David was playing Journey to the Purple Planet this morning while we waited for the bus to come.
At one point I overheard him say, “I love outer space!”
That’s my boy.
Eve Online
At the behest of a friend, I tried Eve Online.
Eve is dense and slow. It feels like playing a spreadsheet from the get-go, as character creation is far more complex than someone who just started playing the game five minutes ago can possibly understand. What did my final stats mean? No idea! What were my final skills? No idea! What can they be used for? No idea!
It took about two and a half hours to get through the tutorial – and you must go through the tutorial. No, the game doesn’t make you, but if you don’t you won’t have any idea what the hell is going on.
Those two and a half hours were probably the least fun I have ever had playing something that presented itself as a “game”.
For one thing, you have no direct control over your ship. No joystick control here, no. No fancy flyin’, just right-click a point in space on the convenient list and choose “Approach” and you’ll fly there. That’s it.
Combat? As far as I can tell, it’s fully automated – and it’s standard MMO combat dressed up in sci-fi trappings. To fight you fly towards an enemy, lock on target and turn on your gun. If your ship and equipment is superior to his, you win. If not, you lose. That’s it.
Travel in the Eve universe is even worse. Imagine having to endure a gryphon ride in World of Warcraft every time you change zones. That’s how Eve is. I began to groan every time I was given a mission that required me to fly to a new solar system because I knew I’d be sitting there doing nothing for ten minutes while the autopilot flew the ship.
I gave this game two and a half hours to present me with something exciting or compelling and it completely failed. I’ve got thirteen days left on my trial, and I would rather work on Planitia than play this game again.
Dear God in heaven, first we lose Privateer Online for Earth & Beyond and now this? Can nobody make a real massively-multiplayer outer space combat/trading game? Is it just not possible?! That’s the MMO I really want and nobody will freakin’ make it! Why?
(Sorry Nathan.)
EDIT: Okay, what did I like about Eve?
I liked the fact that it wasn’t Yet Another Fantasy MMO.
I liked the fact that the entire game takes place on one server. When you meet another Eve player in real life you can actually find him in the game guaranteed because there’s only one server.
I liked the fact that the client is only about 700 megs in size and there’s no significant patching after installation before you can play.
The game is quite pretty.
Nathan pointed out to me that the density and pace of the game keeps out the 1337 kiddies, and this was borne out in my play experience last night. I didn’t see any chat in any of the channels that wasn’t mature and on-topic.
If everything took about half as long to do as it does in Eve then I would probably love it.
Populous: The Beginning
This is another game I recently dug up and played as research for Planitia.
Now, when it first came out I actively hated it, but as I’ve played it more it’s grown on me.
That’s not to say that it doesn’t have its share of problems.
For starters, I actively hate hate hate the title, especially since it supplanted the clever, original title which was “Populous: The Third Coming”.
And then there’s the fact that Populous: The Beginning isn’t a Populous game. Not by a long shot. In Populous you play a god. In P:TB you play a shaman who wishes to become a god and can only do so by destroying all the other shaman god-candidates that stand in her way. P:TB’s gameplay is much closer to a traditional real-time strategy game than to a Populous game. In fact, the game it most closely resembles is not Populous, but Sacrifice.
P:TB’s gameplay seems to be simultaneously too slow and too fast. It takes forever to build your base and expand your population. On the other hand, combat is completely frenetic and is hampered by both UI issues and targeting issues. Nothing is more annoying than needing to kill a priest right now but not being able to because he’s surrounded by his warriors and thus you can’t properly target him with your Blast spell.
And as if that weren’t bad enough there are other control issues. Half the time when I try to drag a box around a group of units it doesn’t work. Why? Well, look at this screenshot:
See that sky? Looks nice, doesn’t it? But if you click a little too high and start your box in the sky area of the screen rather than the ground area of the screen, your selection box won’t draw and you won’t select anything.
