening. I can personally do without arbitrary time wasting.

This exact criticism was one of my big beefs against Final Fantasy XII. In a long RPG, harsh death penalties severely interrupt the story, which is counterproductive given that the entire purpose of a role playing game is to progress the narrative. Sparsely placing save points and forcing players to traverse long distances after dying during a boss encounter doesn’t fit with the context of the game. It is an old mechanic originally used out of technological limitation; It doesn’t have a place within modern gaming.

Final Fantasy XIII handled death in a slightly different manner: Save points, though still used are placed with more frequency. If you die during an encounter, your party will load from the point right before you engage in battle, giving you time to rethink your strategy and swap paradigms and party members around. Many newer games follow a similar train of thought regarding death mechanics and I think that it is a good compromise. An encounter can be hard without being unnecessarily frustrating. Other than repeating a though fight x amount of times, there is relatively little disruption to the flow of the game.

Besides, why does time need to be the only method of punishment? And for the record, WoW’s punishes in the form of a hit to equipment durability. Repairs cost money and time = money (same thing :P). Death should be fun or at least more creative. Ideally, I think that character death should have a lasting effect in the game environment. I love persistent gaming environments that embrace this idea, which is what fascinates me about Dwarf Fortress (I still intend to play more of this game if I ever get over the learning curve).

You will die horribly in Dwarf Fortress. Your civilization will crumble and fall, overrun by enemies and social unrest. But losing in Dwarf Fortress is just the beginning. When you die, you can reclaim your fortress as well as your previous fortune should you chose or start a new. Either way, the efforts of your first campaign are now an active part of the gaming world. The big picture is that every event, be it winning or losing contributes to the overall story. You still lose, but your loss is a part of the game. No time is ever lost.

Death should add to the uniqueness of your particular story, instead of representing yet another tedious element of gameplay. Or rather, instead of dying and restarting from a saved game, what about just having characters that permanently die in a dynamic fashion? You could of course just reload a saved game, but I think that players should be encouraged to face the consequences of their failure within the context of the game. The goal of a game is to be challenging AND fun, not frustrating. Neither goal is mutually exclusive.

Bioware has the idea. Mass Effect 2 for example (spoilers ahead):  Towards the end of the game I was given the chance to travel through the Omega 4 Replay to rescue my crew or to delay the rescue mission for the sake of preparing myself. It was not a forced option, it was a location within the galaxy map (that I accidentally clicked on…). I chose the latter option, not knowing that my crew, including the lovely Kelly Chambers would be dissolved in a vat of acid before my eyes. I sacrificed my crew for the sake of dicking around. I really wasn’t expecting that to happen, I wasn’t expecting there to be a consequence.

A part of me still wants to reload the end of Mass Effect 2 to replay it for the sake of getting a perfect ending (I also lost Legion during the last mission). Another part of me though feels that doing so would be cheating. I think I will just stick with my original outcome. I will be missing a few buddies when the third game rolls around but that should at least make it a little bit more interesting, right?

StarCraft II Beta: Better Late Than Never

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Hah, a StarCraft II beta invite dropped into my inbox over the weekend while I was out frolicking with my dearest male unit. I was about to delete it thinking that it was a scam; I didn’t think that the beta was still active given that we are a mere two weeks or so away from the supposed retail release. But what harm could come from at least entering the serial number into my BNet account to check (I view most emails on my phone).

It is a shame that the email didn’t arrive earlier in the week, the beta phase ends tomorrow according to Wikipedia so I don’t think that I will be getting any “testing” time in. It’s nice to actually get an invite for once, usually I’m the one who is left out. Oh hmm, I should probably pre-order the actual game.

The Assassin’s Creed Series

You see folks, this why I can never ever run a serious, as in, “professional” gaming blog. I’m just never current on anything that isn’t World of Warcraft, The Sims or the one or two other games that I am interested in enough to pre-order and actually post about before they go out of style (I also never post, but that is a different issue :P). But that aside:

Assassin’s Creed was a good game, not great by any measure, but good; It just failed to live up to the massive amount of hype constantly being pushed out at the time. I think the most disappointing aspect of the game wasn’t necessarily the repetition (though the repetition was pretty bad, I had to force myself to complete the game), but that it felt half-assed. Most people compare it too a tech demo, demonstrating the crowd reaction engine and I think that is for the most part an accurate assesment.

The overarching plot of the series is if anything, predictable if not somewhat ludicrous but I like the premise. Even though I know that the whole Animus deal is a plot gimmick, I feel that it works within the context of the game. I also like the duality between Desmond and his ancestor(s). I kind of wish that Assassin’s Creed 2 had more out-of-Animus scenes, they provided a pacing break in the gameplay (I know that am probably the only one who feels that way….).

Assassin’s Creed 2 plays out like a fluid narrative rather than a sequence of grind quests stapled together. Oh and by narrative I mean a nice variety of tasks to complete. There is a cohesive though somewhat ludicrous plot, there are characters and there are cinematics. If nothing else, it is very polished in both presentation and appearance. The bloom is way overdone, but the environments are vibrant and well designed. Unlike the first game, this game is more like what one would expect from the Playstation 3 in terms of quality.

