Archive for the 'Gaming' Category

The Silent Clunker

Published on June 26, 2010 in Gaming. 0 Comments

After the hours of enjoyment that I had out of Silent Hunter 4 I’m really quite disappointed in Silent Hunter 5: Battle of the Atlantic. The latest instalment of the long running franchise from Ubisoft might well be the best looking version, but it seems like a half baked apple pie. Once you cut through the fine looking pastry of the updated graphics engine you find that it’s got a terribly bitter and undercooked centre hidden underneath.

I’ve just had another go at trying to play and yet again the game froze after a short while forcing me to reboot the entire computer and if it doesn’t freeze the computer spontaneously reboots. I don’t know if it’s a fault with my machine specifically, but the game seems to be an exceptionally temperamental beast. This time I had some monitoring software running the background, and it looks like both the CPU and graphics cards have hit dangerous temperatures while running the game. I’m not entire sure why though. For all it’s flash graphics and water effects it still doesn’t seem like it should be as taxing as playing Crysis with the settings on high. It certainly shouldn’t be melting down the machine. Maybe my rig is starting to show it’s age, but it handles hundreds of units on screen at once in Supreme Commander 2, so why does it go crazy when it’s only rendering a distant tanker and the inside of a submarine?

The interface is a total departure from the four previous games, which makes it quite difficult to transition from say Silent Hunter 4 which I had grown quite good at, to the newer game. In Silent Hunter 5 you control the entire submarine as though you actually are the captain. You move through the boat in first person using the mouse and standard WASD keys to get about, but Annoyingly for weird folk like me who operate in an upside down world you can’t invert the mouse. The movement is glitchy though, and it’s fairly common to get stuck on a ladder trying to get from the command room to the conning tower, or vice versa. It’s also while moving about in first person inside the sub that I usually find the game freezes. In fact the last four times its frozen when I was moving forward through a bulkhead door from the command room towards the sonar and radar stations. I’m not sure if this is coincidence or not because it doesn’t happen every single time.

The overall interface seems very console like, with only lip service paid towards the concept of creating a simulation. The torpedo attack system, which is of course is the heart of the simulation,  has been reduced from a complex recreation of German submarine technology to a magic map where you have to line up numbered dots to plot a hit. It might as well have been made into a quick time event or a mini-game. To be fair Silent Hunter 4 also had an auto torpedo data calculator to make things easier for novices, but it simply gave an indicator either red, amber or green depending on how likely an hit would be based on current torpedo settings and other variables. The new system reduces this to such a patronising and counter intuitive level that it’s actually a pain to use.

There seems to be no simulation of damage either. Enemy ships and vehicles have two very prominent health bars that indicate how damaged they are. It doesn’t seem to matter how well you do when you attack as a hit on the waterline with a torpedo has exactly the same effect as one that detonates under the keel.  They might as well have gone the whole hog and put in some red numbers floating up as the target takes damage. Not that you would be able to see them though, as every single time you miraculously manage to hit anything whit the retarded aiming system the target hits the turbo boost button and takes off at 20+ knots, and that happens even if their maximum speed is 10 or even less.

One of the other  much requested features with fans of the earlier games was a better crew system, and there is now a far greater emphasis on crew management and interaction than previously. Before the crew were basically faceless extras, but now the main officers are individual characters with their own back stories, voices and so on. Truth be told however they’re still fairly one dimensional, and seem like mash-ups of various characters from the film Das Boot, but it’s better than nothing. Sadly the interface makes the crew interface a constant pain in the arse. You click through menus like you’re playing a console based RPG, asking some hardened torpedo officer about his sick wife, and at the end his moral goes up a bit.  Sure it works as a very basic simulation of you being a mentor to your officers, but the entire thing is scuppered by the fact that the conversation tree, and the officer’s moral, resets to the factory settings when you load a saved game.

Speaking of resetting the game: the world isn’t persistent. If you hammer a battleship and set her ablaze, but are then forced to save and reload. The ship is instantly repaired and takes off at UNSAFE SPEEDS away from you. It seems that every allied ship in the Silent Hunter world, from the smallest trawler to a huge heavily laden oil tanker, is capable of instantaneous acceleration from 3knots to over 20knots at the first sign of trouble. The enemy AI also appears to be fairly retarded. I’ve attacked several heavily defended convoys during my few games, and the allied destroyers have put in a lacklustre effort at best. When compared to the Japanese ships in Silent Hunter 4 they look positively lazy. This is ironic given that the allied destroyer crews were, in reality, much better equipped and far more effective than their Japanese equivalents.