So what does clicking on the sky do? Why, nothing, of course. P:TB borked itself from a playability standpoint solely so that the player can look at the sky, meriting a place alongside Ultima IX and Sacrifice in a category I call “What Price SKY? DUN-DUN-DUN!”
In the end, P:TB is not the terrible game I thought it was when I first played it but it’s certainly not great either. It’s certainly not worthy of the Populous name and I was unable to draw any inspiration from it.
Today’s Bit of Gaming History: Magic Carpet
Now, that’s an interesting bit of video on its own, but it’s even more interesting if you look very closely at the prototypes Peter presents. In the first one, you are obviously flying over a Populous level that has been converted to use a voxel heightfield. Another one briefly displays an ASCII header that reads, “CREATION BY BULLFROG”. Now, if you’re up on your Bullfrog history, you know that the original name for Populous was “Creation”, and Peter was forced to change it when he couldn’t get a trade mark.
Thus, I think it’s clear from these prototypes that the project started with Peter telling his team, “I want to fly over a Populous world. Make that happen, I don’t care how you do it.” And once that was accomplished, they came up with a game – Magic Carpet – to go with it.
EDIT: I think I may need to start explicating posts like this one a bit more. I think too often I operate under the assumption that everyone else has studied video game history and design as ravenously as I have and thus I don’t have to explain things. Magic Carpet was a Bullfrog title released in 1994. It didn’t do that well because it required a powerful PC and the only network play was over LAN – this was back when most network play was done with a serial or null-modem cable. It also (as Sol mentioned) had a very short draw distance which made it kind of hard to play. The concept was good, though, and a remake could be quite fun.
Gamespot Reviews Top Spin 2…
…which finally just released here in the States (it’s been out in Europe since late last year).
They gave it a 7.5, which is a bit disappointing. I was hoping for an 8 or better. At least we beat the DS version 🙂
And to answer Ryan Davis’ final charge near the end of the review: we had nine months, and Top Spin 2’s rendering system is amazingly complex. It’s honestly a tribute to Tom’s and Bobby’s abilities that the darn thing works at all. And personally, I never had any problems on the Intel DualCore 6600/2 gigs of RAM/Radeon X1900GT machine I’ve got here at work 🙂
Still, my first professional game review! And it’s definitely in the “Not Suck” category! Woohoo!
Game Voyeur
I’m not sure why, but I’ve always enjoyed watching other people play games almost as much as I enjoy playing them myself.
Indeed, in some cases I enjoy it even more.
For instance…playing NetHack? Incredibly frustrating.
Watching someone who actually knows what he’s doing play NetHack? Fascinating.
Which you can do by telnetting to nethack.alt.org. (Or just by running this groovy Java app.)
And you can watch people play Slash’Em by telnetting to slashem.crash-override.net.
And you can watch people play Dungeon Crawl by telnetting to crawl.akrasiac.org.
If that’s a bit too primitive for you, how about some replays? There are enough Warcraft III replays at www.wcreplays.com to last you a year or more!
Of course, if Warcraft III isn’t your bag, www.gamereplays.org is quickly becoming the replay clearinghouse, with replays for Rise of Legends, Company of Heroes, Supreme Commander, Battle for Middle-Earth I and II, Command & Conquer 3, Age of Empires III…indeed, practically every RTS that isn’t Warcraft III.
The reason I love replays is because they’re such a small download for a lot of content. But sometimes you just want to watch somebody absolutely destroy a game and you don’t care that you’ll have to download several hundred megs to do it. That’s where speed runs come in.
There are two basic kinds of speed runs – straight and tool-assisted. Straight speed runs are just like they sound. Someone plays the game normally all the way through and demonstrates a great level of skill as they do so. Tool-assisted speed runs use emulators, luck manipulation and other tools to provide an eye-popping, but not particularly “authentic” experience. (If you’ve seen that stupendous video of someone beating Super Mario Brothers 3 in eleven minutes while racking up 99 lives and never taking a hit…that was a tool-assisted run.) Tool-assisted runs require patience, but no real skill.