Anyway, Assassin’s Creed 2: It is to say the least, a lot more fun than the first game. It’s more polished and rounded off with Prince of Persia style platforming mixed in with Grand Theft Auto style opendedness and side quests. The free running works a lot better than the first game in my opinion; The cities are constructed with to allow you to jump around more naturally.

No singular element in Assassin’s Creed 2 really stands out or shines. The combat system, though a little bit better than the first game still suffers from the same downfalls. You can now stab people in a couple more ways but ultimately it still boils down to just hitting the square or the circle button at the appropriate moment. Too many things on too few buttons. The side quests don’t vary too much from stabbing things or collecting things. Also, social camouflaging is great in theory but somewhat poor in execution: I really love the idea of crowd blending and being able to play in a more organic environment, but the way that it is implemented and the way the AI reacts in the game is very limiting. In practice it still feels like a game.

But you know what? I had a lot of fun playing this game. It’s not often that I play a game through completion nowadays; In fact sadly, I can probably name the games that I have actually finished this year on one hand. No single element in this game is particularly great but together all of the elements sum up to a very attractive package.

This is just a personal gripe/tangent, but: I know that the 6 assassin’s tombs are 100% optional side quests, but did those for the most part, annoy the hell out of anyone else? Jumping puzzles suck enough on the PC with full control over a mouse and keyboard. They suck to an entirely new degree when you have little to no control over where the camera pans.

By the way: The official assassin’s hand sign thing that Lucy flashes you in the first game is totally The Shocker isn’t it? 😛

The Sims 3: Ambitions

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Job related content or rather, the distinct lack thereof has traditionally been a huge gaping hole in every single Sims game. Normally your sims choose a career path: Medical, business, food, whatever. In terms of gameplay, that career consists of little more than vanishing into a building for about 8 gameplay hours 5 days a week. Assuming that all of your sims have a regular job/school, that is almost a fourth of the game per sim spent doing almost nothing.

Ambitions is good because it allows to you to actively control your sim at work. I won’t bother explaining the details for all of the new professions because that has already been done and uuuh I haven’t played them all to be honest. The new profession objectives are fun, though fairly typical in what you would expect from the Sims style click based gameplay (run around, click, do something, repeat). I like the stylist and the architect professions because they affect the outward appearance of the town and its people (it is fun giving people pink mullets :P).

Twinbrook is the new town set in a half-flooded southern swamp-ish area. It’s well designed with a lot of atmosphere and character and show cases some of the new graphical effects. My one complaint is that it is very limited in size to the point where there is absolutely no where to place a 64×64 lot to start a Legacy Challenge.

I am going to hold my tongue on this one, but I haven’t encountered any serious glitches yet. I am sure though, that the serious game breaking bugs will surface in time (like the World Adventures family tree glitch which to date has not been fixed or really discussed much at all). By the way, I repeated the exact same thing from this post on the Ambitions executable to enable large addresses. My game has not crashed yet.

Ambitions isn’t a radical addition to the Sims 3. Even though the professions are fun to play and do actually add core gameplay to the franchise, they generally fail to integrate into the old career paths (with the exception of the medical career), to the point where there is a stark contrast. The old careers are boring in comparison to the new professions and I don’t really see myself ever going back to them. But, ultimately, Ambitions only adds 6 professions to the game which isn’t that much content for a long term play sort of game. Still, it is nice to see an expansion that isn’t based off of adding another loading zone ala World Adventures.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

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Guess what I will be doing this Saturday morning? I was #5,808 in line and I clicked the very second that it popped. Well, slightly less than the very second (had to select ‘2’ from the dropdown menu). Some of you have fast fingers.

 

Round 2:

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Ah well, it was a nice try. Sold out when I was at abouh 1.8k in line. Keybound the cache clear refresh to a keyboard macro, coordinated on Vent, started refreshing a couple of minutes early, ignored the ticket quantity. Still got about the same position in like 5.8k-ish. Maybe next year!

UPS and Keiya’s Sims Crack Habit

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Where the hell is my package going? Why did ship from Oklahoma to Kentucky when I live in California? Furthermore, why did I bother with one day shipping on Amazon instead of just running over to Best Buy to purchase it after work QQ. I ordered the newest Sims 3 expansion pack, Ambitions on Sunday. I feel obligated to write a semi-review or glitch (go go EA QA) guide at some point. Actually, I am looking forward to playing this expansion quite a bit because it changes core gameplay. World Adventures was interesting, but allowing sims to travel to other load zones broke time continuity (among other things).

Other than the three new load zones and a couple of other things, not a whole lot was added into the game. The ability to control sims while on the job, as opposed to them just vanishing into a rabbit hole for 8+ hours has been on the top of most player’s wish lists since uuuh the first game?