On the positive side, as I said, the entire game looks amazing. The Type VII U-boat that you command is very detailed as are the various ships that you encounter during the course of the game. Sadly the good looks are really all that Silent Hunter 5 have going for it at the moment, and with suspicion growing that Ubisoft have all but washed their hands of the franchise, it seems likely that none of the problems I’ve described will ever be fixed. I’m sad that the series has been sunk like this. Silent Hunter 5 had a lot of promise, but Ubisoft have concentrated far too much on the fancy bells and whistles that people shouted about, and forgotten entirely about the core of the game. They’ve even managed to leave in bugs that have been known about and patched before in earlier iterations of the game engine. They unnecessarily revamped and outright butchered the interface, and even the fancy new crew interaction system doesn’t work properly.

In short, and with much sadness, I must say that you should avoid this game unless you’re willing to wrestle for long hours installing and trying fan made modifications that restore some of her potential glory. Given the overheating issue however I for one will have to return the game to the shelf for the foreseeable future.

XCOM – Reprised

Published on April 15, 2010 in Gaming. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

The man who nearly had a blog has pointed out an article on Blue’s News which reveals that a new XCOM game is in the early stages of development. The XCOM series is one of my all time favourite game franchises, and it’s one of the few that I still own all of the games from so I was naturally excited. There’s already a website up for the game, but there’s only a single screenshot so far, and the blub on the page is already causing my head to shake:

XCOM is the re-imagining of the classic tale of humanity’s struggle against an unknown enemy that puts players directly into the shoes of an FBI agent tasked with identifying and eliminating the growing threat. True to the roots of the franchise, players will be placed in charge of overcoming high-stake odds through risky strategic gambits coupled with heart-stopping combat experiences that pit human ingenuity – and frailty – against a foe beyond comprehension. By setting the game in a first-person perspective, players will be able to feel the tension and fear that comes with combating a faceless enemy that is violently probing and plotting its way into our world.

So it’s going to be a a rip off of the X-Files then, and crossed with Half-Life probably?

I don’t know about you, but that seems like a total let down. Sure I may be misinterpreting the blurb, and there’s not a lot of information to go on of course, but it seems to me that this won’t be a first person shooter in the traditional sense. Nor will it have anything particularly to do with the original XCOM franchise. The player is an FBI agent tasked with identifying and eliminating an alien threat to Earth rather than the commander of a special force dedicated to combating the alien menace.  I take it the developers have done the usual and thrown the original game in the re-imaginatron 2000 and this is the result. No doubt it will also be “gritty”, “realistic”, and have an “innovative control mechanism”.

I’m not at all enthused about the whole project, but out of fairness to 2K and the XCOM franchise I’m going to reserve judgement on the project until I see something concrete examples of in game screen shots and know a bit more abotu the game itself. Speaking about screen shots, there is one on the page and it looks decidedly the wrong side of budget game graphics, but I suppose it’s early days yet.

This isn’t the first time that an FPS has been attempted in the XCOM universe either. Those of you with long memories will remember XCOM: Alliance which was the great white hope of the XCOM franchise. It sadly sank without a trace along with the whole franchise at the end of the nineties.

At least one good thing has come out of this announcement though. I’ve been inspired to dust off my old notes for the xcom TV series scripts that I was working on ages ago.

Back In The Liberty Groove

Published on April 4, 2010 in Gaming. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

A Long Time Ago…

Published on March 25, 2010 in Gaming. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

I just discovered the disk for Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance buried at the bottom of one of my drawers and it’s got me thinking about the potential that was missed with the game. Don’t get me wrong though, it was an excellent addition to the venerable X-Wing game series, but it could have been much much more than just another space fighter game.

In X-Wing Alliance, or XWA as it’s known to fans, you play the role of the unfortunately named Ace Azzameen the youngest son of an outer rim merchant family. You spend much of the start of the game cutting about aboard a battered old freighter doing missions for various members of your family before inevitably joining the Rebel Alliance. While in the alliance though you occasionally have to head home to help out your family with transport jobs, rescue missions and so on using the family space freighters. It adds an interesting bit of variety to the battles against the dastardly Galactic Empire.

What I would love to see though would be a game based in the Star Wars universe that combined elements of the X-Wing games, and space trader games like Elite and the X series.

I know that there is sort of an element of this already in the MMORPG Star Wars Galaxies, and possibly in the forthcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic, but these feel clumsy and bolted on instead of being the core of the game play.

What I would love to see is a game where you can traverse the Star Wars Galaxy, or even a small part of it, at will. Trading, privateering, blockade running and carrying out random missions for various factions. As the player grows richer they can invest in upgrades, hire new associates, buy increasingly powerful ships and eventually end the game with a vast fleet, space installations and a fortune in credits.

I’m surprised nobody has thought to develop a game like this yet.

Incidentally I love Wookiepedia the Star Wars Wiki site. I could probably spend days reading it and never get bored.

The Assassin’s Creed

Published on March 16, 2010 in Gaming. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

After making several grand recommendations that I should get hold of Assassin’s Creed 2 for the PC El Kay got tired of my relentless application of the Infamous Tendering Process and bought it for me, and I’m already glad she did.