Me, I like both. I don’t mind tool-assisted videos as long as they are labelled as such.
For straight speed runs, the place to go is the Speed Demos Archive. This is the home of my favorite speed run of all time.
For tool-assisted runs, TASVideos is a great place to start. Since tool-assisted runs require emulation, they tend to be done on older games.
Of course, you can just type the name of your favorite game into YouTube and you’re practically guaranteed to get something…
But my second-favorite speed run wasn’t found by any of these methods. Instead, I found it while doing research on “Metroidvania” games. It’s a complete run through the first castle of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night – non-tool-assisted – in 71 minutes.
(Why was I doing research on Metroidvania-style games? You’ll see…)
Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars
So the demo for C&C 3 was released today and I tried it out.
First…1.2 gigs for a demo. The equivalent of two CDs for a demo. Just insanity. And I know at least a third of that was taken up by those lovely, lovely high-res movies that they just couldn’t bring themselves to downsample. You know, the ones you’ll watch exactly once and then become dead bits on your hard drive?
So I got it up and running and snickered through the opening FMV (look, guys, when you’ve got Michael Ironside for your game, you are obligated by law to give him cool dialog). But once I got into the game, I was very, very pleasantly surprised.
For one thing, the game ran at full frame rate on my computer, unlike some other games named Supreme Commander that I won’t mention. I didn’t have to tweak nothin’.
And the other thing I didn’t expect was to recognize the buildings and units. The Red Alert series had done all kinds of strange and freaky things with their units (dolphins with guns on their backs, anyone?). Unfortunately that stuff snuck back into the “real” C&C series in C&C: Tiberium Sun. In C&C 2 the units were really esoteric and it was hard figuring out what you should attack with what. I mean, go on…tell me, without looking it up, what units a GDI Disc Thrower unit should be used against.
So I was very surprised when I started the first mission and was presented with an MCV, which deployed into a Construction Yard, which I then used to build a Power Plant, Refinery, and Barracks, which then allowed me to construct Riflemen, Rocket Soldiers and Grenadiers. It all felt very familiar and very welcome. I think at one point I may have said something like, “Oh, baby, I’ve missed you so much”…but I can’t be sure.
After playing through the included demo mission and a skirmish game, it feels to me that C&C 3 is basically C&C 1 remade using the C&C: Generals engine.
And you know what? I could not be happier. There is nothing wrong with just taking an older game, tweaking it a bit, giving it a fresh coat of paint and fixing whatever minor problems it had. Especially when the original game is widely considered one of the best ever.
Reminds me of the middling reviews Dungeon Keeper 2 received. Most reviews said something like, “It’s just Dungeon Keeper 1 in 3D with some fixes and new units, traps, room types and a new campaign.” Um…yeah, that’s what made it one of the best games released that year, idiots!
I mean, jeez, that’s like saying, “They’re just M&Ms, only now they have peanuts in them.”
To sum up, unlike the other game named Supreme Commander that I won’t mention, this demo actually made me want to play this game. And I’m sure I’ll be picking it up…eventually.
Reasons Why I Can’t Buy Guitar Hero 2 For Myself For My Birthday
1. Daddy, what’s a harlot?
2. Daddy, can I get a tattoo?
3. Daddy, what is “Strutter” really about?
4. Daddy, what’s “Heart-Shaped Box” really about?
5. Daddy, what’s “Cherry Pie” really about?
6. Daddy, what does “FTK” stand for?
7. Daddy, what are suicidal tendencies, and what does it mean to be institutionalized?
8. Daddy, does Zack De La Rocha really mean to suggest that every single time a white cop shoots a black person it’s racially motivated, rather than the cop just doing his job?