Oh And: Come on EA; would it have hurt you that much to roll out some of the Sims 2 expansion pack functionality into the Sims 3 base game? (like apartments). Or at the very least, some fairly significant additional content in the form of a free downloadable patch instead of pushing everything into DLC on your stupid store. I know that I will still end up purchasing every single expansion pack like an addict but still. T_T

I MUST GET BLIZZCON tickets tomorrow. Watch me get held up at work or stuck in traffic on the way home though :/. Oh and, I went a whole week without playing WoW, playing any games (iPhone games on the plane don’t count), or sitting in front of (my) computer because I *gasp* went outside! Might post about my vacation if I ever get around to sorting through photos.

Final Fantasy XIII

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Whoops, this post (which has been sitting in my temp stack for two months like well all of my posts) turned into a mish mash rant of sorts. So a history first: A close elementary school friend actually introduced the Final Fantasy to me while we were in day care or something. I had received Final Fantasy I as a birthday or a Christmas gift that year or something and it was the most awesome thing evar. I actually fell in love with the series in high school/early college. That is when I more or less ultra binged on 6 through 8. I have Final Fantasy VIII wall scrolls, posters and action figures burried somewhere. My dorm room was like a shrine…

You will either love or hate Final Fantasy XIII; It’s just one of those divisive games, granted most opinions seem to lean towards the hate side. There’s a fine art to tutorial balancing that Square Enix obviously does not understand. At all. I mean, a 15 hour long tutorial, really?

But past the slow start, both the story and gameplay pick up quit ea bit. If you find the game boring initially, it is. Just grin and bear it. I am actually having a lot of fun so I will take back most of the nasty things that I was originally going to say. I take that back, this game is such a grind: Grind grind grind, short movie, grind grind. Uninspiring and cliche anime characters, bland dialogue at best (grating at worst), standard JRPG story. Final Fantasy XIII isn’t even much of an RPG anymore, it’s a bland action game without the part with the action fighting. What the hell happened?

Massive criticism aside, Final Fantasy XIII is an interesting addition to the longstanding series because it marks a very clear way in which the developers perceive the series. Quite a few gameplay and design changers were made, some of which paid off. Overall, the package fails to deliver as a whole.

So here is problem number one: While the pacing is very consistent and while enemies are fairly well placed, it is still such a huge grind. There is a huge emphasis on the combat system, which I like to some extent. The paradigm system is very fast paced and forces you to swap roles rapidly on many occasions.

In fact, the paradigm system would have been awesome if it wasn’t dumbed down. The auto attack button effectively allows you to spam ‘X’ 90% of the time. There no more random battles, and fewer enemies, which are strategically placed along your journey.  But to make up for that, some of the trash pulls are just so long. They aren’t even fast paced fun trash battles. It is as if all they did was jack their health pools up by a factor of 10. I mean, if you really wanted to, it really isn’t hard to use the pathing system to avoid most enemy encounters. But if you do that too often, your characters will be so far behind the ‘leveling’ curve (if you can even call it that), that future encounters will be near impossible. You are fucked if you do and fucked if you don’t.

So back to the pacing: Final Fantasy XIII is a very controlled experience, obviously paced with calculation which is a huge change over the traditional, wander around town, hit dungeon, wander around town paradigm. It is also shamelessly linear, which on the plus side eliminates the forced exploration. Let’s face it: All RPGs are linear, Western games are just better at hiding it. The pacing is too consistent. I miss the cliche RPG towns. Towns provided a good break in the grinding and also provided a different method of exploring character development in a more casual setting. Final Fantasy XIII is effectively a string of dungeons taped together. It is…a never ending grind, boss, grind, boss pattern.

The characters story and dialogue feel watered down. It’s not that bad per se, it’s just that at the time I had first picked up FFXIII, I had just finished playing Mass Effect 2 and before that, Dragon Age. So silly spoiled me just expected all RPGs to have decent-ish writing and dialogue or at the very least, engaging gameplay to make up for the lack of writing and dialogue.

JRPGs are feeling very tired as a genre because they haven’t changed or evolved all that much in the past decade or so, especially when oyu compare them to what other RPGs have to offer.  But to be fair, I have pretty much outgrown this genre. It’s clearly designed to appeal to a demographic that does not include myself (not a teenager anymore).

The gameplay changes are interesting but not ‘interesting’ enough to sustain the genre in my opinion. JRPGs are feeling tired, they haven’t changed much. Especially when you compare them to what Bioware has to offer. But to be fair, I think I’ve just outgrown the genre. It’s clearly designed to appeal to a demographic that is not me (not a teenager anymore). Square, I commend you for making an active effort to change the series but WTF.

On the plus side: The sky production as expected is super sky high. I mean, that game is gorgeous and some of the cut scenes are a real treat to watch. Well the good thing about it being super ass linear is that when I pick it up again in like, a year after feeling kind of bad about paying $60 for a game and not finishing it, I probably won’t feel lost to the point of having to restart the game.

And, sorry Kotaku: I totally just plucked your screenshot (which probably is just a stock image from a press release) off of Google Image because I was too lazy to take my own.