To be honest though the main reason for my reluctance wasn’t anything to do with the game itself, but more to do with the now infamous DRM system that Ubisoft have applied to the game. To be doubly honest though if El Kay hadn’t pushed me I’d probably have hummed and hawed for so long that I would end up never buying the game. It’s a good job El Kay “doesn’t take any humming and hawing shit” though because I’d have missed out on an excellent game.

At it’s heart Assassins Creed is simply a platform game set in a sandbox world, but it’s not the genre that makes it remarkable: it’s the world itself. There is a framing story set in the near future of 2012 where Desmond Miles, who’s DNA contains the genetic memories of a long lineage of assassins stretching back to Altair the medieval Assassin from the original game. At the beginning of Assasins Creed 2 Desmond has just been freed from a shadowy corporation that has been using him to access his genetic ancestor’s memories using a Maguffin called The Animus. The vast bulk of the game is set in Renaissance Italy between 1476 and 1499. It follows the life of Ezio Auditore da Firenze a young Florentine nobleman who, as the result of his family being murdered, becomes embroiled in an a secret war between the ancient order of assassins who seek to free mankind, and their enemies the Templars who are  conspiring to control the world.

Two things really make the game for me. Firstly the world of 15th century Italy is so vividly realised that it almost becomes an important character in the game. Merchants peddle their wares to passing groups that wander realistically through the finely detailed streets. Guards react realistically to you when you pass into restricted areas, or even if you’re rude and bump into other people in the street. Bards run after you strumming medieval ballads that bear an uncanny resemblance to 80′s rock lyrics on their lutes. Everywhere this is activity which makes the cities seem alive in a way that I think only Grand Theft Auto IV has even approached. Interestingly the game also includes a database, part of The Animus interface, which  contains details on important historical individuals and landmarks. It really fired me to investigate an area of history that I really knew nothing about. I was a aware that Leonardo DaVinci and Michelangelo both lived and worked in Italy during this period, but I knew nothing about the politics or culture. The makes of Assassin’s Creed should be rightly proud of themselves for avoiding setting their game in a far more recognisable age such as the second world war, or medieval England.

The second element that I really loved from the game was the control method. Ezio is a master of free-running, and the game manages to allow you to control him through complex, and dangerous, manoeuvres across the rooftops of medieval Italy without the controls ever becoming difficult to handle or intrusive. You simple hold down the run button, point him in the direct that you want to travel, and off he goes scaling buildings, sprinting across rooftops and balancing precariously on ledges. It really has to be seen to be appreciated:

Battlefield Heroes

Published on January 2, 2010 in Gaming. 0 Comments Tags: , .

I’ve been playing Battlefield Heroes the last couple of days. It’s a “free” game developed by EA Digital Illusions (DICE) the part of Electronic Arts that’s responsible for the Battlefield series of games. The game is free to download, and it’s free to play on the servers, but to get access to several items and abilities you have to pay, with real money, for an in game currency called Battle Funds. They don’t confer any direct in game advantages, but they do allow access to fancy costumes for your character and permanent access to different pieces of equipment. Those unwilling to part with their hard earned readies have to make do with earning in game Valour Points which essentially operate in the same way as Battle Funds, but have far fewer purchasing options, and far less purchasing power.

The game is played primarily from a third person point of view, but is otherwise a fairly standard team based; capture the flag first person shooter. The teams are made up of two opposing factions, the nationalists and the Royals, who are rendered into a shiny cartoon parody of World War Two. As a player you have to create a character to take part in the cartoon war. The two sides really only differ cosmetically with the National’s having a distinctly WWII German look about them, and the Royals resembling WWII British soldiers.

As with most modern team based shooters each side is divided into three classes. The Soldier who is the standard FPS run and gun specialist; the Gunner who specialises in heavy weapons and is the tank of the team, and finally the commando who doubles up both as an infiltrator and a sniper character. Naturally all three classes have their own strengths and weaknesses but apart from their superficial appearance both teams are identical in game play and stats.

The object of the game is, naturally, to slaughter the enemy team. Each side starts out with fifty “tickets” which are simply the number of respawns available to that team before it loses the match. The first team to run out of tickets loses the match. To complicate matters there are flags scattered around the various maps that can be captured. The more flags a team holds, the more tickets the enemy loses whenever one of their team is killed. As you kill enemies and complete missions your character gradually levels up, unlocking new abilities as he goes, but the game generally makes a good job of keeping people on the server at a similar level of experience so nobody rides roughshod over the entire game with uber equipment and skills.

All in all it’s an enjoyable romp, but I can’t see myself playing it for long as the selection of maps seems limited and there doesn’t seem to be much team play or strategy going on in any of the games that I’ve played so far.

