Mr eel

Games

The Nintendo Channel - Under-cooked

Nerd that I am, I spent a few minutes of my Saturday morning playing around with the recently released Nintendo Channel for the Wii. It’s pretty dull.

Ads for games. Wow. Watching these is like watching any other ad on television — pointless.

DS Demos… of old or frankly boring-sounding games — Sight Training? *Yawn*

The game catalogue is potentially interesting, since it could prove to be a good way to track upcoming stuff or otherwise find interesting games you might have missed previously.

It’s got no hope of doing that in it’s current form. For starters the catalogue is anemic. It only holds a small proportion of recent releases. Additionally, the actual information on each game is limited and very dry. Marketing copy, bullet list for number of players etc. No screenshots, no videos.

So much more could have been done with this. For example I would like to be able to flag an upcoming release and have new information about it sent to me periodically and a message when it’s finally been released. I forget game release dates sometimes, so that would be useful.

But typical Nintendo, anything outside of making games — which they do very well — tends to be under-cooked. The interface is lovely and it has a lot of potential, but as of now it’s a waste of time.

Posted on May 31st, 2008 | There are 0 comments

Mass Effect is Actually Really Awesome Even Though I Wasn’t Too Sure When I Started Playing It

Well, I sat on this post for a little bit because I wanted to mull over things a little first. Hindsight often makes games less compelling than you thought they were when playing them. That’s not the case with Mass Effect. It really is a very good game.

For a bit of context; I don’t play a lot of RPGs, since I find the emphasis on histrionic drawn-out dialog, stupid characters, clichéd settings and crappy game mechanics to be totally annoying. Oh and random battles. OMG I hate random battles. Granted I’m making a lot of generalisations here and most of these criticisms are pointed at Japanese RPGs, but hey… that’s mainly what’s out there right now.

Mass Effect thankfully avoids those problems. The combat is real time, 3rd person and despite the dodgy squad AI, has turned out to be great fun — I didn’t think too much of it at first. The dialog system is flat out brilliant. Being able to shape the direction of a fully-voiced conversation is an excellent experience, and the choices given to you show a fair bit of subtlety — they aren’t just the set of good/bad/indifferent given in most other games. Often I found myself thinking carefully about what response to give. Fucking up a bit of espionage because I made the wrong choices was actually enjoyable, because it felt believable. For anyone complaining about sitting through lengthy dialog and having to skip it; YOU ARE PLAYING THE WRONG GAME. Seriously, Mass Effect is all about learning and interacting with characters in the game. If you have a problem with that, it’s not the game for you.

The dialog only works because of the great writing and a compelling plot. Yes, the plot isn’t entirely free from cliché, but in the context of a game it doesn’t need to be the most original or deep-thinking story ever. The fact that you are affecting the outcome of the story based on your choices is the part that makes it especially compelling.

The sense of a large galaxy waiting to be explored is fantastic. You get to rocket about looking at various planets and pursuing the various side quests. Slight criticism; the on-planet side quests are a bit hit and miss. They tend to be repetitive, with some pretty bland environments. Still, they’re a good chance to collect some money and level up, like a slightly more interesting version of grinding — c’mon at least you’re tooling about in stealth ship while you do it.

I loved reading the planet descriptions and poring over the Codex as I learnt more things about the game-world. The amount of work put into these is fantastic. Open a codex entry and a deep, velvety voice starts reading it out to you. Yes, I did spend a fair bit of time listening to the entires.

So aside from the graphical glitches and ropey frame-rate, Mass Effect has become one of my favourite games, despite my initial misgivings. The fact that this is the first entry in a trilogy gets me all giddy. I can’t wait for the next one to come out!

In the meantime, I might play the game again. This time around I’m going to be really, really mean…

Posted on January 13th, 2008 | There are 0 comments

January 2007 - Currently Playing

Like usual, I’ve got a few different games on the go at the moment. Here are my initial impressions of what I’m currently playing.

Mass Effect (Xbox 360)

Buggy graphics, driving the Moko vehicle on planet is a pain in the arse and the combat difficulty fluctuates weirdly. It also suffers from artificial difficulty. The idea that anyone would attempt to take on an tank-sized robots with rifles is ridiculous, but that’s what the game wants you do to — it makes it hard you see.

It also has quite complicated RPG elements, which the game makes no effort to explain or ease you into using. Which is a shame, because if you don’t read the manual you’ll be confused as to what’s going on. Also, you’ll get caned in combat. You absolutely have to swap and upgrade your equipment. Ordinarily I hate this kind of thing, but I actually really enjoy it in Mass Effect.