Yes, I know, the original Guitar Hero also had songs of questionable moral fiber like “Infected”, “Fat Lip” and “I Wanna Be Sedated”. But GH2’s track list skewed much more mature…and I know if I buy it Megan’s going to want to play it. And yes, I’m in control. I could buy it and tell Megan that she can’t play it and she would abide by that…but I don’t think she’d really understand. It would seem unfair.
So I can’t buy it.
Maybe I’ll be able to buy 80’s Edition, should it ever show up.
Supreme Commander
Here’s my quick take on the Supreme Commander demo.
Runs terrible on my computer and I’m not sure why. My computer can run Age of Empires III, Dawn of War and Company of Heroes just fine. I understand that the whole point of Supreme Commander is scale, but even on the first mission of the campaign I’m getting terrible slowdown and that mission isn’t very big. And this is with the lowest graphical settings, which honestly make the game look like crap. The scale also gives lots of interface problems – just try to target an enemy interceptor on the main view map. Thus, you’ll actually spend a lot of time either zoomed out so you can click on the icons for enemy units or you’ll be clicking on the minimap to give your commands. So why have the close-up view at all? Oh, right – it makes for good screenshots.
And then there’s the fact that the actual gameplay is…Total Annihilation. I understand that Supreme Commander was specifically designed to be the spiritual successor to Total Annihilation, but honestly, all playing the Supreme Commander demo did was make me want to go back and play Total Annihilation again rather than make me want to play Supreme Commander. Because the gameplay isn’t significantly different and TA will actually run on my computer.
Licensed Kiddie Crap
Last weekend something interesting happened.
I came out of my bedroom to see my 12-year-old daughter Megan playing Ico on the PS2. I knew she’d pulled it out recently to play again (we’ve both played it through many, many times) so I wasn’t surprised.
Then I looked again and realized that it wasn’t Megan playing, it was my five-year-old David! I knew he had been watching Megan play Ico but I hadn’t realized that he’d gotten interested in it enough to try it himself! Needless to say I was very happy.
Of course, Ico is a terrible game for a five-year-old. (You can watch this movie to familiarize yourself with the game if you have not played it…you heathen, you.) The control scheme is confusing and having to drag Yorda around everywhere is a pain. Plus he was terrified of the shadows – when they appeared he would actually jump off a cliff and kill Ico to end the game rather than fight them. But he kept going back to it. He eventually got to the point where he could move around well, pull switches, jump up ledges and even climb chains.
But I really wanted to find him something he could play. I thought about Katamari Damashii, and while that game is charming and upbeat, its control scheme is even more confusing than Ico’s is. I really didn’t have anything suitable for him.
Now, longtime readers of this site might remember that I used to work for a company called Human Code. At Human Code we made a lot of money making very pretty dreck based on very popular licenses. I personally was the tester on Barbie Pet Rescue, which was released the same year as Deus Ex and outsold that game, thus proving to some pundits that the PC game industry was doomed.
Thus, I have very little tolerance for licensed kiddie crap. And yet I needed a game for David…
On the recommendation of Tom, I bought Dora the Explorer: Journey to the Purple Planet. He said he was surprised at how good it was, and the fact that new copies were still available at Fry’s seemed to bear this out.
And I was also surprised – it’s a good game. It’s fully 3D, but the controls are easy to master. The graphics and animation are good and seem more fluid than the original cartoon. And it’s set in outer space, which David loves (although he hasn’t actually gotten the rocket ship working yet). I couldn’t pry him off it all weekend.
If I’ve got a complaint about the game, it’s that the makers were forced to conform to Sony’s standardized interface requirements which state that you must provide multiple save slots that the player can switch between, you cannot create a save file without prompting the player, you cannot override a save file without prompting the player, you must have options for volume and subtitles and mono/stereo, etc…the kids this game is targeted at can’t read yet; why are you making them deal with all this text?
But that’s a fairly minor point. Global Star Software, the makers of Journey to the Purple Planet, appear to be another incarnation of Human Code – practically everything they do is licensed. I’m just glad they are taking games for small children more seriously than most companies.