My Eye is Bigger Than My Wii

Published on December 28, 2009 in Gaming. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

I was surprised to find that my wee sister has gone and bought herself a Nintendo Wii. I have to admit that I was fairly sceptical about the Wii to begin with. I actually, perhaps foolishly, advised her against buying one because many of the games seemed very gimmicky at first glance. Having finally played a few different games on the console though I’ve found it very intuitive, and the controls don’t seem all that gimmicky when they’re done correctly. I’m sure that there are quite a few poor games that have badly designed motion sensor based controls that feel shoehorned in to an otherwise standard console control scheme. The Nintendo games that I played on my sister’s machine, Mario Kart and Wii Sports specifically, seemed perfectly designed for the system.

I do still think that some of the available games are gimmicky, but i suspect that’s simply laziness on the part of the developers. It’s easier to throw out a new Wii-Fit-esque clone than it is to come up with something genuinely original. It’s the problem that plagues every form of modern entertainment so I can’t judge the Wii on that any more than I can judge the cinema.  I am worried that when I passed a cursory glance at the latest Wii games available on play.com most of them were game versions of the standard post-Christmas celebrity fitness videos, but I’m going to assume that there are some nuggets of gold like Mario KArt buried under all that shite.

Writing Musings

Published on December 27, 2009 in Pen and Paper RPGS and Writing. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

I’ve just found an old, almost prehistoric notebook of mine from the mid-nineties. What’s unusual about this particular book is that it contains quite a sizeable chunk of a role-playing game that I had put quite a lot of work on, but that I had completely forgotten about until now.

The game idea, from what I can make out of my faded teenage writing, appears to be based around a Gothic Victorian, or maybe Edwardian, Earth.It certainly seems to be set sometime in the late 1800s and early 1900s, but the setting is fairly indistinct. I could argue that that was deliberate to avoid having to prescribe too much to potential players, but I think that it’s far more likely that I didn’t know enough about the period in question to write a comprehensive background section. In an age just before the emergence of the World Wide Web information like that took time and effort to research and the history section of the school library wasn’t exactly overflowing with information.

I think, from what I’ve read and what I remember, it was partly inspired by the Ravenloft setting for Dungeons and Dragons, or maybe by some of the HP Lovecraft books that one of my friend’s had. I also sense a slight hint of maybe White Wolf and their World of Darkness edging in, but the. Strangely it also bears some resemblance to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Van Helsing and several similar “action/horror” movies that came out in the early to mid 2000s.

The setting and tone are very rough around the edges, and I’ve returned the thing to its hiding place lest it be purged during one of my folk’s regular top-to-bottom clear-outs, but it has intrigued me. Imagine it, a gothic horror version of London, or maybe even Glasgow. A city trapped on the cusp of a new century, but being held back by the demons and ghosts of the past. A metropolis trapped in curling, endless fog and long cold nights. Strict class divisions, strange artefacts from foreign lands that stand as horrible sentinels  in monolithic museum. Maybe an ancient evil stirs in the filth alleys and dingy workhouses. Then a lone crusader, a saintly hero or a dark anti-hero, strides out into the night to do battle with it. The fate of the British Empire, civilization and the world!

Faceboot

Published on December 18, 2009 in Gaming. 2 Comments Tags: , , , .

McDowall and I were talking the other day about the phenomenon that is Facebook, and specifically about Facebook apps.  More specifically we were discussing his idea that the classic game Uplink would make an excellent would make an excellent Facebook app.

I think there might be a lot of merit to his idea. The interface for the original game is 2D and fairly simple to replicate, and it could probably even be implemented in flash if the need arose. The game has a lot of depth, but is simple enough that casual players could quickly get involved.  I think the game could integrate well with Facebook to allow people to assist or oppose other players. The game would revolve around increasingly higher tiers of jobs that required equipment and programs bought from within the game, and players could hack each other to steal their opponents’ hard won cash or programs.

Naturally of course McDowall could add a Paypal system for buying more in game cash, or exclusive programs and equipment and thereby increase his direct revenues. The only problem being he would have to pay some percentage of royalties to Introversion Software for making money off the back of their idea.

Google Outbreak

Published on December 13, 2009 in Bizarre Internet and Gaming. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

I love a good zombie game, and I also like to see what people have been up to with the google maps API out htere in internet land. What could be better though than to combine the two like the wizards at Class3Outbreak.com have done. I don’t know if you’ve seen this doing the rounds on bloggin sites, but it’s pretty cool. It’s basically a simulation of the effects of a zombie outbreak in Washington DC as seen from the birds eye view provided by Google maps.

You can’t control the zombies or humans directly, but you can manipulate settings such as number of civilians, number of zombies. Prevalence of armed civilians and infection rate. It’s really interesting to leave it running and watch the mayhem the develops. In an odd way it reminds me The Game of Life as it’s left running for the player to be an observer, and not a direct participant in events.