All the problems aside, the dialogue system and dialog itself is fantastic. I’ve yet to find a badly voiced character and most of the interactions are believable. I normally avoid dialogue in RPGs because it tends to be irrelevant junk, but in Mass Effect it’s interesting.

Also the sense of a well-developed universe is enough keep me poking about, although I almost wish I didn’t have to bother with all the on-planet combat. It’s a bit bland.

I’m still ambivalent about it, but I think I might come out liking this game. We’ll see.

Silent Hill 0rigins (PSP)

Despite my fears, this is actually a competent entry in the series. The art direction is spot on, the sound design and music hits all the right notes and there are some genuinely scary moments. It’s a quintessential Silent Hill game. That’s actually part of it’s problem.

It retreads the previous games very closely. The monsters — hello nurses — the settings, even how progression is handled. None of it is surprising. In that sense it’s not much like the previous games, where you can see a conscious effort was made to move the series in new directions.

It’s early in the game, but I’m slightly disappointed. Almost no time is being given to the plot — being a prequel, you would think this is pretty important. Instead I’m trudging through large, bland levels and getting assailed by loads of monsters.

Now, here is where I really complain. Combat in the Silent Hill series has always been clumsy and a bit lame. Thankfully it wasn’t much of an issue, since it wasn’t emphasised much and most of the monsters were easy enough to handle.

0rigins however confronts you with lots of monsters. Most of them are pretty tough, they are placed in multiples, will chase you and respawn at the most annoying spots. This coupled with a clumsy combat system makes for a frustrating time. Being killed by respawned monsters after solving a tricky puzzle is just plain shit. So rather than soaking up the atmosphere and you know, being scared, I’m just get annoyed at the game.

I’m early on in the game and I can see it might get better, but I’m feeling a bit ambivalent about this one as well. I’m having doubts anyone can make a Silent Hill as good as Team Silent — the dev team within Konami.

Zelda - The Phantom Hourglass (Nintendo DS)

I love the graphical style, the controls work surprisingly well, tooling about in the ship is good fun and in general the game just oozes quality.

However… it forces you to return to a central dungeon repeatedly. This sucks. It really, really sucks. It’s boring and it takes a long time. I actually put the game down for awhile because I was just getting annoyed with it.

If I just grin and bear it, I know I’ll be rewarded with some good fun. At the same time however, I know I’m going to have to go back to that stupid dungeon again. Let’s see if I actually finish it.

Posted on January 6th, 2008 | There are 0 comments

OMFG, They’re Selling This? The Unreal 3 Engine looks Dodgy to Me

So I recently finished Gears of War. While running through the game, I noticed quite a few graphical glitches. Textures would flicker to black as the characters and scenery moved. I reflexively thought this was the Xbox 360’s GPU going to mush — they have a reputation for this apparently — and was feeling a bit anxious about sending it off for a warranty repair, especially considering I’d just bought the bastard thing.

Well! Turns out it’s not the hardware at all, but rather the Unreal 3 engine used in the game. I was able to confirm this while playing Mass Effect earlier today. It also displays the same errors, as it also uses the U3 engine. I also had a quick spin of Forza 2, which while being a stupid boring car game — I got it free, meh — at least didn’t have any graphical errors.

This according to the internets has been confirmed as an issue with the engine itself.

It’s really bad in Mass Effect. Really bad. Even looking in the stat-screens — which displays no scenery — character models are marred by this constant flickering. It strange because the U3 engine is otherwise beautiful, with fantastic lighting and a huge draw distance.

I’m a little bit gobsmacked at the idea that a finalised, released game has such obvious errors. I was also interested to note that the videos demonstrating the game lacked these errors. Mmmmm, yes very interesting. How very helpful of Bioware — and by extension Epic Games — to vaunt the quality of the graphics while neglecting to actually make sure things worked properly. That is false advertising.

I put down good money for that game, I expect it to work properly. If there is a patch that fixes the error I might be mollified, but otherwise I’m considering returning the game.

Seriously, what a dodgy bunch they are — Bioware and Epic both.

Posted on January 2nd, 2008 | There are 1 comment

A Whinge About Gears of War Having a Prick of a Final Boss

So I’ve just about finished Gears of War on casual. I’m at the final boss. He’s one tough motherbitch. That’s OK, you expect the final boss in a game to be a challenge, but this time I call bullshit.

There are two types of difficulty in games. One is where the player fails simply because they didn’t do things correctly. In a situation where the player can see how precisely they failed, they have an opportunity and the motivation to replay in order to get it right.

The other form of difficulty is where the game designers have just made enemies extremely hardy, able to met out massive damage and with lots of secondary enemies harassing the player. This is a brute, artificial and demoralising form of difficulty — “just throw heaps of enemies at the player”.

The big-boss in Gears of War falls into the latter category. Now game players have preferences. Some folk get off on these sort of challenges. Power to them, but I’m guessing they don’t represent most gamers. Keep in mind I’m playing the game on casual. For anyone who wants the challenge they can play the hardcore or insane modes. At that rate I’m a bit confused why Epic decided to make RAAM such a bastard in the casual mode.

After hours of good fun blasting away at Locust, I now feel frustrated and the beginnings of boredom. I’m no GoW superstar, but I’m not totally inept. I don’t feel like I’m even getting close with this boss.

So, maybe I might finish the game. It’s a great game and I want to finish it, but I actually want to be entertained, not frustrated. Mind you if I ever beat the bastard thing I’ll probably be ecstatic

EDIT: I beat it. Felt a bit more like luck than anything else. The boss just sat there while I hammered it. My comments above are still valid I believe.

Posted on December 30th, 2007 | There are 2 comments

YAC (Yet Another Console) - I Boughts an Xbox

I spent a bit of time over Christmas playing my brother’s Xbox 360. After playing and loving Super Mario Galaxy, I was satisfied with the Wii for awhile and didn’t have any plans to buy a new console. But ZOMG Gears of War is really brilliant. It’s not particularly original, the plot is rudimentary and the dialog has too too much gung-ho-yanks-are-so-tough for my taste, but damn… it’s plain good fun to play.

So I gave in to temptation and bought one for myself, with a copy of GoW. I really only have a couple of comments at this point.

Gears of War is totally a system seller. I’m loving it.

The Xbox power supply really is friggin huge.

The console is noisy as all get go. The fans go full-bore most of the time, but the disc-drive is particularly noisy. M’thinks it’s just a standard PC drive, which would explain the rattling noise it gives off. Not so nice.

Still, I’m happy. Merry Christmas for me. Let’s hope the bugger doesn’t melt on me!

Posted on December 28th, 2007 | There are 1 comment

Me, Playing God of War 2

I am teh god of war, none shall defy me yargh, oh you want some of this do you? YARGH, tore you in half, uh oh big statue smashing everything to shit, climb inside beat you UP! Yarrrrr killed by Zeus, gone to hell. Not in hell flying around on a flaming Pegasus! HELL YEH. Smashing Titan fingers, beat up more people, climb up on some stuff, more flying about, beat up loads more people. Knock this cheeky guy about coz he’s got some key. Right, lets fight some more people to beat up and hurt in novel ways…

STOP. No, now you have to solve a stupid puzzle. Sorry.

* sigh

Posted on July 12th, 2007 | There are 0 comments

Half Life 2 Makes Me Dizzy

Well, now that I have a shiny Macbook Pro I figured it was time for me to set up Boot Camp and play Half Life 2. I’ve actually played HL2 Deathmatch a good deal, but I’ve never played the single player game. I debated buying the current retail box, or waiting until Valve release the Orange Box set — HL2 and all of it’s addons.

In the end I bought it off Steam and downloaded it. Worked out to be $28AUD with Episode One, which had previously been about $20AUD by itself. Steam is very annoying or at least the client app is, but the convenience of buying online and downloading games far outweighs any irritation. I’m keen to see even more games distributed this way. Lower cost for punters, no DVDs or paper packaging. A hell of a lot less waste all round.

As for the actual game — I’ve played it for hours on end today. It is very, very good. And running on my MBP, I can crank the settings right up. It looks lush.

The only real downside is that the game makes me feel ill. Having the perspective in game swing about while my body sits still inevitably makes me nauseous. Thankfully it usually takes awhile for it to kick in, so I’ve still managed to play a large chunk of the game.

I’m looking forward to completing the game and getting back into Deathmatch again. I’ll play woefully like usually, but I hope I can avoid embarrassing myself too much.

Posted on July 3rd, 2007 | There are 1 comment

I Just Finished Zelda - The Twilight Princess

Wow. What an awesome game. I’ve played quite a few of the Zelda games and this one is pretty close to being my favourite. I need to think about it a little, but I think Wind Waker is still the Zelda game I like the most. But that may change…

The most compelling part of the game for me was the plot. It wasn’t predictable, the dialog was actually very good and most importantly it had characters you could empathise with. I mean holy shit, this game actually had character development!

Despite obviously being a Gamecube Port — I played the Wii version — it looks absolutely fabulous. I couldn’t care about the amount of polygons or textures. All that matters is that the art was bang on.

The character design in particular is very good. Standouts are Midna and Ganonodorf.

I think I need to mull over it a little more, but as a whole this is a deeply impressive game. Seriously, if you’re a gamer you should check it out.